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TEXTXET Studies in Comparative Literature 49 Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

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Re-imagining Language and Literature for the 21st Century Selected Proceedings of the XXII International Congress of FILLM held at Assumption University, Bangkok, Thailand from 19-23 August 2002

Edited by

Suthira Duangsamosorn (et al.)

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’.

ISBN 90-420-1637-X © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Introduction

9 - 11

Bureau of FILLM 1999-2002 — Local Organizing Committee

13

Keynote Address Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University, New York.

Commonwealth Literature and Comparative Literature

15 - 38

SUBTHEME 1: New Foundations: Grounding Language and Literature Studies in Ethics

Vridhagiri Ganeshan, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad, India.

Grounding Language and Literature Studies in Ethics or Altum Silentium

41 - 54

Anders Pettersson, Umeå University, Sweden. The Possibility of Global Literary History

55 - 66

Edward P. Vargo, Independent Scholar, Thailand. “I Am Not a Consumer, I Am a Learner:” Language and Literature in Lean and Mean Universities

67 - 92

H.P. van Coller, University of the Free State, South Africa. The Medium of Teaching At South African Universities: the Position of Afrikaans

93 - 112

Piera Carroli & Louise Maurer, Australian National University. Issues of Inclusion and Representation: Teaching Literature and Culture Across Art Forms

113 - 130

SUBTHEME 2: New Contexts: Facing Social Change in Language and Literature Studies

Roger D. Sell, Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Social Change and Scholarly Mediation

133 - 150

Liang Chua Morita, Assumption University, Thailand. Language Shift in the Thai Chinese Community

151 - 163

Esther V. Schneider Handshin, University of Birmingham, UK. History in Memory: Problems of Literary Representation of the Holocaust in the Writing of Ingeborg Bachmann, Barbara Honigmann and Ruth Schweikert

165 - 177

Sigfrid Hoefert, University of Waterloo, Canada German Naturalist Drama in Film: the Case of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber and Der Biberpelz

179 - 188

Sonia Faessel, University of New Caledonia. Construction of A Cultural Identity in the Writings of Sia Figiel and Flora Devatine: the Case of The Girl in the Moon Circle (1996) and Tergiversations et rêveries de l’écriture orale (1998) 189 - 194 Ho-Byeong Yoon, Chugye University for the Arts, Seoul ‘Language War’ for the Survival of the Fittest in the Era of Multi-cultural Society: Perspectives of Korean Literary Circles for the Vision and Re-Vision

195 - 204

Edson Rosa da Silva, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. La métamorphose de la littérature et de l’art selon André Malraux

205 - 213

SUBTHEME 3: New Instruments: Integrating Technology into Language and Literature Studies

Antoine Compagnon, University of Paris - Sorbonne, France. A World Without Authors

217 - 232

Patrick Imbert, University of Ottawa, Canada. Literature and Globalization: the Future of the Humanities

233 - 240

Meta Grosman, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Literature Teaching As A Challenge

241 - 255

Suthira Duangsamosorn, Assumption University, Thailand. The Changing Form of Fiction: Narrative Technique in Chart Korbjitti’s Time

257 - 267

Greg Stratton & Donna Czekalowski, Edith Cowan University, Australia. Journeys in Writing: Technology and Literature As the Art of Possibility

269 - 280

Maria Luisa Antonaya, Assumption University, Thailand. A Revolutionary Medium: the World Wide Web in Peace Activism

281 - 288

SUBTHEME 4: New Communications: East Meets West Meets North Meets South

Chetana Nagavajara, Silpakorn University, Thailand. Contemporary Poetry As A Global Dialogue

291 - 318

Theo D’haen, Leyden University, The Netherlands. Post/Modernist East

319 - 330

Cecilia Hsueh Chen Liu, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan. Writing Back to the Empire: From M. Butterfly to Madame Butterfly

331 - 344

Mithilesh K. Pandey, Purvanchal University, India. Akademi-Awarded Novels in English: Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope

345 - 354

Carrie Villeneuve, Assumption University, Thailand. S.P. Somtow’s Jasmine Nights: A Lesson in Orchestration and Mastery of Language

355 - 366

Sushama Kasbekar, Assumption University, Thailand. A Comparison of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and S.P. Somtow’s Jasmine Nights

367 - 377

Hope Saban-pan Yu, University of Calgary, Canada. Representation in Philippine American Women Writers: Between Authenticity and Orientalism

379 - 389

Lindy Stiebel, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa The Return of the Native: Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1986) Revisited in Post-apartheid Durban, 2001

391 - 405

Daniela Hurezanu, Arizona State University, USA. Roland Barthes et le Japon

407 - 414

Introduction

After an interval of 33 years, the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures returned to Asia for its triennial Congress in the year 2002. During this period of time, these Congresses had traveled from India to England, Australia, France, the United States, Hungary, Canada, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Germany, and Zimbabwe. Now FILLM (from the Federation’s French name–Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes) embraced a proposal from Assumption University of Thailand to host its XXII Congress in Bangkok from 19-23 August 2002. What made this proposal unique is that Assumption University is chiefly known for excellence in management studies and language education for business. In an age when many voices question the relevance of the traditional humanities for the post-modern world, some might find this an unlikely venue for a Congress promoting language and literature. Not so FILLM’s President Maria Alzira Seixo. She found it exciting and hopeful that a forward-looking school of management should make the promotion of the humanities, specifically of languages and literatures, its business. Such a venue could expand the possibilities for interdisciplinary dialogue, already a goal of each Congress. For FILLM’s chief aim, as one of the twelve constituent member federations of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies of

— 9 —

Introduction

UNESCO, is to bring into dialogue scholars of all nations who normally focus upon different specializations in modern languages and literatures. Appropriately, the theme of this first Congress to be held in the new millennium was “Re-Imagining Language and Literature for the 21st Century.” Such a focus was meant to draw out new visions and approaches to render language and literature studies more relevant to our age and its emerging realities. It was a moment of great pride for the host university when Her Royal Highness Princess Soamsawalee inaugurated the Congress and its rector, Reverend Brother Martin P. Komolmas, addressed the audience. To welcome scholars from over 33 nations was to underscore Assumption University’s own character as the first international university of Thailand. It also accentuated the basic harmony between the objectives of the university and FILLM “to further knowledge in languages and literatures as a vehicle of better understanding between people of various nations and cultures.” The pivotal point of the Congress followed in the keynote address on “Commonwealth Literature and Comparative Literature.” Here the internationally known Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak prepared the audience for what was the main concern of the gathering with her unapologetic defense of languages and literatures. She called on the participants and FILLM itself to play a more aggressive role especially in the promotion of the latter because “literature is our teacher and investigator. It provides robust models of knowing and doing.” During the following days, the “Re-Imagining” of the Congress circled around four sub-themes–“New Foundations: Grounding Language and Literature Studies in Ethics,” “New Contexts: Facing Social Change in Language and Literature Studies,” “New Instruments: Integrating Technology into Language and Literature Studies,” and “New Communications: East Meets West Meets South Meets North.” Each subtheme began with a plenary session and a major address. For “New Foundations,” Vridhagiri Ganeshan raised challenging questions about the place of ethics in current language and literature studies. For “New Contexts,” Roger Sell built the case for literary scholars as mediators in a world and discipline that badly need reconciliation and peace. To introduce “New Instruments,” Antoine Compagnon drew out the implications of the new technologies for the humanities in “A World Without Authors.” Finally, Chetana Nagavajara set the tone for “New — 10 —

Suthira Duangsamosorn

Communications” with his wide-ranging “Contemporary Poetry as Global Dialogue.” The rest of the 130 papers on offer came under these four subthemes to deal with questions like the following: What ethical issues are emerging in the relationship between contemporary university administrations and teachers of language and literature? How do examples of social change imbedded in literatures of previous eras illuminate the present situation? How do shifting views of race, class, gender, and environment affect language and literature studies? What changes are coming into language and literature education though the globalizing influence of information technology? How do literary studies survive in competition with visually supported narratives such as film, television, or virtual reality? How has your culture imagined itself before the rest of the world, as seen in its literary works, and how has it imagined the rest of the world? How do postcolonial literatures contribute to the meeting of cultures? Of course, these questions only suggest the vast richness and diversity of exchanges that took place in the parallel sessions. The dominant note that emerged from the Congress was that language and literature studies must indeed become more inclusive of voices from all continents. To quote Roger Sell, “Communication does change the status quo.” To reflect this spirit, the editors in Bangkok have selected those papers that they considered best fit under each of the four sub-themes. Here, I would especially like to thank my colleagues and consultants David Wells, Chetana Nagavajara, Edward Vargo, Liang Chua Morita, Sushama Kasbekar, and last but not least, Theo D’haen. I hope that this selection conveys the enormous creative energy and scholarly endeavor that went into the XXII International FILLM Congress, confirms your own efforts to bring language and literature studies into the 21st century, and stirs your own new visions.

Suthira Duangsamosorn Bangkok, July 2004

— 11 —


BUREAU OF FILLM 1999-2002 PRESIDENT: Maria Alzira Seixo (Portugal) VICE PRESIDENTS: †Hans Bungert (Germany) Neide de Faria (Brazil) Roger D. Sell (Finland) Eugene Eoyang (Hongkong/USA) Phyllis P. Franklin (USA) Chetana Nagavajara (Thailand) SECRETARY GENERAL: David A. Wells (UK) ASSIST. SECRETARIES-GENERAL: Stephan M. Finn (South Africa) Tava Gwanzura (Zimbabwe) Meta Grosman (Slovenia) Rosemary Johnston (Australia) Edward P. Vargo (Thailand) Sisir Kumar Das (India) TREASURER: Jeanne Delbaere-Garant (Belgium) LOCAL ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Chetana Nagavajara, Advisor Edward P. Vargo, Advisor Bancha Saenghiran, Chairman Sompit Porsutyaruk, Vice Chairman/Congress Program Suthira Duangsamosorn, Secretariat Laura Brahmakasikara, Registration and Treasurer Linchong Chorrojprasert, Paper Selection Norranuch Paikaew, Hospitality and Banquet Somboon Duangsamosorn, Social and Cultural Events Uraiphan Nawinprasert, Excursions Narong Chomchalow, Publications Apinya Pupat, Evaluation Marlar Myint, Secretary Than Than Mu, Assistant Secretary

— 13 —


Commonwealth Literature and Comparative Literature1

Your title is “Re-imagining Language and Literature for the Twenty-first Century.” A harnessing of Commonwealth Literature for a deconstruction of Comparative Literature might fit this title. In the middle of the twentieth century came the first indication that the leaders of the world must be thought of as US rather than British/European. That imperative has matured for half a century. Michael Ignatieff wrote recently: Authority relies on awe as much as on force... The British imperialists understood the power of awe. They governed huge tracts of Africa, and populations numbering in the millions, with no more than a couple of administrators for every thousand square miles. In Afghanistan, awe is maintained not by the size of the American presence but by the timeliness and destructiveness of American air power. 2

My theme, “Commonwealth Literature and Comparative Literature,” belongs in this larger historical flow.

1

This is the lightly edited text of a speech given at the biennial convention of the Fédération internationale des langues et literatures modernes, held at Assumption University in Bangkok on August 20-23, 2002. I thank Henry Staten for a prompt and meticulous first reading.

2

Michael Ignatieff, “Nation-Building Lite,” New York Times Magazine, 28 July 2002. — 15 —


The following news item appeared in the pages of the Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, on a random day (which happened to be July 16, 2002): Washington may deploy a new force against terrorism in the Philippines–English teachers ... US officials wanted to revive a century-old tradition of sending teachers to this former American colony: to help promote democratic values, US ambassador Francis Ricciardone said yesterday. ... A similar program had been under way for some time in Indonesia, which has been identified as a potential breeding ground for extremists. He said English-language teaching officials had been key components of US diplomatic missions “throughout the Cold War.” Washington believed the program had “helped us defeat communism, which was the threat against the previous generation, he said (p. 15).

What the United States government is acknowledging is what we know as common sense: that education in the Humanities attempts to be an uncoercive rearrangement of desires.3 The importance of this acknowledgement, that terror can be combatted best by changing minds indirectly through the teaching of English rather than only terrorizing rogue governments is an extraordinary, nearly monumental event. Part of the success of such undertakings depends on force of example, on the special innocence of the English Teacher Abroad, the quintessential Quiet American. (Today this acknowledgement has been dishonoured. The Quiet American is in hiding. To come to terms with this is part of my current work. The following paragraph is somewhat anchorless now. On the other hand, and perhaps paradoxically, the general mandate of the essay remains relevant today, even more strongly.) The United States often sends to the global South material that has been discredited at home. It is therefore no surprise that the Humanities are trivialized at home, as they are instrumentalized abroad. We must

3

I think there is something like a relationship between these and the “tutored preferences” discussed in Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 118-119 and passim. Professor Kitcher is speaking of an ideal community of taxpaying citizens and he is concerned about “well-ordered science,” whereas I will be speaking of students in general, including the rural poor in the global South. Even with these differences, I would argue that “transmitting information” (118) would not necessarily lead to a tutoring of preferences. This is part of a more general interrogation of “consciousness raising” as a basis for social change. — 16 —

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

insist upon the peculiar usefulness of instruction in the humanities, of teaching reading, everywhere, on the highest possible levels, not only where hearts and minds have to be prepared for protecting a specifically “American” way, but in the most metropolitan of countries, for a general training in at least wanting to test the limits of what we can become, however insubstantially. This does not mean that my thoughts for the new century are on behalf of an older epistemic style. I am merely speaking for the durable. Without any trace of technophobia, we must at the same time defend close reading, reading to track the play of logic and rhetoric, reading that becomes indistinguishable from writing, reading as the robust model of knowing and doing, and not in English alone. Otherwise, there is no inter-nationality in literature, and our meeting is no more than an attractive ritual. At the concluding plenary session of the most recent School of Criticism and Theory, one of the participating faculty pointed out that Gayatri Spivak was the only faculty who had actually read a literary text at her seminar! (It was J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a text that I was reading everywhere that year, although not at with you. It is certainly a text that invites us to test our epistemic limits.)4 My colleague at the School cast a somewhat pitying glance at my still being tied to so archaic an instrument as the book. I insist upon the durability of the verbal text as indistinguishable from the psychic instrument with which we decipher. To practice the one is to hone the other. Indeed, we transform the seemingly non-verbal text into the verbal before we decipher. I would urge that this is not a trans-formation. Just as the figurative is predicated upon its dis-figuration, so is the so-called non-verbal predicated upon its verbalization. This is not to say that language is the last instance. The linguistic turn was the flavour of the fifties. This is to insist that the criticism of virtuality is not only virtual, the criticism of the video is not only videographic, film not only filmic, and so on. To think language is the last instance is to forget that the verbalizing imperative itself may be held in the random as a guard against the imagined menace of the random. Thus the idea that the nonverbal supposes the verbal is kin to broader ideas such as the law

4

I have gathered some, if not all, of the results of this talking in “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” forthcoming in Diacritics (June 04). — 17 —


supposing its transgression, or that guaranteed freedoms can be exercised only by binding them, to specific content and context. Let me give you an example. Like some of you here, I slept while I crossed the Pacific. The captain did it with machines, in relative comfort, in twelve hours and change. A hundred and fifty years ago, I would have tossed and turned, walked on the deck or stewed in steerage, perhaps kept a diary. And the captain would have steered the boat at considerable discomfort and exposure to the weather, not to mention deployment of management skills. But the difference between planes and ships is not comparable to the difference between electronic media and literature. The technology that helped the flight captain to let me sleep on my crossing has not changed his psychic apparatus in kind. Because of the place of verbalization in all decoding, learning how to read literary verbality can make the psychic apparatus change directions; may, even, perhaps upgrade it. Having access to the electronic as substance and form, substance as form as substance, of the making of art, does not supersede the psychic apparatus. The dismissive friendliness of the media folk, shared by my colleague at the summer school remains unexamined. This then is the case for close reading. Now I move to plurality. The psychic apparatus leans on one language, learnt at mother’s knee or symbiotically at migration or displacement in childhood. The nonliterary and the seemingly non-verbal are interpreted mainly in that language, that idiom, even if it is only to break it up, dis-seminate, inseminate it with other tongues as the work of incessant de-lexicalization and re-lexicalization, goes on, crossing the borders between intention and its other side. To lexicalize is to separate a linguistic item from its appropriate grammatical system into the conventions of another grammar. A new lexicalization involves a delexicalization as well. This is a constant and ongoing process and we cannot necessarily fix a positive or a negative value to it. I first insisted that the study of literature is not an obsolete skill. What I have just said allows me to make the move from Commonwealth Literature to Comparative Literature–from literature in one language to literature in many. Commonwealth literature carries the memory of British Empire in a way that can help us today. Comparative Literature carried with it the aura of liberation, flight from the Third Reich; and remained Eurocentric. This European circumscription can be expanded by using the already-existing resources — 18 —


of what is called Area Studies in the US, institutes with a worldwide network, if tempered with the built-in anti-imperial auto-critical irony of the best of Commonwealth literature. If we do not now make this effort, Commonwealth Literature and Comparative Literature will give way to a version of World Literature coming from the US. Publishing conglomerates have recognized a market for anthologies of world literature in translation. Academics with large advances are busy putting these together. Typically, the entire literature of China, say, is represented by a couple of chapters of The Dream of the Red Chamber and a few pages of poetry. Typically, notes and introduction are provided by a scholar from the area commissioned for the purpose by the general editor, located in the United States. This parallels what Ignatieff writes about US imperialism: Nation-building isn't supposed to be an exercise in colonialism, but the relationship between the locals and the internationals is inherently colonial. The locals do the translating, cleaning and driving while the internationals do the grand imperial planning. The locals complain that the internationals don't understand anything, not even the local languages. Behind one prominent U.N. bureaucrat’s desk in Kabul there is a furtive crib sheet in Dari, Pashto and English: Stop, Go, Left, Right, Please, Thank You.

The market for the world literature anthologies is international. Students in Taiwan, Thailand, or yet Nigeria will learn about the literatures of the world through English translations organized by the United States. Thus institutionalized, this global education-market will need teachers. Presumably, the graduate discipline of Comparative Literature in the US and the global South will train such teachers. In music, the keynote is “the lowest note of the scale,” which keeps the composition in tune. The German word bestimmen, generally translated “to determine,” carries this nuance of tuning. Figuratively, the keynote means “the prevailing tone of thought” (OED). A keynote address at a conference cannot ask for more than what the sociologists call frame resonance. But literary reading can aspire to musical resonance, resonance in detail. A training in literary reading has come to mean for me, over the last four decades, a training to imagine the distant other in view of a responsibility to come, perhaps; an uncoercive re-arrangement of desires. — 19 —


As I pronounce these words for the twenty-first century as a keynote for the re-imagining of language and literature, I may be a consensus-breaker. For the mood of the academy at its international level has changed. In 1978, Edward Said’s words about the constitution of the other seemed just. We got a lot of mileage out of postcolonialism. In 1999, Donald Pease suggested that, by locating itself in US hybridity, “postcolonial theory has constructed the most recent of the variations on the theme of US exceptionalism.”5 This often produces a continuity with thinking the US as the place of refuge and asylum. The flip side of this is the interest, today, of the international civil society in the reconstruction of the world as somewhat baldly stated by Michael Ignatieff in The New York Times:6 imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect [reading this I was a bit nonplussed at thinking that Gandhi, Nehru, and Mandela fought for political correctness]. Nations sometimes fail, and when they do, only outside help–imperial power–can get them back on their feet. Nation-building is the kind of imperialism you get in a human rights era, a time when great powers believe simultaneously in the right of small nations to govern themselves and in their own right to rule the world. ... The Afghans want us to protect them, and at the same time help them back on their feet.

And David Harvey, a stalwart of the US left, can make this surprising pronouncement: I share with Marx the view that imperialism, like capitalism, can prepare the ground for human emancipation from want and need. ... at the present moment, the US has no option except to engage in such practices unless there is a class movement internally that challenges existing class relations and their associated hegemonic institutions and political-economic practices. This leaves the rest of the world with the option of

5

Donald E. Pease, “US Imperialism: Global Dominance Without Colonies,” in Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 203-220.

6

Donald E. Pease, “US Imperialism: Global Dominance Without Colonies,” in Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, eds., A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 203-220. — 20 —


either resisting US imperialism directly (as in the case of many developing country social movements) or seeking either to divert it or compromise with it by forming, for example, subimperialisms under the umbrella of US power.7

UNESCO is revamping an old translation project, suggesting that it is “a way to increase the mutual knowledge and exchange between cultures.” Translation is the most intimate act of reading. I am myself a translator and have just finished translating a 400-page Bengali novel into English. But I will respectfully submit that these gigantic translation projects, like the great dams subsidized by the World Bank, do little good. Comparative Literature had been troubled by the incursion of Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies in the metropolis–tendencies emerging out of the upwardly mobile New Immigrant. Today, the monolingual metropolitan side of Cultural and Ethnic Studies has found its natural support in the hybrid metropolitan dominant and offered the times their backup: World Literature in translation. Because Commonwealth literature tangles with the legacy of the most powerful empire of the immediately preceding centuries, it has never been altogether metropolitan. Yet, because it is written in English, which is rarely the language of the grass roots in the former colonies, its connection to those bottom layers has never been firm either. Commonwealth Literature is not the literature of the colonized grass roots. This peculiar above-of-below hybridity is not therefore the place from which a reinscription of a Comparative Literature to the times can be secured.8 We still need Area Studies–inter-disciplinary institutes outside the purview of our Federation. I am among those who feel that the role of

7

Nader Vossoughian, Interview with David Harvey: Questions about The New Imperialism, Agglutinations.com (Nov 3, 2003).

8

What I write is only true of the dominant handful within the Commonwealth group. The entire list would include: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brunei Darussalam, Cameroon, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji Islands, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, NK "http://www.thecommonwealth.org/dynamic/CountryResult.asp?ID=225" Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Swaziland, The Bahamas, The Gambia, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uganda, United Kingdom, United Republic of Tanzania, Vanuatu, Zambia, Zimbabwe. If what I write is even partially feasible, the terms of that literary dominance might themselves be questioned. — 21 —


literary instruction is to work for change, if necessary, rather than necessarily follow already existing trends. I feel that it is time for Comparative Literature to work at situating its Eurocentric origins, retain its linguistic emphasis and help Area Studies turn around its Cold War mandates, rather than merely segue into the demands of the new imperialism. A tiny window to another landscape had in fact opened in fortress Area Studies at the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. It was closed in the fallout from September 11, 2001. What I am proposing is not a politicization of the discipline. We are in politics. I am proposing an attempt to depoliticize in order to move from a politics of hostility, fear, and “solutions” destructive of the multiplicity of languages. It is in the acknowledgment of such an open future that we need to consider the resources of Area Studies, specifically geared for what lies beyond the Euro-US. It is because of our interest in the depoliticization of the discipline that we must be aware of the distasteful consequences of the fact that the evil empire has now shifted from the Soviet Union to the Middle East: the transformation of the open future into a crisis that must be managed by making language-learning politically instrumental as dictated by the most conservative trend in the old Area Studies, even as English is seen as instrumental to the economic dominant by those native to the “Areas” who aspire to a share in the globalized new imperium. Area Studies were founded in the wake of the Cold War and funded by Federal grants in the US, backed up by the great foundations, especially Ford. To meet the demands of war, scholars of diverse disciplines were forced to pool their knowledge in frantic attempts to advise administrators and policy makers. ... The war also showed the need for trained personnel for most foreign areas. ... In these Army Specialized Training Programs and Civil Affairs Training Schools many professors had their first experience with curricula organized by area rather than by discipline, and many students made a real beginning in the study of foreign areas and in their languages,

— 22 —


says the Introduction to the “national conference on the study of world areas, which was held in New York on November 28-30, 1947.”9 Language and Area Centres between 1959 and 1968 were authorized by Public Law 85-864, the National Defence Education Act of 1958 (as amended), Title VI. In the more hopeful air of the last decade of the twentieth century, we had been able to claim that, without the support of the Humanities, Area Studies would only transgress frontiers in the name of crossing borders. Now that the United States is crossing frontiers with no thought of transgression, the US Congress has allocated a large amount of money to Title VI, for supporting language learning in the so-called “Muslim countries,” for purposes of “national security.” This in its turn has led to an examination of the apparent radicalization of Area Studies by its alliance with “postcolonial” theory. A bill to appoint an “International Advisory Board,” is up before the US Senate. This board will have, among other things, three members (out of seven) who will represent Federal agencies that have national security responsibilities, after consultation with the heads of such agencies. ... [T]he recommendations of the International Advisory Board shall not be subject to review or approval by any officer of the Federal Government [but the Secretary of Education] ... The recommendations of the Board may address any area in need of improvement, except that any recommendation of specific legislation to Congress shall be made only if the President deems it necessary and expedient.10

Southeast Asia and East Asia were, in the earlier dispensation and for obvious reasons of sphere of influence, a concentrated focus of Area Studies.11 George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” is Asian. I am sure there are many in this audience who are well acquainted with the style and method of US Area Studies, often as objects or subject-objects–glorified native infor-

9

Charles Wagley, Area Research and Training: A Conference Report on the Study of World Areas (New York: Columbia Univ., n.d.), p. 1; emphasis mine. This information is also included in Spivak, Death of A Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), p. 6-7.

10

HR 3077 RH, Union Calendar No. 185, 108thCongress, 1st Session [Report No. 108-308], http://www.cgsnet.org/pdf/HR3077RH.pdf

11

Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998). — 23 —


mants–of their investigations. Indeed, most metropolitan countries have various kinds of Oriental and African Studies and the like, often focussed along the lines of old imperialisms. Area Studies in the United States typically exhibit quality and rigour (those elusive traits), combined with openly conservative or “no” politics, at best a species of liberal pragmatism, small p. Being tied to the politics of power, their connections to the power elite in the countries studied are strong, the quality of their language-learning generally excellent, though just as generally confined to the needs of social science fieldwork, and their data-processing is sophisticated, extensive and intensive. Commonwealth literature has almost nothing to do with this academic style. If a generalization can be made, the radicalism of this radical critical offshoot of the British Empire comes closest to a superficially “hybridized” version of what Raymond Williams called the Bloomsbury fraction in the heyday of the Empire.12 In the earlier mode, in the writings of a Raja Rao (1909- ) or Chinua Achebe (1930- ), there was a degree of nativism, which one can still discern in a Buchi Emecheta or a Kofi Anyidoho. Feminisms, either celebrating the native or the migrant female, is a strong element. But perhaps the most powerful strand now, after the massive Asian immigration of the last forty years, is where the ironic limit between the native and the migrant begins to waver, as in the writings of Salman Rushdie or Bharati Mukherji’s Jasmine.13 The source of US Culture Studies in the academy is the colonial subject from the former British Empire or his or her descendants now resident in the United States: the

12

Raymond Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1982). In this essay, Williams presents an analysis of a cultural group that included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. The entire essay should be read to see how Williams distinguishes a fraction from an emergent class. Briefly put, Williams points out that “it is impossible to develop a modern cultural sociology unless we can find ways of discussing [group] formations which both acknowledge the terms in which they saw themselves and would wish to be presented, and at the same time enable us to analyse these terms and their general social significance” (p. 152). Williams suggests that it is important that they all went to Cambridge. I am suggesting that, mutatis mutandis, being touched by empire for a writer (in English) of Commonwealth literature has something like an inimically intimate relationship to “going to Cambridge.” This is not the place to narrate the development of this relationship as it travels through the vicissitudes of global imperialisms. Let me simply quote Williams’s concluding summary of the Bloomsbury mindset: “It was against cant, superstition, hypocrisy, pretension and public show. ... It is a philosophy of the sovereignty of the civilized individual” (p. 165). If you scratch a Commonwealth writer, you may find something close to this set.

13

New York: Fawcett Crest, 1991. — 24 —


Anglophone New Immigrant. Ethnic Studies were more strongly associated with the Hispanic sector among the Old Immigrants, (East-)Asian Americans in uneasy combination, especially upon the Western coast of the US, themselves divided between the Old and the New more noticeably, since the cultural dynamics of the Asia-Pacific have been more catastrophically changeful than Central and South America. Academic “Cultural Studies,” as a metropolitan phenomenon originating in the radical fringes of national language departments, dominated by English, thus confronted Area Studies with no more than metropolitan-language based presentist and personalist political convictions, often with visibly foregone conclusions that could not match the implicit political cunning of Area Studies at their best; and earned itself a reputation for “lack of rigour,” as well as for politicizing the academy.14 The languages of the cultures of origin were invoked at best as delexicalized and fun mother-tongues, as fragments signalling “otherness,” unable to compete with English as instrument of signification and figuration. It is over against this entire conglomerate that I propose a new way of approaching languages and literatures in the twenty first century. But before I can turn to Area Studies and Comparative Literature, I am obliged to consider a new way, yet another way, in which English is now being globally instrumentalized. As I was completing my background research on some 1858 photographs of an early eleventh century temple in Thanjavur, India, just before the FILLM conference in Bangkok, CNN informed me that Mahathir of Malaysia had re-instated English-medium instruction into the Malaysian curriculum. There were comments from the Malaysian-American Chamber of Commerce, from the government sector and the private sector, and from students, male and female, well-distributed among the classes. The reasons given for the preferability of English were largely economic. International exchange was also mentioned. Some mentioned the Internet. The young woman in the group mentioned that the Internet transmitted knowledge and my heart sank. I thought of a pamphlet issued by the Modern Language Association of America in the early seventies, long before the Internet had penetrated

14

These sentiments are expressed in Margaret Talbot, “The Way We Live Now: 11-18-01; Other Woes” New York Times Magazine November 18th 2001, p. 23, in the wake of September 11. — 25 —


public consciousness: English: the Pre-Professional Major.15 The authors had urged that learning to read literature helped doctors in their bedside manner, lawyers in their cross-examination. As in the case of the epistemic shift away from terrorism, there was an intuition, in these common-sense exhortations, of the connection between training in literary reading and the ethical; not merely the professional, pre-med or pre-law would do just fine for that. This intuition is interesting to me because it presupposes that the ethical is not merely knowing the difference between right and wrong but learning how to relate to others–literature being a field of others. Thus the future potential terrorist will not kill, the future doctor will sympathize with the patient’s pain, the future lawyer will ferret into the witness’s psyche. This rudimentary intuition of the ethical now works in the service of the political and economic incentives for English that we have already noticed. I believe that in the twenty-first century we must de-politicize the languages and literatures that fall under the purview of FILLM, and by this I mean all the languages and literatures of the world. By “de-politicization” I mean that we must not compete politically and economically with the already secured position of English. (Perhaps Mandarin can, but with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, one is less sure. And at any rate, is the triumph of Han Chinese what we are after? To legitimate the dictatorship of one language by something like a reversal?) We must resist ranking languages by their geopolitical importance. Let the world do it. Here we must have the courage to be powerfully other worldly. The language and literature departments must pull together in this effort. The Fédération is a global collective. It can begin to reckon with the diversity of educational institutions. For efforts such as this will be difficult, both in the older universities of Euramerica, and in the bureaucratically burdened universities of the global South. Indeed, in this effort the collectivity of the Fédération will be put to the test. We must come to grips with the fact that the ethical dimension (not just knowing the difference between right and wrong, but relating to the other) informs and operates the linguisticity of every language, the

15

Linwood E. Orange, English: the Pre-professional Major (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1972). — 26 —


textuality of every literature; it can interrupt the political and economic.16 We as a federation of teachers and scholars can supplement the ethical dimension in English rather than give way to its political and economic superiority. Those of us who work at powerful institutions, those who occupy high positions in policy-making institutions, those who have access to or can raise funds, must keep this in mind, so that those of us who teach and/or write well, can go forward in their work. Otherwise there will be no languages and literatures left to tend. This federation was founded as a Commission in 1928 to acknowledge the advent of a new literary modernity and reorganized by UNESCO in 1951. As we are well aware, the United Nations are now peculiarly vulnerable to political and economic pressures. Even as we peruse the report from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and Save the Children-UK on the trafficking in women and girl children maintained by so-called peacekeeping missions, George W. Bush is insisting that the standards of the International Criminal Court not apply precisely to peacekeeping forces! And this is only one example among many.17 We urge that the Federation desist from politicizing itself and do everything in its power, in a long-term sustained effort, to keep the study of non-hegemonic languages and literatures supported; to keep on demonstrating that to be human, to have language, is to be angled toward the other before its instrumentalization for political or economic ends, or indeed any purposiveness at all. Commonwealth literature, with its liberal core, can help here, against its own grain, to undo the opposition between Area Studies and Comparative Literature. Area Studies related to foreign “areas.” Comparative Literature was made up of Western European “nations.” This distinction, between “areas” and “nations,” infected Comparative Literature from the start.18 If the “origin” of Area Studies was in inter-regional vigilances in the

16

The difference between this and Franz Boas’s idea of the equality of all cultures (Mind of Primitive Man, New York: Free Press,1963[2d. ed, 1940]; Race, Language, and Culture, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982, c1940) is the difference between content and form, between anthropology and literary criticism, although they are, of course, also deeply involved with each other.

17

I wrote this before the invasion of Iraq–when US foreign and domestic policy changed drastically and language policy changed as well. It is not possible to account for those changes here.

18

The groundbreaking energy of Orientalism (Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978) tends to conflate Oriental Studies, Area Studies, Comparative Literature. Enabled by its initiating impulse, we now make these distinctions. — 27 —


aftermath of the Cold War, the “origin” of US Comparative Literature is in inter-European hospitality. Arabo-Persian humanism of the European middle ages is now a special interest. Individual national traditions legitimately claim comparativism now and then. What is important for our immediate situation is that in its current formation, Comparative Literature is Eurocentric. In the last decade of the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association of America for example, there does not seem to have been a single session devoted to Thai literature. I am referring specifically to Thai because our meeting is in Bangkok. In the Columbia University Library, there is a good collection of Thai literature in translation, and accounts of Thai literature ancient and modern. But the methodology of this material is uniformly unliterary. Either the issue is Thai identity. Or Thai literature is taken as ethnographic evidence. Neither way will release ethical possibility. If one uses literature to establish national identity one is interested in defining the self rather than moving toward the other; also, since national identity is presumably collective, reading with an eye to that effort can in no way learn to learn from the singularity of literature. I know this point will speak to some in the audience. Commenting on the fiction of the Indian writer Mahasweta Devi in a book called Imaginary Maps, which contained some of her fiction in translation, I had spoken of “ethical singularity.”19 I cannot tell you how often women from the global South have honoured me by speaking specifically to that point. What I am saying now is that if we read literature for national identity, it is the call of the ethically singular to which we cannot respond. If, on the other hand, literature is read as ethnographic evidence – as in Herbert P. Phillips’s Modern Thai Literature: With An Ethnographic Interpretation, or Mattani Mojdara Rutnin’s informative Modern Thai Literature: the Process of Modernization and the Transformation of Values–we treat it as object of investigation, rather than that impossible use of language and the world–the literary–where we are ourselves investigated as subjects and flung away from ourselves.20

19

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. xxv.

20

Herbert P. Phillips, Modern Thai Literature: With An Ethnographic Interpretation (Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai’i, 1987). — 28 —


Consider Thai being learnt intensively in a Comparative Literature setting. Consider the Comparative Literature matrix as Asian, one choice among several, perhaps–involving other Asian languages. Consider a theoretically sophisticated reading being advanced within that matrix, as easily as we steer with English, French, and German. Impossible to imagine, you might say. But asked to think of a keynote for an entire century one must dare to think. The Fédération embraces African, Asian, Pacific, and Euramerican universities. Comparative Literature cannot hold just the last item on this list as its matricial base. Rather than take this difficult or impossible alternative, the way Comparative Literature is conveniently negotiating the nation-region divide is by destabilizing the “nation”-s–introducing Francophony, Teutophony, Lusophony, Anglophony, Hispanophony within the old “national” boundaries–the biggest winner in the US being “Global English.” This destabilization follows the lines of the old imperialisms and competes with the diversified metropolitan nationalism of Ethnic/Cultural Studies. The new step that I am proposing would go beyond this acknowledgement and this competition. These words were written before Spring 2003, when I taught at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This gave me a sense of another kind of comparativism, where acknowledging Polynesian rather than US diversity leads to a singular intellectual enterprise with Comparative Polynesian and Indigenous Studies. Hawai’ian is there learnt intensively in a Comparative Literature setting. The Comparative Literature matrix is, at least potentially, Polynesian, one choice among several, perhaps–involving other Polynesian languages. Theoretically sophisticated reading can be advanced within that matrix, as easily as we steer with English, French and German. There are analogous projects here and there, India-based in Jadavpur, the efforts of Silvia Casiquanqi and others in Latin America, Comparative Area Studies at Duke, Kirti Chaudhuri’s outfit in Florence. My research is not adequate to Africa. Given the state of the world, such projects cannot yet cohere. I plead for such coherence, and I ask these efforts to sublate and sabotage old-fashioned Eurocentric Comparative Literature by stealing its wonderful trick of close reading, learning how to read by recognizing rhetorical signals, an invitation to the imagination that can transform rational choice. I have been calling for the traditional linguistic sophistication of Comparative Literature and the political irony of the writers from the — 29 —


Commonwealth to supplement Area Studies, with some of which it overlaps, and History, Anthropology, Political Theory, Sociology, by approaching the language of the other not only as “field” languages. Polynesian comparativism, in the grip of different modes of colonialism, does not share the postcolonial irony of the Commonwealth dominant. Yet it fosters the approach to subalternized languages which the combination of the resources of Area Studies and the spirit of Commonwealth Literature might also foster. In order to crack this one in the field of literature, we need to move from Anglophony, Lusophony, Teutophony, Francophony, et cetera.21 We must take the languages of the Southern hemisphere as active cultural mediums, rather than as objects of cultural study by the sanctioned ignorance of the metropolitan migrant. This inter-nationalization is also useful in the field of Human Rights. Outside of Gender and Development, the question of Human Rights is most often confined within trade-related political paradigms leading to military intervention, ostensibly based on game theory and rational choice as unacknowledged theoretical models. If a responsible comparativism can be of the remotest possible use in the training of the imagination, it must approach culturally diversified ethical systems diachronically, through the history of multicultural empires, without foregone conclusions. Paradoxically, the systematization of ethics allows for its use in fashioning violence in the multiform global Imaginary. The study of the ethical lineaments is more successful through language-based literary investigation than through evidence from interested cultural informants, like East Asian capitalist men or South or West Asian fundamentalists who sometimes invade the unexamined culturalism of Cultural Studies. The proper study of literature gives us entry to the performativity of cultures as instantiated in narrative. Here we stand outside, but not as anthropologist; we stand rather as reader with imagination ready for the effort of othering, however imperfectly, as an end in itself. It is a peculiar end, for “[I]t cannot be motivated ... except in the requirement for an increase or a supplement of justice [here to the text], and so in the experience of an inadequation or an incalculable disproportion.”22 This is

21

The following paragraphs have been integrated into Spivak, Death, p. 12-23.

22

Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Acts of Religion, tr. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 249: translation modified. — 30 —


preparation for a patient and provisional and forever deferred arrival into the performative of the other, in order, not to transcode, but to draw a response. Believe me, there is a world of difference between the two positions. In order to reclaim the role of teaching literature as training the imagination–the great inbuilt instrument of othering–we may, if we work as hard as old-fashioned Comp. Lit. is known to be capable of, come close to the irreducible work of translation, not from language to language, but from body to ethical semiosis, that incessant shuttle that is a “life.” This approximation or neighborliness can guard even the “good” political instrumentality of an International Criminal Court, whose current requirement is that “potential candidates for elected posts for the ICC ... must have an excellent knowledge of or be fluent in at least one of the working languages of the Court–English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic.”23 Melanie Klein has argued that there is no time when the human being does not have a source of pleasure and pain, be it the bottle, be it the breast. It is the thing with which to grasp a plus, a minus. With this simple ingredient, “natural” intelligence, like artificial intelligence, begins to program itself. At the origin, then, with the gift of articulating and associating, and a very small semiosis kit with a plus and a minus, we’re starting to make the entire, elaborated ethical semiotic system that is the human being. “This thing pleased me, therefore plus,” there you have your little memory. Otherwise you can’t do a plus. “This thing displeased me, therefore minus,” it begins. But the beginning is always already there. There isn’t a time that you can see “human in the zero degree.” That is the enigma of memory and it is tied to the time of the body. We can call this “biology as semiotic ingredient.”24 Considerations of such gendered timing of ethical semiosis in the rhetoric of fiction loses something if it is “evaluated” in terms of its

23

In its current formulation, the wording has been interestingly revised: “The official languages of the Court shall be Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. ... The working languages of the court shall be English and French” (Article 50 (1 and 2). The article quoted in my text now reads: “Every candidate for election to the Court shall have an excellent knowledge of and be fluent in at least one of the working languages of the Court” (Article 36. 3b) (www.iccnow.org/romearchive/romestatute/rome-e.doc).

24

This is a general digest of Melanie Klein’s work. The only citation can be to her entire corpus, as collected in The Writings of Melanie Klein (London: Hogarth Press, 1975). — 31 —


contribution to the anecdotal logic of character and world, national identity or ethnographic evidence. I am looking toward a future that is yet to come. I will therefore read a francophone novel, Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon, and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, a piece of Commonwealth Literature, to conclude my remarks, rather than offer you a text in my mother tongue.25 In Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon, there is a moment when an undisclosed West African subaltern speaker, possibly feminine, says to the French-speaking upper-class young woman from Guadaloupe, who will later compliment herself on knowing Creole: “What strangeness that country [quelle étrangeté ce pays] which produced [qui ne produisait] neither Mandingo, nor Fulani, nor Toucouleur, nor Serer, nor Woloff, nor Toma, nor Guerze, nor Fang, nor Fon, nor Bété, nor Ewe, nor Dagbani, nor Yoruba, nor Mina, nor Ibo. And it was still Blacks who lived there [Et c’étaient tout de même des Noirs qui vivaient là!].”26 The young woman passes this by, noting only her pleasure at being complimented on her appearance. Is this characterology or political comment? How far should literature be read as sociological evidence? We should at least note that Condé herself remarks, in the Preface to the much later second French edition: “I had the idea of putting the narrative in the mouth of a negative heroine.”27 Where on this grid of reading literature as text and/or evidence of uneven permeability shall we put a graduate student’s comment that the subaltern’s remark is improbable, because only an academically educated person would know such a comprehensive list of African languages? The least sense of the shifting demographies of Africa would correct this. Commenting after the fact on the lines of communication among countries colonized by the same power in the previous centuries, it is possible to speak of an “enabling violation.” Perhaps these languages shrank, but they got French.28 Can one make such an uninvolved judgment

25

The readings of Condé and Coetzee have now been integrated into Spivak, Death, p. 16-23.

26

Maryse Condé, Heremakhonon (Boulder: Three Continents, 1985), p. 24.

27

Condé, En attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon) (Paris: Seghers, 1988), p. 12.

28

Derrida has an uncharacteristically hardheaded comment about the poor souls who must cross to Europe to seek refuge or escape from poverty: “Today, on this earth of humans, certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages. They must learn the language of the masters, — 32 —


about changes happening in one’s own time? In Richard Philcox’s brilliant translation of the passage from Condé I have cited above we read “Fulani and Toucouleur” for the French “Peul and Toucouleur” in the list of languages. Let us pause a moment on this detail of translation, which the metropolitan reader of the translation will undoubtedly pass over. The Fulbe are a distinct people who apparently originated [text for unpacking there] just above the Sahel between Mauritania and Mali and over the centuries migrated through the savannah of West Africa as far as the Lake Chad area. One of the areas they settled was the mid-Senegal valley. The mid-valley people referred to themselves as Haalpulaar’en (singular Haalpulaar, speaker of pulaar), whether they were pastoralists or cultivators. It was the nineteenth century French ethnographers who divided these people into distinct groups: the largely non-Muslim pastoralists were called peul-s while the mostly Muslim agriculturalists were called toucouleurs. English travellers to the Sokoto Palisades (in present day Nigeria) adopted the Hausa word for the Fulbe there–Fulani.29 These proper names of languages carry the sedimentation of the history of the movement of peoples. Strictly speaking, Fulani would include both Peul and Toucouleur, and so is not an appropriate alternative for the latter. But the implied reader of the translation is not expected to have this information. The idea of shifting demographic frontiers caught in the virtuality of the Internet and telecommunication is generally assigned to postmodern globalization. The best among the globalizers know that there may be a history here. The eminent globality-theorist, Professor Saskia Sassen, for example, invokes shifting demographic frontiers and admits that she needs a historical fix.30 I had quoted this passage from Condé in answer when she expressed that need, but could not complete the reading. Today, in this more appropriate context, I complete that task. The new internationality makes visible the import of the translator’s

of capital and machines; they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better” (Derrida, Monolingualism, p. 30). 29

Michael Gomez, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: the Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 22-23.

30

Saskia Sassen, discussion after Keynote, Conference on Comparative Literature in Transnational Times, Princeton University, March 23-24, 2000. — 33 —


choice. That in the translation from French to English lies the disappeared history of distinctions in another space,–made by the French and withdrawn by the English–full of the movement of languages and peoples still in historical sedimentation at the bottom, waiting for the real virtuality of our imagination. If we remain confined to English language U.S. Cultural Studies, we will not be instructed either by the staging of restricted permeability or by the disappeared text of the translation from and into the European national languages that form the basis of what we know as Comparative Literature. Cultural Studies, tied to plot-summary masquerading as analysis of representation, and character-analysis by a pre-critical model of motivation or an unearned psychoanalytic vocabulary, would reduce Heremakhonon to a Bildungsroman about the heroine Veronica. The old country–an undifferentiated “Africa”–would then exist as a backdrop for the New World African, as is so often the case. The text stages the folly of such an magining. For Comparative Literature Africa is marked by the imperial languages. For the Commonwealth writer Africa can be a running sore. The Area Studies expert can quote Ignatieff: “Nations sometimes fail, and when they do, only outside help–imperial power–can get them back on their feet.” I am proposing an effortful collaboration. There are, of course, many institutional obstacles to such collaboration. Part of it, however, is a result of institutional fear, on both sides. Disciplinary fear. The social sciences fear the radical impulse in literary studies. The humanities refuse to recognize that strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the Humanities in the area studies paradigm are already around. If the distaste for the Social Sciences and the Area Studies can be overcome, there is, as we have already seen, the fear of Cultural Studies. Suppose through the approved channel of Francophony, Teutophony, Lusophony, Anglophony, Hispanophony, they should begin to want to “rediscover their ‘heritage’ languages and cultures?”31 Since, in this scenario, Area Studies are odious, we will be back in Cultural Studies, monolingual, presentist, narcissistic, not practised enough in close reading even to understand that the mother-tongue is actively divided. In such a scenario it is hard not to read literature, sometimes, as a didactic aid. Let me invite you to compare the fear of Cultural Studies to

31

Volkman, Crossing, p. ix. — 34 —


this picture painted by the Magistrate, a benevolent imperialist, to the fearful young imperialist officer in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians: [The barbarians] do not doubt that one of these days we [the colonizers] will pack our carts and depart to wherever it was we came from, that our buildings will become homes for mice and lizards, that their beasts will graze on these rich fields we have planted. You smile? Shall I tell you something? Every year the lake-water grows a little more salty. There is a simple explanation–never mind what it is. The barbarians know this fact. At this very moment they are saying to themselves, “Be patient, one of these days their crops will start withering from the salt, they will not be able to feed themselves, they will go.” That is what they are thinking. That they will outlast us.32

Coetzee’s novel is also, of course, a staging of what may be called logic and rhetoric–assuming that they can be so neatly distinguished. The protocol of passages that resemble the one that I have quoted above may be called “logical,” when placed in distinction from what I am going to call “rhetorical.” These logical passages are often accounts of the fruits of imperial experience, as above, with some historical generalizability within the loose outlines of the narrative. Over against these are the many passages where the Magistrate tries to grasp the barbarian in an embrace that is both singular and responsible. Among these singularities, the exemplary singularity is “the girl,” a young barbarian woman whose name we never learn, whose name perhaps neither the Magistrate nor the writer-figure knows. The staging of rhetoricity in the novel is the Magistrate’s attempt to decipher her. This is quite different from the staging of the logical Magistrate, a capable and experienced senior official who is able to summarize the characteristics of Empire. A series of dreams may be one account of this deciphering effort. To have sex with the girl is another. The Magistrate, usually a promiscuous man, is generally unable to perform what would be recognizable as an act of sex with this young barbarian woman. What does come through in his efforts to do so is his repeated generalization that the meaning of his own acts is not clear if he tries to imagine her perspective: “I feed her, shelter her, use her body, if

32

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 51. — 35 —


that is what I am doing, in this foreign way.”33 I cannot forget that Freud urges that we should investigate the uncanny because we are, ourselves, Fremdsprachig, “foreign speakers.”34 What can it mean but seeing the other as placed, native? The girl is returned to her people and the Magistrate, intervening on behalf of tortured, barbarian prisoners, is himself brutally and systematically tortured. In prison, he is reduced to nothing. Coetzee describes him describing his deciphering effort thus: “So I continue to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl, casting one net of meaning after another over her. ... What does she see? The protecting wings of a guardian albatross or the black shape of a coward crow afraid to strike while its prey yet breathes?” The passage begins with a paradox: the irreducible figure. The logic of non-contradiction requires that what is irreducible is truth, not figure. The passage continues with a figuring of the undecidability of meaning. Web after web is thrown. But the meaning that is sought is the meaning of the Magistrate as subject as perceived by the barbarian as other. The meaning is undecidable in at least two ways. First, there is no stable declaration of meaning. And second, the alternative possibilities of the meaning of the dominant self in the eyes of the barbarian other are given as questions. It is possible to suggest that two alternatives are standing in for an indefinite structure of possibilities here. Earlier I commented on the difference between Polynesian comparativism and old Comp. Lit. on the one hand, and Commonwealth literature on the other. Yet the Polynesian effort can give us a new metaphor for the old Commonwealth: for Hawaii to go toward Polynesia rather than be the fiftieth state of the union is to think of itself as an active piece in a jigsaw rather than an ambivalent piece of uniformity. I want to take that metaphor further–beyond geography–and close with a reading of the opening of the Southern African novelist Bessie Head’s classic novel,

33

Coetzee, Waiting, p. 30; the next quoted passage is from p. 81.

34

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works, tr. Alix Strachey et. al (New York: Norton, 1961-), vol. 17 , p. 221, hereafter cited in the text as UC, with page numbers following. — 36 —


published in 1973, A Question of Power.35 I think Head liked D. H. Lawrence because she herself was the child of a Lady Chatterley and her stable hand lover. In this, she was a Commonwealth writer, indeed, and she used the savage irony of the mad. As we suspect later, the novel begins in the mad mind of the central character, Elizabeth. But without that hindsight, this is what we read: It seemed almost incidental that he was African. So vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years that he preferred an identification with mankind to an identification with a particular environment. And yet, as an African, he seemed to have made one of the most perfect statements: “I am just anyone.” It was as though his soul was a jigsaw; one more piece being put into place. How often was a learner dependent on his society for his soulevolution?

In an extended reading I would stop on the words “soul” and “learner.” Here let me just read it as our impossible dream, to be unmarked, without being a clone of Europe. The first step toward going out of identity in identity–“As an African, he seemed to have made one of the most perfect statements: ‘I am just anyone’.” As an African. This is the goal: to work as a fragment in a world like a jigsaw, respecting linguistic difference yet encouraging translation, as a practice rather than a solution. “As though his soul was a jigsaw.” The model in Hawai’i has only recently moved towards greater Polynesia. The dream of “just anyone” is just around the corner. Of course, the literary is not a blueprint to be followed in unmediated social action. But if as teachers of literature we teach reading, literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation. And, imprisoned as we are in the vicious circle of our stakes in institutional power, the Magistrate's researches in extremis can perhaps rearrange our desires. With teamteaching and institutional goodwill, we can continue the effortful coalition that I have suggested, with this lesson in view. Our own undecidable meaning is in the irreducible figure that stands in for the eyes of the other. This is the effortful task: to displace the fear of our faceless students, behind whom are the eyes of the global others, and to take responsibility to nurture a desire for justice. These arguments apply, not only to the United States, but to every

35

New York: Pantheon, [1974, c1973]. — 37 —


metropolitan country, and to elite universities everywhere, in spite of historical differences. I hope there are one or two in this room who will join with me in trying for a globally just program of studying languages and literatures in the twenty-first century.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Columbia University

— 38 —

NEW FOUNDATIONS: GROUNDING LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDIES IN ETHICS



—I—

First of all I would like to thank the FILLM and the Local Organizing Committee in Thailand, for inviting me to this International Congress and giving me the opportunity to be one of the Plenary Speakers. In view of the risk they have taken by doing this, in order to protect them and myself, I would like to preface my talk with the following words of the German Poet Hermann Hesse, whose 125th Birth Anniversary is being celebrated all over Germany and different parts of the Globe this year: “Meine Aufgabe ist es nicht, andern das objektiv Beste zu geben, sondern das Meine so rein und aufrichtig wie möglich.” (“My task is not to give others objectively the best, but whatever is mine as plainly and sincerely as possible.”) The FILLM seeks to encourage and promote dialogue and discussion between scholars in the different branches of modern languages and literatures on an international basis and to break down the barriers between them in an age of increasing specialization and intellectual fragmentation. I do hope that my talk will break down some of the barriers and build a small bridge in this context. I am living as a Germanist and Teacher of German as a Foreign Language (DaF-Lehrer) — 41 —


not in the centre, but only at the periphery, even within India. In one of the texts of Indian Literary Tradition, Ananda Vardhanas “Dhvanyaloka”, it is said: savadhaastu bhavanthaye baahulyena sumedhasaam nikeroopathaya sarve thee manthavyaa vipaschathaa (There are bound to be plenty of coincidences amongst great minds; But all of them should not be taken by the wise as being identical.). Going by the essence of these wise words of Anandavardhana and by the traditional Asian/Indian discourse, I would like my talk to be considered in all modesty as nothing but a long quotation from all that what I have read on the given topic till now and an unpretentious attempt to add a little bit of my own thinking to it from a cross-cultural perspective. The central theme of the Congress is: “Re-imagining Language and Literature for the 21st Century.” One could however ask: Why only Reimagining? Going by the possibilities offered by the Cyber Technology of today, why not Re-imaging Language and Literature for the 21st Century? The sub-title says: “A search for new visions and approaches to render Language and Literature Studies more relevant to the New Age and its emerging economic realities.” One could again ask: Why a search for new visions? Why not just new (in)sights? I am a little concerned and worried because in my experience till now very often people who have great visions turn out to be those who have lost sight of actually what is happening around them. The Sub-theme 1 on which I am expected to talk now has been formulated as: “New Foundations: Grounding Language and Literature Studies in Ethics.” This implies a turn towards ethics again. Is it not strictly speaking a problem of industrially and technologically advanced countries in Europe and the USA? On the contrary is it not so that in the so-called Third World the current problem is rather: ‘Turning away from Ethics’ within the context of globalization. My submission is that the existing foundation seems to be quite alright and hence we don’t actually need a new foundation. What we urgently require are new structures on the existing, though not always visible, solid foundation. As a practising teacher from Asia who has realized that whereas theories, particularly those transferred from Europe to Asia without cross-cultural reflections, merely instruct, the — 42 —

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practice on the spot aptly cautions and enlightens I still have several problems in my interaction with Europe and also USA. Therefore I am in a way quite concerned about the topic of our discussion and at the same time also a bit confused. Let me happily share my dilemma with you all!

— II —

Teaching is a profession in which an ethical vision is always supposed to play an important role. Teachers are expected to reflect upon the broader and deeper meaning of human life and through their teaching initiate discussions on how one can develop oneself into a qualified and competent personality and contribute to improving the world not in self-interest, but for the welfare of humanity. This attitude enlivens and vitalizes teaching and learning. We all would like to believe in this firmly and put it constantly into practice. But what kind of reality do we find around us nowadays? Can anyone offer us a coherent, viable and universally valid concept of ethics? It is impossible to talk of ethics per se in today’s globalizing world. The world seems to be so fragmented and divided that any broad consensus, when it comes to a discussion on ethics, seems next to impossible. In the light of this it is essential and relevant to ask ourselves: What is the kind of ethics we are talking about - the fundamental ethics, the applied ethics, the meta-ethics, the European, the American, the Asian, the African, the Latin American, the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Buddhist, the Business, the Environmental, the Medical and so on and so forth? Is it not in fact unethical to talk about ethics in whichever context looking at what is happening around us in the world today? In reality we find everywhere more and more catchy slogans being dished out but very less serious discussion on the disturbing aspects of the kind of ethical imperialism which is in vogue in current international relations and the relevance and validity of an ethical relativism which is badly required. The famous German dramatist Bertolt Brecht would have said: “So viele Fragen, So viele Antworten!” In today’s world there are no objective and universalized norms to take ethical decisions and act accordingly. Ethics seems to be culture bound and hence it is now widely recognized and accepted that each — 43 —


culture has its own concept of ethics particularly when it comes to various types of acts in the interpersonal behaviour and communication. An act which is considered ethically positive in one culture can have negative connotations in some other culture. For example in some cultures it is an accepted norm that in a verbal interaction with someone one straightaway expresses what one feels and thinks about an issue even if thereby one hurts the feelings of the other person, whereas in some other cultures it is considered to be right and proper not to express one's true feelings and frank opinion so that the feelings of the other person are not unnecessarily hurt. Even within a single culture what does it mean to be “ethical” in one’s thinking and actions? Is it accepting whatever the society in which we are living defines and prescribes as acceptable ethical norms and behaviour? Is it feasible that every one of us decides on the basis of one’s own feelings and subjective notions what is ethical and what is not? Since the reality around us today is what it is, is it alright to accept the selfishness of the individuals who look after only their interests as ethically alright? We all know that most of the so called ethical decisions are taken nowadays not from an altruistic but from an egoistic individual point of view particularly in the political and economical spheres of life. Consequently all statements and judgements made on any issue - whether we are talking of environmental pollution, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, violence, unequal trade relations and similar other problems–have only a relative moral and ethical validity. Nothing can be totally true or totally false because the various ethical standpoints are based on individual perspectives and attitudes.

— III —

If one looks back at the history of the world then one finds that in earlier times different cultures had a similar concept of ethics and also parameters to assess the excellence of character of a person by prescribing certain virtues and character traits. Let me take the example of my own country and culture. As they continue to be today also, the people of India in ancient times were living with diverse languages, customs, traditions and religious beliefs. But the varied religious literature of Indian culture, like Ramayana exhibiting the substance of Hindu Dharma and the Jataka — 44 —

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tales displaying the essence of Buddha Dharma emphasized similar ethical values. This is also true of the old cultures of China, Egypt, Greece and Rome. In most of the cultures one assumed that anyone who possessed virtues like courage, honesty, temperance, humility, magnanimity and wisdom would automatically display good ethical and moral behaviour. This perception continues to prevail in many cultures and countries of Asia even today. For example, I am sure that both in India and in Thailand we all believe that people indulging in corruption do not become bad people because they indulge in corruption, but because they are bad people they indulge in corruption and so why complain?! In the olden days in all cultures ethics was an essential aspect of education and personality building of young people. People were educated to first become good human beings and then they were taught professional skills on the job. Language and Literature played a crucial role in this kind of ethics based education. Interestingly in most of the cultures the young children were taught right thinking and good behaviour with the help of literary texts which emphasized how important it was to lead a life of (up)right thinking and exemplary deeds in the interest of one and all in the society. While doing this the teacher as well as the student were aware of the fact that ethical problems are primarily interconnected with problems of speech and therefore one has to master the language as well since speech leads to action. The characters in these literary texts in their speech as well action served as models to be emulated since they were supposed to be ethically impeccable. This is how teaching of languages and literatures started on an ethical foundation. But then, why is it so that today we as teachers of languages and literatures feel that this kind of teaching is becoming more and more a difficult and often an impossible task?

— IV —

Let us, from an Asian cross-cultural perspective, look at what has happened in Europe during the last several centuries! After all Europe has been always interpreting the whole world, let us for a change interpret Europe now! As we all know in the pre-industrial society in Europe there was a kind of ethical unity since all kinds of institutions which played an important role in a particular society were strictly interwoven and interdependent. Hence social life encompassed equally various aspects of — 45 —


life, namely, the economical, the political and also the religious. Each of these aspects was considered to be an important component of the larger social framework. It was regarded inappropriate and practically impossible for any member of the society to follow one set of ethical standards in family life, but yet another in one’s professional or religious life. Private life as well as public life were governed by the same set of ethical parameters based on common values. The social and cultural constraints were same in every sphere of life and one could not break out of them without risking oneself being excommunicated from the social network. This explains why in business circles those days one could not afford to have a different kind of ethical norms which could have been rather lenient. With the transformation of the preindustrial age into an industrial era every sphere of the society underwent massive changes with the result that now the individual’s role in family life could differ from his role in the economic or political or even religious life since to each of these realms of life one started applying different ethical norms. The business world developed its own concept of not so moral patterns of thinking and behaviour which became in due course socially acceptable as a new form of commercialism gained control over the life of people at large. After all it was the businessmen who raised productivity, created new wealth and jobs which changed the once poor European societies into rich ones we see today. As a result of this the moral hold of the religious authority, namely the Church, had to decline and along with it also the ideal of a ethical unity in the social interaction. Politics developed a set of amoral ethical rules of its own. The long and not so easy path from feudalism to industrialism and from there on to today’s technological world vibrated with new ideas which successfully replaced the old ones and the result was that social institutions began to weaken and an individualistic culture started taking roots. Society was now no more a closely interwoven and co-ordinated entirety but an arrangement based on a mutual understanding amongst its members with an understanding that henceforth individual interests, even if they at times differ from the collective interest, need not necessarily be branded outright as evil. The political and economical history of Europe in the 20th century shows clearly the growing disillusionment with classical ethical values in the society and the egoistic interests of individuals prevailing over collective interests. Even the way in which the Europeans who, calling themselves ‘civilized’ but calling arrogantly others ‘primitive’, went on to — 46 —

Vridhagiri Ganeshan

colonize the rest of the world interacted with alien cultures and countries, was in no way conditioned by the ethical values originally cherished and nurtured in their own cultures. The present practice in Europe and also in USA, compared to Asia, is that one consciously differentiates between one’s professional life and private life. A person has a certain professional competence, goes with it into the labour market, looks for job for subsistence and is paid for discharging one’s duties at the workplace effectively. What one does in one’s private life and so-called leisure time and what kind of human being one is in general, is of no concern to the employer. The social status depends more on one’s income than on one’s virtues as a ‘good’ human being. The role one plays in the family has nothing to do with the role one plays in one’s professional life. One hardly finds nowadays in the so called ‘advanced’ countries any integral personalities but for that more and more fragmented personalities. No wonder all the psychiatrists have roaring business! One switches constantly between various roles as employee, citizen, member of a community and member of a family (if at all one has a family since family as an institution is also getting increasingly disintegrated!) and adjusts oneself to different kinds of ethical norms prescribed by the sub-system in which one is operating for the time being. The individual is only a tiny part of a big machinery and is not even conscious of the whole machine! One has absolutely no control over one’s behaviour and actions in life due to the terms dictated by the system and sub-systems. The conventional priest has been replaced by the social worker and the psychiatrist. The body of a person takes part in all kinds of professional and private activities without relating one’s actions to one’s own inner soul also due to non-participation in religious life or lack of religious faith and belief. People are all the time busy in various activities which keep them so busy that they seldom have the time and inclination to look into their inner self and indulge in a self-dialogue thereby asking themselves: What is the meaning and significance of whatever I am doing with reference to my inner composure and equilibrium. As and when one gets a little tired of the European world one goes on an adventurous trip to other cultures and countries to experience something exciting or looks for inner solace under the guidance of non-Christian religious teachers and ‘Gurus; most of whom have in the meanwhile mastered the art of commercializing Eastern Wisdom in order to offer it exclusively to the affluent European clientele. The consequent outcome of this trend is that today all ethical questions in — 47 —


the personal life of a person have to be resolved by the individual concerned all alone since everyone is responsible for one’s own actions in a not so friendly world. Under these circumstances discussions on ethics by self appointed intellectuals have taken the form of an interesting professional game for select insiders called experts and tend to nurture a kind of metaethics as a purely academic discipline without having much relevance to the reality outside. Though the importance and value of ethics seems to have declined in one’s own culture Europe and USA with their technical civilization, called in the meanwhile ‘Globalization’, are quite keen on determining for the whole world what moral and ethical questions exactly are in international interactions particularly in the political arena as well trade relations and advising how everyone should go about them. The new ethics prescribed by the industrially and technologically highly developed countries cannot be valid for the whole world if one looks and evaluates them from a crosscultural perspective and perception. After all today's reality is that ethical and moral questions concerning a particular society are resolved by establishing social conventions which then regulate the social behaviour in that society and these conventions can differ from culture to culture and country to country and cannot have therefore universal validity. One has to also recognize the fact that in most of the Asian, African and Latin American countries even today the economic systems and the form of governments, which vary from country to country, have not been able to substitute religion totally as it has been the case in Europe. Most of the people in these continents (including many of the Marxists!) are able to carry on their lives without bitterness and ultimately survive in spite of not so comfortable and pleasant environmental and infrastructural conditions around them because they still have some kind of religious faith and ultimately trust in God. Therefore discussions on ethics and the inferences drawn in the European context cannot be simply transferred and applied to non-European countries since in these countries no one has yet proclaimed: “God is dead!”.

—V—

Let us now turn our attention to teaching of literature and imparting ethical values. We all know that in the literatures of almost all cultures — 48 —

Vridhagiri Ganeshan

there are number of texts which present and discuss ethical values explicitly or implicitly. They help us to impart a kind of education emphasizing certain ethical values. There are various issues which literary texts draw our attention to in this context like the duties of an individual towards community in which one is living, the rights of the individual in contrast to the powers of institutional(ised) authorities, the desire and attempt of an individual to fight against injustice in the world, the conflict between one’s principles and value system on the one hand and the compromises one has to make on the other hand in order to survive in a society and still coming to terms with it and the question of accountability of leaders to those whom they want to lead. We, as teachers of literature, have been earnestly trying to focus the attention of our students to such problems by analysing and discussing appropriate and relevant literary texts in our classrooms. We enthusiastically deliberate with our students hours together and in our attempt to find satisfactory answers to questions like: How do the various characters in this work radically differ in their beliefs, desires and behaviour?; How does their interaction lead to ethical dilemmas? In what manner does this literary work depict ethical conflicts?; What is the ethical standpoint of individual characters in this work, do they complement or contradict each other and how?; How do different characters in this work react when they have an ethical conflict and it becomes necessary for them to take a decision by or without compromising on their value system?; Is there a change in the personality of individual characters in the course of events narrated in this work?; What is the ethical standpoint of the author and how is it projected in the work?; How does literature humanize ethical conflicts?. We feel elated when we are able to observe and ascertain that studying literary texts do help in few cases individual students to build up their personalities in a positive manner, but we also feel disappointed and frustrated when we realize that very often all that what we do in the class room seems to have absolutely no effect on the life of our students outside. We all feel that this kind of Literature Studies is becoming more and more difficult in the world in which we are living today. Why is it so? In fact we have reached a stage where many teachers these days simply mistrust terms like ‘ethical’, ‘values’ and even ‘literature’ because they know that it is impossible to return to old approaches and methods which seem to be no more valid and even sometimes totally redundant. — 49 —


It is unfortunate and yet true that the onslaught of globalization has been creating intense traumas to our ethical sensitivity as teachers and has been forcing us into all sorts of ethical dilemma. Ideally we should be, along with our students, able to contemplate the repercussions of political, economical, religious and environmental problems on our psyche as well as physical well being in the present day world. But due to reasons beyond our control this is becoming more and more impossible. When some of us still make an attempt to initiate such discussions, we find to our distress that there are hardly any takers. Teachers of various subjects grouped together under the term ‘humanities’ and ‘social sciences’ are today undergoing a crisis since they are, to a large extent and that too increasingly, losing their importance in society due to commercialization of education through resetting of priorities by the economically powerful lobbies coupled with the persuasive pervasion of a consumerist culture. In this kind of scenario the dilemma most of us have to face is that on the one hand we don’t want to give up as teachers our role as epitomes of social consciousness but on the other hand are being more or less forced to extend our support to governments and corporate sectors who have their own agenda motivated by short term gains rather than long term benefits by concentrating less and less on public welfare. If teachers accept the values of individualistic consumer societies who will fight for social justice? Universities have been considered as important institutions in any society because they took up the task of representing public interest by critically commenting and evaluating established institutions of authority in their respective cultures and countries. The credibility of universities is suffering today because of the political influence on them.

— VI —

In spite of all these constraints one could still maintain that even in the changed scenario of globalization teaching of literature and grounding it in ethics still has a purposeful function to fulfill. Through European history till the 20th century literature did portray businessmen as a rule as negative personalities. If at all a businessman was projected as a positive figure then it was for acting in a non-materialistic manner. The second half of the 20th century broke this tradition and business world — 50 —

Vridhagiri Ganeshan

acquired a new legitimacy in literature. In the business world of today managers have to face varied questions pertaining to responsible and effective management based on certain principles and cultural variables of the society concerned. In this context discussing culturally bound ethical parameters with the help of literary texts, particularly in management and business-language courses has its own importance and relevance. Hence reading and discussing literary texts to start with in one’s own language has to be strongly recommended to everyone in the business world so that they can constantly modify and alter the ethical framework of their professional world. This becomes more important when it comes to cross-cultural business contacts and interaction. Business managers should know that principles and practices which are considered essential and sensible in one culture may not be suitable and acceptable in another culture. Whoever wants to interact in the international business circles with partners from diverse cultural identities and backgrounds should be prepared to acquire competence in cross-cultural communication. But very often what is being marketed as courses and workshops in cross-cultural communication turns out to be just a one-way traffic from the Euro-American perspective and perception. I know courses in business German in which the foreign learner as a potential business partner is loaded with lots of information about the business ethics and practices in the German speaking countries so that he can behave ‘properly’ when he interacts with his German partners. But how many Germans undergo a similar training organized from the perspective and perception of other cultures before they go on their foreign trips for business negotiations? It would definitely be of immense value if teachers in Europe and USA would offer their students a training in ethical ideas and practices in other cultures and also discuss literary texts from these cultures and show how these cultures understand themselves. The uncomfortable question in this context is: How many teachers from Europe and USA have ever taken the trouble of learning a non-European language? How many of them are really well informed at least about one non-European culture and its literature(s)? One should not overlook the fact that countries like India, China, Japan and the Arab world do have their own methodical and comprehensive theories of ethics and literature with transcendent as well as enlightening contemplation about the dawning, framework, usefulness and effect of literature and its ethical values. If one takes a closer look at them, one would realize that these — 51 —


traditions do surpass in many aspects some of the thinking and theories from Europe claiming unjustly universal validity. It is indeed sad that the traditions of non-European cultures are practically ignored while discussing problems of literature and ethics within the framework of comparative literature at European universities and even at the academic discussions supposedly with a cross-cultural approach. Europe is in deed too busy talking to itself and USA is similarly preoccupied in projecting itself all over the world as the Saviour. Even outside Europe most of the so called elite of the Asian, African and Latin American countries take greatest pleasure in studying and discussing again and again only the European traditions and theories and suffer under a self created deficit syndrome about their own cultures. Let me draw your attention to two more problems connected with ethics at international level: 1. The onslaught of globalization and with that that of the English language, particularly the American variety, is leading to a situation where in a country like India our own languages are systematically being neglected in such a manner that they are dying a slow death. We already have a generation growing up in India which is unable to communicate in any Indian language and proudly announce that they speak English at home! 2. There was a time when in several cultures no one spoke about things like intellectual property. Literature once created by someone belonged to anyone and everyone who wanted to respond to it. This has been always the case in the Indian literary tradition. There are several transcreations of the Indian Epic ‘Ramayan’ by Valmiki originally written in the Sanskrit language into different Indian languages by various Indian poets. For example “Kambaramayanam” in Tamizh by Kamban, “Pamparamayana” in Kannada by Nagachandra, “Vilankaramayana” in Oriya by Saraladasa, “Vasistharamayana” in Telugu by Madikisingana, “Gitiramayana” in Assami by Durgavara, “Adhyatmaramayanam” in Malayalam by Ezuttachan, “Ramacharitamanas” in Hindi by Tulsidas, “Bhvartharamayana” in Marathi by Eknath and “Ramavataracharitra” in Kashmiri by Prakasarama. Also the other famous Indian epic “Mahabharath” by Vyasa written in Sanskrit was transcreated in Assami by Harihara Vipra, Kaviratna Saraswati and Rama Saraswati, in Bangla by Kashiram Das, in Kannada by Pampa, Naranappa and Tammanna, in Malayalam by Ezuttachen, in Marathi by Kukteswara, Sridhara and Moropant, in Oriya by Saraladasa, in Tamizh by Pukashenti and Villuputhrurar and in Telugu by Nannaya, Tikkanna and Errapragada. — 52 —

Vridhagiri Ganeshan

In all these cases nobody ever spoke about copyright and royalty to the original authors! Living in the 21st century we claim from one viewpoint that the world is coming together but yet from another viewpoint talk of intellectual property rights of individual authors and even nations. Famous authors in the past who were great thinkers and created immortal works never became rich and actually ended as starving idealists, but today there are successful authors who are millionaires armed with tax and investment advisors and who try to squeeze the maximum out of translation and film rights when they sign their contracts with the publisher. Is it really ethical to limit create thoughts to the ownership of one individual and say that this is somebody’s (copy)right just because publishing houses are playing their own politics by employing unique marketing strategies and paying phenomenal advances to best selling authors with the result that many deserving authors never see the lime light. If the original work is supposed to be the property of one person who wrote it, what about the interpretations and book reviews? Whom do they belong to? In the light of all this it is very essential that we, at this FILLM Congress, ask ourselves the following questions as stated in the first circular sent by the organizers, and now slightly modified by me, more from a cross-cultural standpoint and not any more from exclusively from a mono-cultural or an Euro-American perspective: 1. How do literary studies influence cross-cultural linguistic and cognitive development? 2. What is the function of languages and literatures in the dynamics of current cross-cultural interactions? 3. What ethical issues are emerging as prime mover in language and literature studies in different cultures? 4. How do shifting views of race, class, gender and environment in diverse cultures affect language and literature studies in the era of globalization? 5. In a globalizing world what responsibilities fall upon specialists and in language, literature and culture and teachers who teach these academic disciplines in countries being globalized assuming that if colonialism was rule of foreigners by force then globalization is rule of foreigners by invitation? Of course we could discuss these questions for days and months and even years together and feel intellectually very excited and elated. But it — 53 —


is more important that each one of us as teachers do not give up our pursuit of some variant of education with implicit ethical aims. Whatever we may think of ourselves and whichever bandwagon we may be right now sitting on or gaping at as mere onlookers, let us consciously reflect on the question: What ethical improvement in ourselves as teachers should we aspire for in and out of the world of language and literature so that we are able to send out from our class rooms such students who would want to be useful members of the society in which we are pedagogically engaged and who will be willing to work for the welfare of a society which they will be happy and proud to value and protect. The famous Tamizh Poet Thiruvalluvar said: karkka kasadara karpavai kattrapin nirkka adharkku thaga (Learn well whatever you learn! Once learnt, act and live accordingly!)

This is the message we have to pass on to all our students. I sincerely believe that whatever may be the outcome of our discussions at this Congress, only a change of attitude in every one of us as teachers and scholars will effectively change the world in a positive manner. There is the story of a Zen-Master who went to New York for the first time. While he was walking on the streets he felt hungry and therefore bought a hotdog. The Zen-Master gave the hotdog vendor a ten dollar note and since the vendor did not return any money asked him politely: “Excuse me what about the change?” The Hotdog vendor smiled at the Zen-Master and said cheekily: “Change? Well you are the Zen-Master, you should know it better, the change comes always from within!” Some of you must be wondering why I chose “ALTUM SILENTIUM” as the subtitle for my talk. This is a phrase from “Aeneas” of the Roman poet Virgil which means: “Deep Silence”. My humble contention is that if after all our discussions and deliberations we are not going to follow it up individually with effective action, then let us better maintain a “Altum Silentium”—a Deep Silence! After all silence is considered as the best and highest form of human communication in the Asian Culture!

Vridhagiri Ganeshan — 54 —

The Possibility of Global Literary History

—I—

There are several reasons why we should endeavour to acquire a tenable idea of the main outlines of the literary history of the world. Some of these are connected with the need to understand other cultures and their mutual connections and their relationships to one’s own. The social, economic, and cultural processes commonly referred to as “globalization” can be perceived and evaluated from very different perspectives, but few would deny that familiarity with other peoples’ cultural traditions and modes of thinking is desirable and is becoming increasingly important.1 Another argument is that a defensible understanding of world literary history is of great internal significance for literary studies, since the

1

This is sometimes argued with great insistency. In a recent article Masao Miyoshi contended that we must “build a future that we will all share with an unprecedented commonality. For such a future we need to reimagine our common and universal culture, as we have never done in human history”. Masao Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality”, Comparative Literature 53 (2001), pp. 283-97; here, p. 296. — 55 —


investigation of literature’s past must, reasonably, constitute one of its main branches.2 Our understanding of literary history is also inextricably intertwined with our ideas about literature itself. For example, many people suppose that literature has existed in all cultures throughout history, but that literature came to be an autonomous art form–relatively independent of religion, political powers, special social occasions, et cetera–only in the western European societies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.3 This is to picture literature as a cultural universal which, however, did not really come into its own until the 18th century in Europe–a little like a chemical element which may be as old as the planet but not have been produced in pure form until modern times. Others are more inclined to say that we equivocate when we use the same concept of literature about the contemporary art form as about texts from earlier cultural stages. This group sees the modern art form as an invention rather than as a refinement of something that was there from the beginning.4 The two standpoints imply different perceptions of literature itself and must obviously be intrinsically associated with conflicting understandings of the history of world literature. The main objective of this paper is not to argue for the value of global literary history, so those few remarks about why literary history matters will have to suffice. As indicated in my title, it is instead the possibility of global literary history that is meant to occupy centre stage here.

2

Cf., e.g., René Wellek’s “Literary Theory, Criticism, and History“ (1960) in his Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 1-20, and Jörg Schönert’s “Literaturgeschichte” in H. Fricke et al. (eds.), Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft: Neubearbeitung des Reallexikons der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 3 vols., vol. 2 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 454-58.

3

I take these ideas to be very nearly commonplaces. For clear formulations of them see, e.g., Paul Kiparsky, “On Theory and Interpretation”, in Nigel Fabb et al. (eds.), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 195-96 (the ubiquity of literature) and Abraham Rosman and Paula G. Rubel, The Tapestry of Culture: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 5th ed. (New York etc.: McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 229-30 (the unique autonomy of the arts, including literature, in Western society).

4

This view of the art forms, literature not excepted, has been advocated by, among others, Preben Mortensen and Larry E. Shiner. See Mortensen’s Art in the Social Order: The Making of the Modern Conception of Art (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997) and Shiner’s The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). — 56 —

Anders Pettersson

In a sense, the possibility of global literary history cannot be doubted, since we already possess a large number of histories of world literature. Works of this kind have existed since the first half of the 19th century. I believe there are good reasons for regarding Handbuch einer allgemeinen Geschichte der Poesie5 (Handbook of a General History of Poetry, 1832-33) as the first completed history of world literature; this was a work of Karl Rosenkranz, a German professor of philosophy. The genre is still productive; I know of three major histories of this type whose publication was in process well into the 1990s. The most extensive of them, presumably the largest history of world literature to date, is the German Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft (New Handbook of Literary Studies), a work which began to appear in 1972 and whose 24th volume came out in 2002. The Gor’kij Institute for World Literature at the Soviet Academy of Sciences was behind the very carefully planned Istorija vsemirnoj literatury v devjati tomach (History of World Literature in Nine Volumes), published between 1983 and 1994–in only eight volumes, despite its name, for after the fall of the Soviet Union the collective of writers felt incapable of dealing adequately with the 20th century part of the history.6 Finally, there is also the ambitious seven-volume Scandinavian, mainly Danish, Verdens litteraturhistorie (The Literary History of the World) which appeared in the period 1985-1993.7 Surprisingly, no comparable contemporary surveys appear to have been written in English. At least to my knowledge there is not a single history of world literature in English whose first edition dates to the time after the Second World War. The Neues Handbuch, the Istorija vsemirnoj literatury, and the Verdens litteraturhistorie are all comprehensive both in scope and volume–their ambition is indeed to treat world literature as a whole, and

5

3 vols. (Halle: Eduard Anton).

6

See the notice from the editorial management in vol. 8 (1994), pp. 5-6.

7

Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Klaus von See, was published by AULAVerlag, Wiesbaden. 25 volumes were originally planned. Istorija vsemirnoj literatury was edited by G.P. Berdnikov (from vol. 6 by Ju.B. Vipper) and published by Izdatel’stvo Nauka, Moscow. Peter Ulf Møller’s “Writing the History of World Literature in the USSR”, Culture and History (Copenhagen) 5, 1989, pp. 19-37, offers a presentation in English of the work. Verdens litteraturhistorie, edited by Hans Hertel, appeared simultaneously in a Danish, a Swedish, and a Norwegian version. I base my remarks on the Danish edition, published in Copenhagen by Gyldendal. — 57 —


they comprise from more than 10 000 pages (Neues Handbuch) to circa 2 800 pages (Verdens litteraturhistorie), paratext excluded. Naturally, they abound in information about the literary history of all major civilizations. We have every reason to be grateful for their existence. At the same time, these works can certainly be criticized on many points. My intention in the rest of the paper is to consider briefly some of the main objections that might, or should, be raised against them. I shall first comment on the rather widespread epistemological critique of literary history and explain why I find it overstated. I shall then present a few methodological objections of my own and conclude by suggesting that in future work on world literary history we will need to formulate partly new aims–aims that are both more diverse and more precise–and also find partly new ways of handling the very concept of literature.

— II —

In 1998, Linda Hutcheon observed in an article that “challenges to the epistemological status of historiography have undermined confidence in the institution of literary history itself”,8 and the truth of her remark appears undeniable. There are several examples of individual works which represented, or were taken to represent, serious epistemological challenges to historiography in general or the writing of literary history in particular. In 1973, for instance, Hayden White published his Metahistory, an analysis of historical thinking which demonstrated, among other things, how various metaphorical patterns of thought governed the reasoning in works by eminent 19th century historians. White described conceptual creativity on the historian’s part as being logically inevitable: the historical field does not in itself, “objectively” as it were, supply us with the concepts that we need to describe it.9

8

“Interventionist Literary Histories: Nostalgic, Pragmatic, or Utopian?”, Modern Language Quarterly 59 (1998), pp. 401-17; here, p. 417.

9

See esp. pp. 30-31 in White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992). — 58 —

Anders Pettersson

White regarded history writing as constitutively narrative,10 and I believe that most people share that view. Partly because of this, JeanFrançois Lyotard’s criticism of grand narratives–especially in his book La Condition postmoderne (The Postmodern Condition, 1979)11–has certainly had a negative effect on the credibility of traditional literary history. Later, the critical arsenal was enriched with the addition of David Perkins’s carefully argued doubts, in his Is Literary History Possible? (1992), about whether “any construction of a literary past can meet our present criteria of plausibility”.12 Nor was literary history’s case strengthened by the common suspicion that it must always be profoundly ideological. This kind of scepticism is well illustrated by Hutcheon’s 1998 article, where she mentions traditional literary history as “the totalizing verbal counterpart to the geographic world vision of empire visible on maps” and takes it as a matter of course that “the writing of literary history serves political interests”.13 It is true that much traditional literary history deserves serious criticism for being constructed around national or political myths, or for more banal varieties of ideological one-sidedness, or for factual inaccuracies, or for careless or fanciful employment of concepts. However, human projects of every kind have a tendency to be carried out in ways that leave much to be desired. Personally, I can see nothing that would in principle prevent literary history from being an entirely useful, important, and intellectually respectable pursuit. In fact, I believe that it already is, for all its contingent faults. It is my own ontological conviction that an outer world exists. It is independent of human minds–independent of being thought about or talked about–and could thus very well survive the extinction of the human species. Our access to the outer world is however mediated by our sense organs, with their special capacities and limitations, and by the ideas or concepts that we invent and use to represent it. Since these ideas

10

See esp. ibid., p. 2.

11

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

12

Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), p. 17.

13

Hutcheon, pp. 404 and 405 respectively. — 59 —


or concepts are human constructions, our representations of the world are certainly constructed by ourselves. This does not, however, hinder them from corresponding to reality. They cannot do this in the sense of picturing reality truthfully in reality’s own terms (since reality in itself has no terms of its own), but they can correspond to reality in the sense of proving to be compatible with it when tested in experience, in actual intercourse with the world. Though this philosophical stance is by no means uncontroversial, I believe it is still rather close to the philosophical mainstream: whatever the case, it is well represented within university philosophy in the Anglophone world and has been rather elaborately explicated by thinkers like John Searle and Ian Hacking.14 For one who adopts such a philosophical position, the ordinary epistemological critique of literary history will not appear very damaging–the accounts of literary history’s predicaments will sound very much like descriptions of the general conditions of human empirical knowledge. White’s observations about the historian’s inescapable conceptual creativity are quite true, but there are no sceptical consequences peculiar to historical scholarship to be drawn from them. For we can never describe reality in reality’s own terms – that is as impossible outside history writing as within it. Some of Perkins’s most important misgivings about literary history are in fact based on the implicit demand that literary history should truthfully reflect literaryhistorical reality.15 If such true reflection simply cannot be had in any discipline, the reservations need not worry us, at least not as a specific critique of literary history. Further, conceptual schemes are always inevitably associated with a more or less circumscribed culture and its interests, so one might well hold that some sort of ideological colouring must always be discernible in our thinking and our representations. As

14

See, e.g., John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 151 and Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 82-84.

15

When questioning the adequacy of the conceptual apparatus of which we must make use in the writing of literary history, e.g., Perkins points to “the arranging of texts and authors into groups”–that is, to our ideas about such things as genres, periods, and traditions–and alleges that if “this process has no plausibility, literary history must also lack it“ (p. 20; cf. p. 4). What he holds against our conceptual groupings is, in the final analysis, their constructedness. It is as if Perkins expects genres, periods, traditions, etc. to be divisions in reality itself and is prepared to deny the descriptive validity of the corresponding concepts when they are not. — 60 —

Anders Pettersson

regards the criticism of grand narratives, finally, narratives in general can, in my opinion, be truthful or incorrect, and I fail to understand why it should be possible for a narrative of small scope to be productive and trustworthy, while this would be out of the question for a narrative of large scope (if that is what is meant by the rather unclear expression “grand narrative”). Epistemology is a complex and contested subject, and I do not expect what I just said to have convinced anyone who did not already think along much the same lines. I only wanted to give a short explanation of why the well-known epistemological criticism of literary history fails to impress me. Let us now move on to my own methodological objections to current global literary history.

— III —

The writing of a literary history of the world poses problems of many kinds. Apart from the purely organizational and economic, these could be placed under three headings. Firstly, we have the difficulties associated with the basic mastery of the subject–with the factual knowledge required, and with the ability to interpret other cultures. Secondly, there are those which concern the delimitation of the aim of the historical work and the creation of a coherent perspective in it. One also confronts, lastly, the problems of presenting the material in an effective fashion: problems of disposition, diction, illustration, etc. In this context, I will confine myself to the second kind of complications–those associated with the aim of the history and the creation of a consistent perspective. It is weaknesses in this area that particularly come to mind when I consider the three large literary histories of the world mentioned earlier. For one thing, their perspective on world literature could be said to be determined, by and large, by the western cultural tradition. If one makes a crude division of the material treated in the histories into The West and The Rest, one will find that The West occupies something like 85% of the space in the Neues Handbuch and The Rest about 15%. The corresponding figures for the Istorija vsemirnoj literatury are 67% West and 30% Rest, and for Verdens litteraturhistorie 87% West and 9% Rest (in the latter two histories the remaining space is devoted to general introductions which cannot be classified with respect to region). Calcula— 61 —


tions like these may of course be performed according to somewhat varying principles, so the exact figures should be treated with caution.16 Yet the general picture appears clear enough. Another problematic aspect of the histories is one that recurs in almost all literary history writing with a great chronological span that I know of. It is connected with the aim of the work and with the concept of literature employed. As is well known, ‘literature’ as a term denoting texts emerged in Europe in the late 18th century, and was then a considerably more inclusive concept than it later became. Around 1800, literature was normally still understood to also comprise such things as history, oratory, and much philosophical writing. Successively, the domain of literature was then narrowed down and came to include, principally, only poetry, drama, and fictional prose–until, during the last forty years or so, whether the term should be extended began to become an issue.17 Literary histories traditionally use the concept in a manner that I, for one, find paradoxical and inconsistent. The concept of literature is employed very broadly about older literatures; for instance, medieval Arabic literature is traditionally thought to include history, biography, geography, philosophy et cetera.18 Modern literature however, especially modern western literature, is principally understood to consist of fictional

16

By “The West” I mean Europe, North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia except the Central Asian areas. “The Rest”, then, comprises Asia and Africa except the Russianspeaking parts of Asia.

17

Two general accounts of the concept’s history can be found in Robert Escarpit, “La Définition du terme ‘littérature’”, in Robert Escarpit et al. (eds.), Le Littéraire et le social: Éléments pour une sociologie de la littérature (Paris: Flammarion, 1970) and in René Wellek, “What Is Literature?”, in Paul Hernadi (ed.), What Is Literature? (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978). Later treatments of the concept include: Stein Haugom Olsen, Bruce Robbins, and Bernard Harrison, “Literature”, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 4 vols., vol. 3 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 147-160; Peter Widdowson, Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Rainer Rosenberg, “Literarisch/Literatur”, in Karlheinz Barck et al. (eds.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, 3 vols. to date, vol. 3 (Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2001), pp. 665-93.

18

Cf., e.g., Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. xi: “For the medieval period, the scope of ‘literature’ has not been restricted to belles-lettres but has been extended to other types of writing–history, biography, geography, philosophy and so on–as medieval writers and readers did not make the same distinctions between various types of ‘literature’ as do modern ones.” — 62 —

Anders Pettersson

prose, poetry, and drama. The term “literature” is thus simply not being used according to the same criteria where more modern western literature is concerned (let us say, approximately, western literature after circa 1800) as when the subject is older literature or literature unaffected by western influences. Some have maintained that this is exactly as it should be. Thus N.I. Konrad insists, in the Istorija vsemirnoj literatury, that literature actually is a considerably wider category in earlier periods than in later ones, and that this change in inclusiveness is, in itself, one of the most important historical developments in the literary field.19 But how does Konrad know that medieval Arabic geography and suchlike is in fact literature? The concept of literature did not exist in the Middle Ages, nor did any really close counterpart, so the medieval Arabs themselves certainly cannot be said to have regarded their geography writing as literature.20 It is true that scholars usually call it literature today. But if that usage rests on the employment of different criteria for classifying texts as literature with respect to different periods, we are back where we started: at the question of how that use of the concept of literature can be justified. Personally, I can see no way of defending the rationality of current practice in this respect. We would hardly find it acceptable that a terrestrial globe employed different principles of representation–different scales, different signs, et cetera–for the western and eastern hemispheres. Why should we accept histories of literature that change subject midway? I cannot help seeing them as the result of a basically unreflecting following of tradition. If my criticism of the normal handling of the concept of literature in histories of literature is just, I may seem to have proved that global literary history is impossible. For if our ordinary concept of literature is incoherent, when used in such contexts, we cannot conceivably write a global history of literature, in the ordinary sense, in a consistent manner.

19

See N.I. Konrad, “Mesto pervogo toma v ‘Istorii vsemirnoj literatury’”, in Istorija vsemirnoj literatury, vol. 1 (1983), pp. 14-20; here, p. 14.

20

The closest Arabic equivalent to ‘literature’ was adab–a concept designating cultivated behaviour and polite letters. See, e.g., Hartmut Fähndrich, “Der Begriff ‘adab’ und sein literarischer Niederschlag”, in Neues Handbuch, vol. 5 (1990), pp. 326-45. — 63 —


I do indeed believe that we cannot do that: for all its merits in other respects, a literary history of the world in the ordinary sense will inevitably be flawed regarding its understanding of what is or is not literature. But that only means that writers of global literary history need to be clearer about their aims and principles. Above all, we should not assume, as has too often been done, that there is a given, fixed object, literature, of which a history of world literature should give a diachronic description–coupled, perhaps, with explanations of the changes that literature has gone through. We will have to find an independent way of circumscribing the very subject of our history, and I submit that our delimitation of the subject can be sufficiently motivated only by the objective of our history, by references to what, more precisely, we wish to understand and demonstrate. As I see it, there can be no single correct answer to the questions of what a history of world literature should attempt to elucidate and how its subject matter should be defined. We are free to make up our own minds. If we believe in the interest of global literary history, we will have to ask ourselves in what sense of global literary history we want to write it. There are many legitimate intellectual interests which a global literary history may answer to, and the choice of aim will carry with it differences, possibly profound differences, in the form and content of the resulting historical account. One option would be to decide on one definite concept of literature on which the history should be based, and then write a world history of that which is literature in this special sense. For instance, one could write the global history of literature-in-the-narrow-sense, including in the history only such material as is compatible with modern definitions of literature as an art and excluding history, oratory, philosophy, geography, magical writings, and so forth. This would meet the interest in knowing what there was in other cultures that corresponded to literature in the modern western sense. A history of world literature along these lines would of course look very unfamiliar, but that is not in itself an intellectual shortcoming. More worrying, perhaps, is that such a history might simply separate individual older works from the culture to which they belong, and where they form natural parts of a textual world very different from the modern western one, and thus be deeply unhistorical in important respects.

— 64 —

Anders Pettersson

Conversely, one could write the global history of literature-in-thebroad-sense–of all verbal discourse, or of all verbal discourse with marked aesthetic ambitions (whatever one takes that to mean). True, this would be an insuperable task unless it was done in extremely broad outline and the history were focussed not on individual works or authors, or even genres, but on something like verbal cultures and their successive changes. In fact, I know of one such history: the French anthropologist Charles Letourneau’s work from 1894, L’Évolution littéraire dans les diverses races humaines (The Evolution of Literature in the Different Human Races). In his very original work, Letourneau emphatically includes oral literature in his considerations, and he describes it as his aim simply to “mark the principal phases” through which literature has passed with a special focus on its emergence.21 (Here it is The Rest, not The West, that is in focus: The West is given about 26% of the space, The Rest 67%, and 7% are set apart for general introductions and the like.) Letourneau’s work is of course antiquated, and its employment of the concept of race is certain to make a modern student of literature feel rather uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I find it easy to sympathize with several of the intellectual impulses behind Letourneau’s book. I would be even more interested, though, in a global history of literary cultures (“culture” understood in some suitable, pragmatic manner), where the worlds of texts associated with different cultures could be described, against their societal background, together with their principal characteristics and functions, and the kinds of discourse tending towards verbal art could be marked off and exemplified. I would also be greatly interested in reading a global literary history concentrating on the formal and pragmatic possibilities of language typically employed in literary discourse in the modern sense, and on their emergence and use in various cultures throughout history. We have seen that global histories of literature tend to adopt a western perspective. I have argued, however, that the traditional concept of literature, and the approach that normally accompanies it, are by no means prescribed by the material itself, that partly new points of

21

Ch. Letourneau, L’Évolution littéraire dans les diverses races humaines, Bibliothèque anthropologique 15 (Paris: Ancienne Maison Delahaye, L. Battaille et Cie, éditeurs, 1894): “on s’est seulement attaché à marquer les phases principales par lesquelles elle [sc. la littérature] a passé, à en scruter surtout la genèse” (pp. v-vi, quotation from p. vi; translation mine). — 65 —


departure could and should be found. If I were a Chinese, or Indian, or African scholar or theorist, I would perhaps find it natural to make traditional Chinese, or Indian, or African textual categories my main points of reference and attempt to view and describe global literary history and global literary culture from such a vantage point.

Before concluding, I would like to return to Hutcheon’s picture of traditional literary history as “the totalizing verbal counterpart to the geographic world vision of empire visible on maps”. We can certainly do without the world vision of empire and its verbal counterparts. There seems to be nothing wrong, however, with having a map of the world, provided that it is constructed with care and in accordance with sound and specifiable principles. Such maps help us to orientate ourselves in relation to other parts of the globe and to see how the world hangs together. They may be constructed for different purposes, for highlighting different aspects of the geographical realities, and still be true to reality. In a similar fashion, global histories of literature can improve one’s perspective on the literary cultures of the world, including one’s own, and they may do that while differing widely in their specific aims and in their principles of representation.

Anders Pettersson

— 66 —

“I Am Not a Consumer, I Am a Learner:” Language and Literature in Lean and Mean Universities1

The shepherd, qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be ‘identified’ with a project that is raising the sheep for market. — Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (27)

During his acceptance speech for the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, Günter Grass spoke of how capitalism “rages unimpeded” through the world after the so-called death of socialism. “It has turned the free market into dogma, the only truth .... Globalization is its motto, a motto it proclaims with the arrogance of infallibility: there is no alternative” (299). This new dogmatism also dominates today’s corporate university. The reengineering of higher education is transforming it into “a horrifyingly

1

A shorter version of this essay was presented at the XXII Congress of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures, Bangkok, Thailand, 18-23 August 2002. I thank Frank Molloy and Vilma O’Neil for commenting on earlier versions. One of the slogans on “a souvenir T-shirt from July’s G-8 Summit protest in Genoa, Italy” in 2001 reads, “‘I am not a consumer; I am a citizen’” (Woodruff S8). — 67 —

Language and Literature in Lean and Mean Universities

efficient and prosperous business enterprise” above all else.2 Its advocates go full speed ahead with the certainty that this is the only way to go. In this essay, my primary interest is to examine the interface of this new corporate university with language and literature studies. I begin with a brief description of how global capitalism is remaking higher education in its own image. Next I consider its negative impact upon the humanities and scrutinize some critical responses to the corporate model. In my conclusion, I stress that language and literature studies have the resources to rehumanize the corporate university. If we integrate our critique and plans of action with those of certain ground-breaking movements in the corporate world, we can aid in replacing the “new dogmatism” with a healthier model.

The Corporate University in A Global Economy

The reconfiguration of the university as a for-profit institution aims to deliver a “namebrand product” and to serve as a training ground for the corporate work force. Its administrators become corporate managers; its faculty, profit-generating “R&D workers and entrepreneurs;” its students, “shoppers at the education store, buying a career-enhancing service” (Williams 744, 747). Corporate administrators want larger classes to provide a “more efficient delivery of educational services,” more adjunct and part-time instructors to cut costs, “more measurement and accountability” to increase productivity, not to mention new revenue streams.3 Their buzzwords are “corporate efficiency,” “swift and flexible decisionmaking,” “streamlined operations” (Harris 26). Basically, management’s demands that faculty and staff should do more with less follow “the lean

2

Micciche 451. Consider, for example, the development of pseudo-universities like the University of Phoenix, where managers make all the decisions and teachers are called in only as “subject matter specialists” (Altbach, “Rise” 3).

3

Lewis and Altbach 6. Also see Altbach and Finkelstein, 2; Enders 6; Rhoades 3-4; “Statements” 7; and the summary of Bill Readings’s analysis of the corporate university in The University in Ruins (Green 280-81). Paul Delany discusses how universities differentiate between disciplines on the basis of market response. In practice, they shoot the wounded for fear that a kinder approach leaves them vulnerable to hungrier rivals in the struggle for rank. Universities now produce not good citizens “but indicators and ratings that place them within well-publicized hierarchies and that in turn generate research funding” and recruits (92-93). — 68 —

Edward P. Vargo

and mean strategy popularized by 1980s United States business culture”–a model that damages “long-range productivity while redistributing wealth from workers to stockholders” (Holt and Anderson 135). Such “‘supply-side’ higher education” shows no concern to enfranchise students to exercise their rights in a democratic society (Williams 744). It offers little to mitigate “socioeconomic polarization” or to facilitate “the balance of cooperation and competition among countries”–all traditional goals of the state university (Rhoades 3). Under this new dispensation, the greatest threats come to tenure, academic freedom and “the critical evaluation of society” for its own “self-renewal.”4 The model of the corporate university has taken root most fiercely in the United States–a culture driven by the dogmas of the free market, where it seems only natural to apply the values of utilitarianism, professionalism, and “for-profit competition” to higher education (Gorzelsky 307; O’Meara 3). In the mid-1990s, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), and the RAND Corporation’s Council for Aid to Education (CAE) all argued that the only way to meet budget shortfalls was to “replace ... collegial self-governance with a corporate model of management from the business world” (Harris 25). Legislators and corporate donors also push the economic model of contraction, following trends to tighter budgets, downsizing, outsourcing, and loss of lifetime employment in the outside world.5 Both Pierre Bourdieu and Noam Chomsky link this current bias in education to an “attack on substantive democracy” from the ranks of privilege. In the latter’s view, rich industrial societies now control graduate students and young faculty the same way they manage workers–keeping them insecure through lower entry-level wages as well as declining or stagnant wages for more working hours. From this perspective, to function more rationally and efficiently is to serve “the

4

Kerr 11. Also see Altbach, “Academic” 2.

5

McLeod 33. For an example, see how the Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota, following the advice of outside consultants, tried to apply such policies to dismantle due-process mechanisms, weaken academic freedom, and reject faculty approaches to decision-making (Sullivan 87-88). — 69 —


interests of power and privilege.”6 If these negative effects were limited to the United States, it would be distressing enough. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The trend to the United States “‘market-based, ... privatized, corporate model” is worldwide (Rhoades 3). The British university system, for example, is now closer to that of the United States–more entrepreneurial, more pressured to compete (Lodge 11). The Australian government forces its universities to be entrepreneurial yet hampers them by uniform regulations–a “’one size fits all’” approach.7 In European countries with “a strong tradition” of social welfare, unions, and collective bargaining, “commitment to the public good” is still a strong factor in support for higher education, but the argument for adaptation to the realities of corporate capitalism is growing in some countries (Altbach, “Who” 6; Enders 6). Even in China, the indigenous socialist model is giving way to the capitalist model. Banks are beginning to invest in higher education “as a new commodity in a buyers’ market.” Private companies are moving into a field that is ripe for marketing because of high demand, short supply, and poor use of resources (Rui 10; Postiglione 12). One of the clearest examples of how the twin forces of corporatisation and globalization work hand in hand to transform higher education is the “landmark 1994 World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement which formally declared education to be a tradeable commodity” (“Classroom” 4). The ultimate goal is to make higher education “subject to free trade discipline just like bananas or airliners” (Altbach, “Higher” 3). Developing countries will suffer the greatest damage, for they still require the engagement of their academic institutions in developing the nation, strengthening civil society, and doing research to meet local needs. Overseas programs looking for profit and unconcerned with national

6

Chomsky 35-36, 38. Chomsky points to the strong backlash in the 1990s from the ranks of privilege to contain and destroy previously passive and marginalised sectors that have been defending their interests in the public arena since the 1960s, often supported by “value-oriented intellectuals” who challenge established institutions (37). Bourdieu centres his criticism on neoliberal think tanks that proclaim “a whole new age of abundance and liberty” while seeking to dismantle recent achievements in social welfare and to restore the past order in economic relations (43).

7

Tierney and McInnis 20. Also see Gamage. — 70 —

Edward P. Vargo

development will swamp smaller and poorer nations.8 The pressures that globalization puts upon higher education also became very evident in a workshop on Education/Knowledge at Leadership Forum 2000, a gathering in Bangkok of academics, business leaders and government officials to consider specific cooperative strategies for countries of the Greater Mekong Sub-Region. Academics from Australia, England, India, New Zealand, and the United States generally assumed that higher education in Southeast Asian countries should take globalization as an absolute good. Taking market forces, funding needs, and the global “knowledge marketplace” as contextual imperatives, they repeatedly referred to the buying and selling of commodities, economies of scale, flexibility, efficiency, accountability, and quality control in their proposals for higher education reform. The hegemony of managerial discourse could not be clearer.9

The Decline of the Humanities in the Corporate University

The decline of the humanities has been inversely proportional to the rise of the corporate university. The falling off is both speculative and practical. “[A]s intellectual ‘labourers’ we feel ourselves unusually vulnerable to the intensified corporatisation and finance-capitalization of the university” and to the “chaotic disordering of our speculative universe” (Baucom 169). At the same time, our influence in the classroom is waning.10 Analysts like Daniel Green argue that corporate society wants

8

Financial profit may lure even reputable institutions to export off-the-shelf programs for use without local adaptations. “Knowledge products are being sold across borders, but there is little mutual exchange of ideas, long-term scientific collaboration, exchange of students or faculty” (Altbach, “Crisis” 5).

9

For a more detailed description of specific presentations at the Education/Knowledge Workshop, see Vargo 4-8.

10

J. Hillis Miller attributes this in part to the end of the cold war. In its striving for superiority over the Soviet Union after the shock of Sputnik, the United States expensively built up both humanities and science programs. Now the two programs are being downsized together. Just as funders who demand “immediately applicable technology” no longer see any great value in basic scientific research, so they see no further need “to transmit national cultural values” through humanities programs (10-11). — 71 —


“’docility and grammatical competence ... and a high level of textual skills’” from graduates in the humanities. It “’does not want ... a group of people imbued with critical skills and values that are frankly antagonistic to those that prevail in our marketplaces, courts, or legislative bodies.’” So why would stakeholders want to pay for our offerings of “enhanced critical thinking skills, refined sensibilities, [and] a raised political consciousness?”11 We ourselves are also implicated in the present devaluation of the humanities. An inbred hierarchic approach draws us away from lay conversations and makes us look irrelevant (Gorzelsky 315-316). Infighting over various ideologies–“theory, ‘political correctness,’ women’s studies, and multiculturalism”–gives literature departments a bad press and fragments them in a way that feeds into the hands of the corporate university.12 A hostile constituency sees us to be defensive, consumed with our failures and difficulties, naive about finances, impractical in our recommendations, cynically impotent, and boringly verbose (Stimpson, “Casting” 23-24). By confining foreign language teaching to the lowest levels and segregating full-time literature professors from part-time language teachers, Dorothy James maintains, foreign language departments have made it easy for today’s managers to justify cutting small upper-level courses and sustaining lower-level courses without full-time senior faculty.13 For thirty years, literary studies has mimicked the now dominant “technical and managerial professions” to privilege research,

11

Scholes, qtd. in Green 281. More than one writer has linked the collapse of the North American job market in the humanities to the devaluation of the humanities under the for-profit coda in higher education itself. Linda Hutcheon writes: “The increasing use of part-time and adjunct instructors in the humanities ... is a sign of more than economic malaise; it signals a devaluation of the cultural capital of the humanities in the eyes of higher education itself.” Moreover, legislators may cut support for the humanities out of “a misguided commitment to being practical or a desire to save taxpayers’ dollars” even when there is strong public support for humanities education (“Blame” 4). Also see Micciche, McLeod, and Williams.

12

Miller 12. Also see Said, “Restoring” 3. Traditionalists and radicals fighting the culture wars naively ignore the reality that literary studies hold precious little cash value in the corporate university (Green 281).

13

James 49. By playing along with industrial policies of outsourcing, “’two-tiered’ salaries,” and the exploitation of part-time instructors, Constance A. Sullivan argues, foreign language departments are destroying tenure, establishing an impossible standard of productivity for teaching loads, and undermining their graduate programs (90, 92-93). — 72 —

Edward P. Vargo

esoteric discourse, and productivity in their efforts to sustain departmental rank and prestige. “[P]astoral care of students or fostering a love of literature no longer count as production.” As professionals, we were unwittingly reproducing small-scale “academic capitalism” even as we were becoming “uncompetitive.”(Delany 92-93).

Losing and Finding Our Way in the Corporate University

Faced with public distrust and misunderstanding of what we do, we tend to project a low self-image and simply retreat in lament over the loss of faculty authority.14 A sense of hopelessness that views the current situation as impossible to change pervades many of our departments in corporate universities, “a failure of imagination nurtured by material conditions as well as by diminished faith in others” (Micciche 446). Yet, as Virginia Anderson reminds us, what seem to be “permanent, allencompassing, and correct” constructs are just the most recent permutations of ideologies, and they will not last (466). Higher education needs to recommit to the notion that “’the world out there is ... available to our remaking, not a sullen set of givens into which we must squeeze and squander our unique selves’” (Hutcheon, “Blame” 4). Of course, as long as trendsetters gain a higher advantage, others will follow. No changes are likely in the corporate model until the higher education market reacts against “runaway costs among high-end providers,” “less personalized, technology-driven delivery systems,” commercialization, and over-reliance on the profit motive. No changes are likely “until a demonstrable, empirical case” convinces any of higher education’s stakeholders that “any of these developments is threatening the quality of higher education.”15 Nonetheless, a growing number of studies in the United States itself, from Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins to Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the

14

Newman 36. Also see Enders 7, Fetterley 705, Kramnick 91.

15

O’Meara 5. Altbach points out that the poor are worse off in many of the United States because the promise of high aid has not followed high tuition. In his considered opinion, the ideological change needed “[t]o make higher education more affordable ... is unlikely to occur in today’s political and economic climate” (“Who” 6). — 73 —


Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning, take up the challenge to come up with viable alternatives.16 Notable among these studies is Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise, a report produced by the World Bank’s Task Force on Higher Education and Society in the year 2000. What makes this report so remarkable is that the Task Force recommends a reversal in some of the World Bank’s previous policies. In opposition to the “user pays” policy, the Task Force reaffirm the important role that higher education in developing countries has to serve the public good.17 They make a strong case for a new kind of “general education” in developing countries alongside training in “specialized skills” for a greater number of students.18 They dispel the myth that market forces automatically ensure quality: “To the extent that competition is driven by cost alone, it is likely to abet the provision of low-quality education.”19 They also recognize that there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence between the management practices of higher education and business. Higher education needs more “time and space” to develop “individual initiative and creativity,” and this necessarily blurs the bottom line.20 In short, it should be obvious that knowledge and use of this report can strongly buttress our own efforts to correct imbalances in the global corporate university.

16

See Brown’s excellent review-essay for a discussion of other similar studies.

17

Ramphele and Rosovsky, members of the Task Force, summarize the report to say that “fledgling democracies” cannot survive if thrown to the market wolves and need help to thrive. A nation’s social and economic development needs a group of highly educated people “[a]s leaders, entrepreneurs, and administrators.” Higher education ought to use “the market’s energy” without turning its back on “the areas of basic science, the humanities, and access for the disadvantaged.” Ramphele and Rosovsky “see the state’s most important role as the guarantor of standards” (7).

18

Task Force 10; also see 83-84, 87, 89. Linda Hutcheon thinks along the same lines: Combining “broader educational goals” with the acquisition of skills is “desirable and important both for the general economic and social well-being of the nation and for the personal and professional life of the informed and thoughtful citizen—and voter” (“Blame” 4).

19

Task Force 32. In poorly functioning markets, free market forces only encourage the continued survival of “weak, exploitative institutions” and the profit-driven tendency to “underinvest in certain subjects and types of higher education, even if these are important to the well-being of society as a whole” (38).

20

Task Force 59. For a more complete analysis of the Task Force’s report, see Vargo 8-14. — 74 —

Edward P. Vargo

Commentators in language and literature studies like Jeffrey Williams make the Task Force’s last point more explicit by arguing for the university as a “safe space and time for students to imagine other prospects for their lives than being consumers, to examine critically the social world they had no part in making, and to envision a different world they might choose to enter” (748). Williams urges us to direct our considerable resources for reflexive criticism to what is happening in our workplaces and what impact this has on society.21 Above all, we need “to propose new images or fictions of the university.” We can reimagine the university as “a world that values people over profits,” that teaches “the values of an open rather than corporately controlled society,” that produces research furthering “public interest rather than the more immediate and tangibly quantifiable gains of corporate interests.”22 Also insisting on the need for “time and space ... to develop and exercise disciplined judgment,” Robert Eric Livingstone advocates a renewed commitment to the “disciplined reading” taught by literary studies as the best “near term” response to globalization’s “putative imperatives” (153-54). Disciplined reading involves “critical attention to the narratives being constructed for us and for our students and careful consideration of the analytic tools needed to grasp them” (155). An excellent site on which to study further engagement with globalization theory is the January 2001 issue of PMLA, which was devoted to the special topic “Globalizing Literary Studies.” Ian Baucom, for one, believes that “global literary study, as a project for the future of literary study,” risks making “the literary market a corporate partner of, as well as an analogue for, global capital.” He rejects Michael Bérubé’s “modest proposal” in The Employment of English for a “world-literatures-in-English incarnation of global literary study,” because he sees it as a desperate attempt to latch onto “the professional managerial class” to order to ensure the survival of

21

Williams recommends drawing the new idea of the university out of documents of the popular imagination. He himself highlights changes in the public view of our profession over the past forty years by tracing the evolution of The Nutty Professor from “the original 1963 Jerry Lewis version” to Eddie Murphy’s “1996 blockbuster” (744-48).

22

Williams 750. Also see Harris 28. — 75 —


English departments in the existing world order.23 For Edward Said, the lack of “a compelling alternative model” is what makes it difficult for the humanities to resist “the terrible negative effects of globalization.” Muting the force of postcolonial theory and celebrating multiculturalism uncritically, we “run the risk of enfranchising” the practices of globalization “while diagnosing them.”24 In response to the entire issue, Balachandra Rajan comes to the following conclusion: If we do not want to be co-opted into the market-driven multiculturalism of “transnational corporate cultures,”25 we have to enter into “a global exploration of social justice and human interconnectedness, as they are found in the world’s diverse literatures.”26 Finding ways to survive within the corporate university continues to be a major concern. Beyond proposals for new courses like Michael Bérubé’s, Cathy N. Davidson argues that English departments can position themselves as among the “most forward-looking, ... inspired sites

23

Baucom 169-70. Paul Jay proposes a “two-semester sequence called Literatures in English, one that stressed the transnational relations (in a variety of periods) of writing in English” (44). His hope is to “shift the centre of English away from its traditional British and American focus without colonizing the variety of literatures and cultures now contributing to the transnational explosion of English” (40).

24

Said, “Globalizing” 66. Also see Gunn 23. Elsewhere, Said insists that “battered humanism” should be “taking part in the debate around notions of the human and humane (as in human rights, inhumane behaviour, dehumanization, etc.), showing that there is both a local and a universal side to these issues” (“Humanism?” 4). In this debate, the human-rights advocate Jacqueline Bhabha argues against a simplistic binary opposition between globalization as “the quest for profit sans frontières” and human rights as “the quest for equity and justice.” Both are forms of globalization–from above and from below–with “multiple intersections” between them (“Going” 33-34). Ian Baucom advises literary critics that when they attend “to the processes of globalization,” and especially when they want “to celebrate the global as a solution to” present problems, “also to attend to the concentrations of wealth, influence, and power that accompany or even motivate the marvellous expansions of our intellectual horizons” (160). Waïl S. Hassan calls for maintaining “’critical vigilance’” over our own “affiliations with power” as we prepare an effective alternative model to the subtle cultural imperialism of Eurocentric global capitalism (40). The late Pierre Bourdieu does the same when he envisages “critical networks that bring together ‘specific intellectuals’ into ... an autonomous collective individual” for the purpose of critiquing the “lexicon,” “mode of reasoning,” and “sociological determinants” of the dominant neoliberal discourse (42). The collective individual should also enter “into sustained and vigorous exchange” with outside organizations in efforts to develop a more just manner of doing politics (44).

25

This phrase is borrowed from Foster 48.

26

Rajan 1444-45. — 76 —

Edward P. Vargo

of learning in the midst of the information age” by offering the critical reading and writing skills needed for “global communication.”27 Foreign language departments in particular have come up with various ways to save themselves, from coordinating language-literature-culture-vocational training courses that might attract more students into the foreign languages to the opposite strategy of reducing the size of the basic language sequence so that there is less need for part-timers.28

Promoting Humane Values in the Corporate University

Survival is one thing; the manner in which we survive is another. To move along with current trends in higher education without considering all the consequences exposes us to the fate of Kenneth Burke’s hapless shepherd. Concerned with the integrity “of our specialized knowledge and our convictions”(Sullivan 94), many commentators in language and literature support practices for our dealings with students, administrators, and the world at large that go against the grain of the corporate university. These approaches build upon notions of caring, empathy, ethics, collaboration, and community. In The Peaceable Classroom, for example, Mary Rose O’Reilley and Peter Elbow propose a challenging program of teaching through which students can learn how to listen with empathy, how to criticize others without causing terminal damage, how “’to accept criticism without rancour’” (33, qtd. in Micciche 438). Deborah Klein, an expatriate teacher in Nigeria, builds her own practice on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy of dialogue, caring, and empowering. She strongly objects to the use of “trickery, condescension, and exploitation of power relationships” in order to enlighten and liberate (176). She also stresses the constant need to selfmonitor the “tremendous classroom power” exercised by “even the least overtly directive teacher,” all the more so if one positions oneself “as a

27

Davidson 100-01, 99. To win over our corporate administrators, Carol T. Christ encourages us to embrace relationships and opportunities that promise “revenue generation” for our programs. These include engaging in positive public relations campaigns, incorporating information technology “into the teaching of literature and writing,” promoting interdisciplinary approaches, “distance learning,” and “continuing education” (17-18). Also see Wallen 355-56.

28

James 51, Sullivan 94. Also see Gilman. — 77 —


caring and compassionate teacher.”29 When he introduced the special topic of “Ethics and Literary Study” in the January 1999 issue of PMLA, Lawrence Buell warned that ethical criticism cannot afford to privilege “a privatization of human relations that makes the social and the political secondary” (14). In this same spirit, John Muckelbauer’s “productive reading” treats ethics not as a set of fixed standards for judgment but as a process of inquiry that encourages “alternative and multiple practices of freedom” (88). This method of reading does not settle for passive understanding; it seeks to stir “new questions” that can lead the reader to change self and to meet the society in which s/he lives (74). Finally, by adapting the American pragmatists’ triad of “experience, mediation, and belief,” Kate Ronald and Hephzibah Roskelly find an effective way to involve their middle-class American writing students in the powerful structures of domination (620). They propose it as an appropriate local method to give voice to the silenced and to affirm hope in the possibility of systemic change. When it comes to exchanges with the managers of the corporate university, our considerable critical skills make us quick with sceptical responses but poor at negotiation and compromise. As Kathy N. Davidson argues, we need to learn how “to think more institutionally and collaboratively,” how to get to yes with administrators.30 Or, as Claire Gaudiani maintains, we need to become more worldly in understanding the bureaucratic systems that drive up the cost of doing business, in facing the “negative effects of myopic and self-absorbed choices on the future well-being” of the entire institution, and in making both the tough and the easy choices that shared governance entails (31).

29

Klein 182. Despite the current hostility to” teaching as relationship,” Judith Fetterley insists on the point. “For teaching is above all about relation and that relation is potentially one of caring.” She argues that this focus “provides an opportunity to develop a feminist ethic for the profession of English” and that caring for students includes caring for one another: “[W]e might begin to talk to one another differently, and, more radical still, we might even begin to listen” (710). Also see Podis and Podis.

30

103. Davidson draws upon “the famous Harvard Negotiation Project” of Roger Fisher and William Ury “to put forward ten lessons” that relate to learning how to negotiate (103-08). Shattock affirms the traditional importance of building consensus and “team activity” in university management as he notes the tendency of faculty to resist “flat structures” and to privilege process over speed in decision-making. “To improve university management” within the new corporate university, he concludes, “we need to educate a wider proportion of our staff in what the management issues are and how to approach them” (2). — 78 —

Edward P. Vargo

In her book Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century, Annette Kolodny also supports a model of inclusive collaboration. In opposition to the single “man of action” model, all the stakeholders in a decision become “true partners” in the process of making the decision and accepting the consequences of its implementation.31 Since feminist Writing Program Administrators usually work through “collaborative teams,” Laura R. Micciche argues, they have the tools to broaden dialogue about administration in the entire system. Through “materialist analyses” of their working conditions, they can expose the ways in which the tone of an institution stunts or amplifies the emotional habits of its workers, develops their affective relations to their work, and communicates to them what is im/possible (see 449-53). Highlighting hope and trust as central to breaking the impasse of the present situation, Catherine R. Stimpson elaborates a triple covenant with students, colleagues, and society in sharp tonal contrast to “increasingly misleading references to higher education as ‘an industry’– as if administrators were corporate executives, faculty members a work force, knowledge a product, and students nothing but consumers.”32 Finally, John Alberti contends that English departments have the analytic resources and strategic opportunities “to assume leadership roles in ... institutional community-building efforts.” Because they can explore student “discourse communities” and alter “interpretive communities” for greater inclusiveness (575), they are in an excellent position to advocate “physical common spaces” in which students and faculty can come together to engage “both oppressive and empowering” social constructions (582-83). Alberti suggests that the new alternative to physical presence–distance learning–discourages discussion, encourages rote learning, attracts students with consumer-based remedies, facilitates social segregation, and erodes academic working conditions. A multicultural

31

Micciche 453; see her discussion of Barry Sarchett’s and Stanley Fish’s “man of action” model on 449-50. According to Susan McLeod, developing “collaborative work cultures” enables “every faculty member to become an effective change agent.” The process involves “providing access to knowledge, building effective teacher-student connections, and practising good stewardship” (34). Also see Fullan 8-9.

32

“Casting” 20. In an earlier essay, Stimpson stresses “an I-thou relationship,” “a trust in freedom of inquiry, and respect for the personhood of each individual” as key values to exercise with both students and colleagues (“Public Duties” 101). — 79 —


democratic society cannot afford such fragmentation of its citizens.33 As for interactions with society at large, Jonathan Brody Kramnick reminds us that literary criticism needs to return to the tradition of the mediating public intellectual and to take on the world’s concerns in lay language (85). Virginia Anderson’s special interest is to a find a constructive response to a hostile constituency wary of moves against patriarchy and capitalism in composition studies. To go beyond polarizing arguments, we need to identify our boundaries and listen to all the “others” beyond our students with whom we must deal. Rather than trying to silence or exclude our opponents, we need to be aware of what good or evil they can do, deal with their incursions, and build on “what is possible within our boundaries.”34 Among three proactive responses through which we can control our fates–all rooted in the concept of community–Robert Newman begins with “an enhanced public relations campaign” to educate the public on the benefits we offer them (36). He waxes eloquent on the content of this campaign. “[W]e furnish the skills in communications and ... critical thinking” that the competitive corporate world needs. “We excite and groom the imagination needed for invention and production.” We give our students “their most powerful and translatable commodities” in speech and thought. Our critiques of the corporate world “demonstrate our cultural centrality in healthy questioning ... ; in intellectual attempts at inclusion ... ; and in approaches that take seriously the principles of democracy.”35

33

See Alberti 576-578. In Philosophy/Law Professor Martha Nussbaum’s words, the catastrophe to guard against is becoming “’a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others’” (300, qtd. in Brown 514).

34

Anderson 468; also see 445, 459, 464-66, 470.

35

Newman 38. Linda Hutcheon cites Stanley Aronowitz’s concern in The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning: “[T]he move within universities and colleges toward more vocationally oriented training has meant a de-emphasis on intellectual growth; we may ... be turning out people who (at least, we think) can meet the immediate needs of the corporate world but not people who can think for themselves” (“Blame” 4). — 80 —

Edward P. Vargo

Service — Boon or Bane?

The question remains: Does the corporate world really want what Newman says it needs? The competitive spirit of the lean and mean university seems to undercut all this talk of caring, empathy, collaboration, and community. The service courses that we offer seem to keep us in a subservient position to the “franchise managers and owners” and to the “consumers of the franchise”–parents and students (Williams 747). Many outside our departments consider first year English writing teachers, for example, as “nursemaids” sent to clean up (Anderson 452). This derogatory label raises the spectre of opposition to the feminist ethic that underlies a good number of the proposals mentioned above. Laura R. Micciche agrees with Eileen Schell that “a pedagogy based on feminine values such as ‘nurturance, supportiveness, interdependence, and non-dominance’ (76)” feeds into “gender ideologies” and offers “virtually no leverage” to counter exploitation (Micciche 439). Rational discourse–rigorous scientific research–is categorized as male. Emotional discourse–practical, service-oriented fields like writing instruction–is devalued as feminine. While affective education benefits the business of academe, the corporate university prefers to relegate such labour to adjuncts who just happen to be mostly women. Micciche recommends that composition studies move away from service to research as the only way to gain respect.36 Her solution seems off the mark. Being an instrument to serve other ends has a long tradition in higher education. The corporate university’s current service to the global economy is a natural evolution from mass education provided by the land grant universities for the “economic needs of a growing industrial and corporate-based” United States capitalist society in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Alberti 565, 566). As Daniel Green argues, the teaching of literature itself has never been for its own sake but rather to serve extraneous purposes–to teach rhetoric, history, morality, or interpretative method. Even James Axtell’s recent justification to the corporate university that the teaching of literature develops mental prowess remains an instrumen-

36

See Micciche 439-41. Judith Fetterley relates the low status of the humanities to the fact that teaching prevails over scientific research; that marks our activity as feminine. Privileging theory has been a masculine ploy to gain status, with questionable results (see 706). — 81 —


tal purpose (see Green 277-79). Finally, as Paul Delany reminds us, the humanities have long “served to credentialize” the white male upper-class elite, and we should “welcome the ruin” of this tradition (90). It is not so much the question, “To serve or not to serve,” but whom, what, and how we serve. There is a way in which service sloughs off subservience and becomes leadership. Aldo Scaglione argues that we need to “think hard” about our “rightful role” in governance, not in subservience to other constituencies, but “in active cooperation” with them (76-77). The social contract calls upon all to use power “not to oppress but to serve, not as an end but a means, not to create problems but to solve them” (79). Following this line ensures healthy democratic relationships between administrators, faculty, and students. We need to have confidence in our ability to “effect changes if we put our minds to it.” We should work for changes that enhance the role of administrators as “servants of the servants” (80). “[A] good academic administrator is ... a friendly collaborator instead of an enemy” (82). At Bangkok’s Leadership Forum 2000, Neil Quigley was a lone voice in emphasizing the crucial need for transformational leadership. Most of the other speakers made proposals for higher education that follow the style of transactional leadership. Such leadership–prevalent in the corporate university–stresses rules and sanctions and behavioural objectives. It operates on the level of preconventional moral development normal for a pre-adolescent child. In contrast, transformational leadership operates on the level of postconventional moral development achieved by the fully mature adult. It takes the “cost and benefits for all stakeholders” as its moral referents. It draws on “self-chosen, universal ethical principles to seek creative solutions to ethical dilemmas that serve the common good while respecting the individual rights of all interested parties (including self).”37 There is nothing subservient about such leadership. It promotes a kind of service that is a corrective to the excesses of the corporate university.

37

Graham 152-53. For further analysis of Quigley, see Vargo 6-7. — 82 —

Edward P. Vargo

Demythologizing and Defanging the Demon

In this final section, I want to consider the kind of interaction between the humanities and business cultures that can get us beyond our present impasse in the corporate university. An interesting way to begin is to consider the place of the humanities in a business school. A few years ago, Joseph Urgo reported that “the most recent AACSB [American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business] accreditation standards ... demand fewer credit hours in business and more credit hours in liberal arts; at least half of any student’s program of study must be in what the AACSB calls ‘general education.’” Technical training tries to reduce uncertainty, promote quick decisions, and increase productivity. “Liberal education at its best,” writes Urgo, “prepares students for uncertainty by rewarding the very qualities that technical training means to reduce” (135). A genuine education does not limit itself to training for narrowly pragmatic immediate ends. “[W]hile a business education will ensure competency in the present environment, an engagement with the liberal arts will prepare students for the obscure destinies of a jobless world” in the Information Age (137). A major presumption of this era is that knowledge is “the business of all, especially of business.” This reduces higher education to just “one among many providers” in the “ecology of knowledge” (Liu 121). To deal with “the really critical issues in the relation of the academy to business” today, Alan Liu argues, humanistic scholars must perceive “business as an intellectual as well as a practical partner” with whom we share “a common stake in knowledge work.” As an example, he cites Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, which he calls “the most influential and widely cited gospel of the new knowledge work.” Only if we seriously engage the full intellectual force of such productions can we determine “the new–and not nineteenthcentury–difference between the academy and the ‘learning organization’”(119-20).38 Only if we take “the knowledge-based society” seriously can we proceed to ask, with Noam Chomsky, what and whom it serves. “However rich, knowledge is quite different from true understand-

38

Liu 119-20. For an extensive bibliography of print and online resources bearing on the relation between the academy and business, reports on relevant controversies in various countries, study questions, and the like, see http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/liu/palinurus/ — 83 —


ing.” To assure a more humane future world, we need “an understandingbased society.”39 Ironically, we may find some of the best alternatives to the corporate university in corporate culture itself. Even as higher education was embracing the lean and mean business strategies of the 1980s, the past decade has seen growing movements to re-humanize the corporate world, to “trace productivity to relationships, collaboration, and creativity rather than to sheer efficiency and economy.” Beyond deploring or surrendering to the importation of business strategies into higher education, it is possible to seek and achieve “real managerial power for the nonprofit approaches to human development” (Brown 519). We have allies within on-going movements to re-humanize corporate culture such as Servant-Leadership. This institutional model, “based on teamwork and community” and “in ethical and caring behaviour” (Spears, “Tracing” 1), attempts to “lead people by coaching, empowerment, persuasion, [and] modelling” rather than by the profit motive, fragmentation, performance measures, and similar controls (Covey xvii). Servant-Leadership is not subservience but a proactive sharing of authority to meet common goals. All those commentators above who focus on empathy, caring, stewardship, trust, serving the servants, respecting all stakeholders, and covenants are writing in the spirit of Servant-Leadership. If they would recognize their common concerns with each other and with promoters of Servant-Leadership, they could join together in “critical networks of autonomous collective individuals” to supply “a compelling alternative model” to the corporate university.40 Thus, for example, we could promote the organizational model that Margaret J. Wheatley develops out of the findings of modern life

39

Chomsky 34. Linda Hutcheon holds that “students need both knowledge and training, intelligence and facts, to cope with the world of the twenty-first century. Our colleges and universities must graduate educated, thoughtful, and ethical citizens as well as skilled ones. ... [S]ociety ‘needs people capable of taking the long view, of going against the grain, of reflecting on what it means to be a human being thrust into the third millennium’” (“Blame” 4).

40

Holt and Anderson note how the business world has developed a “popular critique of overwork in industrialized countries” with “twelve-step ‘workaholic’ groups,” “best-selling books,” and programs of life-style change like “‘downshifting’ ... and voluntary simplicity” (139). The aim is to achieve more balanced, multifaceted lives focussed not just on work but also on “family and other social bonds” and active participation in democracy (140). For other examples of efforts to reinstate spirituality in business cultures, see Vargo 15-16. — 84 —

Edward P. Vargo

scientists. These researchers observe “a world where creative selfexpression and embracing systems of relationships are the organizing energies. ... Organisms shape themselves in response to their neighbours and their environments. All respond to one another, coevolving and cocreating the complex systems of organization that we see in nature” (344, 346). Wheatley applies these observations to the human situation to conclude: “Simultaneously, and in ways difficult to chart, the process of organizing involves creating relationships around a shared sense of purpose, exchanging and creating information, . . . coadapting, coevolving, developing wisdom as we learn, ... being alert to changes from all directions” (347-48). Administrators who rely too heavily on sterile organizational charts damage the organization’s need for individuals to go beyond the rules in unpredictable crisis situations. Administrators who exploit a dog-eat-dog mentality to raise performance deny the forces of creativity and connectedness. Life-giving servant-leaders allow for the human ability to surprise and to “create meaning together” in the best interests of the organization.41 For another example, we could advance the balanced stakeholder service enterprise strategy to counter the tendency of corporate reformers to focus upon the interests of private investment above all. This approach guarantees “positive net value for all stakeholders ... so that no stakeholder group is used purely instrumentally to serve others” (Graham 148). Because competing interest groups can easily enough torpedo such an initiative, an organization “must have distinctive abilities both at managing conflict and at adapting successfully to change over time” for this strategy to work (154). It demands a growing shared awareness that “a deep understanding of the human person” is “the only source of sustainable competitive advantage as we enter the new millennium” (Bausch 231). The real genius of the capitalist system is not the efficiency that so obsesses current managerial discourse, but its remarkable ability to release the greatest of all assets–unpredictable human creativity. If one considers the function of work as well as its remuneration, process, and product, then the only way to release full potential in an organization is to “form community,” to develop “self-directed work teams, councils of

41

Wheatley 350, 347. This and the following two paragraphs are largely drawn from Vargo 14-23, where a fuller treatment of Servant-Leadership’s possibilities for higher education can be found. — 85 —


equals, and alliances in which everyone is serving and accountable to the others.”42

A higher education that privileges creativity and community cultivates “the personal and corporate disciplines of the inner world” as well as skills with which to manipulate the external world (Palmer 206-07). A higher education that cultivates self-esteem, integrity, initiative, and mutual trust can infuse in all its members the vitality and spirit needed to acquire true excellence (see Conley and Wagner-Marsh 254-55). The challenge for servant-leaders is not just to dismantle dehumanizing mechanisms of control, but to aim at rehumanizing the corporate university. As Nellie McKay has suggested, we can conceive this as a project of peace: “We might feel differently if we understood ourselves as living together in a community of seekers and dispensers of knowledge rather than as combatants, at war with those with whom we disagree and with whom we can settle our differences only violently” (Hutcheon, “Presidential” 527). We can no longer live in isolation from the realities of the world. Our challenge is to dialogue and interaction with our students, with each other, with the managers of the corporate university, with a society that sometimes misunderstands and suspects what we do. The ivory tower is collapsing, and good riddance, even if the corporate university is raising fearsome structures to replace it. Without our input these structures will end up empty and abandoned, like the half-finished towers that dot the Bangkok skyline since the economic crisis of 1997. The time to act on our hopes and beliefs is now.

Edward P. Vargo

42

Bausch 242; Bottum with Lenz 169. Like Graham, Bausch stresses higher education’s need to search for “entirely new models of education that focus on the needs of persons rather than the vested rights of the providers” (236). For a selection of writings that have focussed on “the ethical underpinnings of strategy” in the last two decades, see Spears, Insights 367n1. — 86 —

Edward P. Vargo

Works Cited

Alberti, John. 2001. “Returning to Class: Creating Opportunities for Multicultural Reform at Majority Second-Tier Schools.” College English 63 (2001): 561-84. Altbach, Philip G. 2000. “The Crisis in Multinational Higher Education.” International Higher Education 21 (Fall 2000): 3-5. —————. 2000. “The Rise of the Pseudouniversities.” International Higher Education 25 (Fall 2001): 2-3. —————. 2001. “Higher Education and the WTO: Globalization Run Amok.” International Higher Education 23 (Spring 2001): 2-4. —————. 2001. “Academic Freedom: International Warning Signs.” International Higher Education 24 (Summer 2001): 2-3. —————. 2002. “Who Is Paying for Higher Education—and Why?” International Higher Education 27 (Spring 2002): 5-6. Altbach, Philip G., and Martin J. Finkelstein. 1996. “The American Academic Profession.” International Higher Education 4 (Spring 1996): 2-3. Anderson, Virginia. 2000. “Property Rights: Exclusion as Moral Action in ‘The Battle of Texas.’” College English 62 (2000): 445-72. Aronowitz, Stanley. 2000. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon. Baucom, Ian. 2001. “Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies.” PMLA 116 (2001): 158-72. Bausch, Thomas A. “Servant-Leaders Making Human New Models of Work and Organization.” Spears, Insight 230-45. Bérubé, Michael. 1997. The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies. Cultural Front Series. New York: New York UP. Bottum, Bill, with Dorothy Lenz. “Within Our Reach: Servant-Leadership for the Twenty-first Century.” Spears, Insights 157-69.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. “For a Scholarship with Commitment.” Profession (2000): 40-45. Brown, Phyllis R. 2000. “The Business of Higher Education in America: Some Hopeful Prospects.” Rev. of Literature: An Embattled Profession, by Carl Woodring; Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education, by Martha C. Nussbaum; The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defence of Higher Education, by James Axtell; Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University, ed. Randy Martin. College English 62 (2000): 511-23. Buell, Lawrence. 1999. “In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA 114 (1999): 7-19. Burke, Kenneth. 1969. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: U of California P. Chomsky, Noam. 2000. “Paths Taken, Tasks Ahead.” Profession (2000): 32-39. Christ, Carol T. 1998. “Challenges of the Millennium.” ADE Bulletin 121 (Winter 1998): 16-18. “Classroom Sell-out Irks Teachers.” Bangkok Post 30 July 2001: 4. Conley, James, and Fraya Wagner-Marsh. “The Integration of Business Ethics and Spirituality in the Workplace.” Spears, Insight 251-57. Covey, Stephen R. “Servant-Leadership from the Inside Out.” Foreword. Spears, Insights xi-xviii. Davidson, Cathy N. 2000. “Them versus Us (and Which One of ‘Them’ Is Me?).” Profession (2000): 97-108. Delany, Paul. 2000. “The University in Pieces: Bill Readings and the Fate of the Humanities.” Profession (2000): 89-96. Enders, Jürgen. 2000. “The Winds of Change and the Conditions of Academic Staff in Europe.” International Higher Education 21 (Fall 2000): 6-7. Fetterley, Judith. 1999. “Dreaming the Future of English.” Symposium: English 1999. College English 61 (1999): 702-11. Fisher, Roger, and William L. Ury. 1992. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Foster, Thomas. 2002. “Cyber-Aztecs and Cholo-Punks: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Five-Worlds Theory.” PMLA 117 (2002): 43-67.

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Fullan, Michael G. 1993. Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform. School Development and the Management of Change 10. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Gamage, David. 2000. “Australian Higher Education: Current Issues and Policy Directions.” International Higher Education 21 (Fall 2000): 20-21. Gaudiani, Claire. 1996. “The Soul in the Machine or the Machine in the Soul?” Profession (1996): 2636. Gilman, Sander L. 2000. “Learning a Foreign Language in a Monolingual World.” PMLA 115 (2000): 1032-40. “Going Global.” University of Chicago Magazine Dec. 2000: 29-35. Gorzelsky, Gwen. 2002. “Ghosts: Liberal Education and Negotiated Authority.” College English 64 (2002): 302-25. Graham, Jill W. “Servant-Leadership and Enterprise Strategy.” Spears, Insights 145-56. Grass, Günter. 2000. “‘To Be Continued ...’” Trans. Michael Henry Heim. Nobel Lecture 1999. PMLA 115 (2000): 292-300. Green, Daniel. 2001. “Abandoning the Ruins.” Opinion. College English 61 (2001): 273-87. Gunn, Giles. 2001. “Introduction: Globalizing Literary Studies.” PMLA 116 (2001): 16-31. Harris, Charles B. 1998. “The Downsizing of the American Mind: Academic Citizenship and the Current Crisis.” ADE Bulletin 121 (Winter 1998): 25-28. Hassan, Waïl S. 2000. “World Literature in the Age of Globalization: Reflections on an Anthology.” College English 63 (2000): 38-47. Holt, Mara, and Leon Anderson. 1998. “The Way We Work Now.” Profession (1998): 131-42. Hutcheon, Linda. 2000. “Blame Canada: Where Defense of the Humanities Makes the News.” President’s Column. MLA Newsletter (Fall 2000): 3-4. —————. 2001. “Presidential Address 2000: She Do the President in Different Voices.” PMLA 116 (2001): 518-30. James, Dorothy. 1997. “Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who’s Minding the Store?” Profession (1997): 41-53. — 89 —


Jay, Paul. 2001. “Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English.” PMLA 116 (2001): 32-47. Kerr, Clark. 2001. “Shock Wave II: The 21st Century In American Higher Education.” International Higher Education 23 (Spring 2001): 10-11. Klein, Deborah. 1999. “Iago Lives in the Panopticon; or, Teaching Resistance, Granting Respect.” College English 62 (1999): 169-91. Kolodny, Annette. 1998. Failing the Future: A Dean Looks at Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP. Kramnick, Jonathan Brody. 1997. “Origins of the Present Crisis.” Profession (1997): 84-92. Lewis, Lionel S., and Philip G. Altbach. 1996. “The Dilemma of Higher Education Reform in the United States.” International Higher Education 6 (December 1996): 6-7. Liu, Alan. 1999. “Knowledge in the Age of Knowledge Work.” Profession (1999): 113-24. Livingston, Robert Eric. 2001. “Glocal Knowledges: Agency and Place in Literary Studies.” PMLA 116 (2001): 145-57. Lodge, David. 1999. “Interview with David Lodge.” With Elaine Showalter. Profession (1999): 9-14. McLeod, Susan. 1999. “The Ethics of Hiring in a Time of Change: A Response to the Final Report: MLA Committee on Professional Employment and to the ‘Statement from the Conference on the Growing Use of Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty.” ADE Bulletin 122 (Spring 1999): 31-34. Micciche, Laura R. 2002. “More Than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work.” College English 64 (2002): 432-58. Miller, J. Hillis. 1996. “Literary Study in the Transnational University.” Profession (1996): 6-14. Muckelbauer, John. 2000. “On Reading Differently: Through Foucault’s Resistance.” College English 63 (2000): 71-94. Newman, Robert. 1999. “Reviving the State of the Profession.” ADE Bulletin 122 (Spring 1999): 35-38. O’Meara, KerryAnn. 2001. “The Impact of Consumerism, Capitalism, and For-profit Competition on American Higher Education.” International Higher Education 22 (Winter 2001): 3-5. O’Reilley, Mary Rose, and Peter Elbow. 1993. The Peaceable Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. — 90 —

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Palmer, Parker J. “Leading from Within.” Spears, Insight 197-208. Podis, Leonard A., and JoAnne M. Podis. 2000. “The Rhetoric of Reproof.” Opinion. College English 63 (2000): 214-28. Postiglione, Gerard. 2001. “China’s Expansion, Consolidation, and Globalization.” International Higher Education 24 (Summer 2001): 10-12. Quigley, Neil. 2000. “The Role of Universities in the Development of Leadership and Management Skills in Business and Government. Education/Knowledge Workshop”. Leadership Forum 2000. Bangkok, 16 Feb. 2000. Rajan, Balachandra. 2001. “Globalization and Imperialism.” Forum. PMLA 116 (2001): 1444-45. Ramphele, Mamphela, and Henry Rosovsky. 2000. “New Report on Higher Education in Developing Countries: Educated People Are No Luxury, They’re Essential.” International Higher Education 20 (Summer 2000): 7-8. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Rhoades, Gary. 1998. “Market Models, Managerial Institutions, and Managed Professionals.” International Higher Education 13 (Fall 1998): 3-4. Ronald, Kate, and Hephzibah Roskelly. 2001. “Untested Feasibility: Imagining the Pragmatic Possibility of Paulo Freire.” College English 63 (2001): 612-32. Rui, Yang. 2001. “China’s Entry into the WTO and Higher Education.” International Higher Education 24 (Summer 2001): 9-10. Said, Edward W. 1999. “Restoring Intellectual Coherence.” President’s Column. MLA Newsletter (Spring 1999): 3-4. —————. 1999. “Humanism?” President’s Column. MLA Newsletter (Fall 1999): 3-4. —————. 2001. “Globalizing Literary Study.” PMLA 116 (2001): 64-68. Scaglione, Aldo. 1997. “The “Question of University Governance.” Profession (1997): 75-83. Schell, Eileen E. 1998.“The Costs of Caring: ‘Femininism’ and Contingent Women Workers in Composition Studies.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Eds. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 1998. 74-93.

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Scholes, Robert. 1998. The Rise and Fall of English. New Haven: Yale UP. Senge, Peter M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Currency Doubleday. Shattock, Michael. 2002. “Forget Copycat Management.” International Higher Education 27 (Spring 2002): 2. Spears, Larry C., ed. 1998. Insights on Leadership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit, and ServantLeadership. New York: John Wiley & Sons. —————. “Tracing the Growing Impact of Servant-Leadership” Introduction. Spears, Insights 1-12. Stimpson, Catherine R. 1996. “The Public Duties of Our Profession.” Profession (1996): 100-02. —————. 1998. “Casting Our Lots with Change: The University and Its Covenants.” ADE Bulletin 121 (Winter 1998): 19-24. Sullivan, Constance A. 1999. “The Corporatized Research University and Tenure in Modern Language Departments: Notes from Minnesota.” Profession (1999): 86-95. Task Force on Higher Education and Society. 2000. Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise. Washington: World Bank. Tierney, William G., and Craig McInnis. 2001. “Globalization and Its Discontents: Dilemmas Facing Tertiary Education in Australia.” International Higher Education 25 (Fall 2001): 19-21. Urgo, Joseph R. 1996. “An Obscure Destiny, This Business of Teaching English.” Profession (1996): 134-38. Vargo, Edward. ”Higher Education and the New World Order.” The New World Order: Corporate Agenda and Parallel Reality. Ed. Gordana Yovanovich. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, forthcoming. Wallen, Jeffrey. 2002. “Professional Discord.” Opinion. College English 64 (2002): 348-59. Wheatley, Margaret J. “What Is Our Work?” Spears, Insights 340-51. Williams, Jeffrey. 1999. “Brave New University.” Symposium: English 1999. College English 61 (1999): 742-51. Woodruff, David. 2001. “Just Say No.” Asian Wall Street Journal 8 October 2001: S8. — 92 —

The Medium of Teaching At South African Universities: the Position of Afrikaans

Introductory Comments: the University: A Historical Perspective

The universities of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance closely resembled the general idea held until recently of universities. They were enclaves of scholarship where men of outstanding ability taught select students. The use of Latin as the medium of instruction contributed to their elite nature: the less sophisticated, indigenous languages were excluded and with them those students who could not master Latin. Students across Europe spoke one academic language and often studied the same texts. Though knowledge was pursued seemingly in autonomy and freedom, universities fell under the shadow of the Roman Catholic Church, and their academic integrity was in varying measure compromised. Despite the circumstances, new universities could be formed, and were in fact formed by academics in conflict with their former colleagues and institutions. The University of Cambridge was formed in 1209 by dissidents from Oxford University, as was the University of Padua in 1222 by dissidents from the University of Bologna (the earliest European university). Because of the general use of Latin, students could move readily from one university to another, their situation otherwise — 93 —


permitting. From a satirical poem by the seventeenth century Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens one can deduce another similarity in present and past universities: professors were poorly remunerated and took every opportunity to make another penny. The intervening centuries brought little change to universities as institutions for gathering and dispensing knowledge. Internal structures were extended and adapted,1 most notably in the nineteenth century (mainly to accommodate new disciplines). The University of Berlin (est. 1809) became a model for subsequent universities. The main change was external: where the medieval universities had owed allegiance to the Church, the later universities fell under the sway–despite their struggle for autonomy–of the national states. (This change brought about the recognition of national languages at universities.) With the change came the frequently raised complaint that universities have become the lackeys of governments.2

Academic Freedom

Despite academic freedom being an acclaimed virtue, it has (almost) never been realized in South Africa. Academic freedom is synonymous with the autonomy of universities, and restriction of this autonomy starts commonly even at the establishment of a university and is tightened by imposing conditions on subsidies and dictating the entrance qualifications of candidate students. Gilliomee (2001a: 4; 2001b: 39) traces early State interference in South African universities to the anglicization of the then existing universities and the establishment of new, solely Englishmedium universities. A yet more striking instance of State intrusion was that of the previous National Party government, particularly in the admission policy of universities: all but a handful of Black students were banned from the

1

As Van der Merwe, 2002: 39 comments: “If not managed creatively and carefully, such interference with the fundamental right of institutional autonomy can have destructive effects”. [check quotation].

2

In this article I make grateful use of various articles about universities collected in Fragmente. Tydskrif vir Filosofie en Kultuurkritiek (vol. 5 of 2000), particularly those by Ijsseling, 2000, Goosen, 2000 and, especially, Roussouw, 2000. — 94 —

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“White” (English) universities on the grounds that ethnic universities were being established to accommodate them. With a few notable exceptions (especially the universities of Fort Hare and the Western Cape), these ethnic institutions were never seen as more than “bush colleges”. Against this history of State interference, it is unsurprising that since 1994 the new South African government has produced a stream of reports and laws indicating clearly its intention to regulate higher education in accordance with its wider political interests. Giliomee (2001a: 30; 2001b: 67) points out the similarities between the recently published National Plan for Education and the 1975 recommendations of the De Wyk De Vries Commission: both documents, he contends, are politically motivated and brook neither query nor dissent. The reasons for the conspicuous parallels in the governing style of the earlier National Party and the current African National Congress are complex and better left to some-one versed in the political aspects of contemporary history. But even the layman can spot the same centristic, ideology-driven mannerisms, the same intolerance of criticism (especially from supporters and from the news media), and the same growing bureaucraticising of all aspects of social life through a network of controls. An unfortunate consequence of apartheid’s obsession with selective exclusion is that the present government views any discriminatory selective process (even where it is justifiable on the grounds of being reasonable and fair) with unthinking suspicion. Accessibility has become disproportionately emphasized (till even the small handful of Afrikaans dramas in national TV are presented with sub-titles). These factors play an active but unjust role whenever a claim is made for the preservation or necessity of exclusively Afrikaans education institutions such as schools and universities. The impression is inescapable that Afrikaans is being punished for the faults–even for imaginary faults–of the predominantly Afrikaans-speaking, previous government. This matter has been very comprehensively elaborated in numerous publications. (See the overview in Van Rensburg and others, 1994.)

The Inception of Afrikaans Universities: A Brief Survey

All institutions of Higher Education had English as their medium of instruction until 1918. Most teachers were English speaking; and — 95 —


examinations were written in English (Steyn, 1994: 206). Stein lists some of the events that prompted the advent of Afrikaans universities: in 1917 Dutch was admitted as an examination subject and a limited number of courses were taught in “Dutch” at the Victoria College (the later University of Stellenbosch) and at the Grey University College (the later University of the Free State); in 1918 the University of South Africa accepted examination scripts written in Afrikaans; in 1919 the University of Cape Town followed suite. A fierce debate raged over whether Afrikaans or Dutch should be used beside English as the academic language. By 1925 Afrikaans had triumphed and in that year acquired official status. The historical processes that led to universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria and the (Orange) Free State becoming Afrikaans-medium are treated in detail by Steyn (1993a, 1993b, 1994 and 1995) and Giliomee (2001b: 39-42). In the early 1930s only the University College of Potchefstroom taught solely in Afrikaans; all the other institutions were English or dual medium. While Afrikaans diminished, and ceased as a medium of instruction by the end of the 1930s, at the University of Cape Town (Steyn, 1994: 214), the universities of Pretoria and the Free State were establishing themselves as mono-language Afrikaans universities. By 1950 there were four Afrikaans and four English medium universities. Since 1990 the situation has changed: the new Constitution Act of 1994 has greatly undermined the status of Afrikaans. Afrikaans has been diminished to simply one of the eleven languages indigenous to South Africa, while English has become in practice the preferred official language.3

The South African University Today

Discussion of South African universities today is fraught with descriptive terms such as “post modern” and “post apartheid” and takes place in contexts of “market forces” and “globalization”. The many government papers and bills on Higher Education indicate without doubt that the government has adopted a historically new stance on universities. The

3

Van der Merwe, 2002 provides a summary of the effects of globalization on South African universities, in particular the effect on the Rand Afrikaans University. — 96 —

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New Academic Policy (Discussion Document, Department of Education, November 2001) states clearly that the post-apartheid context demands a reaction to challenges raised by globalization, but also to challenges “arising from the developmental imperatives of equity, redress and reconstruction which derive from the country’s history”. A post-apartheid policy and a legislative context for higher education have been outlined in various reports and papers.4 But it would be a distortion of the truth to attribute the changing perception on education solely to the ANC’s ideological prejudices: world-wide the role of universities is being reassessed (See, for instance, Van der Merwe, 2002: 38).

The Accessibility of the Universities

Universities are seen word-wide as national assets that stand primarily in service of their society and consequently in service of particular governments. Our present government has added its voice to the call: “Higher education plays a central role in the social, cultural and economic development of modern societies (Higher Education White Paper: 1). Our universities are doubly bound by state wishes, firstly–because of their severe dependence on state subsidies (which cover almost two thirds of running costs), through fear of the practical consequences of losing favour; and, secondly, through the direct effect of legislation on higher education. The present government is keenly interested in empowering and emancipating hitherto under-privileges sections of our society, intentions often associated with the ideals of democracy. Expressed in educational terms, the wish is for the “transformation of higher education” which requires “increased and broadened participation of students, responsiveness to social interests and needs, more equitable student access and increased student progression and graduation rates”. A recently published report, The Transformation and Reconstruction of the Higher Education System (May 2002), states that “staff profiles

4

Among the most important documents are the SAQA Act (1995), the Higher Education White Paper (1995), the National Commission on Higher Education Report (1996), the White Paper on Higher Education (1997), the Higher Education Act (1997), the South African Qualifications Authority Act (1998), the National Plan for Higher Education (2001), the Proposal for Subsidy Formula (2001), the Proposal for Programme Mix (2001) and the Report on the Restructuring of the Higher Education System (2002). — 97 —


at universities must reflect the demographic composition of South African society”. This unqualified proposal apparently applies to all universities irrespective of the particular demographic features of a particular province or the nature of other universities in that area. In the case of the University of Stellenbosch, for instance, this proposal is patently unjust. The University is situated in a predominantly Afrikaans-speaking area (about 68%) and in close proximity to two English-medium universities. In a previously published document, Indicators and Benchmarks for Universities and Technicons in South Africa (September 2001) the putative national benchmarks for staff ratios are as politically driven and uncomfortably prescriptive: “At least 40% of professional staff are African; each gender has [a] 50% share of contract enrolment” and “ At least 40% of professional staff has [a] 50% share of professional staff total.” Admission to universities has become a controversial issue in recent years among educationists. Many believe that a lowering of admission requirements (as at the University of the Western Cape) will lead to a lowering of standards. This fear has given rise to the numerous bridging courses that are intended to protect standards by training and supporting under-prepared students. These bridging courses (akin to the courses offered at USA “community colleges”), generally apart from maincampus activities, are invariably in English because, as a result of poor education in the past at black schools, most of the bridging students are black: nearly all these students have received their secondary schooling in English and of necessity continue their tertiary education in English. As a consequence, the introduction of bridging courses has placed the Afrikaans medium universities under increasing pressure to present courses in English. A further factor has added to this pressure: legislation is increasingly giving recognition to “prior learning” and formulae for equating different qualifications. One example is the promoting, in practice, of earlier three-year diploma qualifications into three-year degrees. This concession has greatly increased student numbers, particularly of English-proficient black students. This in turn has increased the need for bridging-type courses, which in turn has increased the need for English at Afrikaans medium universities.

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The Mobility of Students

In a society such as ours where mobility is assumed, students are often expected to move on from one institution to another to complete their studies. This nomadic tendency is furthered by other social circumstances: many students cannot afford long periods of study, and add to their qualifications as they can, often at different institutions. Legislation has again had an influence: measures have introduced a single co-ordinated higher education system that allows different exit levels from education programs.5 The mobility that this makes possible has been supported by language measures: students must, in addition to having their prior courses recognized at different institutions, receive instruction in the language of their choice. Because black students are the main beneficiaries of the system, the government has stressed the importance of English as the medium of instruction (cf. the National Plan for Higher Education, February 2001, that states that Afrikaans is a barrier to access for many African students). The recommendations and proposals in the most recent document on the transformation of higher education (May 2002) are clearly aimed at destroying Afrikaans universities through fusing them with other (English medium) universities, restructuring them, and threats. While for various reasons (among them, economic) regional cooperation is quite acceptable, several of the proposals (for instance, combining the Rand Afrikaans University with Wits Technicon–when the English language University of the Witwatersrand almost borders the Technicon) seems nothing more than political engineering.

Pragmatic Considerations

Faced with large-scale unemployment (particularly among blacks) and spurred by the bent for affirmative action, the government looks frequently to higher education to provide the remedy. Technicons and technical colleges have been institutions primarily concerned with shaping students for immediate, practical service in commercial life: universities are now

5

Cf. The South African Qualifications Authority Act (Act 58 of 1995) and the Higher Education Act (Act 101 of 1997). — 99 —


being used for the same purpose. Increasingly the “outcomes” of academic programs are emphasized, with the expectation that in addition to knowledge, students must acquire “skills”. And the insistence on “implementability” and “relevance” is not limited to what is taught in courses; it has spread to research. Researchers, government policy dictates, must seek alliances with the private sector, usually at the latter’s beck and call as a service provider. Because of the dominant position of English in the private [openbare] sector and in government circles, research–even in the Humanities–is increasingly conducted in English. With the shift to multidisciplinary research, and the emphasis on training and producing black researchers, the role of English is simply enlarged. The implications for language practice at universities (particularly at post-graduate level) are obvious.

Internationalization and Globalization

The effect of globalization and the need of universities to be recognized and to participate and compete internationally have obliged non-English scholars to become proficient in English. Salverda (2001) discusses the situation in tertiary institutions in Holland and comes to the disturbing conclusion that within the foreseeable future Dutch may disappear as the medium of instruction. The same situation exists in South Africa. Not only are publications increasingly in English (especially in the natural sciences), but all post-graduate study is conducted almost exclusively in English: research applications to the National Research Foundation must be in English. The general trend towards English has persuaded many educators–including Afrikaans speakers–that abandoning other languages and adopting English will benefit their students in a competitive world where English is the lingua franca. This reasoning about language is clearly shared by our government in their goal of making South African institutions of higher education (and their students) competitive in the global economy.

Involvement with Society

Universities were traditionally seen as centres where knowledge is formed and distributed. Their function lay in fulfilling this role. The — 100 —

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famous instance of Newton pondering the law of gravity oblivious of the plague that ravaged England is often used to show how ambivalent the idea is of what is “valuable and relevant to society”. Who, the question asks, contributed more to society–those who fought the plague or Newton? But in South Africa this question has been answered: we have no national universities (such as, perhaps, Cambridge and Oxford). Our universities are increasingly seen as tethered to a region, and even to the immediately-surrounding, local society. Community service is not longer the perhaps patronizing gesture it once was: the very legitimacy of the universities now depends on their direct and immediate benefit to their community. The idea is growing that courses on social service should be introduced at universities, in effect placing students in the service of their communities and forming symbiotic bonds between universities and communities. Until recently community service was conducted mainly in English, as the needy section of society was predominantly black and their preference for English was presumed. But there is no reason why community service should not be conducted in Afrikaans, particularly as there are many communities rather better in Afrikaans than English. The need to escape an unwitting adherence to English is demonstrated at my own university (the University of the Free State) where many social projects use Sesotho, a tendency likely to increase in the future.

The University As An Economic Entity

Universities have always offered socio-economic advantages together with those purely academic. From an economic perspective, universities are an asset for their community and for the state, both through refining the productive abilities of the students that pass through them into society and through the benefits of their research (in the form of scientific discoveries and innovative practices). Today universities are turned towards the money markets and are run more as businesses than as old-fashioned academic institutions. One indication of the change is the conspicuous number of economics-trained rectors and vice-rectors heading South African universities. Entrepreneurial enterprise is not only encouraged but bluntly imposed on educators in inverse proportion to the dwindling state subsidies. To tap — 101 —


this so-called “third source of income” universities undertake activities quite different in character from traditional fund-raising. In the process, universities have become ever more dependant on the private sector, and the contact, being again almost inevitably in English, has exacerbated the plight of Afrikaans. [adage] In recent years total student numbers in South Africa have increased dramatically, though the spread of the increase has not been uniform. In fact, the Historically Black Universities (HBUs) have shed 27 000 students while the Historically Afrikaans Universities (HAUs) have gained an additional 56 000 students. In one light this change represents the effect of healthy market forces even though the large gap between the better and worse endowed universities rather skews their competitiveness. Nevertheless, it became apparent that the whole process of change requires national regulation, and this has now received attention in the proposed plan for higher education, which has the further goal of increasing the number of South African graduates to the benefit of the economy.

The University and Ideology

Mention was made earlier that universities generally, and this includes South African universities, have seldom been free from the control of an external ideology. Our present situation is no different. To the ANC government, with its wish to open universities to larger numbers and its anathema for selection mechanisms, the idea of exclusively Afrikaans universities is unpalatable. In many of Minister Kader Asmal’s public statements the reproach recurs that potential students are excluded from universities, from the University of Stellenbosch is the example he has pertinently singled out, because they do not understand Afrikaans. His argument runs that Afrikaans speakers are not similarly disadvantage if they have to attend English-medium universities as most Afrikaans speakers can understand English. That it is their second language, and possibly a weak second language, is countered by the fact that black students share the same plight. The national plan for higher education has taken a clear stance on “equity” and “redress”. One of the most decisive ideological intrusions into the autonomy of universities is contained in the Equity Act (no. 55 of — 102 —

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1998). Besides the high priority the act places on the admission of black students, it seeks to regulate the composition of the teaching corps: the proportion of staff members from the “designated groups” (which are specified as persons other than whites; women; and the handicapped) must be increased to become more representative of their national proportion. Institutions must report regularly on the ratios of each category of “designated” persons and they must submit their plans for the achievement of the required ratios. The qualifications of applicants to university posts are no longer decisive; in appointing staff, universities must consider applicants’ “potential”. The ideals propagated in this act seem lofty (promoting equality in the workplace by “promoting equal opportunity and fair treatment in employment through the elimination of unfair discrimination” and “implementing positive measures to redress the disadvantages in employment experienced by black people, women, and people of disabilities.”) But several of these measures are difficult to implement, and others are likely to be resisted. Among the impediments are the lack of trained people in many areas, the improbable time scales and goals, and the “institutional culture” of the HAUs. Black lecturers (often solicited from abroad) are generally not proficient in Afrikaans and cannot be appointed at Afrikaans universities unless, as would inevitably be the case, these institutions are anglicized. Even at dual-medium universities the legislated measures will have disadvantages: black appointees will lecture in English to predominantly black classes, thereby incurring government complaints that these institutions are offering “ghetto” education and practising apartheid.

The Status Quo and Afrikaans Universities

This brief survey of conditions establishes that exclusively Afrikaans universities are not viable. Nor is some limited form of virtual or technological university purely in Afrikaans feasible. For, even discounting South Africa’s local politics, the sheer force of globalization is overwhelming: universities that do not prepare students for international participation and competition are simply redundant. Quite practical considerations highlight the difficulty: textbooks in many fields (for instance, physics) are revised and renewed with a frequency (and at a — 103 —


cost) possible in English–on account of the many English speakers contributing to the pool of knowledge–but impossible in Afrikaans. Afrikaans-speakers can simply not be fully taught purely in Afrikaans. The idea of an exclusively Afrikaans university does not merit serious consideration. And in fact no university in South Africa today is exclusively Afrikaans. The main campus of Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education is perhaps the nearest approximation; but the university as a whole is only imperfectly Afrikaans, and the Vanderbijl campus is marketed without reference to Afrikaans. The University of Stellenbosch is nominally Afrikaans, but this applies to little more that its administration and the bulk of the under-graduate courses on the main Stellenbosch campus. Several courses–such as Forestry and Military Science–which are not taught at other institutions are taught in English; and all under-graduate courses at the Bellville campus at taught in both Afrikaans and English. Many post-graduate courses are conducted solely in English. The University of the Free State, too, is parallel-medium, offering its courses in both English and Afrikaans. The two exceptions are the MBA course and the Bachelor in Management Leadership, and they are both solely in English. In line with the government rationalisation program, the University of the Free State is presently incorporating the University of Quaqua and the Bloemfontein campus of Vista University. These two institutions are English medium, and their incorporation unavoidably threatens Afrikaans. The Rand Afrikaans University is presently still parallel-medium, but its proposed amalgamation with Wits Technicon could bring immediate anglicisation. The University of Pretoria, previously a foremost Afrikaans university, is becoming rapidly anglicised under a pro-English rectorate. Giliomee (2001: 29) points out that the submissions by Pretoria University for the proposed National Plan for Higher Education omitted any mention of instruction being in Afrikaans or even dual medium. The rector (in communications to Dr Saleem Badat of the Deaprtment of National Higher Education), has in fact expressed the university’s keen anticipation that the university will transform to “one predominant formal academic language”. Supporting this indication of the university’s intentions is its response to the Alexander Committee’s questionnaire on the desirability of dual medium instruction: alone of the universities Pretoria thought it unnecessary to reply (see Giliomee: 30). — 104 —

H.P. van Coller

Interviews with the previous rector, Prof. Van Zyl, have revealed that the preservation of Afrikaans was not among the priorities he had set himself as rector (nor was preserving the Christian character of the university) The mission statement emphasises the international status of the university and local relevance as priorities. The language question is shuffled aside, despite Pretoria having the largest number of registered Afrikaans students–over 16 000–among the residential universities. Even though Pretoria uses English for instruction, sometimes parallel with Afrikaans but in some cases alone (cf. Schlemmer and Giliomee 2001), it has been severely criticised by the National Working Group for its lack of transformation. In 2000 only 6% of the university’s permanent academic staff were black (Strydom, 2002: 7). Though my knowledge extends to the situation only at the universities, I have little doubt that the situation at the fifteen technicons and the many technical colleges is similar. Exclusively Afrikaans education institutions are few and far between. Even former Afrikaans schools are becoming anglicised so rapidly that 60% of Gauteng schools are presently parallel medium. [it would help to have a comparative figure; e.g. in 1987 60% of schools were Afrikaans]. From the foregoing the pertinent question that arises is: how can teaching in Afrikaans at tertiary institutions, particularly at universities, be sustained?

Why Have Afrikaans Universities?

One can answer this question from at least three different platforms: the democratic platform that offers protection to minority cultures; the sociolinguistic platform concerned with the cultural value of languages and their importance in social intercourse; and the pragmatic platform that limits itself to the practical functioning of the universities. Much has been written about democratic rights and the principles underlying the democratic-liberal doctrine. A recent instance is the declaration on The Rights of Minorities (2001:13) by the FriedrichNaumann Foundation which adds its voice to the conviction that national minorities, provided numbers justify it, are entitled to education to tertiary level in their mother language. Given the fact that the number of Afrikaans speaking matriculants and students is dwindling, it may be — 105 —


that Afrikaans cannot lay claim to more than regional recognition. But in the southern parts of South Africa where Afrikaans is possibly the majority language, in Gauteng where Afrikaans is widespread; and in the central areas of the Free State and North West Cape where Afrikaans is the common medium though not in the majority of cases the mother tongue, Afrikaans has strong claims to recognition.6 Within the conceptual ambit of Democracy is the ideal that the state should enable all citizens to fulfil their realistic aspirations. Because culture and language are so inextricably knitted to aspirations, they too must, ideally, be promoted by the state. Where a language is denied at tertiary level, cultural aspirations are dealt a direct blow. But the blow has also the secondary effect of undermining that language at secondary school level (and ultimately even at primary school level). A language group becomes forced to educate itself in a second or even third language, with detrimental consequences–as evidenced by the previously colonized countries of Africa. The practical implementation of democracy is intimately related to the demographic composition of a region. On demographic grounds most multi-lingual states permit mono-lingual universities in appropriate areas (cf. Loubser, 2001: 90). For this reason the Western Cape could justifiably have more than one Afrikaans university instead of the present one, only predominantly-Afrikaans, university. Seen socio-linguistically, a language can never fully clothe the intellectual and affective life of its speakers unless granted entree to all functions. Of particular importance is that a language must enjoy access to the academic-scientific fields of language such as in politics, law, the media, and the university. Throughout the twentieth century, for just the reason of realising this ideal, immense expertise and energy went into developing Afrikaans. One thinks–as a respectful aside–of the numerous scholars who could have made their mark internationally but chose instead to devote themselves to Afrikaans. Any loss to the scientificacademic status and function of Afrikaans will have far-reaching implications. One immediate effect would be the anglicisation of all

6

Du Plessis (2002) sets out clearly the number of speakers of each of South Africa’s languages, the geographical distribution of languages, and educational profile of the different language groups, and the contribution of each group to the national economy. — 106 —

H.P. van Coller

Afrikaans schools, which would precipitate the demise of all Afrikaans higher language functions. The wish of Afrikaans speakers to preserve Afrikaans in its higher functions is at times attacked by opponents as selfish. Such persons seldom consider the advantages that Afrikaans and its culture have brought South Africa as a whole. When in 1917 Afrikaans speakers won the right to be educated in Afrikaans and to use Afrikaans in science and scholarship, they seized their opportunity. Since then, throughout the past century, there has been barely any area in which the contribution of Afrikaans speakers has been negligible. In most areas the contribution is massive, by people such as Hendrik van der Bijl, Anton Rupert, Elize Botha, Merwe Scholtz, Herman Giliomee, the Stokers , Wally Grant …. South Africa would be the poorer without them. Afrikaans has been a notable strand in the bond between South African universities–mainly those that are Afrikaans speaking–and the Dutch and Flemish universities since the early decades of the last century. This contact with a different, European, academic culture, by providing insight into another scientific tradition, particularly in certain disciplines (linguistics and literature, philosophy, law and historiography) has an appreciable fructifying influence on South African scholarship. This contact with Europe often takes material form in exchange agreements between institutions and in joint projects, frequently with financial benefits. One obvious example is the large donations from the Dutch government and the Flemish joint government to South African empowerment projects (especially to promote multi-lingualism). But of particular value are the exchange schemes that enable South Africans to acquire training abroad to the immense long-term benefit of all the inhabitants of South Africa.

What Would the Ideal Afrikaans University Look Like; and How Many Must There Be?

One’s initial response is that there is no such thing as the ideal Afrikaans university: universities vary considerably depending on their origins and traditions, the composition of their students, their socio-geographical situation, and their idiosyncratic missions. From Du Plessis’s statistics (2000), which calculate such details as the number of school-leavers, the — 107 —


number of registered university students, and population demographics, Afrikaans speakers are entitled to between 2,7 and 7,8 residential universities. How different the circumstances of two universities may be can be seen by comparing the universities of Stellenbosch and the Free State.] The University of Stellenbosch is the sole Afrikaans university in the Western Cape, where there are two English-medium universities despite the preponderance (62%) of the inhabitants of the area being Afrikaans. The parallel-medium University of the Free State, situated in central South Africa, serves an area where Afrikaans dominates, though for economic and cultural reasons: the number of home-language Afrikaans speakers is greatly in the minority and the large numbers of black school children receive secondary education in English. In the near future Free State University will amalgamate with three English-medium campuses (that of Quaqua and two of Vista). In contrast to Stellenbosch, purely Afrikaans teaching at the Free State University would not be justifiable. Weighing all the present circumstances on the one hand against Du Plessis conclusions on the other, I believe that a purely Afrikaans university, though justifiable and desirable, is not feasible. But I believe strongly that for the benefit of South Africa the five universities presently using Afrikaans as a teaching medium should be respected and preserved: their present Afrikaans-speaking academic staff and students must be seen as a critical mass and not further undermined. Each of these five universities would have to take stock and classify itself in one of the following four categories–and then enjoy state recognition: 1. an Afrikaans university that teaches under-graduate courses in Afrikaans, but that offers, in addition, a limited number of specified under-graduate courses in English and post-graduate studies in English 2. an Afrikaans university of more than one campus, where the Afrikaans campus functions as in the category above, and the second campus has all courses in parallel-medium 3. an Afrikaans university teaching in parallel-medium, having its administration in English and Afrikaans, and committed to multilingualism 4. a bilingual university with administration in English and Afrikaans and all tuition in parallel-medium.

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H.P. van Coller

I would feel reluctant to comment on exactly how each university should be classified in this scheme but believe firmly that Afrikaans must be legislatively entrenched on designated campuses (even by a quota system) and particularly on the campus of the University of Pretoria. I would like Pretoria University to be an Afrikaans university offering tuition in both Afrikaans and English; but even the lesser hope that it will be retained as a parallel-medium institution seems over-optimistic: Pretoria apparently sees itself as an English university offering a last few, limited Afrikaans-medium courses. Prof. Andreas van Wyk seems to be correct when he points out the dangers of parallel- medium tuition (Van Wyk, 2001: 4).7 One consequence of parallel-medium tuition is its effect of producing two universities on one campus. Of course, where parallel-medium tuition is the best option (as at the University of the Free State) it must be used; but then the everpresent danger of “ghetto forming” must be countered. As early as 1999 Minister Kader Asmal (Beeld, 20/11) took a swipe at those he termed “separatists”. Segregated hostels at the University of the Free State–often erroneously alluded to as an attempt to perpetuate apartheid–were in fact the result of an open choice offered all students: students want to live in a hostel that reflects their own culture. But this student preference does not absolve the university from the task of minimising ghetto-forming through encouraging common values at open-day functions, community and joint projects, and culture-awareness programs. Inevitably, however, despite an administration’s best will, the danger remains that minority language groups will be swamped by the majority group. To prevent this happening, the government must pass legislation protecting minority rights. Prof. Van Wyk’s preference for dual-medium (rather than parallelmedium) is less comprehensible: dual-medium tuition is not practical where lecturers and students are inadequately competent in both languages (which is widely the case in South Africa). What happens in practice is that lectures are conducted in the language preferred by the majority. Already this is not Afrikaans. Parallel-medium tuition, strictly controlled, offers a secure language solution where dual-medium tuition

7

Herman Giliomee expressed the same fear more strongly in Die Volksblad (20/3/01): he spoke of dual-medium tuition as an interim period that led eventually to the minor language disappearing as a medium of education. — 109 —


in the one lecture (as used apparently at Stellenbosch) or in alternate sections of work does not. The dual-medium practice leads in time to mono-lingual tuition, as has happened at the University of Port Elizabeth. The Afrikaans-speaking community has every right–on the grounds of what is accepted as fair and just–to expect at least the continuation of the present situation: two mainly Afrikaans universities and three others where Afrikaans will continue as a medium of instruction at all levels. This situation means that only two universities will offer any impediment–and only a very limited one–to any applicant or student who is not Afrikaans-speaking. Given the proportion of Afrikaans-speakers nationwide this dispensation is in no way unreasonable. This situation must be entrenched in law. And the request must under no circumstances be mistakenly or wilfully confused with a hankering after apartheid. The intention behind the request is the democratic right to fulfilment, not the undemocratic will to dominate. The main victims of the move to monoEnglish universities (and the main beneficiaries of Afrikaans tuition) are, in fact, the brown rural Afrikaans-speakers, who also have the lowest percentage of participation in higher education (Schlemmer and Giliomee, 2001: 121).

H.P. van Coller

— 110 —

H.P. van Coller

Bibliography

Du Plessis, Bertie. 2001. Toepassing van universiteite volgens onderrigtaal: demografiese, ekonomiese en onderwysdata. In: Giliomee, H. en Schlemmer, L. 2001. Kruispad. Die toekoms van Afrikaans as openbare taal. Kaapstad: Tafelberg, pp. Giliomee, Herman. 2001a. Die taal-en kulturele uitdagings van die historiese Afrikaanse Universiteite in Suid-Afrika. Twintigste D.F. Malherbe-gedenklesing, 19 April 2001. Bloemfontein: Universiteit van die Vrystaat. Giliomee, Hb. 20001b. Die taal- en kulturele uitdagings van die histories Afrikaanse universiteite. In: Giliomee, H. en Schlemmer, L. 2001. Kruispad. Die toekoms van Afrikaans as openbare taal. Kaapstad: Tafelberg. Giliomee, H. en Schlemmer, L. 2001. Kruispad. Die toekoms van Afrikaans as openbare taal. Kaapstad: Tafelberg. Goosen, Danie. 2000. Die postmoderne universiteit: enkele spekulatiewe notas. Fragmente. Tydskrif vir Filosofie en Kultuurkritiek. no 5: 21-30. Ijsseling, Samuel. 2000. Filosofie, politiek en universiteit. Fragmente. Tydskrif vir Filosofie en Kultuurkritiek. no 5: 11-19. Loubser, Max. 2001. Afrikaans as regstaal. In: Giliomee, H. en Schlemmer, L. 2001. Kruispad. Die toekoms van Afrikaans as openbare taal. Kaapstad: Tafelberg. Rossouw, Hennie. 2000. Die toekoms van die universiteit. Fragmente. Tydskrif vir Filosofie en Kultuurkritiek. no 5: 56-76. Salverda, Renier. 2001. Ons Erfdeel. Steyn, J.C. 1993a. Die taalstryd aan die Grey Universiteitskollege ten tyde van die rektoraat van D.F. Malherbe. Acta academica 25(4): 87-117. Steyn, J.C. 1993b. Die voertaalvraagstuk aan die Suid-Afrikaanse universiteite tot ongeveer 1930. South African Journal for Linguistics. Supplementum 18.

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Steyn, J.C. 1994. Vroeë pleidooie vir ‘n tweetalige Universiteit van Kaapstad. In: Van der Merwe, Chris, Waher, Hester en Hambidge, Joan. 1994. Rondom Roy. Studies opgedra aan Roy Pheiffer. Kaapstad: Department Afrikaans en Nederlands, Universiteit van Kaapstad. Steyn, J.C. 1995. ‘n Rektor skors sy voorganger – ‘n onstuimige hoofstuk uit die taalstryd aan die UKOVS. Journal for Contemporaray History 20(1): 87-112. The Right of Minorities. A Declaration of Liberal Democratic Principles concerning Ethnocultural and National Minorities and Indigenous Peoples. Liberales Institut der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung. Van der Merwe, Chris, Waher, Hester en Hambidge, Joan. 1994. Rondom Roy. Studies opgedra aan Roy Pheiffer. Kaapstad: Department Afrikaans en Nederlands, Universiteit van Kaapstad. Van der Merwe, Derek. Reflections on the impact of globalisation on higher education policy. Aambeeld / Anvil 30(1): 37-43. Van der Merwe, H.W. & Welsh, D. The future of the university in South Africa. Cape Town: David Phillip. Van Rensburg, F.I.J., Malherbe, E.F.J. en Landman, K.J.H. 1994. Taalverskuiwing sedert 1994. Die prosesse van bevoorregtting, ontmagtiging en verwaarlosing. Ongepubliseerde studiestuk. Van Wyk , Andreas. 2001. Afrikaans in ons hoër onderwys in die jaar 2001. Gesprek by KKNK, 9 April 2001. Viljoen, G. 1977. The Afrikaans universities and particularism. In: Van der Merwe, H.W. & Welsh, D. The future of the university in South Africa. Cape Town: David Phillip.

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Issues of Inclusion and Representation: Teaching Literature and Culture Across Art Forms

Introduction

[Maurer/Carroli]

How do we promote a European focus with a cross-cultural dimension to the study of Modern European languages and art forms? How do we convey the ever-changing European cultural landscape? How do we foster critical thinking across cultures and real and imaginary borders in order to encourage students towards an inclusive learning experience of the shifting representation of the past and the present in European literature, cinema and art? What responsibility do we have as course designer and educators of European languages and cultures in an Australian context? These are some of the questions discussed by the academics (and the students) involved in the design of the courses ‘common’ to the three programs: French, German and Italian. In trying to meet these demands, the team devised an issue-oriented model – based on the inseparability of language and culture.1 This model differs from the paradigms of traditional comparative literature, cultural studies, the pure linguistic or pure literary models. In doing so, we relied on the areas of specialisation

1

For more details on course design and course structure see Carroli, Hillman and Maurer 1999 and Maurer L. Crossing the boundaries of language, culture, genre and art forms. — 113 —


of staff, as well as their insider / outsider perspectives. From the diverse cultural backgrounds of the staff, most working across two cultures and ready to collaborate in a manner uncommon in the current structure of humanities departments, inclusive of differences, emerged cross-cultural courses reflecting multifaceted Europe. In the design and delivery of the course the staff endeavoured to include art forms both from the margins and the canon, as well as critical, thought-provoking perspectives. This pedagogical process of inclusion of “marginal” as well as mainstream art forms is ethical in the sense that the academics involved felt their responsibility was to bring the students closer to, and experience the diverse, rich, varied and fluid texture of Europe. The staff endeavoured also, with the seminars to develop students’ socio-cultural competence by transforming their initial attitudes and representations of the foreign country (Byram & Zarate 1998) in relation to the other European countries. Pedagogic boundaries (language, canon) opened up to include new European cultural contexts, such as art forms produced by immigrants, viewed in relation to the broader European context and also the global context. Such pedagogic choices, operated by our team in Australia, differ from European choices relating to university courses, strongly led by concerns about the canon, especially in France and Italy. In Italy, a strong debate on this issue is taking place at present in all available media. This debate is partly in response to concerns voiced by a few Italian academics, such as Gnisci (1996) and Raimondi (1998) and American scholars questioning the exclusion of new cultural context in Italian and French university curricula and critical discourses (Romani 1998), and calling for a renewal of the literary canon. For the purposes of this conference we will focus on choices relating to the issues of inclusion and representation of art (Kiefer and Boltansky) and literature (Tournier) relating to the Holocaust in the first common course “Contemporary European Narrative: Literary and Visual (L. Maurer) and choices relating to the inclusion of literature in French, German and Italian written by immigrants in the second common course “Language and Identity in a European Context” with a particular focus on a text by Pap Khouma, an African Italian writer (P. Carroli).

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Piera Carroli & Louise Maurer

Literature and Visual Arts - Narrative and Ethics: Tournier, Kiefer and Boltanski [L. Maurer]

The inclusion of art and literature on the curriculum emphasises the need for visual literacy to be taken as seriously as the critical abilities to think across cultures we train our students to acquire with texts. To propose that the visual arts be treated as seriously as literature and what’s more to do so in a cross cultural perspective raises issues of ethics and identity both in terms of the articulation between the two disciplines and also in terms of the local and international production and reception of works of arts. In this presentation I will consider works of art which constitute major artistic currents. There can be little doubt that, as is made clear by Jurgensen , “Literary ‘mainstream’ constitutes, defines and redefines the consensus of a specific culture’s imaginative character. It thereby also determines the range and tolerance of subjectively creative variation.”2 However, the question of what literary mainstream is, in the context of an Australian tertiary institution cannot be clear-cut. For students studying languages and cultures other than their own, the inclusion of works by established artists in the curriculum is critical. Many students have no systematic knowledge of what constitutes their own literary and artistic tradition, or that of other European Countries. An option such as “Contemporary European Narrative: Literary and Visual” (dealing with works of literature and art across national boundaries) has to situate the individual work not only within the genre to which it belongs and in the context of a tradition, but also on the international scene before differences due to the local context, as well as cross cultural similarities become apparent. The realisation of such an ambitious scope is fraught with dangers, not the least being that the subject matter could become something of a series of lectures touching on all the schools and “isms” with the result that only a shallow overview would be presented to the students. It requires a theoretical perspective where context as well as the polyvocal dimensions of identity are taken into account.

2

Manfred Jurgensen, “Transformative Identities of Literary Multiculturalism” in Adventures of Identity European Multicultural Experiences and Perspectives, John Docker; Gerhard Fischer (eds) Tubigen; Stauffenburg-Verl., 2001, p. 216. — 115 —


For example, in the sixties at the time when Michel Tournier was writing the Erl-King3, the return to figuration to include narrative and myth in painting as a reaction against abstraction and minimalism in the visual arts was taking place in a number of European countries, and especially in Italy and Germany. In Italy and much more so even in Germany, rejection of non figurative art coincided with the artists’ desire to break the silence about the past and find their own voices, partly in the face of a form of art which culminated in the US in the 70s, was practised by several generations of artists, starting with Pollock, who became known in the fifties, and was the start of a movement which came to be called “international modernism”. In Germany, it took 15 years of silence after the end of the Second World War for an art deep-seated in its origin to emerge. In the words of Günther Gercken “The new art bore the stamp of the German, both in its positive and negative aspects. In its beginning with Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck it was melancholic and impassioned, Markus Lüpertz’s work displayed emphatic force in the Dithyrambics, and Anselm Kiefer’s work was laden with the pathos of historical significance”4. Regarding Italian art, critics writing about Chia, Clemente, Cucchi, Mertz and Paladino in the eighties also eschewed the discredited concept of national identity to emphasise instead what each of the painters owed to the particular region of their origins as well as their individual concerns with tradition5. After World War II in Europe the concept of national identity is problematic. However, this in turn does not mean that there are no over arching views. In the Visual Arts, the latter are provided by the galleries and the critics who, by grouping a number of artists together, preferably by

3

Michel Tournier, Le Roi des Aulnes, Gallimard 1970.

4

Gunther Gercken, “Figurative Painting after 1960", in German Art in the 20th Century, Royal Academy of Arts London, 1985, p. 473.

5

Judith Russi Kirshner, “Collecting contemporary art in Chicago” in Contemporary Italian Masters, Chicago Council of Fine Art, 1984, pp. 10-17. — 116 —


including the word “new” and the nationality6 in the title, make and promote a School with the aim of heralding national identity7. To justify bringing together a number of writers and painters and avoid the links being made on the basis of purely thematic content, a formal perspective specific to the visual arts is as necessary as a close look at the context. More so than the subject matter with which the writer Michel Tournier and the painter Anselm Kiefer grapple, that of the Holocaust, it is the similarities of approaches to the production of meaning which is striking8. Both make extensive use of other material and other texts. Tournier establishes connections between texts in the novel and other works of literature, while Kiefer links motifs in his own paintings with other paintings, such as to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper for example9. The reader’s interaction with the Erl-King, a text which ties together different textual strands with word play and the viewer’s involvement with the paintings demand an active participation, that of establishing connections between parts internally and also to external works. The interplay is not built on resemblance, but begins with the scrutiny of the material used and their configuration. Kiefer for example, associates material such as straw and lead with text in his paintings He inscribes the lines of Celan’s poem “Todesfuge”10 or the names of famous German philosophers, writers, military men, on the canvas11. Straw therefore refers to characters such as the Margaret of Celan’s poem who is also meant to represent Germany in the series of

6

See for example American Abstract Art, the world of abstract Art, New York, Wittenborn & co 1957; or Rosenberg Harold, The tradition of the New, New York, Horizon Press Publishers, Inc 1954, or Russel Johns, “The New European painters”, The New York Times Magazine April 24 1983:28ff, about Chia, Clemente, Cucchi.

7

Bonito Oliva, Achille, The Italian Trans-Avantgarde, Milan 1980.

8

This aspect is developed in Maurer, Carroli and Hillman, “Teaching literature across cultures and across artforms in Teaching Languages”, Teaching Cultures, pp. 100-101.

9

John C. Gilmour, Fire on the Earth, Temple Uni press Philadelphia1990, pp. 19-20.

10

Paul Celan, Der Sand aus den Urnen, ed. A. Saxl, 1948.

11

See for example Anselm Kiefer, Wege der Weltweisheit (Ways of Worldly Wisdom), 305x500 cm, 1976-77. — 117 —


canvasses inspired by the poem. Margaret also evokes Faust’s Margaret who has also been associated to the Brunehilde in the Ring of The Nibelung. These literary associations however are constrained by the surface and size of the canvases as well as by their texture, where the thin strands of straw signifies in contrast to the large, ashy background they are attached to and where words read as marks on a material surface thick with paint. The hand written words fulfil a function similar to that of the diary of Tiffauges, Tournier’s main character who writes as a means to understand the world around him. The superimposition of material in a Kiefer’s painting transform the canvas into a receptacle where the retrieval of strands from German history, names, silhouettes, photographs do not read as individual entities merely echoing a nationalistic past as some critics have chosen to interpret it.12 The resulting fusion has to be seen as the questioning process it represents, whether or not one takes it as an effective means towards new beginning. Tournier weaves into his text such mythic figures as Atlas, St Christopher and Cain and Abel, on the one hand, as well as ogres such as Goering and Gilles de Rais on the other. With both writer and painter, the effect is that of a grand narrative. Both work share an heroic quality. The common references to actual places of the German landscape, the forest, the Marshes and the real or imagined monuments of the third Reich as well as the rendering of space in the novel and in the painting become the stage in which Kiefer on the one hand reworks his country’s history, while in the Erl-King, the forests of East Prussia, and monuments such as the Kaltenborn fortress, pave the way of Tiffauges’ quest. By choosing settings of this kind, and treating them in the manner of a grand narrative, both artists are myth makers, and both have been accused of ambiguity towards, and of displaying an unhealthy fascination for their subject matter.13 Mythology and the potential aestheticisation of fascism are examined in the Tournier text and its reception in Germany and in France while German critics showed themselves weary of Kiefer’s success

12

See Donald Kuspit “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: the American Case against Current German Painting, in Expressions, Jack Cowart ed., St Louis, 1983.

13

See for example Jean Améry “Ästhetizismus der Barbarei: Über Michel Tournier’s roman der Erlkönig” merkur 297, 1973. — 118 —


at the Venise Biennale in 1980.14 The controversial reception of both artists raises the ethical question of whether aesthetic representation can or should attempt to render the historical reality of the holocaust while the necessity to remember such events validates their representation. This paradox is the subject of Ernst van Alphen “Caught by history”15. Discussing the implications of Adorno’s much quoted “after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry” he refutes the dichotomy and hierarchy that such a statement establishes between the historical and imaginative discourses and stresses instead “the manner in which these discourses relate to historical reality”16 and he concludes: History brings with it more responsibilities than only knowing and remembering the facts, especially when that history concerns the Holocaust. Other responsibilities that are poignantly imposed on us involves the working through the traumatic intrusion of an unimaginable reality, and the foregrounding of the cracks and tears that are concealed by the coherence of the stories being told. It is in the relation to those responsibilities that the imaginative discourses of art and literature can step in and perform functions that, although historical, cannot be fulfilled by the work of the historian.17

“Foregrounding the cracks” is precisely what the French artist Boltanski does. Contrary to Kiefer’s or Tournier’s grand style, Boltanski uses objects abstracted from everyday life to deal with the subject to a radically different effect. A silhouette, crudely cut in a scrap of metal in the form of an angel or a falling insect, with a lit candle behind, projecting a gigantic shadow on the wall, can be seen as a metaphor of Boltanski’s visual language. Tin, not Kiefer’s lead, the base material of the alchemist, is used here and Icarus becomes a distorted, immaterial shadow on the windowless walls of the gallery, evocative of a reality the artist knows to

14

Spies Werner “Uberdosis an Teutschem, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, 2,6, 1980.

15

Von Alphen Ernst: Caught by History, Stanford uni press Stanford, 1997, p. 36.

16

Ibid p. 36.

17

Ibid p. 37. — 119 —


be unrepresentable, a powerful re-enactment of Plato’s cave. His is a counter narrative of cut metal or photographs, boxes, piles of clothes, letters. The installations unsettle the viewer because of the place given to everyday life in the process of revisiting the past. Meaning is achieved not by reaching to a higher level of myth making or in terms of attempting to redeem the past in order to rebuild a sense of identity, but by alluding to past events in using processes, the sorting out and classification of objects, which all societies use to some extent, but that the Nazis built to such a devastating pitch. Putting in little boxes objects belonging to women, men and children even though, and precisely because, Boltanski has them bought at the local flea market, is a stark reminder of countless lives destroyed and would find an echo in many born in the fifties and for generations after. The installations often reach a dimension of religious intensity. Here the presence of the past is brought about by working at the same time with a process and through the memory of the viewer, the artist disappearing behind the mirror.18 Furthermore the experience is given an added dimension by not being confined to the past. The exercise was repeated for factory workers in England, and became in that context something else again, a healing process for the workers who lost their job when a factory closed down and who were offered the opportunity to put in little boxes bits and pieces representative of their lives during their employment, a gesture at the same time of local significance for the people concerned, but also in the desire to give a concrete, tangible meaning to the duration of one’s life in a factory, one that reaches beyond the local and the personal to the universal, the boxes linking present and past to a different effect through similar means. What is common to both installations is the wish not to forget, ultimate challenge to death enacting reminiscence as a way to knowledge. For his work on the importance of memory, and in the references to religious icons in his work, Boltanski is closer to the Italian painter Mimo Paladino whose lateral narratives evoke in a highly personalised manner the importance of dreams in the search for meaning. Closer to home, one would be justified to raise the question of whether the grand narrative has left us. Given the ethical nature of the

18

See Lynn Gumpert comments on the metaphor of the mirror, “The life and Death of Christian Boltanski”, in Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988 p. 53. — 120 —


subject of the Holocaust, it would be more than desirable to view with the students the work a painter like the Australian artist George Gittoes who travels across continents and produces works in the Goya tradition of ‘the disasters of war’, not confined to one country. But with a difference: the maimed in his canvasses stare the viewer in the face, challenging the voyeurism of the spectator who can no longer position him or herself as a mere onlooker through the curtains of a stage. We must ask in what sense the effect of consciousness raising is achieved, both with respect to contemporary history and with respect to the viewing subjects. Will not the 21st century-wise spectator turn away in disgust at this literal spewing out of misery and horrors on a grand scale? Has not the horror of war and conflicts be conveyed better by the modern device of photography? I refer here to the successive photographs which sum up the war against Iran, or Vietnam or the war in Algeria or in Palestine. There always seems to be one that says it all. With these questions we see how the visual arts can contribute alongside literature to a course with a primary focus on identities in European narratives. In this presentation, I have examined the work of three artists who have clear interests in common. In order to go beyond the generalities often encountered in the description of artistic and literary movements, it is essential that the groupings of writers and painters be initiated from a critical perspective alert to the means of expression required in both disciplines. The question of literature and identity in texts often excluded from what constitutes the canon, will be addressed by Piera Carroli.

Language, Literature & Identity in A European Context: Towards A “Pedagogy of Inclusion” [P. Carroli]

This section of the paper focuses on Carroli’s contribution to the second common course, “Language & Identity in a European context”. For the purposes of this conference, I will provide a brief overview of the premises and content of my section of the course, then focus on Khouma’s text, partly to address issues of inclusion–there are no other papers on Italian literature–and partly because it addresses more globally issues of exclusion, language and identity across two continents (Africa and Europe) and three European countries: Italy, France and Germany. The — 121 —


main topic of my section of the course, the investigation of the role language/s play in the construction and negotiation of identity in narratives written by migrants or guest workers in France, Italy and Germany, from personal stories to the transfiguration of experience, seems particularly relevant to ethical issues discussed in this conference. The relationship between language and identity has been stressed by sociolinguists while social psychologists such as Tajfel (1995) have highlighted the pluralistic and fluid nature of social identity. Literary theoreticians such as Baktin have focussed on narrative as the genre that allows the expression of multiple voices (Baktin 1982). The complex experiences of immigrants, recent and established, are expressed through their narratives and their use of the language of the host country. Their multiple areas of identification or non-identification–the new country, the native country, the colonial country–often coexist as the narrators negotiate images of the host country with the reality of that ‘imagined’ land. Furthermore, often as the narrators’ new identities emerge, their self-image conflicts with the image that is reflected back to them from Europeans. Reading personal stories is like listening to ‘the other’ expressing her/his point of view on European societies. Language plays a crucial role: as the language of migrants’ narratives changes, the narrators gain competence in the ‘other’ language, and gain a ‘new’ identity. Ideally, this ‘new’ language and ‘new’ identity will be added to the existing one/s and migrants will move freely between and within cultures.19

19

Although this particular aspect, the ‘shifting’ identity will not be treated here, it is worth mentioning that in his paper entitled “Nascono I bambini”. Pap Khouma and a New Senegalese Strand in Italian Literature, Chris Hogarth, argues that, although Khouma’s activities subvert Italian space, he is also becoming ‘colonised’ at the same time. In other words, Hogarth questions de Certeau’s optimistic view that such experiences are always liberating () asserting instead that they may also be negative. On a similar note, Parati (1996) asserts that Khouma, in a way, censored his narration, in order to make his text acceptable to the wide Italian public. As she writes, he never uses the word ‘racism’. Parati’s statement somehow backs Hogarth’s view. It could be said that Khouma had already succumbed to the discourse of the ‘coloniser’. However, I subscribe to a different hypothesis, partly based on Sclavi’s discourse analysis of Khouma’s text (Sclavi 1999). The narrator in I, seller of elephants, is not interested in showing immigrants as pathetic and helpless victims, at least not just that. Instead, the narrator shows readers how it is hard but possible to live between and within languages and cultures and how much better it would be if Italians experienced ‘other’ culture from within and inscribed them in parallel to the many existing regional Italian culture. In short, it is a lesson in interculturality. — 122 —


At a pedagogical and ethical level, comparative literature academics such as Gnisci (1995, 1997) have strongly argued against the exclusion of migrant literature from the curriculum and the canon and the labelling of such texts as relevant only from a sociological, anthropological point of view. If the traditional comparative literature model, still dominant in Italy, remains focussed on Italian literature, the model proposed by Gnisci (1996), based on literature written in Italian, incorporates Europe, the Mediterranean and the World. He points out for example that there are authors who write their texts in Italian in Australia. The focus on language rather than on literature to a certain extent cancels the restrictive criteria posed by questions such as–what is a national literature? Or, should “immigrant literature” or African Italian literature be classified as Italian, or French, or German literature, or as texts to be included in the umbrella society and culture? If the focus is on language, such questions are irrelevant. The comparative model is useful, however, when studying texts written by immigrants to France, Germany and Italy because it brings to the fore the intercultural experiences of the writers and places the texts in historical perspective. Whilst African Italian literature is predominantly written by immigrants coming from France’s ex colonies (e.g. Senegal), in Germany, there are writers who migrated from Italy to Germany and now write in German. The fact that Italy, in the space of 60 years has undergone a transformation, from a nation of emigrants to a nation of immigration (1 million in the last 10 years) highlights the historical character of transnational movements. Although borders, especially within Europe, have never been so ‘fluid’ (they’ve disappeared for EU members, although it must be underlined that the same borders instead, remain closed to many non EU people (Europe 1994), ‘extracomunitari’ as they are called in Italy), and people’s mobility globally, has perhaps never been so vast, there have always been throughout history migrations and also the individual desire to travel from one’s home to see the other side (eg. Ulysses). Although it may be argued that most migrants are driven by economic hardship, several texts written by immigrants also reveal the desire to experience other cultures, cultures often idealised, as in the case of Khouma’s Io, Venditore di elefanti, I, seller of elephants (Khouma 1999). It seems therefore legitimate to include such texts within the ancient travel narrative genre rather than presenting texts written by immigrants as separate from the mainstream national literature. — 123 —


The travel genre provides an opportunity to place recent migration patterns both in historical perspective and also to address immigration as a global issue as well as avoiding the exclusion of immigrant literature from mainstream literary genres. Within this literary and social panorama, two issues in particular have been discussed in the course, crucial to language, literature and identity: the centre and margins in relation to canon and curriculum issues in Europe and in Australia. The ‘foreign’, rather than ‘immigrant’ perspective, was selected as title for the lecture in order to situate the texts within the long tradition of the ‘foreigner’ (lo straniero) in literature (Grossi & Rossi 1997). The narratives included in the course range from personal stories such as Pap, Io venditore di elefanti (Khouma 1999), often mediated through an Italian author to narratives written by less recent immigrants that are self-reflective as the authors (eg. Yoko Tawada, Zehra Cirak in Ackermann 1999), aware of literature writing as strong identification with the ‘host’ country, reinvent language and shape it to portray their multiple identities. This conveys the linguistic self-confidence of the authors and also their affirmation of otherness. Personal stories such as Khouma’s instead, written in collaboration with an Italian writer, highlight an overwhelming wish to participate, with his own voice, in the construction of ‘the immigrant’. The question of representation is addressed directly by Khouma in his interview with Parati when he says that he wrote the book to interrupt the Italian monologue on immigrants with the aim of opening a dialogue (Parati 1995:115-16). In this sense, Khouma’s narrative itinerary, based on his experience as an immigrant, but also on the experiences of other immigrants, provides a multivoiced narrative that includes Italian as well as African perspectives and asks for participation and evaluation by the readers by addressing them directly. By doing so, he overturns the Italian ‘colonial’ monologue about immigrants. This process is already present, by necessity, from the very first moments of the text since, as Khouma states, the book was written “a quattro mani”, by four hands (Parati 1995:118). As most of the other first immigrant narratives, this text is a product of a collaborative process between an Italian and an African. The Italian author, Oreste Pivetta, first recorded and then wrote the African oral text. Khouma then checked it and decided whether he wished to add or delete sections of the story.

— 124 —


Khouma states, these were the first step towards becoming a writer since Pivetta physically wrote the text on paper; however, Khouma’s presence and the experiences of immigration dominate. His ‘raw’ narrative material is already controlled, aestheticized–as he states, he did not want to include all the suffering and humiliation. This ellipsis is already a sign of a sophisticated, literary multiethnic mind as opposed to sociological, documentary-style reportage. Used to shifting between wolof, (a Senegalese language with words from French, English, Portuguese and Spanish), French and Italian, open to cultural interchanges (Parati 1995: 118) Khouma did not want to represent immigrants as victims, but as creative protagonists of their own narratives. This is also the case at the level of discourse. ‘Embarrassing’ events are not swept under the carpet–as in Goffman’s theory of embarrassment- (Goffman 1958, 1972, 1975; Harré 1990)20 but are instead brought to the fore and represented as two different ways, both legitimate, of perceiving, interpreting and evaluating reality. As such, these moments are not narrated as embarrassing, and the narrator is not perceived as a victim who does not understand the new culture, but as a reader of two parallel–albeit not coinciding–narratives (Sclavi 1999). Europe is now made up of different ethnicities and cultures–in Khouma’s text such differences are not swept under the carpet by the ‘new’ comers, rather they exist in parallel to all other ways of interpreting reality and should also be inscribed in the social and cultural fabric of Europe. In this sense, immigrant literature is valuable on a ‘sociological’ level. Literary studies, if inclusive, can be a powerful media to develop language as well as awareness of ‘marginal’ realities through the experience of reading. It can also change public opinion of immigrants. However, even texts such Khouma’s, written by “four hands”, and classified as autobiographical, should not be labelled as “pre-literary”, as they have in Italy (Fortunato, quoted in Parati 1996) or be excluded from national curricula or national canons. It is perhaps not surprising that “Australian” students were really receptive to the texts studied in the course, perhaps because some, such as Khouma’s, fairly linear and based on personal experiences, were written in accessible language. Above all, the texts engaged the students because they represented, first-hand, a

20

Quoted in Sclavi 1999. — 125 —


very different picture of Europe, soliciting curiosity and empathy because they contained stories of survival, and because students too, as immigrants, are linguistic ‘outsiders’. It is hoped that, as these texts write a new European identity (Brinker-Gabler & Smith 1997), Italian academia will take up Gnisci’s proposal to redefine Comparative literature in Italy, a process underway in Australia and America.21

Open Conclusions

[Carroli/Maurer]

Shifting views of language, race and identity demand a redefinition of the canon, both for inclusion in LOTE courses and in the countries of origin, as well as a reshaping of the comparative and cultural model of teaching the visual arts and literature. This paper has shown how a focus on literature written in a particular language rather than national literature, on the representation of the other in historical perspective and across art forms can ‘provide’ students with an inclusive representation of the fluid fabric of Europe.


21

A whole conference entitled Simposio Africa/Italia (Africa/Italy: An Interdisciplinary International Symposium) has been dedicated to this topic in 1998 at Miami University. Some of the papers have been published in an Italian volume entitled Africa Italia: Due continenti che si avvicinano. Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1999, and in ItaliAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures. Stony Brook, N.Y.: Forum Italicum, 2001. The department of Italian Studies at Berkeley University offers a course on the same topic, taught in Italian, entitled “20th Century Literature and Culture: Space, Memory, and History in Italy’s Contemporary Diaspora Literature”. — 126 —


References

Ackermann, Irmgard (ed.). 1999 Foreign ViewPoints: Multicultural Literature in Germany. Bonn: Inter Nationes. American Abstract Art (1957), The world of abstract Art, New York: Wittenborn&co ; or Rosenberg, Harold (1954), the tradition of the New, New York: Horizon press publishers, Inc. Russel, Johns (1983),The New European painters, The New York Times Magazine April 24. Améry, Jean. 1973. Ästhetizismus der Barbarei :Über Michel Tournier’s roman der ErlkIonig, merkur 297. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. First Paperback edition, 1982. Basili (Banca Dati sugli Scrittori Immigrati in Lingua Italiana). Introduction by A. Gnisci. http://cisadu2.let.uniroma1.it/basili/present.htm Brinker-Gabler, Gisela & Smiths, Sidonie (eds.). 1997. Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Carroli, P. 1999. “Australian Perspectives on European Narratives.” Session on “Internationalism”. European conference on promoting sustainable diversity in Higher Education across national boundaries. Oxford: Oxford Brookes University. Carroli, P., R. Hillman, L. Maurer. 1999. Australian Perspectives on (Inter)national European Narratives. Part II - Intercultural Competence in Practice. Lo Bianco, J., A.J. Liddicoat & C. Crozet. Striving for the Third Place: Intercultural Competence through Language Education. Melbourne: Language Australia. Celan, Paul. 1948. Der Sand aus den Urnen, ed A. Saxl. Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of everyday life. Translation of Arts de faire. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley : University Of California Press. Gercken, Gunther. 1985. Figurative Painting after 1960, in German Art in the 20th Century, London: Royal Academy of Arts. Kirshner, Judith Russi1(1984), Collecting contemporary art in Chicago in Contemporary Italian Masters Chigago: Council of Fine Art. — 127 —


Gilmour John C. 1990. Fire on the Earth, Philadelphia: Temple Uni press. Gnisci, Armando. 1995. “Tre paragrafi sulla decolonizazione letteraria degli europei.” Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, Vol. 8, No. 2: 55-66. Gnisci, Armando. 1996. “Crisi dell’italianistica: quali prospettive?” Bollettino ‘900 – Electronic Newsletter of ‘900 Italian Literature. http://www.comune.bologna.it/iperbole/boll900/gnisci.htm. Gnisci, Armando. 1997. “La letteratura degli immigrati in Italia. Caratteri generali e modello di una Banca dati CNR”. Convegno Internazionale: “Migrazioni, interazioni e conflitti nella costruzione di una democrazia europea.” – Bologna, 16-19 dicembre. http://cisadu2.let.uniroma1.it/basili/bologna.htm Goffman, Erving. 1958. The presentation of self in everyday life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1972. Interaction ritual: essays on face-to-face behaviour. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Goffman, Erving. 1975. Frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Originally published: New York : Harper and Row, 1974. Grossi, Lina & Rossi, Rosa. 1997. Lo straniero: letteratura e intercultura. Roma: Centro ricerca educazione allo sviluppo (CRES). Gumpert, Lynn. 1988. The life and Death of Christian Boltanski, in Christian Boltanski, :Lessons of Darkness, Museum of Contemporary Art. Harré, Rom. 1999. “Embarassement: A conceptual analysis”. In W. Ray Crozier (ed.) Shyness and Embassassment. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 181-204. Hogarth, Chris. 2001. “’Nascono I bambini’. Pap Khouma and a New Senegalese Strand in Italian Literature.” Paper presented at the Conference “Writing Europe 2001: Migrant Cartographies. Holland: University of Leiden. Abstract available at the following web site: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/alw/conference/abstracts/abstracts%20H.htm. Jurgensen, Manfred. 2001. Transformative Identities of Literary Multiculturalism in Adventures of Identity European Multicultural Experiences and Perspectives, john Docker;Gerhard Fischer (eds) Tubigen: Stauffenburg-Verl. — 128 —


Khouma, Pap. 1999. Io, venditore di elefanti: Una vita per forza fra Dakar, Parigi e Milano. Milano: Garzanti (1st edition 1990). Kiefer, Anselm Plate XI 280x380 cm Saatchi collection London, in Fire on the Earth, Gilmour John C (1990) Anselm Kiefer and the postmodern World, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kiefer,Anselm Wege der Weltweisheit (1976-77) (Ways of Wordly Wisdom), 305x500cm. Kuspit Donald. 1983. “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: the American Case against Current German Painting, in Expressions, St Louis: Jack Cowart ed . Maurer, L., Carroli, P. & Hillman, R. “Teaching Literature across Cultures and across Art forms.” In Liddicoat, A.J. & Crozet, C. (eds.) Teaching languages, teaching cultures. Melbourne: ALAA. 89-104. Maurer, L. 2001. “Crossing the boundaries of language, culture, genre and art forms” in Killick, Parry & Phipps, The Poetics and Praxis of Languages and Intercultural Communication published jointly by University of Glasgow, French and German Publications and Leeds Metropolitan University, pp.285-291 vol 1. Newton, Adam Zachary. 1995. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press. Oliva Bonito, Achille. 1980. The Italian Trans-Avangarde, Milan. Parati, Graziella. 1995. “Intervista a Pap Khouma.” Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, Special Issue – Margins at the Centre: African Italian Voices, Vol. 8, No. 2:115-120. Parati, Graziella. 1995. “Italophone Voices.” Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, Special Issue – Margins at the Centre: African Italian Voices, Vol. 8, No. 2: 1-15. Parati, Graziella. 1996. “Living in Translation, Thinking with an Accent.” http://tell.fll.purdue.edu/RLA-archive/1996/Italian-html/Parati, Graziella.htm. Raimondi, Ezio. 1998. Letteratura e identità nazionale. Milano: Mondadori. Romani, Graziella. 1998. “Italian Identity and Immigrant Writing: The Shaping of a New Discourse. University of Pennsylvania: Simposio AfricaItalia.

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Sclavi, Marianella. 1999. “L’allegra scienza dei narratori interculturali e il gioco delle narrazioni parallele.” “aut aut”, 291-292: 203-230. Tajfel, Henri. 1995. Gruppi umani e categorie sociali. Bologna: Il Mulino. Translation of Human Groups and Social Categories. Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Tournier, Michel. 1970. Le Roi des Aulnes, Gallimard. Von Alphen, Ernst. 1997. Caught by History, Stanford: Stanford uni press.

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NEW CONTEXTS: FACING SOCIAL CHANGE IN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDIES


Social Change and Scholarly Mediation

The idea that scholarly research into language and literature might have some impact on society may at first sound like wishful thinking. Society, it can often seem, listens to some types of scholars but not to others. It listens to scientists whose findings can be applied in ways which will increase national productivity, or improve the accuracy of military technology. To ecologists who highlight the many ways in which we are ruining our planet it is surely less attentive. And humanities subjects often seem to be regarded as an unnecessary luxury. The humanities, we perhaps gather, are a mere self-indulgence for lotus-eating parasites with nothing better to do. To the extent that this accusation does make itself heard, how do we as humanities scholars react? Sometimes, perhaps, by over-reacting. The temptation is to stand on our dignity and make noises about our scholarly integrity. At worst, some of us may even retort that society is not worth bothering about at all, that we are not prepared to prostitute our intellects, and that we prefer to cultivate our own secluded little patch. Or to be just slightly more extrovert, we may adopt the kind of mordently oppositional stance which intimates that we are holier than everybody else, so that everybody else will never take us seriously and will simply let us be.

— 133 —


If society and humanities scholars do sometimes seem to be at loggerheads, the explanation probably lies on both sides. On the one hand, society can certainly be very crass. On the other hand, as scholars we can easily get so involved in our research that we momentarily forget the basic terms on which we carry it out. The facts are that nowadays very few scholars are financially independent, and, still more to the point, that our scholarly wisdom is actually worthless unless it can be justified to other people. If we claim that what we do is valuable for its own sake, we may be practising a subtle form of self-deception. Nothing can be said to be valuable unless there are human beings who value it. And if we ourselves were the only people who valued our scholarship, then we could speaking from our own self-interested bias. For the argument to hold, the valorization has to be shareable by other people as well. It is only in their eyes, in the eyes of society, that we can be legitimated, which means we must be willing to explain why our activities are valuable for their own sake. Without appealing to any very crude measure of social relevance, we do need to have some sense of bearings. Our efforts must be shaped by a verbalizable perception of how they relate to human interests and undertakings in general. Much current work in the humanities is in my view eminently justifiable, and as we look ahead into the new millennium I think we can be hopeful. We can admit, fairly and squarely, that society has probably never been totally crass in every respect, and that, even if it has never produced a paradise on earth, some of its achievements have been magnificent, even by our own most scrupulous standards. We can be fair on ourselves as well, and on our forbears. We can frankly recognize that ever since our fields of learning first began to be developed there have been scholars whose sense of human bearings has been very real, and that dichotomisation of society and scholarship are ultimately unreal. Scholars do belong. We do make our cultural contribution. The only question is: Can we be sure that our future relationship with society will consolidate all that is best in the record hitherto? And to my mind at least, the answer is yes, we can. Our future role can readily be imagined, it seems to me, in ways which not only allow us a due intellectual autonomy, but suggest that our findings may indeed have genuine human bearings. One especially constructive idea is that some of our scholarly activities may help people adjust to the confusing and sometimes — 134 —

Roger D. Sell

frightening processes of change within society itself. This is by no means far-fetched, I shall be arguing, as long as we can develop an adequate theory of communication. What I mean by this is a communication theory which will underwrite attempts to mediate between people of different positionalities.

******

Now in order to have a sense of human bearings, a scholar does not have to be a sociologist. I myself am not a sociologist, and in speaking of social change I shall not be presenting statistical documentation or sociological analysis. My own sociologizing is much the same as that of any other interested lay person. I have read some sociological texts, and I have read about some, too. In this way I have picked up a number of terms and ideas which help me to think about my own and other ordinary people’s everyday day experience of change. It is to change as experienced, to the way society seems to be changing to ordinary people, that linguists and literary scholars can, I think, address themselves. And since the two main social changes I have in mind can seem, as it were, to contradict each other, our experience of them is indeed difficult to cope with. What makes the difficulty even more acute is that both changes affect society in the most fundamental way, because they both have to do with the very size and number of different social groupings. On the one hand, we can often feel there is a tendency for social groupings to become ever smaller in size and greater in number. Think only of the way in which many different kinds of minority–people representing different economic interests, classes, ethnic origins, religions, cultures, sub-cultures, gender identities and sexual orientations–have in recent decades found their voice and championed their own cultural and political identity. On the other hand, we can just as easily feel there is a tendency for social groupings to become ever larger in size and fewer in number. Think only of the way people all over the world seem to be coming closer and closer together as a result of communications technology and supranational economic, political, environmental, and cultural developments. In other words, we would often be very hard pressed to say whether society’s essential dynamism is centrifugal or centripetal. On — 135 —


balance, our experience is probably that it is somehow or other both at the same time. The centrifugal tendency tends to be described as a central aspect of the condition of postmodernity. Here the main meaning of “postmodernity” is not “post-early-twentieth-century-artistic-Modernism”, but something more like “post-Enlightenment”. It refers to a widespread scepticism as to grand narratives of scientific explanation and political teleology, and the political scepticism involves far-reaching problems of identity and authority (Lyotard 1984 [1979]; Foster 1985; Connor 1991; Harvey1989; Jameson 1991; Rutherford 1990). On this view, any sense of a common human nature has now been seriously destabilized, and traditional power structures must be breaking down or getting more complicated. Centrifugal phenomena are now a main stimulus to Western liberal philosophers, who tend to speak in jubilantly Heraclitean or Blakean terms of the energies which can flow from a conflict of powerful opposites. Conflict, says Stuart Hampshire (1992 [1989]), makes for life and liveliness, both within the individual soul and within societies; it is quite simply the normal and most healthy condition of human life. Hampshire’s only proviso is that the hostilities must be controlled by rational justice. This last point is well taken. After all, the many different groupings of postmodern people still cohabit just the one planet, and often just some very tiny corner of it, since roughly half the world’s population now live in urban areas. Now that so many of them have begun to insist on their own right to self-realization, the risk of friction, bigotry, injustice and violence is only too apparent. The philosophers’ goal is accordingly to facilitate a politics of recognition, which would lay down clear guidelines as to the arrangements appropriate for each and every grouping within particular jurisdictions (Taylor 1994). This is a project which severely tests the liberal mind-set. For what can a politics of recognition actually entail? Central to liberalism is the Kantian ideal of a dignity which is to be respected in every single human being, quite irrespective of who he or she happens be (Kant 1998 [1785]). So Ronald Dworkin (1978) describes a liberal society as one which guarantees procedures for dealing fairly with all sorts and conditions of people, with no questions asked about their ideology and politics. In such a “difference-blind” society, any collective aspiration to some particular ideal of the good life would be fundamentally out of place. Rather, citizens would be free to cherish their own life-ideals, and as much as possible — 136 —

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that freedom would be safeguarded by a scrupulous procedural impartiality on the part of the society’s institutions. Charles Taylor (1994), on the other hand, though profoundly concerned for each individual’s human dignity, thinks that the egalitarian principle may sometimes have to give way to the positive discrimination of those kinds of difference which have traditionally been downtrodden, or which may otherwise run the risk of extinction. For example, he takes no exception to a Quebec law which stipulates that francophones and immigrants may not send their children to English-language schools. He sees here a justification for granting a higher degree of recognition to the collective aim of preserving a Frenchlanguage culture than to the individual freedom of Canada’s inhabitants in general. For K. Anthony Appiah, by contrast, recognition on Taylor’s terms comes embarrassingly close to compulsion. “[T]he desire of some Quebecois to require people who are ‘ethnically’ francophone to teach their children in French steps over a boundary”, the boundary between public and private. Speaking from his own feelings as a gay, black male in the United States, Appiah similarly questions the identity which seems to be politically scripted for people such as himself. “If I had to choose between the world of the closet and the world of gay liberation, or between the world of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Black Power, I would, of course, choose in each case the latter. But I would like not to have to choose” (Appiah 1994: 163). In the best of imaginable worlds, he would be able to think of the sexual body and skin colour as belonging to the self’s personal dimension. In practice, a coercive narrowing of the scope for human identity has all too often resulted from the very attempt to guarantee a common human dignity. The egalitarian politics of Rousseau, for instance, presupposed both an absence of differentiated social roles and a very strict common purpose; everyone would simply submit to the general will. Hence arose the standardizing Terror of the Jacobins, to which there have since been parallels in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (Taylor 1994: 44-51). If Appiah is beginning to find a postmodern politics of difference too intrusive, other commentators go still further, and see the entire phenomenon of postmodern disintegration as, precisely, a phenomenon: a good bit more apparent than real. Some our time’s most powerful intellects are seeking to rehabilitate ideas of a commonality of human concerns which can lead to rational and progressive forms of co-existence, and without encroaching on the rights of individuals. For Habermas — 137 —


(1994), the choice between a procedurally difference-blind egalitarianism and the collective support of differentiated underprivilege is actually misconceived. In a democracy, he argues, we are the authors of our own laws, and those laws are always to be interpreted in the particular circumstances which apply in our society, and in particular cases. In effect, this means that we can have a common political culture which will be one of tolerance towards cultural differences on other levels. Certainly, much of the way we live our lives presupposes that Enlightenment buzz-words such as expertise, responsibility, and cooperation still denote genuinely existing potencies for good. This is a recurrent theme in the writings of Raymond Tallis (1995, 1997), who among other things points to the fairly justifiable confidence with which most people in the West submit to a hospitalization. In the same way, institutions such as law courts, ombudsmen, boards of arbitration, the International Court of Justice, and the United Nations all work on the assumption that, when differences between one individual or grouping and another become problematic, a just resolution can be negotiated. By the same token, one rapidly growing area of research is now Peace Studies. Partly a product of the Cold War, and often classified under the heading International Relations, Peace Studies were quick to develop in certain neutral countries (cf. Rytövuori-Apunen 1990), but their relevance was also clearly recognized elsewhere (cf. UNESCO 1991, Boasson 1991) and continues to be explored (Otunnu & Doyle, 1998, Pupesinghe, 1998, Cortright, 1997, and Doyle 1997). In some countries, Peace Studies are already well established within secondary and even primary education as well (Hine & Parry 1989), with appropriate textbooks (e.g. Smoker et al.1990). Such educational developments are themselves an object of study, both in neutral countries (e.g. Pulkkinen 1989) and in the United States (e.g. Stomfay-Stitz 1993). Still more important, every once in a while the lessons to be learnt from Peace Studies are illustrated by our own time’s history. After a careful process of discussion, as of Good Friday 1998 there at last seems to be a chance of new arrangements for Northern Ireland. Here is where we come round to society’s centripetal dynamic, which is not necessarily malign, and which postmodern centrifugality has certainly not neutralized. On the contrary, although a major effect of the new order in Northern Ireland would be to make that part of the world more centrifugally Irish, another of the new ideas involves a forum–a so-called British— 138 —

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Irish Council–for the discussion of issues relating to the entire British archipelago as a larger sphere within Europe. This is characteristic of a broader trend. In several important areas, knowledge, praxis and values are indeed tending to be globalized.

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If possible, we should presumably try to keep the centrifugal and the centripetal in balance, so as to avoid both the violent divisiveness of war and the risk of totalitarian hegemony. This is certainly the view of Ian Clark, who offers a fascinating assessment of relationships between centrifugal domestic policy and centripetal foreign policy throughout the entire twentieth century. Broadly speaking, he distinguishes four main phases: a pre-First-World-War phase of increasing internationalization; an inter-war phase of mutually destructive national projects; a postSecond-World-War phase of balance between the global order and the domestic welfare state; and a post-Cold-War phase of renewed internationalism, which is now increasing the pressure on domestic diversity. Looking into the future, his conclusion is emphatic: Precisely how the balance between globalization and fragmentation will be adjusted depends on the new role that states are able to form for themselves, and how successfully they manage to mediate between increasingly potent international pressures and the heightened levels of domestic discontent that will inevitably be brought in their wake. (Clark 1997: 202)

A key word in Clark’s prediction is “mediate”. What hangs upon it for him is nothing less than the future peace and prosperity of the human race. The word’s use in this kind of connection is not uncommon, and Clark’s own work suggests the reason for it. If, in a particular society or in the world as a whole, mediation between the centrifugal and the centripetal were to be successful, then human diversification would be energizing and constructive, and dialogue across perceived lines of difference would be illuminating and non-coercive. Contrary to the recommendations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau, there would be no ironing out of difference in the name of stability or consensus, since,

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as Heraclitus and Stuart Hampshire both suggest, such a policy would be stultifying, dangerously repressive, and in the long run quite untenable. Hampshire, for his part, pins his hopes on “a recognisable basic level of common decency”, which can feed into “a minimum procedural justice”. On such a view, “evil, in the form of the drive to domination, consists in the uncompensated violation of this basic justice”. When arbitration is necessary between conflicting moral claims and competing conceptions of the good, the minimum procedural justice should play “the role of the scales, while considerations derived from different conceptions of the good can be seen as the weights that have to be assessed” (Hampshire 1992 [1989]: 186). Perhaps it is not too much to hope that widely various groupings of people will increasingly agree to weigh up conflicting considerations and, when necessary, settle for what Habermas (1993) calls “reasonable disagreement”. But if this does happen, the type of mediation involved will have to be a good deal more positive than that still often discussed within Peace Studies, for instance. Ever since the early eighteenth century, mediation has been regarded as a special branch of diplomacy by which prestige accrues to mediating powers themselves. But it has not been thought of as an undertaking calling for much creativity and foresight. Its perceived scope has rather lain in the sorting out of conflicts already well under way, as Kalevi J. Holsti so bluntly notes: “there are no cases on record where formal mediation actually prevented a war” (Holsti 1991: 112). Given that the Cold War still belongs to the fairly recent past, there is a continuing preoccupation with realpolitik, so that terms like “positive diplomacy” refer mainly to the routine proffer of incentives, sops and threats (cf. Marshall 1997). That this could indeed change is suggested by an increasing number of studies of the role which culture can play, not only in causing obstacles to agreement, but in offering unexpected opportunities for conflict resolution (e.g. Faure & Rubin 1993). Encouragingly enough, such more seriously hermeneutic mediation requires only the straightforward use of our ordinary human capacities, for our minds are actually capable of considerable flexibility. Although we seldom think about it, many different things can be going on in our heads at once. Some single emotion or attitude or state of affairs need never monopolize our psychic energy. For this, the best evidence is introspective: once we begin to scrutinize our own feelings and ideas, we soon notice a certain many-sidedness, not to — 140 —

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say confusion. But from talking to other people we can deduce that they experience the same thing, and it has been much written about as well, especially by literary writers–think only of King Lear’s vacillation between extremes of wrath and self-abasement in face of Goneril and Regan. Support can also be drawn from biological and anthropological considerations. That the responses of human beings to each other, or to events and environment, can be so hesitant and complicated must help to explain our evolutionary success. Our species as a whole, never having set its heart on just some single future, can channel its energies according to circumstance, turning each and every situation to advantage. As individuals, too, we can often afford to “wait and see”. We “keep our options open”, “keep an open mind”, “reserve judgement”, or “look before we leap”. The very currency of such idioms tends to corroborate our ready adaptability, a disposition which becomes problematic only if we crave for certainty–like King Lear–or feel under some obligation to choose, once and for all, between equally feasible courses of action. Otherwise, by being in more than one state of mind at a time we recognize that our impressions may be complex and slow to develop. As we wait, we can enjoy a kind of disinterestedness which stops us from becoming unsociably prickly, and which may have been an aspect of what Keats referred to as negative capability: that capability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1954: 53). True, there are situations in which by coolly refusing to decide or judge we could be letting other people down. Sometimes such epicureanism would hardly serve our own best interests either. But if negative capability should not be allowed to sap the readiness for swift and responsible action, the fact remains that when, even for quite unselfish or urgently practical reasons, we make our minds up, not only do certain possibilities get chosen, but certain others get rejected as well. As for the habit of forming opinions gratuitously, and the posture of always, immediately and emphatically knowing exactly what we mean and what we want, this is perhaps a symptom of spiritual insecurity. It is when human beings do see, as we put it, different sides to an issue that a process of positive mediation can take place. When our thinking is in this mode, we look at a situation, an experience, an activity, both as seen by an observer from the outside, and as it is likely to seem to a person directly implicated on the inside. We deliberately weigh against each other the life-worlds of different evaluations, frames of mind, — 141 —


styles of discussion. This is not a matter of irresponsible free-play. Nor is it an anaemic, lowest-common-denominator affair–a mere syncretic sinking of differences. We can still be critical, can still have our own opinion, and can even end up making a strong commitment on something. At the same time, our viewpoint certainly can move closer to somebody else’s, and any strong commitment will bespeak, not a strident haste or a lazy stock response, but a solid grounding in relevant facts and considerations. In saying “we” here, my appeal is to the very strongest kind of evidence, both for the human predisposition to mediation, and for mediation’s beneficial effects: it is once more a direct appeal to introspection. Whether quite spontaneously, or whether on the prompting of some other person acting as a go-between, we have surely all known what it is to see things in more than one way at a time; have felt the satisfaction of improved understanding; have noticed that relationships can also be improved, even when complete agreement remains impossible; and have ourselves undergone a change of perceptions, attitudes and feelings. Once brought into focus, the process I have in mind can be thought of as a careful negotiation of differences, a trying on of otherness for spiritual size, a testing, a probing, a search for justice or a modus vivendi. Applied in particular situations, this kind of mediation is positive, in the sense that it is self-conscious, deliberately fair-minded, and purposefully future-oriented. Though not assuming the possibility or desirability of some all-embracing consensus, it nevertheless seeks to improve the chances of reasonable discussion, peace and fairness. In a wholly constructive way, it builds on our adaptability, on our capacity for entering into widely different sets of circumstances without becoming inoperational, and, above all, on our ability to do so through an act of imagination–through what Isaiah Berlin once called “the force of imaginative insight” (Berlin 1997: 9).

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This is the kind of mediation we need a lot more of in the frightening world in which the president of the most powerful country has said, “If you are not for us, you are against us”, through which words he not only diabolized his enemy just as much as his enemy had diabolized him, but — 142 —

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positively refused any offer of mediation, instead insisting on war. It is the world in which literary scholars showed themselves unable to de-fuse the Rushdie affair, partly, it seems to me, because they have still not recovered the ancient sense of literary activity as one among other real processes of communication between real human beings. My suggestion is that both literary scholars and linguists could promote positive mediation, and be strengthened even to serve as mediators themselves, if in their own thinking about communication they were to give due weight to five fundamental points. Within the paradigms for linguistic and literary scholarship in the twentieth century, each and every one of these points tended to be overlooked or even denied. Scholars’ sense of general human bearings was not always what it might have been (cf. Sell 2000: 29-118). Point 1. Communicative situations are always triangular, and the activity is in more than one dimension. Communication should preferably not be thought of in terms of a simple binarism of sender and receiver, and it is not unidirectional. It is not really a matter of a speaker or writer or narrator sending a message which is received by a listener or reader or narratee. Any such binarism of sender/receiver tends to prioritize the first term of the binarism, making the speaker or writer or narrator the active party, while the listener or reader or narratee figures as much more passive. In real life, it is true, communication all too often turns out this way, but only as the result of power imbalances. The triangular reality of genuine communication is that the two parties are always in even-handed negotiation about some third entity, though needless to say, the third entity can actually be one or both of the negotiating parties themselves, since they themselves are one of the things they can talk about. Equally well, the third entity can be something quite fictional, as in the case of much literary communication, and in much other communication, too. Whatever the third entity is, the two communicants are comparing notes about it, which means they are contemplating both the third entity itself and each other’s view of it. Either view may prevail, as it were, or neither view. Indeed, some quite new view may emerge, precisely as a result of the interaction. Point 2. Communication is fundamentally affected by differences between the contexts within which the different participants are functional. This is not only the case between communicants belonging to different cultures or different periods of time, in which second case one of them may be already dead and buried. The same thing applies between any — 143 —


communicants at all. All communication takes place between different positionalities. True, to at least some extent the two contexts of operation must overlap. Most obviously, if the two people did not share a general experience of the human condition, and some understanding of a language and its use, then no communication could take place except through intermediaries. But even two people apparently sharing one and the same positionality will always represent it in somewhat different inflections. When they enter into communication with each other, the knowledge, memories, experiences, attitudes, values, prejudices they bring to the process will not be identical. No matter how great the extent of what they already have in common, the contexts within which they operate will not be completely coterminous, and the unitary context fallacy, as I have called it (Sell, 2000: 65-71, 119-45), is something both linguists and literary scholars must scrupulously avoid, since it may always tend, however slightly, to underwrite society’s centripetal dynamism in the malign form of hegemony. By assimilating both parties to an identical positionality, it can fail to recognize that the parties, in fact, and by right, are different from each other, and that such differences are a large element in what genuine communication negotiates. Point 3. Human beings are social individuals. They are not totally autonomous, and not totally determined either. On the one hand, they are nothing if not social animals. Their social formation is so much a part of what they are that to imagine them in some quintessential form abstracted from society is neither ethical nor even possible. Nineteenth century attempts at such quintessentializations were sometimes an ideological corollary of political oppression. On the other hand, people do have at least some degree of personal will, imagination and intellect. As Raymond Tallis puts it, much twentieth-century structuralist and poststructuralist theory ignored the following words of de Saussure, its founding father: Language [langue] is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual .... Speech [parole], on the contrary, is an individual act. It is wilful and intellectual. (de Saussure, 1974 [1916]: 14)

No matter whether the structured system be that of the psyche, language, society or culture, human beings can to some extent operate it, and are not to be entirely conflated with it. Without wishing to re-instate “the — 144 —

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transparent, self-possessed, controlling Cartesian cogito”, what Tallis objects to is Lévi-Strauss’s influential talk of myths which “think themselves out in the men and without men’s knowledge” (Lévi-Strauss, 1970 [1964]: 46). In a key statement to which the present book will frequently be returning, Tallis explains that his own project is to re-assert the centrality of individual consciousness, of undeceived deliberateness, in the daily life of human beings. We are not absolutely transparent to ourselves but we are not utterly opaque either; we are not totally self-present in all our actions but nor are we absent from them; we are not complete masters of our fates, shaping our lives according to our utterly unique and original wishes, but neither are we the empty playthings of historical, political, social, semiological or instinctual forces. (Tallis, 1997: 228)

It is this same relative independence which enables human beings to empathize with people whose formation is not the same as their own, and to negotiate the inevitable contextual disparities of even the most ordinary daily interchanges. It is an independence which underlies human beings’ flexibility of mind, and their predisposition to negative capability. And although a communicant’s movement of empathy can in principle go hand in hand with a critical self-distancing from the other communicant’s “otherness”, there may also be occasions when empathy, having tried on the otherness for size, as it were, becomes something more like sympathy, so suggesting that the positionality from which the empathetic movement started out is amenable to modification, even if there are still areas where the parties agree to differ. At the very least, people of different circumstances and orientations can make advances in mutual understanding. In other words, our account of communicational pragmatics, though it is bound to be firmly historical, should not carry this to the point of historicist determinism. As social individuals, we are capable of projecting ourselves outside of our own world view, and can even become critical of it and strive to change it. The deterministic kind of argument which denies this tends to endorse the most malign forms of society’s centrifugal dynamism. What it suggests is that the difficulties resulting from contextual disparities are so great as to make communication impossible, as if the differences were, in John Hillis Miller’s alarming phrase, “all the way down” (Miller, 1995). In point of fact, life’s inevitable contextual disparities, no matter how small or great, are the very stimulus to — 145 —


communication in the first place, and the relative independence and agility of the human mind is well equipped to deal with them. Point 4. Communication does change the status quo. It is a semiotic process by which people adapt to the world and to each other. In the case of free and unconstrained communication, part of the outcome is always that the amount of overlap between the two contexts within which the communicants are operating will actually have increased. In other words, communication is communication in the etymological sense: it is a making common, a making of community. Even in a case of persisting and extensive disagreement, the new measure of understanding can strengthen human bonds, and make peaceful coexistence much more likely. Point 5. Genuine communication always involves a co-adaptation between the individual and society, and between one individual and another. All social individuals have to adapt to the communicative resources available within society–the language, the genres, the intertextualities–but they do so in the hope that society will adapt to their own personal projects. Similarly, communicants always tend to meet each other half way, since as Aristotle pointed out, this is the key to persuasive rhetoric. You have to present yourself as the kind of person your audience will believe in. As much as you can, you have to become like one of them, in the hope that this will make them more inclined to become like you. Communication works best through give and take, in other words, and a rhetoric which seeks to dispose of all objections and to present a single cast-iron line of reasoning–for instance, the Anglo-American style of academic writing which, given my own training, I find difficult not to practice even here–runs the risk of being, not a gesture of genuine communication, but a power bid.

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To recapitulate, genuine communication is always triangular in structure, and the communicative activity is in more than one dimension. Both parties are active, investigative, and mutually aware, and are seeking to negotiate the third entity, which can be each other, or anything else at all, imagined or real. The contexts within which the two parties are operating, though they must overlap at least partly, are not coterminous. But as social individuals, communicants do have the flexibility of mind to — 146 —

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empathize with otherness, and the net result can involve a widening of the contextual overlap, an increased sense of social bonding, and an improvement in mutual understanding, even when the agreements reached are nothing more than an agreement to dis-agree. Genuine communication is a co-adaptive give-and-take in which the common humanity and human parity of both parties is recognized in a way which does not obliterate difference. Such communication is not divisive, but it is not hegemonic either. It can harness society’s centripetal and centrifugal dynamisms at one and the same time. When we view communication in this way, the channels for scholarly mediation in society are very clear. Nor are there any real surprises. Positive mediation is the attempt to encourage different parties to empathize with each other’s point of view, even when disagreement remains unavoidable. It is a matter of enlarging the area of overlap between the inevitably disparate contexts within which the parties are functioning. As linguists and literary scholars we ought to be well equipped for this role, since our specialities have very much to do with the different ways people have thought and felt within different constellations of time, space and culture, and with the different ways in which they have used language. Provided that we as scholars do not set ourselves up above other people, provided that we retain the human touch, provided that we avoid an arrogant scholasticism, we should be able to help. This will certainly not be a matter of preaching at other people, and it will be much more than just a matter of supplying information. We must ourselves set an example of genuinely communicational overtures. In our own style of scholarship and discussion, we must show a readiness for a truly communicational give and take. There must be no talking for victory. There must be no automatic disempowerment or disqualification of other people’s point of view. Or to end where this chapter began, there must be no too ready assumption that society is crass, and that as scholars we have a sanctity which entitles us to be irresponsible. That would be to close one channel of communication down. And to close communication down is always to undermine humanity’s main hope of a brighter future. If the world is going to become a better place, this will have to be through genuine communication, which our own scholarship can help to nourish. Roger D. Sell — 147 —


References

Appiah, K. Anthony. 1994. “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction”. In Gutman 1994:149-63. Berlin, Isaiah. 1997. “The Pursuit of the Ideal”. In his The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, pp. 1-16. London: Chatto & Windus. Boasson, Charles. 1991. In Search of Peace Research. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Clark, Ian. 1997. Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connor, Steven. 1991. Postmodernist Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Cortright, David (ed.). 1997. The Price of Peace: Incentives and International Conflict Prevention. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1974 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics . London: Fontana. Doyle, Michael W. 1997. Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, Socialism. New York: Norton. Dworkin, Ronald. 1978. “Liberalism”. In Stuart Hampshire (ed.). Public and Private Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 113-43. Faure, Guy Olivier & Rubin, Jeffrey Z. (eds.). 1993. Culture and Negotiation: The Resolution of Water Disputes. Newbury Park: Sage. Foster, Hal (ed.). 1985. Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press. Gutman, Amy (ed.).1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984, 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols. 1 & 2 . Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1993. Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Hampshire, Stuart. 1992 [1989]. Innocence and Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Hine, Robert A. & Parry, Donald A. (eds.). 1989. Education for Peace. Nottingham: Spokesman. Holsti, Kalevi, J. 1991. Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism or the Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Kant, Immanuel. 1998 [1785]. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keats, John. 1954. Selected Letters, ed. Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970 [1964]. “Overture to Le Cru et le Cuit”. In Jacques Ehrmann (ed.). Structuralism. Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 31-55. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984 [1979]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marshall, Peter. 1997. Positive Diplomacy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Miller, John Hillis. 1995. “The University of Dissensus.” Oxford Literary Review 17: 121-43. Otunnu, Olara A. & Doyle, Michael W. (eds.). 1998. Peacekeeping and Peacemaking for the New Century. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Pulkkinen, Lea. 1989. “Progress in Education for Peace in Finland”. In Hinde & Parry 189: 88-101. Pupesinghe, Kuman. 1998. Civil Wars, Civil Peace. London: Pluto Press. Rutherford, Jonathan (ed.). 1990. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Rytövuori-Apunen, Helena. 1990. Peace Research in Scandinavia, 1959-86. Aldershot: Avebury. Sell, Roger D. 2000. Literature as Communication: The Foundations of Mediating Criticism. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Smoker, Paul et al.. 1990. A Reader in Peace Studies. Oxford: Pergamon. Stomfay-Stitz, Aline M. 1993. Peace Education in America, 1829-1990: Sourcebook for Education and Research. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press. — 149 —


Tallis, Raymond. 1995. Newton’s Sleep: Two Cultures and Two Kingdoms. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Tallis, Raymond. 1997. Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism, Irrationalism, AntiHumanism and Counter-Enlightenment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Gutman 1994: 25-73. UNESCO. 1991. UNESCO Yearbook on Peace and Conflict Studies 1988. Paris: UNESCO.

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Language Shift in the Thai Chinese Community

It is a striking fact that many of the people of Chinese ancestry in Thailand do not speak a Chinese variety. The Thai Chinese have no doubt experienced language shift from Chinese to Thai. The shift is largely the result of assimilation, which the government encouraged. The most important contributing factors to the shift during the first half of the twentieth century include the decline of Chinese education, pro-Thai enactments and positive attitudes towards Thai society and the Thai language.

1. Introduction

The Chinese have always played an important role in Siamese society. In as early as the reign of King Thai Sa (1709-1733), the Phraklang (head of the ministry of finance and foreign affairs) was Chinese and the Phraklang ministry was dominated by the Chinese at all levels. King Taksin, who reigned from 1768 to 1782, was the son of a Chinese father and Siamese mother. Even the founder of the Chakri dynasty, Rama I or King Ramathibodi (r. 1782-1809), was half-Chinese. There was from the beginning an extensive Chinese strain in the Chakri royal family, one which, through reinforcement, continues strong to the present. The Chinese people have also made a significant contribution to the country. It was they who built the modern sector of the economy of Siam.

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They dug the canals, constructed the railways and erected the government offices, buildings and bridges of Bangkok. Both independently and as employees of Western firms, they developed the network of institutions and services necessary for the rice-export economy: the banks, warehouses, rice mills and barge lines that brought the rice to Bangkok. They even acted as brokers who travelled around the countryside buying up farmers’ surplus rice for export to Hong Kong, Calcutta or Singapore. If it is indeed true that 91% of the population of Thailand today speaks as a native language one or more varieties of Thai, how did the country become the way it is when 20% of its people have some Chinese ancestry (as do 35% of Bangkokians) (Smalley, 1994:3)? It is obvious even to the most casual observer that the Thai Chinese have experienced and are still experiencing language shift from Chinese to Thai. The Chinese varieties spoken in Thailand include Teochiu, Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese, Hainanese, Hokkien and Taiwanese. 60% of the Sino-Thai population are of Teochiu ancestry; less than 1% of Mandarin ancestry; 8% Hakka; another 8% Cantonese; 11% Hainanese; 4% Hokkien; and 1% of Taiwanese ancestry (Smalley, 1994:212-213). This paper explores some of the main factors which have contributed to this shift during the first half of the twentieth century. The reason why the writer has chosen to focus on this particular time frame is because the period in question is possibly the most tumultuous for the Thai Chinese in Thai history and many of the factors which continue to cause the shift today first became influential during that time. Some of the legislation introduced then have also had far-reaching and lasting effects. According to Amyot (1972), it is relatively easy to integrate into Thai society. There are few in-group barriers and social groupings tend to be open. There is the typical resentment against the Chinese for economic domination but this negative feeling is directed towards the group rather than the individual, towards a way of life rather than an ethnic group, and it does not run very deep. As the reader makes his way through the paper, it will become obvious to him that the shift is largely the result of assimilation, i.e. of the Chinese becoming part of Thai society and being accepted by its members. It has been said that although there are more Chinese in Thailand than in any other country outside of China, the degree of assimilation into Thai society is among the highest in Southeast Asia (Amyot, 1972). When asked what ‘being Thai’ consists of, virtually all — 152 —

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Thais would answer that they are Thai as citizens of Thailand, as subjects of the Thai King. If pressed, they may add that ‘being Thai’ means to be a speaker of the Thai language and a participant in Thai culture. Language is clearly an important component of the Thai identity. When the Chinese assume Thainess, they also take on the Thai language as part of their new identity. To many Thais and some Westerners, there is nothing worth commenting about the unquestioned place of one single language as the language of a country. To the people of many Asian countries, however, the fact that the one language of Thailand is Thai seems strange. For them, the coexistence of several to many languages is the norm. The case of Thai is unusual for its surrounding area. Thai is the unrivalled language of education, the language of the mass media and the language of prestige. Standard Thai is the official language, the legally appropriate language for all political and cultural purposes. All internal government affairs are expected to be conducted in Standard Thai. Formal activities such as public speaking and writing are normally carried out in Standard Thai. In addition to being official language, Standard Thai is also the national language, a symbol of identification for the Thai nation. Next to the King and along with Buddhism, Standard Thai is the strongest such symbol. Before we turn to the factors which have brought about language shift, we need to examine why the Siamese government encouraged assimilation.

2. The Rationale Behind Pro-assimilation Policies

The Siamese government had a number of interrelated reasons for pursuing pro-assimilation policies, including slowed assimilation of the Chinese from the beginning of the twentieth century; the rise of Siamese and Chinese nationalism; Chinese dominance over the Siamese economy; the threat of Communism; the strengthening of ties between the Chinese in Thailand and China; and remittances to China. Throughout the nineteenth century, the rate at which the Chinese assimilated into Siamese society was high. Most of the Chinese immigrants were single young men and many took Siamese wives. This was — 153 —


mainly because women almost never emigrated from China prior to 1893. The children of these Sino-Siamese couples grew up with Siamese as their first language and assimilation was easy. Local Chinese culture also underwent changes in the direction of Siamese culture, which closed the gap between the different ways of life and facilitated assimilation. Assimilation slowed from the turn of the twentieth century, due to increased numbers of female immigrants from China; the growth of Chinese education; and interest in and identification with China and Chinese politics. As more Chinese women immigrated into Siam and married Chinese men, assimilation was retarded. Their children were Chinese, not Siamese. The practice of bringing wives from China also steadily became more common. Before 1905, only some of the wealthy merchants brought their wives, and most of the other female immigrants were prostitutes. The immigration of respectable women reached significant proportions only after 1906. At the same time, intermarriage with local Siamese women became less common, at least in Bangkok and other centres of Chinese population. Nationalism, both on the part of the Siamese and on the part of the Chinese, drove a wedge between the two communities. The Siamese developed a spirit of nationalism during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Throughout the reign of King Chulalongkorn (18681910), young members of the Siamese elite were educated in Western schools and in Europe. They learnt not only about modern nationalism, but also its close relation in Western countries with racism. In Europe, they came to appreciate the political dimensions of ethnocentrism and encountered anti-Semitism. Above all, they were exposed in Siam to the European’s unfavourable attitude towards the Chinese. King Vajiravudh (r. 1910-1925) was in many ways typical of the nationalists. He is the alleged author of The Jews of the East, published in 1914. The essay is an elaborate comparison of the Chinese with an anti-Semite’s caricature of the Jews, as well as a statement of the Siamese case against the Chinese in Siam. The Chinese were often seen as mercenary and uncouth. By the 1930s, the Chinese constituted 85% of the commercial class and held in their hands 90% of Siam’s commerce and trade (Kanchananaga, 1941:82; Landon, 1941:144; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:220). Proassimilation policies made sense in the face of such dominance over the Siamese economy. The Chinese’s firm grip on the economy was mostly the result of economic specialisation along ethnic lines during the nineteenth — 154 —

Liang Chua Morita

and twentieth centuries. The Siamese consistently preferred agriculture and government service while the Chinese chose commercial activities, industry and finance. Chinese economic control became the focus of attention as Siamese nationalism rose. King Vajiravudh espoused ideas of economic nationalism, i.e. curbing Chinese economic domination. In The Jews of the East, he urged the Siamese to take a more active role in their own economy. The rise of Chinese nationalism was equally, if not more, detrimental to Sino-Siamese relationships. The Siamese government was often inconvenienced by Chinese nationalism in Siam. The Chinese were swept by the tide of nationalism after China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, and that flared when the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. The increase in Chinese political activity alarmed the Siamese government. Political developments included the organisation of an underground party; organised movements aimed at the British; the introduction of the hypernationalist and anti-Western doctrines of Sun Yat-sen into Chinese schools; demonstrations and near riots; and anti-Japanese trade boycotts. The boycotts particularly harmed the Siamese economy, and Siamese foreign relations were also affected. Everyone was inconvenienced by the accompanying lawlessness and unrest. Growing politicisation in the Chinese community included Communism, although Chinese Communism in Thailand was relatively weak and mostly orientated towards China. The Thai government nonetheless feared Communist subversion. The growing strength of leftist elements and the influx of Communists from China all had to be dealt with. There had been Communist versus Kuomintang struggles but by the late 1930s, the Chinese were shifting towards the Communists, evident in labour unions, Chinese schools, Chinese newspapers and community organisations. There had been a strengthening of ties between the Chinese in Siam and China since the advent of Chinese nationalism in Siam, and that intensified with Communist victories. From the spring of 1948 to the summer of 1950, the prestige and local power of Communists among the Chinese in Thailand steadily increased. As the People’s Liberation Army won repeated victories against the nationalists and gained control of the entire mainland, patriotism soared. With the establishment of the central government in Beijing on 1st October 1949, Communist organisers in Thailand appealed to the Chinese for the first time in terms of loyalty and — 155 —


nationalism. The Chinese Communist Party of Thailand, which had been operating since 1946, became a major political force in the Chinese community. The issue of remittances to China was another sore point with the Siamese government. The government began to be seriously concerned in the 1930s. Remittances had been sent regularly to China since long before the turn of the twentieth century, but full recognition of their possible effects on the Siamese economy came only with the advent of depression and the coming to power of the nationalist government. There was a growing awareness of the large amounts of money sent by the Chinese in Siam to their relatives in China. However, fears about the remittances draining the economy were largely unfounded. The total Chinese contribution to government revenue must have at least equalled, if not exceeded, their remittances. The Siamese government had a very substantial income from the opium monopoly, and most of the den operators and smokers were Chinese. There were also the alien registration fee as well as other fees and taxes the Chinese had to pay. In all probability, the greater part of the income of the Chinese remained in Siam. The remittances cannot be said to have been a serious drain on the economy (Skinner, 1957).

3. The Factors Which Contributed to the Shift

3.1. Education The decline of Chinese schools and education was possibly the single most important factor that caused the Thai Chinese to shift from Chinese to Thai. The lines between the Thai and Chinese education systems were initially sharply defined. Thai schools used the Thai language as the medium of instruction and prepared students for life in a Thai cultural milieu. In Chinese schools, a Chinese variety was the medium of instruction and Chinese culture and values were emphasised. Chinese schools were the most effective institutions beyond the family for imparting Chinese values to the next generation. As a result of the controls imposed on Chinese schools, the lines between the two education systems have been blurred: Chinese schools have increasingly become Thai schools where special, but minor, attention is given to Chinese instruction. — 156 —

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It is beyond doubt that assimilation was the major conscious motive behind the Siamese government’s education policies. After the 1932 revolution which overthrew absolute monarchy, Thai nationalism was encouraged as a means of unifying the people. Chinese schools which appeared to perpetuate minority differences and to extol an alien way of life were a divisive force. The new government also pledged to promote education and literacy in the Thai language, and Chinese schools emphasised the learning of an alien language rather than Thai. The first legislation to affect Chinese education was the Private Schools Act promulgated in January 1919. One of the stipulations of the Act was that the Thai language must be taught at least three hours a week. This was followed by the Compulsory Education Act of 1921, which required all children aged seven to fourteen to attend primary school for at least four years. Children had to go to government schools or private schools which followed the regular Thai course of study to meet the requirement. After the 1932 revolution, the new government decided that all children must receive a Thai education to become useful citizens of the country. To this end, the Educational Policy promulgated in March 1933 emphasised national values. In order to conform to the law, Chinese schools could either accept only students outside the compulsory education age limits and operate according to the provisions of the Private Schools Act, or they could comply with the restrictions of the Compulsory Education Act and operate as ordinary primary schools. Most schools did both to maintain their student body, and in the process tried to evade the letter of the law at every turn. Between March 1933 and August 1935, seventy-nine Chinese schools were closed for infractions of the law (Chen, 1935:438; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:229), many being the only Chinese school in their respective town or community. The number of Chinese schools and students fell sharply between 1933 and 1934. In 1933/1934, there were 271 schools with over 8 000 students (Thailand Statistical Year Book 1933/1934-1934/1935(number 18):418). That decreased to 193 schools with 4 742 students in 1934/1935 (Hsieh, 1949:299; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:230). In April 1939, the Ministry of Education announced that students in the compulsory education age limits could study the Chinese language for only two hours a week and that all other subjects must be taught in Thai. Twenty-five Chinese schools were shut for disobeying the law from April to July of the same year (Landon, 1941:277; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:266). — 157 —


In June 1940, Prime Minister Luang Phibunsongkhram (Phibun), leader of the right wing of the People’s Party and exponent of hypernationalism, issued the ninth Ratthaniyom (Cultural Mandate of the State). It required all Thai nationals to know and use the Thai language. It was aimed specifically at local-born Chinese and Malays, who had never learnt or did not habitually use Thai. The ninth Ratthaniyom was the signal for a mass closure of Chinese schools throughout the country. No Chinese school was in operation outside Bangkok by the end of 1940. In the capital, the number was reduced to two by 1941 (Thailand Statistical Year Book 1937/1938-1944(number 21):127; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:269). There was also a severe shortage of secondary education in Chinese. Since May 1948, Chinese secondary education had been limited to elective courses in one or two Thai middle schools and a handful of Chinese evening schools in Bangkok (Skinner, 1957:366). Thirty Chinese schools were closed for infringements of rules between 1948 and 1950 (Bangkok Post 10th April 1950; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:368). In February 1951, Chinese schools were ordered to follow the grade system consistently by having students at any given grade study both Chinese and Thai at the same level. This was to ensure that all students possess a knowledge of Thai at least on a par with their knowledge of Chinese. The Ministry of Education’s policies caused the total number of Chinese schools in Thailand to fall from over 430 to about 195 between 1948 and 1956 (Skinner, 1957:370). Over the same period, the number of students decreased from over 175 000 to less than 50 000 (Skinner, 1957:371). The decline appears even more drastic when one takes into account the quality of education offered by Chinese schools. Apart from the best schools in Bangkok and in a few larger towns, only a fraction of those who completed four years of education at a Chinese school acquired fluency in Mandarin, much less a command of written Chinese. Students of Chinese schools read, wrote and understood Thai far better than Chinese. They learnt practically nothing of Chinese culture, history or geography. The educational facilities of Thai schools had, since World War II, grown more rapidly than the ethnic Thai population. As a result, more and more Chinese parents sent their children to Thai primary schools, where tuition was free or lower than in Chinese schools. — 158 —

Liang Chua Morita

Although the government’s onslaught on Chinese education fluctuated during the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese education was moribund by the middle of the century. It is deeply doubtful that Chinese education can ever be revived. 3.2. Pro-Thai enactments In order to transfer control over the Thai economy from Chinese to Thai hands, the government launched a series of economic Thai-ification campaigns. The objective was to force Chinese (and other foreigners) from certain commercial fields, thereby creating employment for Thai nationals and, possibly of greater importance, permitting the immediate nationalisation of profit-making industries. Most of the economic restrictions on aliens were on the basis of nationality, not race. The Chinese therefore came under tremendous pressure to assimilate and naturalise. The first round of Thai-ification measures came in December 1938, when Phibun became Prime Minister. In the same month, the new administration formed the Thai Rice Company by buying out several Chinese mills in Bangkok. A law which reserved bird’s nest concessions for governmental development was promulgated in the following month. The concessions were previously given to Chinese firms. A further spate of legislation aimed at economically disabling the Chinese came in March and April 1939. The Salt Act established firm government control over the production of salt and levied a heavy tax on the commodity. The Tobacco Act established similar controls and excise duties on tobacco production and manufacture. The Act for the Slaughter of Animals for Food aimed specifically at the replacement of the Chinese by Thais as pig slaughterers and pork wholesalers. Other moves in the campaign targeted Chinese taxi drivers, fishing and trading vessel owners, fishermen, participants in the petroleum industry and miners. Another wave of restrictions came in June 1942, when by royal decree the government reserved for Thai nationals twenty-seven occupations and professions. The Occupational and Professional Assistance Act passed in the same year stated that factories could be required to employ a minimum percentage of Thai citizens by royal decree. In February 1949, the Occupation Restriction Act barred aliens from ten occupations. Six more were added in August 1951. The list given above gives the reader an idea of the touch-and-go atmosphere surrounding the livelihood of Chinese aliens during those — 159 —


times. No Chinese alien could be sure that his means of livelihood would not be threatened. In addition to being banned from numerous occupations and professions, the Chinese faced heavier taxes and fees. The Revenue Code passed by the Assembly on 29th March 1939 was intended to bring about a 40% increase in government income, mostly by taxing the commercial (i.e. Chinese) class more heavily. In March 1939, the alien registration fee was introduced and set at four baht per annum. It was raised to eight baht in 1946 and then to twenty baht in 1949. In January 1952, the fee hit four hundred baht. The passage of a bill in 1943 effectively prohibited Chinese nationals from buying land in Thailand. The Land Pertaining to Aliens Act denied aliens not protected by special treaties the right to purchase immovable property. The Chinese suffered substantial financial loss and hardship when, on defence grounds, ‘prohibited areas’ policies came into existence. Aliens were forbidden from entering these areas and those already residing in them were forced to leave with short notice. The Chinese typically had to dispose of their business and property at a fraction of their value due to the lack of time. On 23rd May 1941, Lopburi jangwat (province), Prajinburi jangwat and the district of Sattahip were named as prohibited areas. The three amphoe (districts) which included the municipalities of Khorat, Ubon and Warinchamrap were added to the list on 19th September 1941. In late January 1943, six more jangwat were named. Selected areas of amphoe Betong and Sadao also became prohibited areas in 1954. Although many of the restrictions mentioned in this section no longer hold, the pressure to assimilate remains and appears to be longerlasting than the restrictions themselves. 3.3. Attitudes There were several different dimensions of the attitudes of the Thai Chinese which pointed towards assimilation and language shift. The Chinese elite, i.e. those who held high positions in the Siamese government and the leading businessmen, had the most at stake in Siam. Many of them recognised the fact that the pathway to greater prestige, status, power and wealth pointed towards identification with the Siamese upper crust. The government’s practice of conferring Siamese noble titles on members of the Chinese elite facilitated the process of assimilation in — 160 —

Liang Chua Morita

the upper strata. Because of their origin, a display of complete identification on the part of the Chinese was advantageous. It is natural for individuals attempting a new group identification to overcompensate for their background by emphasising the values and prejudices of the new group. The fact that many of the most anti-Chinese government officials were of Chinese extraction (for example, Pridi Phanomyong, Lui Phanomyong, Phraya Phahon Phalaphayu and Luang Wijit Wathakan) attests to the validity of the preceding statement. Often, ethnocentric superiority on the part of China-born male relatives antagonised the Siam-born Chinese. Many China-born Chinese regarded Chinese and half-Chinese born overseas as ‘barbarians’. It is worth quoting Lin Hsi-ch’un at some length to illustrate the point: ‘Because of the old moral teaching, those who remained in China often looked down upon those who left their ancestors’ tombs behind for, as it were, a “mess of pottage.” Their offspring were often regarded as “wild seeds,” or as “barbarous sons.” So when overseas Chinese in their old age did bring their families back, they often were ill-treated and abused. … As a result of this, unless they were well educated, they usually returned to the land of their birth with an ingrained hatred for the Chinaborn Chinese.’ (Lin, 1936:9; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:246-247)

The next quotation is a story told to the author of The Jews of the East by a Sino-Siamese who hated the Chinese: ‘He told me how, when he was still quite young, he had gone to China with his father, who was Chinese. One day a Chinese nobleman came to call upon his father at his home. The nobleman said to his father: “Now that you have amassed a considerable fortune in Thailand, why don’t you return to China to live?” His father replied that he stayed on in Thailand because he had a family there. The nobleman then said: “Well, what of that? Do you have to be considerate of a wife who is nothing but a barbarian? Bring her along and let her be the slave of your Chinese wife. Your barbarian children will make handy house servants.” These words of the Chinese nobleman were spoken in front of my friend, who was favoured with not so much a glance. It certainly is not strange that, after having heard them, he determined in his heart that from that day forward he would be a Thai and a true one.’ (Landon, 1941:38; also quoted in Skinner, 1957:247) — 161 —


It appeared that because many Siam-born Chinese and Sino-Siamese were not accepted by the China-born Chinese and therefore could not integrate into Chinese society, they turned instead to Siam and set their heart on becoming Siamese. Bearing in mind the pro-Thai enactments discussed in section 3.2, it is understandable that many were encouraged to hasten the assimilation process and escape the impact of anti-Chinese virulence and government policy. With regard to Chinese education, a favourable attitude towards Thai education prompted some parents to send their children to Thai schools. In the 1950s, Chinese parents realised that Thai education was crucial to their children’s future in Thailand (Coughlin, 1960). Fluency in Thai and skill in negotiating in a Thai environment were perceived as important in business. Children who were sent overseas for a Chinese education returned to Thailand as cultural misfits, unable to speak or write Thai with the fluency required for business and burdened with alien values and knowledge. In short, they were greatly handicapped in their efforts to make a living in Thailand. This aided the shift to the Thai language. More recently, it was found that some young Chinese were uninterested in Chinese. This is not surprising since Chinese varieties have long lost their importance in Thailand. To these young people, learning English or Japanese would be more worthwhile than learning Chinese (Amyot, 1972; Boonsanong, 1971).

4. Conclusion

In the present situation, the Thai Chinese’s shift from Chinese to Thai seems unlikely to be reversed. Chinese education remains weak and attitudes towards the Thai language are very positive. The assimilation of the Chinese is almost complete, if not complete. Both Chinese and Thai, regardless of ancestry, are one people and one nation. The Chinese are hardly discriminated against, nor is their ethnicity an issue. The Thai language is no doubt a powerful means of achieving and maintaining this unity.

Liang Chua Morita — 162 —

Liang Chua Morita

References

Amyot, J. 1972. The Chinese and the National Integration in Southeast Asia. Bangkok: Institute of Asian Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. Bangkok Post 10th April 1950. Bangkok. Boonsanong, P. 1971. Chinese-Thai Differential Assimilation in Bangkok: An Exploratory Study. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University. Chen, C. 1935. ‘Chinese overseas’. In The Chinese Year Book 1935-1936, pp. 428-455. Coughlin, R.J. 1960. Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand. New York: Oxford University Press. Hsieh, Y. 1949. Hsien-lo kuo-chih (Siam Gazetteer). Bangkok: Nan-hai t’ung-hsün-she. Kanchananaga, T. 1941. Report on Commercial and Economic Progress of Thailand, 1939-1940. Bangkok: Sataman Publishing House. Landon, K.P. 1941. The Chinese in Thailand. New York: Institute of Pacific Relations. Lin, H. 1936. ‘Causes of anti-Chinese movement in Siam’. In China Critic 12, pp. 8-11. Skinner, G.W. 1957. Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Smalley, W.A. 1994. Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Thailand Statistical Year Book 1933/1934-1934/1935 (number 18), 1937/1938-1944 (number 21). Bangkok: Department of the Secretary-General of the Council of Ministers, Central Service of Statistics.

— 163 —


History in Memory: Problems of Literary Representation of the Holocaust in the Writing of Ingeborg Bachmann, Barbara Honigmann and Ruth Schweikert1

“Since Auschwitz, no day has passed away”, Martin Walser wrote in 1979 in his essay Auschwitz without End.2 The coming to age of the generation born after the war has aggravated the problems associated with the memory of that event. That is, it has undergone a transformation from a ‘weak’ form of memory–diffuse and highly undifferentiated biographical memories–into a ‘strong’ form of organized, shared, binding memories. A transformation of the communicable memories of witnesses into the cultural memory of those born later.3 The publicity accompanying the debate in 1998 between the writer Martin Walser and the now deceased President of the Central Board of Jews Ignatz Bubis and the Finkelstein-

1

If you prefer ... in German-language Literature.

2

See Alaida Assmann and Ute Frevert. Geschichtsvergessenheit. Geschichtsversessenheit. Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1999, p. 17.

3

Ibid. p. 29. — 165 —

History in Memory: Problems of Literary Representation of the Holocaust

Novick debate in 20014 demonstrates not only the actuality of the discourse about the past, but also highlights the irreconcilable difference between German and Jewish memory since Auschwitz, to which Gershom Scholem drew attention in the sixties, and which was underlined again by the Historikerstreit5 in the eighties. Each time, these debates throw up questions about the types of language, the forms, in which the Holocaust should be remembered. The future of the past will continue to be a pressing topic as we move into the 21st century. Drawing on the work of the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann who lived from 1926 until 1973, the German-Jewish author Barbara Honigmann, born in 1950, and the German-Swiss writer Ruth Schweikert, born in 1965, I would like in this paper to show the extent to which the problem of representation has suffered a considerable loss of rigour and acuity in the context of the changes in cultural memory. As in previous articles on Ingeborg Bachmann’s, Elfriede Jelinek’s and Ruth Schweikert’s work with National Socialist memory,6 my interpretative approach is interdisciplinary, integrating several aspects of research on memory.7 In this way, I hope to show that these three authors can make a significant contribution to contemporary discussions about the discourses of the past.

4

Norman Finkelstein. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso, 2000.

5

Alaida Assmann and Ute Frevert (1), p. 260-263; Holger Gehle comments the correspondence between the historian Martin Broszat and the writer Saul Friedländer, pointing to their difference regarding the problem of representationof the holocaust in historiography. In H.G. NS-Zeit und literarische Gegenwart bei Ingeborg Bachmann. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 1995, p.2734. Also see Martin Broszat and Paul Friedländer. “Um die ‘Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus’. Ein Briefwechsel. Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol, 36, 1988, p. 229-372.

6

Esther V. Schneider Handschin. “Die Oesterreicher als Herren der Toten” Ingeborg Bachmann und Elfriede Jelineks Arbeit am NS-Gedächtnis”, in Modern Austrian Literature 2003. Esther V. Schneider Handschin. “Vergangenheitsdiskurs und Liebesutopie in Ruth Schweikerts Roman Augen zu. In “Zeitenwende – die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21. Jahrhundert”. Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongress Wien 2000, ed. Peter Wiesinger. Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Oxford, Wien: Lang (= Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Reihe A, Bd. 59), p. 177-186.

7

See Renate Lachmann. Gedächtnis und Literatur. Frankfurt: Fischer. Siegfried J. Schmidt. “Gedächtnis-Erzählen-Identität”, in Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung, ed. Alaida Assmann and Dietrich Harth. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991, p.378-397. Alaida Assmann and Ute Frevert (1). — 166 —

Esther V. Schneider Handshin

As a result of the mass destruction carried out by the Nazis, both Bachmann and Honigmann suffered delayed and permanent effects, not until the 1960s diagnosed as postgenerational traumatization.8 While Bachmann between the ages of 12 and 18 grew up as the daughter of a party member within the community of collaborators and perpetrators, Barbara Honigmann’s Jewish parentage places her on the victim side. Bachmann’s self-consciousness about her historical position in postwar memory found expression in the oft-quoted statement that her memory begins in the ruins of her childhood. Again and again, Bachmann claimed the entry of Hitler’s troops into Klagenfurt, joyously greeted by the town’s population, as a key experience, as the force behind her writing, the beginning of her memory, as her first pain.9 Taking these statements literally is highly problematic, not least given Bachmann’s reluctance to divulge biographical information. This description can, rather, be understood psychoanalytically, as a primal scene of memory. In the primal scene, blind spots in the individual’s memory are overlain with images from collective memory. Following Freud, gaps in the individual’s reality are “filled out with prehistoric truth”.10 From a psychoanalytic perspective, her writing can be interpreted as a memory space in which the awareness of appalling events is stored, an awareness or consciousness of having lived within this collective. This thesis is supported by Bachmann’s claim that childhood provides the chief assets for a writer, and that, strangely, what happens later contributes little.11 Bachmann thematized this differentiation in German-Jewish memory as a negative symbiosis in the story “Among Murderers and Madmen” in her 1961 collection Thirtieth Year. The setting is Vienna

8

Bohleber, Werner. “Das Fortwirken des Nationalsozialismus in der zweiten und dritten Generation nach Auschwitz”, in Babylon, vol. 7, 1990, p. 70-83, p. 71.

9

Ingeborg Bachmann. Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden. Gespräche und Interviews, ed. Christine Koschel and Inge von Weidenbaum. München: Piper, 1993, p.111. Hereafter this work is referred to by the abbreviation GuI.

10

Sigrid Weigel. Ingeborg Bachmann. Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses. Wien: Zsolnay, 1999, p. 317.

11

Ingeborg Bachmann. GuI, p. 79 (8). — 167 —


“more than ten years after the war”.12 Among a group of men, repressed war crimes break into the existing culture of forgetting. The appearance of a stranger and his murder recreate the repressed perpetrator-victim collective, a group whose members have been living in an illusory togetherness since 1945 and the failure of denazification. “Then, after 1945, one believed that the world was forever divided into good and evil, now we are mixed together again”, the narrator says. On the one hand, Bachmann relativizes the perpetrator-victim positions when she writes: For victims and “murderers, times change. One is not a victim for life. Things don’t work that way.”13 On the other, she categorically rejects every ideological exploitation of the victims: “[...] the victims, the many, many victims, do not show the way!” That “the victims are for nothing”, is stressed again at the end of the story: “... a victim [...] – for nothing.”14 The extent to which Bachmann herself suffered in these circumstances within the postwar literary system is illustrated in a letter she wrote from Harvard on July 15th 1955 to her colleague Wolfgang Hildesheimer concerning her publisher Piper who, after the war, continued to publish the antisemitic writer and author of Nazi propaganda Bruno Brehm: “What is so unfortunate is that Piper ... is no Nazi, and this confused situation just makes everything even more awkward”.15 The many drafts in Bachmann’s unpublished writing make apparent the long experimental phase through which her work on National Socialist memory went as she tried to find a solution to the problematic of the aestheticization and metaphorization of the horror and terror of Auschwitz. Apparently, she felt that this attempt had failed in the book Franza, because upon abandoning it in November 1966, she decided not to attempt to “repair” it but to try “something new”. The manuscript seemed to her to be helplessly alluding to something that had yet to be written. She would rewrite the entire book, she told her editor Otto Best. On December 22nd 1966, she informed her publisher, Hans

12

Ingeborg Bachmann. Werke, vol. 2, p. 159, ed. Christine Koschel, Inge von Weidenbaum, Clemens Münster. München: Piper, 1983.

13

Ibid. p. 173.

14

Ibid. p. 277.

15

Siegrid Weigel, p.469, ( 9). — 168 —


Rössner, that it had “less to do with destroying what already exists as properly assimilating it”. The beginnings of a theoretical account of memory, such as the exposure of permanent traces in the collective and individual unconsciousness of the deeply engrained and repressed, delayed damage after Auschwitz, would be further developed in Malina. Only in 1971, after almost a decade of crisis-ridden engagement with “a single, large study of all forms of death, a compendium, a manual”,16 which was also intended to convey a picture of the last 20 years in Vienna and Austria, the spaces of her experiences and writing, was Bachmann finally able to publish Malina, the first volume in her Todesarten project, in which the oppositional, subversive dimension of the memory and writing processes is thematized. “I must tell. I will tell. Nothing in my memory disturbs me any more ... But if my memories are not the usual kind of memory–past events, deaths, abandonments–then I am still a long, long way from the suppressed memory, where nothing must disturb me any more.”17 The courageously radical memory work undertaken by the female narrator engenders the novel’s structure. By using the present tense, the past is omnipresent in the present as unbearable pain. The usual narrative plan of relating memory through past events, deaths, and abandonments is given up after a few pages with the statement: “I don’t want to tell stories. Everything in my memory bothers me”.18 Later, in “The Third Man”, the dream chapter in the second half of the novel, the repressed, silenced layer of memory is uncovered, deeply etched as a permanent trace in the unconscious. While this agonizing memory work of the narrator occurs in the imaginary, on an internalized mental stage, dreams are nevertheless “everywhere and nowhere”. “Time no longer exists, because it could have been yesterday, a long time ago, it could happen again, always, and sometimes it could never have been.”19 Considering the novel from a psychoanalytic perspective, the narrator’s memory work could be

16

Ingeborg Bachmann. Todesarten-Projekt. Kritische Ausgabe directed by Robert Pichl, ed. Monika Albrecht and Dirk Göttsche. München: Piper, 1983, vol 1, p. 619-622.

17

Ingeborg Bachmann. Werke, vol 3, p. 323.

18

Ibid. p. 327.

19

Ibid. p. 174. — 169 —


interpreted as “prehistoricized work”20 in the Lacanian sense. Ingeborg Bachmann’s presentation of the overlarge, omnipotent father figure as a murderer who practises what society practises makes one think of Lacan’s symbolic father. “The door, show me the door ... my father went on, pulling off one pipe after the other, and before I could scream, I was already inhaling the gas, always more gas ... my father has disappeared, he knew where the door was and didn’t show me”.21 For the gas chamber, “the absolute site of deception and division, from which two collectives must begin a new history and a new knowledge”, Ingeborg Bachmann developed a language of dream and trauma through which the repressed in the unconscious can speak. In Malina, the stranger’s sidereal coat and the narrator’s Siberian Jewish coat create references to the Jews. In contrast to discourses in which the second generation by obsessively talking about Jews and antisemitism covers over an empty space, Bachmann’s indirect means of representation registers the traces of mourning without making Jews the objects of her texts. The Jewish voice speaks through quotations from the poetry of Paul Celan, whose suicide is alluded to at the end of a concentration camp-like barrack scene in the dream chapter: “... he drowned in a river while he was being transported, he was my life. I loved him more than my own life.”22 For the German-Jewish author Barbara Honigmann–born in 1949 in East Germany–the agonies, humiliation and destruction of the Holocaust are the starting point for a search for her identity, which eventually leads to her Jewish roots. In her books, Honigmann gives much thought to the problem of Jewish identity. She asks whether the Jews have been largely moulded from the terrible experiences of their ancestors, whether Jewish identity is more a product of trauma than of religious traditions. Such ideas have caused Alain Finkielkraut to reflect on the notion of the “imaginary Jew”.23 She confronts the question of survival

20

Quoted in Klaus Briegleb. „Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart”,in Gegenwartsliteratur nach 1945 (=Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Rolf Grimminger, vol. 12). München: Hanser, 1992, P. 62-187, p. 76.

21

Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke, vol. 3, p. 175.

22

Ibid. p. 195.

23

Alain Finkielkraut, Der eingebildete Jude, München: Hanser, 1982. — 170 —


with her family history, predominantly that of her parents who escaped to England. So it is no accident that her first collection of short stories, Novel of a Child, published in 1986, is dedicated to the memory of her father, and is highly autobiographical, as indeed is much of her later work. Like Bachmann’s Austrian and Schweikert’s German mothers, Barbara Honigmann’s Jewish parents also repressed the Nazi period. Because it wasn’t discussed, she knew only bits and pieces of her parents’ story, and nothing about Judaism. The diagnosis that she experienced her origins as a myth, a secret, as having nothing to do with normal life24 points once more to the already mentioned transmission across the generations of traumatic events. Haydée Faimberg summarizes the consequences of the identification of children with the history of their parents as a speechless, tyrannical invasion into the child’s psychic reality.25 Honigmann suspects that her parents lived “the rest of their lives with the pictures and stories of those who unlike them had been unlucky”.26 This burden must have been so heavy that they always acted as if it had had nothing to do with them, as if no one had ever hidden in a ghetto or been gassed in Auschwitz. They put all their energies into building up the new Germany, the German Democratic Republic, so that Jewishness was no longer relevant. This assimilation attempt also failed, but they stayed put, “caught between two stools”.27 On the one hand, they no longer belonged among the Jews, on the other, they hadn’t become Germans. In Then, Next and Afterwards, published in 1999, the author once more confronts her mother’s silence, when she writes about her death. She dies in the very same silence that her daughter had lived with her, from which she had unsuccessfully wanted to drag her: ...”and only now I realized that it was pointless to always hope and think for her, to

24

Barbara Honigmann. Damals, dann und danach. München, Wien: Hanser, 1999, p. 27 and in Eine Liebe aus nichts. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991, p. 55.

25

Haydeé Faimberg. Die Ineinandverrückung (Telescoping) der Generationen – Zur Genealogie gewisser Identifizierungen, in Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 1987, vol 20, p. 114-142.

26

Barbara Honigmann, 1999 (24), p. 55.

27

Ibid, p. 14. — 171 —


put pressure on her.”28 After her father’s death, she published in 1991, Love from Nothing, in which she explores her lack of love for her father. Once more, the Ahasuerus motif is foregrounded, her feeling of total homelessness, relieved only by her literary engagement with a preceding generation that “told a coherent story.”29 Honigmann’s generation would be the first that could relate their story. Thus only from the 1970s was it possible to read the stories of survivors, like Primo Levi’s concentration camp novel “Is this a Human- Being”. Antisemitism and intolerance towards Jewish tradition in the postwar German Democratic Republic compelled Honigmann to leave the country for Strasbourg in France in 1984. She landed in Strasbourg, she wrote, after a triple death leap without a net: from east to west, from Germany to France, and from assimilation into the middle of the Torah–a Jewish world. She learnt Hebrew and together with other women studied the Hebrew bible and the Talmud. A minimal Jewish identity and a discussion of Jewish life outside the constant antisemitic discourse had not been possible in Germany. With great clarity she describes in Portrait of a Jewish Woman, the problematic which Gershom Scholem and Dan Diner diagnosed as a negative symbiosis30: “Germans no longer know what Jews are, they only know that a terrible history lies between them, and that every Jew that surfaces reminds them of this history, which is always painful and irritating. In these confrontations, both sides feel uncomfortable, make impossible demands of the other, but also cannot let things rest. Because in Auschwitz–symbol for the Holocaust–German and Jew became a couple which not even death can separate.”31 In France, close to the German border, she began to write “properly”, and like her grandfather and father, in German, bringing out her books with German publishers. She claims that writing is a form of

28

Ibid, p. 117.

29

Ibid, p. 34.

30

Gershom Scholem. “Wider den Mythos vom deutsch-jüdischen Gespräch”, in Judaica II. Frankfurt 1970, p. 7-11.Dan Diner. “Negative Symbiose. Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz”, in Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte? Zu Historisierung und Historikerstreit, ed. Dan Diner. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987, p. 185-197.

31

Barbara Honigmann. Damals, dann und danach, p. 15-16. — 172 —


homesickness, a form of ensuring her German membership, albeit in the context of the negative German-Jewish symbiosis: “... from which we, as one says, cannot escape, certainly not now, after everything that has happened.”32 Like other second-generation Jewish authors, she attempts to work through these wounds in writing. As with Ingeborg Bachmann, the extermination in the concentration camps is represented indirectly on the level of dreams: “I had a dream. I was with everyone in Auschwitz. And in the dream I thought: at last I’ve found my station in life”, as she puts it so succinctly in Novel of a Child.33 Execution in Buchenwald and expulsion into exile are quoted from gravestones, for example when she visits with the Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, the graves of his parents and brother in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin: Betty Scholem, née Hirsch, born 1866 in Berlin, died 1946 in Sydney. Werner Scholem, born 1895 in Berlin, shot 1942 in Buchenwald.34 Honigmann’s indirect narrative style, implying much that is unsaid, unsayable, leaves the reader a lot of space for interpretations–tragic stories lie behind the tomb inscriptions. With simple words the author links the clearing away of the “masses of ivy clambering over all the graves, from one to another, from grave to tree and from tree back to grave” with the “stony order” of the cemetery and the “bodies of the dead”, which will once again be grown over, so that this whole work of remembering the dead will also turn to dust. In this scene, the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem states ambiguously: “One needs an axe when visiting the grave of an ancestor, to cut a path through overgrown time.”35 Thus writing, the search for an “inner topography”, is the means by which Honigmann attempts to create a home in homelessness. Storytelling creates an alliance with Jewish tradition, since in that tradition to tell a story is to remember, to re-present the past. The relative shortness of

32

Ibid., p. 18.

33

Barbara Honigmann. Roman von einem Kinde. Darmstadt, Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1998, p. 28.

34

Ibid., p. 89.

35

Ibid. — 173 —


her texts may be related to her fear that, otherwise, no one would listen to her, that the time allotted her is short.36 In Ruth Schweikert’s first novel, Close Your Eyes, published in 1998, and in her play, Welcome Home, first performed in Zürich in the same year, past, present and future are torn into narrative fragments, a narrative technique corresponding to the visual habits of the zapping generation. The novel’s fixed point is the 30th birthday of Aleks Martin Schwartz, on which she recalls the past in fragmented splinters. It is no coincidence that Ruth Schweikert began this novel when she was 30 years old. At 30 lives begin to adapt. At that age, experiences are reevaluated, the author stated in an interview. Intertextual references, for example the eye metaphor of the title, establish links with the well-known story by Ruth Schweikert’s literary model Ingeborg Bachmann “Thirtieth Year”, a timepoint which the protagonist, like Aleks, uses as an opportunity for a life review and self assessment. On that day, Friday 16th June 1995, Schweikert creates and destroys life–Aleks becomes pregnant (with the child she wants) while her mother commits suicide in a clinic. Kaleidoscope-like, the history of Aleks’ German-Swiss family and the Viennese-French-Jewish story of her partner Raoul Lieben are revealed. Following the war and destruction of the Jews, both mothers suffer lifelong traumatization and permanent suffering, which impress themselves persistently on the existential feelings of the post-Holocaust generation. In the novel, Aleks and her brother learn for the first time from Doris Heinrich’s farewell letter, details about the causes of her traumatization, which she had unsuccessfully sought to suppress through the overconsumption of alcohol and drugs. Early on the evening of November 27th 1944, her mother and brother were killed in a British air bombardment, and her father gassed himself in an oven, a manner of death that his daughter Doris compul-

36

Barbara Honigmann says in an interview. Brigitte Krulic. Ecrivains, identité, mémoire: miroire d’Allemagne, 1945-2000. Paris: Autrement, 2001, p. 47. Esther V. Schneider Handschin points to the fact that storytelling plays an important role in delivering Jewish tradition to younger generations. E.S.H. “Erinnerung und Identität in Hermann Brochs Romanen Die Schlafwandler” und Die Schuldlosen. In Symposiumsakte über Hermann Broch. Stuttgart 2002. Also see Jan Assmann. “Die Katastrophe des Vergessens. Das Deuteronomium als Paradigma kultureller Mnemotechnik”, in Mnemosyne. Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung, ed. Alaida Assmann and Dietrich Harth. Frankfurt: Fischer 1991, p. 83-88. — 174 —


sively tries to imitate. The Jewish Ingeborg Lieben waits daily with her suitcase at Zürich main station, waiting to be taken away. Aleks’ identification with her mother’s traumatic past appears in her desire to “wake with mother’s adult child eyes and see her destroyed world” and in her realization “I have too much identity”37 This citation from the artist Louise Bourgeois exposes the silent imposure on the narrator of her mother’s unresolved past. Aleks’ behaviour is an illustration of Anita Eckstaed’s observation that in the third generation, the reconstruction and acknowledgement of a blocked story is no longer possible with psychoanalytic therapy.38 During years of psychotherapy as an adolescent due to the self-abuse of cutting her hands and arms, Aleks remains stubbornly silent. After many turbulent years, she tries to achieve a breakthrough as the painter of melancholy pictures in the noncolours black and white, which she calls “lost pictures”.39 Her partner Raoul Lieben also feels permanently incapacitated by his Jewish origins, suffers from “tormenting dreams” and senses like Ahasuerus that he is on a “worldwide search for his origins and a purpose for his life”.40 Aleks and Raoul’s generation form their opinions about the recent past not from direct personal experiences and memories, but mainly from the sources of cultural memory, for example books and films about the National Socialist period. In this context, the preservation in Aleks’ name of that of Alexie–the German term for dyslexia–is a further sign of the incomprehensibility of these crimes in the present and of the problems of representation, writing and thinking after Auschwitz. Ingeborg Bachmann’s work on National Socialist memory required a 10-year period of experimentation with new ways of writing, to resolve the problems of aestheticizing and metaphorizing the terror and horror of the Shoah. Here is a passage from Ruth Schweikert’s novel: “Black and white the images of the corpse mountains black and white two-dimensional bodies after the liberation of the concentration camps; an amorphous black and white mass struck

37

Ruth Schweikert, Augen zu. Zürich: Ammann, 1998, p. 49, 104.

38

Anita Eckstaed. Nationalsozialismus in der zweiten und dritten Generation nach Auschwitz. Psychoanalyse von Hörigkeitsverhältnissen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1962.

39

Ruth Schweikert. p. 106 (35).

40

Ibid. p.104. — 175 —


down, degraded hunted, dehumanized, eradicated murdered gassed”.41 Schweikert’s narrative zapping-like procedure of piling up images of the horrors like this from the archive of collective memory risks degeneration into mere shock elements or stereotyping. Catastrophes in clip format trigger action, but no dismay. As is well known, in the sixties, Theodor Adorno claimed that Auschwitz could not be mastered by any intellectual or figurative forms.42 Elie Wiesel invoked the Holocaust as the last of the secrets, which could be neither understood nor mediated.43 In the context of contemporary discussions about the problems of representation, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s position is interesting. Following Jacques Derrida, he is of the opinion that a language can be found that without employing the name “Auschwitz” can negotiate with it. After the Shoah, the rules of linguistic association have to be reinvented.44 In summary, it can be seen that in the context of the changes in cultural memory arising from the historic differentiation between the first and second generation of survivors and the succeeding generation, the problematic of representation has become blunted. The “postexperience” of those born after the war is mediated through the mass media, through saved knowledge, narrative rhetoric and the standardized cinematography of the Holocaust.45 This difference also applies to Bachmann and Schweikert. While Bachmann, following Adorno, Wiesel and in a broader sense Lyotard, developed a language of the dream and trauma over the course of an experimental phase lasting many years, Schweikert’s Holocaust images descend into mass media-like stereotypes. Concerning the desired effect of her books, Bachmann took up Kafka’s image of the axe. A book must be, like a blow to the head, “the axe that

41

Ibid. p. 45.

42

Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966.

43

Elie Wiesel. “Die Trivialisierung des Holocaust: halb Faktum und halb Fiktion”, in “Holocaust”: Eine Nation ist betroffen, ed. Märtesheimerund Frenzel. Frankfurt: Fischer. 1979, p. 25-30.

44

Jean-François Lyotard. Streitgespräche oder: Sprechen “nach Auschwitz”. Bremen 1986, p. 68.

45

Manuel Köppen und Klaus Scherpe. “Zur Einführung: Der Streit um die Darstellbarkeit des Holocaust”, in Bilder des Holocaust, ed. M. Köppen and K. Scherpe. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 1997, p. 1-15. — 176 —


breaks the sea frozen in us”.46 This effect she achieved in Malina. As I have shown, Honigmann uses the image of the axe in the context of an exploration of the past. As a Jewish author she suggests, through hints, in a tactile writing style, the extent of the connection between Jews and the Shoah, dispelling any possible return to normality. Author and text are inseparable. With regard to Holocaust literature, Jan Stumper, in his article “In the Grip of the Memory Culture”, stresses the integrity of the author, that without drawing on the biographically buried integrity nothing reliable can be said about the writing.47 For now, as Adorno and Lyotard also claimed, autonomy of the text is out of the question. A realistic literary representation of the Holocaust is still beyond our grasp.


46

Ingeborg Bachmann. Werke, vol. 4. p. 211.

47

Jan Stumper. “Im Sog der Erinnerungskultur. Holocaust und Literatur- “Normalität” und ihre Grenzen”, in Literatur und Holocaust. Text & Kritik, vol. 144, Oktober 1999, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, p. 16, p. 9-17. — 177 —


German Naturalist Drama in Film: the Case of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber and Der Biberpelz

Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber and Der Biberpelz are the best known examples of Naturalist drama in German-speaking areas. Die Weber (1893), a compassionate dramatization of the plight of cottage weavers in mid-nineteenth-century Silesia, portrays the struggle of these people against oppression and intolerable conditions. The play, taken to be revolutionary when it appeared, was at first banned by the censorship authorities and for some time could be performed only on the “Freie Bühne.” The impact of this play was tremendous; it was translated and staged in many countries. The Thieves’ Comedy Der Biberpelz (1893) is Hauptmann’s most popular drama, although at first it was not a success. This satire of Prussian officialdom, with a resolute washerwoman at its centre, captures the atmosphere of the suburbs of Berlin. It is set in a period of rapid change in which the central figure displays the materialistic outlook of a specific social scene and exposes a reactionary and inept bureaucracy. Despite some doubtful practices, the protagonist never loses the sympathy of the German audience. These two Naturalist dramas were adapted to the film medium a number of times. An early Russian version of Die Weber was used for propagandistic purposes during the Russian revolution. A German adaptation of Die Weber appeared towards the end of the silent film era — 179 —

German Naturalist Drama in Film

and has maintained an eminent place in the history of cinema. As far as Der Biberpelz is concerned, three German versions have been produced. One stems from the silent film era, the other from the Nazi time, and the third was filmed after World War II in East Germany. There is also a Georgian film that is based on Der Biberpelz, as well as several adaptations of the two plays for television, among them a Belorussian and an Italian version. I propose to examine the main German adaptations from the silent and sound film era. Analysis is focussed on a number of questions: How did film directors interpret and change the play to make it acceptable in their particular environment and suitable for the new medium? To what extent did they yield to ideological pressure? What impact did the films have? Towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the Danish Nordisk Films Company was very active in Germany and directly approached German writers to adapt their works to the film medium. Gerhart Hauptmann co-operated with the Danish Company. There is evidence that one of his early plays, Hanneles Himmelfahrt, which marks the transition from Naturalism to Neo-Romantic tendencies, was adapted to the screen in 1908. The film is not available, but we know the title (“Lille Hanne”), the director (Viggo Larsen), the length (120 m), and some other details.1 All that is left of the adaptation are two action stills. Somewhat later Hauptmann’s novel Atlantis was also adapted to film in Copenhagen, and in 1912 there were rumours about Hauptmann having sold his drama Die Weber to a “Filmfabrik” in Germany. A report in a newspaper even mentioned the price of the sale: 2000 Mark.2 None of this has been substantiated. We know, however, that the play was adapted to the screen in Russia, but in all probability Hauptmann was not aware of this. The Russian film, entitled “Tkaci,” was produced in 1917 in the film studio Era, under the direction of M. Bonc-Tomasevskij. The first showing

1

In filmographies referring to Gerhart Hauptmann the film “Atlantis” (1913) usually is mentioned as the first production. However, the starting point should be “Lille Hanne” from the year 1908. I wish to thank Dr. Stephan Michael Schröder, a Scandinavian specialist, for directing my attention to this matter. Subsequent research has confirmed that the film was an adaptation of Hauptmann’s work.

2

The editors of the Neuer Berliner Correspondent mentioned this in a letter to Hauptmann. Their letter, dated 1 October 1912, is part of the collection kept at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin. — 180 —

Sigfrid Hoefert

of the Russian version took place on April 20, 1918. The film is presumed lost. According to the description found in a Russian catalogue,3 it is clear that Hauptmann’s drama was used. The story takes place in preRevolutionary Russia, and everything seems to have been “russified.” Nothing is known about the reception of the film. It was also shown to units of the Red Army. In 1927, towards the end of the silent film era, a German adaptation of Die Weber appeared in Berlin. At that time, the German film industry had just come out of a decline (1924-26). Film theory was given more attention, and industry was making efforts to entice more people into the theatres. These measures were carried out in an increasing manner on an ideological level. The film “Die Weber” has to be seen in this context. The director and producer of the film was Friedrich Zelnik. We should note that he was assisted by the painter George Grosz; the latter was responsible for “Stil und Masken,” as it was put. Willy Haas and Fanny Carlsen wrote the script, with Hauptmann as a consultant. On the whole the authors kept fairly close to the original, although they undertook some “interpretatory measures” to shape the plot to their liking. Three aspects demonstrate this: a) in the credits portrait-photos were added for the main characters, b) a scene was added portraying a meeting of the members of the so-called “Schwanenorden,” and c) the ending of the play was changed. The portrait-photos were the creation of George Grosz. The artist showed the actors with their costumes and adorned them with animalheads. In this manner a critical commentary was engendered; it helped to establish the desired audience expectation. The industrialist, for example, appears as a fat pig, his wife as a ruffled turkey-hen, his assistant as a hyena, and the local churchman as a parrot. The cottage weavers were treated more sympathetically. They are shown as a wolf, naive calf, shepherd’s dog, fox, lioness, gorilla, and so forth; and the one person who doesn’t participate in the rebellion (Hilse) appears as an ox without horns. The inclusion of the meeting of the “Schwanenorden” underlines the difference between the upper and lower strata of society. Whereas in the original text we see only the industrialist Dreissiger and his entourage, in the added scene we find a whole array of similar types.

3

Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: annotirovannyi katalog. Tom 3 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961) 298. — 181 —


We are made to understand that the “sacred aim” of the Order is to eradicate “poverty and misery,” but the satirical element is brought out by focussing repeatedly on the faces of the well-nourished members of the Order, and by the addition of subtitles. From a dramaturgical point of view the meeting scene contrasts sharply with the gatherings of hungry weavers. In the final phase of the film it becomes evident that the muchdiscussed “Hilse-problem” of the original has lost importance. In Hauptmann’s play Hilse’s rejection of the rebellion, his blind trust in divine justice, and his accidental death have given rise to various interpretations and threatened the delicate balance between progressive tendencies and a more temperate attitude. Hauptmann clearly developed the drama towards the inevitability of the spontaneous revolt, but he seems to have had reservations about ending the play with “Radau und Spiegelzertrümmerung” (loud noise and mirror smashing) and on a note of “reine Negation.” His artistic integrity, as Theodor Fontane wrote, prevented him from doing this.4 In Zelnik’s film Hilse’s rejection of the revolt is completely subordinated to the steadily increasing extent of the uprising. The film closes with a scene in which we see the victorious weavers stand under a “life-like figure of a crucified Christ” in the same way that the Disciples of Christ stood at his feet. The weavers are here, as Heinz-B. Heller indicated, “politisch wie moralisch exkulpiert” (politically and morally exculpated).5 They have Christ on their side, and the indictment of exploitation of the poor is brought out more forcefully. Conservative circles took offence at the Christ scene and in particular attacked George Grosz. The artist strengthened Hauptmann’s portrayal of the state and the church as failures by giving the action a more pronounced political bias. In the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger from May 16, 1927, we read that it was presumptuous to let Grosz work on the film, and that his Communist orientation had come to the fore: “Ein Mann, der sich politisch so stark als gehässiger Anhänger des Heils, das uns von

4

Theodor Fontane am 26. September 1894”, in Gerhart Hauptmanns ‘Weber’. Eine Dokumentation, H. Praschek, ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1981), 196-197.

5

Heinz-B. Heller, “‘O Gott, ist das die Revolution?’ Friedrich Zelniks Gerhart-HauptmannVerfilmung Die Weber (1927)”, in Literaturverfilmungen, F.-J. Albersmeier and V. Roloff, eds. (Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989) 80-98. — 182 —

Sigfrid Hoefert

Osten nicht kommt, festgelegt hat, der kam auch hier nicht aus seiner Haut.” Hauptmann was pleased with the film and expressed his strongest appreciation (“stärkste Anerkennung”), congratulating Zelnik and his collaborators. He was particularly pleased that the adaptation did not make concessions to base instincts and superficial needs for amusement: “Er dankte […] den Autoren und äußerte seine Freude darüber, daß die filmische Bearbeitung keinerlei Konzessionen an niedere Instinkte und an ein oberflächliches Amüsierbedürfnis aufweise.” 6 Many critics praised the film. The Tägliche Rundschau reported that it was a “new record” of German film;7 the Weltbühne wrote that it was a “silver streak on the horizon after a long night;” 8 the Berliner Tageblatt stated that it was an “unexpected victory” of German film,9 and the Neue Zeit wrote that it was “one of the most grandiose of German films.”10 The Rote Fahne reported that it “towered far above all European productions,”11 and in LichtbildBühne we read that the film was Zelnik’s best production.12 Some critics remarked on the similarities with some of the Russian filmmakers. Axel Eggebrecht in the Berliner Tageblatt states that without the films of Eisenstein and Pudowkin the German film would not have been conceivable. There was the danger of imitating the Russians, he says, but Zelnik’s great directing talents and his apt choice of co-workers enabled him to avoid this.13 Nowadays the film is still highly regarded. Jerzy Toeplitz, in his monumental history of film, states that among the German films of the twenties that deal critically with the social environ-

6

“Zelnik zeigt Hauptmann seinen Film”, D.L.S. (Offizielles Organ des Deutschen LichtspielSyndikats) 2 (1927) 11: 6.

7

Tägliche Rundschau, 17 May 1927.

8

Lucius Schierling, “Weber-Film”, Die Weltbühne 23 (1927) 22: 881.

9

Axel Eggebrecht, “Der Film ‘Die Weber’”, Berliner Tageblatt, 16 May 1927.

10

Neue Zeit, 18 May 1927.

11

Doorwien, “Die Weber im Film”, Die Rote Fahne, 17 May 1927.

12

Lichtbild-Bühne, 16 May 1027.

13

Eggebrecht (see note 8). — 183 —


ment, Zelnik’s “Weber”-adaptation was the best and most important production.14 Although it was a great artistic success, “Die Weber” was not a commercial success. Many theatres were reluctant to show it because of party-politics. In a personal letter to Hauptmann, Zelnik mentions that earnings from abroad were minimal.15 The main reason for this was that censorship authorities had prohibited the film from being shown in various places. In the United States, Zelnik says, it was prohibited five times, and in Paris the Police Prefect prohibited further showings in 1929, after people had demonstrated against the film: “Le préfet de police vient d’en interdire la projection à la suite d’incidents assez violents qui mirent aux prises l’autre soir, des spectateurs plus préoccupés de politique que sensibles à la beauté des images”.16 Shortly after the production of Zelnik’s film, in 1928, the comedy Der Biberpelz was adapted to the screen by Erich Schönfelder in Germany. It was the last adaptation of Hauptmann’s work during the silent film era. The film is not available, but we know from censorship documents that it was a good average production and that the script adaptation remained close to the original text. Only the ending was changed: One of the daughters of the washerwoman marries and the ensuing festivities on a river barge include the local government official who is trying to solve the case of the stolen beaver coat. Unbeknownst to him the same barge is carrying the stolen coat to Berlin. In terms of the impact of this film it was largely limited to local circles. During the Nazi time four of Hauptmann’s works were adapted to the screen, among them Der Biberpelz. Naturally, the film had to pass all the hurdles of the Nazi administration and, as any screenplay produced during the Third Reich, it had to be approved by Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, before public showing. The authorities rejected Erich Ebermayer as the scriptwriter, although he was a friend of Hauptmann. As I indicated in Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film, the Nazis distrusted

14

Jerzy Toeplitz, Geschichte des Films. Vol. 1: 1895-1928 (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1972) 439.

15

Zelnik’s letter, dated 29 August 1932, is part of the collection kept at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.

16

“Au Vieux-Colombier: ‘Les Tisserands’ sont interdits”, Ciné-Comoedia, 17 avril 1929. — 184 —

Sigfrid Hoefert

Ebermayer.17 They had a file on him in which he was described as decadent and exhibiting pornographic and homosexual tendencies in his writings, in addition to having published articles in Marxist periodicals. The scriptwriter who was allowed to undertake the task, Georg C. Klaren, pointed out to Hauptmann that he had been forced to leave out some good aspects and add others, which perhaps were not so good.18 Jürgen von Alten directed the film. Early in December 1937 the film was shown in honour of the poet’s birthday, first in Breslau, then in Berlin. Before the showing, Hauptmann spoke to the public. It is noteworthy that he was allowed to do this. For Goebbels had circulated rumours that Hauptmann had been arrested and put into a Concentration Camp.19 This caused great concern among the theatre and film circles in Berlin, and, when Hauptmann appeared, many artists were greatly relieved. He spoke about his experiences in Erkner, where the drama was set, and underlined that the author of the “Filmspiel” (screenplay) had enlarged the scope of the original by making considerable changes to the plot.20 Several new scenes and motifs were added, for example, the attempts of an engineer to improve the quality of a carburetor; the appearance of a Prince with a fairly modern outlook; the intention of the district official to engage his superior in a duel; the inclusion of a drinking bout in a cabaret; a scene in a sauna; a car accident; a hunting incident in which an informer is wounded; and the attempt of one of the daughters of the washerwoman to commit suicide. In addition, a change in the status of the washerwoman (Mutter Wolffen) was made, as she leans towards a more morally acceptable life. Hauptmann seems to have been sceptical about the film; apparently after the first showing he stated “Gut, daß ich diesen Film nicht geschrieben habe.” 21

17

Sigfrid Hoefert, Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film. Mit unveröffentlichten Filmentwürfen des Dichters (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1996) 51.

18

Klaren’s letter, dated 13 November 1937, is part of the collection kept at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin.

19

Veit Harlan, Im Schatten meiner Filme: Selbstbiographie (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1966) 68.

20

Gerhart Hauptmann, Sämtliche Werke, Hans-Egon Hass and Martin Machatzke, eds., vol. XI (Frankfurt / Main, Berlin, Wien: Propyläen Verlag, 1974) 1156-1158.

21

Günther Grundmann, Erlebter Jahre Widerschein (München: Bergstadtverlag Korn, 1972) 144. — 185 —


The film was received positively. Some critics complained that several aspects (the matter with the carburetor) were a bit too romantic (“filmromantisch”), and that the local official (Baron von Wehrhahn), who was portrayed by Heinrich George, had been turned into a caricature.22 It may be noted that the film was not given much publicity. This might be related to the fact that Wehrhahn, during his first official discourse, sounded a little bit like Hitler, or rather that his speech-melody seemed reminiscent of the Führer’s way of addressing the public. The film provided entertainment. It had no overt political content, but he fact that the washerwoman is no longer lacking moral scruples and that the daughter is ashamed of her made the film more acceptable to the Nazi authorities. Their beliefs were rooted in middle-class morality, and they wished to uphold the respectability associated with those principles. As far as the critical stance vis-à-vis a government official is concerned, it was directed towards a bizarre individual, not the upright type of official favoured by the regime. The adaptation did not have an international resonance. Hauptmann’s Die Weber was frowned upon and not shown during the Nazi regime. But the author was approached and presented with an opportunity to have the play filmed. In a letter to Hauptmann’s wife in December 1941 Ebermayer mentions that there would be a good possibility now to obtain approval for adapting Die Weber to the screen. One would merely have to illustrate (in a prologue, epilogue, or secondary plot) how well the weavers were being treated under Nazi rule.23 We do not know how Hauptmann reacted to this overture. Robert Ley, the leader of the “Deutsche Arbeitsfront” (German Workers Front) made a similar suggestion. We do know that Hauptmann rejected this proposal. In a discussion with C. F. W. Behl he stated “Für dergleichen bin ich nicht zu haben” (I am not available for such an undertaking).24 The comedy Der Biberpelz was also adapted to the screen after World War II in East Germany. Directed by Erich Engel and based on a

22

Werner Fiedler, “Komödie des Übereifers. Der ‘Biberpelz’-Film im Atrium”, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 December 1937.

23

Hoefert, 52.

24

C.F.W. Behl, Zwiesprache mit Gerhart Hauptmann: Tagebuchblätter (München: Kurt Desch, 1949) 154f. — 186 —

Sigfrid Hoefert

script by Robert A. Stemmle, the film appeared in 1949 and turned out to be a genuine success. Critics called it a “Spitzenfilm” (top-notch film) and maintained that it was the best German film of the post-war period.25 Engel created a more flexible storyline and eliminated some details. Hauptmann’s dialogues were largely left unchanged, but the critical dimension of the social environment was strengthened by including an additional person (the wife of the official) and some other changes. For example Motes, the negative character in the play, is seen stealing some publications from Dr. Fleischer’s office and is caught doing this. In addition Fleischer himself is reading socialist literature (August Bebel, Franz Mehring, and others) and is working on a manuscript of a “proletarian comedy”: “Die liebe Not” (Dire Misery). He is also composing a revolutionary song; it should be noted that this song is the prominent “Das Blutgericht,” the poetic text that unites the weavers in the drama Die Weber. The presence of this song in the film links Der Biberpelz more closely to Die Weber and emphasizes their critical thrust. The prevalent opinion in East Germany about the film was that the original text had been perfectly adapted to the film medium. Only the ending, it was said, could have been more effective. The objection might be raised that it was written for an “intellektuelles und literaturbeflissenes Publikum.”26 In West Germany, however, the situation was a little different. The socialist orientation of the film was noticed and frowned upon. In fact, a new ending was produced for use in the Western parts of the country. It was less abrupt and the washerwoman proclaims that honesty prevails in the long run. Other versions of Der Biberpelz and Die Weber were also made. Most were produced for television, still others appeared in foreign countries. In conclusion, I would like to draw attention to one of the foreign adaptations of Der Biberpelz, namely the Georgian version of Hauptmann’s play, because it is an example of the adaptation of a Naturalist drama that has been radically transformed into another genre. The play is entitled “Veris ubnis melodiebi” (Melodies of the Veris Quarter) and was produced in 1974 under the direction of Giorgi

25

Horst Müting, “Klassiker im Film. Biberpelz als Bühnenstück und Film”, Neue Filmwelt, 1949, No 12.

26

Ibid. — 187 —


Shengelaya in Tbilissi. The petty theft of the washerwoman in this case enables the daughters of a coachman to enter the Municipal Dancing School. There is a lot of Georgian folklore, musical display, and dancing in this film. It closes with a happy ending, for the washerwoman and the coachman become a couple. The original Naturalist drama has been adapted to another culture and become a splendid spectacle.

Sigfrid Hoefert

— 188 —

Construction of A Cultural Identity in the Writings of Sia Figiel and Flora Devatine: the Case of

The Girl in the Moon Circle (1996) and Tergiversations et rêveries de l’écriture orale (1998)

Sia Figiel, Flora Devatine, two South Pacific women, the first one born in Western Samoa and living in American Samoa, the second living in Tahiti. Both have an overseas experience Sia spent four years in Berlin, Flora taught French at the French High School in Niamey (Niger). Both have chosen to write in the colonial languages: English and French. The question is: how do these two women manage to express their Oceanian identity through a language that is foreign? They asked themselves this question and they had to invent new writing strategies in order to make their readers feel their own culture. Sia chose to tell a story in the novella form, Flora preferred a combination of poetry, philosophy and metalinguistic writing which makes the reader share her difficulties in writing and the questions she raises about it. Both chose the autobiographic way and questioned the status of the first person in a narrative writing. With an intellectual mind, Flora knows that the “I” is a complex entity and she looked for a definition in the correspondence she had with Bernard Rigo, a French philosopher and — 189 —

Construction of A Cultural Identity in the Writings of Sia Figiel and Flora Devatine

her friend and mentor: “C’est ‘Je’ qui parle à toutes les personnes et par toutes les personnes” [It is the I that speaks in all the persons and for all the persons]; “Ainsi ‘Je’ est mis pour ‘L’Etre’ qui parle” [Thus, the I is used for ‘the being who is speaking’] (p. 188). For her, the “I” is more than a narrative instance, it has a universal value, as Montaigne demonstrated in his Essais: talking about me is talking about mankind. In The Girl in the Moon Circle, life in the village of Malefou is described by a little girl, Samoana, also called Ana or Aga, who is ten years old: so there is a combination of a character and a double narrative instance, the little girl and the grown up narrator. For instance, at the very beginning of the text, Samoana is presenting herself in a homework, with many spelling and grammar mistakes (thus pointing out that English is definitely not her native language) and a childish point of view: “My name is Samoana Pili. I tan year old. I living at Malaefou. I has a dog. My dog name is Uisiki. I has big too. I have three animals. Dog. Big. And Cat” (p. 2); but the spelling and grammar are proper in the following pages and many times, the grown up narrator comes and joins the little girl to make comments about events or remember feelings of her childhood, as for instance in the episode of the drunken father coming home with no money on pay day because he spent everything drinking: “I was thinking of what my papa said. Which touched me so much. All I knew was that he remembered! Everything! Even when he was so drunk! And I wanted so much to hug and hug and hug my papa. And clean the piss off his clothes. And scream to the top of my lungs I love you! But we just didn’t do that sort of thing. We just didn’t” (p. 64). And now what about the writing itself? Flora Devatine is fully aware of the difficulties; the pain, the white page panic, the matter, especially as she knows western literacy: everything has already been told, every style of writing has been experimented, so you have to know all of these if you want to make something new, the orality of Tahitian culture with no writing tradition, which makes her feel an inferiority complex: “Il faut être ‘popa’a’, Français pour écrire ! Et nous, on n’est pas ça ! Et on n’est pas forts pour écrire !” [You have to be a popa’a, French, to write ! It’s not what we are! And writing is not our strong point!] (p. 33) And the words have a meaning by themselves, built by thousands of writers over centuries, they are very “talkative”, as Flora says, “but you don’t hear them”, so that sincerity and authenticity seem to be impossible in writing. Flora tells about the work process to put her thoughts into — 190 —

Sonia Faessel

words and this the subject of her writing: the reader watches her sitting in front of her computer, the image she gives of the writer, and follows the progression of the text, the efforts of the writer, as she gives milestones in bold type: “I want to write, I write, the Writing is becoming” and so on. You watch the creative process in the text by Flora, but you are caught in the fiction in the novella by Sia Figiel. She clearly tells in the interview made by Professor Subramani at the USP, that thinking and creating are incompatible: “The worst thing about ‘thinking’ at the canvas or on the page is that you end up not doing anything. ‘Thinking’ in that way leads to censorship and there’s nothing productive when that happens” (p. 122) For her, the thinking comes before the writing, when she has the whole work in mind. Both had to find new ways of writing in order to make the reader experience the Oceanian perception of the world. They are both inspired by the orality of their cultures: Flora uses the traditional form of the “ute”, the ancient Tahitian poetry, Sia uses the “fagogo”, the oral Samoan tradition of telling stories. From these oral traditions, they keep the imagery and the breathing: for instance, Flora refers to ancient orators and poets, to the sacred value of the talking, to the sacred drum which gathered the audience, using Tahitian words to name these rituals and ceremonies. Sia explains that she tried as much as possible in her work to merge the oral and written traditions so that they become one. She had a long experience of public readings and she writes her text while it is spoken, saying every sentence out loud to get the music she wants, as Gustave Flaubert did in what he called his “gueuloir” [bellowing den]. In that way, she can mimic the oral rhythm, and you can feel the sentence breathing, as if it were spoken, in this one, for instance: “mangoes turn red under the moon and we dream about them and the ways to avoid Mr Brown’s dog Spoki and how to wake up early enough not to wake anyone else up and creep over to Tupu’s house where she’s already waiting for me and we sneak out the back way trying to remember where we left the pile of stones which we’d already piled the day before in the evening when there was still light only to find Pippilongstocking and Simi sitting under the mango with their tongues dancing in each other’s mouths” (p. 81); one sentence, one breath. The title of the chapter is never separated from the following sentences, so that you get the impression of a spontaneous language and not a of a canvas and a patient and long work, for Sia said that she sometimes had to rewrite her text twenty or thirty times in order — 191 —


to get it right. She also said that she wanted to catch the energy which is characteristic of the way young people speak, and she spent nine months listening to the way 10-year-old girls talk. That is why the language structure is generally minimalistic in her novella: the sentences are short, simple, with many assertions like: “ever”, “never”, “always”, short comments and dreams of permanence for the young Ana. For both these writers, the disposition of the text on the page is given careful thought. Flora Devatine disposes her text in verses, so that you read a single poem, rhymed by words or short sentences in bold type, for instance : “J’écris, non pas pour quelque idée originale importante à dire (lire p 50)” [My writing does not lead to some important and original idea. Read on page 50]. Sia Figiel says that she she was interested in experimenting the idea of the lei, the flower necklace, for the composition of The Girl, so that short texts alternate with long ones, focussing the reader’s attention in both cases: one understands that the longest part of the text, “Pulu Leaves”, is very important because it tells about the myths of Samoa, but some of the short ones give an interesting point of view about the narrator or life in Samoa, “one might say that there are big bright flowers blooming all over the composition, interspersed with smaller ones that are just as colourful or perhaps even more so than the big ones”, as Sia puts it in her poetic way. Of course, both are fully aware that they had to find a new language, in order to bring out how it feels in their world. The reader will find native words in both texts; Flora gives a glossary, Sia does not, because she thinks that one can easily understand the Samoan language, and she gives the translation most of the time. The native words are no longer decorative, as they are most of the time in the works written by Europeans, they are the way of speaking of the islanders who merge the two languages, French with Tahitian, English with Samoan. One can feel the appropriation of the colonial culture, mixed with the traditional one, and the native words name the various foods, plants, parts of the house; but there are also whole sentences, which are an echo of the French or English text, as for instance: “Et j’écris, donnant à entendre, D’autres “ta’irei” (tambour), D’autres “ta’ira’a” (sonorité) !, Et à lire des signes nouveaux, gravant, tatouant, enregistrant, un “pehe Œapi” (chant nouveau), “ua hu Œihu Œi te manava” ((les entrailles sont touchées par l’émotion) [So I write, giving other “ta’irei” (drums), other “ta’ira’a” (sounds) to be heard! And I give new signs, engraving, tattooing, recording, a “pehe Œapi” (new song), a “ua hu Œihu — 192 —

Sonia Faessel

Œi te manava” (we are moved to the guts with emotion)] p. 74; or in The Girl: “they tease us before they leave the house. Aua le aamagagai ia Situpo ua lua iloa? Situpo the old man with no teeth. Who has been single his whole life” (p. 26). The music of the language is very important and it is quite perceptive in both texts. It is more obvious in Tergiversations, as Flora chooses the poetic form: the rhythm is like the beating of the sacred Tahitian drum, and the Tahtian words mixed with French create this music lire p. 74 — or you can also hear the breathing — lire p 57. For Sia, the song is very important and it gives the circular canvas of The Girl: it begins with a song, it ends with another, and in both, Sia plays with the music of English and Samoan words lire le circle song, p. 1 et ingki-ingkiongki p. 120. Most of all, the images are at work in both texts. Flora Devatine merges the body, the plants, the minerals and the sea, elements that are deeply felt by Tahitian people and this shows in the way they express their love for their fenua (country), as for instance: “le j’écris est devenu mon filet de fond, posé comme une nasse dans le sens du courant, flottant au milieu des bancs” [Writing has become my bottom net, lying like a fish trap in the current, floating amid shoals] (p. 53), or “et j’écris pour percer des tunnels, des voies d’accès entre vallées, dans le basalte, roches volcaniques, entre les haies, derrière les promontories” [I write to open tunnels, access roads between valleys, through basalt, volcanic rocks, between hedges, behind headlands] (p. 54). Sia chooses the metaphor of the circle, which is powerful among Samoan people and exists “both physically and metaphysically in Samoan culture”, as she explained in her interview. At the centre of The Girl, “Pulu Leaves” tells about the Samoan myths which work as the roots of people and establish a difference in order to deny homogenisation, which is also a reality for Ana and her friends. The arrival of TV in the village, the discussions about the shows which make “permanent TV in our brain”, the made in Taiwan Christ hanging on the wall in Ana’s house. Images are also the natural way of speaking for a young girl whose mind is still full of ancient stories, better for her than the Bible, and it is also a natural way of writing for Sia who is a painter : “I paint with words”, she says and that’s exactly what she does in The Girl, as for instance: “rain falls on the earth like a blessing. A blessing from the skies. Heeding the calls of cracks in the soil. Of thirsty kalo. Thirsty auke. Rivers. Auke. Rivers again” (p. 93). — 193 —


With this metaphor of the circle and the allegorization of the myths, Sia gives value to the indigenous expression of composition and transcends the boundaries of her country. For her, imagination is the best way to freedom, beyond ideologies, dogmas or beliefs. An Ana questioning her surroundings can be found in every society and in every human being. With the image of the writer questioning the act of writing, Flora also reaches something more universal, but she is still dependent on the western myth of writing: the glorious French writers seem to oppress the miserable apprentice she is. Flora is still in quest, seeking out the best way to create boundaries between French and Tahitian cultures, and she could be successful the day she’ll choose fiction instead of the essay. And finally here is the difference between these two works: Tergiversations is still bound to ideology, The Girl is a more intimate work, expressing the thinking and the experience of Sia who gave herself the opportunity of travelling abroad and met other writers–the meeting with Tony Morrison was an important event in her life–who opened her mind to new possibilities.

Sonia Faessel

— 194 —

‘Language War’1 for the Survival of the Fittest in the Era of Multi-cultural Society: Perspectives of Korean Literary Circles for the Vision and Re-vision

After the fall of the Babel Tower,2 communication between people has become only possible for those who use the same language but not possible for those who use different languages, from ancient times to the present international world in the era of multi-cultural society. It seems to be persuasive, at least superficially, when the term multi-culturalism first appeared in the beginning of the 1970s, since its basic manifesto was to recognize equal opportunity, culture, and language traditional or modern, major or minor, western or non-western. When the very idea of globalization simultaneously appeared, such a manifesto has powerfully

1

For the term of ‘language war,’ see Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Robin Tolmach Lakoff, Language War (N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2000), and Byung-hyuk Lee, Korean Society and Language Society (Seoul: Nanam, 1993) and his paper titled “Language War: Korean vs English,” Lingua Humanitatis, vol. 1, n. 2 (2001), 229-38.

2

Genesis, 11, 4, 6-7: “Now let’s build a city with a tower that reaches the sky, so that we can make a name for ourselves and not be scattered all over the earth…. Now then, these are all one people and they speak one language; this is just the beginning of what they are going to do. Soon they will be able to do anything they want! Let s go down and mix up their language so that they will not understand each other.” — 195 —

‘Language War’ for the Survival of the Fittest

influenced Korean society through government-level support in education, employment, economics, socio-political activities, and mass media. In spite of their positive aspects of multi-culturalism and globalism–the first for ‘equality’ and ‘recognition,’ and the latter for ‘global village’–they have aroused various negative issues in contemporary Korean society. These ad hoc problems are not only the matter of Koreans but also the matter of the non-western world or non-Anglo-phone speakers (specifically, nonAmerican English speakers). In the Korean perspective, because their everyday discourse was quite different from that of Chinese characters, Seol Chong (654-?) in the Silla Kingdom (B. C. 57-A. D. 935) tried to transform the Chinese characters into Korean spoken style. In his Records of Three Kingdoms (1281), a famous Korean Buddhist monk during Koyreo Dynasty (9181392) named Ilyeon (1206-1289) writes. “Seol Chong understood Chinese customs, names of things, and literature in Korean. Many scholars tried to follow after his achievements. He integrated diverse writing systems by transforming Chinese characters into Korean style, and systemized it as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, auxiliary word, suffix, etc.”3 For example, to pronounce ‘dol’ (stone) in Korean, Seol Chong combined two Chinese characters: ‘stone’ for ‘do’ and ‘second’ for ‘l.’

Invention of the Korean Alphabet, Hangul and Changes of Writing Style

Such efforts of traditional Korean intellectuals to have our own writing system were realized through the invention of the native Korean alphabet, Hangul, by the great King Sejong (1397-1450) in the beginning of Yi Dynasty (1392-1910). His invention of the Korean alphabet (Figure 1), Hangul, in 1443 provided for the first time a set of twentyeight phonetic letters, now twenty-four, in which Koreans’ thoughts and ideas could be expressed more easily than by using Chinese characters. It is composed of ten basic vowels and fourteen basic consonants (Figure 2). The basic three vowels are /a/ symbolizing heaven, /eu/ earth, and /i/ human beings. And fourteen consonants, which imitate human

3

Ilyeon (trans. Byeong-Do Lee), Records of Three Kingdoms (Seoul: Gwangjo Publishing Co., 1984), p. 403. After this, all the English translation is mine, unless otherwise indicated. — 196 —

Ho-Byeong Yoon

speech organs, are grouped as sounds of molar, tongue, lip, tooth, throat, and half tongue.4 This alphabet integrates philosophical aesthetics and intellectual thought with the sound system. The combination of these vowels and consonants make Hangul one of the most scientific writing systems in the world. In the preface, King Sejong made it clear why he invented it: Korean language is quite different from Chinese; without a national writing system, everyday activities are inconvenient; young and old can feel easy in speaking and writing with their own writing style. In spite of the Great King Seojong’s efforts to have our own writing system, from the end of 18th century in the name of westernization, there appeared three kinds of writing styles: one was a purely Chinese character style in connection with traditionally Chinese cultural influence (Figure 3), the second was a Chinese-Korean style in relation to the influence of Japanese style (Figure 4), and the third was a purely Korean style through the influence of English style (Figure 5). Because of the geopolitical situations of the Korean peninsula located between China and Japan, the former two styles were used in Korean literary circles, and they practised them in their literary works: Chinese style for conservatives and the Chinese-Korean style for intellectual groups. However, there were various problems to teach Chinese characters to Koreans, not because of uselessness but because of the changes of educational policies. Sometimes they asked to use them only with parenthesis or without, or sometimes to use absolutely only Korean in schoolbooks. These policies can be defined as an effort of finding Koreanity–this is my term newly coined to emphasize ‘what the characteristics to be Korean are’ and ‘who we are’–to keep our identity and to compete with the impact of foreign cultures. Though English style was influential in developing purely Korean style from the beginning of the age of enlightenment, the eagerness to achieve fluent English in speaking and writing has been so much emphasized in our Korean daily life that it has threatened the existence of the Korean language itself.

4

Korean alphabet is composed of ten vowels and fourteen consonants. Ten vowels are /a/, ya/, /eo/, /yeo/, /o/, /yo/, (u), (yu), /eu/, and /i/, and fourteen consonants /g/, /n/, /d/, /l, r/, /m/, /b, v/, /s/, /o/, /j, z/, /ch/, /k/, /t/, /p, f/, and /h/. — 197 —


The Necessity of English and the Crisis of the Vernacular in the Global Age

It is necessary to speak and write English as fluently as one’s own national language, because of the opportunity to achieve ‘equality’ and ‘recognition’–recognizing the other or to be recognized the self–in the global age. We can find such examples in the novel titled Captain Lee (1962) by Kwang-Yong Cheon (1919-1988). Doctor In-Guk Lee, the main character of the novel, has to learn Japanese during the period of colonization (1910-1945), Russian during the period of liberation (19451950) and Korean War (1950-1953), and English after the war.5 According to the social changes, Dr. Lee’s need to learn foreign languages is also changed. His changes of learning foreign languages suggest our study to reconsider the contemporary issues in relation to the leading role of English in Korea: education, socio-politics, job-opportunity, studying abroad, etc. Let’s take a typical example, which explains persuasively the invasion of English in Korean society: Every Korean is drawn into the abyss of learning English and is pawing the air to get out of it. From a baby just murmuring few Korean to the aged old working people, no one is free to get rid of the raging wind of learning English in our society. Through the zeal of English, there is no crevice to get in Korean education as well as no creativity of thought to lead our future; a huge amount of money and time is wasted in learning English, though the result is not so satisfactory. For Koreans, however, English is an urgent issue to get a guarantee for success in life. Whether our English is fluent or awkward, we have to make our tongue roll to imitate the native English speakers; a student who is doing that is considered a good student; only an applicant, whose total score of TOEFL or TOEIC over the score of getting permission of entrance from those ivy league universities, can get a humble job to support his/her family. In our society where only English, among other foreign language, has become a unique barometer to evaluate

5

The attitude of doctor In-Guk Lee is usually estimated as flexibility to his environment, egoism, success-oriented lifestyle, etc. See Nam-Hyeon Cho, “The World of Kwang-Yong Cheon’s Novels: Visions of Reality, Its Spirit and Methods,” A Study on Modern Writers (Seoul: Mineum Sa, 1989), p. 52. — 198 —

Ho-Byeong Yoon

one’s own ability, this evil-faced English-stress still continues from cradle to death.6

In the global age, of course, no one can deny the necessity of speaking English fluently since it has its status as “an encratic language” (dominant in the international society), while vernacular as “an acratic language”7 (dominated but struggling not to be dominated). In competing with each other to get an initiative position, the more the importance of English is emphasized, the less space seems to be available for the vernacular to exist. The role of English in Korean intellectual society has been changed from ‘language play’ through ‘language game’8 to ‘language war.’ In the stage of language play after the liberation of Korea in 1945, English functioned as a mere means of showing exotic taste by saying “thank you,” “OK,” “oh, my god,” etc.; in the stage of language game from the 1960s, English has become a core course in our school education, in the entrance examination, and in the job hunting–to know English well is to check up on one’s ability in every aspect; and in the stage of language war, however, the situation has been completely changed. Because as an ideological apparatus of the government-level, it is encouraged to teach English from kindergarten before the children start to understand Korean correctly in speaking and writing. Such matters lead Korean youngsters to be in favour of American cultures, while the Korean morality and culture are on the edge of demolition. Furthermore, in the so-called global age, basic fields of humanistic studies such as Korean literature, history, and philosophy are thought of as non-pragmatic areas; Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish are more attractive to the university students and have displaced French and German which have always kept the second place following English. As far as our study is concerned, it is not only the issue in Korea that English is too much overestimated in education, business, and sociopolitics. Its importance is well known, however, we should not neglect our

6

Hanguk Ilbo (Korean News Paper), 2001. 10. 23, p. 33; it is requited from Byung-hyuk Lee’s paper mentioned in n. 1.

7

For the usage of “encratic language” and “acratic language,” see Barthes, Language War, p. 107.

8

For the discussion of “language game” from 1945 to 1970s in Korea, see Gil-Sup Ko, Language Game in Our Time (Seoul: Todam, 1995). — 199 —


own vernacular that is now on the verge of disappearance. UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) reports such examples: There are about 5,000-7,000 languages and 4,000-5,000 languages of them are minor languages used by only small groups who live in Asia (32%), Africa (30%), South-West Pacific (19%), North-South America (15%), and even in Europe (3%). We can find such small groups in Papua New Guinea (847 kinds), Indonesia (655 kinds), Nigeria (376 kinds), India (309 kinds), Australia (261 kinds), Mexico (230 kinds), Cameroon (201 kinds), Brazil (185 kinds), Zaire (158 kinds), and Philippine (153 kinds), etc. Without speaking those languages used by at best 1,000 people, even the languages used by over 10,000 people are not used step by step. We can foresee that most of those languages, at least 90 % of them, will disappear within 100 years.9

Report of UNEP is only concerned those tribe languages, however, many other languages are also on the verge of disappearance, especially those of non-Anglo-phone languages developed from their ancient intellectual cultures to have their own writing systems. One of them is Hangul, the Korean Alphabet, which shows us several examples. Until the early 1900s, though we have distinguished those sounds of /b/ and /v/, /f/ and /p/, /l/ and /r/, and /z/ in speaking and writing, nowadays there is no differences between these pairs: ‘boys’/‘voice,’ ‘coffee’/‘copy’, and ‘rice’/‘lice’ are usually pronounced the same; we have also difficulties in pronouncing /z/ sound in such words as ‘zip code,’ ‘zero,’ and ‘zebra,’ since we do not use those sounds of /v/, /f/, /r/, and /z/ which were clearly distinguished by the Great King Sejong, the inventor of Hangul. The main reasons, among others, might be the influence of ‘Japanese-English’ Koreanized during the period of colonization: ‘lamp’ in English has been transformed into Japanese as ‘nampo,’ which is still used in Korean society. And now it is necessary for all of us to overcome the present situation and to direct the future in maintaining and protecting our vernaculars from the dominant flow of English, which we cannot but accept as a fact of multi-cultural and global age. As one of the most

9

For the Report of UNEP, see Jong-Rak Kim, “Disappearance of Native Language,” Noksaek Pyeongron (Green Review), vol. 58 (2001), 9-11. — 200 —

Ho-Byeong Yoon

persuasive methods of recognizing the other and being recognized as a self, our study suggests the idea of glocalism–a newly coined term from globalism and localism–in our language policy.

Glocalism of Language: Overcoming the Present, Directing the Future

Glocalism is developed from the idea of Tim O'Sullivan, who has suggested ‘global-local space’ to overcome the gap of ‘global-space’ that cannot be avoided in the multi-cultural global age.10 Since in multiculturalism there always exists the problem of ‘recognition’–‘who recognizes’ and ‘who is recognized’11–and in globalism there exists the matter of ‘porousness’ of vacant space raised by the centrifugal force in influencing native culture and by the centripetal force in accepting foreign cultures. With the idea of glocalism, we can effectively exploit the super power of English influence and develop our own native language. This does not mean a passive attitude for neutralization of different languages but mean an active performance in accepting English and in developing our vernaculars in the global age. The ability of English is different from the idea of developing our native language. Non-Anglo-phone speakers have to concentrate how to make their languages known to the world; Anglo-phone-speakers must try to learn those of minor group languages. By doing so we can identify our language with other’s and can lead our future society to be free from language wars.

Ho-Byeong Yoon

10

Tim O’Sullivan, “Globalization,” Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, and John Fiske (London: Routledge, 1994, 2nd ed), pp. 130-31.

11

Charles, Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 37. — 201 —


Figure 1. Hangul, the Korean Alphabet (1443)

Figure 2. Romanization of Korean Consonants and Vowels

Figure 3. Purely Chinese Style Newspsaper (1883-1884) — 202 —

Ho-Byeong Yoon

Figure 4. Chinese and Korean Style by GilJoon Yoo’s Records of the Western World (1895)

Figure 5. Purely Korean Style Newspaper (1896-1899)

— 203 —


Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cho, Nam-Hyeon. 1989. “The World of Kwang-Yong Cheon’s Novels: Visions of Reality, Its Spirit and Methods,” A Study on Modern Writers. Seoul: Mineum Sa, pp. 45-74. Ilyeon. 1984. Records of Three Kingdoms. trans. Byeong-Do Lee. Seoul: Gwangjo Publishing Co. Kim, Jong-Rak. “Disappearance of Native Language,” Noksaek Pyeongron (Green Review), vol. 9-11. Ko, Gil-Sup. 1995. Language Game in Our Time. Seoul: Todam. Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 1993. Language War. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2000, Seoul: Nanam. Lee, Byung-hyuk. 2001. “Language War: Korean vs English,” Lingua Humanitatis, vol. 1, n. 2 (2001), 229-38. —————. 1993. Korean Society and Language Sociology. Seoul: Naman, 1993. O’Sullivan, Tim. 1994. “Globalization,” Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, ed. Tim O'Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, and John Fiske. London: Routledge, 1994, 2nd ed. pp. 130-31. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 37.

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La métamorphose de la littérature et de l’art selon André Malraux

La question qui m’intéresse dans la discussion de ce sous-thème proposé par le XXIIe. Congrès International de la FILLM est celle de la fonction de la littérature dans la dynamique culturelle. Il n’est pas facile de l’aborder, car l’évolution du XXe siècle, du point de vue social, économique et technique, échappe à toute tentative de simplification. Sans prétendre apporter une réponse à ce problème, je vais pourtant me laisser provoquer par ces questions et essayer de réfléchir, dans un domaine un peu plus large, sur la fonction de la littérature et de l’art–et partant du savoir et de la culture–et encore sur les possibilités de divulgation, de confrontation et de métamorphose que le monde de plus en plus globalisé permet et exige. Je prendrai comme support de mon intervention les idées esthétiques d’André Malraux, dont on vient de fêter le centenaire de la naissance en 2001, car la réflexion de cet écrivain ne manque pas d’aborder ces questions d’une façon moderne et convaincante. Dans ses études sur l’art et la littérature ou dans tous les discours où il s’occupe de la fonction de l’art dans le monde, l’auteur de La Condition humaine attribue à toute forme artistique une fonction politique et sociale, qui consiste à racheter l’homme devant son destin et à lui faire découvrir sa propre dignité.

— 205 —


Qu’est-ce que la culture? A cette question, qu’il se posera lui-même à plusieurs reprises, répondra Malraux toujours dans le même sens. Dans le discours proféré à Moscou en 1934, dans le cadre du I Congrès des Ecrivains Soviétiques, et intitulé «L’art est une conquête», il raconte: «A l’une des usines de Moscou, un ouvrier à qui je demandais: ‘Pourquoi lisez-vous?’ m’a répondu: ‘Pour apprendre à vivre’». Et Malraux de conclure: «La culture, c’est toujours: apprendre1». Ne croyons pas qu’il s’agit là d’une simple affirmation rhétorique lancée à un moment lyrique de son improvisation. Au contraire, c’est une idée qui lui est chère et qu’il reprend à plusieurs moments de sa vie et de son œuvre. Apprendre pour Malraux c’est savoir s’imprégner d’une expérience, de la connaissance que d’autres nous laissent, que nous assimilons et transformons par la suite, dans le mouvement continuel de la métamorphose, pour que d’autres plus tard puissent s’en servir et mieux vivre. Dans le discours qu’il a prononcé à l’Université de São Paulo, au Brésil, le 26 août 1959, s’adressant aux Brésiliens, il dira: Si vous admirez votre admirable architecture moderne, ce n’est pas parce qu’elle est «jolie», comme disaient les bourgeois de 1880. Il devient manifeste que l’art a changé de rôle; que ce que nous appelons culture ¾ et dont l’art est un si puissant facteur ¾ devient l’un des domaines dans lesquels l’homme cherche sa raison d’être, et le domaine privilégié dans lequel il cherche la preuve de sa dignité.2

Deux jours après, au Ministère de la Culture, à Rio de Janeiro, en essayant d’établir la différence entre l’idée de la culture et de l’art dans le monde ancien et dans le monde moderne, il dira: L’objet de la culture alors devient très différent de ce que l’on avait cru: il devient la recherche et, si possible, la découverte de l’élément invulnérable de l’homme et de ce sur quoi l’homme peut fonder sa grandeur.3

1

Malraux, André. «L’art est une conquête». In: La politique, la culture; discours, articles, entretiens (19251975). / Textes réunis par Janine Mossuz-Lavau /. Paris, Gallimard, 1996 (Folio/Essais, 298), p. 106.

2

Cf. Silva, Edson Rosa da (org.). André Malraux : palavras no Brasil / discours au Brésil. Rio de Janeiro, Funarte, 1998, p. 105.

3

Idem, p. 115. — 206 —

Edson Rosa da Silva

A l’occasion de l’inauguration de la Maison de la Culture d’Amiens, le 19 mars 1966, pour n’en citer que trois allusions, tout en affirmant que l’homme et le monde perdaient leur signification dans les temps modernes, il conclut: «La culture, c’est ce qui répond à l’homme quand il se demande ce qu’il fait sur la terre»4. C’est une réflexion donc sur le sens de la culture et le rôle de la littérature et de l’art que j’aimerais proposer, à partir de la vision d’André Malraux, pour tenter de comprendre à quel point la littérature (et les arts, également), peuvent contribuer au dialogue et à l’interaction des cultures dans le monde contemporain. Quelles influences ont-ils sur le rapport que les différentes races entretiennent entre elles et sur la conscience de la relativité de la connaissance et du savoir? Comment lutter contre la tension qui s’établit entre les cultures dites dominantes et les cultures émergentes? Qu’est-ce qui les sépare, ou, plutôt, qu’est-ce qui les réunit? Il n’est possible de relire l’œuvre de Malraux aujourd’hui, sans tenir compte de la réflexion qu’elle développe sur le rôle de l’œuvre d’art dans le dialogue avec l’histoire et avec l’histoire de la culture, et sur son pouvoir de réinvention et de métamorphose de l’histoire et de la culture elles-mêmes. Autrement dit: à travers la réflexion esthétique qui s’intéresse à la présence et à la fonction de l’art dans le monde moderne et dans les rapports entre les hommes. Ses essais nous permettent de nous interroger sur «la façon dont sont ressuscitées et dont se métamorphosent les œuvres du passé à la lumière de la contemporanéité»5, c’est-à-dire leur façon de s’opposer au temps, et par là de mieux comprendre comment se répondent et se fondent6 les discours culturels. Le concept de Musée Imaginaire est sûrement le plus important de l’œuvre de Malraux, car, selon la définition qu’ en donne son auteur dans Les Voix du silence, le Musée Imaginaire est une «confrontation de

4

Malraux , André. La politique, la culture; discours, articles, entretiens (1925-1975). / Textes réunis par Janine Mossuz-Lavau /. Paris, Gallimard, 1996 (Folio / Essais, 298), p. 323.

5

Morawski, Stefan. L’absolu et la forme; l’esthétique d’André Malraux. Paris, Klincksieck, 1972, p. 10.

6

Baratin, Marc & Jacob, Christian. Le pouvoir des bibliothèques. Paris, Albin Michel, 1996, p. 15. — 207 —


métamorphoses»7. Nous ne sommes pas loin de l’idée de la synchronie des textes et de la totalité de la bibliothèque que Jorge Luis Borges traduit avec tant de sagacité dans l’image de la Bibliothèque de Babel. Cette réflexion nous aide à comprendre le rôle de l’œuvre d’art dans le monde moderne, où le musée et la bibliothèque, grâce aux possibilités de la technique, jouent un rôle prépondérant dans la diffusion de la culture, du savoir et de la mémoire, ou mieux, représentent «la possibilité d’un savoir sur le monde, par l’accumulation d’inscriptions et de signes»8. Chez Malraux, l’importance de la bibliothèque est aussi au centre de cette discussion. Voici ce qu’il dit dans L’homme précaire et la littérature, œuvre posthume de 1977: «Ce n’est pas la machine, ce ne sont pas les journaux, qui ont manqué à l’antiquité pour inventer le roman. Et certainement pas l’imagination: c’est notre bibliothèque»9. Prend forme, ainsi, une idée de collection, collectio, qui contient dans une sorte de traînée sémantique deux sens à la fois: l’idée de colligo (réunir, relier) et l’idée de collego (lire ensemble, lire avec), autrement dit, réunion des œuvres (colligo) et collection de lectures (collego), suggérant l’idée d’un fonds collectif (la culture statique) et, en même temps, la génération du savoir (la culture dynamique). Peut-être pourrions-nous utiliser ici le concept d’archive que Michel Foucault discute dans L’archéologie du savoir, en parlant des énoncés, et que je transcris hors contexte, courant le risque d’en réduire le sens: «L’archive n’est pas non plus ce qui recueille la poussière des énoncés redevenus inertes et permet le miracle éventuel de leur résurrection; c’est ce qui définit le mode d’actualité de l’énoncéchose; c’est le système de son fonctionnement.»10 Non seulement une réunion de données, mais un acte d’écriture (dans son sens étymologique de participe futur: ce qui va être écrit). Lire pour écrire. Et j’ajouterais: regarder pour écrire, si nous pensons au musée. «Maîtriser cette accumulation et rendre productive cette mémoire absolue», comme le dit

7

Malraux, André. Les Voix du silence. Paris: Gallimard, 1951, p. 12.

8

Baratin, Marc & Jacob, Christian, op. cit., p. 15.

9

Malraux, André. L’homme précaire et la littérature. Paris, Gallimard, 1977, p. 181.

10

Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris, Gallimard, 1969, p. 171. — 208 —

Edson Rosa da Silva

Christian Jacob, parlant de la Bibliothèque d’Alexandrie11, ou, comme le veut Malraux, «un poète ne se conquiert pas sur l’informe, mais sur les formes qu’il admire. Un roman aussi»12. Ou encore: «La création n’est pas le prix d’une victoire du romancier sur la vie, mais sur le monde de l’écrit dont il est habité»13. A l’idée de tradition, fondée sur l’unicité et la sacralité de l’«aura», je me rapporte à la pensée de W. Benjamin, le musée imaginaire et la bibliothèque opposent l’idée de succession, fondée sur la proximité spatiale et sur la multiplicité des expériences, des cultures et des expressions artistiques. Si, dans la multiplicité des œuvres, l’«aura» perd sa force, le musée imaginaire, dans le dialogue qui s’établit entre les œuvres et les hommes, récupère, dans la succession des manifestations artistiques et dans les particularités de chaque style, la fonction de l’art, non plus sacré, dans le sens théologique premier, mais, encore et toujours, magique, en ce sens que, dans la souffrance et dans le désenchantement du monde, il y a toujours des fragments de couleurs, l’ombre d’un croquis, des ruines anciennes, des morceaux de texte ou des vers épars, à partir de quoi l’homme peut penser réécrire une autre histoire de sa triste destinée. La perte de l’aura–libérant ainsi l’œuvre de ses attaches sacrées–révèle donc la possibilité d’une autre histoire des hommes et encourage de nouvelles conquêtes, la recherche d’autres rédemptions. La bibliothèque et le musée sont des espaces évocateurs du savoir et provocateurs de savoirs. Ils évoquent un savoir-tradition, la culture instituée que l’on ne peut oublier, car elle est porteuse de moments historiques de plusieurs époques; ils provoquent de nouveaux savoirs dans la mesure où ils annexent toujours de nouvelles expériences–soit à travers des œuvres nouvelles, soit à travers de nouvelles lectures. En tant qu’espaces privilégiés où s’actualise la signification des œuvres, ils sont donc surtout une forme de question: que peuvent signifier les œuvres? Au lieu de proposer des réponses dans les œuvres exposées, le musée et la bibliothèque convergent vers l’interrogation que le vide des réponses installe: «Désormais, la question chasse la réponse. Bien que chaque

11

Baratin, op. cit. p. 74.

12

Cf. L’homme précaire, p. 155.

13

Ibidem. — 209 —


paragraphe d’un roman affirme, tout grand roman interroge.»14 La somme de savoir–que les salles pleines d’œuvres semblent métaphoriser–est, en réalité, derrière ces archives accumulées, une absence de réponse, donc une quête de nouveaux savoirs. La succession des œuvres ne peut pas contenir une histoire, ne doit pas obéir à une linéarité. Supposer la linéarité, c’est supposer un ordre, une évolution, un défilé de moments qui détermineraient une histoire figée, jalonnée de noms. Il n’y a pas de savoir définitif: dans la succession des œuvres et des lectures, le savoir acquiert d’autres formes, propose d’autres interrogations, engendre toujours du nouveau. La bibliothèque et le musée se fondent sur l’absence d’un savoir unique (la tradition, sacrée et inaccessible) et s’ouvrent au désir de savoir, à la multiplicité des savoirs (la succession et la confrontation)15, comme un jeu d’échos, comme un jeu de miroirs. En d’autres termes, et reprenant les idées de Walter Benjamin, le déclin de l’aura est la disparition du caractère sacré et de l’unicité de l’œuvre, et son rapprochement, ce qui détruit toutes les certitudes, annulant de la sorte les réponses définitives. Et ce faisant, il provoque des questions. Les œuvres et leurs formes se multiplient et se métamorphosent car elles sont dans l’impossibilité de tout dire et de tout signifier–l’impossibilité de dire le monde: chaque œuvre est une tentative singulière de dire la vérité. Donc: une vérité singulière. La question qui se pose d’œuvre en œuvre (la succession) et qui se transforme d’un temps à l’autre (la métamorphose) fait de la bibliothèque un grand volume, dans l’acception étymologique de rouleau, manuscrits que l’on roule et déroule, un grand volume en énonciation, en rapport de contiguïté, où la présence de l’un, au lieu de le remplacer ou de l’annuler, s’ajoute à l’autre, dit et redit l’autre, en une sorte de «sommation des siècles», comme le veut Malraux: Alors le musée cesse d’être une collection; alors la création apparaît à l’artiste, non comme l’expression du pouvoir qui permit à Poussin de continuer Raphaël, ou même à Fragonard de continuer Rubens, mais celle d’un pouvoir qui transcende l’histoire et

14

Cf. L’homme précaire, p. 198.

15

Cf. Malraux, déjà cité plus haut. — 210 —

Edson Rosa da Silva

fait, de l’appel que Titien entendit comme une voix secrète, la sommation des siècles.16

Le roman cesse d’être uniquement collection dans le sens de colligo, pour être également collection dans le sens de collego. La bibliothèque et le musée sont, de cette façon, comme le dit Christian Jacob, les dépositaires de l’art, où se déroule l’histoire de la culture et de la pensée, non seulement comme lieu de mémoire où se déposent les strates des inscriptions laissées par les générations passées, mais aussi comme espace dialectique où, à chaque étape de cette histoire, se négocient les limites et les fonctions de la tradition, les frontières du dicible, du lisible et du pensable, la continuité des généalogies et des écoles, la nature cumulative des champs de savoir ou leurs fractures internes et leurs refondations.17

Ce sont des espaces qui mettent en scène le questionnement constant de la fonction de l’art par le travail du lecteur-spectateur, du collectionneur et de l’artiste. À la mémoire universelle (l’archéologie de la connaissance et la conservation du savoir) s’allient de nouvelles cultures et des parcours individuels, des transgressions possibles de la tradition qui assurent les inventions de l’avenir, la circulation et l’imbrication des discours. C’est là, dans ces espaces privilégiés de l’art, que l’on conserve le palimpseste de l’expérience humaine, palimpseste infiniment raturé: parfois, illisible, pour provoquer le désir; parfois, confus, en raison du mélange de signes de langues diverses; parfois, surchargé de messages; parfois, vague et distrait comme une mémoire. Déchiffrable ou non, compréhensible ou non, l’important c’est qu’il soit là, qu’il nous fasse rêver des possibilités qu’il renferme, et qu’il accomplisse la tâche difficile de faire parler, conjointement, artistes et écrivains, venus d’autres temps et d’autres espaces, raffermissant et réactualisant, ainsi, ce dialogue transtemporel et transculturel. C’est dans le rôle du musée et de la bibliothèque–qui réunissent les œuvres des nations et des temps les plus

16

Malraux, André, L’Intemporel, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 13.

17

Baratin, op. cit. p. 13. — 211 —


divers–que je peux comprendre le rôle culturel de la littérature et de l’art dans le monde moderne. A partir de ce concert de voix et d’expériences, nous pourrions nous demander, comme Malraux lui-même, si le sens du mot art ne serait pas de «donner conscience à [tous les] hommes [de toutes les races, de tous les credo] de la grandeur qu’ils ignorent en eux»18, de la grandeur inscrite dans la bibliothèque et dans le musée, transmise à travers l’expérience, le savoir et l’héritage culturel. A partir de là, nous pouvons également reprendre le concept de culture comme un apprentissage que Malraux présente dans le discours «L’art est une conquête», et le compléter avec ce qu’il dit dans le discours «Sur l’héritage culturel»19: Tout le destin de l’art, tout le destin de ce que les hommes ont mis sous le mot de culture, tient en une seule idée: transformer le destin en conscience: fatalités biologiques, économiques, sociales, psychologiques, fatalités de toutes sortes, les concevoir d’abord pour les posséder ensuite. Non pas changer un inventaire en un autre inventaire, mais étendre jusqu’aux limites des connaissances humaines la matière dans laquelle l’homme puise pour devenir davantage un homme, la possibilité infinie des réponses à ses questions vitales.

Dans les concepts de littérature et de culture sont en jeu l’homme, la réalité et une forme d’expression. Les rôles qu’ils jouent dans la littérature et dans l’art paraissent bien évidents: à travers les formes d’expression qui se métamorphosent et se réactualisent au fil des siècles et dans les civilisations les plus diverses, l’homme s’inspire des manifestations exemplaires de ceux qui les ont précédés et lutte pour la transformation de la réalité. C’est de jour en jour et de pensée en pensée que les hommes recréent le monde à l’image de leur plus grand destin [...] Toute haute pensée, toute œuvre d’art est une possibilité infinie de réincarnations. Et

18

Cf. Le temps du mépris, Paris, Gallimard, 1935, p. 9.

19

Ibidem, p. 142. — 212 —

Edson Rosa da Silva

le monde séculaire ne peut prendre son sens que dans la volonté présente des hommes. 20

C’est cette présentification qui permet de réordonner les œuvres, mêmes les plus anciennes et les plus différentes, de les relire et de les réinterpréter pour créer toujours une nouvelle histoire, une autre histoire, une histoire discontinue, une certaine victoire sur l’oppression du temps et des conflits humains. C’est dans cette présentification que prend son sens l’enseignement de la littérature, car dans les dialogues de la bibliothèque les littératures se parlent, se réfléchissent et se renouvellent. Non pas pour transmettre une culture déterminée ou un moment précis de l’histoire des cultures, mais pour exhiber les possibilités de l’histoire des hommes. Si la bibliothèque et le musée contiennent les métamorphoses de l’art et le dialogue de la pensée humaine, et si les frontières entre les peuples s’effacent de plus en plus, l’enseignement de la littérature en tant que véhicule des cultures ne peut plus se faire en une seule direction: il ne s’agit plus tout simplement d’enseigner, mais plutôt d’enseigner et apprendre, d’enseigner à apprendre et d’apprendre à apprendre. Voilà ma tentative de réponse aux questions que je vais continuer de me poser.

Edson Rosa da Silva

20

Ibidem, p. 142-43. — 213 —


NEW INSTRUMENTS: INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY INTO LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE STUDIES


A World Without Authors

You no doubt will be bitterly disappointed. In a congress titled “ReImagining Language and Literature for the 21st Century,” for a plenary address on “New Instruments: Integrating Technology into Language and Literature Studies,” you most probably expect a performance loaded with high-tech props, multimedia hype, hypertextual links. Now, this will be a decidedly low-tech event, an antiquated 20th-Century presentation, a plain talk on the effects of information, or digital, technologies on the print culture that academics were familiar with since Gutenberg. “Today,” as the historian of the book Roger Chartier recently remarked, “it is possible, at least in theory, for any reader to have access to any digitized text. If all books were digitized,” Chartier went on to say, “their texts would be delocalized and dematerialized, and thus accessible to all readers.” The sheer possibility of the translation of all texts into electronic form–not yet the reality of their accessibility, nor even the accessibility for all to the limited percentage of the universal library that is already digitized–is bound to have, in fact already has, enormous consequences on the traditional categories of the print culture, that is, on our lives. First, the book’s identity itself is altered by the new technologies. In the world of electronic texts, the difference between textual genres, say between the book and the newspaper, on which the poet Mallarmé insisted greatly, is erased; on the computer, all texts appear in more or

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less the same format, that of the screen: they all look alike. Second, the customary category of intertextuality is also threatened. Electronic texts no longer are discrete, separate entities such as books, with footnotes and bibliographies referring to other discrete, separate entities, but they tend to connect in a hypertextual or even hypermedia network, where they are all copresent. You are simultaneously within several or even many texts, and the notions of footnote and bibliography wear away. Third, the author no longer looks the same. The author slowly grew into a legal or even holy institution since the invention of Gutenberg, but, as Chartier again noticed, “the construction of the category of ownership, of copyright, which was crystallized in the 18th Century, is today being challenged by the fluidity and mobility of electronic text.” It is on this last challenge, the transformation of the author, of the category of authorship by the digitization of texts, that I will focus in the next 45 minutes. One last caveat: of course, I eagerly support the integration of information technologies in language and literature studies (I travelled to Bangkok to say so): word processing, the electronic library, information networks, electronic scholarly journals, and so on, have changed my ways of teaching and researching in the last 15 years, as they have done, I guess, for all of us. I remember the agony of preparing the critical edition of Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, just before the electronic revolution overtook our field: there was a lot of lost time in a chore whose nature has been radically altered and facilitated since. At Columbia University in New York, I have taught graduate seminars based exclusively on digitized texts at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, texts my students could not have access to before. I have also made my yearly lectures at the Sorbonne in “Theory of Literature” accessible on the Web for a couple of years–this year they dealt with the notion of authorship as a matter of fact–, and I am impressed by the growth of their readership from year to year, impressed and perhaps also a bit awed. Developments of information technologies in language and literature studies have overall improved the quality of my work as a teacher and researcher, and they should not generate suspicion on our part. But fervent support should not preclude clear thinking, and should not stop me, us, from reflecting on the consequences of the new information technologies on the status of literature, and on the future of reading. And this is what I will attempt to do now: ponder the challenges to authorship by digitization. — 218 —

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The Death of the Author

Let me start by looking back at what theory taught us a generation ago. At the end of the 1960s, we widely believed in the so-called “Death of the Author.” The author, traditionally the reference point of literary interpretation since the early 19th Century, with Romanticism, and the rise of historicism and positivism in language and literary studies, was the target of a violent episode of the ancestral quarrel of the ancients (in the event, literary history, promoted as method par excellence during the first democratization of the school in the 1870s in many Western nations), and the Moderns (structuralism, later post-structuralism). Michel Foucault gave in 1969 a notorious lecture entitled “What is an Author?” Roland Barthes had just published in 1968 a subversive article whose wild title, “The Death of the Author,” soon became, to the eyes of both their followers and foes, the anti-humanist rallying cry of the new science of the text. The controversy that followed, on literature and textuality, focussed on the figure of the author, a notion that summarized the issues in a sensational way. All established literary notions could be inferred from the affirmation of the preeminence of the author’s intention. Symmetrically, all the anti-concepts of the new literary theory could be deduced from the premise of the death of the author. “The author, judged Barthes, is a modern figure, a figure produced without doubt by our society in as much, at the end of the Middle Ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism, and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, as we say more nobly, of the ‘human person’.” Such was the point of departure of the French “Nouvelle Critique,” soon fashionable abroad under the appellation of “French Theory”: the author was none other than the “bourgeois,” the agency of capitalist ideology. Around him, or her (but the author in question was overwhelmingly male, as well as dead and white), according to Barthes, were organized manuals of literary history and all teaching of literature: “The explanation of the text (œuvre) is always looked after in the direction of the one that produced it,” as though, one way or other, any literary text was a confession, could represent nothing but a confidence. To the author as principle, both productive and explanatory, of literature, Barthes substituted language, impersonal and anonymous, claimed bit by bit as the exclusive material of literature by Mallarmé and — 219 —


the High Modernist Tradition, with Valéry and T.S. Eliot, Joyce and Proust, surrealism and, finally, structuralist linguistics as the final stage of the European avant-garde, according to which, as Barthes recalled, “the author is nothing more than the one who writes, just as I is nothing else than the one who says I.” Did Mallarmé not already profess “the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to the words”? The author then, in theory, surrendered the front of the literary stage to Writing, with a capital W, to the Text, with a capital T, or to the “scriptor,” who was nothing but a “subject” in the grammatical or linguistic sense, that is, an agency, not a “person” in the psychological, philosophical or ethical sense of the word: it was the “subject of the enunciation,” which did not preexist speech, or the enunciation itself, but was produced by the enunciation here and now. From which it followed that writing could not “represent” or “depict” anything that would have existed prior to its enunciation, and that it did not have a more ascribable origin than language itself. Without origin, “the text is a fabric of quotations,” as we also used to say. The notion of intertextual dissemination was thus implied by the thesis of the death of the author. And explanation, as the target of literary study, retreated with the author, as there was no single, original meaning at the principle or bottom of the text. Last but not least, and final link of the new system that could be entirely deduced from the death of the author: the reader, no longer the author, became the agency or the location where the unity of the text occurred, where it made sense, in its destination instead of its origin, but this reader was no more personal than the author which had just been overcome, and he or she was also identified with a function: he or she was no other than “this somebody that holds assembled in one same field all the traces that constitute writing.” As we can see, everything held closely together: the whole of literary theory could be linked to the premise of the death of the author, as opposed to the first principle of traditional literary history, authorial intention. Barthes gave it at the same time a dogmatic tone: “We now know that a text…” and a political resonance: “We now begin to be no longer dupe of…” Theory coincided with a critique of ideology: writing, or the text, “liberated an activity that one could call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, because to refuse to stop meaning is in the end to refuse God and his avatars, reason, science, law.” This was voiced in late 1968: the downfall of the author, which signalled the transition from systematic structuralism to — 220 —

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deconstructive post-structuralism, or to what would later be labelled postmodernity, was in tune with the anti-authoritarian rebellion of the previous Spring, in Paris, Berkeley or Prague. In “What is an author?” Foucault’s argument was also based on a circumstantial confrontation with mainstream academic positivism, from where criticism had been levelled against his manner of treating proper names in The Order of Things, identifying with them whole “discursive formations,” much vaster and vaguer than the works of so and so (Darwin, Marx or Freud). Therefore, with the recommendation of modernist literature, which had witnessed the step-by-step disappearance, the gradual erasure of the author, starting with Mallarmé again (“admitted the volume not including any signatory”), to Beckett and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault did define the “author function” as a historical and ideological construction, the projection in more or less psychologizing terms of the treatment to which the text was subjected. The death of the author did indeed entail the polysemy of the text and a freedom of the commentary that had been unheard of until then, but, one could wonder even at the time, was it not, on the part of Barthes and Foucault, a way of promoting the reader as a substitute of the author, of replacing the author with the reader? There was then still an author, an alternative authority: if it was no longer Cervantes, it became Pierre Ménard, according to Borges’s fable in Fictions, “Pierre Ménard, author of the Quixote,” which everyone in my generation knew by heart. And Barthes and Foucault still were authors, perhaps the last ones, authorities in their own right. Now, this was said and done more than 30 years ago, before the fourth quarter of the 20th Century began. Why should I return to it? A lot has occurred in the mean time: our lives, as I said, have been thoroughly changed by the digital technologies, but what is surprising, even baffling, is that in many ways the outrageous theoretical pronouncements of the late 1960s on the death of the author seem in hindsight prophetic of the actual of the world of the book.

Internet and Copyrights

Both Barthes and Foucault died at the beginning of the 1980s. They did not experience the phenomenal technological developments that, during the — 221 —


last 20 years, marginalised the author and possibly forced his/her retirement. Barthes and Foucault’s questioning of the author was in essence ideological (literary and/or philosophical), integral to the last stage of High Modernism. They both outlined a summary genealogy of the author from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century, and made him/her emerge with capitalism, but they were little concerned with the actual history of the book and of publishing, or of reading, variants of history that have fully expanded since then. It is however the shift from the regime of the manuscript to that of the printing press that gave rise to the modern definition of the author: after the transitional regime of printer’s privileges from the 16th to the 18th Century, through many quarrels between writers and printers throughout the classical age, it is by means of his individual rights that the modern author prevailed in a regime of intellectual property marked by the ideas of the Enlightenment: copyrights in England, “droits d’auteur” in France. Barthes and Foucault hardly tied their censure of the author to the evolution of techniques, and the techniques with which they were familiar were still those of the 19th Century. (An anecdote might be in order here: in 1975, when I started writing my dissertation, Barthes, who was a friend, gave me a brand new electric Olivetti typewriter that he had just bought, but that he could control: whenever he hit a key, he said, it repeated like a machine-gun, and he had reverted to his old mechanical typewriter.) However, their statements on the decadence of the author now take an oracular import in the eyes of many commentators, either resolute or resistant, who attempt to think the repercussion of the digital revolution on the culture of the third millennium. The author, since the French Revolution, is identified with his/her rights–or copyrights in the Anglo-American legal tradition. And it is as such, I mean as rights that the author can give us the impression to dissolve in our present cyberculture–namely in the legal vacuum that this culture initially occasioned. During the last decade, numerous affairs have shown that the author as rights was highly vulnerable in the face of the information technologies, so much so that one could fear that the legal dissolution of the author would become a fatal consequence of the expansion of the Internet. Ultimately, it turned out that legal protections were progressively reinstated, but they remain frail, and, beyond the legal framework, will the author resist to the profound transformations of customs and mentalities that are presently taking place? — 222 —

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“Hello. Congratulations on your last book. I’ve just read the first chapter on the Internet.” This message received by e-mail a couple of years ago from Chicago (I was in Paris at the time) made me first attentive to the effects of the new media on the status of the author. After consulting my correspondent, I understood that it was on the Website of a Paris daily that he had read that first chapter, through a link from the review of my book that the daily had published. My initial reaction was surprise: that first chapter was accessible on the Internet, and I had neither been consulted nor even informed. For translations and selections, my publisher notifies me in advance, with the understanding that if I don’t object before a certain date, I am giving tacit agreement. But for the Internet, nothing such had taken place. Contacted, my publisher was not aware, or at least the persons I knew in the services I usually dealt with. Anybody–it seemed–could now scan any text and make it accessible on the Internet, and the whole world–if it mattered–could read it for free without the author being apprised. This was all done without qualms, under the assumption that no sensible author would object, because any judicious Internet user would recognize it as publicity. At that time, newspapers didn’t yet provide links to online bookstores, so that for the Internet surfer, the voyage from digitized first chapter to printed book was neither virtual nor obvious. One couldn’t just click on amazon.com; one had to go out, confront the hard reality of the street and find a brick-and-mortar store. Newspapers and publishers improvised; no one was sure of the legal framework. Should I relay such an anecdote? We all experienced similar ones. Their scale is frivolous: the number of connections on my first chapter was in all likelihood inconsequential, and the rights would have numbered in cents. Nothing to compare with the anxiety of the music companies facing Napster. But those examples remind us that we are all affected by the digital culture in our existence as authors. Internet users demonstrated amazing inventiveness in order to restrict copyrights, the virtual or immaterial quality of the network of networks and its global dimension giving birth to the utopian fantasy of absolute freedom, that is, free access for all to all information in a legal vacuum. In order to deny intellectual property, one alleged free speech as protected by the First Amendment of the American Constitution, or freedom of information as protected by the European Convention of the Rights of Man, or yet the respect of privacy or of correspondence. “The pioneers of Internet, wrote the legal scholar André Lucas, a specialist of — 223 —


intellectual property, shrouded themselves behind very universal rules of law in order to fight a specific right which appeared to them paralysing.” They presented authorship as a form of censure and tyranny mounted against the freedom to access (freely) any and all information. As long as the Internet – and this was the original intent–had no lucrative goal, was not for profit, but favoured information and education, one eluded in good faith the constraints of intellectual property and copyright. In the digital environment, the rights of the consumers were systematically valorized against those of the authors, viewed as violations of (civil) liberties. Intellectual property, such was the overpowering philosophy of the Web, was archaic and ought to be abolished in the modern digital environment. This is a frame of mind that I still sometimes encounter, ten years later, in many of my own students, but things have changed, and the irony is that the Internet has made all agents more conscious than ever of their rights. All the more so as the expansion of the Internet coincided with the speculative bubble of the 1990s: everything has a price, and, as it goes, “There is no free lunch.” In fact, the argument against copyright based on freedom of information was none other than the reiteration and extension of the classical thesis making intellectual property an illegitimate obstacle in the supposedly neutral and not-for-profit academic world. How could one oppose the rights of authors and the law of profit to the higher ideals of teaching and research? During the previous decades, the 1970s and 1980s, the tremendous expansion of photocopying for pedagogical applications had certainly made agents more conscious of the point of view of authors and publishers, but the shift from the analog to the digital universe suddenly made all transgressions of copyrights appear less outrageous, or perhaps less obvious, as though the novelty of the media ensured the impunity of the distinct practices that it made possible, and as though it would have been nonsensical to take exception in reference to a conservative jurisprudence. But as the Internet itself turned out to be more and more commercial (and as its academic and not-for-profit component progressively became an annex), it was becoming more perverse to take refuge behind the ideal and authority of science in order to disregard the authorship of individuals. In France, the first egregious digital infringement of copyrights–author’s rights and publisher’s rights–occurred when a book on the terminal illness of the former president of the Republic, François — 224 —

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Mitterrand, The Big Secret, written by his personal physician, Dr. Claude Gubler, was put on line. This affair made it plain that the Internet was developing in a legal vacuum. In January 1996, a few days after the former president of the Republic died, his own personal physician published a book on his health. The family of President Mitterrand immediately filed suit and succeeded in having the book withdrawn from bookstores for invasion of privacy and violation of medical confidentiality. A couple of days later, however, the manager of a cybercafé in Besançon scanned the book and made it accessible on his Website, all in the name of free speech. The site was soon closed on grounds entirely foreign to the issue (the cybercafé was not repaying its loan on the computers), but the book had already been duplicated on mirror sites out of France. Now, neither the publisher nor the authors took the owner of the cybercafé to court for infringement of copyright, but the media publicized high and loud the legal vacuum, as if the departure from the print culture entailed that reduplicating a book and making it accessible for free to the public at large was no longer constitutive of the offense of counterfeit. The family of President Mitterrand did not bring suit either against the manager of the cybercafé for conspiracy and for receiving violation of privacy and medical confidentiality, there again as if the rule of law was no longer effectively applicable. It all made it seem, at least in the press and opinion, that the violation of intellectual property was no longer questionable. Things changed quickly however.

The Resistance of the Legal Beneficiaries

A second French affair deserves to be mentioned (I take my examples in France, but they would not be dissimilar elsewhere). It concerned Cent mille milliards de poèmes, One Hundred Billion Poems, by Raymond Queneau (1961) – a predestined text for the Web, it is constituted of a ten sonnets whose fourteen lines are printed on separate strips of paper instead of single pages, so that by turning the strips independently, associating a first line to any second line, then to any third line, etc., you generate in theory 1014 (10 raised to the 14th power), or one hundred billion sonnets. Of course, as Queneau wrote in the “Instructions,” reading all the poems would require more than a million centuries. The volume was digitized in 1997 and put on-line on his Website by a programmer at — 225 —


the University of Paris VIII, without authorization from the beneficiaries, the publisher Gallimard and the heir of the writer. They filed suit against the programmer and the University of Paris VIII, which owned the server. A Paris tribunal retained the qualification of counterfeiting or forgery. Even if the program did not make it possible to visualize more than one poem at a time, the exception of short citation was not granted, because the procedure permitted “to reconstitute the whole work by linking successive citations.” The judge also refused the exception of private copy, on the ground that “by allowing others to connect through the Internet, to visit his private pages, and possibly to copy them,” the programmer “had assisted in the collective use of his reproduction.” The judge barred the defendants under penalty to put on-line the works of Queneau again. A couple of months later, however, a comparable affair concerned once more Queneau, and now the University of Toulouse. The heir filed suit again, but this time lost. The judge there observed that the defendants had planned that the “the privacy of their program be respected” by restricting the consultation of the server to their laboratory and its Intranet, but that the possibility to connect from the Internet resulted from “technical oversights.” The tribunal thus determined the absence of forgery. Legal scholars were unhappy that it didn’t clearly resolve, once and for all, that “the act that consists in putting a text in a server at the disposal of the potential public be as such an act subjected to the consent of the author.” These legal challenges, deemed by them acts of censorship, incensed Internet geeks and nerds, who claimed for instance: “Internet allows an authentic freedom of expression for everybody. […] This is not a formal liberty, limited by the difficulties and the cost of access to publishing on paper. Hence the panic of politicians, moralists, jurists and cops of all kinds. […] All these people can stand only liberties that they control. […] The famous Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes by Raymond Queneau, a computer poem par excellence, was banned on the Web by the stupidity of the “beneficiaries” (a race that I hope is doomed to disappear as soon as possible).”

But the jurisprudence was enough to allow Gallimard to request the instant termination by Internet access providers of Websites that put online texts of its protected authors. Publishers no longer hover about intervening directly with Internet access providers, who now commonly — 226 —

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enforce the strict respect of intellectual property. A paradoxical consequence is that one finds much less modern literature on the Internet than ten or five years ago. For French literature, numerous texts are available on excellent sites up to the beginning of the 20th Century (BNF, Athena), then no longer much. Not surprisingly, the Anglo-American legal tradition of copyright proved much less favourable to authors and journalists than the French tradition of rights of authors, or “droits d’auteur,” which, since the Revolution, sacralized intellectual creation and considered the resultant property as the highest form of property. In its name, resistance against digital infringements was successfully mounted. For instance, in the USA, the Supreme Court allowed that press publishers had the right to reprint articles on CD-ROM’s without the consent of journalists, through a right to modify a collective work. In Great-Britain, the journalists of The Guardian did not achieve the same protections as their French peers at Le Figaro, and the electronic archives of the Times Literary Supplement were assimilated, in spite of digitization and SGML markings, to the old microforms or taped cassettes for the blind, and made accessible for subscribers of the TLS without consultation nor compensation of the contributors, as being part of the so-called “first use of material.” In France, even in the absence of public broadcast, it is now acknowledged, as the law professor André Lucas observed, that “the initiative that consists in putting a text in a server at the disposal of the public is as such an action that is subjected to the consent of the author.” The legal vacuum that prevailed only six years ago, at the death of François Mitterrand, has been filled. Internet users of all kinds can no longer ignore the rule of law. The relations between the Internet and intellectual property, it turns out, have been paradoxical. On the Internet, one first behaved in defiance of the rule of law, as if the author and his/her royalties were relics of the analog Ancien Regime. And yet the public, previously quite insensitive to the transgression of copyrights by photocopying, or even borrowing in libraries, on copyrights, discovered the existence of a law of intellectual property by way of the affairs of the Web (Napster primarily). Authorship, copyrights and their infringements are discussed in the media, both conventional and electronic, much more than a generation ago, before the Internet. Thus, ironically, the digital world has made society more sensitive than in the past to intellectual property and — 227 —


authorship, including in the paper universe. It remains however that copyrights and royalties are most often perceived, incorrectly, as one more tax, and, for most people in most countries, a tax that is no more legitimate and dear than other taxes. Indeed, the courts now typically support the rights of authors on the Internet, and one no longer finds on the Web texts that are not out of copyright, but the author himself or herself is designated in the digital world as “content provider,” a definition that is little compatible with the notions of rights and authorship inherited from the print culture. If we feel blasé, we will say that the author is no longer conceived as a creator is, but only as a beneficiary (an “ayant droit” in French): his or her death is the reference that serves to compute the duration of his/her copyrights. Reduced to the status of beneficiary, the author would no longer make much sense in the digital culture. It might then be that the legal resistance of the recent years was but a rearguard dilatory action, and that the pioneers of the Internet were right when they bet, like Barthes and Foucault but for different reasons, on the death of the author. The fact that the Internet has given up infringing on the rights of authors and providing us with literature not yet out of copyright is not necessarily a good omen. Internet go-getters might have dropped the fight because the stakes were not worth it. Literature was not a worthwhile cause, as opposed to music for instance. More central at the inception of the network of networks, literature and scholarship remain today as appendages of the Web.

Content Providers and Collective Authorship

Let me therefore, leaving the legal framework and what it can tell us of the present state of authorship, say a few words about how digitization affects authorship in essence. The digital book, downloaded, cut and pasted, privately copied, is borderline counterfeiting. If the result is not much worse than when we distributed without scruple masses of Xeroxes in our courses, it undermines authorship well beyond the legal framework, which is conservatively readjusting around the author and his/her traditional copyrights. I will limit myself to a couple of final suggestions. 1. Are contemporary writers, more and more numerous, who exhibit their own productions on their Websites, still authors? Do not texts — 228 —

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2.

that are made accessible for free to any public that will search for them deeply modify the status of the author, his/her relationship to his/her works, his/her relationship to his/her reader? The Web now shelters a vast vanity publisher on the global scale, because digitization renders vanity publishing painless, that is, cheap. The printer and the publisher once gone, there is no longer a transition from private to public writing. Anyone can disclose on-line his/her output, bringing to its close the trend toward the disappearance of personal writing, writing for oneself, writing of one’s own, that started early in the 19th Century. In the print culture, the mediation of the publisher empowered the author: without a publisher there was no author (remember that printer’s privileges anticipated copyright laws). However, it is not enough to have one’s own site; you still depend on search engines that will index it, or not: they have become the latest intercessors, the new media between writers and the public. But for them, precisely, writers are no longer authors but content providers among others. The authority of the author, that is authorship, is also undermined by the speed of electronic publishing. For instance, the danger of inaccuracy is magnified. Uncontrolled information is reproduced on the Web by electronic magazines, but the case of literature is no different: it almost never happens that I consult a literary text on the Web, for instance a poem, without noticing errors of punctuation, misprints, typos, spurious lines, or even omitted lines. The best philological edition of a text is never on-line, precisely because publishers of scholarly editions, after a moment of panic, have managed to protect their rights. Electronic publishing tends, because of legal binds, to bypass editing a text, and instead prefers–because memory is cheaper than labour–to present the totality of its editions that are out of copyright; it therefore leaves to the user–but will he/she do it?–the responsibility of establishing the variants and choose the best text. Scholarly electronic publishing is thus in harmony with the movement of editing and textual studies, which, under the name of “genetic criticism” for instance, take interest in all the phases of the text, without privileging the final version. The hypertext does away with philology and critical editions, which had accompanied and amplified the rise of the author since the Renaissance. — 229 —


3.

The forms of writing themselves change with electronic hypertextuality, which allows authors to create digital books that will never be completed, be it their own or those of authors of the past, to revise them indefinitely, to include notes, commentaries, images and diagrams. The electronic text inevitably becomes a hypertext. Now, can one be the author of a hypertext, which is promptly linked to the whole of the Internet? The notions of author and hypertext are they compatible? Banal situations suggest skepticism: in a discussion forum, it is note rare, it is even constant, to see a contributor protest that he/she is not the author of words that ulterior messages attribute to him/her, and helplessly remind the group that these words were borrowed and quoted from a previous message. But on the Internet a forum has no history, or loses track of history in the transmission of hearsay (intertextuality, as I first said, has changed meaning). Once again, nothing about this is new: it recalls oral culture more than print culture, but the scale of the phenomenon has become global. 4. In cyberculture, individuals are no longer viewed as authorities. (What is an author without authority?) The author as signature dissolves: “the author, Pierre Lévy writes, (typical of written cultures) is, at the origin, the source of authority, while the interpret (central figure of oral traditions) only actualizes or varies on an authority that comes from elsewhere. Thanks to writing, the authors, as demiurges, invent the autoposition of the truth.” » It seems that it is the “demiurgic autoposition of the truth,” which defined the author as totalization in written culture, that we would be leaving. Such a transformation might be less a revolution than a new stage–the last one?–in a plurisecular trend. As Foucault taught us, authorship is not a purely literary idea, but a social and cultural construction inextricably linked to the history of writing and publishing. In our modern (or post-modern) conditions of textual production, authenticity and authority are becoming moot, doubtful notions. The figure of the author becomes undistinguishable from that of the plagiarist, his/her traditional double, and his/her negative alter ego. Should we then, in the age of the hypertext, substitute to the author as individual, worshipped since Romanticism, an author as collective or trans-individual agency? This would be simplistic. On the Internet, contradictory courses tend toward both the disappearance but — 230 —

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also the strengthening of the figure of the author. Let us then differentiate three contemporary figures of the author: 1. The author self-evidently vanishes in a high percentage of textual production on the Internet, a production that has broken with all conventional publishing purpose: messages on discussion groups, e-mails, etc., which are variants of oral communication to which producers recognize neither value nor responsibility. A lot of what goes on on the Internet belongs to a world without authors, that is also, in a sense, without ethics: see as businessmen, accountants and even lawyers at Enron and Arthur Andersen are miffed when their e-mails incriminate them. 2. The notion of collective authorship is intrinsic to multimedia publishing, which requires a plurality of expertise (image, sound, programming, etc.), and mobilizes large teams with well-defined roles for all that contribute in specific proportions to the joint enterprise. The fact that individual signatures do not disappear in joint multimedia productions is amply demonstrated by the credits that escort them and painstakingly signal every single contribution. Individual authorship remains valued in digital culture, even in the sanctuary of free software. Reputations are based on innovations, which résumés don’t forget to list. Even hackers become cult figures. 3. But apart from these two figures, the vanishing author and the joint author, there is a third and probably more original figure, that of a new intermediate agent between conventional text production and reception. While print and recording cultures both generally segregated (with the exception of the avant-gardes) the two poles of production and reception, our digital culture generates modalities of reception-production continuous from one pole to the other. The elementary digital cut and paste process gradually feeds into an expand and publish process, and the best example is that of techno music, where the DJ becomes a composer and creator. Reception naturally and progressively blends into production. As a result, every one is, more or less, an author, just as, during the Renaissance and in the Republic of Letters, every reader was a writer. One can then conclude both to a world without authors, and to a world where every reader is an author. Was the author an ephemeral historical formation of a few centuries? Is he/she a useless player in the — 231 —


new game of digital culture? The Internet induced many intriguing legal quandaries related to the effort of society to make new technologies conform to the Ancien Regime of paper. “As institution, Barthes wrote, the author is dead: his/her civil, emotional, biographical persona has disappeared; dispossessed, it no longer exercises on his œuvre the formidable paternity of which literary history, teaching, public opinion had the role of establishing and renewing the narrative.” But fantasies are as essential in the new virtual culture as they were in the old print culture, and if the meaning of authorship has radically changed, the author has not lost all meaning. Barthes added, and by doing so he once again anticipated the third millennium and the new original figure of the author-reader: “But in the text, in a certain way, I desire the author: I need his/her figure (which is neither his representation, nor his projection), just as he needs mine (lest we all babble).”

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Literature and Globalization: the Future of the Humanities

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there. — project for Art Metropol, Toronto Universities historically have changed slowly, but there are times that are more propitious than others for change… In my experience, almost none of the current generation of senior university administrators understand what is happening. — W.M. A. Wulf, “ Warning: Information Technology Will Transform the University”, Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 1995, p. 47.

Universities have been and are at the centre of conflicts of rationality, which aim at imposing a particular logic. The state wants universities to produce people who will fit in a national bureaucracy, the world of business wants universities to produce people who are directly able to fit the market, and universities themselves generally want to protect their independence. — 233 —


Nowadays, however, they feel pressure to change coming from new liberal economic ideas linked (1) to postmodern/postcolonial dynamics1, (2) to the tremendous transformations brought about by technology and by ecology, and (3) to a generalized concern for human rights, as well as an awareness of problems in ethical conduct. Thus, paradox has displaced the belief in progress and in master narratives. Universities have to take this into account to orient themselves and to foster the experimentation of diversity through communication, production of significations and specialized critical thinking. Within this framework, the future of humanities depends on a general question: Must universities adapt to technological and social change? The answer seems to be affirmative. However, one has to add that universities have to adapt to technological and social change because their function is to produce new and original meanings, products, discoveries, solutions, AND to ask new and original questions. Therefore, universities should help people to cross boundaries and break limits in the new technological/cultural/economic space. 1. The Age of Access One important impact of technology is that it gives access to a tremendous amount of information. Soon each researcher’s computer will have access to the entire world’s libraries and data banks. The book will be the library and the library an almost infinitely, permanently evolving hypertextualized book. 2. Recontextualizations One important consequence is that one can contextualize, compare, put together elements and texts, which before were believed to be self contained, static and linked to limits or territories (either national territories or fields of investigations) as they have been constructed by administrative units. Humanities will therefore develop transversally, intersect between each field and with other fields, and tend to dim the strong opposition between creation and critical analysis. They will expand without the already irrelevant limits of traditional departments or academic units in

1

See Patrick Imbert, The Permanent Transition, Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 1998. — 234 —

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which deficient divisions are sometimes very evident. One thinks for instance of Europe and of its development towards the invention of a new self-image linked to a new culture and a new market. However, in many university systems, in the humanities there is almost no place to study this dynamic, because most administrators and professors still think in term of a German, an Italian or a Spanish Department. In their minds, the past dominates the present and the future. 3. The Past Reread Starting From the Present: Authenticity is Replaced by Perspective To contextualize also means that one cannot only concentrate on the canon and that the voices of those excluded should be rediscovered. Moreover, the past should be adapted to contemporary problematics as can be seen in a recent production such as the rewriting of Romeo and Juliet featured in movie theatres. The goal is not only to help young people to reread the canon in an active, creative way and to help them see links with their own world but also to encourage them to be producers of significations. This dynamic which has been put in place (1) by authors such as Cortazar in Hopscotch, a novel which permits readers to choose their own narrative structure by first reading chapter 17 or chapter 5, for instance, and then by connecting the story through a series of choices, and (2) by publishers publishing series such as The book in which the hero is the reader, a perspective (3) further encouraged and vulgarized by commercials.2 One thinks for instance of Xpedior, a high technology company, saying under the image of a clothespin: “Some see a clothespin, a couple hugging and kissing, some see…an alligator standing on its hind legs.” (Forbes, May 29, 2000, p. 117). This dynamic encouraging people to produce multiple significations from one text or one image is about building new, innovative links, instead of following a narrative sequence. It is about being trained into creating new interconnections such as those in hypertext. As Nestor Garcìa Canclini analyses in Hybrid Cultures, this dynamic has many applications in the daily life of millions of people trying to interconnect with the world.

2

“Globalization, Postmodernism and their Influence on Canadian identities”, Canada Observed: Perspectives from Abroad and from Within, (J. Kleist, S. Huffman), New York, P. Lang, 2000, p. 5971. — 235 —


4. Crossing Boundaries In this context, researchers will tend to cluster by research interests and affinities at the national or international level rather than by proximity derived from physical presence in a particular building. Learning to learn another culture, knowing many languages and being able to express his or her personal multiple self-images, through direct or indirect means of communication, is therefore becoming increasingly important. Faculties will be organized around “program delivery teams,” which will include researchers from different countries or continents, linked by a set of problematics. In this more and more interconnected and multicultural world in which millions of people from very different backgrounds are now in contact, research will contribute to translating specialized discourses and new ideas into learning processes in tune with what is important for students and the society at large; for example, problematics3 connected to questions of racism, genocide and exclusion through literary, political and media discourses with teams involving writers, journalists, critics, professors from the humanities but also from political science, sociology, psychology, and medicine. Research will be assisted by librarian/facilitators for accessing pertinent resources and for disseminating new discoveries. 5. Culture and the Development of Exports Research projects, particularly interdisciplinary ones, will be tied to strategies dealing with the countries export development. It is more efficient to export objects or knowledge when they are linked to recognition and validation of a given country’s culture, ready to sign a contract and to import a product or service. For example, if one wants to sell a Canadian product in Latin America, it is not enough to have a good product (there are usually similar products made in Japan, the United States or Germany). In order to have an edge, exporters also have to recognize the cultural identity and expression of the importing country. Research projects and research centres will therefore help gain an advantage by creating collaborative cultural projects between artists from

3

Similarly when one wants to teach Canadian studies, it is better to focus on an issue which can attract almost everybody. For instance, instead of talking about the political system of Canada, it is better to organize the reflexion around the difference between the presidential system and the parliamentary system and in the second case use the example of Canada. — 236 —

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both countries within the larger context of commercial negotiation. With their knowledge of the country importing goods and through their contacts in both countries, researchers will be able to help organize meetings of, for example, Argentinean or Chilean artists who would, with their Canadian counterparts, organize exhibits or performances helping to communicate not only a vision of folkloric pasts4 but also an understanding of the transformation of national identities into multiple selfimages in the new context of globalization. These new links further valorize encounters to decontextualize/recontextualize images of the other culture. This emphasis on bi-cultural activity would help recognize important elements in the importing country whose elites are aware that they are not equal partners where financing and cutting edge technology are concerned, but who nonetheless know the very high quality of their cultural production, sometimes ignored by more technologically advanced countries. Putting together economic elements with cultural production would also emphasize the fact that heritage is grounded in the future and not in the past, a future made of people from different cultural backgrounds cooperating, and engaging in a stimulating competition instead of in modernity’s warlike conflicts. 6. Concentration on Operations Instead of on Results Students will also be involved in the process of creating new links, of contextualizing new elements, of rereading, not to find elusive authenticity, but to produce new meanings in a new framework such as demonstrated by the recontextualization of classic texts within contemporary dynamics using new media5. Students will have to be lead to meta-linguistic functions, to metaoperations and to pragmatic operations, rather than being presented results or data easily available through technological connections in huge data banks. They will be communicating with different teams or

4

See Alberto Kurapel on folklore and new postmodern endeavour, and how the latter negatively received in the context of a bureaucracy linked to modernity: Station artificielle, Montréal: Humanitas, 1993.

5

The dynamic which made Disney corp. famous because it was able to recontextualize old European legends (those collected by Grimm for instance) into narratives recontextualized in the Americas through a new medium: film animation. — 237 —


professors who will help them to efficiently conceptualize, theorize, experience and also to become more proficient with computation. Students may tend to express themselves more directly, with less control, less inner censorship, because writing on paper asks for an intellectual elaboration before writing. However, technology is affecting this process. When using a computer, most people tend to start a sentence without clearly knowing how it is going to end. New connections will therefore be easier to create outside the canon imposed by the critics. In short, a new kind of open and symbolic productivity and effectiveness is in gestation. 7. Vulgarization Humanities, as a set of specialized languages, will disseminate and vulgarize its transdisciplinary findings in public language, a process particular to our contemporary world in need of productive individuals able to invent multiple scenarios and to produce more than one meaning out of a text, because speed and competitiveness demand hybrid goaloriented personalities who can produce new meanings adapted to fastchanging contexts. These contexts can no longer be defined in relation to mass culture, because culture, nowadays, is already a mix of high or specialized cultures and elements of popular cultures set into high tech or modified traditional media. Therefore, a constant flow of new epistemological and scientific6 paradigms trickling down into public language is especially important, particularly in the contemporary situation when million of people on the planet have completed studies at the college or university level. Within this context, humanities will interact more with media, and media with universities, as a means to disseminate essential knowledge and paradigms, a dynamic which will contribute to a life dedicated to the capitalization of knowledge, and to the constant renewal and updating of the individual’s initial training and education.

6

Patrick Imbert, «Déplacements épistémologiques dans les littératures et les médias des Amériques», L’interculturel au coeur des Amériques, (dir. D. Castillo-Durante et P. Imbert), Colecciòn de las Américas/The Americas Series/Collection des Amériques, Université d’Ottawa / Université du Manitoba, 2002. — 238 —

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Conclusion The process of displacement, which is globalization, will lead simultaneously (1) to more opportunities and yet, temporarily, to less openings for development for some, (2) to increased adaptation to different cultures. Universities, and the Humanities in particular, will help to generalize the legitimacy of geographical and symbolic displacements. Cultures will be transformed by sheer proximity and contact; people will have access to more languages and more expressions of difference. Humanities will help cope with the complexity of cultural competition, a complexity, which is also a new opportunity for creating different and original meanings and relationships. Originality is not to be found in the origin as it has been the case in a modernity valorizing consensual local and national organizations. It is to be developed in the recombination and in the rereading that leads to the production of new significations. This dynamic is particularly important for regions caught nowadays in a painful and hopefully temporary transition between the logic of bureaucratic nation-states and the logic of economic liberalism, that is, a technoglobalization that legitimates displacement.

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Bibliography

Cortazar, Julio. 1975. Hopscotch, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. New York : Avon Books. Accessed on-line http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0117.html Garcìa Canclini, Nestor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Girard, René. 1987. Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of The World. London: Athlone. Imbert, Patrick. 1988. The Permanent Transition. Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana. Imbert, Patrick. 2000. “Globalization, Postmodernism and their Influence on Canadian identities”, Canada Observed: Perspectives from Abroad and from Within. J. Kleist, S. Huffman, editors. New York: P. Lang, p.59-71. Imbert, Patrick. 2002. «Déplacements épistémologiques dans les littératures et les médias des Amériques», L’interculturel au coeur des Amériques, (dir. D. Castillo-Durante et P. Imbert), Colecciòn de las Américas/The Americas Series/Collection des Amériques, Université d’Ottawa / Université du Manitoba. Kurapel, Alberto. 1993. Station artificielle. Montréal : Humanitas. Manganiello, D., Jeffrey, David. 1998. Rethinking the Future of the University. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Tapscott, Don. 1998. Caston. Art, Paradigm Shift. New York: McGraw-Hill. University in the 21st Century. ed. By Steven Muller, Providence, Rhode Island: Berghahn books, 1999.

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Literature Teaching As A Challenge

Since the beginning of literary studies, teachers of literature have been interested in what to teach and how. In the last three decades the questions concerning literature teaching have been subject to constant polemics at the level of university studies and also at all other levels of teaching, often in circumstances that do not favour literature and the teaching of it. Countless conferences and essays have discussed the questions how to teach literature so as to reveal its challenges to the students who prefer visually supported and more easily accessible narrative of film, who are not interested in canonical texts, and who are not willing to make the effort necessary to read longer literary texts on their own. Recently teachers of literature have had to face more radical questions: Why teach literature to disinterested students, and how to justify the study of literature when the end of reading and The Death of Literature (Kernan 1990) have already been announced by several authors. If the value of teaching literature were self-evident, there would be no need to pose such questions and to search for answers to them. If the answers to such questions were easy to find and persuasive enough for everybody, not only for the teachers of literature, the debate about them would not continue from decade to decade. The virulence of the debate testifies to the urgency of demonstrating the importance of literature teaching in the circumstances of decreasing interest in

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literature, paradoxically occurring in the world in need of more human empathy and intercultural understanding and of falling literacy. The quality of literature teaching is considered to be of particular interest in countries where the teaching of literature is at the same time important for literacy, as is the case in Slovenia. Before we can proceed to the examination of possible answers to these questions, we must have a look at how these questions and related issues have been posed, to see who asked them, from what position, with what motivation/intention and purpose, because this influences the proposed answers. The increasing questioning of literature teaching along with the demand for a more student-centred literary studies took a radical turn in the late 1960s, the years of student revolts protesting, among other things, also against the established mostly transmissional teaching of literature and against the accompanying attitudes of professors to students. Student criticism was soon backed by prominent professors. At the colloquium “L’enseignement de la littérature”, held in Paris during 22nd - 29th July 1969, Roland Barthes delivered his famous address “Reflexions sur un manuel” criticising the outdated textbooks of that time and student knowledge about literature as derived from them. In his opinion such teaching reduced the use of literature in adult life to a few answers in crossword puzzles and television quiz shows and to recognising authors’ names at various anniversaries (Barthes 1997 (1971): 71). In Germany several authors came to sympathise with student demands for the reform of literary studies with essays published in Neue Ansichten einer kunftigen Germanistik. Probleme einer Sozial- und Rezeptionsgeschichte der Literatur Kritik, der Linguistik, und Kommunikationswissenschaft (Kolbe 1973). They advocated necessary changes in literary studies by referring to the importance of readers’/ students’ own reading as revealed by the best known German proponents of Rezeptionsaesthetik, Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. The following years saw the publication of countless studies offering new solutions to such questions and arguing for more student-centred teaching. The probing of questions concerning literature teaching in the United Kingdom and the United States ranged from the radical criticism of Peter Widdowson’s analysis of English studies in Rereading English (1982) and the selected papers of the Essex conferences Literature, Politics and Theory: Essays from the Essex Conferences 1976-1984 (edited by Frances Barker and others, 1986) to detailed descriptions of possible student— 242 —

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centred approaches in Robert Scholes’ study Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature in 1985. The total output in this field defies any overview.1 The debate about the deficiencies of the traditional studies and teaching of literature gained additional impetus from the blossoming of reader-response criticism in Anglophone countries and Rezeptionsaesthetik in Germany in the 1970s, which called attention to the centrality of the reader’s own response and production of textual meaning, conceptualised by Iser as the “actualisation” of the literary text. The newly revealed importance of the reader for the construction of meaning changed the perception of the role of students’ own meaning for the teaching of literature. On the basis of accumulated new evidence about the reader’s own contribution to the construction of textual meaning,2 students’ own readings gradually came to be regarded as the most relevant starting point for classroom discussion (See also Sell 2000: 22). As a consequence of this shift the authority of teacher’s own reading and interpretation no longer had priority in the classroom, and the teacher- centred approaches to literature teaching gave way to student-centeredness as the basic principle of interactive teaching. Since such radical changes were naturally not welcome everywhere, there followed an almost continuos flow of studies revealing the failures of the traditional literature teaching and proposing changes if not reforms based on the new findings about literary reading.

1

The publications in the field are too numerous to be read; the following are just some of the studies I have found interesting on different problems: Bergonzi, B. Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture (1990); Brown Ruoff, A. La V. & Ward, J. W. eds. Redefining American Literary History (1990); Elbow, P. What is English? (1990); Fish, S. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995); Graff, G. Beyond Culture Wars: How Teaching Conflict Can Revitalize American Education (1992); Greenblatt, S. & Gunn, G. Redrawing the Boundaries. The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992); Rursch, G. Empirical Approaches to Literature. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (1994); Scholes, R. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998); Schwartz, R. After the Death of Literature (1997).

2

Attention has been drawn to different aspects of the reader's contribution to meaning construction. Stein Olsen (1978:96) points out the necessity of the reader's recourse to her/his extraliterary experience at different levels of reading: “It is a common feature of literary works that they invoke the reader's knowledge of non-literary aspects of the world.” Wolfgang Iser (1978:38) sees the reader's contribution in the fact that “the actual content of (reader's) mental images will be coloured by the existing stock of his experience.” Hirsch calls attention to the highly active mind of the reader “who is now discovered to be not only a decoder of what is written down but also a supplier of much essential information that is not written down.” — 243 —


Among efforts to define more efficient and student centred possibilities of literary studies, Robert Scholes’ work Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature (1985) is of special interest for both its direct criticism of harmful attitudes on the part of literature teachers and its description of the new possibilities of student-centred approaches. Believing that the reverential attitude of the romantic aestheticism to literature is no longer appropriate in an age of verbal manipulation, when students need critical strength to resist the continuous assaults of all media, Scholes proposes that “teaching literature” must stop and “studying texts” start (16): Now we must learn instead to help our students unlock the textual power and turn it to their own uses. We must help our students come into their own powers of textualization. We must help them to see that every poem, play, and story is a text related to others, both verbal pre-texts and social sub-texts and all manner of post-texts including their own responses, whether in speech, writing, or action. The response to a text is itself always a text. Our knowledge is itself only a dim text that brightens as we express it. This is why expression, the making of new texts by students, must play a major role in the kind of course we are discussing. (20)

Scholes’ concept of teaching students productive reading in which they would learn to produce oral and written texts necessitates a redefinition of teacher’s role: Our job is not to produce “readings” for our students but to give them the tools for producing their own… Our job is not to intimidate students with our own superior textual production; it is to show them the codes upon which all textual production depends, and to encourage their own textual practice. (24-25)

Studies along similar lines emphasise that the most important part of teaching literature qua literature is teaching response to literature (Short and Candlin 1988: 179) and that, accordingly, teachers of literature must be equipped with insight into the forms and functions of texts in order to teach students how to bring to life the meaning potential of texts (Van Peer 1988: 267). Several studies demonstrate how to teach and help students to discover not just what a text means, but also how it means: Ronald Carter’s and Paul Simpson’s Language, Discourse and Literature — 244 —

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(1989), Ronald Carter’s and Walter Nash’s Seeing through Language (1990), Henry Widdowson’s Practical Stylistics (1992), and Mick Short’s Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (1996), to name only a few of them. In spite of such intensity of the efforts to stimulate a truly studentoriented teaching that would enable students to read critically on their own, the authors dealing with these issues in the 1990s still find in the field much to be desired. Writing for a special issue of College Literature, significantly entitled “The Politics of Teaching Literature” (17, 2/3: 1990), Zavarzadeh and Morton (1990: 56) would like their students to see that their understanding of texts is a result of their situatedness in a complex network of gender, class, and race relations and to learn to ‘read’ the dominant social systems and its texts against itself. On the other hand, Biddy Martin in his Introduction to the Special Topic issue of PMLA devoted to “The Teaching of Literature” (112, 1: January 1997) believes that teachers and mentors should take the responsibility for alleviating the institutional pressure to master material at the expense of being affected by it. However, in his view “graduate and undergraduate education easily becomes too focussed on teaching students about literature, about interpretation, and about theory without developing pedagogical strategies that encourage students to do for themselves what we put on display–complex, deep, imaginative thinking. (1997: 10)

That is why he pleads for putting the pedagogical concern at the centre of professional and literary exchanges (Ibid., 23). College Literature devoted another special issue to “The Profession of Literature at the End of the Millennium” in 1999. No particular improvement in literary studies seems to be visible from the end of the century perspective (Myrsiades 1999: 1; Schwartz 1999: 5; Cioffi 1999:82), whereas the fully developed psychoanalytically oriented methodology of literature teaching as presented by Bracher (1999: 127) hardly seems practicable. The desire/will to come to terms with these issues continues unabated. PMLA for May 2002 has published the essays of twelve professors trying to answer the two related questions: “Why Major in Literature–What Do We Tell Our Students?” Their essays provide answers calling for improved linguistic and textual competence amounting to students’ better understanding of signifying practices and of — 245 —


beneficial knowledge of how to come to terms with the complexities of contemporary existence.3 The traditional prodesse (to instruct) obviously prevails over delectare (to delight), which has become the domain of visually supported narratives. Yet all the questioning concerning literature teaching along with the attempts to design better curricula on the basis of the achieved understanding of the situation have not resulted in restoring literary studies and literature teaching to the credibility it used to enjoy. Why is this the case? Is this so only because discussing and designing change is easier than implementing it, and because changes of practices backed by such inertia require more effort? Trying to find practical solutions along with theoretical answers to questions about literature teaching that would really enable Slovene students to cope with literary texts on their own and develop broader literacy, we have come to the conclusion that it is not enough for teachers to be persuaded of the importance of literature and to be interested in the theoretical ideas about how to teach it. The most important factor is the students themselves who have to be persuaded of the importance of literature and literary competence, since as long as the students do not share this persuasion they will not develop a lifelong interest in literature. All the possible benefits of reading literature should not be taken for granted but should rather be made as explicit as possible as well as being discussed in detail for each text. Additionally, the discussion of parallel texts–a novel and its filmed version–should sensitise students to the limitations (along with the advantages) of visually supported narratives and emphasise the challenges of the written text and its characteristic demands for active linguistic interaction. The importance of the latter for

3

By way of example: Christina Crosby (2002: 493) writes that “We introduce students to the complexities of language as made evident in metaphors and other tropes (at the level of the word); we demonstrate how literary texts elaborate arguments through figurative language and the structuring process of narrative…” Randolph D. Pope (2002: 503) argues: “the study of literature provides a superb way to think about the world; to study societies, one's own and others; to improve one's capacity to express ideas concisely and effectively; and to gain access to a shared knowledge that is constantly used in allusions in every field of daily life.” And Azade Seyhan (2002: 510) reports: “As literature professors and advisers, we have all along impressed on our students the role of literature in understanding the human condition and its predicaments. We present literature as a powerful alternative way of knowledge; we read it as a social document, as stories of life that history forgot to record…” — 246 —

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students’ cognitive development should be paid special attention. The persuasion of students presupposes arousing their interest and stimulating their active participation with lots of positive support, offering them a suitable challenge together with a vote of confidence and involving them in setting their own goals. Expecting the best from students can be a selffulfilling prophecy. To be effective for the students of today, the persuasion must proceed from their current problems and move away from, or at least update, the traditional defences of the importance of literature in Arnoldian terms. It should show the possibilities of the literary reading to reveal and make understandable for instance the basic Hallidayan functions of language in forming and maintaining human relation, in representing different realities and discoursal possibilities of realising such functions in ways beyond the visually supported narrative of films (Cf. Grosman and Rot Gabrovec 2000: 18 and ff.). A better knowledge of such possibilities of language is an explainable and easily understandable (also acceptable) necessity for students who, immersed in a constant twenty four hour flow of language, are turning into unknowables with questioned identities for themselves and for their teachers, for students whose literacy is falling in circumstances demanding a higher literacy, for students who are no longer able to understand their experience through an organised narrative. A comparative analysis of students’ own concepts as involved in reading and comprehension of literary texts (as shown in our discussion below) can also help students to a better understanding of the constructedness of their social reality through a particular language (Berger and Luckmann 1967) and of the problems posed by the processes of globalization and consequent constant contact of several cultures in ever more multicultural societies. The current generations of students are daily exposed to the media of mass communication that “constantly and emphatically parade a plurality of ways of life and thinking” and thus, unrestricted by any fences of geographical borders, promote pluralism, bringing with it one of its consequences “structural” crisis of meaning (Berger and Luckmann 1995: 38). Growing up in a world in which there are neither common values which determine actions in different spheres of life, nor a single reality identical for all, it is more and more difficult to tell how one should lead one’s life when the unquestioned validity of the traditional order is shaken (Ibid., 29–30). Modern pluralism thus undermines the taken-for— 247 —


granted residing in the realm of unquestioned, secure knowledge, and the world, society and personal identity are called ever more into question (Ibid., 40). The range of options grows beyond imagination, one does not need to chose only what job to take and whom to marry, but can select the gods from a range of possible options, change one’s religious allegiance, one’s citizenship, one’s life-style, one’s image and even one’s sexual habitus (Ibid., 45). The world of countless alternatives and ever present pressure to choose from them is not only more difficult to understand but can also become a very unpleasant if not dangerous place to live in. To make it a more livable-in place takes a complex understanding of intercultural contacts, i.e. a well developed intercultural awareness and a corresponding tolerance. Only through such an intercultural awareness and resulting tolerance can individuals and communities hope to live side by side peacefully, whilst directing their existence towards different values. Both the necessary intercultural awareness and tolerance can be promoted through a challenging interculturally oriented discussion of literary texts. To really help the students to develop literary competence and textual power through their own active involvement, teachers must never forget that students’ own readings, opinions, questions and interpretations are the only acceptable basis of classroom discussion. They must stimulate students’ articulation of their opinions by attentive listening, by voicing their respect and appreciation, and by finding all possible ways how to elicit such responses and avoid stifling them with their own opinions. Betsy Keller (1997: 63) describes the fatal impact of teacher’s own introductory explanation of the text: If the teacher begins the class by lecturing, the students must temporarily suppress their responses and impressions and may conclude that the experience they just had with the text is meaningful only insofar as it prepared them to receive the teacher’s (superior) judgement and analysis. Since students may find speaking about literature a situation of danger of revealing their “incorrect” or otherwise “inappropriate” readings and opinions, great care must be taken to stimulate their self-esteem and persuade them of their ability to speak about literature in socially acceptable ways. They should not only understand that discussing literature can and should be an enjoyable activity, but also have the experience of being able to do it and be respected for it. This is why classroom — 248 —

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discussion should strictly avoid scholasticism and other approaches of teaching that alienate students (Sell 2001: 2).

To avoid teacher dominance and student passivity in literature classroom, teachers must always be aware of the difference between their reading experience and those of the students’ and make sure that the latter is expressed prior to any attempts to upgrade their readings. If students first discuss their readings in small groups, they can see the differences in their understanding and so learn about the processes of meaning production and about the polysemy of texts. Seeing the different readings of their class-mates also reduces students’ anxiety about the ‘correctness’ of their own. For longer texts Slovene students are usually asked to make their own action lines or reading logs so as to feel more secure in mastering the text prior to classroom discussion in which they are first to compare such notes in small groups and to report about their findings. Their reports serve as the basis for drawing the common action line representing readings of the entire class and showing the outstandingly perceived segments of the text as well as the neglected ones. If the teacher is sufficiently attentive to the perspective of students and also to the heterogeneity of their responses, s/he will at this point be able to help the students discover the unnoticed and/or assimilated elements of the text, to consider various possibilities of reading and interpretation, and to see their specific comprehension problems, achieving all this without resorting to prolonged lecturing about it. In discussing the differences among students’ responses, the text’s various ways of inviting such responses through its particular uses of language can be revealed to build up students’ literary competence. On the basis of such discussion students can also be asked to examine already available interpretations of and/or critical statement about the discussed text to find out which of them seems to have the greatest explanatory power for them or appears relevant in other ways. In arguing their own choices from presented critical statements, students come to see various possibilities to deal with different aspects of literary texts, and through arguing for their own readerly and critical preferences achieve a better understanding of their own reading and the factors which influence it. Learning about various possibilities of interpretation and of critical approaches, they also improve their own critical competence and become critical of the opinions of others. They can extend their own

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reading through trying to see the text from the point of view of both fellow students and the authors of existing criticism. When the Slovene students were requested to choose from a list of critical statements and give their reasons for their choices, their answers revealed great interest in critical possibilities and in other people’s readings.4 At this point also students’ own positioning and its influence upon their reading can be problematised, as for instance when they read a foreign text in intercultural contexts. Such contexts often generate differences in reading which remain unnoticed and are consequently underestimated simply because they become visible only when and if special attention is paid to them. Only those teachers who encourage their students to express their opinion and puzzlement and take the trouble to find out what disturbs them, what is beyond their comprehension, what goes against their expectations and makes them uncomfortable in any possible way, may hope to see the differences in the meaning actually produced and to understand their students’ feelings about and attitudes to the text read in an intercultural position. Thus when reading Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Slovene students found Holden to be overcritical of all people, ‘incapable of friendship’ with his room-mates and therefore more or less unlovable, because too ‘self-preoccupied’, though they enjoyed the novel as a whole and agreed with his critical attitude towards his school. Students could reach a better understanding of Holden’s predicament only when they realised that their perceptions of Holden derived from their different–and culture-specific–concept of friendship and of what a friend is expected to be like, as well as what kind of criticism is socially acceptable according to their own standards. Only when they came to see that they had found Holden ‘overcritical’ because in their own culture criticising class-mates and other people would often be considered as a mark of impolite if not bad behaviour, and that their own concept of friends and friendship among class mates did not apply in a more competitive American situation, could they come to see Holden not only from their perspective but also from an American one–and Holden’s own.

4

The first results of my experiments with students and their choices of various critical statements on the basis of their decisions concerning their explanatory power and “ability” to help them connect with various novels and poems are reported in Grosman, M. 1999, Critical Statement in the Classroom. — 250 —

Meta Grosman

In order to see that Holden’s peculiar loneliness and oversensibility become understandable in a different way when seen in their relatedness to his own perception of his social environment in whose competitive atmosphere he can neither reveal his weaknesses nor confide into anybody but his younger sister, students must first become aware of the differences between their own concepts of human relations, for instance of friends and friendship, and the concepts as implied in this novel, or rather, they must develop the necessary intercultural awareness for the appreciation of the less visible differences between the two cultures, their own and the American. To develop such an awareness they must first be able to understand the differences in concepts of what at first seems to be the same thing, i.e. they should learn that what is described as lexical equivalence, or rather, the same meaning of the word denoting ‘the same’ object in two different languages, is seldom really equivalent, especially with such complex words as friend and friendship. They should understand that words, as names for objects, are equivalent in lexical terms only at a very high level of generalisation. In the reality of everyday use words have very peculiar constellations of meaning related to a particular time and space of a specific culture. Students should realise that there are differences between the concepts in their mother tongue and in English, differences in sets of behaviour and in modes of their perception. In other words, that the meaning of the word ‘friend’ is culture-bound and not the same in Slovene and in English, so they should not expect the behaviour related to it in their Slovene situation to apply elsewhere. Only when they come to see that English embodies a different set of beliefs, values and shared meanings, will they be able to reflect on both others and self, Holden’s ideas and their own. To be able to fully understand the differences of another culture and its literary embodiment in a text, students thus need to become aware of their own cultural schemata along with their affective and attitudinal dimensions. Trying to see their own concepts and culturally conditioned schemata from the perspective of a different culture and its different concepts will help them to become aware of what seems ‘normal’ or even ‘natural’ from their own culture only and to accept the fact that other people have other concepts and schemata through which they understand their physical and social world and, accordingly, should not be attributed students’ own expectations and judgements. Such an awareness makes it possible for the students to view The Catcher in the — 251 —


Rye from a dialogical perspective, their own and familiar vs. Holden’s American and unfamiliar; it considerably enhances their language awareness and cognitive development leading to a higher tolerance of differentness. To reach such a level of appreciation, classroom discussion must start from students’ own reading, since only their readings can show what elements and concepts need further examination. Follow-up reading instructions can then focus on modifying and expanding their cultural filter in an organised and consistent manner and showing the complexity and importance of better intercultural understanding. Basing literature teaching on students’ response and establishing actual student responses is particularly important when literature is taught in intercultural contexts in which the differences in reading must be expected to increase because of culturally specific horizons of readers’ expectations. The presented reading and deeper understanding that can challenge the students to see that there are multiple ways of viewing the world, the people and their relationships and persuade them of the importance of meeting this challenge, can only be reached on the basis of thorough discussion and understanding of students’ own readings. If the teacher is attentive to such readings and to their heterogeneity, teaching of the same text will be a challenge raising different problems with different students for her/him also. Seeing the challenges of such reading and teaching can ultimately unite the students and the teacher in the realisation that there exist different possibilities of making sense of human life and different ideas about what matters in it. In our global yet still divided world this realisation is invaluable if we want to contribute to making our world a more livable-in place for all peoples.

Meta Grosman

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Meta Grosman

Works Cited

Barker, F. et al. eds. 1986. Literature, Politics and Theory: Essays from the Essex Conference 19761984. London: Methuen. Barthes, R. 1997 (1971) Reflections on a Manual. (English translation by S. Petrey) Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112: 72–75. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. 1995. Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning. The Orientation of Modern Man. Guetersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers. Bergonzi, B. 1990. Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP. Bracher, M. 1999. Transference, Desire and the Ethics of Literary Pedagogy. College Literature 26 (3): 127–146. Biddy, M. 1997. Introduction. Teaching Literature, Changing Cultures. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112: 7–25. Brown Ruoff, A. La V. and Ward, J. V. eds. 1990. Redefining American Literary History. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. Carter, R. and Simpson, P. eds. 1989. Language, Discourse and Literature. London: Unwin Hyman. Carter, R. and Nash, W. 1990. Seeing through Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Cioffi, F. L. 1999. Post-Millennial Postmodernism: On the Professing of Literature in the Centrifugal Age. College Literature 26 (3): 82 - 94. Crosby, C. 2002. Why Major in Literature–What do we Tell Our Students? Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117: 493–495. Elbow, P. 1990. What is English. New York: MLA; Urbana, IL: NCTE. Fish, S. 1995 Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Graff, G. 1992. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflict Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton. Greenblatt, S. and Gunn, G. eds. 1992. Redrawing the Boundaries. The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. Grosman, M. 1999. Critical Statement in the Classroom. Vestnik 33 (1-2): 23 - 32. Hirsch, E. D. 1987. Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Iser, W. 1978. The Act of Reading. London: Routledge. Keller, B. 1997. Rereading Flaubert: Toward a Dialogue between First- and Second-Language Literature Teaching Practices. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 112: 56–68. Kernan, Alvin. 1990. The Death of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Kolbe, J. ed. 1973. Neue Ansichten einer kunftigen Germanistik. Probleme einer Sozial- und Rezeptionsgeschichte der Literatur Kritik, der Linguistik, und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Muenchen: Carl Hanser. Myrsiades, K. 1999. Introduction. The Profession of Literature at the End of the Millennium. College Literature 26 (3): 1–4. Olsen, S. H. 1978. The Structure of Literary Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Peer, W. Van. 1988. How to Do Things with Texts: Towards a Pragmatic Foundation for the Teaching of Texts. In Short, M. ed. 1988, 267–297. Pope, R. D. 2002. Why Major in Literature–What Do We Tell Our Students? Publications of Modern Language Association of America 117: 503–506. Rursch, G. ed. Empirical Approaches to Literature. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference of the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature, IGEL, Budapest 1994. Siegen: LUMIS-Publications. Scholes, R. 1985. Textual Power. Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. New Haven, CT/London: Yale UP.

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Meta Grosman

Scholes, R. 1998. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven, CT/London: Yale UP. Schwartz, R. 1997. After the Death of Literature. Carbondale, IL and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois UP. Schwartz, R. 1999. Literature’s Year 2000 Problem. College Literature 26 (3): 5 –16. Sell, Roger D. 2000. Literature as Communication. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sell, Roger D. 2001. Mediating Criticism. Literary Education Humanized. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Short, M. ed. 1988. Reading, Analysing & Teaching Literature. London/New York: Longman. Short, M. 1996. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. London/New York: Longman. Short, M. and Candlin, C. 1988. Teaching Study Skills for English Literature. In Short, M. ed. 1988, 178–203. Widdowson, H. G. 1992. Practical Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford UP. Widdowson, P. 1982. Rereading English. London: Methuen. Zavarzadeh, M. and Morton, D. 1990. (Post)modern Critical Theory and the Articulation of Critical Pedagogies. College Literature 17 (3): 51 -63.

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The Changing Form of Fiction: Narrative Technique in Chart Korbjitti’s Time

Introduction

In this paper1 I have used some of the methods and findings in my study of narrative techniques in the novels of American writers conducted earlier. I could trace a continuous development in the influence that the writers received from the predominant media of their time. I followed up on my research with a novel by a Thai writer. I will be looking for explanations in the critical works of David Lodge, Frederick R. Karl and Marvin Magalaner, Robert Martin Adams, Jose Ortega y Gasset, but most of all, Marshall McLuhan. My earlier research revealed that writers have always endeavoured to emphasize the pictorial aspects of their fiction; and the age of modernity gave them an impetus to try modes of representation, which imitated not only art but also the newly discovered technologies. It is possible to trace an interrelation between man’s encounter with these discoveries, and his concept of reality and the changed world on the one hand, and the emergence of modes of writing,

1

Presented at the XXII International Congress of FILLM hosted by Assumption University in August 2002. My thesis entitled “The Emerging Form of Fiction: Some new trends in the fiction of Faulkner, Bellow and Heller”. — 257 —


which reflect these changes in the world at large on the other hand. In fact, a progression in the development of the novel has been discerned by carefully studying how writers have employed new techniques and devices borrowed from non-literary models in the popular culture, such as newspaper layout, advertising, photography, film and television to renew worn fictive forms. The writers need not necessarily be conscious of the impact of modern technology. Writers are thought to alleviate the media’s harmful impact as they incorporate them in their own medium, the written word. This mode of representation is more subtle than direct, and scholars interested in the changing form of fiction have searched for the phenomenon in the works from Joyce to Heller. A recent novel by Chart Korbjitti, however shows, how the Thai writer makes a more conscious effort to incorporate the genres of drama and film to arrive at an innovative narrative technique. Readers are alternately leafing through the pages of a play, or following a shooting script, but they seldom perceive that they are reading a novel. The title page, however, which says, Time, a novel by Chart Korbjitti, constantly reminds them.

Fiction and the Media

If we had to define a novel we would more or less agree that it is a fictitious narrative of considerable length with possible people doing possible things in a possible world. Although the novel is a comparatively recent literary form, the genre has undergone vast changes practically every few decades. As a realistically perceived form, novelists invariably strove to represent reality. In particular, in the last 80 years or so, writers have experimented with the novel by introducing new ways of writing. In his book, The Modern Modes of Writing, David Lodge points out that the novel, for a greater part of the last three centuries, has approximated historical writing rather than any other literary form. He views the novel as a chiefly realistic form which “from the beginnings in the eighteenth century modelled its language on historical writings of various kinds, formal and informal: biography, autobiography, travelogue, letters, diaries, journalism and historiography.” (25)

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Lodge describes the quintessence of the realistic novel thus: This rendering of an individual experience of a common phenomenal world, whereby we share the intimate thoughts of a single character while at the same time being aware of a reality, a history that is large and more complex than the individual in the midst of it can comprehend – this is the characteristic achievement of the nineteenth-century realistic novel of Scott, Jane Austen, Stendhal and Flaubert. (38)

The traditional novel, perhaps until today, resembles history or rather the biographical representation of its protagonist’s experiences in life. Both history and fiction perceived thus are a linear representation of reality. But the novel is by no means a fixed form. The changes that led to man’s understanding of reality are the same changes that bore down on the novel. Critics of the novel never fail to cite the influence of Bergson, Freud, Einstein, Darwin as well as socio-political changes as the cause for finding new ways to represent the new reality of the world in fiction. Authors Frederick R. Karl and Marvin Magalaner in their introduction to Great Twentieth Century Novels explain: As a social and moral document, as well as a contained art form, the novel, from Cervantes’s Don Quixote through Joyce’s Ulysses has responded more quickly and fully to new ideas than any other literary genre. Accordingly, the twentieth-century novel, following the rapid introduction of new models of thought in psychology, natural science and sociology, has reacted boldly to absorb this material into literary communication.

But exactly how the novel has changed and why writers look for new ways of writing is one of the questions touched on in this study. Marshall McLuhan believes that man changed his perception of reality by the media surrounding him. In his book, Understanding Media—The Extensions of Man, he asserts that man is influenced by the media he creates or his extensions, and includes such items as language, the alphabet, the written word, the wheel, the printing press, the telephone, the photograph, the automobile, movies and television, to name a few. Each of these not only alters man’s life but also transforms man’s understanding of reality, he asserts. It is, therefore, that the inventions and new technologies when they came, had a profound effect on writers, and with the advent of photogra— 259 —


phy and later film; writers began to raise questions about reality itself and turn their backs on traditional modes of representation. Marshall McLuhan explains thus: Perhaps the great revolution produced by photography was in traditional arts. ... The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned instead to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers already knew what was happening in photo, press, film and radio. The poet and the novelist turned to those inward gestures of the mind by which we achieve insight and by which we make ourselves and our world. Thus art moved from outer matching to inner making. (194)

Research conducted on how the media have influenced the novel, the written word, would have us believe that these changes are necessary for the survival of the writer’s art, because the poet or writer must adopt his medium, as it were, to a new mode of expression, or let us say language, that can best be understood by the people of his age.

Chart Korbchitti’s Craft

Chart Korbjitti, who writes in Thai, has experimented with a new form with almost every book he published. It is as if he held his fingers on the pulse of society to find a way to speak through the most suitable medium. A powerful storyteller who explored the theme of guilt in his novel, The Judgment, he soon used his camera-sharp descriptions in “The Personal Knife,” an extended metaphor of cannibalism to hold a mirror up to our own dark inner selves. By the time Chart Korbjitti writes Time, the novel I wish to discuss here, he uses cinematic technique more consciously and unabashedly than any other writer has done before. He deliberately breaks up the surface of the narration by the protagonist and inserts what looks like shooting scripts as well as stage directions and actual dialogue of a drama performance. Time, then, is the story of a movie director who sits in a theatre witnessing a stage performance put on by people all in their early twenties about the feelings of the elderly. As the movie director waits for something to happen on stage, he is thinking about time. The time on the — 260 —


stage is 4:45 a.m. But the action does not start deliberately before the clock on the stage strikes five times. The performance he is attending is the 7 o’clock show in the evening. The play depicts one day in the life of the inmates of an Old People’s home. When the play ends it is 7 o’clock in the evening. The day’s events begin with waking up in the morning, bathing, giving alms, taking breakfast, receiving visitors, etc. until the inmates go to sleep. Chart Korbjitti exploits not only the unusual angle: young people performing a play about old people, but also uses an inverted time sequence, which makes readers wonder about time. While in his plot the writer dwells mostly on the quotidian, he is able to convey to his readers the philosophical underpinnings of the Buddhist way of life with its preponderance for thinking the unthinkable. To show the power of Chart Korbjitti’s writing, here is the description of the clock that the protagonist sees on the stage as the curtain rises: …The clock does not merely look old: its wood is worn-out and you can see the chips and cracks of its enamel, frittered away by time. The accumulated grime and dust also testifies that no one takes care of it. But its pendulum still moves from side to side, as it must, unconcerned by the marks of deterioration on the body of the clock. (5)

Integrating his narrative technique with artistic coherence, Chart Korbjitti uses the mask of the movie director occupied with his thoughts in the darkness of the theatre and his imaginary camera to explore transcendental truths. The universal themes of old age and sickness, life and death, time and reality are not new, but the ways they are brought home are. Ever so often the movie director’s musings go off at a tangent. He not only watches the performance on stage with a critical eye, but also describes how he would have shot such a scene. Readers are constantly aware of the two different art form, film and drama. Film, for the movie director, is a more superior means of representation; because the camera can zoom, or close up to highlight visually what actors on the stage have to spell out, or rather act out. Here is an excerpt from the novel (42-43): I think if this were a movie, things would go faster than this time-wasting ladling out of food to tray after tray. Before the patients got their trays and walked back to their beds and were — 261 —


finished eating, people would long have fled the movie house. I think we should back a little and start like this. Close up

Close-up

Voice over (Ubon)

(High-angle shot.) Of bits of shallots and fried garlic spread over the surface of the water, steam drops clinging to the inside of the pot. A dark podgy hand holding the ladle stirs the whole. The ladle takes gruel and dumps it in the main compartment of a tray. One sees the rice gruel and morsels of pork all over the section. The picture slowly fades away. (High-angle shot.) The picture slowly comes into focus. Of Old Yoo’s parched lips opening up. Inside there are not teeth left. Her pale pink tongue is seen moving a little. Ubon’s hand slowly drives a spoonful of gruel into the gaping mouth. It takes a long time for the gruel in the spoon to slide into the mouth. Finally, the spoon leaves the scene. Only the mouth remains, with gums patiently munching—to make you feel there are no taste buds left to savor the food. “Is it good?” /Cut (46)

What the movie director sees on stage has not only a profound effect on his readers but also on himself. Although he is our eyes, so to say, he is also that protagonist who is actively participating in the events on the stage. I sit watching the three of them [nurses] going about their work. It looks no different from feeding babies, having to feed them food as well as water, to threaten as well as entreat. The only difference is that the babies we see here have big desiccated bodies and are close to death. They are not an appealing sight, unlike little babies who will grow up by the day and look so cute, a treat to the eye and the heart. (47)

Description, narration and dialogue in traditional novels have been replaced in the novel Time with movie scripts and bits from a playwright’s manuscript, all of which help create a visual impact similar to that of film and TV.

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Here is an excerpt from what is part of the stage performance. “At the same time the other nurse (Ubon) is wiping the body of the old woman on Bed 4 of the right row. (Counting from Old Yoo’s bed) ... Radio

Lamjiak

Radio

‘Good morning, my dear listeners. We meet as usual in the country news report. Today we start with the most important national item, which I think all of us Thai brothers and sisters all over the world are already aware of, that is that now our country has another new Miss Universe, Miss Phornthip, the second for Thailand. The first was Miss Aphatsara. I’m certain you all remember her very well, because she brought fame to our country by making it known to the nations of the world. Even though at the time our country was poor and few people in the world knew of it, Miss Aphatsara stunned the world with the beauty of Thai women. She made people all over the world realize that, though our country was poor, it was rich indeed in terms of the beauty of its women. And now Miss Phornthip is living proof again of this in the eyes of the world. She was crowned Miss Universe unanimously, to the delight of all of us, Thai brothers and sisters. This is no small feat, my dear listeners, because few countries in the world have as many as two Miss Universes. … What does this mean, if not that the beauty of Thai women is truly world class and that it’s hard to find women anywhere who can compete with our Thai women as far as beauty is concerned’. (Grabs the naked body of the old woman of Bed 1 and turns it over on its side, presenting the bottom to the audience, then proceeds to wipe her back.) ‘—and I strongly believe that in future contests Thailand will have yet more Miss Universes…’ (52-53)

It is often said that the new generations raised on daily exposure to sound and sight of television have lost their verbal imagination. Chart Korbjitti’s technique simply imitates, through the power of the word, what modern media can present, namely actions to be seen and words to be heard. In short, the author uses what modern audiences like best to send forth his message. — 263 —


Significance

Now the question remains that having gained a receptive readership, how does the author’s narrative technique add to the significance of his message. The play on the inner feelings of the elderly that the movie director sees on stage is nothing but a picture of life in old age. The movie director, aged 63 becomes aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, of what old age really means. Although he knows the natural truth of sickness, old age and death, which he too has experienced in his life, seeing these conditions on stage strikes him like a revelation. “To tell you frankly, when I see something like this [the old and dying], I’m scared. Scared to lie on a bed like this.” (47)

The fact that the movie director does not have a name is also significant. Reinforced by strong symbolisms, the players on stage represent both the local (they are Thai people in the old people’s home living out the vicissitudes of life) and the universal (they are human beings left alone by their relatives and all on the verge of death). Other characters in the novel are named the father, the grandmother, the son, the worker, or they are called according to their chief characteristic, such as Old Nuan (a kind and gentle lady) and Old Sorn (the one who teaches). The latter woman lives up to her reputation as a wise woman in the playful banter with a visiting schoolboy. The conversation is a clear reflection of the wisdom of the old, in particular, in that they accept things are they are, which is a pronouncedly Buddhist concept. The son (Looks at the bowl.) “The ice is all melted.” Old Sorn (Uninterested.) “Never mind. It’s ice, so it melts. If it was a piece of stone, maybe it wouldn’t melt. It’s doing its duty as it is. Or what do you think?” The son (Laughs.) “You are too much, you know.” Old Sorn (Laughs.) “I’m tellin’ the truth.” The son (Laughs.) I wasn’t arguing, was I? You know if my gran was like you, I’d spend the whole day talking with her.” Old Sorn “How come? Don’t you talk with your grandmother?” The son “Not much. I don’t know what to talk about with her. She’s always grumbling and being fussy.” — 264 —


Old Sorn “Old people, let me tell you, can be annoyin’.” The son “But I’m not annoyed with you at all.” Old Sorn “If you were with me all day, you would be, believe me.” (Laughs.) (112)

But the most symbolical of all the characters in the play is an old man who none of the inmates has ever seen. He lives in a cell in their ward and keeps shouting periodically, “There is nothing, absolutely nothing.” The stage performance often brings to mind “The Caretaker” and “Waiting for Godot.” The exploitation of the media and the deliberate mix of other forms of representation and genres have a unique effect on the reader. Robert Martin Adams in his book, Afterjoyce – Studies in Fiction After Ulysses noted way back in the 1970s that “artists and writers began to break the smooth surfaces of their works, and therefore were called ‘nonrepresentational’ but the works in art or fiction like that of Joyce and Kafka do not fail to represent.” (17) A memorable comparison between traditional and modern modes of representation was also made by Jose Ortega y Gasset. “The work of art is a window-pane,” he says, “works of realism look through the glass and make it invisible, while modernist works focus on the glass instead and see only a confused blur of colour and forms.” (10) Despite all the visual elements introduced through the setting on the stage, Chart Korbjitti’s narrative technique is indeed opaque. His technique calls for a heightened involvement by the reader, who has to work hard to reconstruct the novel’s plot. Strangely enough, young readers, having ignored literature and novels for long, have expressed great interest in reading this novel. Perhaps not for anything else, but to solve the play’s major puzzle in the plot. At the end of the play, or rather novel, there are more questions than answers. At one point of the novel the protagonist seems to arrive at a realization with these lines, something that Ezra Pound would have loved: “It is only an empty room. It is only an empty room. An empty room.” (232)

To summarize, Chart Korbjitti has experimented with the form of the novel, like other Western writers, to revive worn fictive forms for the survival of the novel. It is easy to perceive the impact that the media — 265 —


had on the Thai writer, it is also possible to speak of “influence”, and the extent by which Chart Korbjitti appears global, but he is also steeped in the local with his themes and the Buddhist outlook on life directed to the Thai readership. But discerning reader can easily recognize the universal truths embedded in this novel.


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Works Cited

Adams, Robert Martin. 1977. Afterjoyce – Studies in Fiction After Ulysses. New York: Oxford University Press. Chart Korbjitti. 1993. Time. Nakhon Ratchasima: Howling Books. (Translated from the Thai by Marcel Barang.) Karl, Frederick R. and Marvin Magalaner. 1968. Great Twentieth Century Novels. London: Thames and Hudson. Lodge, David. 1980. The Modern Modes of Writing. First Indian Edition: Arnold Heinemann. McLuhan, Marshall. 1975. Understanding Media – The Extension of Man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ortega y Gasset, Jose. 1968. The Dehumanization of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Journeys in Writing: Technology and Literature As the Art of Possibility

The Socio-cultural Approach to Teaching Literature Online to Pre-tertiary Indigenous Australians

Ways of acquiring and using reading and writing vary from culture to culture, from context to context. People are informally socialised into the local, culture-specific literacy practices of the families and communities in which they are immersed (Auerbach, 1999, Gee, 1996). Many Indigenous Australian students are required to develop the ability to culturally code switch (Malcolm, ) in order to engage in tertiary academic literacies because of a lack of exposure to the culture-specific immersions of academia. Indigenous students entering pre-tertiary courses are often novices when it comes to literature and the practice of writing. Many students have reported that they had never read a book of fiction before entering the course. Therefore, to work effectively with the range of literacy practices that Indigenous students bring to the unit it is important to begins with students’ narrative understandings. To explore these understandings students are taken in the lives of two contemporary Indigenous authors through the use of an interactive CD to learn something of how the featured writers acquired and use creative writing practices. — 269 —


This interaction helps incorporate students’ own cultural, historical and narrative understandings into their university studies. Culturespecific content, relevant genres and purposes are thus encouraged (Auerbach, 1999) and students’ cultural knowledge and ways of using literacy become a bridge to new learning. Writing becomes a site for social and cultural affirmation.

Using Technology to the Teaching of Language and Literature

Technology is changing everything. The web has become an immensely powerful medium for accessing and disseminating information. We are becoming increasingly networked to new sets of ideas, values and communities. People can find people with like minds, interests or concerns, in ways that were never before possible. All meaning in a post-modern world is now completely up for grabs. Indigenous students through a wider participation in the making of story come to understand how they have been constructed in the broad sweep of history and can begin to see how they participate in their own constructions and narratives. As Gee (1996) reminds us that all words and concepts only take on signification because of sets of associated, situated meanings. Students through their engagement with literature begin to see their own lives and identities at the intersections of sets of associations. The value of the online-multimedia unit ‘Journeys in Writing’ is multiple. The unit is a step in the process toward Indigenous students gaining university entrance, but it can also be many other things. The technology like any online unit makes it possible for students at a distance to communicate on complex issues in with a lecturer. The unit gives students the opportunity to explore the transformative project of turning life into fiction, to make critical comment on the process, to publish on line, to broaden contacts and learn about how others have processed history, culture and language into a social vision. The student learns much about the artistic constraints of form, knowledge and craft. Teaching online gives the student time to think and negotiate variations on tasks. Email keeps a running dialogue on issues and problems, proposals and solutions.

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Greg Stratton & Donna Czekalowski

Students through both the creative and the analytic pieces of writing come to understand much about the practice of drafting, editing and proofreading, as well as learning about the sliding nature and politics of genre. Students also come to an appreciation of writing for an audience/s and in the context of literature itself, the value of voice. The use of technology in this unit contributes to making larger spaces for Indigenous voices within the mainstream space (Lankshear and Knobel, 1998).

Background to Project

The history of policies since colonisation has served to disempower, control and alienate Aboriginal people and has this undoubted implications for the way in which Aboriginal people interact with institutions. Educational institutions historically have played a major role in this production of socio-cultural inequality (Luke, 1993, p. 4) and have not contributed in any significant way in changing the social, political and economic status of Indigenous Australians as a whole. There are currently many debates about the ways that more equitable educational outcomes can be gained by Indigenous Australians. Educational institutions that do not find spaces to value, acknowledge and use Aboriginal discourse(s) as legitimate discourses within their program offerings do nothing to change the status quo (Osborne and Dick). Educationalists (Luke, 1992, Green, 1993, Nataka, 2002, Kalantzis, Gee, 1996, Lemke, 1995) argue that multi-literacies project may provide strategies to improve participation of groups under-represented in higher education. The multi-literacies projects have been built in part as a response to what Stuart Hall (1996) has described as “New Times”. Hall describes that citizens of the world are living in period of unparalleled change where the old social and economic orders and demarcations are radically moving toward new formulations. The multiple literacies movement is responding to issues about the types of citizens and the types of identities that these “New Times” that are forging. The tensions and contradictions for educational curriculum decisions to meet these new affiliations and alliances are nowhere more evident and problematised than in Adult Indigenous Education.

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Indigenous Pre-tertiary programs, bridging or tertiary enabling programs as they are sometimes called in Australia, provide an alternative pathway for Indigenous students to degree programs. An institutional starting position for the provision of tertiary university pathways for many Indigenous Australian adults requires an appreciation of the politics and ethics of the learning process context. Most importantly it requires a planned and long term commitment to emancipatory change. Students have an enormous learning curve if they have not had an appropriate apprenticeship in the privileged and powerful mainstream academic discourses (Gee, 1996) of the university. Most universities take considered steps to address this by offering tertiary study skills units to help address this. In the case of Indigenous Australians, students often carry the psychological baggage of an education system that had previously ‘failed’ them and usually prefer to develop tertiary literacies in an Indigenous preparatory context. Contemporary educators having the benefit of a more sophisticated set of language and learning theories now usually make the socio-linguistic-political nature of the medium they teach through, language and ‘literacy’, more overt to students and part of the learning process. Language and literacy now is as much the target outcome as it is the vehicle of learning. Many educators working in the field of Indigenous pre-tertiary education practice a literacy that is about learning to read and write ‘against the grain’. It is an oppositional tactic that aims to engage those coming outside the discourses of power with the language, literacy and genre practices privileged at university ( Faiclough,1997, Kalantzis ,Cope& Slade 1989). However, much more than being just oppositional, the position is more about the relational tactics required for these ‘New Times’. Teachers and students are now interested in renegotiating issues of curriculum in ways in which students see themselves ‘meaningfully’ reflected, a curriculum which both interrogates the past knowledge foundations but which also engages with the aspirations that students have in the face of the emerging new technologies, new social formations and economic conditions (Luke, 1998). To place Indigenous educational rights, a subset of human rights, in some sort of context, it is important to recognise that it was official government policy in Australia for the greater part of the twentieth century to ‘absorb’ and assimilate Indigenous people into the European population (RCIADIC, 1991). Much of the national pain and soul — 272 —


searching that is going on in both the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous populations at the moment stems from the forced separations of thousands of Indigenous children from family and community. Australia was colonised by England in 1788 and deemed to be ‘nerra nullus’, an empty land. It was only just over 10 years ago that the myth of terra nullus was overturned in High Court of Australia, and legal recognition was given that Australia’s Indigenous peoples had a limited right to land under native title. Indeed, Australia’s Indigenous peoples only won the right to become citizens in 1967. Within this overly simplistic potted history of the last 200 years it is still easy to understand why Indigenous Australians are wanting to acquire the strategies to participate more fully in Australian society. As a result of this history Indigenous Australians are in complex social and economic positions that have huge implications and dilemmas for education. Martin Nakata, an educator and critical theorist (2002) asks the question ‘just where are Aboriginal people positioned in all this’. Nakata is adamant that educators need to move away from the language of ‘difference’, of ‘minority’, of ‘oppressed’, of ‘other’. Nakata believes that ‘language learning needs to go back to the drawing board’. He pleads to Australian educators to ‘give us the codes to break into the bank. Look at the learner as a process of change. Build a curriculum around the notion of change’. McPhee & Walker (2002, p8) believe that ‘the new citizen needs to have an informed understanding of the social and political realities that contribute to individual and collective socio-economic disadvantage and political marginalisation together with the necessary skills and commitment to change it’.

Developing Critical Social Literacies in the Pre-tertiary Context

Advances in on-line technologies have opened up new opportunities that Indigenous Australian students can utilise to develop the academic and critical literacies required to successfully enter and negotiate degree studies. The on-line unit ‘Journeys in Writing’ is using technology to introduce literature to new audiences in dynamic and culturally relevant and negotiated ways. ‘Journeys in Writing’ the focus of this paper, is a pre-tertiary unit for Indigenous Australians that adopts a critical and multiple-literacy — 273 —


approach and is concerned with reading and writing the social, political and cultural worlds within which Indigenous Australian students are working and living. By using multi-media content that is based in Indigenous experience, ‘Journeys in Writing’ aims to re-position Indigenous experience and voices at the centre of the learning process. The unit foregrounds the work and point of view of Indigenous writers and aims to support students to demystify much about how academic and literary texts and readers work to construct meanings. The critical pedagogy supported in ‘Journeys in Writing’ unit foregrounds that the idea that the process of reading and writing are filtered through the frames of cultural values and worldviews. Taking direction from Luke and Freebody (1997) the pre-tertiary program as a whole, aims to support a literacy practice that is useful for everyday lives; a literacy which is vital for a multi-mediated, fast-capitalist, contemporary society. In this way the course and unit’s literacies are about tooling up for pragmatic life realities. The ‘Journeys in Writing’ unit focuses on writers and writing inspired from social contexts that have contemporary resonances for students. This content becomes a context for exploring social and political issues that in turn becomes a mechanism for students taking action to improve their own situations (Auerbach, 1999). This literacy position is the polar opposite of the ‘ignorance is bliss position’ that prevailed during much of many students’ former primary and secondary education. The unit helps the students to develop the frameworks to make critical readings of powerful texts, how to attend to the contexts in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous texts are produced, interpreted and the worlds and readers they reflect (Fairclough, 1993). As critical readers the students become aware of how texts construct and constrain ways of thinking and position identities.

Engaging Pre-tertiary Students in Higher Education Discourses

For the teaching practice to be relevant it must offer students the knowledge, skills and values they will need to critically negotiate and transform the world in which they find themselves (Giroux, 1990, p. xv). This capacity building involves students becoming adept in what Giroux calls ‘border crossing’. This is not just a future oriented activity but is a — 274 —


critical practice that is exercised daily as a student. For a learner to become ‘literate’ in a discourse requires that the teaching and the student be attentive to the problems and histories that construct their experiences in their everyday lives as both students and social beings. A critical literacy pedagogy confronts the social, political and ideological contexts of the academic literacy learning and teaching context, and does not turn away from all the inherent dilemmas of such attention. Topographical metaphors abound in academic discussions relating to language and discourse. These metaphors are useful precisely because they focus teachers and their learners attention on the aim of students’ learning enterprise which is to gain access to the ‘goods’ of society. These ‘goods’ students learn, are always protected by gate keepers who monitor credentials. Friere (1985) speaks of this gaining access to social and economic goods when he talks about people learning ways of naming the world and speaking its secret codes. Gee (1994) reminds us that the way that we choose to define literacy is dependent upon social, political and economic influences, and the ways that we choose to define and implement literacy programmes will have social and other consequences. For educators, the literacies we choose to induct students into, the literacies we privilege will regulate students’ access to relations of knowledge, power and authority. Sreet’s (1984, p. 2) pedagogy of literacy points to a practice the course and unit supports by offering students the knowledge and ability to critically negotiate and transform their experience of life; one that prepares them as political agents capable of shaping and locating their place in history. Walton (1993) agues that critical social literacies are necessary for active participation in post-industrial society. A critical literacy, one that challenges the ‘taken for grantedness’ of social phenomena, sets up a dialectic that critical educators argue can be both motivational and empowering (Lemke, ). This literacy position also recognises, that without access to mainstream literacy practices, people remain relatively powerless. Literacy then, as many have long argued is closely related to issues of power and identity.

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Transforming Life Experience Into Literature

Students are taken into the world of contemporary Indigenous Australian authors where they learn about the process of transforming life experience into literature. Students can see and hear the writers discussing their work. Some researchers have argued that this type of verbal and visual representation of content can be highly relevant and engaging to the Indigenous student group (Smith and Ward, 2000, p. 8; Henderson, 1993, p. 327). By presenting ‘real life’ scenarios and people, students come to feel at ease with the content. Indigenous voices and representations are promoted. In turn, this encourages students to engage in the writing process themselves. Students “share their stories, find their voices and celebrate their cultures” (Auerbach, 1999). The use of contemporary Indigenous authors talking about their own writing processes opened up a universe of interrelated themes that was found to be highly relevant to the target student audience. Whilst the featured writers are successful in that they have produced work to high critical acclaim, many aspects of their own lives and struggles are not dissimilar to those of our students. They write and speak on issues that cut to the heart of contemporary Indigenous identity, history and politics. The writers are individuals whose lives are firmly embedded in the struggle of ordinary Indigenous people. The authors use their life experiences in ways they make quite explicit to students to inform their writing processes. The two writers featured in the unit model writing practices that act as a catalyst for the students’ own creative writing development. In this way a rapport is built with the students, one that we, as teachers, may not normally have been able to achieve. The authors ‘invite’ the student to enter their world and this in turn has allowed the teachers of the unit, to form a learning relationship with students. In the process of developing the multimedia learning resource the featured authors directed the flow of content from a set of structural prompts. The voice of the writers speak directly to the student, telling their stories in a way that students can identify with, authentically as Indigenous people first, and as Indigenous authors second. The writers read their literature to their student audience and take students into their world behind the production of their literature. Their stories are — 276 —


passed on and also something of a collective cultural history and also, importantly, the language skills they use to do so (Villa, 2002). The featured authors provide much of the learning scaffolding by guiding students through their work samples by way of their comments and reflections on their work. In this way, the authors become the students’ “coaches” (Herrington and Oliver, 1995). The authors introduce students to practices that demystify the writing process. The CD includes learning resources such as a Literary Jigsaw that contains supporting information about the writing process, a historical overview of Aboriginal writing in the ‘Meet Some Writers’ timeline section and samples of other Indigenous Australian writers’ work. Students work through analysis activities and encounter commentary on existing Indigenous texts to support the development of their own creative and academic texts. Students thus enter the community of indigenous writing through practice, analysis, apprenticeship and reflection (Warschauer, 1997).


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References

Auerbach, E. 1999. The power of writing, the writing of power. Available http://gseweb.harvard.edu/~ncsall/fob/1999/elsa’sarticle.html Fairclough, N. (ed.) 1993. Critical Language Awareness. London: Longman. Friere, P. 1985. The politics of education. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Gee, J. 1994. Orality and literacy: From the savage mind to ways with words. In J. Mayben (Ed.), Language and literacy as social practice (pp. 168-192). Clevedon: Multilingual matters in association with Open University Press. Gee, J. 1996. Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in Discourses. London: Falmer Press, Second Edition, Giroux, H. 1990. Series introduction: Literacy, difference, and the politics of border crossing. In C. Mitchell & K. Weiler (Eds.), Rewriting literacy: Culture and the discourse of the other. New York: Bergin and Garvey. Green, B. ed. 1993. The Insistence of the Letter: Literacy Studies and Curriculum Theorizing. London: Falmer Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. 'The meaning of New Times', in David Moreley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies London: Routledge. Henderson, L. 1993. Interactive multimedia and culturally appropriate ways of learning. In C. Latchem, J. Williamson & L. Henderson-Lancett (Eds.), Interactive multi-media: Practice and promise (pp. 189-203). London: Kogan Page. Herrington, J., & Oliver, R. 1995. Critical characteristics of situated learning: Implications for the instructional design of multimedia. In Pearce, J. & Ellis, A. (Eds.), ACSILITE95 Conference Proceedings (pp. 253-262). Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Imel, S. 1998. Technology and adult learning: Current perspectives. ERIC Digest No. 197. Available http://ericacve.org/docs/dig197.htm Kalantzis, M., Cope, B., & Slade, D. 1989. Minority Languages and Dominant Culture. London: The Falmer Press. — 278 —


Kurongkurl Katitjin. 1999. Preparing indigenous people for university studies: A review of preparatory courses provided by Kurongkurl Katitjin, School of Indigenous Australian Studies, Edith Cowan University. Perth, W.A. Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. 1997. Critical literacy and active citizenship. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke & P. Freebody (Eds), Constructing critical literacies (chap 6, pp. 95-124). Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. 1998. Critical literacy and new technology. Paper presented at the American Education Research Association, San Diego. Available http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1160/critlitnewtechs.html Lemke, Jay. 1995. Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics. Pages 80-99. London: Taylor and Francis. Luke, A. 1992. Literacy and work in new times. Open Letter, 3 (1): 3-15. Luke. A. 1993. The social construction of literacy in the primary school. In L. Unsworth (Ed.), Literacy learning and teaching: Language as social practice in the primary school (chap. 1, pp. 2-53). Melbourne: Macmillan Education. Luke, A., & Freebody, P. 1997. Shaping the social practices of reading. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke. & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice (chap. 12, pp. 185- 225). St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Nakata, M. 1995. Culture in education: A political strategy for us of for them? Ngoonjook. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 11, May 1995, pp. 40-61. Nakata, M. 2001. Key note address: The Eighth International Literacy and Education Research Network Conference on Learning Spetses, Greece, July 4-8, 2001 Spetses, Greece, July 4-8, 2001. Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) (1991). Final Report. Volumes 1-5, AGPS, Canberra. Smith, C. & Ward, G. K. 2000. Globalisation, decolonisation and Indigenous Australia. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 3-11. Street, B. V. 1984. Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Villa, D. 2002. Integrating technology into minority language preservation and teaching efforts: An inside job. Language learning and technology, 6 (2), 92-101. Walton, C. 1993. Literacy in Aboriginal contexts: Re-examining pedagogy. In A. Luke & P. Gilbert (Eds.), Literacy in contexts: Australian perspectives and issues (chap 3, pp. 39-45). St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Warschauer, M. 1997. A sociocultural approach to literacy and its significance for CALL. In K. Murphy-Judy & R. Sanders (Eds.), Nexus: The convergence of research and teaching through new information technologies (pp. 88-97). Durham: University of North Carolina.

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A Revolutionary Medium: the World Wide Web in Peace Activism

Introduction

By now, any declarations on how the World Wide Web has brought people together and made for faster communications are redundant. The effects are there, visible and inescapable. So, too, is the debate surrounding the good or evil nature of the Internet. Simply put, each organization does what it will with its small plot in cyberspace. We have all become homesteaders, claiming our virtual space and using it to grow ideas and sell them to others. So what is left to write about? Perhaps not much in terms of theory. But case studies are still interesting, since they may always illustrate and inspire others in their work. This is especially important to those of us involved in NGOs and similar efforts. We have seen how groups once dependent on large-scale mailings, meetings, and simply word-of-mouth actions have experienced a revival of grass-roots activities in cyberspace. It is as simple as the fact that we can work more quickly and efficiently, and at a larger scale. The Internet has allowed us to reach many more people, to conduct campaigns through email and provide online documentation to people interested in studying or supporting our efforts.

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This paper examines how both NGOs and smaller grassroots peace movements have benefited from the Internet, both in their active (campaigns) and more static (document archives, resource centres) facets. I will also describe the process of setting up such a system with the example of the TRANSCEND: Art and Peace Network. Part 1 is an overview with case studies, and Part 2 focuses on the creation of the Art and Peace Network.

Part 1 – Online Peace Activism: Characteristics and Case Studies

What are the benefits? The case studies presented in this section are representative of different organizations and types of action. Nevertheless, they have several things in common that have made the use of the World Wide Web significant in their activity and even their basic philosophy. They all rely on large-scale participation in their calls for action, and most of them have also become repositories for documents and data. In both these tasks, the World Wide Web has allowed their activities to develop faster and involve more people. People in Action First, while they employ permanent or part-time staff, the success of NGOs and similar groups depend largely on volunteers who work both in situ and long-distance. Volunteers, donors, and sympathizers keep these organizations going, through financial/material support and activities such as letter-writing campaigns and participation in protests, conferences, etc. Volunteers have traditionally come to know of these organizations through local chapters, the media, and word of mouth. However, their ability to participate depended on the existence of a local group, or in its absence an “easy” way to donate time and/or money, such as receiving newsletters and sending regular financial aid. However, when a local group or accessible centre did not exist, the motivation to join a group also suffered. Therefore, even though a person might praise the efforts of Amnesty International or UNICEF and support its mission, they might not go so far as to seek out a way to take action, because starting up a local chapter does take a lot of time and energy, and is thus not convenient for everyone. With their use of the World Wide Web, NGOs and other humanitarian activist groups have made it easier for people to join. Once you sign — 282 —

Maria Luisa Antonaya

up online, you will be able to devote as much or little time as you can. Online participation can range from joining an email forum to receiving action alerts that will ask the volunteer to send a letter or an email, or make a phone call to a media, government, or other entity. Amnesty International (http://www.amnesty.org), for example, now runs its Urgent Action campaigns online. An Urgent Action consists of an immediate letter-writing (or emails, phone calls, faxes, etc.) campaign to save someone who is being tortured, threatened with death (execution), or in dire need of medical attention. The urgency of these cases has turned online action into a great blessing, and Urgent Action Networks linked to Amnesty International have formed a strong presence in cyberspace. This stronger capacity to organize can also have a positive effect on activities that require “physical” participation, such as protests, vigils, and conferences. MoveOn: Democracy in Action (http://www.moveon.org) recently organized an worldwide candlelight vigil on the eve of the U.S.led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The overwhelming response to this call would have impossible without its mailing lists and website. On March 16, over 6,000 vigils were held around the world (see news stories: http://www.moveon.org/press/moveonpress.html), at 19:00 local time: the first ones took place in New Zealand, and as the day progressed around the world, more locations held their own vigils. Participants were asked to take digital photos and send them to MoveOn’s organizers via email. The result was an immediate, constantly developing photo album of these events, posted as soon as they occurred (pictures: http://www.moveon.org/ vigil/). Extensive news coverage gave the gatherings additional strength, and the world of peace activists knew a renewed sense of community. Democracy in Action has also organized a network called Media Corps, which acts in cases of biassed reporting in television, radio, and print media. Media Corps members receive email alerts whenever such a case is exposed, and are asked to email, write, or phone and the newspaper, radio station, etc., involved. Members have their own page within the MoveOn website, where they can “check off” the alerts they have responded to and catch up on ones they may have missed (more information: http://www.moveon.org/mediacorps/). The system has been organized so that the user-volunteers have control over the activities they engage in and the amount of time and effort they can spend aiding the organization. We can also see that “quick action” groups have proliferated. The Hunger Site (http://www.thehungersite.com) allows visitors to click on a — 283 —


link that results in a food donation by corporate sponsors. This same formula is used by The Rainforest Site (http://www.therainforestsite.com), the Breast Cancer Site (http://www.thebreastcancersite.com), the Child Health Site (http://www.thechildhealthsite.com), and the Animal Rescue Site (http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com). Overall, the speed and numbers supporting humanitarian actions has increased dramatically with the use of the World Wide Web. We can now spend as much–or as little–time as we can/want helping out with time and money. Some may argue that NGOs have, in this sense, become little more than e-commerce hubs, but an Urgent Action is precisely that–urgent–and the faster we can work, the better. Information Everywhere The second way that peace activism has benefited from the World Wide Web is through its ability to collect and distribute information. News travels faster than even before, thanks to the Internet, and this certainly comes with a caveat: the Internet surfer must be careful to check for creditable sources and look out for dangerous biases. Just as there are hundreds of groups working to make the world a better place, there are also self-styled “researchers” with homepages denying that the Holocaust took place, or proposing theories on “superior” races, religions, etc. Bigotry and hatred, too, have seen their opportunity in this hyper-fast communications medium, and the low cost (often no-cost) of a small cyberterrain allow almost anyone to share their views. Nevertheless, for creditable research institutes and NGOs, the Internet–which did, in fact, start out as a way for researchers to share documents–has become a mega-library where we can read everything from the latest reports on human rights violations to the history of certain ethnic conflicts. Economics, political science, activism and theory ... the Web has become a powerful and empowering source of knowledge. No longer limited to a handful of media sources, textbooks, or articles, we can compare and contrast views and find our own way through the information. The Amnesty International website (http://www.amnesty.org) provides access to its news and report archives, country information, news and background information related to its current campaigns, and contact information for the local sections of AI. Q Web (http://www.qweb.kvinnoforum.se/ main.html) is a “worldwide network for exchange of knowledge, experience and ideas on women’s health and gender issues.” Its sections–which include Violence and Abuse, Trafficking, and Gender — 284 —


Equality–contain links, papers, and other resources. Larger organizations, such as the United Nations (http://www.un.org) and its subgroups (UNICEF, ILO, UNCHR) also include an archive of downloadable documents on their websites. All this information also allows supporters to monitor the activities of an organization, and decide whether the content is honest, ethical, and correct. As the corpus of Internet information grows, readers have to become increasingly discerning. The more documents and activity information an organization offers, the better our chances of predicting its actions and true philosophy. Most of the groups we have seen in this first part existed–some as highly respected organizations–prior to their entrance in cyberspace. However, many others have grown from the Internet, and depend on the World Wide Web for all their activities. In Part 2, we will examine the development one such community, the TRANSCEND Art and Peace Network.

Part 2 – Development of An Online Community: The TRANSCEND Art and Peace Network

The Art and Peace Network The Art and Peace Network is one of the projects affiliated with the TRANSCEND organization (http://www.transcend.org). TRANSCEND is an international group of scholars, researchers and educators whose mission is “to bring about a more peaceful world by using action, education/ training, dissemination and research to handle conflicts creatively and non-violently.” Its activities include conferences, publications, research projects, and an online university: TPU (TRANSCEND Peace University). TRANSCEND’s programs include areas such as tourism, economics, nutrition, law, and journalism. T:AP (TRANSCEND: Art and Peace) was created three years ago by a diverse group of artists and art scholars/educators in different fields: film, theatre, literature, painting, sculpture, photography, etc. Our goal is to discover “the human potential for peace, by supporting creativity and the arts.” As part of TRANSCEND, T:AP runs one of the TPU online courses. Over the last years, the network has grown from an email forum to a community that uses the Internet to its full potential to reach artists around the world. — 285 —


The Website The heart of T:AP is its website, at http://www.eartharc.com/tapnet.info/. Here, we include information on networking, actions, projects, and anything else that T:AP members are involved in. The community has recently added a gallery section to share artwork, and publishes a quarterly e-zine and papers when any members participate in conferences. With members in locations as diverse as Japan, Belgium, Uganda, and Israel, the website is an important space for us to stay connected and share our experiences in our journey to educate in peace through the arts. In addition, several members have their own sites, linked to the main T:AP site. This has allowed us to remain true to our own creativity while working towards a common goal. The Email Forum T:AP developed out of an email forum, a closed discussion group that addressed the issues surrounding peace education through the arts. This e-group remains an integral part of the Network. A member can send a message that will reach the entire T:AP community through a central group address shared by all. Messages can be read online or sent to the user’s email address. The email forum has allowed the group to grow and gradually adopt a shared philosophy, mission, and methodology. Discussion on the role of art in peace-building is at the heart of T:AP, and an average day can result in more than 30 messages at the forum. The T:AP community cannot underestimate the importance of these messages. Through the forum, members reach out across cultures, religions, and ethnic groups to explore the common elements in all art forms. The activities led by individual members–which include radio programs, journals, poetry readings, exhibits, experimental theatre–have been a constant source of inspiration for the entire group, and several joint efforts have emerged from this shared information. The Chat Room Chats have become a recent fixture for the T:AP community. Obviously, the difference in time zones makes it difficult for some members to interact this way, but two successful real-time discussions have already taken place, and we hope to continue to hold these events. Real-time activities are especially important for groups whose members will rarely–if ever–meet in person. Some T:AP members have — 286 —


met at conferences, or when travelling to a region where another member lives, but most of our interaction has taken place in virtual spaces. Therefore, right now an online chat is the closest most of us will get to a conversation, and the Network members have welcomed the addition of such a space in the website.

Conclusion

The best way to understand how online activist communities operate is by visiting their websites and even joining their discussions. Many organizations and groups offer email updates and newsletters, and most are working hard to create archives of online or downloadable documents. For NGOs and other action-dependent peace/humanitarian initiatives, time is a key factor in their success, and the World Wide Web has made their work more extensive and efficient. New members are more likely to come from the online community, where users control the amount of time and effort they expend surfing through a website. Volunteering has become easier with online donations, petitions, and other short-term actions. Also, visitors to an activist site can monitor the organization’s activities through the quality of information, frequency of updates, and thoroughness documentation it provides. Obviously, not every online community can offer the amount of material that large organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International include. However, the beauty of the Web is that it is an ever-expanding organism, and unlike a printed book, new information can be added constantly. The World Wide Web has given new strength to traditional grassroots activism, and made the general Internet community more aware of current issues in human rights, health issues, and other matters that require urgent attention. It is our hope that existing communities continue to grow and reach out, that new networks are formed, and local issues may lead to global awareness and action.


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Appendix: List of Online Resources

Amnesty International

http://www.amnesty.org

Animal Rescue Site

http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com

Antiwar.com

http://www.antiwar.com/

Breast Cancer Site

http://www.thebreastcancersite.com

Child Health Site

http://www.thechildhealthsite.com

Coalition for World Peace

http://coalitionforworldpeace.org/

Habitat for Humanity

http://www.habitat.org/

Hunger site

http://www.thehungersite.com

MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action

http://www.moveon.org/

Q Web

http://www.qweb.kvinnoforum.se/main.html

Rainforest Site

http://www.therainforestsite.com

Tolerance.org

http://www.tolerance.org/index.jsp

TRANSCEND

http://www.transcend.org

TRANSCEND: Art and Peace Network

http://www.eartharc.com/tapnet.info/

United for Peace

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

United Nations

http://www.un.org

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NEW COMMUNICATIONS: EAST MEETS WEST MEETS NORTH MEETS SOUTH


Contemporary Poetry As A Global Dialogue

Preamble

The present paper is a sequence to, and an extension of, a previous Festschrift article in German under the title “Imaginärer Dialog: Die zeitgenössche thailändische Lyrik und ihre westlichen Gesprächspartner”1. In that article, I introduced the concept of an “imaginary dialogue” in order to emphasize the point that our contemporary Thai poets are addressing issues which also preoccupy poets in the U.K, U.S., Germany and France, and that without knowing it, they are communicating with their Western colleagues. Naturally it is the responsibility of readers of poetry or literary scholars to “reconstruct” such dialogues, and I have offered a case-study with concrete examples. In other words, such dialogues can take place without real encounter, and in the said article I also venture to explore some theoretical explanations derived from the works of such Western thinkers and poets as J.G. Herder, Noam Chomsky, Stéphane Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot and Michel Deguy. A kind of “deep

1

In: Das Gedicht behauptet sein Recht. Festschrift für Walter Gebhard zum 65. Geburtstag. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2001, pp. 267-276. The English version entitled “An Imaginary Dialogue: A Comparative Look at Contemporary Thai and Western Poetry” was delivered as a Keynote Paper at the 17th World Congress of Poets, Nakorn Pathom, Thailand, 24-28 July 2002, and will be published soon. — 291 —


structure” that cuts across language and national barriers seems to be at work. By sheer accident, I was proposing a way out of a dilemma which an eminent scholar and poet like Michael Hamburger considers as a serious impediment to his scholarly pursuit, when in the “Postscript” (1982) to the second edition of his book The Truth of Poetry, he explains why he has not dealt with African, New Zealand, Carribean or Canadian poetry in English. Hamburger believes that the scholar must have “some understanding of their background conditions, both linguistic and otherwise, and (he has) never so much as visited any non-European country other than the USA, with excursions to Canada.”2 While such a scholarly scruple must be respectfully heeded, we have moved so far in the direction of global communication that we may have to content ourselves, in certain cases, with an imaginary dialogue instead of a real one. In actual fact, the enterprise I am undertaking in response to the framework set by the FILLM congress planners for Sub-Theme IV “East Meets West Meets South Meets North” would not have been possible at all without waiving the kind of self-imposed restriction as the one adopted by Michael Hamburger. A tall order as it is, the wish of the congress planners conditions us to think globally. But the scholarly ambition inherent in that demand cannot be met easily, and I have to admit that I accepted the invitation with much trepidation. Yet the undertaking has been a rewarding one for me, for as I kept on reading, that is to say, reading works by poets of many nationalities, I was benefiting from “le plaisir du texte” which opens up immense intellectual and spiritual experiences that, in spite of their individual uniqueness, are somehow interconnected. It is this interconnectedness that I am trying to analyse and elucidate, naturally in full cognizance of the risk of hasty generalization. Nevertheless, what I am discussing here is not just a personal concern. In an interview given to me in Berlin on 12 April 2002, the distinguished German poet, anthologist, and cultural administrator, Dr Joachim Sartorius, opined that literary scholars and especially comparatists had not done enough in order to come up with syntheses in the order

2

Michael Hamburger. The Truth of Poetry. Tensions in Modernist Poetry since Baudelaire. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1996, p. 317. (Emphasis added) — 292 —

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of Hugo Friedrich’s Struktur der modernen Lyrik of 1956.3 His own modest role as an anthologist, as demonstrated in the anthologies Atlas der neuen Poesie (1995) and Minima Poetica (1999), had been to enable German readers and German poets to acquaint themselves with the poetry and poetics of various countries and traditions. Dr Sartorius agreed that the time had come for scholars to work for an international poetics, which should no longer take the form of a “universal” poetics for all, but should admit of a pluralism of experiences. Is an international poetics (or shall we adopt the term “global poetics”?) just a wishful thinking? I am in no position to propose what it should look like. But any reader of poetry, sensitive to the commonalities of contemporary experience as expressed in contemporary poetry, will have to admit that he or she can sometimes sense an almost irresistible pull of some kind towards a “progressive global poetics” (to echo Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a “progressive Universalpoesie”!) But where do we start from? My answer would be, from what you know best, or from what you like best, or from what is nearest to you. The editors of the Festschrift that I mentioned earlier set the condition that all contributors start off with one poem and branch off into whichever directions deemed appropriate. The results are highly interesting, for some of the contributions do show up an inkling of an international poetics. I wish furthermore to refer to two recent attempts by French poet-scholars (or scholar-poets?) who, while setting out writing on contemporary French poetry, end up with poetics which could well apply to other nations and societies as well, and their frame of reference is not strictly French. I am referring to Michel Deguy’s essay “De la poésie aujourd’hui”,4 and Jean-Claude Pinson’s book À quoi bon la poésie aujourd’hui? (1999).5 In the case of Michel Deguy, he has proposed, in his capacity as a French poet, that it is desirable for his colleagues not to address their work only to France or to a “Francophonia”

3

The one-sidedness of Hugo Friedrich’s endeavour, namely his predilection for the BaudelaireMallarmé lineage, has been exposed by none other than Michael Hamburger (op. cit., pp. 27-29).

4

In: Michel Deguy, Robert Davreu et Hédi Kaddour. Des poètes français contemporains. Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, 2001, pp. 9-22.

5

Jean-Claude Pinson. À quoi bon la poésie aujourd’hui? Nantes: Editions Pleins Feux, 1999. — 293 —


but to “humanity”,6 an old-fashioned concept long lost from the lexicon of contemporary literary studies! I have indulged in a somewhat lengthy preamble in order to establish the desirability and timeliness of an attempt at a global poetics. As for the “globalizing” ambition of the congress planners, it can also be defended as a matter of principle. But the immense task can hardly be carried out by one single individual. It is time for the humanities also to initiate collective projects.7 “Global poetics” might constitute one of the priorities.

Globalization: Pros and Cons

Our age has been marked by extreme (not to say extremist) positions, and “either-or” propositions have become the order of the day. Globalization in the socio-economic field has come under attack, for adverse effects of the globalization process need no further concrete proofs. Anti-globalization movements have genuine grievances to air, but rational citizens would rather not see the bloody events at Seattle and Genoa repeat themselves. Distinguished scholars have analysed the root causes of the ills of globalization, and none other than the eminent French thinker Pierre Bourdieu devoted his “swan-song” (or should we call it his last “battlecry”?) to the theme of globalization in the posthumous essay known in English as “Uniting to Better Dominate”.8 The media as an instrument of globalization are usually viewed with mistrust. Those devoted to the Muses inevitably turn hostile to the media and regard them as an enemy of print culture and consequently of poetry. The American poet-scholar Ronald G. Shaffer writes:

6

Quoted in: Chetena Nagavajara, op. cit., p. 275.

7

I have had experience in directing a collective research project under the aegis of the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) from 1996 to 1999. The project was entitled “Poetry as an Intellectual and Spiritual Force in Contemporary Society: Experiences from Thai, British-Irish, American, French and German Literatures.”

8

Pierre Bourdieu: “Uniting to Better Dominate”, Items & Issues, Social Science Research Council, Vol. 2, No.3-4, Winter 2001, pp. 1-6. — 294 —

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The results of technology, media and television’s replacing books, reading and poetry can’t be overstated. Let me begin with the most obvious result: in an earlier day people could think for themselves … They owned and created their thoughts and views of reality. … sadly, that is no longer the case today … we are so overwhelmed by the media and its brilliant deliverance of its worldview that we accept it as our own. In time we are not the authors of our own opinions and belief systems, accepting rather those foisted upon us by the powerful media moguls.9

This is a powerful statement with its own logic, but adherents of globalization and modern media could counter that even a masterpiece like Goethe’s Werther drove some fervent readers to suicide! And what about those German officers at Auschwitz who spent their evenings reading the great classics after accomplishing a day’s work in exterminating Jews and enemies of State? There can be no end to such arguments and counter-arguments. The most difficult question we have to pose to ourselves is how can poetry deal with globalization. Expose its folly in no uncertain terms by the most acrimonious way? This seems to be what the young American poet Tom Radzienda, who has been living in Thailand for 9 years, is trying to do. I’m Sorry, Mother America I’m sorry, Mother America To disappoint you so gravely in your hour of need When you call upon your sons to murder on your behalf I skip aboard and spit on your sodden flag In the mistaken belief that you would want to know why …………………………… I’m sorry to boycott your imperialism while you exploit I’m sorry that I scream and cry when you bomb I’m sorry that you kill and you take and you starve and rape While CNN reports what you seem to give, Who perceives the landslide of what you take?

9

Anthology. 17th World Congress of Poets. Worldwide Peace and Love Through Poetry, 24-28 July 2002, Thailand, p. 59. — 295 —


Turn off your TV, Mother America: unplug the blinding machine Throw away you local Tribune, Times, Gazette and Globe Look around the world and beyond the corporate press Discover those who report your pilfering while you act like a saint I’m sorry that I expect so much from you, Mother America 10

It was only by accident that the contributions by two Americans quoted above should have appeared in the same anthology especially prepared for the 17th World Congress of Poets taking place in Thailand. While Schafer is looking back with nostalgia towards a “Golden Age” in the past, Radzienda is colliding head-on with the present. I regret not having heard the poet deliver this poem, but at the session which I attended on 25 July 2002, another American poet commended her compatriot for his courage and sincerity. This “North-North-North” dialogue does give me pause. Perhaps America has survived in spite of so many mistakes (and international crimes) committed by some of its leading citizens, because there is a culture of criticism embedded in the American way of life. My only reservation is whether this critical culture is the prerogative of poets. I should hope not, and I cannot stop asking. Are we persuaded to conclude that the best way to prick people’s conscience is to anger them? But Radzienda is not quite so sure himself, and the 5th line of the first stanza is explicit on this. How come that he has not mellowed in the salubrious environment of this “land of smiles” tempered by Buddhism? (But Buddhism too has its own “poetic” problems, as I shall demonstrate later.) Looking towards Europe, I have discovered that Radzienda’s method–which I propose to call an “aesthetics of acrimony”–is in keeping with the search for truth, “whatever it is, and whatever it shows”, which according to the British literary scholar Ronald Peacock is the virtue of modern literature.11 Besides, this is exactly what the German poet Christoph Meckel sets up as the function of contemporary poetry, namely to demonstrate the viability of “mortally wounded truth”. 12 But how can we be sure that acrimony will awaken the champions of globalization to a consciousness of its aberrations, or even to make them

10

Ibid, pp. 39-41.

11

See: Chetana Nagavajara, op.cit. p. 268.

12

Ibid, p. 269. — 296 —

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repent and change their course of action towards the common good? Let us face it, acerbity can also backfire. Poetry is not a sermon, nor a piece of legislation. It only works when it convinces, when it touches, and cynics might even think that most of these globalization “moguls” are not sensitive to criticism and too proud to be cautioned. Are there other ways of appealing to their better (and not baser) instinct? Consciously or unconsciously the Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe has offered a modest answer. Refugee Mother and Child No Madonna and Child could touch That picture of a woman’s tenderness For a son she soon would have to forget ………………. … she held a ghost smile between her teeth and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s pride as she combed the rust-coloured hair left on his skull… … now she did it like putting flowers on a tiny grave13

Human dignity in the midst of dire destitution! The poem dates from 1970, but things have not changed in that part of the world but may have got worse as a result of exploitations, wars and natural disasters. It is here that the media come into play. On a daily (and even hourly) basis we are served with televised news of starving children in Africa. The media are there to transmit information, which, of course, can be partial and distorted at times, but our daily encounter with pictures of starving children does not operate at the same emotional level as poetry. The picture of mother and child as painted by Chinua Achebe works on our imagination in such a way as to create in us a noble sentiment related to human values. My first reaction at the first reading was that this poem is of an artistic order comparable to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden (thanks to the poem’s subtle association with that object of worship). I cannot help wondering whether I would have read the poem some 30 years ago as I do now, so

13

Poems from East Africa. Edited by David Cook and David Rubadiri, London-Ibadan-Nairobi: Heinemann, 1971, pp. 2-3. — 297 —


much have I been influenced by the media. But in this case, the immediacy of the media has reinforced an aesthetic and moral response elicited by the poem. Am I going too far in speaking of a “mutual illumination between poetry and media”? The media inform while the poem elevates. The media alone may arouse pathos. The poem such as one we have just read generates compassion. The media and the poem may conspire to bring about constructive action, even. One important aspect of the poem quoted is its elevation of “the small man” to tragic heights. If in our contemporary society “the death of the small man” is continuously reenacted, there is a small haven in the world of poetry in which the small man can still find his rightful place. There is no need to hark back to the Romanticism of Wordsworth’s “Leech Gatherer” or Chamisso’s “Die alte Waschfrau” (The Old Laundry Woman). If one chooses to move from South to North, a versatile poet like Hans Magnus Enzensberger can show you that the North (or rather the North East) is also capable of such a sensitive touch. In a most touching poem called “Für Karajan und andere” (For Karajan and the likes of him), the German poet depicts a scene in front of the Kiew Railway Station where a group of mendicant musicians poured their hearts out in “melodies [so] moving” as to outclass “Salzburg, Bayreuth and La Scala”.14 Would the contemporary media look for “poetry” from such an abject group, which we could call a “beggars orchestra” (to outdo both John Gay’s Beggars Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera!). There might be only two ways in which, say, television in my country would have dealt with such “base” material, namely to turn it into a mushy soap opera or a hilarious comedy, both totally devoid of poetry. Television still has much to learn from photography, not to say, from cinema. If the existing media can at best be used to reinforce poetry and are not yet ready to “poeticize’ themselves, can we find alternative media to accommodate the needs and aspirations of our contemporary poets? Many have resorted to the Internet, and poetry websites which have sprung up in recent years know no bounds. It is impossible to assess the impact of such “global” system which goes beyond the programmatic framework of “East Meets West Meets South Meets North”. In a free-for-all exchange there can be no quality-control mechanisms which print culture has

14

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Gedichte 1950-1995. Frankfurt/Main:Suhrkamp, 1996, p. 145. — 298 —

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developed to a high level of sophistication, with its publishers, readers, critics and scholars vetting quality at various stages. Nevertheless, those who know how to use that freedom wisely can always benefit from the fruits of globalization. I shall relate to you a personal experience. By sheer curiosity, I wanted to know something about Palestinian poetry, and the website that I could access from Bangkok was fairly productive. My reading was haphazard and discontinuous. One day in April 2002, during my research stay in Germany, I tried to access the said website again. It was dead. The media had been reporting for the past two days massive military incursions by Israel into the West Bank. Reality subdued poetry. The rest was silence.

Reality and Poetry

The perennial debate about form and content and about the “what” and the “how” can find no conclusive answer, but they are not at all irrelevant to our concern at this congress, in as much as the congress organizers have put ethics at the forefront of our deliberations. Would it be necessary at all to pitch Baudelaire’s claim “Tu m’as donné ta boue, et j’en ai fait de l’or” (You gave me your mud and I turned it into gold) against Brecht’s caution that at a certain point in history “Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen [ist] “ (a talk about trees is almost a crime), or to make one choose, in literary studies, between the position of Hugo Friedrich and that of Michael Hamburger (as already mentioned above)? Brecht was lucid enough to emphasize that he was talking about his age, but the “dark age” in which he said he was living is still very much with us. Would it then be legitimate to make a choice or to set priorities in our dealing with the real world? The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz goes even further than that in proposing that reality is marked by hierarchy. All reality is hierarchical simply because human needs and the dangers threatening people are arranged on a scale. No easy agreement can be reached as to what should occupy first place. It is not always bread. Often it is word. And death is not always the greatest menace; often slavery is… The poetic act changes with the amount of background

— 299 —


reality embraced by the poet’s consciousness.15 It must be admitted that Milosz’ writing, coming out of the postSecond World War period, is historically conditioned. We cannot very well subscribe to his hierarchical order of reality, putting word over bread and slavery over death. Just look at the hunger in Africa today, and the atrocities committed by all sides in the “African World War” which is just about to experience a truce for the first time. A global dialogue in the form of poetry on the subject of hunger and war has been going on for some decades. The dehumanizing effect of war, for example, has been stressed time and again by contemporary poets. The following poem by the Lebanese poet Adonis on the event in Beirut in 1983 may substantiate our point. A Mirror for Autumn Have you seen a woman Carrying the corpse of Autumn? Have you seen a woman Rubbing her face on the pavement Weaving a dress With threads of rain? People Are burnt-out coals On the pavement.16

It can be seen that Baudelaire and Brecht can conspire to bring about a happy marriage between the “what” and the “how”. This is not always the case with poems written on the spur of the moment, whose directness and immediacy rather than finesse and sophistication create a powerful emotional impact on the readers. We should be grateful to anthologists who have done a great service in collecting and editing these poems, which may otherwise have been lost, or at best known only to a very limited circle.

15

Quoted in: Scar on the Stone. Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia. Edited by Chris Case. Newcastleupon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998, p. 5.

16

Modern Poetry of the Arab World. Translated and edited by Abdullah-al-Udhari. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 63. — 300 —

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I am thinking, for example, of an anthology called Scar on the Stone. Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (1998) which is a historical record of a group of people who endured so much and suffered so much, yet at the same time could find expression to match the pain of existence and to share it with the rest of us. A short poem by Ilja Ladin can tell us a great deal about the atrocities committed by man and likewise about the perseverance of those who refuse to stop feeling, thinking and expressing, in other words, who refuse to be silenced! From sky to here From the sky to here the way is much shorter From sky to here birds don’t need wings nor have flowers ever needed a scent 17

We are at a great distance from the great epics of yore that celebrate the great exploits of the heroes, (however bloody those exploits may have been), for “the small man” who suffers is in no position to set himself up as a hero. The “heroic age” is gone for good. Killing and getting killed know of no epic grandeur. A question remains as to why the small man finds ordinary speech inadequate to express his innermost feeling and has to resort to the poem. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking that poetry only carries noble sentiments, for hatred, anger and vindictiveness too are the stuff that poetry is made of. Indeed the most powerful poems coming from the Indonesian poet and dramatist Rendra can be called a “poetry of wrath”, a reaction to the injustice inflicted on the common people. I wish to mention in this connection another anthology in German called “Hier ist niemand gestorben: Revolutionsgedichte aus Lateinamerika”(1990) for which the anthologists have deliberately selected only poems by those revolutionaries who were later killed in action. The very title is ironic, in the sense that “nobody has died” simply means that these poets had time to write poetry while still living. With the benefit of hindsight, the readers are in a position to reflect upon what

17

Scar on the Stone. Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia, p. 100. — 301 —


had been in the minds of these poets before their death. The “death of the author” (to parody Roland Barthes’ famous concept of “la mort de l’auteur”), is here no metaphor but real physical death. Would the readers have reacted differently, had they not known that they were reading poems by men who were about to die? Reality as it is is harsh enough, but to be thrusted, so to speak, into the know about the imminent death of these revolutionaries is even emotionally more taxing. But such is the power of poetry which probes the depths of the human heart that the readers cannot help being touched. Premonition of death prompted the young revolutionary Rigoberto López Perez to write a farewell letter to his mother which he left with his friend Carlos Fonseca, who in turn rearranged the letter into lines of free verse that turns out to be exquisite poetry.18 The poetic spirit is already inherent in the letter, and a little formal touch makes a work of art out of it. What is more real, reality or the poetic work?

The Redeeming Power of the Word

Much attention has been given to Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum that no poems can be written after Auschwitz. But his apodictic statement is not to be taken literally. The fact remains that in Auschwitz itself and after Auschwitz, great poetry was written and continued to be written, as may be witnessed from the anthology Auschwitz: Gedichte (1993). One poem “Gedicht über Auschwitz–Prolog” (Poem on Auschwitz–Prologue) by Anne-Marie Fabian challenges Adorno’s position. What must I observe When I write a poem on Auschwitz? I must will it, ……….. I was not in Auschwitz yet I accept the call to report - via the poem -

18

Hier ist niemand gestorben. Revolutionsgedichte aus Lateinamerika. München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1990, pp. 46-49. — 302 —

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on ignorance, forgetfulness, to put into words even slander and possible recurrence. Perhaps also, by writing myself I may come nearer to the truth about Auschwitz.19

That almost mysterious belief in the power of the word as a guiding light towards the truth does lend strength to the viability of poetry in our contemporary world. Even somebody like Anne-Marie Fabian who never experienced “the real thing” can still feel so much empathy with the actual sufferers. What about those who went through the atrocities and could still write? Let us listen to Paul Celan who described how he survived as a poet. Accessible, near and never lost in midst of all losses, one thing remained: language. This, the language, remained in possession, in spite of everything. But it had to go through its own unanswerability, to go through dreadful silence… Went through and could re-emerge, “enriched” by it all. It was in this language that I, during those years and the years that followed, tried to write poems: in order to speak, in order to give direction to myself, in order ascertain where I was and whither I was heading, in order to draw up reality for myself.20

The message is quite clear: if language survives, man survives. Language is thus that indestructible, impregnable stronghold of the human spirit. Yet the way in which Celan describes his experience could mislead us into thinking that language on its own can propel itself forward without human intervention! I shall have to look for help from a colleague who knows how to analyse this process of poetic creation which is the special case of Paul Celan. The French poet-scholar Jean-Claude Pinson writes:

19

Auschwitz. Gedichte. Ausgewählt und herausgegeben von Adam A. Zyck und Dorothea Müller-Ott. Verlag Staatliches Museum in OswiÑcim, 1993, pp. 63-64. (My translation)

20

Paul Celan, Ausgewählte Gedichte. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 127-128. (My translation) — 303 —


How to be poet in a language which is at the same time his mother tongue and the language of his brethren’s extermination? Celan will have no other concern than to tear apart this language, pierce holes into it and construct within this language, which is and is not his own, another “counter-language”. This results incontestably in one of the most exquisite poetry of the 20th century.21

The creative mind knows where it is going. The will is there, just as in the case of Anne-Marie Fabian which we have seen above. Celan’s greatness lies in that perfect match between his “counter-language” and his profound vision. Turning from Europe to South East Asia, we know that the experience of the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia has nothing short of the European holocaust, the only marked difference being a mass fratricide executed in the name of political ideology! It can be assumed that “poems from the Killing Fields” must have been written both by those who have survived and those who have not. Judging from the small anthology in English called Cambodia’s Lament. A Selection of Cambodian Poetry (1991) collected from Cambodian survivors residing in the United States, we can say that here too suffering engenders writing. A poem by Ok Kork “Could we ever forget?” goes beyond a purely personal eye-witness account. I’m telling this story Out of a rage That never relents How did it happen That Khmer killed Khmer? You must try To help me think this through.22

Scholars of modern poetry very often refer to the first poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal in which the poet turns towards the reader and addresses the latter as “mon semblable, mon frère”, thus anchoring a personal experience in the community of like-minded

21

Jean-Claude Pinson, op. cit., p. 43.

22

Cambodia’s Lament. A Selection of Cambodian Poetry. Edited and translated by George Chigas. George Chigas, 4 Grand Avenue, Milles Falls, MA 03149, USA, 1991, p. 41. — 304 —

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brethren. Ok Kork demands a little more than that: he generalizes his personal fate in such a way as to make it part of the human condition. The inner strength is inadequate: his brethren must help him solve this human enigma. The American editor seems to be reaffirming the redeeming power of the word, when he says that “the act of writing becomes a vital part of the process of healing for the writers and their Cambodian audience as they struggle to come to terms with the horror.”23

Man and Nature

Let us face it. The legacy of the 20th century has indeed been onerous. Our poets cannot turn a blind eye to what has been happening around them, and as I have pointed out above, globalization with its powerful media makes our contemporary world conscious of the base instinct of man that can plunge us into an abyss at any time. Is it possible for a contemporary poet to contemplate nature in absolute tranquillity? It may be possible, but it is not easy. It has thus become the responsibility of our poets to remind us that even nature suffers from the destructive force of man. The English-born Austrian poet Peter Waterhouse conveys to us a very potent message from his exposure to the events in former Yugoslavia. The fruit tree The inns The open yards Every leaf from the apple tree: a man-made leaf from the apple tree Every bird: a man-made bird Every puddle: a man-made puddle Man-made fields, man-made valleys And man-made emptiness Saturday, 16 September 199524

23

Ibid., p. v.

24

Peter Waterhouse: E 71: Mitschrift aus Bihac und Krajina. Salzburg: Residenz Verlag, 1996, p. 32. (My translation. The word “man-made” is inevitably too explicit, as the German original simply prefixes “Menschen-” onto those various substantives.) — 305 —


The humanist legacy of anthropocentric worldview has, in view of recent history, had to be turned upside down. This is not altogether counter-productive, for it has given back to poetry a certain sense of humility that could form a basis for regeneration. Waterhouse is philosophically more acerbic than those “Green” poets who have been fighting very hard to preserve the natural environment, for he deliberately points to that suicidal urge in man who, by starting killing each other, is killing the world and nature as well. Such stern warnings are timely, and it can be observed that man’s loss of absolute confidence is not a total loss, for moderation and sobriety can bring about great poetry as well. Let us turn to Mexico for counsel. This is how Octavio Paz circumscribes the role of man in the context of the natural phenomena. Orange Little sun silence on the table, permanent noon. it lacks something: night.25

A still life, visually, artistically, aesthetically and imaginatively perfect, remains metaphysically incomplete. There are limitations to what man can create: the rest lies in the hands of nature. To be more precise, man cannot create in this context; he can only curate. The image of the sun, by way of association, may be grandiose enough in its own small way, but it pales beside all-embracing nature. From Austria to Mexico, a return journey towards nature has been well prepared: the price to pay is purely and simply humility. Then nature will appear resplendent in its pristine grandeur. We shall have to move back to Africa for such an experience. The South African poet Murray Carlin has this to offer. The Mango Tree ………………… Where the storms surging strain To bend the big tops, and the flash Lights every leaf, and men must race The roaring myriads of the rain

25

Octavio Paz: The Collected Poems 1957-1987. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. Manchester: Carcanet, 1987, p. 491. — 306 —

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That depth of hollow must and dead Darkness under the mango tree Gives shelter; it will lighten to A green hall once the rain has fled Approaching it, you may be afraid As, in its equatorial Glitter, tick and hum, its stands Rounded, having an enormous shade.26

I must confess I have yet to come across a poem in my mother tongue that celebrates the serene majesty of a mango tree in the same manner as the South African poet, although mango trees are a common sight in my country. Perhaps we gluttonous Thai, committed to perpetual hedonism, only think of those exquisite ripe mangoes that go so well with glutinous rice! Having read this poem, I have near looked at mango trees in the same old way again. (I must confess that having seen Monet’s paintings, I can never look at poplar trees in the same old way either!)

Displaced Identity

It is true that poems expressing the poets’ attachment to their homelands abound. They need not be overtly patriotic, but in these poems the identity of the poets with their native soil is never questioned. Great poets of the 20th century have made their contributions. Brecht wrote at least two “Deutschland-Gedichte,” and Pablo Neruda never hesitates to declare: “If I were to die a thousand times,/ Always there would I want to die,/ If I were to be born a thousand times,/ Always there would I want to be born.”27 Be that as it may, identity cannot be taken for granted by all. Great poetry can arise also out of the tensions of problematic identity. One is even tempted to conclude, with regard to West Indian poetry, for example, that the more problematic the issue of identity becomes, the more challenging is the task of the poet. Let us look at Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa”

26

Poems from East Africa, p. 31.

27

Quoted from the German version, in: Sinn und Form, 2. Jahr, 1950, 5. Heft, p. 24. (My translation) — 307 —


I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?28

It must be observed that a number of leading poets live with such a divided identity, even nurture it, for a conflict which has been reflected upon and internalized can become a source of intellectual and spiritual strength. Jarring dissonance, if well manipulated, can be very effective. In a poem called “Approaching Santa Cruz Airport, Bombay” by the Indian poet Adil Jussawalla, a young man returning home by air experiences from a vantage point mid-air the harsh reality awaiting him. I peer below. The poor, invisible, Show me my place: that, in the air, With the scavenger birds, I ride… ……………..The slums sweep Up to our wheels and nothing’s free But singing while the benedictions pour Out of a closing sky. And this is home,….29

Nevertheless, it would be too dogmatic to posit that good poetry is the fruit of conflicts of identity. Happy are those who accept life as it is and have no qualms about identifying themselves with traditions. Let us travel down the Indian sub-continent to Sri Lanka. Literature, cinema and soap-opera must have influenced people in our contemporary society in such a way as to make them find the tradition of arranged marriages an anathema. Yet the Sri Lankan poet Patrik Fernando succeeds very well in describing how an arranged marriage could work, whereby an almost spiritual union arises out of that matrimony. “The Fisherman Mourned by His Wife” is a masterpiece of poetic understatement, a

28

The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Edited by Paula Burnett. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986, p. 243.

29

Indian English Poetry since 1950: An Anthology. Edited by Vilas Sarang. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1995, p. 120. — 308 —

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perfectly controlled work of art marked by sobriety and sophistication.30 In a global dialogue, there is a place for being different. At the other end of the spectrum, we encounter a culture which is deeply conscious of its traditional roots but is so confident of itself as to be ready to open up to all winds of change. If it decides to go Western, it can beat Westerners on their own ground. Look at those Japanese musicians and conductors who excel in Western classical music and occupy leading positions in the “North” itself. (That Japan has faltered in the domain of economic globalization need not necessarily detract from her international stature in the arts.) In some respects Japanese cinema has outclassed even Hollywood. I wish to refer to a poem by the contemporary Japanese poet Nakagiri Masao which demonstrates how Hollywood can be received constructively. High Noon ……………………………. The smell of gun powder hung under the canopy The hero’s duty was done Cicadas chirped Suddenly the church-bell started ringing He noticed that he had in no time become small He turned on the water-tap When a little water passed down his throat He knew that his life too would go on 31

This is not mere description or imitation. It is a re-reading of a Hollywood classic, not a passive reception. Hollywood has been internalized, relived and recreated. The poet, in other words, has been “dialoguing” with his American colleagues. There is a humane touch of humility in this re-interpretation: man is smaller than his own heroic deed. Are we dealing with Oriental wisdom here? Humility is a safeguard against loss of identity, maybe!

30

The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Edited by John Thieme. London: Arnold, 1996, pp. 761-762. (In order to do justice to the poem, I would have had to quote extensively.)

31

Mensch auf der Brücke. Zeitgenössische Lyrik aus Japan. Herausgegeben von Eduard Klopfenstein and Cornelius Ouwehand. Frankfurt/Main: Insel Verlag, 1989, p. 79. — 309 —


Although academic “Orientalism” has had bad press in recent years, there is another stream of Orientalism which seeks to probe the spiritual depths of the Orient. In my aforementioned Festschrift article, I demonstrate how the British poet Grevel Lindop has captured the spirit of Buddhism in his “epic” poem called “Touching the Earth. A Poem on the Life of the Buddha”, a project to which he proposed to dedicate his whole life!32 Naturally, it took him years to be able to identify himself with Buddhist thinking. (He has since become a practising Buddhist.) More problematic is the “Orientalism” of the “Beat” poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti as is evident in his poem “ A River Still to be Found”. Having identified himself with the spiritualism of India, he is not content with “…our bodies/ still in time…/ transported…/ dreamt eternal/ by the Ganges.” He demands more, namely to transplant or “displace” the holy river to his homeland. That is why he refers to the Ganges as “a river/ still to be found/ in the interior/ of America.”33 There is something to be said for a “cultural” globalization that aims to forge a spiritual link among nations and cultures. Displacement of identity, in this case, is certainly not misplaced.

Poetry As Empathy

Allow me to begin with a personal note. During my apprentice years as a student in Europe in the early 1960's, the young Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko was having unprecedented success with his poetry reading which could fill sports stadiums. One poem, especially, captured the imagination of his audience, namely, “Babi Yar”, and when I heard him read it later in Singapore, I could sense its impact. Empathy is the hallmark of the work. No Jewish blood my veins runs through, but I am hated with an encrusted passion, by all anti-Semites, as if I were a Jew,

32

Chetana Nagavajara, op. cit., pp. 272-273.

33

Quoted in: Analysis and Anthology of American Poetry. Bangkok: Siam Publications, 2001, pp. 109110. (In Thai, with original poems translated into Thai and accompanied by commentaries.) — 310 —

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and because of that I’m a genuine Russian. 34

The capacity to feel for others and to feel with others is a quality that elevates contemporary poetic to ethical heights. And the modern age abounds in events that represent a testing ground for genuine compassion which cuts across national and racial boundaries. The poet goes one step further in emphasizing that a true patriot inevitably partakes of a common humanity. (The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, a patriot through and through who was ready to put up with the aberrations of the Soviet political leaders, expresses similar sentiments towards the Jews in his heart-rending Trio for Piano, Violin and Violoncello in E minor, and understandably incorporates “Babi Yar” into his Thirteenth Symphony.) Lest it be misunderstood that empathy only works in one direction, let us turn our attention to Jews who express compassion for Arabs persecuted by the Jews themselves. Back in 1967, Erich Fried, himself a Jew, admonished his fellow Jews in no uncertain terms. Listen, Israel When we were pursued I was one with you. How can I remain that way When you are becoming pursuers ……….. You have survived those Who were cruel to you. Does their cruelty Live on in you now?35

Here is a Jew, writing in German during his voluntary, life-long exile in England, pointing his finger at the atrocities perpetrated by Israel on the Arabs! If justice cannot be found in the arena of international politics, then one might look towards poetry as the realm of the just! Perhaps we shall have to substantiate such a claim with concrete

34

Yevtushenko Poems. Introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Authorized translation by Herbert Marshall. New York: Dutton, 1966, p. 109.

35

Erich Fried: Gesammelte Werke. Gedichte, Band 1. Berlin: Wagenbach, 1993, p. 430. (My translation) — 311 —


evidence. I am writing this paper at the time when the Israeli-Palestinian enmity is reaching its paroxysm, but through my reading of the anthology Palestinian and Israeli Poets, in which works by Palestinians and Israeli are collected side by side in the same volume, I cannot help feeling that they share certain common preoccupations and that even reconciliation might be possible. It is reported that in an interview given by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “he is very much drawn to the work of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai in which he recognizes a love of the land similar to his own. If one did not know the identity of the author, Darwish observes, it would be impossible to say whether Amichai’s poems had been written by a Jew or an Arab.”36 We are moving from sympathy and empathy to spiritual affinity! It may be an irony of life that while internal strife is tearing a country asunder and the opposing factions are adamant in refusing to listen to reason, outsiders with no vested interest often show sympathy for the plight of innocent people who have to bear the brunt of the ravages of war. They empathize with the victims. Vietnam is a case in point. While war-mongers on both sides were intent on winning the war, much of the world’s opinion was for ending that war. Empathy gives rise to poetry, and there were perhaps few insensitive corners of the globe which did not have their own version of “Vietnam War Poetry”. Poetry by those involved in the War or directly affected by the War is known for its emotional impact and philosophical depth37, but non-Vietnamese and nonAmerican Vietnam War poetry touches our responsive chord through its empathic humane concern. Cultural difference and geographical distance do not matter. In a poem called “Vietnam”, a poet from Kenya, Jonathan Kariara, maintains a perfect neutrality. He does not take sides, for he can never be on the side of war.

36

Palestinian and Israeli Poets. Edited by Daniel Weissbort. London: King’s College London, 1999, p. 216. (Modern Poetry in Translation No.14)

37

In my Festschrift article, I analysed an exquisite poem on Vietnam by Denise Lovertov. op.cit., p. 272. — 312 —

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……………………………………. This was never to be forgotten For this was not war As other wars are wars For chroniclers These other sons Had been sent to stir the spirit (Their blood mingled with the sons of rice) They would smell this In the field which The women Had sown In blood.38

We could extrapolate that the poet feels as much sympathy for the “sons of bread” as much as for the “sons of rice”, for his main preoccupation is to prove the futility of war. Many of us will remember that when the war spilled over from Vietnam into Cambodia, it took on even more atrocious dimensions, ending up in one of the most devastating fratricidal act in human history. The “Killing Fields” in Cambodia shocked her Thai neighbours, for the Thai and the Cambodians, in spite of intermittent wars, have shared common cultural and spiritual heritage for the past 700 years. It is doubtful whether we would be able to speak present-day Thai at all, if the Thai language were to be cleansed of all the words of Cambodian origin! Able scholars of Thai language, literature and culture were at one time expected to master at least 3 oriental languages, namely Pali, Sanskrit and Khmer. Educated Thai are knowledgeable about Khmer architecture and sculpture, as parts of the ancient Khmer Kingdom covered present-day Thailand. It was totally incomprehensible to us how the Khmers rouges could destroy their own cultural patrimony, which was tantamount to destroying their own history. The Thai poetess Chintana Pinchalieo, in a series of anti-war poems dealing with wars in South East Asia and the Middle East, addresses the poem “Angkor Wat…Angkor Thom…Phnom Penh” to the people of Cambodia by evoking the greatness of the old Khmer civilization.

38

Poems from East Africa, pp. 68-69. — 313 —


Angkor Wat…Angkor Thom… Panom Penh Suriyavaraman will weep Each massive laterite block will shudder Sobs will rack long-dead Jayavaraman With each vicious spat of the gun “I, the very Zenith of Power, once held sway Over the mighty Kampuchean Empire My imperial command mandated Magnificent Ankor Wat and Ankor Thom To worship me, men toiled and lugged House-sized rocks through jungle-gates Men hand-chiselled immense rocks To erect glorious graveyards of stones Before its fall, majestic Ankor Thom Dazzled mortals with imperial splendour Surmounted by the sculptured faces Of the all-seeing Avalokitesavara “How dare they challenge me, so brazenly, These murderous brutes of the new days Blasting the echoing hills with gun-blaze From Earth’s face I shall wipe their cursed race! Sublime, four-faced Avalokitesavara gazes On the continuously changing world On the eternal state of uncertainties On the unending chain of changes Today, an inexpressible sadness Fills each of the four sacred faces For, by Kmer sons are Kmers slaughtered Just because friends conflicted with friends Bang…bang…blasted the savage guns Ankor Wat, Ankor Thom… Kampuchea disintegrates In Phnom Penh, corpses piled on corpses As Sailendra mourned the dead

— 314 —

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Oh, the once-great empire, Kampuchea, Fallen reminder of boundless might The Past casts sad shadows On the flaming rage of the Present Suriyavaraman will weep Sacred four-faced laterite image will wail For, when Kmer sons slaughter Kmers, Whatever is there that remains for pride?39

The Cambodian tragedy is no longer an internal affair of Cambodians. A new “global” spirit is pervasive, and a Thai can feel as intensely about the fate of her neighbour, if not more intensely, for the admonition directed at the Cambodians in the final stanza is explicit enough. The knowledge of Khmer history and culture is not cold academicism. This is “Orientalism” at its most noble, for it is premised on empathy. The call made by the Cambodian poet Ok Kork “to help me think this through” (as quoted above) has been answered by the Thai poetess Chintana Pinchalieo. An empathic dialogue is going on here. The various examples I have quoted and analysed under this section “Poetry as Empathy” should make us conscious of the fact that a new historical sense has emerged. When in 1919 T.S. Eliot wrote his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he maintained a rather Eurocentric standpoint that “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”40 There is no need to emphasize that Eurocentrism will not suffice any more. A poet writing at the dawn of the new millennium has learned to think globally, and empathy is his guiding spirit.

39

Quoted from Analysis and Anthology of Contemporary Thai Poetry. Bangkok: Siam Publication, 2001, pp. 163 (In Thai). English translation by Chamnongsri Rutnin, for which grateful acknowledgement is herewith expressed.

40

Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Edited with an Introduction by Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975, p. 38. — 315 —


Epilogue: the Plight of Contemporary Thai Poetry

Now that I have attempted to establish connections among poets of various nations, it is time for me to look inward. Knowing others should serve as a step towards knowing oneself. As I begin to ask the question whether we do connect and if so, how we connect, I cannot help feeling that things are not what they used to be. Literary scholars and juries of literary awards tend to agree that the past decade or so has, with rare exceptions, been lean years for Thai poetry. What a difference from those years immediately following the political upheavals of 1973-1976! The best of contemporary Thai poetry has been oppositional. Fighting for democratic freedom against military juntas has proved to be inspirational as far as poetry is concerned. By and by the enemy of the people has become elusive. We now have one of the most democratic constitutions in the world, at least on paper! There are no more big issues to address. There is no vile enemy to combat. Our daily politics is fraught with petty machinations manipulated by petty politicians, crafty enough to switch from overt political or military dictatorship to subtle economic oligarchy. Small-minded they may be, but their masterly stratagems are so effective in winning over simple-minded voters who are so confused as to be unable to distinguish between friends and foes. This is the stuff for the daily press, not the big themes that poetry is wont to tackle. But it would be a little too simplistic to explain the malaise besetting contemporary Thai poetry by these purely external factors. There are more profound philosophical reasons which should not be overlooked. I have hinted at these in a previous essay entitled “The Conciliatory Rebels: Aspects of Contemporary Thai Literature”41 Schooled in Buddhism, our “rebels” could not remain rebellious for long, for they soon realize that the enemy is not necessarily external to the self, but that the enemy inside has also to be combatted. Social and political issues are thus looked upon as the way of the world subject to the law of impermanence. Poetry becomes a philosophical reflection and the enemy is soon forgiven. In my Festschrift article, I singled out for analysis a poem by Saksiri Meesomsueb entitled “Retracing Footprint on the Path”, a commemorative work for the 20th anniversary of the bloodbath of 6

41

In: Manusya. Journal of Humanities. Vol.1, No. 1, March 1998, pp. 72-87. — 316 —

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October 1976.42 In that poem, a stark naturalistic description of the atrocities committed in that event is exquisitely transcended by a Buddhist act of forgiving. The poem makes its impact because the poet knows how to identify the enemy of the people first and then magnanimously forgives them. Had he started off preaching too soon, the poem would have fallen flat. Lesser poets either revel in horrid naturalistic details or else indulge in didactic verse in line with Buddhist teaching. Saksiri’s poem is a rare case and even he himself has not achieved a second “tour de force” of the same order. Buddhism is a philosophy of life that dwells largely on general truths, and a poet writing “Buddhist poetry” can only succeed on two conditions: first, he must know how to maintain a very high level of serenity and detachment when dealing with these universal truths; second, he must try to “personalize” Buddhist teaching, infuse it with human warmth without lapsing into too subjective emotional paroxysm. It is a difficult art to master, and traditional Thai literature has opted more for the narrative than the lyrical genre. Only two contemporary Thai poets have succeeded in maintaining that precarious balance between philosophic detachment and human engagement, but frankly speaking, even they could not sustain it for long. One has since given up and now accepts “commissions” such as writing a poem to commemorate the anniversary of a political party! (Did he stoop to conquer?) Another has reverted to the oppositional stance, declaring “Never shall I desire to reach Nirvana/ But shall travel on in this cycle of birth and rebirth,/ Translating the real value of those multitudinous stars/ Into poetry dedicated to the universe.”43 Perhaps the Thai poet Angkarn Kalayanaphong is being realistic. Poetry need not aspire to reach up to the level of the Buddhist Dharma, and it might even content itself with the awareness of the first stage of the Ariyasacca (the Four Noble Truths) that consist of Dukkha (suffering), Samudaya (the cause of suffering), Nirodha (the cessation of suffering) and Magga (the path leading to the cession of suffering). Goethe is quite explicit on this when in his drama Torquato Tasso he lets his protagonist, the poet Tasso, make the following claim:

42

Chetana Nagavajara; “Imaginärer Dialog…”, pp. 267-268.

43

Angkarn Kalayanaphong. A Poet’s Pledge (Panithankawi). Bangkok: Carat Books House, 1986, p. 23. (My translation) — 317 —


And if man in his torment remains silent, I was given a divine privilege to say, how I suffer.44

The only way out of the dilemma facing contemporary Thai poets would be not simply to look back or to look forward, but also to look around. This paper may have presented a rather dark image of the world around us, but with so much sufferings prevalent at the global level, we cannot afford to be parochial, not to say, provincial. We shall have to read more “globally”, and having recourse to translations is better than not being exposed to the experience of others at all. A global dialogue through contemporary poetry is becoming increasingly dynamic. And if poetry does arouse empathy, as I have tried to demonstrate, then we may be heading for a world-wide moral regeneration.45

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44

Goethe: Torquato Tasso, lines 1432-1433.

45

Part of the material used in the present paper is derived from the research findings of the project “Poetry as an Intellectual and Spiritual Force in Contemporary Society: Experiences from Thai, British-Irish, American, French and German Literatures”, which I and a group of colleagues undertook in 1996-1999 with a grant from the Thailand Research Fund (TRF). A two-month research in Germany, France and U.K. in March-May 2002, supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, enabled me to extend the scope of my investigation. Grateful acknowledgement is herewith expressed. My mentor, Prof. Dr. Eberhard Lämmert of the Zentrum für Literturforschung Berlin, has shared his wisdom and knowledge with me for many years, and the Zentrum itself has proved to be a most hospitable institution to work with. I have benefited from the advice of numerous colleagues, notably Prof. Dr. Stephen Parker of Manchester University, U.K., and Dr. Prapote Assawavirunhakarn of Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. — 318 —

Post/Modernist East

For the American economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1980 and 1989) the modern “world system,” instituting the hegemony of the West, emerges somewhere around 1500. For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, this date also figures as the beginning of modernity. Spurred on by the print revolution, early modernity sees the emergence of what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities” and of Europe’s nation states, most of them with their own literature in the vernacular. In the same period we also witness the emergence of the individual “I/Eye”, as Joel Fineman has demonstrated in a major study of Shakespeare’s sonnets. These developments only quickened in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment, when according to Habermas modernity really fully comes into its own with the dawning of its own progressively historical self-consciousness, reaching back to “the discovery of the ‘new world,’ the Renaissance, and the Reformation” as “the epochal threshold between modern times and the middle ages” (1987, 5). A sense of subjectivity, language, and history, then, are constitutive elements of Western Modernity. The linked triumph of Wallerstein’s world system and Habermas’s modernity over the five centuries following from the year 1500 is intimately tied to the rise of the bourgeoisie as the carrier of the central ideas of modernity, and to capitalism and imperialism as that class’s

— 319 —

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translations of these ideas in the fields of economics and politics (Watt 1957, Green 1980, Wolf 1982, Young 1990). At the centre of the system, these ideas eventually culminate in the Enlightenment discourse of modernity Lyotard defines as finally superseded in postmodernity: “the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth,” (1993, 72). At the same time, by the systemic process of inversion between centre and periphery explored by Wallerstein, those at the periphery, whether geographically or socially, are progressively marginalised. Rosemary Jackson, in another context, speaks of “the shadow on the edges of bourgeois culture,” which is “variously identified as black, mad, primitive, criminal, socially deprived, deviant, crippled, or (when sexually assertive) female” (Jackson 1981, 121). Heavily gendered and racialized, then, modernity posits as normative Sylvia Winter’s, 1990, “figure of man”– white, male, middle class–in what Paul Gilroy defines as a “dualistic system that reproduces the dominance of bonded whiteness, masculinity, and rationality,” (1993, 46). As a consequence, “entry into the European terrain of the modern,” Simon Gikandi claims, “has often demanded that the colonized peoples be denied their subjectivity, language, and history” (1992, 2). Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, 1993, argues that Gilroy’s “system” of “bonded whiteness, masculinity, and rationality” reached its apogee in the nineteenth century with the “classic” realist novel, particularly in England and France. Whether explicitly, as in a number of late-nineteenth-century novels like Guy de Maupassant’s BelAmi or Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, or more implicitly, as is the case with earlier novels such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Honoré de Balzac’s La peau de chagrin or La cousine Bette, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the realist novel relies heavily upon a kind of “manichean aesthetics,” to use Abdul R. Janmohamed’s, 1983, memorable phrase, opposing “modern” “Europe” and “European” values and attitudes to those of the “rest” of the world. If the way in which the West tried to realize its hegemonic project came under scrutiny around the turn of the twentieth century, as witness King Leopold II’s colonial adventures in what was then known as the Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, this did not immediately or necessarily detract from the value attached to modernity’s propositions in general. After all, Conrad’s Marlow in his own person and — 320 —

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sanity testifies to the validity of modernity’s tenets if correctly applied, and by extension his tale (both of and about Marlow) functions as moral caution with regard to England’s colonial enterprise. Still, with Modernism, of which Conrad is often seen as an early representative, the discourse of modernity is coming to be questioned. We can point to developments internal to the West to explain this questioning. José B. Monleón, 1990, for instance, in a study devoted to the gothic in European literature, argues that toward the end of the nineteenth century the historical initiative passed from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat according to the same logic that hitherto had animated the rise of the bourgeoisie. As a consequence, the middle classes came to perceive the discourse of modernity, instead of as solely or mainly supportive for their own aspirations, as potentially threatening to their recently acquired hegemony. The result, as far as Monleón’s own chosen field of study is concerned, is an upsurge of the gothic, i.e. of a discourse that, as Rosemary Jackson, 1981, and Neil Cornwell, 1990, have also argued with regard to the fantastic, has functioned as a repressed double to the discourse of modernity from the latter’s earliest conscious inception in the eighteenth century. However, Said argues, “many of the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society and culture, include a response to the external pressures on culture from the imperium,” (1993, 227). Specifically, Said feels that “the formal dislocations and displacements in modernist culture, and most strikingly its pervasive irony, are influenced by precisely those two disturbing factors Seeley [J. R. Seeley, a late-nineteenth-century historian of English imperialism in The Expansion of England] mentions as a consequence of imperialism: the contending native and the fact of other empires,” (1993, 228). The result, according to Said, was the “new encylopaedic form” (1993, 229) of the modernist work of art: circular, spatial, and fragmentary in its yoking together of apparent heterogeneities, and as opposed to realism’s ideal form of transparency, linearity, temporal progressivism, and homogeneity. As examples of modernists whose works exude the kind of irony, as well as embody the kind of “imperial” pressures he thinks of, Said mentions Conrad, E. M. Forster, T. E. Lawrence, and André Malraux among prose writers, and therefore as most immediately refashioning the realist novelistic conventions of modernity. Yet, he also notes that “the impingements of empire on an Irish sensibility are registered in Yeats and Joyce, — 321 —

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those on American expatriates in the work of Eliot and Pound” (1993, 227). And his list of modernist masterpieces bodying forth the concomitant changes in form includes Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, A la recherche [du temps perdu], The Waste Land, [The] Cantos, and To the Lighthouse. Said also points out that although “most histories of European aesthetic modernism leave [them] out,” not only were there “massive infusions of non-European cultures into the metropolitan heartland during the early years of this century” ([1993], 292), but “the cross-fertilization between African nationalism as represented by George Padmore, Nkrumah, C.L.R. James on the one hand, and, on the other the emergence of a new literary style in the works of Césaire, Senghor, poets of the Harlem Renaissance like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, is a central part of the global history of modernism” (1993, 292-93). Said himself uses the terms “resistance culture” and “the literature of opposition” to refer to the work of these writers. I myself prefer to use the term “counter-modernism”. Concurrently, I prefer the term “counter-postmodernism” for those works usually labelled as “postcolonial,” yet using postmodern themes and techniques. Postmodernism, or “centre-postmodernism” or postmodernismtout-court, I then see as pushing to extremes from within Western culture the doubts modernism had already raised with regard to the discourse of modernity. Counter-postmodernism I see as the (formerly) colonized, or those marginalised by or in the West, reclaiming their “subjectivity, language, and history”. Elsewhere, I have examined these things with regard to the literature pertaining to the Caribbean, and specifically to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and some of its numerous re-writings - modernist, countermodernist, postmodernist, and counter-postmodernist. Here, I only want to look at two works, one modernist, one postmodernist, that both definitely emanate from the “centre”, i.e. “the West”, but that are both set in China. Specifically, I will deal with Het verboden rijk (The Forbidden Empire), a novel by the Dutch writer J.J. Slauerhoff, and published in 1932, and Lost in Translation, a postmodern novel by the American author Nicole Mones, from 1998. Slauerhoff (1898-1936) was trained as a medical doctor, and he mostly exercised his profession on board steamers bound for, or tramping around in, the South China seas. Alternatively, he shipped for South America. Slauerhoff knew his languages, particularly English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as the concomitant literatures. He — 322 —

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regularly made translations from the Spanish and Portuguese. In fact, translation, whether in the form of the strict correspondence between source- and target-language one usually thinks of when using the term, or in the looser, more “creative” sense also employed, and practised, by for instance Slauerhoff’s fellow modernist Ezra Pound, was an important source of inspiration to Slauerhoff, as it was for many other Dutch modernists. Some of his best known poems are “creative” translations from the Chinese, usually by way of the more famous English translations by Arthur Waley. Slauerhoff’s various literary interests come together in Het verboden rijk. On one level, this novel (or “romance”) recounts the founding of Macao, of Luis Vaz de Camões’ part in this, and of the writing of the latter’s Os Lusíadas. At the same time, it is the story of an early twentieth-century Irish sailor, a radio officer, who drifts down the social ladder in the South China seas. In its mixing of time settings, in its use of various first- and third-person narrators, and in the way Camões and the Irish radio officer seem to merge, the officer assuming the role of Camões to the point of having the latter’s memories and dreams, Het verboden rijk is typically modernist. As such, if nothing else, it questions the stable identity of the Western “self” as it had emerged under modernity. There is, however, more at stake in het verboden rijk. Os Lusíadas is in many ways Portugal’s main literary contribution to the rise of Western modernity. Published in 1572, it is one of the earliest major works in the vernacular to chronicle Europe’s expansion. As such, it is a major factor in the creation and consolidation of Portugal as “imagined community,” of its sense of identity as rooted in a common language and a common history, of its conviction that it has the natural right to triumph over the countries it conquers in its colonial expansion. Het verboden rijk questions all of these assumptions. First of all, the founding of Macao is not presented as an heroic undertaking, but rather as a matter of petty squabbles among Portuguese noblemen and military commanders. Then, Het verboden rijk almost completely bypasses the content of Portugal’s national epic, and focuses rather on the personal history of Camões, invariably re-interpreting the known facts from the poet’s life in an unfavourable light. Sometimes, episodes from Os Lusíadas are recast into (fictional) events from Camões’ life. For instance, the famous episode in Os Lusíadas where an old man on shore, in Lisbon, warns Vasco da Gama of the dangers of the voyages of discovery, and — 323 —

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which has been read as an early form of self-critique by the Portuguese nation, is transformed into Camões’ father imploring his son not to embark for the Indies. We know this to be pure fiction because the real Camões’ father, a ship’s captain, had died in a shipwreck off India while Luis was still a child. This way, episodes from the poem that have taken on symbolic meaning with an eye to Portuguese identity are downplayed to purely personal incidents. In other words, the coming into being of Portugal’s national epic is here made out to be the result of petty jealousies, personal trivia, and sheer hazard. The alternation from first- to third-person narrator in the story of Camões as related in Het verboden rijk only reinforces the feeling of futility that ultimately pervades it. If we can still sympathize with Camões when he tells us his own tale, the third-person passages provide a distancing framework, reducing everything to its “true”–that is: much diminished–size. This alienating effect is even enhanced when we come to think that the third-person narrator in the Camões episodes may well be the Irish radio officer hallucinating about Camões. It is very well possible that even the first-person narrative of Camões is “in reality”–i.e. within the “reality” of the fiction here presented to us–a case of extended or “free-floating” “style indirect libre,” and hence also the result of the contemporary narrator’s imaginings. Such manipulation of narrative instances is, of course, the very stuff modernism is made of. Here, though, I would argue that it also reflects upon the very stabilities of identity that modernity had tried to establish: subjectivity, language, history. In this respect, I think it is not a coincidence that the contemporary radio officer is an Irishman who complains that he is spurned not only by the English–as he finds only natural–but also by the Irish themselves. In fact, he is not clear as to what he is: a descendant from the Iberians that are said to have populated Ireland before the present-day Irish, or of survivors of the Spanish Armada, washed ashore on an Irish beach? Perhaps we should stop to contemplate here that Slauerhoff himself was born and reared in Frisia, a part of the Netherlands where a separate language is spoken, that his own family antecedents were very mixed, partly German sailor’s blood, partly from the isle of Vlieland, to the north of Frisia, and that he never really felt at home in “Holland”. Finally, the whole story, past and present, of Het verboden rijk is played out against the backdrop of China, Europe’s ultimate Other. Both Camões and the Irish radio officer try to impose themselves upon China, — 324 —

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the former as part of a group of soldiers escorting a Portuguese embassy from Macao to Beijing, the latter during his visits to Chinese port towns. Both fail. The only thing left from Camões’ embassy expedition are the stone markers the embassy party had raised along their route. It is these same stone markers that lead the Irish radio officer to Macao after his ship has been raided by South China sea pirates, and he is abandoned somewhere inland. China proves impenetrable to the representatives of modernity. It is therefore all the more remarkable that the Irish radio officer, after his moment of greatest fusion with Camões, when he literally assumes the body of Camões in battle, and relives Camões infatuation with a half-caste woman, daughter of the colony’s governor, upon awaking from a drunken stupor, decides to abandon Macao, and to vanish into China, leaving behind his Western identity: Ik, die eerst zo zwak was en geen voet aan zijn uiterste rand durfde zetten, zal binnendringen in het land dat altijd ongerept is gebleven, dat niet afweert, maar duldt; zich in schijn veroveren laat en alle barbaren en vreemdelingen ombrengt in zijn lome, langzaam verstrikkende greep en onder de druk van zijn massa. Een der nimmer bewusten van de miljoenen te zijn – welk een geluk; of als dat onbereikbaar is, een die alles weet, alles achter zich heeft en toch voortleeft. (618) I, who once was so weak and did not dare to set foot even at its outermost circumference, will penetrate the land that always kept to itself, that does not turn back, but that tolerates; that allows itself to be conquered in appearance only, and that finishes off all barbarians and foreigners in its torpid, slow strangle-hold and by the pressure of its masses.

To be one of unconscious millions–what bliss; or if this proves impossible, to be one that knows all, that has experienced all and yet goes on living. (My translation) I now turn to the second novel I want to discuss. At 36, Alice Mannegan, the protagonist of Nicole Mones’ Lost in Translation, already seems to have achieved what Slauerhoff’s radio officer announced as his intention at the end of Het verboden rijk. Alice is an American living in Beijing as a foreign-language interpreter, having studied Chinese at Rice University, in Texas. In fact, she has deliberately opted for Chinese, and for China, in order to get away as far as possible from her father, Texas — 325 —

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Senator Horace Mannegan, an erstwhile opponent of bussing in the South, and of desegregation. In a famous speech the senator had held little Alice, blond and very white, aloft for his constituents as an example of what should remain “unsullied.” The senator invariably stands for what he considers “American” values. Needless to say, the United States, as the most “unsullied” product of European Enlightenment thinking, is also the epitome of Modernity, even to excess, as with Senator Mannegan. Still, if Alice is honest with herself, she has to admit that she has not really gotten away from the senator, or from America, as she remains dependent upon the monthly allowance her father, even after fourteen years, continues to send her. Alice’s predicament is shared by her near-co-protagonist, Dr. Adam Spencer, a rather obscure American archeaeologist, who has come to China to search for the remains of Peking Man, an early hominid, and possibly proof of the fact that present-day men are not all descended from one set of ancestors in East Africa–the “out of Africa” theory–but rather from various such sets, spread around the globe. Spencer is at a dead end in his career in the States, as in his personal relationships, having just gone through a divorce, and suffering terribly from being separated from his young son. Spencer’s grandfather was a famous geologist, and he was acquainted with Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit who spent most of his life in China, as an archaeologist. It was Teilhard who discovered Peking Man, at a site near Beijing, in 1929. In 1941, with the Japanese occupying Beijing, Peking Man was set to be shipped out to America, to be preserved there. Pearl Harbor put an end to these plans. Peking Man disappeared. On his deathbed Spencer’s grandfather confided to his grandson that Teilhard had hidden Peking Man somewhere in the North of China, safe from warfare and upheaval. Now, Spencer has come to corroborate his grandfather’s communication, and to revive his own career. He too, though, remains dependent upon the US, emotionally because of his feelings for his son, financially because of the need to find funding for his expedition. As Spencer does not speak Chinese, he hires Alice as an interpreter. In fact, it is the hunt for some version of “Peking Man” that unites the three main characters in the book, Alice, Adam, and Teilhard, not only literally but also metaphorically. Spencer literally searches for the fossil in question. Alice, upon first coming to China, fell in love with a Chinese student of history, Jian. Regardless of the difference in their — 326 —

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cultures, he asked her to marry him. Her father prevented this. Now, Jian is married to a Chinese woman, and has children. Alice still regularly goes to see his mother, though. Alice has compulsive sex with Chinese men, deliberately seeking out different ones in Beijing discotheques, first seducing them and then severing all contact. Teilhard sought for the essence of Chinese philosophy and wisdom. In their different ways, they are all searching for “true Chinese man” (343), the essence of Chineseness as different from the rest of the world, and certainly from “Western man,” a specimen all three of them feel disappointed with. The irony is that the more they try to “enter China,” the more the Chinese they come into contact with insist on their own being “different,” and on the Westerners’ inability to ever truly understand the Chinese. This is especially frustrating for Alice Mannegan, who speaks Chinese like a native, who has adopted a Chinese professional name, and who invariably introduces herself to the Chinese men she seduces under a Chinese alias. The title of the book, then, is doubly apt here. It is a well-known dictum that the essence or “flavour” of a message, especially from one culture to another, is “lost in translation.” Alice is also literally “lost in translation,” i.e. in her illusion that she can fully penetrate China, the Chinese nation, the Chinese soul–in other words: fully achieve the ideal Slauerhoff’s narrator put forward at the end of Het verboden rijk. Alice’s experience, however, is also that of Adam Spencer and Teilhard de Chardin. In their various ways, they too fail to find “true Chinese man.” The failure to find “true Chinese man,” and the various delusions the protagonists of Lost in Translation labor under, is illustrated in various ways. Most graphically, it is brought out on the final page of the book, when Alice and Adam go to visit a local apothecary in inner Mongolia, the place where “Peking Man,” whom they found to have been stolen from the cave in which Teilhard de Chardin had him hidden in 1941, has most probably been ground up into dust and mixed in with magic potions. It is most poignantly illustrated, though, in Alice’s affair with Lin, an archaeologist added to Adam Spencer’s expedition to the north of China by the Chinese authorities. With Lin Alice thinks she has regained the intimacy with China she lost when she and Jian broke up, many years before. Yet, it is precisely when Alice thinks to have become closest to Lin, to have gained his trust and commitment, and to in reality have changed cultures, that everything explodes in her face, and he rejects her for her Western ways. Ironically, he does so precisely because — 327 —

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he thinks she tries to become Chinese in the wrong way, following the ways of custom and tradition, whereas to him China is a modern world power, the country of the future, not the past. Ironically, this brings Lin’s view of China close to that Alice’s father, senator Mannegan, has of America. With one stroke, then, Lin, and by extension “Chinese man,” is revealed as not “different” but rather as the “same” to other men, China as not “different” from other nations but as simply one of many nations. The West’s “Other” turns out to be very much like the West’s “Self”, and vice versa., as the corollary surely must be that what goes for China, also goes for the United States. Lost in Translation, then, is fully as much “about” the United States as it is about China. And just as Camões, the vagabond, becomes the national hero of Portugal, writing the national epic, that is to say: “writing the nation,” outside of that nation, so Alice Mannegan, sexual tramp and self-confesssed America-hater, ironically assumes the figure of the American anti-hero, living the acceptance of the un-exceptionalism of the United States outside the U.S. Alice returns to the United States, to be with her dying father in his last days. Adam Spencer returns to his research on native American customs. With full poetic justice, their fate parallels that of “Peking Man.” On the final page of the novel , speculating that the fossil has been ground up into magic potions, Alice suggests: “Let’s just say Peking Man has been–reabsorbed into the population” (366). Thinking to “Other” themselves, Alice and Adam instead find their true “Self,” a “Self” neither Western nor Eastern or in any way “Other”, but simply that of common humanity. In this way, they do achieve what Slauerhoff’s narrator set out to strive for at the end of Het verboden rijk,: “To be one of unconscious millions–what bliss; or if this proves impossible, to be one that knows all, that has experienced all and yet goes on living” (618). Unlike that narrator’s, though, theirs is not a modernist rejection of Western modernity, but a postmodern acceptance of modernity as everyman’s present condition.

Theo D’haen

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Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. 1991 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Brooker, Peter, ed. 1992. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman. Cornwell, Neil. 1990. The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. D’haen, Theo. 1997. “(Post)Modernity and Caribbean Discourse,” in A. James Arnold, ed., A History of Literature in the Caribbean, volume 3, Cross-Cultural Studies, A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, Vol. 12, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 303-21. Fineman, Joel. 1986. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Gikandi, Simon. 1992. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consiousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Green, Martin. 1980. Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Habermas, Jürgen. [1985]. 1990. “Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for SelfReassurance.” In Habermas [1990], 1-22. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. [1980]. 1992. “Modernity -- An Incomplete Project.” In Brooker [1992], 125-38. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. JanMohamed, Abdul R. 1983. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press. JanMohamed, Abdul R. and David Lloyd, eds. 1990. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. — 329 —

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Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. “Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” In Natoli and Hutcheon [1993], 71-90. Mones, Nicole. 1998. Lost in Translation. New York: Dell. Monléon, José B. 1990. A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Natoli, Joseph and Linda Hutcheon, eds. 1993. Postmodern Reader. Albany: State University of New York Press. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Slauerhoff, J. 1983. Verzameld proza 2. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijgh en Van Ditmar. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974, 1980 and 1989. The Modern World-System I, II, III. London: Academic Press. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto and Windus. Winter, Sylvia. 1990. “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” in JanMohamed and Lloyd [1990], 432-69. Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Young, Robert. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.

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Writing Back to the Empire: From M. Butterfly to Madame Butterfly

Introduction

The 1988 Tony-Award winning play M. Butterfly written by Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang makes a great hit among the Broadway shows. More importantly, it invites quite a few cross cultural discussions and speculations. The play is about the incredible love affair between a former French diplomat Rene Gallimard and a Chinese opera singer Liling Song, who turns out to be a man and a spy. It is inspired by a two-paragraph story in The New York Times (May 1986) in which a French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot was guilty of treason by disclosing confidential national secret to his Chinese “girlfriend” Pei-fu Shi, who disguised “his” sexual identity under the “modest” Chinese costume. Hwang perceives the rupture of the story, namely Bouriscot’s assumptions of the Asian stereotypes, and develops it into a “great Madame Butterflylike tragedy” (M. Butterfly 95). Hwang provides a plausible reason to explain why after twenty years of cohabitation, Bouriscot has learned nothing, including the true sexuality, about his lover: “For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women” have “so saturated our consciousness” that we, including Bouriscot, prefer to remain in a convenient world of surface and bypass — 331 —


“truthful contact between nations and lovers” (M. Butterfly 100). In other words, it is the rampant cross-cultural misperceptions or misconceptions that enable Hwang to create a good play. This also is the reason why M. Butterfly is often chosen for the text of the present post-colonial study. In addition, M. Butterfly is designated a political play. Hwang specifies his intent, positionality as well as strategy in the “Afterword,” declaring that he is to write a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly” linking “imperialism, sexism, and racism” by “breaking the back of the story” (M. Butterfly 95). The trajectory of “breaking the back of the story” is reminiscent of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s radical method of “reading against the grain” so as to locate the silence which spots aporias (gaps or lacunas between thoughts and rhetoric) and the signs of resistance (Spivak 197). Likewise, Hwang intends to radicalize his source story to the root and probe the ideas or imagined space beyond the story. But Hwang cautions the reader that his “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly” is not “an anti-American play” or “a diatribe against the stereotyping of the East by the West, of women by men” (100) although the conventional narrative of the Italian opera is about a submissive geisha girl Cho-Cho San (“Butterfly” in Japanese), who sacrifices her life for a “Vagabond Yankee”—Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of the American navy. Whereas Puccini’s Madame Butterfly contains “a wealth of sexist and racist clichés,” it still reaffirms Hwang’s “faith in Western culture” (M. Butterfly 95). Therefore, in M. Butterfly, Hwang desires to subvert the stereotypes by re-inscribing them and wills his play to be “a plea to all sides to cut through our respective layers of cultural and sexual misperception” (M. Butterfly 100). As for Hwang’s positionality, it is explicit that his complicity lies with the West rather than the East. Given his background (the second generation son from a wealthy Christian Chinese family in America) and emerging status in the American theatre, we have good reasons to believe “the Asian component of his sensibility had already incorporated the West” (Bigsby 330). Despite the fact that Hwang is known for genuine combination of Western and Asian theatre forms and that once he remarks his plays are “his attempt to ‘explore human issues without denying the collor of [his] skin,’” there is no denying that he fills his service in the regime of American theatre, which to him means “to acknowledge the multi-cultural nature of American society” (Bigsby 330). Moreover, Janet Haedicke asserts that “M. Butterfly achieves its political — 332 —

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object ‘to fight the religion of the present in America’ by trying ‘to link imperialism, racism, sexism [in] a certain historical perspective’” (28). Indeed, Hwang’s pro-American positionality might be able to account for the polarized responses from his audience. According to a reader-response project conducted by John J. Deeney, a professor from Chinese University of Hong Kong, American responses to Hwang’s play “have been positive and readers have not been unduly upset by the deliberate aberrations from conventional thinking and acting. On the other hand, Chinese readers have been largely negative, contrary to what one might have thought” (Deeney 29). Overtly, Hwang’s play has a greater appeal to the Americans than to the Chinese. This different reception reassures us that Hwang’s M. Butterfly is not so much a correction of the cultural indictment of the East as criticism of the Western attitudes toward the East. At this point, Hwang’s positionality is similar to that of J. M. Coetzee, a white South African writer and critic. Coetzee in his famous book White Writing documents important works of South African literature. But more often than not, Coetzee alludes to the Western literary tradition and writes about the appraisals of the imagined space of European and North American genres and their impact on the natal space of South Africa. A central argument of Coetzee is that “writing ... is white insofar as it is generated by the concerns of people no longer European, not yet African” (11). In this light, M. Butterfly could be another kind of white writing for it is also haunted by the imperial past and set out to explore the grey area which is neither white nor black. Nevertheless, M. Butterfly is valuable as a practical test to recent theoretical speculations. Most critical concerns of the play centre around the issues of gender, identity, ethnicity, theatricality, and subversions of the binary oppositions such as West vs. East, Male vs. Female, Master vs. Slave, Victor vs. Victim, Colonizer vs. Colonized, Reality vs. Fantasy, Mind vs. Body and so on. It is agreed that Hwang successfully parodies Madame Butterfly by means of travestism and transformation of western male into the critical butterfly. The transformation of the characters, either Gallimard or Song, demonstrates the dynamics or ambivalence or destabilisation of gender, identity and culture politics. More interestingly, Jung Su applies Bakhtinian concept of dialogism to explain the textuality and meaning of the play, while Gransci’s hegemony is cited to describe the western cultural leadership. Edward Said’s Orientalism is applied to explain the Eurocentric ideology as well as misconception (Su 90). — 333 —


Kathryn Remen makes good use of Michel Foucault’s concepts of discipline and punishment and presents a convincing case of reading M. Butterfly as “the theatre of punishment” in which we, Gallimard’s ideal audience, align ourselves with the punishing power and witness our prisoner Gallimard’s death penalty for his over-indulgence in the fantasy of the perfect woman (399-400). However, some questions remain unanswered. For example, Hsiao-Hung Chang and Dorinne K. Kondo both ask, “Must one reinscribe stereotypes in order to subvert them?” What is the nature of power and gender identity? “Does Hwang elide in-depth exploration of homosexuality or homophobia by appropriating travestism?” (Su 95). Haedicke is puzzled when “M. Butterfly begs for a feminist reading; yet an Anglo-American feminism grounded in sexual difference as paradigmatic opposition falters before the play” (27). My reading of M. Butterfly attempts to answer the above questions together with other post-colonial considerations. In the meantime, I’d like to introduce my reading strategies labelled as “interpellation and interpolation” derived from Bill Ashcroft’s essay “Interpellation and Post-colonial Agency” and his book The Empire Writes Back.

Interpellation and Interpolation

M. Butterfly is a text appropriate for post-colonial speculation in that it is written with post-colonial strategies. As mentioned before, Hwang writes his deconstructivist play by “breaking the back of the story.” It turns out he writes a parody against Madame Butterfly, successfully subverting a western canon. Indeed, he is practising re-placing theory advocated in the influential book The Empire Writes Back. In explaining post-colonialism as reading strategy, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin start by pointing out the subversion of a canon involves not only replacement of other texts, but more importantly, a conscious alternative reading (The Empire Writes Back 189). While commenting on the post-colonial readings of canonical works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, they write, “more important than the simple reading of the text itself by critics or in productions has been widespread employment of the characters and structure of The Tempest as a general metaphor for imperial-margin relations, or, more widely, to characterize some specific aspect of post-colonial reality” (The Empire Writes Back 190). Re-reading or re-writing The Tempest has — 334 —


become a paradigm for post-colonial literature. Moreover, there exists a tendency to make the silent characters speak for themselves. For example, Jean Rhys’ strategies of writing back to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea are to centralize the marginal character—the madwoman in the attic—and to interrogate those ordinary tropes of invasion and colonization, such as the system of slavery. “From a postcolonial reading perspective such unspoken subjects may well become the crucial announcements of the text” (The Empire Writes Back 193). In this light, David Henry Hwang writes back to Puccini’s imperialist text by articulating the conventionally voiceless Butterfly. If Gallimard were not so obsessed with his imperial fantasy, he should have recognized the two different Butterflies. When he meets Song at the German Embassy, Song on the stage “was a Butterfly with little or no voice—but she had the grace, the delicacy” although he also believes that “in opera the voice is everything” (M. Butterfly 15). But when he approaches Song offstage, he is “silenced” by her pungent refutation, re-imaging a western woman sacrificing for a short Japanese man. Another triumphant moment at which Song retorts against the western masculinity is when s/he answers the judge’s interrogation in the French courtroom: Judge: Would you care to enlighten the court with this secret knowledge? I’m sure we’re all very curious. Song: I’m sure you are. (Pause) Okay, Rule One is: Men always believe what they want to hear. So a girl can tell the most obnoxious lies and the guys will believe them every time—“This is my first time . . That’s the biggest I’ve ever seen”—or both ... You’ve maybe heard those phrases a few times in your own life, yes, Your Honor? Judge: It’s not my life, Monsieur Song, which is on trial today. .... Song: Rule Two: As soon as a Western man comes into contact with the East—he’s already confused. The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East. Do you know rape mentality? Judge: Give us your definition, please. Song: Basically, “Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes.” The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor …but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique. Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the — 335 —


East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can’t think for herself. (M. Butterfly 82-83)

In truth, Hwang allots quite a lot of speaking space to the supposedly submissive subjects. Song the travestite just now speaks in the identity of an oriental woman. And many of his words repeat the exact phrases that Gallimard has said about the Vietnamese. But the repetition sounds ironic because of its being uttered by an emasculated subject. Similarly, when Renee challenges the phallocentrism with her “clinical” observation and outspoken comment about “weenie” (the penis), her words are “simply not acceptable” to Gallimard (M. Butterfly 55-56). However, Hwang succeeds in making them heard. Besides, Hwang makes good use of the strategies of appropriation and reversal of the original text. The most obvious example is key details, phrases, or themes of Madame Butterfly have been enacted or quoted but distorted at the appropriate place of M. Butterfly. Even M. Butterfly itself is put within a “big quotation mark” for we may read the play as Gallimard’s confessional monologue before death. The confessional framework is akin to the memory of Tom in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. The narrator can walk in and out of the memory freely. The intrusion of reality into fantasy or fantasy into reality is also Arthur Miller’s favourite technique. But Hwang uses it to usurp the reality as well as fantasy. This is how he creates the ambivalent, actually traumatic, moment for Gallimard to commit suicide. Unlike the conventional tragedy which presents recognition at the end, M. Butterfly provides a tragic misrecognition. That is also an intriguing subversion of the conventional trope. To sum up, in Hwang’s play we find a good demonstration of Bill Ashcroft’s “principle of post-colonial agency” by means of “interpolation.” According to Ashcroft, the most contentious problem in post-colonial theory is how to make the voice of the colonized heard. Can the subaltern speak? Or can one use the language of imperialism without being inescapably contaminated by an imperial world view? To answer those questions, Ashcroft proposes this principle of post-colonial agency, the kind of agency available to the subaltern subject. He explains: … the principle concedes, on the one hand, the central function of language in constructing subjectivity, but which confirms that capacity of the colonized subject to intervene in the — 336 —


material conditions of suppression in order to transform them. The point is that this is invention. Resistance to imperial control does not necessarily mean rejection, the utter refusal to countenance any engagement with its forms and discourses... the most effective post-colonial resistance has always been the wrestling from imperial hands of some measure of political control over such things as language, writing and various kinds of cultural discourse, the entry into the “scene” of colonisation to reveal frictions of cultural difference, to actually make use of aspects of the colonising culture so as to generate transformative cultural production. In this way, the colonized subject “interpolates” into the dominant discourse, and this word interpolation is the general term I want to use for this range of resistance practice. (“Interpolation” 176-77)

To paraphrase and summarize Hwang’s theatrical method and Ashcroft’s theorization, I would come out a rough depiction of how M. Butterfly “writes back to the empire”. It begins with a radicalized reading of the canon, then spots the rupture or the silence in the text, re-registers the alienated other into the dominate culture, regains the speaking power and makes the difference or friction seen or heard. But this sounds like oneway wish fulfilment. Moreover, Ashcroft is aware what Edward Said has warned about the “inequitable exchange” between the west and the east, the Aufhebung and the subaltern (The Empire Writes Back 179). The ambivalent, precarious, almost unpredictable relationship between the dominator and the dominated is another uncontrollable variable to prevent one from conforming to Ashcroft’s solution. To settle down the confusing colonizer-colonized relationship, Ashcroft appropriates a rhizome model. He further explicates: A better model of the ambivalent, fluid, chaotic relationships within the colonial exchanges and indeed of social reality itself is perhaps provided by a concept that I want to appropriate from Deleuze and Guattari: that of the rhizome. The rhizome describes a root system which spreads out laterally rather than vertically, as in bamboo, which has no central root but which propagates itself in a fragmented, discontinuous, multi-directional way…. But this notion is just as constructed as that of centre and margin, just as much in the interests of perpetuating power as the Manichean binaries of self and other, coloniser and colonised. The imperial power represents itself as a central root, but in fact

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the operation of power, like the operation of social relations themselves is both processual and discontinuous and propagates laterally and spatially like the rhizome. This metaphor provides a complicated and less easily representable model of colonial relations, but it does accommodate the various subject positions an individual may occupy within the colonial discourse. The colonised subject may also be the colonising subject depending on its location in the rhizome. (“Interpolation” 183-84)

The rhizome model seems convincing especially when it is applied to describe the subverted power or gender relations in M. Butterfly. Song indeed overpowers Gallimard at the end of the play. Yet, what about the day after? The subversion does not mean total negation or replacement. The western hegemony may stay in power even when Gallimard ceases to be. Likewise, Madame Butterfly will continue to be sung, appreciated, or depreciated, even parodied, or maybe assimilated by different people in different positionality and to different degree. To me, the rhizome seems a preferred map to visualize the post-colonial situation. Of course there are other considerations to discuss about Hwang’s play. But most importantly, Ashcroft’s post-colonial theories of interpolation and rhizome have answered the questions for Hwang. Must one reinscribe stereotypes in order to subvert them? The answer is yes. According to Ashcroft, it is a worthy risk. Although it may not completely resist or overthrow the hegemony, it does not necessarily become contaminated in it. In fact it is not possible to maintain cultural purity or isolation. As for the question of the nature of power and gender, the rhizome gives a vivid depiction. The power is indeed a matter of positionality and interaction for it is always in the fluid destabilisation, so is gender. Gallimard, Song, and even Comrade Chin can be male, female and androgynous, depending on the situation. The question whether Hwang has avoided the discussion of homosexuality by means of travestism will be answered when I come to post-colonial consideration of the white womanhood.

More Post-colonial Consideration

M. Butterfly maps out a convincing post-colonial situation. The Empire Writes Back defines “post-colonial” as “to cover all the culture affected by — 338 —


the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin 2). David Henry Hwang in his “Afterword” points out his use of the term “oriental,” instead of Asian or Chinese, specifically to denote an exotic or imperialistic view of the East. Although the play takes place in the decade 1960-1970 in Beijing or from 1966 to the present in Paris, Gallimard, his wife Helga and their western friends cannot get rid of their imperialistic mentality but hold on to colonial fantasy. Gallimard compares himself to Pinkerton because he says, “We, who are not handsome, nor brave, nor powerful, yet somehow believe, like Pinkerton, that we deserve a Butterfly” (M. Butterfly 10). Helga at her first appearance points out her colonial background. She declares, “My father was ambassador to Australia. I grew up among animals and kangaroos” (M. Butterfly 14). More often than not, she acts like a tourist and goes with the ladies to a martial arts demonstration. Moreover, the Danish student Renee with whom Gallimard has “extra-extramarital affair” has a father exporting “a lot of useless stuff to the Third World” (M. Butterfly 52). Gallimard’s supervisor Toulon, who is also French ambassador to China, insists that he lives in China but not with Chinese (M. Butterfly 45). To the westerners, the imperial past is never passed; the post-colonial situation is endlessly prolonged. That is why they continue to sing and read their imperialist narrative Madame Butterfly and wonder why the Chinese cannot appreciate its beautiful music (M. Butterfly 19). Ironically, they would never understand why the Chinese are “incredibly arrogant” about their “very old civilization” (M. Butterfly 18). However, the seemingly overdetermining post-colonial situation is bitterly felt by the Orient, not the West. In Puccini’s opera, it is Cho Cho San who suffers and sacrifices herself. “Death with honor/ Is better than life/ Life with dishonor,”(M. Butterfly 15, 92) she says. But to whom does she do the honor? What does her death mean? Vron Ware makes a very interesting comment on interracial love affairs and her conclusion is Interracial sex frequently leads to death in colonial fiction, and it is important to ask what this means. Is it a discourse on the impossibility of love between a man and woman from entirely different cultures? (233)

If Ware is right, I would add that the suffering or death is often assigned to the third world woman, just like butterflies which are often caught and pinned to death. Consequently, Gallimard has to transform himself into — 339 —


a Butterfly woman before he commits suicide if his suicide is to repay the impossible love. In fact, the overdetermining post-colonial situation is responsible for the production of Third World Difference that dehumanizes the oriental woman like Song Liling into “plaything.” “Third World Difference” is a term used by Chandra Talpade Mohanty to describe that “ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in the [third world] countries” (The Post-colonial Studies Reader 260). As a matter of fact, Mohanty’s essay “Under Western Eyes” is valuable in “critiquing Western feminism which too easily elide[s] specific cultural difference and ‘naturalise[s]’ all women’s oppression under widely differing manifestations of patriarchal domination to European models” (The Post-colonial Studies Reader 250). Song makes a similar distinction when she taunts Gallimard at the first meeting with a sharp contrast between the Western woman and the Oriental woman: Song: Consider it this way: what would you say if a blond homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner—ah!—you find it beautiful. (M. Butterfly 17)

She is fully aware that the Oriental woman is the object of the Caucasian men’s imperial fantasy. She asks Gallimard— Song: Could you imagine it otherwise? Clubs in China filled with pasty, big-thighed white women, while thousands of slender lotus blossoms wait just outside the doors? Never. The Clubs would be empty. We have always held a certain fascination for you Caucasian men. Gallimard: . . . that fascination is imperial, or so you tell me. (M. Butterfly 22)

Song’s statements well support Mohanty’s third-world difference. That also answers Janet Haedicke’s puzzle when she claims that AngloAmerican feminist reading for sexual difference is frustrated by M. — 340 —


Butterfly. White women may take a similar standing with their men. As the famous feminist poet Adrienne Rich states, White feminists today, raised white in a racist society, are often ridden with white solipsism—not the consciously held belief that one race is inherently superior to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant, unless in spasmodic, impotent, guilt-reflexes, which have little or no long-term continuing momentum or political uselessness. (qtd. in Ware 20) Indeed, there are two different worlds of women. Besides, gender or sexual ambivalence that Hwang creates in his play may be responsible for Haedicke’s frustration. But Haedicke admits she has a “still haunting response” to the play at the beginning of her essay. It is because when she attended the performance of the play in New York in 1988, she expected “an indictment of male exploitation” and “viewing the discomfort of her male companions” before the play. But she turned out to be the one who was defiant and who “had pleaded guilty to the Asian’s onstage indictment of Western men” (27). That is, she sympathized with subjectivity of Song and felt guilty for pushing Gallimard to the death end. Haedicke’s ambiguous response to the play points out the functional role of white femininity in the post-colonial situation. In fact, Vron Ware has proposed white womanhood on the agenda of post-colonial discourse which becomes one of the major aims of her book Beyond the Pale. She further expounds, “I hope to demonstrate that the construction of white femininity—that is, the different ideas about what it means to be a white female—can play a pivotal role in negotiating & maintaining concepts of racial and cultural difference” (4). In truth, white femininity in the western history has long been regarded as a symbol of civilization. In the fictions, she is used to convey Eurocentric attitudes toward race and class. Consider the women characters, especially old women in the novels of Henry James and E. M. Forster. In the colonial fiction, she may become an excuse for flaunting power. Adela Questeds in A Passage to India may be a good example. Her quest is to alienate Fielding from the colonized subject Aziz. With this knowledge in mind, I discover Hwang has a clever use of his white female characters, Helga and Renee. To begin with, Helga is characterized older than Gallimard, ignorant about Chinese opera, but a “pretense” to keep the good name of Gallimard. Her snobbish attitude toward the customs and history is farcical in a sense, but it is typical of the Eurocentric mentality. Her — 341 —


marital relationship is sterile but does safeguard Gallimard’s heterosexuality. Ironically, she seems more functional in China than in France. Gallimard is to divorce her even before he knows Song is coming to seek him out. There is an unsaid irony when Helga is attracted by the riot right in her own country! Paradoxically, both Helga and Gallimard have found their life in China more enjoyable. Helga confesses to Gallimard: I never thought I’d say it. But, in China, I was happy. I knew, in my own way, I knew that you were not everything you pretended to be. But the pretense—going on your arm to the embassy ball, visiting your office and the guards saying, “Good morning, good morning, Madame Gallimard”—the pretense… was very good indeed. (M. Butterfly 75)

The function of Helga in the play can be viewed as the hidden consciousness of Gallimard. She is like a fictional trope to disguise the unpleasant side of Gallimard’s mentality. The English novelist Charles Dickens is famous for using women characters to speak of human evil. But Hwang uses Helga to cover Gallimard’s weakness. For example, in China she reminds Gallimard of the duty of a married man and giving birth to the offspring. In a word, Helga is a dutiful colonial daughter, who is functional but not effective in the post-colonial discourse. Renee, on the other hand, reveals the aggressive side of Gallimard. Her boldness in sexuality and craze for exotic China are attractive to Gallimard because Gallimard would like to explore that hidden space. Here is Gallimard’s comment about her: And so, I embarked on my first extra-extramarital affair. Renee was picture perfect. With a body like those girls in the magazines. If I put a tissue paper over my eyes, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. And it was exciting to be with someone who wasn’t afraid to be seen completely naked. But is it possible for a woman to be too uninhibited, too willing, so as to seem almost too… masculine? (M. Butterfly 54)

Psychologically speaking, Renee represents Gallimard’s adventure for exotic sexuality. Her masculinity may account for Gallimard’s hidden homosexuality while Helga’s existence reminds Gallimard of homophobia. Hence I consider that Hwang has explored the discussion of sexuality not only in the exploration of the oriental women, or travestism, but also in the construction of white femininity. — 342 —


In conclusion, post-colonialism as a reading strategy helps me see why and how David Henry Hwang wants to write a deconstructivist play. He does not like cultural misconceptions or misperceptions as much as we do. He does not like stereotypes of any kind either. But it seems likely that he can write as many plays as the misconceptions he can locate in his multi-cultural American society. His play is not to further extend these misconceptions; instead, they help us see why and how the bias or fantasy is produced and affecting our life. Moreover, the meaning of Hwang’s deconstructivist text does not stop with de-canonizing or overthrowing a canon. “A canon,” Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argue, “is not a body of text per se, but rather a set of reading practices…” (The Empire Writes Back 189). And M. Butterfly does provide a set of alternative reading practices.


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Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, & Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. ——. 1994. “Interpolation and Post-colonial Agency.” New Literature Review 28/29 (1994-1995): 176-89. ——, eds. 1995. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Bigsby, G.W. E. 1992. Modern American Drama, 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Chang, Hsiao-hung. 1992. “Cultural/Sexual/Theatrical Ambivalence in M. Butterfly.” Tamkang Review 23: 1-4 (1992-1993): 735-755. Coetzee, J. M. 1988. White Writing. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Deeney, John J. 1993. “Of Monkeys and Butterflies: Transformation in M. H. Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and D. H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly.” Melus 18.4 (Winter 1993): 21-39. Haedicke, Janet V. 1992. “David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly: The Eye on the Wing.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7.2 (Fall 1992): 27-44. Hwang, David Henry. 1988. M. Butterfly. London: Penguin. Kondo, Dorinne K. 1990. “M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique of Essentialist Identity.” Cultural Critique 16 (1990): 5-29. Remen, Kathryn. 1994. “The Theatre of Punishment: David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.” Modern Drama 37 (1994): 391-400. Shimakawa, Karen. 1993. “’Who’s to Say?’ Or Making Space for Gender and Ethnicity in M. Butterfly.” Theatre Journal 45.3 (October 1993): 349-62. Skloot, Robert. 1990. “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang.” Modern Drama 33.1 (March 1990): 59-66. Spivak, Gayatri. 1992. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: The U of Chicago P. Su, Jung. 1995. “From ‘Madame Butterfly’ to ‘M. Butterfly’: Cultural/Gender/Theatrical Subversion in M. Butterfly.” Research Papers in Linguistics and Literature 4 (May 1995): 86-106. Ware, Vron. 1992. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History. London & New York: Verso.

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Akademi-Awarded Novels in English: Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope

Indian novel in English is a significant component of Commonwealth Literature with writers like Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao among others winning international acclaim as men of letters. The premier institution of India, the National Academy of Letters, i.e. Sahitya Akademi has acknowledged the excellence of several works of fiction over the years. Keeping in view its aesthetic and cultural content The Serpent and the Rope won the Akademi award in 1963. Rooted in the native ethos, the novel manifests the basic assumptions which sustain Indian culture in all its complexity. The theme of true love and marriage leads to the larger concern of the quest for self-knowledge beautifully suggested in the very title itself. The oriental and the occidental worldviews in respect of basic human issues such as sex and marriage, society, religion, learning and death stand juxtaposed on so vast a scale and with a rare authenticity of experience in this work of art. Though Raja Rao spent most of his life abroad, his love for the inherited culture has not diminished and remains his central preoccupation. He has made no secret of this inclination, “My roots are in this country … I live abroad but I am chained to this country” (Rao: 1977, 30). It is obvious that among the Indian novelists Raja Rao is the greatest interpreter of Indian thought and culture. While his contemporaries like Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. — 345 —

Akademi-Awarded Novels in English: Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope

Narayan by and large confine themselves to social reality, Raja Rao concentrates on cultural and philosophical dimension in his creative writings. The present paper intends to examine the nuances of his native ethos as manifested in his The Serpent and the Rope. There is a significant relationship between man and culture. The stream of culture undergoes changes of content as well as of form as it flows. Old elements are dropped and new elements are added. In other words, culture as a whole is in a sense nothing but the over all pattern of human action in a particular society, culture is powerful than life and also stronger than death. Thus, on the one hand it can deny satisfaction, on the other hand it can fulfill desires. It is an integral part of the individual personality. In fact, the history of culture is the history of man. Ideas are the real foundation of culture. In this connection Benedict Anderson’s remarks about the importance of Nation’s culture is true while expressing the nation’s ambivalent emergence with great clarity: Nationalism has to be understood by aligning it not with selfconsciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being. (Anderson: 19)

Literature coming from bilingual cultures demonstrates how the tension or interaction between different cultures, languages and systems can be utilized for narrative purposes. But “nations like narratives lose their origins in the myths of time only and fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.”(Bhabha: 1). The fiction itself is a cross-cultural phenomenon. This follows the model of the west which resulted in the meeting of two cultures. Raja Rao has a wide experience of regions, languages, cultures, as he has travelled widely and had been in contact with different cultures of various countries. As a consequence, his social contacts show variety of cultural fabrics mixed up in the cultures of the world, and in “The Serpent and the Rope, the East-West theme assumes a depth and validity not achieved before in Indo-Anglian fiction.” (Mukherjee: 89). The novels of Raja Rao basically illustrate not anything else but character’s awareness about their own culture while interacting with western culture. His masterpiece The Serpent and the Rope begins with Ramaswamy’s coming back to India after spending some years in France, and his metaphysical definition of the re-discovered country. In this case, the protagonist’s awareness of the two cultures intensifies his concern for — 346 —

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his own identity. He is in search of true image, torn between the traditional values he has absorbed from childhood and the new values his education has bestowed upon him. Therefore, “instead of being a static East-West confrontation it becomes a stage in his (Rama’s) evolution, an objectification of his restless intellect,” (Mathur:48) which ultimately ends with the resolution. Fully aware of all that India and Europe stand for, the novelist is in a position to mediate between the two. He brings home not only the points of departure but also the points of contact through an apt fictional presentation. The hero of the novel, Ramaswamy met Madelaine, a college teacher of History at the University of Caen. She loved Ramaswamy because he was an Indian and she loved India. Soon they are married and have a child. After sometime it was discovered that their marriage was not a union of souls but a result of temporary lust for physical pleasures. The initial proximity between the two coming from diverse cultural stocks as they do undergoes a serious rift and eventually they part ways. However, it is essential to note that neither Ramaswamy is an average Indian youth nor is Madelaine an ordinary French girl. Both of them are highly sensitive representatives of their country’s cultural and metaphysical approaches to life. Ramaswamy reviews her estimation of his own character in the following words: I knew she would be unhappy first, then angry, knowing that Indians are so undependable. If a European says he comes by such plane he will comeby, it if he missed his connection he will sleep in a hotel, and come by the next. But this Indian haphazardness, like the towel in the bath-room that lay everywhere about, was exasperating to Medelaine. (Rao, The Serpent and the Rope: 1968,58).

Both of them are not satisfied with each other’s behaviour and try to find some anomaly in their way of living. What Madelaine says about herself to Ramaswamy is meaningful in view of her class and so with to which she belongs: You will never understand us the French. There is piety of course and compassion. But Lord, there is so much calculation. I tell you virtue is a part of French bourgeois economy. (The Serpent: 86)

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Ramaswamy with all his attraction towards Madelaine is unable to adjust with his French wife and her sensibility, as she is a bit conscious that “I am a French and nothing should be useless, everything must have a right to exist” (The Serpent: 136). Moreover, “in the marriage of Rama and Madelaine, two contrary world-views, two contrary epistemologies, come together, and the novel is a study of that encounter.” (Ranchan: 5). It is clear that inspite of cultural differences Madelaine tries to come closer to her husband by identifying herself with Ramaswamy and his religion, by offering flowers and grass to the stone image. This stone image appears like a bull and is worshipped as Nandi, the carrier of Lord Shiva. Madelaine can not worship the stone image like her husband due to her Christian predisposition. She becomes conscious in her effort to come closer to him and share his religion and mythology. While studying Buddhism, she fails to go beyond the surface. She is unable to realize that according to Buddhism sorrow is the very tragedy of creation. She is also unable to believe like a Hindu wife that husband and wife are like purusa prakriti and she simply treats marriage as a social institution based on a sympathetic understanding of each other. But Ramaswamy’s quest finds fulfilment only when he comes in contact with Savithri. C.D. Narsimhaiah rightly says, “a country’s culture lives in such insubstantial things as a little gesture as a mere ‘recognition’ without the need for an explanation (the two words suggest the difference between Savithri and Madelaine according to Rama).” (Narsimhaiah: 86). An Indian girl, whether she stays in India or in the West, is always capable of realizing her feminine virtue. Savithri herself accepts, “This Cambridge undergraduate, who smokes like a chimney and dances to barbarian Jazz. She says into you, I’ve known my Lord for thousand lives, from Janam to Janam have I known my Krishna” (The Serpent: 211 -212). Like a psychologist, Raja Rao has suggested that their personal relationship is no longer stable keeping in view their different cultural backgrounds. Ramaswamy’s inability to deal with practical side of life, his haphazardness “like the towels in the bathroom that lay everywhere” is attributed not to any personal drawback but to his Indianness. The burden of cultural background falls most heavily upon their personal relationship. When Madelaine is impatient with Ramaswamy’s heavy seriousness and his refusal to grapple with tangible reality, she does not regard these as characteristics of an individual human being. These are — 348 —

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related immediately to the larger cultural, philosophical and religious background of the country of his origin. Madelaine writes to him “I wondered whether I could really love you—whether any one could love a thing so abstract as you … I wonder if Indians can love” (The Serpent: 42). On the other hand, the role of Little Mother is in every way the exact opposite of Madelaine. It has been seen that Madelaine really lacks that ‘feminine principle’ and ‘mother principle’ so richly and abundantly present in Little Mother. But a far more fundamental difference between them is that Madelaine is actually aware of the values she stands for, while Little Mother’s total strength lies in her unconscious and unquestioning identification with a set of ancient values. Raja Rao’s art of characterization as demonstrated in the portraits of Savithri and Saroja is also noteworthy. Both of them are self-effacing characters and neither is striving deliberately to live up the ideals of their culture. Savithri may be the ideal of Indian womanhood for Ramaswamy, but as a character she comes alive most vividly when she is her own self—the argumentative, rebellious, cigarette-smoking undergraduate fascinated by the wisdom and philosophy of a South Indian Brahmin who for her has the additional glamour of possessing a French education and a French wife—rather than when she is enacting the representative and symbolic role of Radha. But it is obvious that both these girls fought studiously against their marriages, but they lost because they were not strong enough by themselves. While in London, Savithri had once exasperated Ramaswamy with her fatalistic resignation to marriage, but when she was actually faced with marriage she lost courage and sent a desperate appeal to Ramaswamy: “No Hindu woman would wed a Turk. I feel besieged. The Turk is at the door. Help me to jump into the pyre … ” (The Serpent: 295). From the point of view of marriage, it may be an ‘impersonal principle’ where the element of personal fulfilment is irrelevant because the characters suffer acutely. For example, Saroja cannot get reconciled to her cruel fate even on the day of her marriage: “She (Saroja) wished she had been a European woman; it would have given her so much freedom, so much brightness. “What freedom!” I exclaimed. “The freedom of foolishness. In what way, Saroja, do you think Catherine or Madelaine is better off than you.” “They know how to love.” “And you?” — 349 —


“And we know how to bear children. We are just like a motor car or a bank account.” (The Serpent: 259)

It is with the object of presenting visionary realities that Raja Rao sets his scenes and leaves his characters to move or talk. The western approaches to life are explained through Madelaine and other European characters. And then the generalization is arrived at that in a European home the law of personal operates as is clear from Madelaine’s speech to Rama: You thought of his (their son Pierre’s) future; I thought of the present … your impersonal approach was strange to me, you yourself so impersonal … I loved to bathe in it. But how cruel it can be, how exasperating for a European. You people are sentimental about the invisible, we about the visible. (The Serpent: 208)

On the other hand, in an Indian home it is the law of the impersonal that operates. But Ramaswamy expresses his own feelings in the following manner: “I’ve a gift for you”, I said. “Show it to me”, she (Madelaine) shouted from the kitchen. “Here is a gift Sari from Saroja”, she was disappointed; she wanted it to be from me. (The Serpent: 198)

This acceptance of the impersonal law not only integrates the living generation but also establishes a relationship with the dead as well as the generation to come as ‘mother to daughter in law as from father to son is the race created’. Besides showing the difference between essentially impersonal and European personal attitudes, Raja Rao makes a mark by treating sex as a natural and spontaneous phenomenon partaking of the Indian tradition of linga-worship. He treats both love and sex on the temporal and the spiritual levels. In treating them at the temporal level he does not like to cross the limits of decency in spite of acquainting the reader with the nature of sex intimately. While comparing and contrasting the culture of two main characters, Raja Rao comes to the conclusion that both are complementary to each other. As the hero Ramaswamy believes that one can know one’s culture better by coming in contact with another as he himself realizes in the company of Madelaine and she also feels that she has come to know — 350 —

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Indian culture through her contact with Rama. Inspite of their sharply differentiated attitudes towards life, Ramaswamy and Madelaine have one striking similarity as characters: they are intensely self-conscious about the epistemologies they represent. Hardly ever do they regard themselves or each other simply as individual human beings. Instead, they are constantly interpreting their own and each other’s actions in terms of their national and cultural differences, invariably comes to an end with generalizations about Indian and western traits of character. Thus when Madelaine is indignant about some social or political injustice and Rama fails to be aroused, he attributes it not to their differences in temperament but to his “thin Brahmin blood” and her “warm southern blood.” “But inspite of their representative function”, as Meenakshi Mukherjee comments, “both Ramaswamy and Madelaine are completely convincing and recognizable as individuals. Their self-consciousness about culture and history and heritage is the way they have been conceived of as characters and it sets them apart from other characters in the novel.” (Mukherjee: 90-91). Nevertheless, Raja Rao whose spiritual and mystic inclinations were already noticed in his short stories, has grown now profoundly metaphysical and religious in The Serpent and the Rope. The philosopher in Raja Rao is in ascendancy and he now transcends the political, social and economic problems that India faced in those days. As he himself says, “For me literature is Sadhana, not a profession, but a vocation. My writing is mainly the consequence of the metaphysical life. What I mean by Sadhana.” (Rao, 1972: 8). He now grows deeply philosophical and treats the Vedantic philosophy of Advaitavada in the novel. The very title of this novel is symbolic and reminds the reader of the perennial metaphysical question of the Illusion and the Reality. But the chief protagonist of the novel Ramaswamy ultimately realizes the truth of life from the path shown by his Guru. Therefore, rejoicing in the rejoicing of others is another principle of the Hindu way of life. It is this principle which is at the base of Hindu altruism, forgiveness and catholicity. Raja Rao explains this principle well with the utmost economy of effort and words and yet comprehensively in the conversation between Ramaswamy and Savithri: “And what shall one do with one’s pain?” “Know that to have pain is to give pain. Rejoice Savithri, rejoice in the rejoicings of others. That is the Truth.” — 351 —


“You ask me too much my love. Can I still call you like that?” “Yes, my Principle, my queen, you can. Love is rejoicing in the rejoicing of the other.” She touched me with the tip of lips as though Truth had been there, just there, and the moment was the whole of Truth. (The Serpent: 364)

Besides dealing with Ramaswamy’s relations with Madelaine and Savithri, the novel is essentially a spiritual autobiography of Ramaswamy or for that matter, an expression of Raja Rao’s own spiritual quest in so far as there is close resemblance between the hero and the novelist. The hero tells his own story and includes as much as possible with a view to telling the whole Truth. It is not merely the events of his life that Ramaswamy recounts but he tries to find the truth hidden behind them. C. Paul Verghese perceptively comments that “instead of a straightforward narration of events in chronological order, the narrator protagonist leads us through the introspective diary events, in most thoughts and feelings, analysis of intimate human relations personal letters, quotations and tales from the Vedas, Upanishads, French and discussion of philosophical political system.” (Verghese: 147). Ramaswamy is a clearly conceived fictional character and though he often represents Raja Rao’s point of view, he can not be identified with his creator. What Meenakshi Mukherjee observes is true that “he is artistically realized and recognizable as a character who is nostalgiac for the past, who lapses easily into sentimentality, who dramatizes himself as Krishna and who fulfils to the best of his ability the role of an Indian as he conceives it.” (Mukherjee: 92) Finally, Ramaswamy realizes on his return to India that the whole European culture and the materialistic civilization is only an illusion like the Serpent, while the Indian spiritual Advaitic Vedant based vision is the Reality, the Rope. After intense introspection for some days and through the grace of powerful Guru though in distant India, thousands of miles away from France, the crisis is over. The devotee Ramaswamy remembers his Guru at Travancore and feels very much relieved to see the Vision of Truth. As he, quoting Sankara, says, “Life is a pilgrimage, I knew, but a pilgrimage to where and of what?”. As a Vedantin, Ramaswamy’s approach to death and life is also philosophical. He does not believe in the existence of death and only real illusion, Mrityu is death. Liberation in the Hindu tradition is liberation from the cycle of repeated births and deaths. Ramaswamy looks upon death as a mystery — 352 —

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but nevertheless believes in the continuity of life. The phenomenal world is bound by the law of cause and effect. The Ganges and the holy Benares denote the continuity of life. Finally, he compresses Vedanta beautifully so that he extends the teachings of Shankaracharya, Vivekanand and other great religious teachers straight into the hearts of the Englishspeaking people: All numbers are possible when they are in and of zero. Similarly all philosophies are in and around Vedanta. But you can more improve upon Vedanta than improve on zero. The zero, you see, the sunya, is impersonal; whereas one, two, three and so on are dualistic. One always implies many. But zero implies nothing. I am not one, I am not two, I am neither one or two. I am the ‘1’.” (The Serpent: 216)

However, the Sahitya Akademi awarded fiction The Serpent and the Rope seems to be very unique in that context which highlights the cultural and philosophical heritage of India. Raja Rao as an artist by and large bypasses the conventional fictional norms in order to lend to his stories a broad spiritual aura and in fact his novel is a spiritual odyssey—one by which an age can measure itself its values. His work reveals the ‘criticism of life’ while the ultimate realization of the hero about life comes to an end in the form of Guru. “He may keep the reader at a cultural remove, for those who are unacquainted with his psychological predispositions, his unerring sense of Indian tradition and his rather obsessive passion for the perennial themes of literature” ( K. R., Rao: 93) and “a going out of oneself in human as well as in cosmic issues marks the measure of his significance” (Narsimhaiah: 128). Therefore in the history of Indian English novel The Serpent and the Rope has become a classic in which Raja Rao succeeded in achieving a synthesis between East and West, ‘tradition’ and ‘individual talent’ while endowing it with an unusual spiritual bias.

Mithilesh K. Pandey

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Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso and New Left Books. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990 rpt. 1993. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation” in Nation and Narration ed. London: Routledge. Mathur, O.P. 1980. “The Serpent Vanishes: A study of the East – West Theme in the Serpent and the Rope, “ K. K. Sharma, ed. Perspectives on Raja Rao. Ghaziabad: Vimal Praksahan. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 1971. The Twice Born Fiction. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann. Narsimhaiah, C. D. 1973. Raja Rao. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann India. Ranchan, S. P. and B.M. Razdan. 1966. The Illustrated Weekly of India: 6 April. Rao, Raja. 1977. “The Future World Is Being Made In America” Span: Sept. ————— . 1972. “Face to Face” Times Weekly: 16 Aug. ————— . 1968. The Serpent and The Rope. New Delhi: Orient paperbacks. Rao, K. R. 1985. “Raja Rao and the Metaphysical Novel”, G.S. Amur, V.R.N. Prasad, Nemada, Nihalani eds. Indian Readings in Commonwealth Literature. New Delhi: Sterling. Verghese, C. Paul. 1971. Problems of Indian Creative writers in English. Bombay: Somaiya Publication.

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S.P. Somtow’s Jasmine Nights: A Lesson in Orchestration and Mastery of Language

Although the authors of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures note that post-colonial literatures emerged “in their present form out of the experience of colonization” (Empire 2), there is space for a text such as Jasmine Nights, written in English by a Thai writer, to be placed within post-colonial discourse because it shares similar features with post-colonial texts having emerged from outside the experience of colonization. Empire outlines four critical models to account for the ‘special character’ of post-colonial texts, but none of the four models account for texts written in a language of an imperial force,1 by writers from an experience independent of colonization but closely involved with one or more imperial powers. Jasmine Nights demonstrates that such a text is possible and because possible, can be included. This text shares similar features with other post-colonial texts, outside as well as inside the text, but it is the story within Jasmine Nights, centred by conflicts of place and displacement, “a pervasive feature” (Empire 10) of the post-colonial text, which opens space for this text within post-colonial discourse.

1

The main concern of Empire, and this paper, is literature written in English, but the authors acknowledge Spanish, Russian, French, and Dutch as other imperial languages. — 355 —


Historians have identified the various forces of imperialism which entered Southeast Asia in the 1800s and controlled most of the region until the Second World War. For instance, Colin Mackerras writes: The latter half of the nineteenth century…was marked by a phase of ‘imperialism’ that saw both the establishment of new colonial frontiers and a redirection of economic activity. The rivalry of Europeans played a part in this development … [meaning that] the British [in order to maintain their dominance] accepted compromises with [other powers]…[In addition] the Europeans [were not] facing rivalry merely with one another. [This] period … was marked by the emergence into world affairs of centres of power outside of Europe…[like] the United States. (Mackerras 154)

As a result of this ‘phase of imperialism’, eventually by the outbreak of World War II, of all the states in the [Pacific] region, only one–Thailand–was independent. All the others were under the colonial domination of a foreign power–Britain in the case of Malaya, the Straits Settlements, Burma, and the Borneo territories of Sarawak and North Borneo (Sabah); the Netherlands in Indonesia; Portugal in East Timor; France in Indochina [Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos]; and the United States in the Philippines. (Mackerras 302)

And Rhoads Murphey explains, Thailand … never became a colony, thanks in part to AngloFrench rivalry and their tacit agreement to leave it as a neutral buffer zone between British Burma and French Indochina. [Thailand’s] independence was also due in part to a fortunate series of able Thai kings … who adroitly played the British and the French off against each other and at the same time promoted the modernization of their country. (Murphey 338)

During his reign [1857-68], King “Mongut negotiated several treaties with the United States, France, [Britain] and a score of other states. In setting out on this multilateral path, the Siamese hoped to avoid such suffocatingly close bilateral relationships as those between Britain … and Burma or France and Vietnam” (Murphey 184). From this description of Thailand’s history, and Empire’s definition of ‘post-colonial’, Thailand, and subsequent production of texts, do not — 356 —

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apply. However, the greater part of the definition does apply: “[the authors] use the term ‘post-colonial’ to apply to the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged … and for the discourse through which this is constituted…[these texts] asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” (Empire 2). It is not the purpose of this paper to suggest that Thailand experienced another form of colonialism due to its close relationships with imperial powers, but rather to suggest that the historical and geographical place of independence between imperial forces created a unique tension not included in this definition of ‘post-colonial’ and, subsequently, the four models of criticism offered by Empire do not account for this special character. Additionally, the purpose of this paper is to suggest that other features which account for the ‘special character’ of postcolonial texts, as identified in Empire, and most particularly, “the concern with place and displacement” (Empire 8), can be constitutive elements of the term ‘post-colonial’, and thus differentiate ‘post-colonial’, a literary term, from ‘colonialism’, a historical experience. Post-colonial texts simultaneously accept the values of the imperial power, assert their difference from those values, and then subvert them. Textual features of the post-colonial text which ascribe difference from the imperial power are tools like “[e]ditorial intrusions, such as footnotes, the glossary and the explanatory preface” (Empire 61) Because these tools are placed outside the action of the novel, these tools indicate and remind the reader that the “language which actually informs the novel is an/Other language” (Empire 64), meaning the text exists for the reader as a paradox: the action and dialogue occur in another language, though written in English. Jasmine Nights makes use of such tools, placed outside the text, a preface in the form of a ‘dramatis personae’ and a glossary of Siamese words found after the story has ended. Bookended in this way, the novel initially appears to use English to merely translate the action as it occurs in Thai. Yet, in Jasmine Nights, the language which informs the novel is English, as the Thai protagonist and narrator only speaks English and so the dialogue of Thai characters has not only been translated for the reader but also for the narrator himself. Furthermore, the narrator’s relatives address him in a ‘stilted Victorian English’ (Nights 2) and the major relationships the protagonist forms are with characters who are all English speaking. — 357 —


The appropriation of a foreign (and imperial) language and culture over the native (and not colonial) language and culture to the point of exclusivity makes this novel worthwhile for future study. However, for the purposes of this paper, it is only the narrator’s use of English as it “causes a disjunction between the apprehension of, and communication, about the world” (Empire 25) that will be investigated. It is not merely such tools as a preface and glossary, or the use of English as a medium for the text, which qualify Jasmine Nights for inclusion within this particular discourse, but its theme of alienation, of “place and displacement”. The authors of Empire observe that “[i]t is here that the special post-colonial crisis of identity comes into being; the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place” (Empire 9). As a result, “the most widely shared discursive practice with which this alienation can be identified is the construction of place. The gap which opens between the experience of place and the language available to describe it forms a classic and all-pervasive feature of post-colonial texts … In each case, a condition of alienation is inevitable until the colonizing language has been replaced or appropriated as [a subverted linguistic code]” (Empire 10). Thus the conflict between place and language as the basis of Jasmine Nights qualify it as ‘post-colonial’ because the alienation which all the characters experience is a result of this ‘gap’. Because the novel is set in Thailand, the language available to the main character, English, is not a colonizing one, but identified as the ‘prestige dialect’ in the novel, English language privileged with authority and nonetheless causes a disjunction for the main character, as it supplants his first language while in his native country. It is once the ‘prestige dialect’ has been appropriated, subverted and challenged in its exclusivity by the characters, by means of a construction of place, that their alienation is suspended. To begin, all the major characters of Jasmine Nights are ‘displaced’. The novel is set in Bangkok and chronicles the events in the life of a twelve-year-old Thai boy during the year 1963. Several forms of displacement affect the characters with whom the protagonist forms significant relationships. There are characters of a physical displacement, that is, they are in a place different from their place of ‘origin’: Americans, Afrikaners, Germans and Brits in Thailand; the protagonist’s parents are ‘some place’ else; and servants are moved within and removed from the protagonist’s household; there are those who suffer an ideological — 358 —

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displacement: Virgil, a twelve-year-old Black American, struggles with physically being ‘free’ and ideologically being ‘slave’, and Piet van Helsing, an Afrikaner, and Wilbur Anderson, a white American, struggle with ideas of white supremacy and equality; and there are those who experience a metaphysical displacement: the great-grandmother of the protagonist, though not dead, is not wholly alive and can visit the boy in his dreams; and the boy’s pet chameleon, Homer, who does die, also visits the boy in his dreams; finally, there is the linguistic displacement of the protagonist, who has returned to his place of origin but is unable to speak his native language. It is the boy’s crisis of identity, as a result of his linguistic incapability, which sets the action of the novel in motion. In Jasmine Nights, the protagonist, though Thai, has accepted English culture to exclusivity. He doesn’t eat Thai food, “for fear it will kill [him]” (Nights 322); instead he eats ‘civilized’ food like ‘bacon and eggs’ (Nights 15). He rejects his Thai name, Sornsunthorn, and his family nickname, Little Frog, re-naming himself ‘Justin’. But most significantly, he doesn’t “speak a word of the [Thai] language” (Nights 2); he speaks only English, speaking ‘the prestige dialect’ as well as an “English lord” (Nights 30, 53). Consequently, he has no access to formal education, as “an experiment with a Thai-speaking school proved disastrous; it lasted two days” (Nights 26) and the British school, Scola Britannica, has been closed by the government. While he awaits the re-opening of the British school, he educates himself with ‘classics’, a combination of the Classical writings of Homer, Virgil and Ovid, with canonized literatures such as Shakespeare and Keats, which he finds in the ruined house on his family compound. Though a Thai and in Thailand, Justin says of himself: “I am alien here” (Nights 2). By denying himself access to any aspect of his ‘Thainess’, Justin lacks the language most appropriate to describe his experiences, using his study of the Classics instead. Empire identifies the Classics as originally being “the heart of the intellectual enterprise of … humanistic studies ... [The] Classics, with its emphasis on scholarship, philology and historical study … and the perpetual search for determinants of a single, unified and agreed meaning” (Empire 3) ultimately, and supposedly, provide humanistic truths. As a result, when Justin uses the Classics to interpret his new experiences in Bangkok, his experiences have an authority the other characters’ experiences do not. Justin, in addition to mastery of the English language, desires to be a master of written language and regards the Classical writers as his — 359 —


masters, thus his re-naming as ‘Justin’ is particularly resonant. Justin the Martyr, circa 100-167 CE, “was the first Christian writer to bridge the gap between faith and reason” (HyperHistory)2. Likewise, Justin, in Jasmine Nights, is responsible for orchestrating the unifying place which bridges the gap of experience and language for him and his friends through the act of writing. However as a member of the upper classes, Justin’s denial of his origins and desire for mastery of English does not initially present a crisis of identity. His privilege separates him from the ‘real’ world and, consequently, reinforces his disjunction of language. His contact with his new (though original) world, Bangkok, is limited and protected. His family compound is “circumscribed by high stucco walls topped with broken glass” (Nights 1) and is a “pocket universe” (Nights 36) where the ‘darkness’ of Bangkok is kept out. Within this pocket universe, Justin does not experience ‘disjunction’ at all as his every need is provided for, excessively, and it is only the servants who cannot understand him. The servants, in return, “regard his refusal to speak Thai as an eccentricity, one of the many inscrutabilities of the privileged” (Nights 2). Besides, the lower classes don’t matter as Aunt Noi-Noi says, “if you seen one you’ve seen ‘em all…they all look alike” (Nights 232). Even within this universe, however, Justin constructs another identity for himself, out of the Classics he loves, and he is at various times, an epic character: Paris, Orpheus, Achilles, or some wayward son of the father of all gods, Zeus. The only one who sees Justin’s absorption of English and his recession into a world of fantasy as a ‘crisis of identity’ is his great-grandmother. “You are not English”, she tells him, “you are a creature of two worlds, the path you must take lies in between them. Think of your chameleon … you must learn to change your colour as you change your habitat … without changing the colour of your soul. If you don’t learn this, I promise you that you will spend the rest of your life adrift, clinging to planks, without every catching sight of land” (Nights 12). Initiated by his great-grandmother, Justin’s journey of experience, a journey to experience the ‘real world’, forces him to use “the language of his heart” (Nights 12). The first real boy from the real world Justin encounters is Virgil. Virgil is also ‘an alien here’, an American in Thailand, but also suffers

2

See also the entry for Justinian I, an emperor and writer. — 360 —

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ideologically as a Black American. Unlike Justin, Virgil has achieved a ‘chameleon’ lifestyle for experiencing Bangkok, and has also constructed a place where his slave identity is set free. Virgil speaks fluent Thai and is “far more worldly” (Nights 2), easily moving about the savage world of Bangkok and making friends with the natives. Justin, on the other hand, joining Virgil’s forays into the new place, can describe his experience with the only language available to him: the myths of the Classics. The excitement is almost unbearable. I have never before felt the sharp grass scrape bare skin, or tasted canal mud in my nostrils … The klong is the River Styx and we are crossing into the land of the dead. When [my servant] Piak seizes the oars and Virgil stands at the prow, I realize that Piak is Charon the ferryman and Virgil is [the poet] Virgil, who will be my guide as we descend into the dark places… and [my maid] Samlee, of course, is Beatrice, the unattainable, gliding toward the pungent paddies. (Nights 39)

Justin is jealous of Virgil because his ‘chameleonizing’ appears to be more successful; not only does Virgil speak Thai while roaming the wilds of Bangkok, he freely speaks “a language of his soul”, Black English. Yet, having adapted to his new place, Bangkok, with a new language, Thai, Virgil nonetheless suffers from an ideological displacement, believing himself to be inferior to whites because he is black. In order to bridge this gap of this particular displacement, Virgil constructs a world, a “treehouse on top of the world” (Nights 10), where his language of his soul, Black English, is free to describe his experiences and ideals. When Justin asks permission to enter the treehouse, Virgil informs him, “Yes. But first I want you to know that it be my treehouse and in my treehouse there ain’t no servants and there ain’t no masters” (Nights 33). Virgil, though having reconciled language and physical place within the treehouse, cannot reconcile this ‘true self’ with the physical place outside of it, particularly when in the presence of representatives of that ‘other’ place. Because Virgil suffers a disjunction with self and place, he follows Justin on his journey. Obstacles on their journey are the bullies, Piet Van Helsing and Wilbur Anderson, white boys intent on keeping Virgil in his place. As children do, Virgil and Justin have an argument (Justin cannot understand Virgil’s acceptance of Piet and Wilbur’s identity for him) and during the time when Virgil stops speaking to him, Justin befriends Virgil’s — 361 —


tormentors. Justin discovers that, besides their physical displacement (Afrikaner and American in Thailand), these boys also experience ‘disjunction’ between an ideology to which they do not truly subscribe and the language they truly wish to speak. Of Piet, Justin discovers he is not just a bully but a creative genius of sorts who has constructed a “whole world under his bed” (Nights 267) where he can speak his own language, much like Virgil’s treehouse. Of Wilbur, Justin discovers that he is not a bully but impelled to act as his father dictates. Wilbur tells Justin, meeting him in a bathroom, and after the latest beating of Virgil: “…Virgil’s right…it [isn’t] your fight” [and he shows Justin that] his buttocks are completely covered with livid stripes. Here and there, a deep puncture shows the impact of a belt buckle. “[Your father] did that to you for fighting?” “No, for losing…to a nigger.” (Nights 316)

Justin is the first to realize that the ideological places of his friends do not need to exist in Thailand: “this isn’t Georgia” (Nights 145), “this isn’t a … colony” (Nights 218), and though of a different cause, his and his friends respective displacements have the same effect: “… now I see that [Wilbur], too, is the victim of a self-perpetuating cycle of injustice. It’s not him. It’s not Piet, it’s not Virgil. It’s the whole forsaken universe, locked in a maze without doors, all of us, each one of us an island, each one of us alone” (Nights 316). Justin’s newly developed empathy is a “gift” (Nights 311) and eventually, the two sides, Virgil on one, and Wilbur and Piet on the other, also realize that their ideological places do not need to exist in their current physical place, and subsequently use Justin as “a conduit, since their code of conduct forbids them to address one another directly” (Nights 319). From his position as conduit or, to return to history, as ‘a neutral buffer zone’ between warring factions, Justin desires to reconcile everyone’s displacement, his and the others, by constructing one unifying place. His belief in the Classics as the source of a unifying meaning provides the medium for such a construction, a play. A play is most suitable for such a construction, as Empire notes that before written culture “oral cultures … [assumed] that words, uttered under appropriate circumstances, have the power to bring into being the events or states they stand for, to embody rather than represent reality. This conviction that, the word can create its object, leads to a sense that language — 362 —

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possesses power over truth and reality” (Empire 81). In order to embody the experience of the new place, with a language they all share, “the play will be the thing” (Nights 320), the one big orchestration of language “that’ll make them understand one another through each other’s eyes” (Nights 318). Justin, as master of the common language the two sides share and himself a potential writer, combines the necessary elements to construct the place which will embody the gap of their experiences. However, the first two attempts of construction fail because Justin merely “cobbles” (Nights 293) and “liberally pilfer[s] from the masters” (Nights 317). His attempts fail because Justin has not created a new language, one which allows all their experiences to co-exist equally, no slaves, no masters. Incidentally having mastered his native language after this failure, Justin is enraptured by a likay performance and finally realizes that his exclusive use of English language and the Greek tragedy not only excluded the experiences of his friends, but also his own native experiences. His attempts failed because the new language did not follow a truly ‘multilateral path’, denying his own existence within two worlds, as his grandmother prophesied. In order to successfully bridge the gap for him and his friends then, the play Justin orchestrates must include parts from all sides, “an inspired commingling” which “brings them all together” (Nights 355). For his final vision, Justin appropriates a Greek myth as the frame for all the necessary components. He chooses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, superimposed on the landscape of the antebellum South. Since it’s already a Greek myth, it [is] not … difficult to readapt the tale to the format of a Greek tragedy. [The] big innovation … [and] the essence of the grand scheme … [is] that the white people will play Negroes and the Negroes white people-that each will achieve an understanding of the other by acting out the other’s role. (Nights 342)

The play, the inspired commingling, is a combination of spontaneity and script, experiences and dialects, Greek tragedy and modern likay, and is a success. The event of Justin’s harmonious orchestration demonstrates the power of language over truth and reality, securing a place between experience and language for all the displaced characters: Virgil can use

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Black English without being beat up, Wilbur and Piet don’t have to beat him up; the parents of these boys are in the audience and talking to each other; Justin’s maid, Samlee, elevated in status within the household and recently impregnated with, what he believes to be the soul of his now deceased great-grandmother, is also present; and Justin’s parents, after their absence, have returned. Finally, Justin has achieved an identity for himself; though he couldn’t include the mechanism into his final vision of the play, Justin is the deus ex machina, organizing chaos by creating a new order. Justin, rather than play his two sides of friends off one another, has used the language to which they all have access to orchestrate a space where they can “just be together. Not masters and servants, and not members of different races and cultures, but just ourselves, together” (Nights 383). With its theme of alienation and its resolution with a construction of place fused from multiple forms and experiences, Jasmine Nights opens a space within post-colonial discourse for texts from outside the historical process of colonization. Although the definition for ‘post-colonial’ offered in Empire includes a wide range of texts, the four models of criticism neither accounts for the independence of a nation amidst imperialist activity and the resulting unique tension with one imperial power, or between several, nor for the writing of a text in a language which is not the writer’s native language, using the imperial authority the second language maintains. Jasmine Nights makes possible a fifth model of criticism, one which does account for such a ‘special character’. As well, a fifth model offers a place for further analysis of a character such as Justin, whose journey has not been about regaining his native language at all but rather about how his Englishness contained the tools for reconciliation between self and place, for himself and everyone else, wielding the authority of the Empire when neither a historically colonized subject nor ‘authentic’ colonizer: is he an example of a true hybrid? of a neo-colonial? or of severely displace values? This ‘model’ would then serve as a comparative model to the other models which “account for particular linguistic, historical and cultural features” and which “argue for features such as hybridity and syncreticity as constitutive elements of all postcolonial literatures” (Empire 15). Finally, it is still important to “engage with imperial experience” (Empire 7), because “through the literary canon, the body of British texts … all too frequently still acts as a touchstone of taste and value, and through [Standard English], … asserts — 364 —

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a universal norm, [so that] the weight of antiquity continues to dominate cultural production” (Empire 7) throughout much of the world. A fifth model for texts from outside historical colonization is necessary in order to continuously challenge the imperial assertions of power, authority and hegemony, as well as the imperially constructed values of civilization and humanity because of the ever increasing interest in, and use of, the English language as an international language.

Carrie Villeneuve

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Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. “Justin the Martyr.” Hyper History Online. 24 June 2002. . Mackerras, Colin. 1992. Eastern Asia: An Introductory History. Malaysia: Vinlin Press. Murphey, Rhoads. 2000. A History of Asia. New York: Longman. Somtow, S.P. 2001. Jasmine Nights. Bangkok: Asia Books.

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A Comparison of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and S.P. Somtow’s Jasmine Nights

Jasmine Nights is a novel of Bangkok, about Bangkok, for Bangkok. It gives us an insight into Thai culture, especially the culture of elite families, and is replete with humorous and humane situations, spotlighting childhood discoveries. The novel has been described as a semi-autobiographical memoir. As put by Herbert Phillips: “It should be apparent from the foregoing that, from the point if view of those who read it, the work of Thai writers is very much an urban middle-class phenomenon … and, their literary efforts are always refractions rather than reflections of their society. What they lack in sociological literalness, representativeness or scope of coverage is hopefully compensated for the angle, depth, subtlety, and imaginativeness of their literary perspectives. The perspectives with which they are most comfortable derive from their own personal backgrounds and prejudices…”1 Jasmine Nights revolves around a twelve-year-old boy Justin who is nicknamed “Little Frog”. He refuses to use his Thai name and eat Thai food. In 1963 Justin’s parents have disappeared and he begins to live with

1

Herbert Phillips. Modern Thai Literature. The Community of Writers. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu,1987, pp. 53-54. — 367 —

A Comparison of Roy’s The God of Small Things and Somtow’s Jasmine Nights

his three maiden aunts called ‘The Three Fates’. Justin’s world is divided on more than one plane. He plays a pivotal role in the love life of his three aunts. They are an epitome of high-class snobbery, flamboyantly dressed and frivolous, full of fun and frolic. Only the eldest Aunt Ning Nong is the most businesslike with correct deportment and manners amongst the three while Aunt Nit Nit and Aunt Noi Noi “use” Little Frog for their amorous escapades. Justin’s other world is made up of his friends. His friendship with Virgil O’Fleary a black American boy and Piak the son of the gardener, sets him off on hilarious chain of events. Later he meets Piet, an Afrikaner and Wilbur Andrews, an American. This odd assortment of friends leads him to meet Jessica, Wilbur’s sister and Griselda, the daughter of the family doctor, Dr. Richardson. Justin is also close to his great-grandmother, Khunying who is struggling against death. Justin’s pet chameleon, Homer’s death puts him onto the discovery of the nether world and the deep-rooted Thai beliefs of this “other world”. On the other hand, The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy is seen through the eyes of two seven year old twins Esthappen and Rahel. Ayemenem is a small village in Kerala–Mammachi Kochamma has a pickle making factory. Her husband, Papachi ill-treats her, but she carries on valiantly. Her daughter Ammu, is Estha and Rahel’s mother. She marries a man from the far east, from the tea gardens but the marriage ends in failure and a divorce because of the of the wayward ways of her drunken husband. Mammachi’s son, Chacko has a daughter called Sophie Mol–a beautiful girl brought up in England. But when Sophie Mol comes to Ayemenem she dies in a tragic accident. The entire novel revolves around this incident. A word about the authors. SomtowSucharitkul of S.P. Somtow was born in Bangkok, educated in Eton and St. Catarine’s College, Cambridge and belongs to the “privileged class.” In his ancestry mention is made of a grandfather whose two sisters were married to King Rama IV. Somtov’s work includes avant garde musical compositions and 27 genre novels. His novel Jasmine Nights has been acclaimed by the international community in Bangkok. The novel has a strong autobiographical touch. Arundhati Roy shot into limelight with her maiden venture as a novelist. The God of Small Things was written in 1997. It won her the prestigious British Booker Prize and fifty thousand pounds as signing — 368 —

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amount. The novel has often been compared to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Roy hails from the small village of Kottayam in Kerala district in India. Her mother was a divorcee and found it rather difficult to bring up the young child. Both novels introduce us to a slice of life from the variant yet similar cultural backgrounds of the two milieus. In Jasmine Nights the reader can almost feel the grey and gloomy atmosphere of Sukhamvit Road or the clammy coldness of the water of a klong meandering along Bangkok’s busy streets an picture the banquets of Thai royal households with “usual pigs roasting on spits, vast vats full of fiery curries, satays, kuaitiaos and khnoms”2 Samlee, Justin’s maid, who is also the willing concubine of Vit, Justin’s great uncle is the epitome of servility of the lower classes. She even succumbs to have a child to raise her status in the family. On the other hand, there is Justin’s grandmother, Khunying, who expects servitude and loyalty and keeps her three inheritors, the Three Fates on tenterhooks regarding their inheritance. Similarly, Kerala backwaters come alive with strong images painted by Roy. Her fascinating imagery brings alive a lively canvas: “May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute blue bottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stir themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun…”3

Alienation

Alienation is a theme which runs through the novels. The hitherto all pervasive theme of alienation in Anglo-Indian writing, which can also be traced in the works of expatriate writers in other countries has somewhat retreated to the background. Instead of the East-West encounter so vividly represented in Raja Rao’s novel, The Serpent and the Rope the theme of alienation has become more subtle as characters are steeped in

2

S.P. Somtow. Jasmine Nights. Asia Books Co., Ltd., 2001, p.157.

3

Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things. India Ink, 1997, p. 1. — 369 —


their own environments and backgrounds; rather than clashing with foreign cultures. This is particularly true of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things , a novel set in a small village. When Ammu returns to the village after her divorce, she has broken traditional norms. Life is a lonely scarred and barren path, till she meets Velutha and feels the first stirring of love. Similarly, her children, the twins, Esthappen and Rahel are alienated in their own home and social strata. They are seeking love and finally turn to each other. They enter into a relationship which maybe taboo, breaking the social norms of their society, but fulfilling since it releases their urgent need for love and togetherness. Similarly, Ammu and Velutha turn to each other though he is a low “pariah”, an outcaste and she belongs to the higher strata of society. Their love is a moral crime in the eyes of society, but an answer to the alienation they feel from it. Similarly, we find that the theme of Alienation runs through the whole novel of Somtow, as his young hero Justin, a young Thai boy who does not eat Thai food and speaks and thinks in English is thrown back to his old and aristocratic Thai family, after his schooling abroad. He seeks the friendship of both his American friends who are neighbours, but the gardener’s son asserts himself as a stable companion. However, Justin finally finds a way out of his alienation in the sexual act which is an awakening for him. His nurse Samlee, who had always been an erotic icon for him becomes the object of his passions and he breaks the barriers of his alienation when he conjoins with her.

Language

Roy’s style is inimitable. Being an architect by profession, she has woven the story which moves on more than one level. In a cinematic and cyclic technique, the scenes keep on changing one after another and the narrative moves both backwards and forwards. Her language is sparkling, weaving an incomparable vocabulary. She has triumphed because she has daringly invented a new idiom and vocabulary. For example, ‘Lay Ter’. ‘A Sunbeam Lent to Us Too Briefly’; ‘re-Returning’‘, ‘Half Hindu-Hybrids’. — 370 —

Sushama Kasbekar

“The baby clutched his index finger while he conducted his insane, broken, envious, torchlit study.”4 “Ammu’s trying not-to-cry mouth”,” clear as glass kiss”, “Bottomless-bottomless feeling,” “part-time Happiness”, “two egg”, “Poor old Vellya Pappen, had he known then that History would choose him for its deputy.”5 “Ammu’s resting under the skin of her dream, observed them and ached with their love for them.”6 Candidness, lucidity, compactness are all attributes which come to mind when reading the book. This approach, often called the “modernist approach” is comparable to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. This third person narration which throws light on different characters, is omniscient narration. Though the major point of view is that of Rahel and Estha yet the author also keeps in mind other characters, a device which George P. Elliot calls “meddling” … And whenever and wherever Roy meddles, it does add to the effect of the narrative,7 or, as Donald Eichert says “Roy very skilfully uses the technique of stream of consciousness of a small girl.”8 What makes the narration of the novel effective is the use of the technique of “interior monologue” at many points which helps us a lot in knowing what exactly goes on in the minds and hearts of the important characters. This narrative technique proves totally appropriate in describing the saga of a family of three generations, living in the Ayemenem House, “a saga, microscoped in time, which irreversibly moves towards its doomed destiny.”9 With Somtow in Jasmine Nights the language is kaleidoscopic. As he recalls incidents which he calls “slides” he describes the bizarre in minute details. For example, here’s slide: “A close up of a set of false teeth, floating in a glass of water on a shelf next to the bathroom sink.

4

Ibid, p. 117.

5

Ibid, p. 199.

6

Ibid, p. 218.

7

G.P. Elliot. Approaches The Novelist As Meddler.Critical to Fiction. p. 335.

8

Donald Eichert. To the Booker Born. The Week, October 26, 1997.

9

Binoo K. John. An Epochal Chronicle, India Today, March 15, 1997, p. 117. — 371 —


They belong to Samlee , my nanny, my secret beloved. Samlee sleeps on a straw mat at the foot of my bed. Before she goes to sleep she sits and fans me with a bamboo fan, and she tells me stories bout disembodied heads that crawl along the garden paths at night, dragging their slimy guts behind them. She does not know how frightened I m because she does not think I understand…”10 Thai and Sanskrit words are easily woven into the narration. There is a generous use of picturesque language like the description of a Thai banquet. “As we arrive they are just bringing on the suckling pigs, thirty or forty of them, on silver platters, each one with electric lights in its eyes.”11 There is a generous use of Greek allegory as well: Justin meets his new friends, Virgil O’Fleary, the black American boy and Piak, the gardener’s son, they cross the Styx and at one point he writes: “As I (Justin) follow my new friends down the ladder into a backyard hat is not my own, as we crawl, like Red Indians after buffalo, toward the empty boat still moored beside the missing one, I think no metaphysical thoughts. The excitement is almost unbearable, I have never before felt the sharp grass scrape bare skin or tasted canal mud in my nostrils. It is only after we clamber onto the boat that I begin to seek out mythic analogues for the adventure. The klong is the River Styx and we are crossing into the land of the dead. When Piak seizes the oars and Virgil stands at the prow, I realize that Piak is Charoen the ferryman and Virgil, who will be my guide as we descend into the dark places … and Samlee, of course, is Beatrice, gliding towards the pungent paddles…”12

There are many quaint phrases coined by the writer: “gustatory enthusiasm…”, ”communal platter”, mosque like hair drying devices”. “To them you are as mythical a beast as the unicorn or the harpy submerged yourself in the welfare of your family.”

10

S.P. Somtow. Jasmine Nights. Asia Books Co. Ltd., 2001, p. 3.

11

Ibid, p. 7.

12

Ibid, p. 40. — 372 —

Sushama Kasbekar

The World’s Dark Pain

Jasmine Nights tells us about the racial feelings and how the Civil war in America was very real to the Americans living in Bangkok. When Virgil O’Fleary, the black American boy who is Justin’s friend and the other boys, Piet and Wilbur fall out amongst themselves and the question of apartheid looms large in Justin’s mind. And Justin has mixed feelings for Wilbur, “I had been ready to give him the cold shoulder for the rest of the school year, but now I see that he, too, is the victim of a self-perpetuating cycle of injustice. It’s not him. It’s not Piet, it’s not Virgil. It’s the whole forsaken universe, locked in a maze without doors, all of us, each one of us an island, each one of us alone.”13 And again, “Yet I can’t singlehandedly bring about the dream that moved more than 200 thousand people to march on Washington. I can’t abolish apartheid, I can’t even force my feuding friends to acknowledge each other’s common humanity. I feel so helpless it hardly seems worth taking even one step towards haling the world’s dark pain….”14 Thus, even in his small and limited universe, Justin feels the tremours of the colour bar and the underlying theme of alienation which most foreigners feel when they are away from home and hearth. In The God of Small Things alienation is to be found in one’s own society–the kind that perpetrates casteism significantly. Velutha, who is Ammu’s lover, is a low cast untouchable while Ammu is a high caste. He is a carpenter by profession. He has a powerful physique and is referred to as a creator, a creator of small things. He was a human God, made of flesh and blood. He left “No footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirror.” But he towers over the other characters. Yet, his lot was to suffer at the hands of the police, at the hands of society–from whom he was alienated–and from his love, Ammu, because he did not belong to the high caste. While Ammu’s case of alienation was on two counts–Firstly, her marriage was a failure. She returns, unwelcome, to her father’s house where her “life is dammed … an unmixable mix.” In fact, she feels the alienation even more than Velutha because she is virtually an untouchable in her home, in her family and in the society. Her love for Velutha

13

Ibid, p. 316.

14

Ibid, p. 317. — 373 —


leads her to death–to die helpless, sick, alone in a strange bed, which proved fatal and disastrous. Velutha works at Paradise Pickles and Preserves factory owned by Ammu’s family. Yet, because he is an untouchable, the other workers resent him, and he is paid less money for his work. Velutha’s presence is unsettling to many who believe he acts above his station. His own father notes this problem: “Perhaps it was just a lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance in the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel.”15 When Velutha has an affair with Ammu, he breaks an ancient taboo and incurs the wrath of Ammu’s family and the Kerala police. Roy describes the policeman’s violent actions as being done out of fear, civilisation’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women power and fear of powerlessness. The division between the Touchables and Untouchables is so ingrained in Kerala society that Velutha is seen as a non human. If they hurt Velutha more than they intended to, it was only because any kinship, and connection between themselves and him, any implication that if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature–had been severed long ago.

Transgressions

Transgression seems to be an underlying theme in both novels. Justin is curious about the forbidden fruit and what it could bring them. From the beginning of the novel we find Justin trying to find the answers to the mysteries of sex. His love for his maid Samlee, the veiled discussions with his friends Virgil and Piet, the lecture on sex education of Father Regenstrom and his reference to ‘birds and bees’ to his biology teacher Miss Ciccolini and the consequent uproar which resulted from it, are all attempts at trying to understand this complex unmentionable mystery of life. Justin’s escapades into the amorous adventures of his aunts is rather hilarious. He spies on his aunts and their lovers, he is almost omnipresent in their adventures and escapades. At times he is enclosed in

15

Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things. India Ink, 1997, p. 339. — 374 —

Sushama Kasbekar

cupboards with a tape recorder recording the interlude between his Aunt Nit Nit with the rakish Dr. Rich. Or he is hiding in a cart in the clinic of the same doctor and his other aunt. Justin’s discovery culminates in what he calls “the Judgement of Paris” where he finally discovers the mysteries of life. While Justin’s escapades are rather humorous, we find Rahel’s dilemma more complex and’ at times, an escape from loneliness, emptiness and incompleteness. “Various characters in the novel suffer as a consequence of breaking certain inalienable laws which human beings have to obey.”16 Rahel and Estha are twins ‘dizyotic twins’ who are attracted to one another. This close, incestuous brother-sister relationship which has been faintly outlined, hinted at, as a painter draws a pencil outline, but does not put in the colours–has come in for great controversy, by readers and critics. In the hotel they were, almost two in one, two bodies and one soul.” “On the next bed lies Chacko’s niece and nephew who slept with their arms around each other. A hot twin and a cold one. He and she.”17 Ammu’s relationship with Velutha is taboo according to social norms, since she is a high class Syrian Christian lady while he is a mere low caste carpenter, a Parvan. Yet Roy has written about their 13 nights of love and togetherness with sensitive artistry. She draws out their pitiable helplessness. “Even later, on the 13 nights that followed this one, instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew that there was nowhere for them to go. They had nothing. No future. So they stuck to the small things.”18 The episode between one of the twins, seven year old Estha and the Orangedrink Lemondrink man in the foyer of Abhilaash Talkies is an incident of sexual depravity rarely written about. This awakening to the facts of life of the seven-year-old boy is rather startling. The incident gets interspersed with the screening of the movie “The Sound of Music” which Estha, his sister Rahel, his mother Ammu and Baby Kochamma the twins

16

Amina Amin. Breaking Laws, Crossing Forbidden Territory. An Analysis of the God of Small Things.

17

Arundhati Roy. The God of Small Things, India Ink, 1997, p. 122.

18

Ibid, p. 338. — 375 —


aunt have come to watch. The awesome musical score of the film, the pivotal performances of Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews in the movie and their ‘seven peppermint children’ and the story co-mingle with the story of the family from Ayemenen. In Jasmine Nights as well we find a similar episode–but this time the movie is “Spartacus”. The actors, Kirk Douglas, Woody Strode, Peter Ustinov, Jean Simmons all serve as a back-drop for the rendezvous and amorous adventures of Aunt Nit Nit and Dr. Richardson. Justin is as usual, the “cover” for his aunt and accompanies her to this movie along with his friend Virgil O’Fleary. While Aunt Nit Nit and Dr. Richardson, escape to a noodle stall to talk at ease, Justin follows them and hides in an overhanging tree. But when he finds that his aunt is being side tracked by Dr. Richardson, he falls out of the tree and starts beating up Dr. Richardson. The movie serves as an interesting backdrop for such ludicrous adventures and discoveries. Both novels are a slice of a complex culture. Somtow has presented the higher echelons of his society, and a young boy’s endeavours to come to terms with his own sexuality and coming of age. It also portrays the shortcomings in Thai society. The inherent humility and courtesy of his people, the longing for acceptance in a Western society, age-old norms of ruling and reigning, the servile nature of the poor people, the change over from a male to a krojack… all this and more are portrayed through the eyes of a fascinating youngster. And in many ways it has steered clear of the average Thai novel, for, as Michael Barang puts it: “Too many Thai novels, I found, are dripping with honey and rosy beyond belief. They are cultural and ideological reasons for this. Thai culture is non confrontational in essence and, for the sake of social harmony, the Thai will always try to see only the “good side” of things and feign to ignore problems as long as they can: This works to some extent in real life, but applied to the novel, it means fatal blandness.”19 Roy has etched a deeper picture of that facade of Indian society which refuses to accept love between people of two castes or classes, between a sister and a brother, and an ex-nun and her lover. The novel has a deeply brooding character punctuated by sparkling vocabulary. It has to be read on many levels since the story begins on a plane which

19

Marcel Barang. The Twenty Best Novels of Thailand.. Thai Modern Classics, 1994, p. 14. — 376 —

Sushama Kasbekar

could be the centre of ‘stream of consciousness’ makes us realize the characters feelings, their innermost thoughts and their inner turmoil. As emphasized by Roy in her interview,: “I have to say that my book is not about history but biology and transgression. And the fact is that you can never understand the nature of brutality until you see what has been loved being smashed. And so the book deals with both things–it deals with our ability to be brutal as well as our ability to be so deeply intimate and so deeply loving.” What probably stands out in both novels is the magical and quirky twists in the story and language. Poetic license has been used to the utmost. The novels have painted pretty pictures, bizarre situations and above all through the fragile world of young children, the double standards of adults and society stand out in stark contrast to the innocent children. The picture is shattering. Yet, a sense of artistic excellence, an elevating almost lilting feeling comes through when we realize that both writers are deeply optimistic and celebrate the spirit of life.

Sushama Kasbekar

— 377 —


Representation in Philippine American Women Writers: Between Authenticity and Orientalism

Can an American know the heart of a Filipino? Can a writer speak on behalf of her people? For whom does she speak? This question of representation besets immigrant writers the world over. Whenever they write, they are believed to be representing someone. Toni Morrison in “Paradise Found” for instance, talks of having to answer sociological and political questions during book readings, instead of queries that address literary concerns (Gray 65). What should the roles of writers be given their positions of power and responsibility? Filipino writers who have made America their home like Cecilia Manguerra Brainard and Jessica Hagedorn are faced with the same questions. Should they depict the Philippines the way they see it now, after years and years of being away? Can they speak on behalf of the Filipinos? Occupying such controversial positions, these writers are read by Filipinos and Americans alike and are judged on the basis of how well they represent the Philippines. While one is praised for sympathetically portraying her subject, the other is condemned for criticizing the Philippines. A closer study though, reveals that neither Brainard nor Hagedorn, nor any Filipino immigrant writer writes from a purely Philippine perspective. They fail to come up to the immigrant’s expectation of representation. — 379 —


Having been observed and analysed by the Spaniards then the Americans, the rest of the world has read and heard their views. Filtered through their eyes, the Philippines became a country “nearly a successful replica of the United States–except that its citizens are mostly darkskinned, poor, ostensibly ‘Roman Catholic’ in faith” (San Juan 5-6). The Filipinos were thought friendly and hospitable, but not necessarily ambitious. Masterpieces like the Banaue Rice Terraces are praised for their uniqueness but for all the agricultural accomplishment, the Philippines is still perceived as a backward country. Occasionally on television, men are seen coming home from fishing and counting out the day’s meagre earnings. They smile, the only positive bent in which the Filipino is perceived. The Philippines, famed pearl of the Orient, rich in natural resources, home of friendship and hospitality, is today a land of corruption, mail-order brides and domestic helpers. Like the sultry woman in a Tanduay rum advertisement, the Philippines has found itself perpetually objectified. Tentative impressions have often led to racial stereotypes that encourage misrepresentations of the Filipino. So when a writer like Brainard or Hagedorn writes, and is heard, she breaks through the gaze and the silence. She is no longer object but subject. She defines herself as she writes her story. The complication emerges when the audience assumes that the writer is also writing their story in her story. In many critical readings, the writer is assumed to be the spokesperson of a group. Although it is not difficult to understand how writers are tasked with representation, the idea becomes problematic. Questions like whose Philippines–hers or theirs–should she represent, come up. Should it be the Philippines she knows, even if it is not the Philippines of the masses? Since this is an opportunity, maybe she should focus on deorientalizing the Philippines. But critics argue that the task of deorientalizing the Philippines can only be achieved if the author knows the Philippines “as it really is” and not as the exotic paradise the colonizers have shown it to be. It is at this point that the writers come under very close inspection. Can Brainard represent the real Philippines when she hails from a Western tradition of writing? Since kindergarten “she had been educated in English, not her native Cebuano, and taught from a mostly Eurocentric perspective. At the same time she grew up surrounded by American culture–watching Hollywood movies, reading American books and magazines” (Huebler 100). How can this highly-educated woman from an upper-class Philippine family, living — 380 —

Hope Saban-pan Yu

“in a Spanish-style villa, tended by servants and surrounded by gardens of orchids” (Huebler 98), know anything about the situations of the masses? Powerful political kinship ties have accorded Brainard special status in the community. She cannot know enough to represent the common Filipino. The same goes for Jessica Hagedorn. Essentially, both writers are criticized for not representing the Philippines authentically. Their works have been perceived by Filipino critics as “a racist and fetishistic” exoticizing project to gain “acceptance into the U.S. literary mainstream” (Balce-Cortes online). Before we can discuss authenticity, we should be able to understand what orientalism is. Edward Said defines orientalism as “a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness” (Said 6). Orientalism is how the West makes sense of the East. On a very basic level, it is a set of stereotypes that when applied to new observations, provide an easy and convenient way to analyse the subject. For example, once Orientalism perceives Filipinos as indolent, all actions will be studied within the parameters of such perceived indolence. The body of generalizations that will evolve remain unchallenged and uncontested. But this is not to say that the “Orient,” which is a construct, does not exist in reality. We cannot just dismiss it as “a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away” (Said 6). Said explains that the orientalising efforts of the colonizing era have given birth to a body of ideas, beliefs, cliches, or learning about the East, and other schools of thought at large in the culture. Now one of the important developments in nineteenth-century Orientalism was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient–its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness–into a separate and unchallenged coherence. (Said 205)

Susan Montepio, a critic of Brainard’s works, claims the sense of continuity of When the Rainbow Goddess Wept is sacrificed in the retelling of epic stories in the novel. I believe that this fragmented sense of continuity is a result of the author’s subconsciously subscribing to Orientalism. Inspite of her good intentions to capture “the essence of the Filipino culture by weaving in folklore and epic songs” (Huebler 101), many of her observations are informed with Western perspective, with

— 381 —


“orientalism.” Yvonne witnesses her mother drive the Japanese soldier away: Seeing Mama that way made me think of Bongkatolan, the woman warrior with dark hair reaching her ankles. In battle she wore clothes woven and beaded by the goddesses who loved her. Bamboo shield and sword in her hands, hair whipping in the wind, Bongkatolan equalled the finest men warriors. (When 72)

Anyone who can describe Bongkatolan “with dark hair reaching her ankles” and claim she “equalled the finest men warriors” is clearly voicing Western consciousness. Here, the Filipino woman is portrayed as mystical as well as possessing fighting skills equal to men. Precolonial society was egalitarian and the idea of comparing women as men’s equals is “orientalising.” The sad part is this is filtered through the eyes of a Filipina. One critic, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, points out particulars in Brainard’s work that misrepresent the Filipino. She maintains that when one considers Brainard’s vantage point for the telling of stories and compares it with the story she tells, one feels dismay (Hidalgo 102). Like her other narratives, Brainard “ends up by glossing over things” (103). She integrates folktales, traditions and superstitions in the text, rewriting and revisiting Philippine history, “to suit her present needs” (106). Brainard exoticizes the Philippines just enough to appeal to an American audience. Indeed, there are evidences–especially in her other works–to justify complaints. Brainard tends to paint very vivid pictures intent on achieving a single effect. At times, as in the following excerpt, that effect comes at the cost of a mimetically accurate representation: I watched the mountain people walking down the trail to the village to sell or trade their produce. Carrying enormous conical baskets on their backs, they strode with a rhythmic bounce in a straight line. It was always like that; mountain people always walked single file, even when they were on a wide stretch of land. Esperanza even had a joke about mountaineers marching single file in the heart of Ubec City. It was dumb, I thought, dumb. They were like ants. (When 78)

As in this passage, indigenous people tend to make regular appearances in Brainard’s novel. Laydan the cook, in fact, is another example of “orientalism”:

— 382 —

Hope Saban-pan Yu

When I was twelve, I begged my parents to allow me to travel with Inuk. I cried for days until my mother accompanied me to the singer to inquire if I could be his apprentice. I sang to him the epic fragments which I had learned from a villager. He made a face, saying I had a lot to learn, but he took me in. We travelled from village to village for weddings, funerals, all sorts of celebrations, and Inuk would sing these beautiful songs, about the maiden in the skyworld, and the gentle goddess Meybuyan. (45)

But ironically, all the while that Brainard gets blamed for orientalising, she seems perfectly aware of this phenomenon of orientalism. Her characters understand the disparity between the world’s understanding of the East and the actual East. Time and again we see this sort of understanding filtering through the beliefs and behaviour of Max, one of her characters. Max has lived so long in America that he thinks and behaves like an American. He is “frightened of a lot of things – animal innards, blood soup” (46) but he is not afraid of eating “his beef, bloody. ‘Rare’ he calls it” (46). This is not the only instance of orientalism being laid bare. Just as much as Max stereotypes the Orient, believing the ways of all who lived here are primitive and unhygienic, Brainard shows that the Philippines is a fertile hunting ground for libidinous American males like Martin Lewis: He often attended barrio fiestas to pick out young beauty queens–seventeen year-old girls wearing lipstick, high heels, and long gownsfor the first time–and talk the girls’ parents into letting him take them with him to Ubec to ‘train them to be radio announcers.’ The only kind of announcing they did was the moaning and groaning executed on Lewis’ circular bed. When he grew tired of them, he dispatched them back to their barrio with fifty pesos in their purses–hymen fee. (161)

Many critics take offense at Brainard’s portrayal of the Philippines. She reinforces the West’s patriarchal attitude towards the East. As the West always suspected, Brainard’s Philippines, the backward impoverished country, cannot fight its own war. It needs intervention from the Americans: “William Cushing, an American guerilla leader in Mindanao, found a place for us in the mountains” (43). This stereotype of the helpless Filipino waiting for the aid of benevolent Americans provide a vehicle for American patriarchy. — 383 —


Hidalgo implies that Brainard fails to seize the “opportunity to explore the problem” (99) and instead retreats into the banal. Brainard completely de-individualizes herself: One waits in vain for any insight on what the customs, practices and beliefs signify besides being material for memories of an idyllic time. The author is silent on what they might reveal of the culture she purports to be explaining. In fact, there are no explanations. (98)

One can assert that this de-individualization makes the novel the product of what Foucault terms “author function” (107). Instead of Brainard, the individual author, the voice in the novel would represent different socially determined roles. Brainard’s words reflect a number of forces acting upon her like the hegemonic ideas of postcolonialism and the immigrant culture of the United States. Her works reflect not what Brainard thinks, but rather, what her times think. Foucault states that we are accustomed to defining the author as “the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of signification” (118). However, the truth is “the author is an ideological product” (119). By bringing the author down to the level of a “product,” Foucault underscores the forces around the author that “create” them as much as they are “creating” their characters. He shifts the focus from author being the creator of all signifiers, to his or her conditions being the author’s creators. In the world of fiction, the author is not the prime mover, but the environment. Foucault would say that Brainard does not produce wholly independent ideas–no one does. Rather, she serves as the vehicle for the ideas of her times. For Foucault the question would be, not “What kind of person created these fictional works?” but rather “What kind of times and situations created this author?” Foucault would argue that Brainard has internalized some Orientalism, but he would continue that she has also internalized her experience of living in the Philippines, of immigrating and of assimilating to the United States. Hers is a blend of all these different perspectives, all these different lives. When she thinks of faith healing, for example, she cannot possibly think of it in a way unbiased by Western thought. Her views on Philippine issues are far more complex than the critics would have it. In the novel, for instance, note the depiction of faith healing as a fraudulent business: — 384 —

Hope Saban-pan Yu

the faith healer flicked his long fingernail on Bitong’s stomach, making a two-inch cut. He placed a copper coin on the cut, then he lay a cotton ball soaked in alcohol on the coin. Mang Viray took a match and lit the cotton ... blood oozed out of the little cut and clotted into an ugly purple mass ... With a dramatic flair, he cleaned the wound with alcohol and showed everybody the blood clot, which he explained was poison from Bitong’s system. But later, after studying Bitong’s toe, he shook his head and said there was more poison, and that he could do nothing else. (119)

Evidently, Brainard writes under the shadow of the West’s take on faith healing. Upon the original Philippine meaning of “faith healing” (which was assumed to be done with incantations or the laying of hands on the body or the use of herbal concoctions and oils) she has added centuries of Eastern-Western discourse as well as her own experiences with it. Since Brainard is not herself the object of any single culture, she cannot objectify any culture singly. This is what the critics fault. While it is understandable that Filipinos can be incensed with such writing, asking an author to return to a previous mind-set is futile. Just as words accumulate meaning after meaning and therefore become carriers of their own history, so is it with traditions. Many sources of faith healing come to us tainted with early Christian and indigenous-patriarchal discourses. And just as the early engagements between indigenous and colonial authorities and textual sources vibrated with colonialpatriarchal voices, a historian’s encounter today with sources on faith healing cannot escape traces of that previous exposure. How can an author not replicate the staging of faith healing as a contest between tradition and modernity? In the same manner, how can Brainard refer to faith healing independently of the tradition-modernity dichotomy? To condemn faith healing, as she does in the novel, is to articulate the Western view. And to defend the practice would also be to answer to the dialogue started by the colonizers. To engage in the dialogue in any way at all, in fact, would be to concede that she cannot escape the very environment she has grown and lives in. At first reading, it seems that Hagedorn, with her unassuming treatment of such issues of superstition, escapes this dilemma. In Dogeaters, for example, Dalisay intones an “invocation against witches: — 385 —


‘Asin, suca / get-teng, luya / bawang, lasona’ ... ‘Salt, vinegar / scissors, ginger / garlic, onion’ ... An invocation against death, to protect her unborn child” (13). There is just the incantation but no physical cutting up of the body. But even Hagedorn, an advocate of matters Filipino, gives in to the established ideal. She provides evidence for Said’s argument that the idea of the Orient is weighted with backwardness. Lola Narcisa and the servants she portrays in Dogeaters weep without shame listening to a radio serial entitled “Love Letters:” Without fail, someone dies on Love Letters. There’s always a lesson to be learned, and its always a painful one. . . pure love, blood debts, luscious revenge, the wisdom of mothers, and the enduring sorrow of Our Blessed Virgin Barbara Villanueva.” (12)

Into this setting comes Freddie Gonzaga, Rio’s father, who likes to consider himself a Spaniard even if he is Filipino born, and denigrates the serial as appealing “to the lowest common denominator ... the ‘bakya1 crowd’” (11). Despite such Orientalism in her work, Hagedorn is seldom accused of being unfair to the Filipinos. Just as one does with Brainard, one could easily argue, for instance, that by making these stereotypical portrayal of Filipinos, Hagedorn is perpetuating the Oriental myth. One could say that the Philippines still struggles to free herself of the notions of backwardness and widespread low-brow sensibilities that she presents in Dogeaters. But Hagedorn is usually praised for creating characters that reveal “the complex nature of the Filipino” (Davis 124). Finally, all criticism whether positive or negative, intersect at the juncture at which the author is perceived as having successfully represented the people who she believes she speaks for. When Brainard is lambasted, it is because she fails to make a balanced representation. When Hagedorn is lauded, it is because she depicts the Philippines as it really is. Evidently, even some authors like Ninotchka Rosca are convinced that the purpose of literature is utilitarian: “to represent this self in fiction, the writer assumes part of the responsibility for defining it even as he or she reflects it” (Rosca 242).

1

Bakya means low-brow. — 386 —

Hope Saban-pan Yu

As we have seen earlier, the problem with this attitude is manifold. After having been born in one world and being relocated to live in another world, which “self” does a writer recreate? The backward self or the modern self? Can these two be ever untied from the other? In her article on Brainard, Hidalgo argues that the author presents both sides at the same time. Hidalgo further asserts that Brainard projects her own privileged position of power and influence upon her exoticized Filipino subjects. There is certainly some cause to Hidalgo’s complaint but one can also argue that anyone who finds herself at the intersection of two cultures must recreate her world, must redefine her culture. Similarly, all immigrants are in some stage of integration. As Hagedorn writes in Dogeaters, one does not know when “reality will diminish the grandeur of [the] childhood image of home” (245). And this is true for all things and all people, not just immigrants. Modernization invades Filipino places one person at a time. Our fellowmen continue to modernize while our memories are locked and sealed tight. Or worse, the places of the past alter in our memories–into idyllic edens that resemble neither past nor modern. Homi Bhabha calls this idealism “the fatality of thinking of ‘local’ cultures as uncontaminated or self-contained” (Bhabha 54). Instead of being pure, they are, as Brainard’s and Hagedorn’s novels show, in flux. They are always being contaminated. Immigration hastens the process of change . Bhabha states “the people have taken with them only a part of the total culture ... the culture which develops on the new soil must therefore be bafflingly alike, and different from the parent culture” (54). These authors write about this new culture from their new perspective. Their views can be held to be neither Filipino nor American. They represent, if anything, the inner dialogue in which the individual writer engages, about the duality of the lives she has known. Bhabha quotes Mikhail Bakhtin: The ... hybrid is not only double-voiced and double-accented ... but is also double-languaged; for in it there are not only (and not even so much) two individual consciousnesses, two voices, two accents, as there are [doublings of] socio-linguistic, consciousnesses, two epochs ... that come together and consciously fight it out on the territory of the utterance ... It is the collision between differing points of view on the world that are — 387 —


embedded in these forms ... such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words. (58)

Instead of lamenting an untraditional perspective, Bakhtin celebrates the conception of new worlds. He sees these worlds in not only the author’s perspectives but also in their words. He provides the postcolonial reader with a new way to read and appreciate this outlook. His is a concept where there is a venue for faith healer/doctor, backward/modern and Filipino/American.

Hope Saban-pan Yu

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Works Cited

Balce-Cortes, Nerissa. 2000. “Imagining the Neocolony.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2.2 (1995). 21 November 2000. . Bhabha, Homi. 1996. “Culture’s In-Between.” Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, p. 53-60. Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra. 1994. When the Rainbow Goddess Wept. New York: Penguin. Davis, Rocio. 1997. “Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters: Revisioning the Philippines.” Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration. Ed. Geoffrey Kain. Michigan: Michigan State University Press, p. 115-127. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, p. 101-20. Gray, Paul. 1998. “Paradise Found.” Time. January 19, 1998: 64-8. Hagedorn, Jessica. 1990. Dogeaters. New York: Penguin. Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. 1994. Filipino Woman Writing: Home and Exile in the Autobiographical Narratives of Ten Writers. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Huebler, Dana. 1997. “An Interview with Cecilia Manguerra Brainard.” Poets & Writers Magazine. March/April 1997: 97-105. Rosca, Ninotchka. 1990. “Myth, Identity and the Colonial Experience.” World Englishes 9, no. 2 (1990): 237-43. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. San Juan, Epifanio, Jr. 1998. “Transforming Identity in Postcolonial Narrative: An Approach to the Novels of Jessica Hagedorn.” Post-Identity. Summer 1998: 5-28.

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The Return of the Native: Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds (1986) Revisited in Post-apartheid Durban 2001

The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place — Eudora Welty in Bradbury 2001

Introduction

I should begin by explaining my project in this paper. In 2001, Lewis Nkosi–the well-known South African literary critic and writer–revisited his ‘home town’, and was based for a three month period at the University of Durban-Westville where I teach English Literary and Cultural Studies. One of the first things I heard him speak about was something obviously close to his heart – it was a conference paper delivered on campus entitled “The ‘Native’ is Everywhere and Nowhere”. In it, he described what it was to have been a ‘native’ under apartheid and how he decided to refuse to be one at a certain point in his life. He talked as well of his return to postapartheid South Africa and how the visit made him look again at what it was to be a ‘native’–both in the apartheid sense; and also in the sense of being native to a place, belonging to it.

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The Return of the Native: Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds Revisited

In preparation for his visit, I had been reading Mating Birds (1986). This was Lewis Nkosi’s first novel; one which won the McMillan Pen Prize and which was widely hailed as a ‘protest novel’ with The Guardian commenting however that the novel was: More than just another protest novel. Its attack on apartheid is not moral so much as clinical. It is in exposing the mythology of segregation that Lewis Nkosi’s power and originality lie. (dust jacket)

My interest in the novel was to look at this “mythology of segregation” through the lens of place–in other words, what use had Nkosi made of spaces/places in this novel to underline or highlight his point about a system that denied interracial intercourse? Furthermore, how did Nkosi interpret these self-same places on his return visit in 2001, post apartheid? The novel may have been a work of fiction but the places described in it existed then and now, and were well known to Nkosi, a son of Durban. So, with this project in mind–a retracing of steps as it were– Lewis Nkosi and I spent some days revisiting a few of the places described in Mating Birds. The conversations I recorded as accurately as possible and, because place in this case was before our eyes, I photographed the contemporary scene which I juxtaposed with archival material of the same places taken in the 1950s which is when the novel is set.1 This paper then is a multi-faceted one: it is a literal revisiting of Durban spaces that appear in a fictional work, set in the 1950s and written in the 1980s, from a post-apartheid and post-colonial perspective. The framing question throughout prompted by Nkosi’s conference paper, is always ‘what is it to be ‘native’ to a place (in the many different senses of the word ‘native’)? First, perhaps, to situate Lewis Nkosi in a brief biography. He was born in Chesterville, a Durban black township, in 1936. He was a bright schoolboy with aspirations, however his road out of the ghetto was not an easy one. He told me as we were looking at an exhibit on the notorious ‘Durban System’, designed to control ‘natives’ for labour purposes, that, fresh out of school, he was lured by the offer of a job as a clerk in a fertilizer company to live in a black men’s hostel. The job, it turned out,

1

My thanks to Lewis Nkosi for spending time with me going over old ground, but seeing it afresh from a new perspective; and also for sharing his insights with me. — 392 —

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was actually to be a manual labourer–he remembers “so little food”, no privacy, a “brutal” existence (Nkosi 2001a). He became a junior reporter on Ilange nase Natal newspaper, moved to Johannesburg to work on Drum magazine in 1956 and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in 1961. He was only granted a one-way exit for this Fellowship so was, in effect, denied re-entry to his native land. From America he went to London in 1964, becoming Literary Editor of New African magazine from 1965 to 1968. He was granted British citizenship. He then embarked on the academic career of Professor of Literature holding positions at the University of Zambia, the University of Wyoming and the University of California, Irvine, among others. He now lives in Basel. In a sense he has become the traveller, not the native – he holds British citizenship which asserts that he ‘belongs’ to Britain; he lives in Europe, the source generally of the settlers who came to Africa and necessitated ‘the native question’; and, as he ironically remarked, he is still looking for his passbook (which all ‘natives’ were forced to carry under apartheid), which he needs to prove he is a native of South Africa in order to reapply for South African citizenship! His published works include plays (The Rhythm of Violence 1964, Black Psychiatrist 2001); essays and literary criticism (Home and Exile 1965, The Translated Heart 1975, Tasks and Masks 1981); and novels (Mating Birds 1986, Underground People 1993). Speaking of black South African writing generally, he summarises his own writing project: The novelists, dramatists and poets remind the public constantly what the public wishes to forget. Black writers in particular, feel an urgent sense of obligation to expose the wounds and to make the ‘knowledge’ public; but such an attempt by black writers only creates for the other side huge anxieties and discomfort. (Nkosi 1981:77)

Before looking at questions of place and belonging in Mating Birds, it will be useful to see what Nkosi had to say about being a ‘native’ in South Africa, one who refused. Firstly, he acknowledges the constructedness of the idea of the ‘native’: the ‘native’ being a “category developed against the backdrop of British imperial culture which referred to indigenous populations in the colonies as ‘natives’” (Ahluwalia 2001:64). As Nkosi remarked in his conference paper, the idea of the ‘native’ only exists in a time of colonisation. Mamdani on the same question writes: — 393 —


In colonial discourse, the problem of stabilising alien rule was politely referred to as ‘the native question’. It was a dilemma that confronted every colonial power and a riddle that preoccupied the best of its minds. (1996:3)

The word ‘native’, Nkosi pointed out, is usually associated with origins, but in apartheid South Africa the word came to mean “illegitimate or interloper” (Nkosi 2001b). Settlers positioned themselves as belonging in certain spaces and thus afforded certain rights, whilst ‘natives’ were allocated separate spaces with correspondingly fewer or no rights. Mamdani goes so far as to see apartheid or institutional segregation not as exceptional to South Africa, but “actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa” (1996:8). How did Nkosi, specifically, respond to his positioning within the apartheid state as a ‘native’? There were two required characteristics of the ‘native’, he stated: one to be mute and the other to be invisible. He quoted instances of how, when walking down the street, he might be bumped into by whites: his response?–“It wasn’t their fault; I hadn’t realised I was invisible” (2001b). As a young intellectual writer who lived by words, the required muteness was less tolerable. Correspondingly this is how he recorded his refusal to be a ‘native’: from when he started to speak out/back–a transition he dates at around the age of eighteen. Albert Memmi, the native Tunisian writer on colonization, outlines how”[t]he intellectual lives more in cultural anguish [during colonization] … Those who understand their fate become impatient and no longer tolerate colonization” (1990:186). The two solutions for the colonized according to Memmi, are to assimilate with the colonizer or to revolt against the colonizer and make a decisive break: “After having been rejected for so long by the colonizer, the day has come when it is the colonized who must refuse the colonizer” (1990:194). Fanon, in his poetic style, expresses the refusal thus: “The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes” (1986:140). Nkosi’s personal refusal was expedited by his decisive physical break with South Africa in the 60s, returning for the first time only 30 years later.

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Mating Birds

In Mating Birds, however, the protagonist Ndi Sibiya (onto whom Nkosi acknowledges he has projected much of himself at a similar age) is stuck in the role of ‘native’: mute to the outside world, nearly invisible, but in a state of anger. As the book opens he is on Death row, condemned to hang for the rape of a white woman, Veronica Slater. The narrative recounts from a first-hand perspective, Sibiya’s life in rural Zululand, his shift to the city with his mother after his father’s death, his few years at the University of Natal before being expelled for organising demonstrations, his growing obsession with the white woman which leads to her alleged rape, his trial and subsequent sentencing. The whole tale is profoundly predicated on spaces regulated by the apartheid state – thus certain beaches are allocated to whites, others to blacks; Cato Manor settlement is black while Veronica Slater’s bungalow is in a white area; the only place where the lovers can (accidentally) meet is a place of commerce, the corner café. Thus, as Ahluwalia remarks on the importance of concepts of space to identity formation: “Space is a construction to which identities are assigned” (2001:70). In this sense, to fight for a space is to fight for one’s very identity; especially if it is a place where one was born, one’s natal place. Sibiya to begin with does not transgress physical or racial boundaries. In Durban’s history, one of the most contested spaces was the beachfront with the choicest central beaches labelled ‘white’ and those to the north assigned for ‘black ‘use. To the eye, no visible boundary existed but to all intents and purposes an impenetrable wall, such as the Berlin Wall, segregated the swimmers from one beach from those of the other. Nkosi, in conversation, says Snake Park beach, where the narrative is centred, “could have been any beach of the time” (2001a) where a ‘black’ designated beach bordered on a ‘white’ one. Sibiya describes it thus: I can see it all quite clearly: the beach, the children’s playgrounds, the seafront hotels, and the sweating pink-faced tourists from upcountry; the best time of all is that silent, torpid hour of noon when the beach suddenly becomes deserted and, driven back to the sea-front restaurants and the temporary shelter of their hotel rooms, crowds of seabathers suddenly vanish, leaving behind them not only the half-demolished cheese and tomato sandwiches but sometimes an occasional — 395 —


wristwatch, an expensive ring, or a finely embroidered handkerchief still smudged with lipstick from an anonymous pair of lips. Not infrequently the tourists leave behind them an even worthier trophy–a young body lying spent and motionless on the warm white sands to be gazed at by us, the silent forbidden crowds of non-white boys in a black mutinous rage. (1986:3-4)

What marks these beaches are the noticeboards which read “Bathing Area – For Whites Only”, which fills Ndi “with rage” (6). The girl, Veronica, who suns herself so provocatively close to him, yet who is protected by the invisible boundary, together with the muteness and invisibility of the ‘native’ who watches her, can also be read as a space whose identity is longed for. Ndi says: I am certain what I felt for her was not exactly sexual desire for a body I must have known I could never possess, the race laws being what they are in South Africa; no, it was something more, something vaster, sadder, more profound than simple desire. Mingled with that feeling was another emotion: anger.” (7)

Ndi notes that, like a “good native” (8), he should not have stared at the woman lying in her bikini but that he was unable to avert his gaze: I was compelled by something in the girl’s eyes that was ludicrously simple, open, naked, and undemanding, a sort of acknowledgement of myself as a person inhabiting the same planet as herself” (9)

When Fanon asks ‘What does the black man want?’ Bhabha suggests an answer–Fanon, he says, shows “the black man wants the objectifying confrontation with otherness” (in Fanon 1986:xviii). This is the biggest prize Veronica offers Ndi: her gaze which registers his existence. This mutual gaze repeated again on the public beach is used with intensity later in the book: “For minutes on end we stared deliberately into each other’s eyes. Obviously if we could not use words we could use looks” (1986:146). Both Memmi and Fanon would have read into Ndi Sibiya’s lust for Veronica Slater a greater desire to possess her identity–in other words, perhaps Ndi far from refusing to be a ‘native’, wishes for assimilation with

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the colonizer.2 The fact that he despairs of this process is cause for his frustrated anger. Ndi, in turn, explains Veronica’s flaunting of her (out of bounds) body in front of him as a signal that she needs his desire to affirm her power: It was as if she could not live another day without the sustaining need that there was a ‘native’ somewhere who desired her to distraction (or shall we say to destruction!); a black man who in his impossible dream of gaining possession of her was prepared to throw his life away in a stupid wager against Fate itself. (74)

In some ways then, Veronica’s voluptuous blonde body is itself a contested site of struggle. Nkosi makes Ndi frequently stress the whiteness of her skin (despite all the tanning) as if her body is a symbol of colonial conquest and by a black man, a ‘native’, entering this space, albeit covertly, some retribution could be sought to assuage the anger. Brink, in an article that sees Mating Birds as a book flawed by “private sexuality”, maintains “the whole narrative turns her into a space to be inscribed by his [Ndi’s] lust” (1992:17,8). Ndi Sibiya acknowledges that “the girl became a kind of sickness for me” (1986:67); and, as a mark of his obsession, he literally treads “the same old ground again and again” (170) as he is required to do in his court testimony later. The central location in this book remains the beach where the pair reappear wordlessly day after day. When Lewis Nkosi revisited Snake Park Beach in 2001 and stood on the invisible line that separated the two beaches, he remarked that though Durban beachfront had “utterly

2

Memmi and Fanon both comment on the position of the colonized black man fantasizing about the colonizing white woman: “The extremism in that submission to [the colonizer] is already revealing. A blonde woman, be she dull or anything else, appears superior to any brunette…A mixed marriage is the extreme expression of this audacious leap.” (Memmi 1990:187) “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now…who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization… I marry white culture, white beauty and white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.” (Fanon 1986:63) — 397 —


changed”, the sea remained constant mingling its waters as it always had. He remarked on what happened to certain kinds of desire when prohibition was removed: he told the story of seeing on this visit a young man sitting on the low wall at the back of the beach indifferent to a young bikini-clad white woman sunning herself close by. He commented too on the wordlessness of Veronica and Ndi’s beach liaison saying that the girl did not have any words to say to him, a ‘native’. However, when they bump into each other at the café, then they automatically speak to each other in order to apologise: “’No, no! It’s entirely my fault!’ She spoke in a lowered tone at once courteous and surprisingly shy for a white woman addressing a native” (115). Nkosi sees this as a poignant moment in the novel: “they are just human beings after all” he said to me (Nkosi 2001a). Part of the repeated spatial cycle that mirrors the obsession’s patterns is the path to Veronica’s bungalow which Nkosi today describes as having been near present-day Kingsmead Cricket Stadium. The “greenpaned [later ‘painted’ 1986:170] bungalow that stood discreet and isolated among a clump of trees and undergrowth” (131) contains a n interior characterised by whiteness–the bed with “unembroidered white quilts”, the bathroom a “palace of white marble” with a “soft white rug” underfoot and a “bright white-wash look” to the walls (134-135). Though Sibiya has entered the heart of whiteness, he remains a ‘native’. Veronica uses this subject position, his invisibility as a native when he is standing outside the bungalow to shield him (perhaps?) from her white friend’s suspicions: “ ‘What does the kaffir want? Do you know him?’ And Veronica lied. ‘Some vagrant native, I suppose. How am I to know every stray native?’” (133). On the fateful day when they eventually make love in her bungalow, Ndi follows her over the familiar terrain–again we watch the two separately traverse the yellow sand, cross the beach road and the wasteland beyond it, go through the rickety gate of the green-painted bungalow set in a clump of trees. This time the interior of the house, though still white, is actively menacing–Ndi describes how “a macabre ghostly white light seemed to pour into the room”, Veronica’s body is “vulnerable, white”; she has “white fragility”; the lovers roll into “a small patch of sunlight” in the oppressive, nauseating heat (170-177). Veronica’s account in her court testimony is diametrically opposed to Ndi’s–to protect her ‘name’, her status as colonizer, she must insist it was rape and that Ndi is unknown to her, an intruder, all of which the white court is described as being predisposed to believe. She describes her bungalow as “dainty, picturesque” but of — 398 —

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“unfortunate solitariness” (152); that the day in question was crushingly hot, that an unknown native (“your Lordships, I am not in the habit of studying the face of every native who crosses my path!” 158) raped her. The rape scene is described in much prurient detail in the courtroom which Ndi abstractly notices is bathed in white light, symbolic perhaps of the smallness of his chances of being acquitted, a black man: “Above all, there was the light, white, searing, and blinding, which filtered through a side window of the court, a light strong enough to dazzle the eyes” (161). The trial necessitates a daily trip from the prison, Durban Central, to the Courts. When I read the description of the route I was puzzled–it could not be factually correct given the positions of the Supreme Court and prison. Nkosi had changed any possible route between the two places to include a scenic descent from the Ridge, a steep hill that affords a magisterial gaze over the city: Every day the sedan invariably took the same route, which surprised me for what it revealed of the appalling laxity in security arrangements. From the Supreme Court, a large Victorian building, old and gray with the accumulation of bird droppings, we would drive down through the gardens with only one stop at the traffic lights. Nothing is better than the view of the Indian Ocean from the brow of this hill, but the court building itself is a disappointment … From here the road leads down to the sea, through the racecourse and the city’s main shopping area. On a clear day you can see the ocean and the palm-fringed esplanade. It is a calm sea, reflecting nothing of the city’s turbulence, nothing of its minor fractious wars, nothing of race riots and conflict. From this point you can see the docks and beyond the stretch of white sands of the Durban beach, shiny like pearls in the day’s blazing sun. (37-38)

When I asked Nkosi why he had changed the geographical route so obviously such that any native Durbanite would notice the lapse, he gave an interesting answer. It was “artistic licence” (2001a) for he particularly liked this view from the Berea and Ridge over the city and harbour, coming down the hill. The view is particularly fine and the air on the hill slightly cooler than in the humid city bowl, which is why this area has been extensively settled by whites since Durban’s colonial origins. I was reminded of what Mary Louise Pratt named the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” (1992:205-206) convention frequently used by nineteenth century — 399 —


explorers and travel writers. For a nineteenth century British (white, Christian, male, non-native) adventurer, to survey the immensity of the colonial holdings the preferred position was from a high vantage point, the bird’s eye view. This position adopted by the viewer is a powerful one for the land appears passively laid out before the viewer (as in the quotation above, “a calm sea”, white sands of the Durban beach”, “the Indian Ocean”), yet one may not be seen in any equivalent manner: Like the supervisor in the Panopticon, the writer who engages this view relies for authority on the analytic arrangement of space from a position of visual advantage. The writer is placed either above or at the centre of things, yet apart from them, so that the organisation and classification to the writer’s own values. (Spurr 1993:16-17)

The irony then lies in giving Ndi, a black prisoner in an apartheid judicial system–in other words, severely disempowered–such a proconsular view over Durban from the vantage point of one of the oldest and most well-todo white suburbs. A little further in the passage from the novel quoted above, Ndi refers wistfully to the “big liners steaming out of the bay for the distant shores of Europe, America and the Far East”, which promise dreams of “escape from South Africa” (1986:38)–a solution which his creator managed to achieve, but not Ndi, the protagonist. The only other time in the novel that the bird’s eye view is used for landscape description is under very different circumstances. Ndi recalls his early years spent in the rural district of Mzimba near Eshowe in Zululand as a pastoral idyll: On a clear day you could see the white plumes of smoke rising for miles around in a shimmer of brilliant sunshine from the brown clusters of village huts, the broken furrows of red earth marking the dongas where the rain had bitten deeply into the earth. The entire landscape is dominated by the Tugela River, which for seventy miles flows down the narrow, wooded gorges, past vast undulating hills, past the rolling plains upon which herds of Zulu cattle graze solemnly while gazing into the limitless blue of the horizon … I can remember clearly the vast homestead nestled on the side of a hill, the huts set around the cattle kraal, which is the natural forum of a large Zulu family. A short walk up the incline of this hill and we could look down on one of the most beautiful stretches of countryside in all of — 400 —

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Zululand. From the edge of the plateau, visible from about a hundred miles inland, the sea looks perfectly calm.(42-43)

This is a typical ‘traditional native’ scene of the countryside which felt the effects of colonization through a system of indirect rule, in other words, rule through ‘native’ (meaning in this case ‘rural’) institutions governed by tribal chiefs (see Mamdani 1996). Ndi recalls this scene now as an adult, but he recalls it as an insider then, one who belongs, unlike the fleeting glimpse of the deceptively tranquil city which he describes as a transient passenger in a prison van. As a child, he did belong to his extended Zulu family firmly rooted in the rural landscape. In terms that remind one of Sol Plaatje’s earlier work Mhudi (1930), Nkosi gives Ndi words that describe a self-sufficient, literally and metaphorically ‘wellgrounded’ community: “The Land was fertile, we had cattle, we grew enough to eat and to spare” (43). Plaatje writes of the Baralong people: “Their cattle … ran almost wild and multiplied as prolifically as the wild animals of the day. Work was of a perfunctory nature, for the mother earth yielded her bounties and the maiden soil provided ample sustenance for man and beast” (1975:21). Both these passages from Mating Birds and Mhudi sound the same elegiac note–both societies discussed would soon be derooted: the Baralong by Mzilikazi who broke away from Shaka, and Ndi’s community by forced removals–specifically that of the village of Manzimhlope “to be moved to an area fifty miles inland to make way for a new white settlement” (1986:60). Ndi’s family is moved by his father to his maternal aunt’s village so as to pre-empt any forced removal. So Ndi’s sense of belonging physically to one spot is broken, a process which is exacerbated by his father’s decision to get him educated and, finally, after his father’s death, by his mother’s decision to move with him to the city, Durban. For his family, his education at the Lutheran Seminary alienates them from him: “Henceforth I would remain one of the Sibiyas only in name, but in every way that mattered I would become a ‘white man’” (87). In terms of his sense of belonging to a set of beliefs, he confesses: “I am lost. To be more precise, I’m doubly lost. Unlike my father, I believe in nothing, neither in Christian immortality nor in the ultimate fellowship with the ancestral spirits” (47). He can describe Zulu traditional practices (48) using Zulu words, but he no longer subscribes to them. He feels neither native to the traditional Zulu world or to the white urban world–he is the black intellectual in limbo.

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Cato Manor township, “the sprawling, fetid black slum five miles outside the centre of the city” (90), is the urban counterpoint to rural Mzimba in this novel: The tin shacks of Cato Manor clung precariously as if for dear life to the hillsides and slopes overlooking a stream called Mkhumbane, whose greenish slimy waters flowed eastward and southward on its sluggish journey toward the Indian Ocean, embracing to its already heavily polluted bosom all the scum and filth of innumerable shacks without proper sewage, without proper toilets or plumbing, on hot days as unbearably hot as over-heated ovens, on rainy days as leaky as open sieves. (90)

Here the elevated perspective yields no paradisal vista which is worth possessing–Cato Manor’s great advantage however, despite the poverty of some of the shacks, was its proximity to the centre of Durban and so, it too, was earmarked for forced removals in the 60s. Though its hilly aspect could not yield a ‘good view’, Lewis Nkosi remembers how the hills had a strategic purpose in the past. Lookouts posted on the hills could warn illegal beer brewers and consumers if police vans were approaching: “‘Kwela! Kwela!’ [police vans into which blacks would be ordered to jump–kwela] would warn others to hide in the hills” (Nkosi 2001a). It is in Cato Manor that Ndi’s mother makes the transition from rural beauty to urban shebeen queen and, finally at the trial, to a “stooped, stumbling figure … already in mourning clothes, covered up in a blanket” (1986:164) supported by family members bussed in from Eshowe, the old home. They are there for Ndi’s mother in her hour of need; they do not understand the person her son has become: I am not to be trusted. They have come to the view that I am now as foreign to them as the white girl they have been observing in the witness box with whom I am said to have coupled … I have become a stranger, a shadow with whom they have nothing in common. (21)

To Ndi, they now adopt the characteristic of a ‘native’ that Nkosi earlier observed: muteness. He is no longer native to them in any reachable way; he speaks volubly to them on their prison visits to see him but he is incomprehensible to them, as incomprehensible as the whites by whom he is being judged and punished.

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I will mention one last place that appears in this novel, not because of its prominence in the book, but because of its symbolic importance in Nkosi’s visit in 2001: the building that was once the headquarters of Durban’s Native Administration Department, now Kwa Muhle Museum which houses various exhibits which record the apartheid years. The Department for Native Affairs embodied South Africa’s institutionalised segregation at its complex worst, for it was here that the ‘natives’ came to apply for permission to remain in Durban for work purposes. The long queues outside this building during the apartheid era testified to how torturous this process could be.3 Ndi would have stood in these queues as must have Nkosi as both had a number of jobs as young men–Ndi even worked for a while “as a clerk for the Bantu administration” (101). How appropriate that this once feared place is now a place of remembrance and also a space for Durban citizens of all races to speak out in workshops and performance. Fortuitously, when Nkosi visited Durban in 2001, Kwa Muhle Museum had just installed an exhibition on the “Politics of Space: apartheid architecture, urban design and spatial policy”. The exhibition details, by means of photographs and commentary, how architecture, urban design and spatial policy were harnessed to ensure separate spaces for blacks and whites; with the eighteenth century British jurist James Bentham’s Panopticon providing the ideal surveillance model for black spaces. In other words, spaces were designed over which absolute surveillance was possible, so much so that people in effect would ideally feel themselves always watched, and thus keep themselves in check. In a sense, the invisible boundary line between the black and white beaches described earlier operated in this fashion. Nkosi was fascinated by this exhibition which reminded him graphically of the past times through which he had lived. He wanted photographs of the segregated beaches, of the house in a black township which he said was very similar to the one he was born in Chesterville. On seeing the photograph of ‘natives’ queuing at the Department of Native Affairs building, the very building in which we were then standing, he

3

All African workers were obliged to register either as ‘togt’/day labourers or monthly contract workers within five days of entering the towns. Both had to pay a registration fee, and every ‘togt’ worker was required to wear a metal badge with his registration number. Any African entering the town had to obtain a five-day ‘visitors’ pass which allowed him legal entry into the town only for the purpose of seeking employment or visiting relatives and friends (2001 caption, “The Politics of Space” exhibition, Kwa Muhle Museum). — 403 —


commented on the “wonderful change” in the building’s history: its function of “proscribing, restricting” blacks was now reversed. The building was now a “free” space encouraging black expression–in fact, he discussed the possibility of staging his play, Black Psychiatrist, in the Kwa Muhle Museum courtyard with the education officer there. He saw this change in the building’s function as an “entirely appropriate reappropriation of space” (Nkosi 2001a). The ‘native’ was now encouraged to speak in this space and was no longer required to be mute. However, much as he applauded the abolition of racial apartheid, Nkosi commented on what he saw currently taking its place: what he calls an “apartheid of poverty” (2001a). Be that as it may, before leaving the exhibition, Nkosi took the opportunity to demonstrate literally the demise of institutionalised apartheid–he took great delight in lounging on the ‘Whites Only’ bench at the exhibition, a ‘native’/non-white no longer!

Conclusion

This paper has tried to take cognisance of Stephen Slemon’s encouragement to delegates at a recent literature conference to look at “the [necessary] return of the native within our postcolonial frameworks of interest–the native, that is, as locale, the native as ‘local’” (2001/2:2). I take that to mean looking, with fresh eyes, at the spaces with which we are familiar or even over-familiar and thus blind to; evaluating “the organisation of space and place as a geography of belonging and identification” (Grossberg 1993:175), or otherwise, as the case may be. Furthermore, I have tried to unpack another meaning of ‘native’ in the apartheid sense of the word, a meaning which applied to all colonized indigenous people at a certain time. To do this through the lens of a fictional work, with the author’s contemporary comments on the real spaces the fiction dwells upon as a further filter, is like trying to peel an onion of many layers. It makes the eyes water but sharpens the senses.

Lindy Stiebel

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Lindy Stiebel

References

Ahluwalia, Pal. 2001. “When Does a Settler Become a Native?” Pretexts: literary and cultural studies. 10(1): 63-73. Bradbury, Malcolm (ed). 2001. The Atlas of Literature. London: Greenwich Editions. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 1986. Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press. Grossberg, Lawrence. 1993. “ The Space of Culture, the Power of Space”. In: Chambers, Ian and Lidia Curti (eds.) The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies Divided Horizons. London and New York: Routledge. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism. Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Cape Town: David Philip; London: James Currey. Memmi, Albert. (1957) 1990. The Colonizer and the Colonized. London: Earthscan Publications. Nkosi, Lewis. 1981. Tasks and Masks: themes and styles of African Literature. Harlow: Longman. —————. 1986. Mating Birds Johannesburg: Ravan Press. —————. 2001a. Conversations with Lindy Stiebel, Durban. —————. 2001b. “The ‘Native’ is Everywhere and Nowhere”. Unpublished conference paper given at the Third International Conference held by the Centre for the Study of South African Literatures and Languages (CSSALL), University of Durban-Westville, 6-7 July. Plaatje, Sol. (1930) 1975. Mhudi. Broadway: Quagga. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: travel writing and transculturation. London: Routledge. Slemon, Stephen. 2001/2. Newsletter- Press ACLALS International (Association of Comparative Literature and Language. Canberra. Spurr, David. 1993. The Rhetoric of Empire: colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing and imperial administration. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Roland Barthes et le Japon

Si parler de l’autre implique également le dévoilement de celui qui parle et de celui dont on parle, on peut accepter que pour un Occidental, parler de l’Orient doit inclure la parole sur soi-même. C’est pourquoi j’ai choisi de parler de L’Empire des signes de Roland Barthes, livre publié en 1970, après un voyage de quelques semaines fait par celui-ci au Japon, en me référant aux Mythologies, livre publié en 1957, où l’auteur démythifie certains aspects de la société française contemporaine. Il faut préciser qu’avec la subtilité et la finesse qui le caractérisent, Barthes nous prévient dès le début de L’Empire des signes que l’Occident et l’Orient ne sont pas pour lui deux réalités figées qu’il oppose, qu’il n’est pas amoureux de ce que nous, les Occidentaux, appelons l’Orient, et que peut-être ces deux entités sont pour lui aussi, deux fictions. Le processus de démythification qu’il entreprend dans Mythologies doit être compris comme dévoilement d’une origine et d’un contexte historiques–bourgeois, notamment–qui se cachent sous les apparences les plus diverses de la société française. L’art bourgeois–que ce soit la musique ou le théâtre–, la cuisine bourgeoise et même l’érotisme bourgeois sont des constantes de la culture française (en particulier) et occidentale (en général). Il faut préciser ici que Barthes se réfère spécifiquement à la culture française, et que ces références peuvent s’extrapoler seulement de temps en temps à l’Occident en général.

— 407 —


Qu’est-ce qui est “bourgeois” pour Barthes? En théâtre et dans l’art vocal, est bourgeoise une vision de l’art où l’acteur ou le chanteur est “dévoré” par son art, où il transpire pour convaincre le public, par son “labeur musculaire,” qu’il éprouve des sentiments forts, qu’il est “embrasé par un véritable incendie de passion” (100). C’est que, pour un public bourgeois, la passion ou le talent de l’acteur doivent être palpables. Plus le travail de l’acteur sur scène sera matérialisé dans ses cris, ses gestes et son agitation, plus le public aura l’impression qu’il aura reçu l’échange dû à son argent. On peut constater dans cette affirmation, qu’à la critique de l’idéologie culturelle “bourgeoise,” Barthes ajoute la critique d’une idéologie de consommation et du calcul (l’une renvoyant, d’ailleurs, à l’autre). L’idéologie bourgeoise pénètre même le domaine théoriquement le moins bourgeois, l’érotisme. Quand il parle de strip-tease, Barthes prend bien soin de préciser qu’il se réfère au strip-tease parisien, mais dans ce cas on pourrait extrapoler ce qu’il dit à la plupart des cultures occidentales, y compris les États-Unis. Pour qu’il soit “efficient,” l’objet du désir doit être pour l’homme occidental tout d’abord éloigné, figé en un exotisme qui “éloigne le corps dans le fabuleux ou le romanesque” (138). Ce n’est pas par hasard que les hommes occidentaux préfèrent dans ces spectacles érotiques, les femmes “exotiques” (notamment, orientales), qu’ils mettent dans des décors qui varient selon l’époque (Barthes mentionne le “décor vénitien avec gondole”), mais qui sont censés recréer le même cadre exotique. “Tout ceci,” dit Barthes, “vise à constituer au départ la femme comme un objet déguisé” (138). À cet éloignement ou à ce déguisement contribuent aussi les accessoires classiques du music-hall: “les fourrures, les éventails, les gants, les plumes, les bas-résilles,” tous les “objets luxueux qui entourent l’homme d’un décor magique” (138). Cependant, pour Barthes, le but de ce spectacle–danse, accessoires de luxe, dévoilement de la femme–n’est paradoxalement pas, l’érotisme, mais au contraire, sa domestication, l’effacement de l’obscénité de la chair, la transformation du dénuement en une pratique quasi-sportive qui maîtrise ce que la chair a d’effrayant. Bref, il s’agit, là encore, d’une pratique qui veut “donner au strip-tease un statut petit bourgeois rassurant” (139-140). Tout comme l’art, la cuisine française, érigée en mythologie par Barthes, porte également le signe d’une certaine appartenance sociale. Le “bifteck et frites” traditionnel relève, par exemple, d’une mythologie — 408 —

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populaire qui s’adresse à tous les français, comme le vin, alors que la “cuisine ornementale” promue par la revue Elle relève d’une cuisine de rêve, objet du désir du peuple, mais mangée–peut-être–par une élite. “Cœur de la viande,” le bifteck s’apparente à la mythologie sanguine du vin. Morale de l’efficacité et de la simplicité, il est associé aux frites, auxquelles il transmet “son lustre national” (74). Mais, si le bifteck, les frites et le vin sont des images unifiantes de la conscience nationale, la “cuisine ornementale” est une cuisine de “classe:” il s’agit, en fait, du “rêve même du chic,” d’une cuisine qui reste au niveau visuel, photographique, l’objet représenté étant à la fois “proche et inaccessible,” c’est-àdire magique, mythique. Dans cette cuisine faite pour l’oeil, “la catégorie substantielle qui domine, c’est le nappé,” la finalité même de celui-ci étant “d’ordre visuel” (120). On va voir plus tard comment cette cuisine “du revêtement et de l’alibi, qui s’efforce toujours d’atténuer ou même de travestir la matière première des aliments, la brutalité des viandes ou l’abrupt des crustacés” (120) est exactement à l’antipode de la cuisine japonaise d’où le nappé est complètement absent. Dans cette anatomie de la cuisine faite par Barthes, il y va en fait de plus que de la simple cuisine, car le rapport qu’il y analyse indirectement est celui de l’homme avec la nature. Cette cuisine occidentale de l’ornementation reflète, d’un côté, le désir de “fuir la nature grâce à une sorte de baroque délirant,” et de l’autre côté, la tentation “de la reconstituer par un artifice saugrenu” (120-21). Dans le domaine de l’art et de la cuisine, l’idéologie petit-bourgeoise, dit Barthes, présente deux versants: la tendance vers le “vérisme” (la nature telle quelle) et la tendance opposée, celle demandée impérieusement par le “journalisme domestique:” la “trouvaille” ou “ce qu’à l’Express on appelle glorieusement avoir des idées” (121). Et Barthes de finir ses considérations sur la cuisine petit-bourgeoise en employant les mêmes qualificatifs que lorsqu’il parle du striptease français: les photographies de ces journaux domestiques saisissent le plat cuisiné toujours “comme un objet à la fois proche et inaccessible,” comme un objet “magique.” Le même désir d’exotisme, dans un cas, comme dans l’autre. Ce qui frappe à une lecture rétrospective des Mythologies, c’est que les remarques sur la cuisine française sont essentiellement les mêmes que Barthes fera vingt ans plus tard, lors du voyage au Japon, dans L’Empire des signes. Plus précisément: quand il parle de la cuisine japonaise, — 409 —


Barthes, qui s’adresse à un lecteur français, relève la différence spécifique de la cuisine nippone par rapport à, et en comparaison avec, la cuisine française. Pour le sensualiste qui est Barthes, la cuisine japonaise combine deux qualités suprêmes: le visuel et le vivant. Le visuel, parce qu’elle est comme un tableau–un “tableau hollandais,” dit-il quand il parle du sukiyaki, une sorte de ragoût où les crudités en train de cuire devant les yeux du client, changent de couleur, de telle façon que celui-ci a l’impression d’assister au “Crépuscule” même de la Crudité (30). Se référant à la crudité, Barthes nous attire l’attention que celle-ci a une toute autre valeur dans la cuisine japonaise que dans la cuisine française. Dans la première, il s’agit d’aliments très peu cuisinés, en état encore naturel, alors que la crudité est en Occident le signe d’une intériorité de l’aliment, comme dans le cas de la viande saignante. Le même rituel du sukiyaki est pour Barthes le signe d’un autre rapport non seulement avec la nature, mais aussi avec la mort. L’aliment–légume ou animal–n’est pas tué dans la cuisine où “tout est permis,” sa mort n’est pas “pudiquement éloignée dans le temps et dans l’espace,” comme en Occident; au lieu de préparer le plat dans cet espace secret, d’où il sortira “embaumé” et “nappé,” le sacrifice sur lequel est fondée toute cuisine a lieu devant nous; sa préparation devant vos yeux est une consécration de ce qu’on mange, par le spectacle de la mort (31). Je reviens à la catégorie du visuel, qui est pour Barthes le trait le plus important de la cuisine japonaise. C’est en parlant ce trait, qu’il semble engager un dialogue avec ses remarques de Mythologies, car il se hâte de préciser qu’il ne s’agit pas du tout du même type de visuel que celui pratiqué par les revues féminines occidentales, et dont la caractéristique de base est le nappé. Si dans la cuisine française-occidentale, le visuel se donne en tant que ce qui couvre la nature, dans la cuisine nippone, c’est exactement le contraire. Voilà la description d’un plateau de repas japonais, avec lequel beaucoup d’entre nous sont familiarisés aujourd’hui: “c’est un cadre qui contient sur fond sombre des objets variés (bols, boîtes, soucoupes, baguettes, menus tas d’aliments, un peu de gingembre gris, quelques brins de légumes orange, un fond de sauce brune” (19). Nous retenons de ce fragment, non seulement la picturalité du repas, présente jusque dans le mot “cadre,” mais aussi la fraîcheur des aliments, seulement découpés et offerts presque tels quels. Le caractère visuel de la nourriture oscille, en fait, entre la peinture et l’art graphique, rencontrant de la sorte, le scriptural. C’est que cette — 410 —

Daniela Hurezanu

nourriture n’est pas un “tableau figé,” parce que vous mangez “puisant ici une pincée de légumes, là de riz, là de condiment, là une gorgée de soupe, selon une alternance libre, à la façon d’un graphiste (précisément japonais)” (19). Cette qualité du repas nippon consistant dans la participation du consommateur au “faire” de la nourriture a deux conséquences importantes: d’abord, elle érige ce repas au rang d’une écriture au sens le plus fort du mot. “Car l’écriture est précisément cet acte qui unit dans le même travail ce qui ne pourrait être saisi ensemble dans le seul espace plat de la représentation” (22). Ensuite, elle expose le travail, le force à sortir de la cuisine et implique le faire dans l’étant du repas. C’est ce mélange du faire et de l’étant qui fait de la cuisine nippone ce que nous appelons “jeu” ou “art.” Les différences entre la cuisine française-occidentale et la cuisine orientale (dont la cuisine japonaise semble une version radicale) sont relevées par Barthes à tous les niveaux pour être exploitées dans le cadre, parfois d’une anthropologie culturelle, d’autres fois d’un questionnement philosophique. La dimension des aliments, leur consistance, les outils employés pour manger, sont, à côté du travail, d’autres critères d’évaluation. La dimension. Pour mieux illustrer cette différence essentielle entre l’Occident, qui va toujours vers le gros et le grand (et en 1970, quand il écrivait ces lignes, Barthes ne pouvait pas connaître l’expression publicitaire américaine “More is better”), et l’Orient, qui suit le mouvement inverse, “vers l’infinitésimal,” Barthes reconstitue pour nous le Marché Flottant de Bangkok: Sur le Marché Flottant de Bangkok, chaque marchand se tient dans une petite pirogue immobile; il vend de très menues quantités de nourriture: des graines, quelques œufs, bananes, cocos, mangues, piments (sans parler de l’Innommable). De luimême à sa marchandise en passant par son esquif, tout est petit. (24)

La consistance des aliments. L’une des choses qui restent avec vous après la lecture de ce livre est la description de la matière alimentaire, qui fait penser aux analyses de Bachelard. Le riz, la soupe et la tempura font l’objet d’une description de la matière ou de la substance alimentaire, qui va du “léger conglomérat” d’une “blancheur compacte, granuleuse [...] et cependant friable” (21) à la substance aquatique de la soupe dont la légèreté et la “densité claire” (22) la rendent différente des soupes riches — 411 —


occidentales, et à la matière interstitielle de la tempura, comparée à une “dentelle” ou à une “fleur éparpillée,” (34) substance “du côté du léger, de l’aérien, de l’instantané, du fragile, du transparent, du frais, du rien, mais dont le vrai nom serait l’interstice sans bords pleins, ou encore: le signe vide” (36). Enfin, le dernier critère du livre pour indiquer la différence entre l’Ouest et l’Est, porte sur l’instrument employé pour manger. Entre les couverts occidentaux et la baguette orientale il y a selon Barthes plus qu’une simple différence d’instrument. Il y a un accord profond entre la nourriture orientale et la baguette, car celle-ci “introduit dans l’usage de la nourriture, non un ordre, mais une fantaisie et comme une paresse” (24). L’ordre auquel Barthes se réfère est l’ordre des plats du monde Occidental. Chez nous, dit-il, il y a comme une sorte de rite qui consiste à ordonner le repas autour d’une sorte de centre, alors qu’en Orient le rituel du repas est décentré. Au Japon, “tout y est ornement d’un autre ornement: d’abord, parce que sur la table, sur le plateau, la nourriture n’est jamais qu’une collection de fragments, dont aucun n’apparaît privilégié” (32-33). Je reviendrai un peu plus tard à l’idée du décentrement, quand je parlerai de la structure des villes. Pour revenir à la baguette, il y a une autre grande différence entre elle et les couverts occidentaux, notamment la fourchette et le couteau, qui concerne la manière de saisir la nourriture et de la porter à la bouche. Selon Barthes, la baguette est beaucoup plus maternelle, car jamais elle “ne perce, ne coupe, ne fend, ne blesse, mais seulement prélève, retourne, transporte” (26). Si pour la fourchette et le couteau, la nourriture est une “proie” sur laquelle on “s’acharne,” par la baguette, la nourriture est “une substance harmonieusement transférée” (27). L ’ a n a l y s e c o m p a r é e d e l ’ a r t occidental et de l’art japonais, en particulier celle du théâtre, est faite minutieusement dans trois essais de L’Empire des signes, qui sont tous développés à partir du théâtre de marionnettes Bunraku, pour aboutir à des considérations plus générales sur l’Occident et l’Orient. Le premier essai, intitulé “Les trois écritures,” analyse le Bunraku en tant que pratique de “trois écritures séparées:” “le geste effectué, le geste effectif, le geste vocal” (66). Ces trois systèmes de signes correspondent à: la marionnette, le manipulateur, le vociférant. À partir de cette juxtaposition de systèmes, Barthes entreprend une herméneutique capable d’expliquer en quelques pages ce que d’autres pourraient à peine dire en plusieurs livres. — 412 —

Daniela Hurezanu

D’abord, la voix: la voix du récitant japonais semble rassembler toutes les possibilités de l’émotivité vocale, “toute la cuisine de l’émotion,” dit Barthes, mais en tant que code, non pas, comme en Occident, en tant que signe extérieur d’une intériorité. Autrement dit: le code de l’émotivité théâtrale est présenté en tant que ce qu’il est–code (la voix est “sa propre prostitution”)–non pas comme illusion du réel. Ensuite, “le geste est double” (67), car il y a le geste de la marionnette (qui correspond au personnage en train d’agir sur scène) et le geste des manipulateurs (qui, eux, n’essaient absolument pas de se cacher, à la façon d’un Dieu qui tire les ficelles, comme dans notre théâtre de marionnettes). Ce geste double, continue Barthes, “sépare l’acte du geste,” c’est-à-dire “il montre le geste, il laisse voir l’acte, il expose à la fois l’art et le travail” (67). Si nous revenons un peu en arrière à la description de la cuisine japonaise, nous nous rappelons que Barthes y signale la même structure: par le fait qu’elle ne cache pas le travail dans l’espace séparé de la cuisine, espace qui aurait ici la fonction des coulisses au théâtre, par le fait qu’elle se fait devant vous ou même que c’est vous qui la faites au fur et à mesure que vous mangez, cette cuisine met à nu le travail. L’enjeu de cette exposition deviendra plus clair pour le lecteur une fois que Barthes aura mentionné le nom de Brecht. Brecht, qui était parvenu à la conclusion que, pour révolutionner et la société et l’art (en particulier le théâtre), il fallait révolutionner le concept même de représentation, en empêchant la catharsis esthétique. En brisant donc l’illusion scénique, ce qui ne pouvait se faire que par l’exposition des codes et du travail caché dans l’œuvre. Une fois l’enjeu circonscrit, Barthes poursuit cette herméneutique comparée dans deux autres essais aux titres significatifs: “Animé/ Inanimé” et “Dedans/Dehors.” On aura déjà compris, par la seule présence de ces dichotomies qui articulent la pensée et la structuration identitaire en Occident, que dans la différence de deux types de théâtre, il y va de beaucoup plus. Plus que sur l’illusion de réalité, le théâtre occidental est fondé sur l’illusion de totalité, dit Barthes, car il conçoit l’art lyrique “comme la simultanéité de plusieurs expressions (jouée, chantée, mimée), dont l’origine est unique, indivisible. Cette origine est le corps, et la totalité réclamée a pour modèle l’unité organique: le spectacle occidental est anthropomorphe [...]” (77). Par contre, le Bunraku, ne cherche pas “la simulation du corps” (78) dans la marionnette, il refuse de faire de — 413 —


l’inanimé de l’animé et “congédie le concept qui se cache derrière toute animation de la matière, et qui est tout simplement ‘l’âme’” (79). La ville est un autre espace convoqué par Barthes pour rendre compte d’une différence structurelle entre l’Occident et l’Orient. Il faut signaler ici qu’en ce qui concerne la ville, il y a déjà une différence à l’intérieur de l’Occident lui-même, entre les villes typiquement européennes, de structure circulaire, organisées autour d’un centre “plein” qui comprend l’église et l’agora, et les villes américaines, de type quadrangulaire, le plus souvent dépourvues de centre (Barthes mentionne Los Angeles comme ville emblématique). Au centre-ville européen, Barthes oppose le centre vide de Tokyo, ville qui a un centre, mais parce que ce centre est habité par l’empereur, donc interdit, il doit être contourné, jamais touché. Les autres villes japonaises, dit Barthes, ont comme centre qui rassemble les commerces et l’activité, la gare, centre dépourvu des significations spirituelles des centres-ville européens, et paradoxalement le point le plus mobile, donc le plus centrifuge de la ville. Et, dernière grande différence, les rues de Tokyo n’ont pas de nom, et les habitants s’y orientent selon des repères connus, comme la gare, par exemple. Le fait que la ville la plus grande du monde n’est pas soumise à la classification rationnelle des villes occidentales, surtout américaines, où les rues sont souvent numérotées, prouve, dit Barthes, que le rationnel n’est qu’un système parmi d’autres, dont on pourrait se passer. On comprend plus clairement maintenant que la structure cherchée par Barthes est la structure identitaire de l’être humain, toujours la même n’importe où elle s’écrit: dans un livre, dans la cuisine, sur une scène, dans les rues d’une ville. Pour l’homme occidental, il s’agit presque toujours d’une structure autour d’un centre ou d’une subjectivité organisée autour d’une structure binaire, alors qu’en Orient le vide semble tenir la place du centre.

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