The Semiotics of Exile in Literature

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10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng

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The Semiotics of Exi le in Literatu re



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Hong Zeng



The Semiotics of Exi le in Literatu re

THE SEMIOTICS OF EXILE IN LITERATURE

Copyright © Hong Zeng, 2010.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-10447-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zeng, Hong, 1969– The semiotics of exile in literature / Hong Zeng. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-230-10447-1 (alk. paper) 1. Exiles’ writings—History and criticism. 2. Exiles in literature. 3. Expatriation in literature. 4. Displacement (Psychology) in literature. 5. Symbolism in literature. I. Title. PN56.5.E96Z46 2010 808.8—dc22

2010007416

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: September 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

1

Semiotics of Exile in Photography

7

2

Poetics of Exile

33

3

Semiotics of Exile in Tragedy

91

4

E’criture Feminine and the Semiotics of Exile

115

5

Cosmic Exile and the Fourth Dimension in Escher, Borges, and Proust

129

Artist in Exile: Divinely and Demoniacally Possessed

141

6

Notes

165

Bibliography

171

Index

175



Contents




I want to thank the following professors for reading the articles in this book and giving valuable advice to me: Professor Scott Klein, James Hans, Elizabeth Petrino from Wake Forest University, and Professor Eric Downing, Lilian Furst, James Peacock, Alice Kuzniar, Diane Leonard, William Kirkpatrick, and Gang Yue from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Most of them are professors of comparative literature. Their suggestions and encouragement influence a lot of the writing in this book. I want to thank Edwin Mellen Press for allowing me to reprint and revise the parts on Hai Zi and Gu Cheng from my previously published book, A Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy in Literature and the Arts: Taoism and Zen Buddhism and An English Translation of Poems of the Contemporary Chinese Poet Hai Zi.



Acknowledgments




T

his collection includes my own essays in comparative literature from 1997 to 2002. Thematically, these essays may be subsumed under the core theme of the semiotics of exile as reflected in various genres and discourses: photography, poetics, tragedy, prototype of artists, concept of time, and e’criture feminine. Exile, in the previous literary criticism, has been mostly a geographical concept: it is a synonym of the uprooted experience of living abroad, away from one’s motherland. Most of these criticisms examine one specific ethnic group of immigrant writers. For example, German writers exiled in America or England after World War II, American writers’ self-exile to the left bank of Paris after World War I, Polish women in Soviet Union, Spanish writers in Mexico. Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile,1 and Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances2 are two of the very few books that explore exile as a philosophical language reflected in the experience of multiple ethnic groups (mostly writers) exiled in different countries. However, they didn’t examine the language of exile outside the experience of expatriation, nor in relation to genres and discourses to show how the experience of exile is central to these genres. In this book, the sense of exile I explore is not only geographical dislocation but also cultural and psychological uprootedness. In other words, I attempt to define a universal language of exile—as has not been done in previous scholarship—reflected in various genres and discourses irrespective of nationality and time. It does not even have to do with the experience of expatriation. This book includes studies of writers who are expatriates (Peter Handke, Alfred Byron, James Joyce, and Gu Cheng), writers who become exiles in their country because of the vicissitude of history (Wang Anyi, Hai Zi), poets who are necessarily exiles in their poetic 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


I ntroduc tion

The Semiotics of Exile in Literature

experience (Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath), novelists who were labeled as romanticists but are indeed exiles from romantic ideal, (Byron and E. T. A. Hoffmann), writers about cosmic exile in time (Marcel Proust and Jorge Luis Borges), and female writers whose e’criture feminine narrates the quintessential self-exile in female experience, expressed outside symbolic order (Marguerite Duras, Maria Luisa Bombal, and Toni Morrison). Just as Roland Barthes established a semiotics of photography and an empire of signs in Japanese culture and just as Julia Kristeva established a semiotics of desire in painting and literature, I attempt to define the semiotics of exile as an implication of disjointedness within signification, selfhood, narrative, time, and genre. Exile suggests longing for a lost center and a vagabond state. Reflected in the disjointedness of signification, it implies a deconstructive poetics with an absent center, floating signifier, simulacrum, and fragmentation that have singular affinity with postmodernism. Disjointedness within self implies a divided self, multiple personalities, masks, and doppelgangers. The disjointedness within narrative privileges fragmented text and narrative irony. Disjointedness within time implies fractured time and collage of times, as well as plural, tangential sequence. In terms of genre, the semiotics of exile implies inability to belong or categorize, thus has the propensity of upsetting genre. Utilizing Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, I also find the affinity between the semiotics of exile and the semiotics of photography, which according to Barthes, emblemizes exile, mourning and nostalgia.3 In Chapter 1, I examined the semiotics of exile in photography. Photography, according to Pirandello, is linked with the motif of exile. It signifies not only an estrangement between self and image under the spotlight but also the daily enlarged disparity between the perennial life preserved by the photograph and the reality of the corporeal being subject to the erosion of time.4 In the writings by Lu Xun and Roland Barthes, the spectacle of photography is tied with the “specter,” the theater of the dead.5 In its insistence on the living reality of what has been dead, photography flouts the division of reality and illusion, death and living. Thus, in my view, this emblemizes the wedding of Eros and Mourning in the novel of nostalgia for a dying culture. The semiotics of photography has its characteristic trope of exile, mourning, cultural nostalgia, and loss of reality. In the two novels studied in this chapter, Wang Anyi’s Melody of Everlasting Regret 6 and Peter Handke’s Der kurze brief 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


2

3

zum langen Abschied,7 photography is the central emblem of exile, death, impasse of the past, the divorce of body and image that results in the protagonists’ lost sense of reality. In Chapter 2, I studied the poetics of exile. Poetics of exile means estrangement from origin—disjointedness, disparity, decentralization, and marginality. In the five poets studied in this chapter, the poetics of exile is characterized by disparity and marginality in its various manifestations. In the Canto fifteen of Don Juan,8 whose protagonist features the self-fictionalized, exiled Byronic hero, the language of disparity is reflected in the playful disjointedness between form and matter, more specifically, between its rhyme scheme and its narrative content, as well as in the dual narrative voices of the narrator in his simultaneous indulgence and disparagement of the English aristocratic society. The poetics of disparity makes this romantic text take on a curious affinity with postmodern poetics of différance that can be compared with Barthes’s account of the pleasure and the bliss of the text. In Sylvia Plath’s poetry, the disparity is painted as in Edvard Munch’s wood print in the clash of the symbolic implication of primal colors. In Emily Dickinson’s poetry on death, as in Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics, exile is the acute, liminal experience of self-estrangement and self-disintegration, for which death is the only adequate metaphor—the nothingness at the center of existence that gives rise to the experience of pure being. Hai Zi’s poetry captures the tumultuous current of vagrancy, nostalgia, and lost love, and his yearning for a lost primal unity is constructed on Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of Zagreus.9 Gu Cheng’s exile from the Taoist paradise is implicated in the split voice of his last poetry, with an omniscient, posthumous self looking back with detachment at the delimited living self.10 In Chapter 3, I examined the semiotics of exile in tragedy. The sublimity of tragedy is engendered through the dual nature of tragic heroes. Tragic heroes are demigods—larger than human in their heroic encounter with an external power but at the same time damned by their human limitation. They suffer the primal contradictions. The confrontation with the alien power either elevates them to a higher status through self-sacrifice or reduces them to a creaturely status when the blockage cannot be overcome. The tragic heroes are almost always loners and exiles in their tragic obsession and knowledge. Tragedy, like the feeling of sublimity, is associated with the threatening and the unfamiliar. It flouts rather 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Introduction


than confirms our conventional beliefs. Therefore, tragedy is emblemized by a semiotics of disparity and disjointedness characterizing that of exile. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved,11 Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,12 and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy,13 exile is found in the reenactment of the Western tragic tradition in which tragic heroes are figured as ostracized loners caught in a boundary situation. Chapter 4 examines the relationship between the semiotics of exile and female discourse. In the three pieces of female writings studied in this chapter, Bombal’s “The Final Mist,”14 Duras’s “Moderato Cantibile,”15 and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,16 the prohibited and marginalized female desire is suppressed into soliloquy: their whispering, unconscious, digressive style mirrors the language of vagrancy and delineates an acute sense of self-exile in female existence. Its decentralization (or avoidance of a center), unconsciousness, and hesitancy are reflected in a diachronically deferred and synchronically amplified narrative. Its semiotic flux, exiled from—and unbound by—the symbolic order of male discourse, also recalls the prelingual expression described by Kristeva’s female semiotics17 and Cixous’s female poetics.18 Such apparently disparate narrative at the depth, however, revolves implicitly around a hidden, unspeakable center—the prohibited desire whose force was intensified rather than assuaged by repression and silence and explodes finally into female mythos that fuses the subject and object, living and death, life and art. Chapter 5 studies the relationship between exile and time. In the two writers studied in this chapter, Borges views man as banished spirit in the monstrous chaos of infinity; Proust depicts man’s acute feeling of being exiled from his memory. Both writers are preoccupied by a cosmic exile in time that is ultimately redeemed by art—their construction of the fourth dimension in their literary creation can find analogy in the magic mirrors of M. C. Escher’s painting. Chapter 6 examines the prototype of the artist in exile. It studies the relationship between artistic creativity and exile and how the semiotics of exile is reflected in the artistic forms of the chosen text. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” feature the protagonists as failed and exiled artists—exiled in the romantic sense of being alienated from the crowd due to their passionate obsession and eccentricity, and in the antiromantic sense of being 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


4

5

shut out ultimately from the romantic ideal of art. The semiotics of exile is reflected in the text of disparity—in its use of irony, the grotesque, and fragmentation and in the divided nature of the artist as both divinely and demoniacally possessed. Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also depicts the protagonist—Stephen Daedalus—as an exiled artist.19 His self-exile from Ireland and its religion and politics is premise for his artistic creation. The semiotics of exile is reflected in its art of disparity (an image-charged narrative flow that may find analogy in the poetics of French symbolist poetry), in the medley of dissimilar images through symbolic reverberations, and in the divided nature of his muse in his poetry: the villanelle temptress who is both divine and demoniac. Across different chapters, we can find repeated and overlapping motifs central to the language of exile: postmodernism with its disparity of signification; semiotics of photography; the technique and philosophy of irony, the grotesque, and fragmentation; split voice and personality; the use of mask and doppelganger; and the semiotic flux of female discourse exiled from symbolic order. In this collection of essays, each individual essay represents an approach of comparison that has not yet been made in scholarship, or rarely made. For example, Plath and Munch; Wang Anyi and photography; Toni Morrison and Western tragic tradition; Proust, Borges, and Escher; Byron and Barthes’s reading theories; Hai Zi and Nietzsche; Hoffmann’s reaction against Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Schlegel’s romantic premises; and the imagery in James Joyce and French symbolist poetry. Therefore, they made an original contribution to the criticism on the major Chinese, English, German and French writers. As a whole, they illustrate the diverse ways in which literature can be linked with art, science, and philosophy. Therefore, the book not only sheds a new light on the criticism of important individual authors but also illuminates and instructs in the methodologies of comparative literature as a discipline. In summary, these essays as a whole examine the semiotics of exile with its mythmaking power in various aspects—the semantics of photography, the constituent value of tragedy, the concept of time, the prototype of artists, and the construction of female mythos. It’s the first book that systematically explores the relationship between the semiotics of exile and genres, forms and discourses. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Introduction




4

Se m ioti cs of Exile in Photography

Photography, according to Pirandello, is linked with the motif

of exile—first and foremost, it is the estrangement between self and image under the spotlight, then the daily enlarged disparity between the perennial life preserved by the photograph and the reality of the corporeal being subject to the erosion of time. According to both Lu Xun1 and Roland Barthes,2 the spectacle of photography is tied with the “specter,” the theater of the dead. In its insistence on the living reality of what has been dead, photography flouts the division of reality and illusion, death and living. Thus, in my view, this emblemizes the wedding of Eros and Mourning in the novel of nostalgia for a dying culture. Therefore, the semiotics of photography has its characteristic tropes of exile, mourning, cultural nostalgia, and loss of reality. In the two novels studied in this chapter, Wang Anyi’s Melody of Everlasting Regret3 features a protagonist who is a plaintive Shang Hai beauty in the 1930s that lost gradually her contact with reality in the contemporary world, when her accustomed cultural milieu faded away. In the other novel, Peter Handke’s Der kurze brief zum langen Abschied,4 the protagonist is a German exile in the United States, whose personal vision and family relationship are constantly distorted and harassed by the memory of the past—the images of explosion, fragmentation and death in the World War II. In both novels, photography is the central emblem of exile, death, impasse of the past, the divorce of body and image that results in the protagonists’ lost sense of reality. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Chapter 1

8


At the beginning of Melody of Everlasting Regret, Wang Anyi depicts the Shang Hai Lanes from a bird’s eye’s view: The sun bursts out above the roofs, casting zigzag, refracted light. It is a grandeur made of myriad fine crusts, giant power collected from endless patience.5 No description sums up Wang Anyi’s thought and art better. If there is one feature distinguishing the narrative voice of Wang Anyi and Zhang Ailing, another woman writer drawing consistently on the faded glamour of the old Shang Hai society, it is that Zhang Ailing’s voice is always in singular form, like a long-past story staged in the traditional opera arias, or sung out in unhurried reminiscence on the scant strings of the classical Chinese musical instrument huqin. But Wang Anyi’s narrative voice, distinctively her own, is yet felt in plural form, like the converged multitude of chorus. Perhaps because of Zhang Ailing’s singular voice, the passage of time in her novels is mostly seen in a linear continuum. The collectivity of Wang Anyi’s narrative voice is reflected in her rendering of past time from the bird’s eye view with its spatial simultaneity. In their retrospective storytelling, Zhang Ailing likes to encase her story in opera aria with its linear progression—an irretrievable, past time. Love in a Fallen City, for example, begins and ends with the idle play of opera on huqin, suggesting the central story has already become as distant and indistinct as that in the sung opera.6 In Melody of Everlasting Regret, Wang Anyi encases her story in pictorialism, whose spatial expression sums up many times at once.7 Partly owe to the singularity of her voice, beneath Zhang Ailing’s plaintively bright color is all grieved aggression and haughty aloofness, as she expressed—life is a gorgeous robe, eaten away by worms. However, Wang Anyi, on account of the chorus nature of her voice, in its profound detachment (a bird’s-eye view presupposes distance) underlines an immense accommodation. This accommodation is in proportion to the author’s minute attention to the banal, earthbound lives. The choral transcending power is the sum of the crusts of mundane, weighed-down lives, which are the very opposite of transcendence. Zhang Ailing’s many heroines reveal their basic simplicity against flashy luxury. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


P hoto g r a phy in Wang Anyi’s M elody of Everl asting Regret: Exile, Mo u r ning, and Lyr i c al Ti me

9

Wang Anyi’s heroine, Wang Qiyao, a collective icon, contains in her placidity infinite grace. Among the multitude voices in Melody of Everlasting Regret, photography, in its multifarious symbolism serves as a hidden, converging technique through which the motifs typical of novels of nostalgia—exile, mourning, and lyric time—are refracted. The novel starts with Wang Qiyao’s initiating experience before the camera in the film company. After failing to be an actress, she was invited to pose for photography for the Shang Hai Life magazine, which made her famous and pushed her to the culminating event of her life: being chosen as the third beauty in the Shang Hai beauty contest, an event that triggers her doom. Her most persistent lover, Mr. Chen, is an enthusiastic photographer, and her intermittent connection with him covers the longest span of time in the novel. The unease and disorientation Wang Qiyao felt before camera when she tried acting roles strikes resemblance to Pirandello’s commentary: The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises of his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. . . . The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.8

The isolation of the photographed in the spotlight in front of the incomprehensible mechanism of camera figures the theme of exile: an estrangement from one’s accustomed (social) milieu. Unlike many native soil writers, the exile that Wang Anyi depicts is not a geographical displacement, but a psychological one, as the exile Wang Qiyao experiences is more painful than the “imaginary nostalgia”9 of expatriates: in the inexplicable vicissitude of history, she becomes an exile in her own city, which is only a shell of the old one. At the end, with Wang Qiyao’s death, the city is also envisioned as the wreckage of a sunken ship.10 In photography, the photographed is estranged not only from her milieu but also from herself. The enlarging gap between image and corporeality of the photographed informs the progression of 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




the novel. Photograph is the freezing form of life, which is absolved of its flux. As time goes on, there is an extending disparity between the preserved aura of the photograph and the real person’s susceptibility to the eroding time. Therefore, photography is linked with anachronism and antiquity and is the reservoir of the destroyed past, like Wang Qiyao herself. Parallel to the estrangement between the photographed and the audience, the disparity between Wang Qiyao herself and her image in the eyes of her audience—her lovers, the audience of her beauty—determines her essential loneliness throughout her life. The loneliness was prefigured very early in the novel in Wang Qiyao’s triumphant scene in the beauty contest. In spite of the rain of flowers showering upon her from the audience seats, Wang Qiyao is besieged with an eating loneliness so that she feels the wedding dress alone is what is close to her. The passivity of Wang Qiyao’s character, in accordance with the passivity of the photographed before the mechanical contrivance of camera, makes her a mirror that reflects man’s ideal of femininity and of an extinct past. What Li Binliang, the iron, prominent official sees in Wang Qiyao is actually his female alter ego—the hidden helpless, weak part of himself in front of the crushing mechanism of the wartime history. This self-projection into femininity is hinted in Li’s relish of Mei Lanfang’s opera arias, the female role impersonated by man. The relish comes from Li’s recognition that male actor, guised as female, understands the essence of a woman more than a woman does, thus staging the ideal instead of the actuality of femininity. What Ah Er, the small town youth, sees in the outcast Wang Qiyao is the faded glamour and bustle of an old city beyond his provincial background and the deposit incarnation of plaintive classical beauty, like Wang Zhaojun and Yang Gueifei, who embody the lyrical theme of exile and mourning. Kang Minxun discovers Wang Qiyao’s concealed past through her early photographs and regards her as a relic from the last age that brings back his heart (191). When it comes to Lao Kena, the split between image and the corporeal Wang Qiyao has become so obvious that what Lao Kena embraces is no more than an excavated past in the abstract, while Wang Qiyao in corporeality is almost spurned by him in revulsion. Wang Qiyao’s gradual detachment from her self-image preserved in the aura of photography is unfolded through the progressive 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


10

11

deterioration of her self-control, which ends in the devastating indignity of her death. For the most part of the novel, Wang Qiyao’s passivity bespeaks a positive character of poise, adaptability, and tried refinement preserved in the face of a tumultuous history. However, later, her emotional hunger and helpless situation become so acute that she not only bullies Sha Sa with false responsibility when her illegitimate child is fathered by another man but also offers gold to Lao Kena to beg him to keep her company. Her harsh unforgiveness toward Long Legs, who eventually murdered her, contrastingly different from her usual compassion and tolerance, makes her almost a hideous mock image of herself in that disastrous night, when she actually invites to be murdered at the hand of the one who has no original intention to do so. Her death image—phantasmogorially old, dried out, and ugly—marks the most devastating split from her photographed beauty and points in understatement to the tragic fate of nostalgia. Wang Anyi’s lyricism and accommodation is counter pointed with a relentless realism that is paradoxically achieved through the hallucinatory image of death. Thus the novel—through the enlarging gap between the photographed and her milieu, between the photographed and her audience-lovers, and between her actuality and her image—enacts in a frightening, understated way the process of estrangement, which is the essence of exile. Photography is also intimately linked with death. The photographed is reduced to a flickering appearance formed in the dark box (a miniature coffin), deprived of corporeality, and is stilled. These effects are analogous to the effect of death. In Lu Xun’s “On Photography,” photography is associated with witchcraft that robs the photographed of his spiritual essence, so that the photographed, without his “vital breath,” is also physically maimed.11 According to Roland Barthes, photography’s origin is traced back to theater (instead of painting, as we naturally believe) through a singular intermediary—death.12 There is an original relation between the theater and the cult of the dead: the first actors separate themselves from the community by playing the role of the dead, which left its mark in the whitened bust of the totemic actor, men’s painted faces in Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Kathakali dancers, and the Japanese mask of the Noh performers. This is the same relationship in the photograph. However “lifelike” we strive 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




to make it, the frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mystical denial of an apprehension of death.13 Photography is a primitive theater, a kind of tableau vivant (living picture), a figuration of motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.14 The “spectacle” of theater and photography, etymologically means “specter,” or the return of the dead (CL, 9). In narrative terms, we might analogize the novel of nostalgia to the return of the dead and perceive a hidden parallelism between body and text—as I will exemplify later—in a novel where eroticism, entwined with mourning, becomes a characteristic trope of the novel of nostalgia. Not accidentally, Wang Qiyao’s first acquaintance with camera and cinema operation and her tableau vivant (wearing a wedding dress) during the beauty contest are all heralded with death. We might regard the tableau vivant as a primitive theater linked with photography. The seamy side of death in the film prefigures the indignity of Wang Qiyao’s own death forty years later, which strikes an uncanny mixture of familiarity and strangeness. The first occasion in the film firm, under the lotus-shaped light, a woman lies in the bed illuminated by a special light. It suddenly occurs to Wang Qiyao that the woman is playing dead, although it is unclear whether it is a suicide or a murder. Although the film firm is noisy, the woman looks as if she were just sleeping on, perhaps for a thousand years (28). The novel ends with Wang Qiyao’s death forty years later, which rolls her back to this death scene, only this time the witness becomes the victim. The distinction of life and fiction collapsed. Men play a passive, predetermined role in the drama of life. The last hallucination haunting Wang Qiyao’s dying eye is still that waving lotus-shaped lamp. The scene is so uncannily familiar that she strains to recall it. Then she remembers the dead woman in the film firm forty years ago. Only this time the woman is herself, who died at another’s hand. Wang Qiyao realizes that in two hours, the crowd of pigeons will shoot into sky. The flowers on the opposite porch will open the theatric curtain of another flowery season (384). In the first scene, the vague perception of predestination is conveyed through an uncanny sense of “déjà vu” or, as we may reword it, “recalling the future.” It seems to be obscurely connected with Buddhist cyclic time (the lotus-shaped lampshade is a hint), the memory of former lives that renders each turn of reincarnation weightless. The novel ends with the cycle of time—the seasonal 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


12

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blooming of flowers completely indifferent to human death. Here, death is intertwined with a heavy sense of fatality—the most agonizing form of mourning. The inexplicable feeling of déjà vu as the prefiguring of future doom seems to coincide with Barthes’s definition of photography as “a prophecy in reverse . . . like Cassandra, but with eyes fixed on the past” (CL, 87). Photography is intrinsically linked with violence and fatality, as facing the equipment reduces the photographed into a passive object or a museum object that is at the mercy of an external, irrational, humanly incomprehensible mechanism—the mechanism of fate. Wang Qiyao had once marveled at the cinematic montage. In the film making, the continuity of life is broken into seemingly random collage of meaningless photographs. The film, when staged, however, resumes the continuity. The opening up of the inside mechanism might point to an outsider introduced to the cinematic operation the illusory nature of life itself with its apparent continuity and rationality. The sudden shock of violence at the end of the novel, a death gruesome in its very flatness and lack of causality, is the opening up of the secret operation of fate, which is beyond human logic and hitherto camouflaged by Wang Anyi’s minute realistic description and largely rational narrative. It is as if the third person omniscient narrator of the book, for the most part of the book, has the narrative under perfect control. Until near the end of the narrative, the narrative suddenly takes on a centrifugal course into the hand of fatalistic forces. At the moment of murder, both Wang Qiyao and Long Legs, the murderer, seem to be in an inexplicable, almost fantastic mental frame at the surreal moment of midnight, as if in a farce (382). It is as if both Wang Qiyao and Long Legs are “exiled” from their normal self, like one under the distracting, controlling mechanism of the camera. The only witness of the murder, although not that of an omniscient mechanical eye, is also the nonhuman eyes—the eyes of the pigeons. The superimposing, haunting scenes of doom and death also cast their flitting shadow in the middle of the book over Wang Qiyao’s first sexual encounter with Li. In that scene, she walked into the bedroom with Li. Above the double bed was a lamp. The lamp seemed to be in a distant past, so that Wang Qiyao felt the vertigo of being touched by an old occurrence (94). Tableau vivant is a form, according to Barthes, closest to photography in origin and linked with “specter.” Wang Qiyao’s tableau 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




vivant in her triumphant scene of beauty contest contains also the confusion of wedding and mourning. As Wang Anyi described it, the moment of Wang Qiyao’s triumph was touched with its very transience, as its tragedy and grief were compared to the fate of falling flowers on the river. The beauty contest scene reminded Wang Qiyao of her earlier encounter with the film’s dead woman scene. She felt that they were the same scene before the camera. In the film company, she witnessed another woman’s performance of death. In her beauty contest, she dressed as a bride in a wedding. She thought perhaps a wedding was death, and death was a wedding (64). Photograph’s adherence to the contingency of the referent reminds Barthes of the torture of being bound with a corpse. For Barthes, the adherence suggests the spiritual immovability in a changing world that is only found in Eros and Mourning (CL, 20). The equation of the two through photography is duplicated in Wang Qiyao’s life. Recalling examples of both Chinese and Western novels, it occurs to me that there is a hidden connection between body and text in the novels of nostalgia. The wedding of Eros and Mourning enveloped in a heavy atmosphere of doom, symbolically characterizes the nature of nostalgia for a dying-out culture, which is love in mourning. In Shen Congwen and Su Tong’s works, the lures and perils of death are linked with eroticism and symbolically configure the nostalgia for a rich culture on the verge of extinction. The same is true with Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury: his incestuous love for his sister and his consequent suicide is linked with his grief for the declining South.15 In figuring the clinging feeling toward a moribund culture, eroticism, death, and fatality are interwoven with madness. Photography is violent, not only because it turns subject into object at the mercy of an incomprehensible mechanism (of fate, which includes the vicissitude of history), but also because it imposes on the lover viewer the undeniable “that has been” (CL, 94) when the referent has died. In the lover-viewer’s eyes, the gaze from the photographed has a clearness that penetrates the mist of time and possesses a perennial life that denies death, which denies reality. Thus, photography, like Wang Anyi’s minute realistic descriptions, through its absolute realism, conveys a temporal illusion and leaps from representation to presence. The insistence on the living reality of the dead is the suppressed madness of the photograph. The text of irrepressible nostalgia cannot find full expression unless 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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linked with the immediacy of body, the entangling of love and death, which is figured as the willing torture of being bound with a corpse as lover. Necrophilia is found in Shen Congwen’s story “Three Men and a Woman,” in which a woman’s corpse is excavated by her lover and placed naked on a stone table strewn with chrysanthemums.16 In Su Tong’s stories staging the fall of the South, the ghostly sexual lure bedecks death into a grand festival.17 Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are obsessed with declining aristocracy and buried-alive ghost lovers. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,”18 an aristocratic spinster sleeps with the dead body of a man who betrayed her and whom she murdered for years. In Wang Anyi’s novel, when Lao Kena embraced the aged Wang Qiyao, the real horror came not from Wang Qiyao’s age, but from the horror of embracing an excavated, decayed body. Even her room, in Lao Kena’s sense, was permeated with the “the decayed air of night” (CL, 370). All these elements are explicitly present in Shen Congwen, Su Tong, Faulkner, and Poe’s novels and their stories run in a thick undercurrent beneath Wang Anyi’s deceptively traditional, smooth, and rational narrative until it breaks out into shocking violence near the end. Unlike Shen Congwen, whose radical melancholy is not devoid of a mellowing quality; Su Tong, whose fin de siècle (end of the century) aesthetics at least provides a narcotic swoon of self-immersion; Poe’s childlike indulgence of neurotic imagination; or the peaceful surrender to water that Faulkner grants Quentin Compson’s death at the end; Wang Anyi’s realism, beneath her graceful and refined writing, is almost brusquely jarring. The duality of realism and hallucination and the equation of the two in the nature of photography are consistent with the fact that the negative and positive films of the photograph produce the same image. What is negative? What is positive? What is reality? What is illusion? Is life the reproduction of art or art the reproduction of life? What about history? Is it the copy of fiction, or is fiction the copy of history? Wang Qiyao’s ending is the copy of the film she witnesses forty years ago. Her stage show in the beauty contest is the copy of the ideal femininity. Wang Qiyao’s friend—Jiang Lili’s youth is the copy of sentimental novels, which is later transferred into her exaggerated revolutionary enthusiasm. War and tawdry romance are brought together. In the endless refraction in the mirrors, the boundary of fiction and reality totally collapses. With her 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




ingenuity, Wang Anyi renders almost imperceptibly this subtle dissolution as the disturbing framework encasing the whole book. The novel’s beginning pictorial depiction of the Shang Hai Lanes revealing itself through the morning mist has the effect of brushing aside the dust to reveal a time peeled and faded oil painting, or as the description has it––lifting a theatric curtain (4). The novel ends with Wang Qiyao’s death, an ending that merges with the performed death she witnessed in the film company many years ago. Artistic performance and reality thus coalesce. Indeed, Wang Qiyao’s death is described as drawing open the theatric curtain of another flowery season (384). In keeping with the dual nature of positive and negative films of photography, Wang Qiyao’s relationship with men is also tinged with the duality of fullness and void. Alice, where Wang Qiyao cohabits with Li, is a place full of mirrors that, even in the midst of their love, have been telescoped into a dreaming inaccessibility. Everything in Alice is in double. All are in pairs—sorrow and joy, dark and light. One is true. One is false (98). When Wang Qiyao’s liaison with Kang Minxun is stranded, the shadow play made by Kang Minxun’s hands already prefigures the future transpiration of their love (204). When Mr. Chen stopped seeing Wang Qiyao, his only comfort is sought in a selfimposed enclosure in which illusion and reality are reversed. He himself fades into nothing, while the flowery face of Wang Qiyao on the photo is the only reality (248). When Wang Qiyao confides her past to Lao Kena, cloaked ominously in thick smoke, she is almost the incarnation of specter who sees with a strange clairvoyance into her own end, as she says, “The play is closing . . .” (360). The confusion of reality and fiction, which evacuates experience, sometimes takes the comforting seat in the Buddhist identification of void and being. The summing lyricism of Wang Anyi’s pictorial technique has a definite reference to Buddhism, which is probably the only recognizable ideology behind her writing and accounts for the breadth of accommodation in her narrative voice. For example, when talking about Wu Qiao, Wang Anyi writes, it contains the essence of Buddhism. Its vacuity and cleanliness is made of the fullness of trifles (128). Sometimes the identification of reality and fiction takes on the tone of despair and disillusion. In the book, the film director once advised Wang Qiyao to retreat from the beauty contest, for glory fades into nothingness. All is vanity (58). In her novels and 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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short stories, such as “Our Uncle’s Story,” and “Star Singer from Japan,”19 Wang Anyi tends to reveal her characters, like a photographic exposure, at a moment of shattering self-recognition––of their self-dramatizing impulse and the ludicrous meaninglessness of their whole lives. Wang Anyi’s retreat from the description of major historical events and her focus on the survival of ordinary people in history are rooted in her concealed mood of skepticism and nihilism. Her excruciating effort to render the concrete details of daily life, which is tangible to the touch, has an undertone of pathos, as they are fabricated as a shield from the major forces threatening to make human life and history vaporize into the weightlessness of fiction. However, the shield is often proved useless. The large shift of perspective beneath Wang Anyi’s traditional, smooth narrative is startling: a microscopic description of an interior room with chatting people around the dinner table might suddenly be pulled far into space, unoccupied by human beings, or shifted to a bird’s eye view beyond human perception. The effect feels like the vertigo of vacuum test. Time also contracts or expands at will. It may be brought to a halt through the interiorizing process or to let it fly as if a hundred years are lived in one year. However, like photography, in Wang Anyi’s straining effort to render the physical texture of a past age alive through the most quotidian and concrete details, these things are seen already in the process of evaporation. Description, in their minute mimesis, paradoxically takes on an air of hallucination. The duality of Wang’s writing is in accordance with the duality of photography: both reality and hallucination—momentary and infinitely deferred—are trying to preserve life while producing death. The cuisine scene recurring throughout the novel contains the most profound understanding and pity for life: surface is depth; physical sense the most intangible air; celebration is mourning. In the mirroring palace where Wang Qiyao cohabits with Li, the object of nostalgia already recedes into the depth of mirror beyond touch. The lyricism of her writing is derived from a retrospective view in which past is always already scarred by an anticipatory loss. The dexterity of going into immediate life, while at the same time contemplating with detached compassion, certainly characterizes Buddhist Zen. Between in or out of this world, Wang Anyi has been trying to strike a balance, which often fails in her characters because of their blind desire for 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




life. When Wang Qiyao insists on returning to Shang Hai after her sheltered life at Wu Qiao, she has a vague sense of herself running into the bustling world behind the theatric curtain as a moths flying into fire (146). The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is about the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. The mirroring stage, according to both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is associated with narcissism before adult age. Melancholy in mourning is bound with narcissism. Cultural nostalgia is narcissism in plural form.20 Freud recognizes a link between cultural ideal and narcissism.21 Wang Qiyao’s cohabiting life with Li is set in a mirror palace, significantly named Alice (recalling Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, wonderland in the mirror). Alice is described as the haunting dream of ideal femininity and feminine ideal like Wang Qiyao herself in the novel, which links an extinct cultural ideal—Wang Qiyao’s imprisonment in her mournful love and waiting reflected both the author and the heroine’s inability to escape from a cultural nostalgia. The desire for a past derealized by time, or haunted by a dreamlike sensation even at the moment of experience because of the characters’ anticipatory sense of loss, is the impetus of Wang Anyi’s attempt to endow the past with corporeality with her minutely concrete details, at the same moment it recedes into thin air. Just as a photograph attempts to duplicate the exact detail of the photographed and tries to keep the photographed alive, it also actually produces death on the subject. The cuisine description in which Wang Qiyao holds a dinner party with Sha Sa, Mrs. Yan, and Kang Ming Xun is an excellent example of the duality of Wang Anyi’s realistic description, which is parallel to the duality of photographic realism. While the texture of daily life (smooth surface of the glutinous rice ball, tender eggs, fragrance of wine) is described with fine touches, they are at the same time telescoped into the mist of distance (185). In these passages, cultural nostalgia is refracted through a narcissistic enclosure—a sharply delimited space in which things are brought so close that their physical textual are caressing to touch. In an article by Gang Yue, there is a perceptive comment: “What Wang Anyi wants to touch is a concrete, restraining refinement and elegance. This interior refinement and elegance are fine sands ground out of clamorous world. Stroking these sands at the bottom 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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of the well is peace.”22 The enclosure of narcissism is embodied in spatialized moments, which achieved a state of seeming stasis. The more humane perspective in Wang Anyi is always self-protectively delimited: a small lighted area precariously suspended in the vast void of darkness or arbitrary historical forces. Omniscience can only be achieved in nonhuman terms, as her identification with the pigeon’s perspective at both the beginning and the end of the novel. Omniscience may become ominous too, as the bizarre indifference and dispatch with which the murder of Wang Qiyao is accounted. In the same way as a small realm of light highlights the immensity of dark surroundings, the narrative restraint that confines the description to a physical surface—people’s chatting in an enclosed space—paradoxically reveals a disturbing depth of existential darkness. Already the seeming stasis of the pried-open moment is superimposed by the shadow of its fleeting, and the dinner celebration is heralded by mourning. The people at the dinner talk about how they seem to watch the soul of the dead and how they are like hunters of emptiness (185). Already the people sitting around the dining table with their vivid food and talk are seen as dissolved dust (185). This wise, compassionate reticence probably explains the true nature of Buddhist Zen’s resolute equation of phenomena (surface) with essence (depth). In these passages, the spatialized and stabilized moment that opens up an unhurried and precise listing of cuisine details are juxtaposed with a “misty, indefinite” film of distance dreaming, in the same way as what the exactitude of the photograph’s physical surface that it heightens, is only a temporal hallucination. In many places of her description, like Wang Qiyao’s tableau vivant in the contest and this scene, present is revealed only retrospectively through the mist of distant time, so that future loss casts a shadow on the most festive scene and is displaced in the narrative into the characters’ inexplicable psychology of anticipatory loss and mourning. In this light, the wedding of Eros and mourning reflects the time scheme of the novel of nostalgia—the fusion of past, present, and future that by turning death from figure to fact and festival into mourning in its retrospective narrative, creates the timeless aura of nostalgia. The transformation from loss to timelessness is parallel to the photograph’s welding of the momentary shot that produces death to a temporal illusion of perennial life. Inscribed 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




on the photograph is always “He is dead. He is going to die,”23 an act of death infinitely deferred that always brings the viewer back to that early moment in which the photographed is alive before the camera. This perhaps explains the circular structure of the book, beginning with the pigeon’s perspective and Wang Qiyao’s first witness of cinematic death, which merges into the end scene with her own death, where the only witnesses are the pigeons. In depicting death and loss, the circularity hovers between prefiguring and actualizing, living and death, and distills a timeless nostalgia into the narrative consciousness—a melody of everlasting regret. Moment is to the lyric as sequence is to the story. The moment in which all times are distilled evokes Wang Anyi’s choral voice that is both an elegy and celebration of life in the vicissitudes of her characters and her city. From the very beginning, Wang Qiyao is mentioned as “Wang Qiyaos.” The choral voice—like the boatmen’s chorus in Wang Anyi’s “Love in a Small Town”24 or in Melody of Everlasting Regret—in the city chorus of fireworks at a new year’s beginning (366), is the never-ending background music echoing through many of her novels and stories. In Melody of Everlasting Regret, her summing lyricism created through the abundance of pictorial technique enhances her story into a synthesis of narrative, painting, and music. The moment in the novels of nostalgia is one that is layered with all temporal dimensions. It is the land of shadows upon shadows, a timeless twilight zone.

Ti me, I mag e, a nd Fic tio n i n Peter Handke’s DER KURZE BRIEF ZUM LANGEN ABSCHIED Time and Judith/Claire Antithesis

The temporality of Der kurze brief zum langen Abschied is very close to that of Quentin Compson’s description in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Both are perceived through the anguished eyes of a member of a defeated race. The protagonist in Der kurze brief at the very beginning mentions a dusk more terrifying than night25—a limbo realm between past and present, which is the same spiritual environment as Faulkner’s Quentin Compson character. The protagonist of Der kurze brief, a German exile at the United States, also lives in a twilight, limbo realm situated between past and present. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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In the ambivalent twilight, matters are dissolved into phantasmal images: diffracted, distorted, and fragmented images; and simulacra of reality that mock the diseased mind. The artificial wall between the past and the present crumples as the solidity of matter does. Past invades and obliterates present. Future is encountered only retrospectively in terms of its inevitable loss. Both present and future are seen in the impasse of a past. Often, present scenes and the protagonist’s sense of reality are completely obliterated by similar scenes in the past. In both books, the woman is made the emblem of that difficult past and converges the protagonist’s ambivalent feeling of love and hatred. In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy embodies for Quentin the lost past—her fall is equated in his mind with the fall of the Old South.26 The time dimension in Der kurze brief is also emblemized in its women characters—Judith and Claire. While Judith is the personification of the protagonist’s past with its war terror, Claire is the embodiment of his rare sense of the present who provides what little ease and serenity the protagonist finds in his relationship with the outside world and Nature. It is Claire—for all her aplomb—rather than Judith, the terrorist, who stays outside the protagonist’s projection. It is also Claire who points out to—as no one else has done in this book—the protagonist about his own unacknowledged fears and needs and teaches him to let go of his past. Under her guide, the protagonist recognizes his own spiritual symptoms, which leads more or less toward a recovery. The metaphorical alignment of Judith with the past can be confirmed in the following analogies: like the impact of past on the protagonist, for the most part of the book, Judith is physically absent but fantastically omnipresent in her intrusion into the protagonist’s present reality. This intrusion is characterized by violence and terror (bomb). She traces the protagonist secretly as the past hunts him. She robs him as his sense of past usurps his present. One of the rare appearances of Judith is made in a shop where the protagonist catches a glimpse of her toe only—a visual dismemberment suggesting the dismembered bodies in the war. Judith has no sense of time and orientation. She is always belatedly aware of things, an analogy of the aftermath repercussion that the protagonist has to live with. She has no sense of outside and inside. Once, as the protagonist told it, Judith was unaware that she had already 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




gone out of a house and still talked about the car outside the house (14). This illusory sense of the inside also suggests the effect of the past on the protagonist: he cannot perceive any outside reality except in terms of his inward mental disturbance, an attribute he shares with the dramaturge in this book. In many ways, the dramaturge is a double of the protagonist. The dramaturge once said something about himself that is perfectly applicable to the protagonist. He said he was completely cut off from life. Life becomes only a phantom reflection of his inner states. He cannot see reality any more. It becomes only a metaphor of his situation (130). Judith’s insistence on the artificiality of Nature when she said, “Those orange trees were planted. Not nature” (162), suggests a Nature that is inevitably scarred by history. Judith’s impact is often seen in terms of the protagonist’s distortion of Nature. For example, after suffering the mild explosion and electric shock caused by Judith’s gift box, which hides a small wired dynamite, the protagonist saw Nature, as if suddenly swarmed with lizards. The protagonist’s long farewell with Judith suggests his difficult separation with his personal and national past. At the end, they are seen as coming to terms with each other after the separation, suggesting the protagonist’s reconciliation with his past by giving it up with a mixed feeling of nostalgia and relief. In contrast to Judith’s phantasmal omnipresence and physical absence, Claire is so physically present that it is impossible to reduce her to mere projections. Her conduct of daily chores evinces a serenity that soothes the protagonist into a normal connection with the reality of his daily world. With her, the protagonist no longer feels his perception of the outside world distorted into nightmarish simulacrum of his mental anxiety, nor does he need to compulsively fix attention on the outward signs of things around him to distract attention from himself. Things just happen and he is at peace with them. For the first time since Judith’s departure, he is able to observe nature as it is, which evinces the same tranquility as Claire does. When he is with Claire, the expression of their intimacy is talking about things outside. So while Judith embodies the interiority of a past that the protagonist cannot get out of, which is his projected world, Claire embodies the peace of the outside reality. She has her own traumatic past: a German teacher stranded in a foreign country. But she is already starting to lose memories— although not without certain twinge of sadness—and reconciling 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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to the reality of the surrounding world. Having experienced loss, she tries to educate her child away from any possessive impulse. So much hidden similarities may be found between Claire’s child and the protagonist that she is no less than a mother figure to the protagonist. More than a mother figure, her previous profession as a German instructor suggests that she is also a teacher to him on how to get along with the German loss after the war. Both the protagonist and Claire’s child are upset by the fear of loss, change, and disruption of their own sense of order. Both the protagonist and Claire’s child confuse nature with artificial signs and engage in solitary self-talk. Claire, by talking in a wisely oblique manner about the child, educates the protagonist about his own hidden fears, and by talking about the need for nonpossessiveness, she teaches him to let go his past. Under the influence of Claire, the protagonist finally is able to reconcile himself to his past loss. It is after being with her that the protagonist comes to the epiphany of seeing life as a dance of farewells taking place at all times—farewells that one makes with grace and calm and ritualizes into an art of life (103). The protagonist’s coming to self-knowledge under her guide effectively reduces his sense of self-alienation and alienation from the world. It is after being with her that he experienced his rare moment of bliss—a complete harmony between his inside and outside world. Sitting in front of the window, he looks at a cypress branch and experiences the mystical feeling that the swaying of the trees penetrates him and becomes one with his own breath (78). For him, Claire is the invisible mediator between him and the world and the transparent window, in its very unobtrusiveness, that connects him to the outside. It is only natural that this moment of epiphany is described in a passage both preceded and followed by the mention of Claire. The image of the swaying cypress becoming one with his breath is subtly echoed in the kind of intimacy between him and Claire with their mingled breath: “We seldom touched one another and never kissed; our way of caressing was to lie side by side, breathing in and out” (97). Once, while out in the Nature, when he is only with the child, he nearly sinks into a muddy swamp—an entrapment suggesting his own existential situation. He gets out and sees Claire’s unruffled sleeping face and feels comforted. Claire is his mother figure, teacher, as well as a soothing Nature before being scarred by history and man’s 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




traumatic projection. The alignment of Claire with the comforting Nature, apart from the cypress analogy, also finds expression in her repeated act of pacifying the child with orange juice. The image of orange trees in the John Ford episode is associated by him with Nature, origin, and permanence. While Judith is an actress, with a self-dramatized violence, suggesting a fictionalized and phantasmal past that harasses the protagonist, Claire is the peaceful reality of daily world, embodying an undramatized, nevertheless heroic spirit of endurance in coping with life’s hardship, including the protagonist’s sexual instrumentalization of her. She is the food provider. The food she makes is preserved for extensive use. Symbolically, she provides nourishment for the protagonist’s wounded spirit. As long as the protagonist is with her and without the intrusion of Judith, the time dimension he experiences is a peaceful sense of the present and a delighted interest in the outside world. Image as Mediation

Image, according to Henri Bergson in his Memory and Matter, is the mediation between inner and outer world, body and mind, past and present. Image is in fact the afterimage of memory. Memory distinguishes spirit from matter. In matter, past extends to the present in a continuum. The accumulation of memory divides and consolidates moments and offers a freedom from the necessity of flux in which matter is inevitably caught.27 In Der kurze brief, all the protagonist’s perceptions of reality are rendered in images of violent distortion, hollowed out and dismembered—pantomimes, like animated cartoon figures. Often, these images, like balloons swelled with macabre phantasmagoria, are always under the threat to burst. This explosion threat suggests, in the transformation of reality into image, the protagonist’s consciousness stages compulsively the war bombing, which has been his obsessive memory from the first page of the book. Seemingly random snatches of scene in the book are made to echo each other ingeniously as figurative variations of the protagonist’s war-destabilized mentality. With dense, subtle recapitulation of symbolic images, the narrative almost acquires the formal ritual of choreography. Often, the tragic damage of war is recapitulated in a burlesque fashion after the war. For example, the image of 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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war bombing is recapitulated, after the war, in several places in the distended images on the verge of bursting. When watching one of the cartoons, the protagonist sees a cat blowing a bubblegum so big that it bursts and the cat chokes to death (49). The protagonist himself is not exempt from this distortion. When he lies in the bed, he is suddenly assaulted by a delusion that he himself swells up so much on that he becomes somewhat subhuman, with bird’s skull and fish’s fins (22). He once expresses his dislike of comics, because they remind him of an inhuman life that can only survive in the minds of children, distorting their environment (29). However, he himself is exactly a stumbling, retrogressed, distorted child whose vision of the world is also distorted. It is interesting to see how every derogative comment he makes about others applies perfectly to him—a backfire effect of his dehumanizing reduction of lives into things and things into ludicrous images. Like Green Heinrich, he objectifies, distorts, and deadens life through his (artistic) frame of vision. But unlike him, he is not immune from this distortion. Image in Der kurze Brief functions as a negative mediation between outside and inside, body and mind, past and present. Instead of connecting them, it bespeaks their violent rupture. The sense of rupture may be traced back to the destructive effects of war, which tears bodies, traditions, and literally the land of Germany apart: his childhood loss of his mother to suicide; a failed integration with Nature, which is only a silent place registering his hard toil to earn a living; and also his recent separation with his wife Judith. In a strange way, concomitant with his liability to reduce lives to figures of his mental state is his liability to see lives, including his, as mere “things.” The latter, in a way, is due to the dysfunction of memory. Since according to Bergson matter is distinguished from spirit because of the “storing-up” function of memory in higher lives, which are able to distinguish between past and present, a dysfunction of memory may cause a perception of lives as mere matter caught up passively, unreflectively (because they become the protagonist’s reflection) in an inevitable flux. The dysfunction of memory in Handke’s protagonist is reflected in the frequent moments when the present is totally usurped by the past. The problem with the protagonist is that his past—both personal and national past—refuses to become memory but insists on being a reality of the present. A possible explanation to reconcile these two kinds of reductive perception might be: the reduction of lives 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




to mental figures suggests an objectification that reduces the subjectivity of independent lives to malleable, passive things. The protagonist confesses that when he hates Judith, he sees her as a thing; when he loves her, he sees her as a being. All of the protagonist’s perception becomes a blinding afterimage of memory. As he expresses it, whichever way he looked, there was a blinding afterimage (119). Blinding in the sense that it prevents him from seeing reality as it is. For him, America is nothing more than the afterimage of Germany and a mundane life in a peaceful foreign country that is only a simulacrum of his war-beset past. Living in a peaceful street, his expectation of violence is yet irrationally instantaneous and reflexive. For example, a mere silence in the room will make him feel someone is preparing to attack him in the next second. Some fallen hair on the clothes alarms him to distraction—perhaps it is a remembrance of a dismembered body in the war. In keeping with the protagonist’s monomaniac obsession, images are caught in sharply delimited perspective. For example, his perspective through the hiatus of closely curtained window creates an optical delusion of back-and-forth movement out of the normal progression the street people (30). This cinematic slow motion and optical delusion of back and forth movement is repeated in the novel—such as the action and counteraction of the marine in his laborious performance—suggesting the protagonist’s mind shuttling between past and present. The movement creates an effect of furious stasis (as we often find in Faulkner’s books), hinting at the impasse of the past: his every effort to go forward in time is drawn backward. Apart from the metamorphosis of distention, distortion, fragmentation, and truncation, which characterizes how the protagonist’s war-damaged mind processes the outside world into mental images, things are also seen as constantly dwindling away, a delusion bespeaks the protagonist’s fear of loss. The protagonist’s displaced sense of time is reflected in the displacement of sound and sight: muted sight drifts disconnected and unaccountably; shrill sounds coming out of an unidentifiable place. The metaphor of bombing, apart from symbolizing the violent way things are transformed into images, is also echoed in Judith’s murderous gift, which causes an explosion when the protagonist touches it. Every serious damage in the war is burlesqued in the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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protagonist’s paranoid perception after the war. The protagonist reduces reality to images, as he reduces living characters to concepts and situations to language in an attempt to subdue a gnomic world that is a projection of his war-destabilized mentality. However, this reduction backfires on him. At his most depressed moment, he looks at a television screen’s mirror image of himself and finds a consolation in these flickering images. As long as he recognizes things and lives as mere images, he feels protected from actual harm. The backfiring effect lies in the fact that he is also subject to this reduction: he becomes a pantomime of himself, as if he is playing a role that is not his own. He becomes a balloon replica of himself, his own shadowy double, a ventriloquist. As he expresses it, he moves in a strange element as if a mere imaginary figure in some other people’s thoughts. He heard himself as a ventriloquist (152). Divorce of Image and Body in Film and Photography

Everything in the protagonist’s perception is reduced to a flickering appearance—a process recalling the nature of film, which is a recurring metaphor throughout the book. In film, there is the same divorce between image and body and the symbolic motif of exile we find in the protagonist’s perception and experience. Pirandello once comments on the feeling of the film actor before the camera: “The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises of his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering for an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. . . . The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.”28 In the protagonist’s perception of himself and the world, there is the same evacuation of reality in becoming dimensionless images. The sense of exile felt by the film actor characterizes the protagonist’s exile from his country, his isolation in America, and his alienation from himself. The pathologically erratic juxtaposition of vignettes characterizing Handke’s narrative also suggests a film montage. The protagonist is a playwright. His perception of people around him is often cast in cartoon figures and analogized 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




to circus performers. The understatement of his pondering over history is also associated with his knowledge of films. Aside from film, photography forms another important symbol of this novel. In Barthes’s Camera Lucida, photography is associated with the motif of death, violence, temporal illusion, and madness.29In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” photography exemplifies the process of mechanical reproduction, which Benjamin links with the aesthetics and politics of fascism.30 In Der kurze Brief, fascism certainly constitutes the protagonist’s national history and his guilty conscience. All these symbolic messages contained in photography are dominant motifs in the protagonist’s experience in this novel. What Judith—the embodiment of his past—leaves him is a camera. And Claire’s child—in many ways a replica of the protagonist—is upset by the disrupted order of photographs. According to Roland Barthes, photography’s origin is traced back to theater through a singular intermediary, by way of death.31 The pervading specter of death is exactly what the protagonist cannot avoid seeing in this novel beneath every mundane reality after the war. Violence is implicit in camera in reducing a subject into a passive object, the same way as the protagonist turning lives into objects. In imposing on the lover viewer the undeniable “that has been” (CL, 94) when the referent has died and photographed through its absolute realism, it conveys a temporal illusion and leaps from representation to presence. The insistence of the living reality of the dead is the suppressed madness of the photograph. In Der kurze brief, violence, temporal illusion, and madness are the effect of the past on the protagonist. Thus the camera Judith—as the personification of his past—left him is highly symbolical. Under the impact of his own and national past, his present reality is transformed into hallucinating scenes of violence. The obliteration of present reality by past scenes bespeaks a temporal illusion that often drives him into frenzy. Victim of the war violence, the protagonist has to stage compulsively this violence toward others to keep an inside-outside balance, and this violence is his objectification of living human being into “things”: his cartooning of people around him, his murderous fight with Judith, and his occasional sexual instrumentalization of Claire. Violence becomes its own subterfuge through which the protagonist tries to hide from the world and himself. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Film fictionalizes history, gives it a false continuity, and distances the historical trauma from the individual. It is an attempt to master reality through the detour of fiction. The novel ends with the protagonist’s encounter with John Ford years after his separation with Judith. At the end, John Ford seems to give a glimpse of permanence, but not after Judith and the protagonist’s separation. Permanence, love, harmony, peace can only be captured retrospectively—an aching paradox that we find also in the tragedy of anachronism in photography. On the one hand, past voids and usurps present. On the other, the expectation of a better future cannot be caught glimpse of unless it becomes irrevocably past. Future, as it were, slipped into the past without passing through the present. Both present and future are haunted by past. The closed temporality of this novel marks a radical difference from the openness of romantic temporality and makes it antiromantic. Romantic time is either the conglomeration of past, present, and future (e.g., John Keats and William Yeats) in an artistic eternal now or an infinitely deferred future (Percy Bysshe Shelley’s substitution of metaphorical images), or infinitely deferred future identified with an indefinite, past golden age (e.g., Novalis). In Handke, both future and present are forfeited by the impasse of past. Bild-Buildung

Buildung in this book is about how to restore bild—image—to an incorporation with the body of things. In many buildungsroman novels, bild functions as an important metaphor in the protagonist’s buildung. In Wilheim Meister’s Apprenticeship, the picture of the young prince in love with his king-father’s bride hung in the child Wilheim’s bedroom externalizes the failed Oedipal scenario that will be staged repeatedly in his future life. The symbolic replacing of father in the Oedipal scenario is exactly the function of buildung. In Henry von Ofterdingen, the protagonist Heinrich finds a mysterious likeness of himself in the picture of a poet and writes his own destiny as a future poet. Heinrich’s dream image (bild) of blue flower is incarnated in Mathilda, a transient corporation of bild and body that has to be lost again through Mathilda’s death and restored through Heinrich’s recooperation of that ideal, disembodied image with the body of his poetry. In both 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




books, bild functions as a hidden, indecipherable (to the protagonists themselves) oracle picture of the protagonist’s fate, as it were, a latent photographic negative that will be developed as the protagonist progresses through the story into the manifest one through the protagonist’s development. Buildung is the dynamic process through which the latent, static, watermark bild is manifested through the characters’ realization of their fate. Photography in Der Zauerberg contains the same metaphor of buildung through the development of the latent to the manifested image. The X-ray is a perfect symbol of the inside nature of the bild—that the protagonist are molded from potentialities inside themselves. In all the above novels, the cooperation of bild with body necessitates a violation of a living person in the process of appropriation, and this violation is the cost of buildung. In coming to be the father figure incorporated into the society, Wilheim has to give up his dream of being an artist. In replacing Mathilda with a poetic body rerealizing his dream image (of blue flower), Henry has to lose to death the living Mathilda. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to realize his own potentiality for understanding life and death, Hans Castropp has to suffer tuberculosis and stay on an isolated mountain for seven years to bring the latent image of disease (figured in X-ray) to manifest as disease and death are the detours of understanding life. Grune Heinrich is closest to Handke’s Der kurze brief in the destructive dehumanization of the bild. Just as Green Heinrich kills Anna by putting her into a picture frame, the memory of wartime Germany (figured in photography and film) voids all present reality by turning both the protagonist himself and—through his distorted vision—the whole world around him into dimensionless cartoon figures. Violence is often its own subterfuge. Desperate to escape violence, people often react by behaving or perceiving violently. Distorted mental image (bild) in Handke’s work—as the negative mediation between outer and inner, body and mind, present and past bespeak originally the violence that past exerted on the protagonist but through the strange mechanism of violence—becomes for the protagonist a subterfuge from violence. Handke explained the conclusion of Der kurze Brief as a reformation of autobiographical elements, a “fairy-tale” ending to a 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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The novel disappoints however in its ending, which has the narrator and his wife meet the film director John Ford at his home in California. During the meeting the alienation between inner and outer world is overcome in a ‘magical’ moment when history stops and a state of pure nature is reached. It is a weakness of the novel that it presents an analysis of the disruption of the narrator’s perception of the world and of his increasing distance from his wife in terms which link the specific constitution of this gap between inner and outer world to the conditions of the narrator’s childhood and his position within the social and property relations in Austria, only then to avoid a similarly concrete coming to terms with this alienation of perception by raising the action in the final instance into a ‘magical’ moment of unalienated ‘directness’ of experience.33

However, in my view, the ending glimpse of permanence provided by John Ford, the film director, is as fictitious as the nature of film with its disembodied images. Contrary to Linstead’s comment, the failure of integrating image and body at the end suggests the failure of buildung in this book—the failure of integrating inner and outer world. What Linstead calls “the magical moment”—the glimpse of eternity symbolized by the orange trees is belied, intentionally on the author’s part, in the text by an illuminated image of death connected with these trees. In the book, the lit-up orange trees make the protagonist blink. When he opens his eyes again, the world has darkened, and a big yellow spider falls at his feet (160). The dead spider is a recapitulation of an image in the dramaturge’s earlier talk with the protagonist. The dramaturge said he hadn’t been exposed to nature for a long time, but when he reached out his hands, he felt like a dying body of a killed spider slowly sinking to the ground on its thread (130). Nature is always scarred by the human history of destruction and death. John Ford’s idea of pure nature and permanence is nowhere to be found. The invisible thread that the spider hangs on symbolizes the invisible hand of the past. Thus Handke provides on the surface a “fairy-tale” solution while at the same time undercuts it with symbolic images. Instead of being what Linstead calls “the ‘direct’ experience,’” film has been associated throughout the book with the mediated and the unreal and an impossible means to overcome reality. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


bitter marital episode.32 Michael Linstead exclaims his disappointment at this “fairy-tale” ending saying,


Earlier, the protagonist talked to Claire about the film “Iron Horse,” a film about the building of transcontinental railroad between Missouri and California. Implicitly the protagonist sees it is as a symbolic unification of East and West Germany. Claire, with her usual penetration, reminds him that it is a silent film—in other words, a pantomime bespeaking of its own inability to communicate, which belies the “transcontinental railroad” as the symbol of communication. The film of Abraham Lincoln, in the eyes of the dramaturge, is also flagrant in its artifice, poses, and gestures. Since the protagonist’s way of dealing with the outside world is also to turn it into film montage of images, his effort is as futile. The passage of time, as the process of fictionalization, is a mediation of painful experience. After hearing Judith’s story of her past with the protagonist, John Ford asks, whether all is true (167). Judith’s affirmative answer only ironically suggests the dual nature of the characters’ experience: fiction as the detour of experiencing an unbearable reality. The incorporation of image and body is only momentarily realized in the protagonist’s contact with Claire. Their separation, however, is final, as figured in the film metaphor at the end. The solution is no solution, but only renunciation. The film metaphor provides a sad subterfuge: as film fictionalizes experience, so time fictionalizes history—here, through diminishment. If there is any comfort at the end in the protagonist’s encounter with the film director, it is this: the reality of a painful past is still experienced as fiction, but it is a fiction, however, that has lost most of its harassing aspect in a longer retrospection.



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4

Poetics of Ex ile

Poetics of exile means estrangement from the origin—disjointed-

ness, disparity, decentralization, and marginality. In the four poets studied in this chapter, the poetics of exile is characterized by disparity and marginality in its various manifestations. In canto 15 of Don Juan, whose protagonist features the self-fictionalized and exiled hero Don Juan, the language of disparity is reflected in the playful disjointedness between form and matter, more specifically, between its rhyme scheme and its narrative content. The poetics of disparity makes this romantic text take on a curious affinity with postmodern poetics of Différance that can be compared with Barthes’s account of the pleasure and the bliss of the text. In Sylvia Plath’s poetry, the disparity is painted, as in Edvard Munch’s wood print, in the clash of the symbolic implication of primal colors. In Emily Dickinson’s poetry on death, as in Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics, exile is the acute, liminal experience of self-estrangement and self-disintegration, for which death is the only adequate metaphor—the nothingness that gives rise to the experience of pure being. Hai Zi’s poetry captures the tumultuous current of vagrancy and lost love, expressed in imagery of fragmentation and truncation recalling Nietzsche’s idea of Zagreus. Gu Cheng’s exile from Taoist Paradise is expressed through the split voice: the omniscient, posthumous self looking back at the sharply delimited living self.



Chapter 2

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Canto 15 of Don Juan is about Adeline’s matchmaking for Don Juan, an exiled Spanish aristocrat in England. As it seldom happens in the former cantos, the rhyme scheme in canto 15 forms an independent subtext from the narrative matter. As befitting the language of disparity characterizing the semiotics of exile, the dialogical, conflicting relationship between the rhyme scheme and narrative content bespeaks an increasingly purposeful arrangement of rhymes on Alfred Byron’s part. On the surface, the sudden narrative turn to the account of the ghost in this canto seems only to be another example of the rambling, digressive, and conversational style of this book, and there is no more purpose in its appearance at this particular stage of narrative than anywhere else. However, the ghost—being in its nature disembodied spirit—suggests a separation of form and matter that emerges necessarily out of the logic of detachment between form and matter abundant in this canto: the conflict between the rhyme scheme and narrative content, between the dual aspects of the dual aspects of the narrator, between appearance and reality in the dressed food and dressed women, between the apparently rectifying and essentially deadening impact of prospective marriage. In my view, the narrative energy, charm and pleasure of Don Juan as a whole is generated essentially through Byron’s manipulation of disparity and friction at all levels. The friction-fiction analogy suggests the hidden homology of Eros and irony, which are, respectively, the major content and technique of Don Juan. In other words, the essence of the ghost is the spirit of disparity and friction presiding over the whole work. The repetitive pleasure of erotic friction accords with the repetitive nature of Juan’s amorous adventures; the inexhaustible narrative pleasure of inventing fictions, in a hiatus of vacuity between disparate elements; and the book’s reluctance to end because of this pleasure, which accounts for the unfinished nature of Don Juan. The rhyme scheme and narrative matter in this canto are orchestrated, as it were, into a musical duet: the rhymes, as if beaten out on a muffled drum, in a comically ominous undertone, forms an insidious asides that undermine the buoyant narrative stance, which might be analogized to a flippant courtly music played out 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Th e G h o st as E ro s and Irony in C anto 1 5 o f Don Juan

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by violin, with a rococo delights in decorative details. On the surface level, the narrator ostentatiously praises Adeline as the “purest vintage,” newly wrought coins, and a “right honorable lady”1 who “had a good opinion of advice” (15.29) and makes Juan, as well as the narrator himself, assume a reverent complaisance to her advice about the beneficial, reformative, and edifying effect of prospective marriage. However, this connivance is offset by the narrator’s tongue-in-cheek understatement of Adeline’s possible ulterior motives in her matchmaking—perhaps vicarious satisfaction of her sexual interest in Juan. The ominous nature of marriage she advocates is suggested in the rhyme scheme that pairs the vocabulary of marriage or coupling with pigeonholed uniformity and deadening constriction. In stanza 35, “marriage” is rhymed with “miscarriage” and “wedlock” with “deadlock.” In stanza 39, “doomed” is rhymed with “groomed.” In stanza 40, the rhyme of “matches-watches” evokes the idea of marriage (match) as mechanical routine (the mechanical progression of watch) and the jealous supervision of spouse (when watch is used as verb, it means observing and prying closely). In stanza 43, the rhyme of “molded” and “folded” gives a vivid image of Juan as malleable, passive material in feminine hand he had married. In stanza 44, the rhyme of “home” with “tomb” has a more devastating undertone. In stanza 48, the rhyme “catalogue-clog” suggests marriage that pigeonholes individual and mars that person’s freedom. In the same stanza, the “trouble-double” rhyme suggests the trouble and trials of marriage (double). In stanza 57, the rhyme “combinedblind” hints at marriage (combined) as a result of blindness—a mistake of judgment in having oneself thus trapped. In the same stanza, the rhyme of “tame-blame” evokes vividly the image of a manipulative, nagging wife. In stanza 61, the rhyme of “blendedmended” suggests the presumable function of marriage (blended) as moral rectification, only the sly tone hints rather at the uncomfortable restriction man has to suffer in marriage. In stanza 84, the rhyme of “married-tarried,” and its extended, long-vowel rhyme “grieve-deceive” suggests, marriage is a mistake of momentary decision whose consequence has to tarry life, causing endless grief and deception on both part. These systemized rhymes form an undercurrent discourse independent of the narrative matter. For example, in stanza 35, the first rhymes of “marriage-miscarriage” and “wedlock-deadlock” form insidious asides undermining the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Poetics of Exile

36


When Rapp the Harmonist embargoed marriage In his harmonious settlement (which flourishes Strangely enough as yet without miscarriage, Because it breeds no more mouths than it nourishes, Without those sad expense which disparage What Nature naturally most encourages), Why called he ‘Harmony’ a state sans wedlock? Now here I have got the preacher at a deadlock. (15.35)

The “disparage-encourage” rhyme hints at the dual attitude of the narrator toward marriage—his manifest attitude of encouragement hides his real intention of disparagement. Similar examples of the disparity and conflict between rhyme schemes and narrative matter are in the couplet: “By many virtues to be worth the trouble / of single gentlemen who would be double” (15.48). The eulogy of the worth of marriage is undermined by the rhyme “trouble-double.” On the banquet set by Adeline for the purpose of Juan’s acquaintance with his candidate wife, instead of describing those chosen ladies, the narrator flies into a seemingly digressive discourse on food and cuisine aesthetics. The narrator’s apparently flippant, offhanded elaboration of the cuisine aesthetics forms a subtle link to the nature of marriage with the same appalling deadliness disguised under pleasant decorum. Like the ominous asides on marriage hinted in the rhyme schemes, the food are catalogued, in exotic, alluring nomenclature, in the same way as Adeline lists the properties of a long line of candidates for Juan’s would-be wife. These ladies, dressed to be displayed and chosen, suggest the same use of the dressed food. The learning of these candidates (hinted in their names, “Miss Reading,” “Miss Showman,” and “Miss Knowman”) suggests that learning has become a social decoration among these aristocratic ladies. The masculine ring in the names suggests the manipulative impulse and antinature artificiality that defeminizes these women, anticipating the prospect of a constrictive, grating relationship had Juan married one of them. On one occasion, the analogy of the candidates and the dressed food are explicit, “But so far like a lady that ’twas drest / superbly and contained in a world of zest” (15.74). 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


narrator’s ostentatious champion of marriage emphasized by the affectation of rhetorical question:

37

There is analogy of sexual appetite and the appetite for food. The nature of marriage, like the aesthetically dressed food, is the same beguiling and legitimizing of the natural appetite: “Who would suppose from Adam’s simple ration / That cookery cold have called forth such resources / As form a science and a nomenclature / From out the commonest demands of nature?” (15.69). Man’s civilized facade plays havoc with his primitive desire. This conflict in man recalls the cuisine description in the earlier canto; when Juan and his crew encountered a sea disaster and ran out of food, they adopted the “democratic” and “civilized” method of drawing straws to decide on a cannibalistic ritual. This intertextual macabre association around food accentuated the drumbeating rhymes in this canto, which links marriage with the “Dance of Death” (15.39). The relishing description of the dressed, killed animals almost coming to life only highlights their deadliness—a deadliness that is hinted as the nature of marriage under the guise of social decorum. The friction between the manifest narrative stance and latent comment of the narrator, apart from the two levels of comment on marriage, also finds expression in the narrator’s dual regards toward his own work: on the surface, he ostentatiously flaunts the triviality of his theme, his “desultory,” “rambling” style, his easygoing social connivance, which is abruptly shattered by his occasional piquancy of satire. For example, in stanza 93, his arrogant flouting of social decorum is expressed in another cuisine analogy: “But politics and policy and piety / Are topics which sometimes I introduce, / not only for the sake of their variety. / but as subservient to a moral use / Because my business is to dress society / And stuff with sage that very verdant goose” (15. 93). The phrase “stuff with sage that very verdant goose” has multifarious suggestions. Apart from the sexual innuendo contained in the food-sex analogy in the matchmaking episode, it hints at the primary narrative technique of Don Juan—the cooperation of the worldly wise narrator-commentator and his young, innocent hero. It also suggests the double-edged attitude of the narrator toward his social milieu: on the one hand, with his witty sage and apparent complicity he dresses it up in pleasant, alluring details, such as his rococo delight in cuisine aesthetics. On the other hand, the comparison of the society to the emblem of 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Poetics of Exile


stupidity—the goose—suggests a vehement contempt that belies the apparent complicity between him and society and makes the phrase ring with a deadly disparaging tone. Thus we see the split in the narrator: the careless, flamboyant, seeming purposelessly digressive narrator, with his ready acquiescence and glib modesty, his exaggerating gallantry toward the ladies, and his eager allowance for their social and sexual foibles, camouflages a purposeful, calculating, arrogant, and flouting narrator, who is “born for opposition” (15.22). Hence, the key words “masquerade” and “contradiction” evoke multifarious reverberations in the text: the dressing of killed animals into delicious food, the pretension of the women, the dual impact of marriage, the double stance of the narrator—one minute he is glib, compliant, and conniving and the next he is relentlessly taunting and disparaging. So why does the ghost emerge at this stage of the narrative? In Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot, C. C. Barfoot and D’haen explore the significance of the ghost in terms of the shadow of influence. Ghost, as a replica of life, contains an implication of influence and emulation. According to Barfoot, the work Don Juan had been seen its literary indebtedness to Alexander Pope. It also implies the political repercussion of the French Revolution—the disappointing shift of the Revolution with Napoleon’s restoration of imperial system makes the Byronic hero dwindle into the antihero of Don Juan in the book.2 However, why does the narration stage the ghost at this particular moment of the narrative? In my view, the narrative turn to the ghost in this canto is not a simple whim of the author or narrator; it forces out this canto’s necessary logic. A ghost, which by nature is a disembodied spirit, signifies a separation of form and matter that finds abundant exemplars in this canto. The ghost, seen in the context of canto 16, is essentially a masquerade of Duchess Fitz-Fulke. In the same way, the narrator also masks his latent narrative attitude beneath his manifest attitude. Therefore, the ghost also emblemizes the dual attitudes of the narrator. This friction of the dual narrative attitudes, as analyzed, is created by the conflict between the rhyme scheme and narrative matter. In fact, the major part of the narrative energy, charm and pleasure of this book as a whole



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is built on disparities on all levels and their consequent friction. Thus, ghost—as the spirit of disparity and conflict—presides over the whole book and form the friction-fiction analogy that links Eros and irony. The former constitutes the narrative matter— Juan’s endless amorous adventure. The latter constitutes the narrative technique: Byron’s use of irony that is the major fountain of his creative energy and fictive invention. Byron’s use of irony in Don Juan is his major tool for comedy. First and foremost, irony is found in the mock epic form borrowed from Pope, whose elevated diction grates with its trivial, comic matter. Second, as Lilian Furst points out in her Fictions of Romantic Irony, Byron’s Don Juan is an ironic inversion of the Spanish legend of Don Juan: “Instead of being a heartless, compulsive seducer of women, this Don Juan is a helpless prey, not moved by the upsurge of his own sensual appetites, of which he has no inkling, but victimized by the lust of others, and often caught in a complicated network of social relationships beyond his grasp.”3 Juan’s feminized passivity is reflected in canto 15 in his docility toward Adeline’s manipulation. Third, irony is in the rhyming of the high and the low (such as “sublime” and “crime”) that creates a precipitous rise and fall in the narrative tone. Fourth, irony is in the frequent use of dash, which often marks an anticlimactic transition, a trivializing qualification, or a glib withdrawal. Fifth, irony is also prominent in Byron’s fertile invention of different masks for the narrative stance and their swift rotation: indulgent or intolerant, encouraging or disparaging, complicit or condemning, modest or arrogant, pacifying or provoking, tonguein-cheek, or flaunting. Sixth, irony is in the irony of situation: for example, in the hilarious parody of the Gothic mystery in which the ghostly monk in the legend turns out to be the “full, voluptuous” body of “her frolic Grace—Fitz-Fulke” (stanza 123). Thus the “sensuous” ghost converges the erotic and the ironic. Irony presupposes disparity. According to Jacques Derrida, the disparity between signifier and signified and the suggested arbitrariness of signification makes meaning and depends on Différance—a deferral of meaning (or ending) and an invitation to an endless play that gives rise to the proliferation of fictive invention. The play takes place in a space of vacuum, a space between



Poetics of Exile

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Between two worlds life hovers like a star ‘twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge. How litter do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge, Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves Of empires heave but like some passing waves. (15.99)

This passage recapitulates certain images in canto 14, stanza 8: You know, or don’t know, that great Bacon saith, Filing up a straw, borne on by human breath, Is poesy, according to the mind glows— A paper kite, which flies ‘twixt life and death, A shadow which the onward soul behind throws. And mine’s a bubble not blown up for praise, But just to play with, as an infant plays. (14.8)

In both passages, human existence is cast in the image of frailty and evanescence—paper kite and bubble. While the passage in canto 15 has an anticipatory reference to the ghost, the passage in canto 14 is a treatise on poetic invention. These two strikingly similar passages hint at the symbolic identity of the ghost and poetic creativity, which will be further analyzed in the later part of my chapter. The above passage from canto 15, marks a startling shift from the frolic, garrulous narrator dabbling in trifles to the lyrical one with a silent cosmic melancholy. This shift points to the underlying nature of laughter and masquerade of Byron. Most critics regard the careless, self-derogative narrator and his puppet hero in Don Juan as ironic inversion of the dark passions of the Byronic hero in his earlier poetry. However, in my view, the narrator and the earlier Byronic heroes are not merely ironic antithesis. As I have analyzed, under the glib sociability of the narrator, he has the same spark of disparaging arrogance, as well as a cosmic melancholy and despair. In this passage, life is revealed as no more than evanescent bubbles on the passing waves. Byron’s defiance is to fill that bubble with 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


the disparate elements. The image of vacuum is abundant in the book. Sometimes it is on a cosmic scale:

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illusive, iridescent colors with his exuberant invention. Laughter and a flaunted masquerade, instead of the exposed misanthropic arrogance and alienation in his earlier poetry, become the means of expressing this despair and defiance. An ironic detachment, oscillating between frivolous and grave, gay and melancholy, becomes the means of rising above it. In this canto, between the ominous rhyme scheme of macabre dance and the delightful surface of aristocratic life, is that space between death and life where Byron lavishes his poetic invention and his endless masquerade of narrative stances alternating between the piquant and the relishing. This passage, at the end of canto 15, is the prelude to the introduction of the ghost in canto 16. Thus, the ghost is associated with the nature of Byron’s poetic inspiration—which is a play between differences; a play at the edge of an abyss like a child’s whistle on the graveyard that defies and relieves the potential nihilism of life and death. It is undeniable there is certain element of dark humor in the comedy of this book, such as the rhyme scheme’s understated analogy of the nature of marriage with death. However, the capability to attain irony itself bespeaks a detachment and superiority that counteracts the darkness of despair. Irony presupposes contradiction. Traditionally, irony is the contradiction between the literal and hidden meaning. In canto 15, stanza 88, the ability of inventing fiction is linked with the ability of self-contradiction: If people contradict themselves, can I Help contradicting them and everybody, Even my veracious self? But that’s a lie; I never did so, never will. How should I? He who doubts all things nothing can deny. Truth’s fountain may be clear, her streams are muddy And cut through such canal of contradiction That she must often navigate o’er fiction.

This linking of self-contradiction, invention of plural self-identities and the fictive invention in general is recapitulated in canto 17, stanza 11, bespeaking that the contradictions in irony is the fountain of Byron’s creativity in Don Juan. Temperate I am, yet never had a temper; Modest I am, yet with some slight assurance; 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Poetics of Exile

The Semiotics of Exile in Literature Changeable too, yet somehow idem semper; Patient, but not enamoured of endurance Cheerful, but sometimes rather apt to whimper; Mild, but at times a sort of Hercules furens; So that I almost think that the same skin For one without has two or three within. (17.11)

Irony is erotic in the sense that both irony and eroticism thrive on playing in the space between what is seen and not seen, which creates a titillating sensation. The ironic pleasure lies in conjecturing what is the true intention behind the writer’s literal expression. The erotic pleasure is also between the seen and unseen: in an earlier canto, it is described as in the titillating space between the exposed ankle of a woman and what is hidden beneath her skirt. Now we come to this sudden discovery: Since the nature of ghost is exactly that titillating mystery between the visible and invisible, the seen and the unseen, ghost is a perfect emblem of both the ironic and erotic pleasure. In my view, the link of grotesque, irony and fragments on the basis of arabesque in the poetics of Friedrich Schlegel—the prominent German romantic theorist—confirms, from another angle, the symbolic convergence of ghost (one kind of grotesque), irony and the erotic. To Schlegel, the grotesque is the synonym of arabesque.4 Irony and grotesque, like arabesque, share the idea of infinity (the endlessly curled lines of arabesque), uncertainty (lack of resolution and ending), digression (one stem in the arabesque pattern branches off into many branches) and fusion of incompatible realms (in arabesque there is the fusion of fragmented vegetative, animal, and human lives). We might regard the fragmented and episodic nature of Don Juan; with its prolific diversity, which combines contradictions and incompatibles; and its lack of resolution and ending as originating in its ironic form and regard this irony as linked with the grotesque, of which the ghost is certainly one kind. The entangled, sinuous lines of arabesque also evoke an erotic pleasure. Thus we see again that irony, the erotic, and the grotesque converge in the essence of a ghost. Roland Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text might provide another angle of linking the erotic and ironic. This book explores the pleasure and bliss of the text in terms of erotic pleasure: Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Text of Bliss: the text threats and imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all cultures (which permeates him quietly under cover of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.5

“Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so.”6 The narrator in Don Juan navigates with the ease and caprice of an ironist between his complicity with and contradiction of a society in which he is a member. The pleasure of the text in canto 15 of Don Juan is in the narrative matter: the delightful surface of aristocratic life, the mood of compliance. It is the dit, the expressible and comforting elements. The bliss of the text is in the inter-dit, the understated and disruptive rhyme scheme of this canto. Don Juan is often considered to be written in the satire form and yet lack of the “moral purpose of the satire.”7 It is perhaps because the narrator’s attitude toward their social milieu is never unambivalent: there is contempt for it as well as delight in it. While through his understated rhyme scheme he disparages its vanity, pretension, and deadliness, through his narrative matter he delights in its pleasing surface. To the narrator, the surface is not necessarily less prized than the depth, for it is not in either of them but in the seam between them that the narrator finds the space of his prodigious invention. More than Juan, Byron genuinely relishes this surface of aristocratic life. He enumerates with delight its cuisine’s aesthetics, feeds on the food, and gives in return to the readers a feast of words—in the glib nomenclature of food and in his sly allusion of these foods to sex, which makes them more appetizing. This appetite and satiety produces an extravagant display of verbal skill and consumption of words. Excess and surfeit are exactly what characterize bliss. “The brio of the text is its will to bliss: just where it exceeds demand, transcends prattle, and whereby it attempts to overflow, to break 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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There was a goodly soupe a la bonne femme, Though God knows whence it came from; there was too A turbot for relief of those who cram, Relieved with dindon a la Periguerx; There also was (The sinner that I am! How shall I get gourmand stanza through?) Soup a la Beauveau, whose relief was dory, Relieved itself by pork for greater glory. (15.63)

We are almost able to feel the narrator caress and flirt with the sensuous, exotic sounds of the names of the food. The names of the dishes and the act of their consumption play flagrantly on sexual puns—“bonne femme,” “cram,” and “relieved.” At the same time, there is association of death with food. In stanza 8, death is called the “gaunt gourmand” that consumes lives. Eros (sexual appetite, delightful surface of life) and Death are both linked in food, and the feast of food is also the feast of words. Since ghosts are naturally associated with the dead and in this book are associated with erotic desire (the “full,” “voluptuous” Fitz-Fulke), it is not unimaginable that the ghost should emerge from the incense of the banquet. Like the banquet of verbal felicity, the ghost is also the spirit of poetic invention. Thus, not only on a serious, cosmic scale as in canto 15, stanza 99, but also on the comic, miniature scale of food metaphor, the ghost is made the inventive spirit that floats between the edges of life and death. Barthes also comments, “Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? . . . It is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing . . . between two edges; it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance.”8 The quick alteration of narrative stance between revelation and concealment in Don Juan stages this alluring appearanceas-disappearance. In its elusive nature a ghost incarnates this appearance-as-disappearance, as in the image of the monk-ghost. The play on the ghost between revelation and concealment is 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


through the constraint of adjectives—which are those doors of language which the ideological and imaginary come flowing in.” (Barthes, 13–14) Let’s take the following stanza as an example:

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Our hero was in canto the sixteen Left in a tender moonlight situation, Such as enables man to show his strength Moral or physical. On this occasion Whether his virtue triumphed, or at length His vice—for he was of a kindling nation— Is more than I shall venture to describe, Unless some beauty with a kiss should bribe. (17.12)

“Repetition itself creates bliss.”9 Like this passage, repetition in Don Juan is often characteristically configured in the verbal gymnastics of a back and forth movement, a baiting solicitation and titillating withdrawal. Such sentence pattern is everywhere in Don Juan. For example, in describing Don Juan’s appeal: “His manner was perhaps the more seductive / Because he ne’er seemed anxious to seduce” (15.12). He also claims, “Temperate I am, yet never had a temper; / Modest I am, yet with some slight assurance. / Changeable too, yet somehow idem seper; / Patient, but no enamoured of endurance; / Cheerful, but sometimes rather apt to whimper; / Mild, but at times a sort of Hercules furens” (17.11). The pleasure of repetition in an erotic rhythm of action and counteraction is also found in the arrangement of the plot. The “full,” “voluptuous” ghost is the repetition of the earlier appearance of the spectral, monkish ghost; the icy Aurora is a recapitulation of the tropical Haidee. The masquerade of the male (Don Juan) into female in the Turkish court is repeated in the metamorphosis of the female Fitz-Fulke into the monkish ghost. Ghost, which by nature is a shadowy replica of life, suggests repetition with variation. Byron’s irony in many ways illustrates Schlegelian irony in its alternation between enthusiasm and skepticism, self-expression and self-withdrawal, and creation and destruction. His intermittent self-disguise and self-revelation stage that erotic flash mentioned by Barthes. In a way, ghost, which is imprisoned underground, represents the suppressed—the deeper personality of Byron as well as his narrator. The ghost is the shadow of the earlier Byronic heroes in their fierce solitude. It is not mere whim on the part of the narrator that the appearance of the ghost in canto 16 gives 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


found in canto 17, where we are left with no certainty about the consequence of the ghost’s visit:


away to the ghostly list of orphans in canto 17. Great men are orphans because they are unprecedented and unappreciated in their time. In Byron there is certain self-regard for his state of expulsion from the English society in his lists of orphans and his inexplicit equation of orphans with great men such as Pythagoras and Socrates. The icy, refined Aurora in a way is not only a ghost of Haidee but also Byron’s alter ego in her detachment from the society of which both are members. The cast of Aurora as an orphan in the same religion as Don Juan seems to point to this implicit identity between Byron and Aurora. As Aurora laments “the Eden that is no more,” the narrator laments the disappearance of the Edenic love between Juan and Haidee. Juan’s subsequent amorous events after Haidee no longer attain to that lyrical height. The amorous events become more or less a repetitive burlesque. The failed hero is replaced by the inventive energy of the narrator. At the beginning of Don Juan, the narrator states that he “wants a hero.” In a sense, this hero is found in the narrator himself. He is the real hero, whose creative energy replaces his dumb hero. “The narrator, not the hero, possesses the hurricane energy of Don Giovanni, [the Don Juan in Spanish legend] which, redirected from sex into art, is expressed in the hectic and irregular sportive velocity of the language.”10 Near the end, Don Juan’s voice and action are more and more usurped by those of the narrator. The narrator, more than Juan, participates in the scene he creates. The ending canto of orphans becomes almost Byron’s own self-depiction. With the emergence of the ghost, the ghost of the suppressed Byron and all his early Byronic heroes—alienated, solitary—come to surface. The spirit of disparity emblemized in the ghost seems to contradict Coleridge’s theory about the organic relationship between rhyme and content.11 The rhyme does not develop from within the narrative content,but is imposed from without, violating and undermining the content. In talking about the bliss of the text, Barthes suggests that bliss is the “disfiguration of language,” which brings culture and language to a crisis. “The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s (mother tongue) body to glorify it, embellish it, dismember it, or take it to the limit of what can be known about the body: I would go so far as to take bliss in a disfiguration of the language . . .” (Barthes, 37). Byron’s use of rhyme in canto 15 suggests such disfiguration 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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of culture and language: his violation of the organic relationship between rhyme and content stated by Coleridge and generally believed by the English Romanticists. This dismemberment and artificial grafting suggests the nature of the grotesque: grotesque (ghost) is the juxtaposition of the incompatible.12 In Don Juan, ghost is both visible and invisible, sensuous and intangible. The ghost symbolizes the violation of the consistency of form and matter, therefore it emblemizes the transgressive. So is irony. As to the eroticism in Don Juan, it contains also the element of the transgression, in both moral and physical sense. The ghost is thus the spirit of poetic disfiguration and invention and converges Eros and irony. In conclusion, the ghost is the presiding spirit of Don Juan. Being in its essence disembodied spirit, ghost represents the detachment of form and matter—the language of disparity that features the semiotics of exile, which mirrors the exiled state of the Byronic hero. This detachment creates a space for play. The play, causing both conflicts (friction) and conflation between disparate elements, constitutes the friction-fiction analogy that links Eros and irony. While Eros is the major content of Don Juan, irony is the major technique. Thus ghost is metaphorically the poetic inspiration in Don Juan. Being at once visible and invisible, the ghost also serves as the metaphor for ironic and erotic pleasure, both of which thrive on playing in the seam between the seen and the unseen, between the delight with and the disparagement of culture and language. Prominently, ghost symbolizes the narrator/ Byron’s split between his manifest and latent persona, his manifest and latent attitude toward their cultural milieu. The ghost’s emergence at the end suggests the falling of the mask and the release of the suppressed Byronic hero. Ghost in Don Juan is the genius of creativity, the spirit of transgression that allows Byron to transcend his earlier poetic works. Instead of the agony of alienation, the spirit of laughter from a prodigal becomes the antidote to the potential nihilism of life.



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If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way? —Emily Dickinson

In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger defines Dasein as “being holding out into the nothing on the ground of concealed anxiety.”13 Death in Emily Dickinson’s poems is a metonym for a crisis of consciousness in which an indefinite feeling of anxiety brings the poet into confrontation with both an external and internal nothingness. The enclosed space of self or individual reason, through either violent destruction or subtle disintegration, is released into the boundlessness of the nothing, which, according to Heidegger, is the only occasion giving rise to the experience of pure being. Emily Dickinson’s poems on death form a liminal consciousness in which the annihilation of nothing is a necessary prelude to the experience of pure being. It might be visualized in the luminist painter Frederick Church’s work, “Wreck”: a slanting gleam of sunlight struggling through a swarm of dark clouds sheds a steady light on the gray, empty sea, scattered in the distance with some broken pieces of ruined ship. The light entrenches, tranquilizes, and partially illuminates the vast scene of wreck but is not strong enough to warm it. The ruined ship might be analogized as the individual self of the poet in a moment of wreckage, shattered by power beyond comprehension. The ruins floating on the vast emptiness of sea can be seen as the release of disintegrated self into the boundless nothing. The slanting gleam of light struggling through the dark clouds is the divine intuition of the poet striving in partial success to ascend over the ruin, contemplating calmly its own wreck, but not strong enough to warm the poet’s soul. Let’s look at first Dickinson’s “There is a Certain Slant of Light.”14 Heidegger’s definition of anxiety, different from the ordinary meaning of the word, is not anxiety in the face of any particular thing. “The indeterminatedness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the essential impossibility of determining it” (BW, 101). 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


A H eideg g er ian Approac h to Emi ly D ic k inso n’s Po etry on Death

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Such anxiety does not let confusion arise. Much to the contrary, “a peculiar calm pervades it” (BW, 100). In the “bewildered calm” (BW, 100) of anxiety, the nothing is revealed in the slipping always of beings as a whole. A feeling of “no hold on things” comes over us. In this poem, the setting of winter afternoon presents seasonal death and imminent death of the day, when the bloom of nature slips away and the afternoon sun beam almost measurably retreats. The retreating movement in the nature suggests the receding of beings as a whole. The empty, barren winter landscape is resided only by a spectral slant of light. The apparition of the light accentuates space and stillness. The word “certain” evokes the indefiniteness of anxiety evoked in the poet when suddenly confronted with nothing, as beings slipping away as a whole, a retreating movement incarnated in the light’s receding. According to Heidegger, in the slipping away of beings as a whole, these beings, divested of their familiar associations, are revealed in all their strangeness: “as the repelling gesture toward the retreating whole of beings, it discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other—with respect to Nothing” (BW, 109). The nothing and the strangeness of beings revealed by nothing oppress us: “the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing” (BW, 100–103). In Dickinson’s poem, the nothing oppresses the poet with a bewildering calm of anxiety and solemnity: it “oppresses, like the heft of cathedral tunes.” The strangeness of beings revealed by nothing is hinted by the indefinable nature of the light, with its profound but elusive influence on the poet, “Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— / We can find no Scar, / But internal difference, / Where the meanings, are.” The ephemeral light in the dying day impinges on the poet the mortality of human life. The annihilation of nothing in the nature is internalized into the poet’s awareness of the nothingness of self and makes her an empty vessel with receptive sensitivity toward the slightest change in nature. The receptive sensitivity in the poet spreads contagiously to the landscape, so that the enclosed nothing of the self is released to the nothing in the open: “When it comes, the Landscape listens— / Shadows—hold their breath.” The feeling of suspension in this line also coincides with Heidegger’s expression of the original mood of anxiety when “we are snatched away and left hanging.” (BW, 105) 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Poetics of Exile


The auditory sensibility is certainly the most passive in the five senses. The reduction of the usual manifold senses to the auditory and the consequent sharpened sensitivity of hearing is strongly reminiscent of the climactic line in “There is a Funeral in my Brain”: “As the all the Heaven were a Bell, / And Being, but an Ear.” The alert passivity in the heightened spiritual realm is crucial to the whole category of Heidegger’s concept of openness and attunement, his “letting be.” The sense of trancelike passivity characterizes Dickinson’s most poems on death. Heidegger rests the experience of being that is resolute on the experience of nothing: “In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Dasein is all that is there. . . . Only on the ground of the original revelation of nothing can human existence approach and penetrate being. . . . Dasein means: being held out into the nothing” (BW, 103) He claims in exaltation, “pure Being and pure Nothing are the same.” In this poem by Dickinson, the retreating light intimates both the oppression of nothing and spiritual enlightenment of pure being. It entrenches the whole landscape in its light, tranquilizes, and holds the landscape in its spell. The state of passivity under the spell leads naturally to the loss of speech. According to Heidegger, because beings as a whole slip away and only nothing crowds around, anxiety also “robs us of speech.” In this poem, anxiety evoked by the retreating of beings and the closing in of nothingness is “sealed” of speech: “None may teach it—Any, / It is the seal Despair / An imperial Affliction, send us of the Air.” The poet’s awareness of mortality and the nothing within and without impinge on her individual ego with an effect of damage. The invisible scar and affliction is “heavenly” and “imperial” because the wreckage of the self, and the release of it into the pure draft of being, necessitates pain and evokes a feeling of sublimity. The end of the poem opens a vista of indefinite space with the departure of the light. The immeasurable distance is the abysmal source of being revealed in all its profound otherness as opened up by nothing. Although poetic vision is shown to be too limited to tap that source, the poet is touched momentarily by its intangible wind, hinted in “an internal difference” that lifts her into the realm of pure being. “I felt a funeral in my brain”15 presents a more successful moment of poetic vision, but precisely because of this, the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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poem ends with a sharp recoil of senses. The lapsing out at the ends suggests that the poet cannot bear the vision revealed in the abysmal experience. In this poem, the death ritual is metonym for the emerging and breaking down of poetic vision. The heavy, muffled sounds at the beginning of the poem evoke the same sense of encroaching force, contracted space and oppression in Heidegger’s concept of anxiety. It also intimates something profound that is concealed underneath, which is on the verge of breaking through the benumbing calm of surface. The cause of the anxiety, in accordance to the indefiniteness of Heideggerian anxiety, is not given. The numb state, abundant in Dickinson’s poems on spiritual crisis figured in death, is often a prelude to the breakthrough of poetic vision. Likewise, Heidegger observes in “What Are Poets For,” “Among all ventured beings, those belong most readily within the Open are by nature benumbed, so that, in such numbness, they never strive for anything that might oppose them.”16 In this poem, the enclosed space explodes under its claustrophobic pressure and the individual mind, figured in the creaking of the coffin, is broken down and released into the open. The space of nothing opened up by destruction invites occupation. As Heidegger states, “the essence of being is letting dwell.” While at the end of “There is a certain slant of Light,” poetic consciousness cannot bridge the gap of nothingness, in “There was a Funeral in my Brain,” the open space brought about by nothing is resonant with pure being. Boundary of the self falls apart. Distance collapses. The soul expands to the circumferences of things. The wrecked ego is released into the resounding open. The heart’s space is resonant with the ringing of pure being. The climactic moment of the poem is characterized by the same receptive passivity indicated by the auditory sense as in the former poem, “As all the Heavens were a Bell, / And being, but an Ear, / And I, and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here,” “Silence” suggests the same feeling of being “robbed of speech” as the great current of being suffuses the space opened up by nothing. “Some strange race” suggests the remnant otherness of being as revealed by nothing, although larger part of the otherness is devoured when pure being occupies the space of nothing and become one with it. The great current of being overwhelms the poet, who cannot bear the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Poetics of Exile


vision the poem opens up and is shattered to pieces, struck silent, and loses consciousness. The last passage shows the poet, in ultimate passivity, is absorbed into the abysmal draft of being. The vertiginous lapse out is a moment in which the poet’s self is given over to the open. According to Heidegger, the open is the whole draft to which all beings, as ventured beings, are given over. Drawing as so drawn, they fuse with the boundless, the infinite. The fusion with the boundless also means the annihilation of the self that feels and articulates. The remnant sentience in the poet between waking and sleep catches some dim, profound, and inarticulate knowledge at each plunge. According to Heidegger, in the movement of giving over to the open, “when something is encountered, a barrier comes into being.”17 In this poem, the world that the poet hits at every plunge is barrier turned into being. The ambivalence of syntax in “finished knowing, then,” suggests that a profound knowledge is caught in a glimpse before the complete lapse out. In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger remarks, “We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the Nothing through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in existence that our most proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom.” (BW, 106) While in Heidegger’s description of the relationship of anxiety, nothing and being, the three yield to each other smoothly in the quiet mood of meditation at some rare moment of our lives. In Dickinson’s “There is a certain slant of Light,” and “There was a Funeral in my Brain,” the finitude of human beings is much more acutely evoked as it can yield to the freedom of the openness of nothing only through a painful damage, or violent destruction of the poet’s self, a pain so acute that death is the only adequate figure. Only in this light can we understand the painful apotheosis in Dickinson’s poems. Only in this light can we understand the tearing pain, the physical coldness akin to death, as well as the feeling of release and exaltation in Dickinson’s letter to Higginson, where she talks about the moment when poetry comes to her, “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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The polarized mood of despair and exaltation in which the poet is consumed by a fire that cannot warm her is movingly revealed in her poem, “It was not Death.”18 The state of crisis in this poem is akin to Heideggerian anxiety in that the retreating of beings as a whole is evoked by the “shaven life,” and the oppression of nothing and spatial contraction is suggested by the image of being “fitted into a frame,” the difficulty in breathing, and the image of encroaching midnight staring around. The feeling of suspension, “of being snatched away and left hanging,” in Heidegger’s description of anxiety is suggested spatially by the image of the ground repealed by frost and temporally by the stopped clock. The release into the space of nothing is implied in the last image of the empty chaos of the sea. The sea of nothingness and despair is figured as death in the poem and cast in the ritual of burial in the third stanza. However, such nothingness and despair also occasion the triumphant experience of being and resurrection in the first stanza. Thus Dickinson’s poems transcribe the most destructive and abysmal moment of spiritual life into gain and profound experience of being, which is expressed in her acute glimpse of poetic vision that is represented simultaneously by voice and silence. The above analyzed poems depict how the wrecked individual mind is released into the open space of nothing and how nothing, as the abysmal source, holds out to the experience of being. The spatial progression in these poems from contraction to expansion is found in many of her poems on death, such as “There Is a Maelstrom” and “It Is Not Death.” Her poems on death is often set in a scene of harvest, secretly vanquished by silence and stillness, a paradoxical combination that welds the consummation of being with nothing. Like Heidegger expresses, “Like the moon, so life surely has a side that is turned away from us, and that is not its opposite but its completion to perfection, to plentitude, to the real, whole, and full sphere of global being. . . . Death is the side of life that is averted from us, un-illumined by us.”19 Dickinson, in her life of severe seclusion, is one who has seen into the dark.



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Although a considerable amount of crucial works on Sylvia Plath are biographically oriented, while critics treat her poetry little more than the illustration of case history, the artistic merits of Plath lie much less in the personal-confessional aspect than in a startling, dramatic voice with imagistic-symbolist expression. Her poems are not poems of ideas, but poems of states—and often of unsteady states of extremity. The images in her best poems—elliptical and disjunctive, shifting with a dream logic far beneath consciousness—startle readers with their unexpected leaps and precision and possess a physical immediacy that at times absorbs readers into their vortex. Plath’s poems attract much negative criticism. Harold Bloom, for example, disapproves of Plath’s “hysterical intensity” and “coercive rhetoric.”20 Irving Howe also holds a partial dissent toward Plath’s sensationalism even as he recognizes the strain of the “jeeringly tough”21 tones directed partly against herself. In Sylvia Plath: the Poetry of Initiation, Jon Rosenblatt effectively refutes the negative criticism by clarifying the term “confessional poetry” and pointing out that Plath’s work is not merely autobiographical self-revelation but a reordering of personal experience into patterns that obtain an objective character through repetition, allusion, and symbolic enactment, especially in her “scenario of initiation”: entry into darkness, ritual death, and rebirth.22 His statement that in Plath’s poems, landscapes are often mindscapes and bodyscapes, concurs with my association of Plath’s poetry with the Norway Symbolist painter Edvard Munch’s works, which display the same traits. Since Plath’s imagery is a predominant feature of her art, it attracts much criticism. The recent study of Plath’s mythological sources by Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath,23 reads Plath’s images as code elements for aspects of the Great Mother myth that Robert Graves explained in The White Goddess.24 Charles Newman’s The Art of Sylvia Plath includes a few perceptive essays on Plath’s imagery.25 However, the only comparative study of Plath with pictorial art is made by Constance Scheerer in “The Deathly Paradise of Sylvia Plath,” in which she compares Plath’s images with Rousseau’s carnivorous gardens.26 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Sy lv ia P l ath and E dvard M unch: Mindsc ape o f Chagr i n

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However, it strikes me that at a deeper level, Plath has more of an affinity with Munch in their shared powerful sense of despair and alienation. In the use of color symbolism, Plath shares with Munch the same taste for the starkly eloquent expression of black, white, and primary red. Often her poems and his paintings are seized at an extreme psychic moments that deform objects and create a vortex of contorted images. They have the same obsession with death, either in its aspect of the void or in its voracious, seductive side. Emotions are objectified in their works in the same opposite direction of molten dissolution and frozen fossilization. The Medusa persona in Plath’s works with its exalted blasphemy recalls Munch’s dire Madonna—women as victim as well as victimizer in their passion, bearer of vicious energy, as well as devouring agent of death. In color symbolism, black often dominates Munch’s work. In his The Kiss, only the woman’s facial contour and long hair emerge a little into light, hovering above the backdrop of night like a moon-wrought chimera, fragile and evanescent as a first kiss. In Melancholy, Evening, a man in pensive thought is absorbed into the background gloom. In the distance, a woman in a white dress on a trip to a distant island draws a faint expression of ache and longing from the man’s immovable face. The apparitional white nearly engulfed by the dark in these pictures elicits the fragility of life, the passage of love, and alienation from the longed-for object. In spite of the deep negativity of the black, it is the suppressing dark that is the protective cloak of men in melancholy, while the white in its living beauty is felt as a sting. Similar emotional connotation in similar chiaroscuro is found in Plath’s poems. In “Winter Landscape, With Rooks,” the speaker, walking like a dark-feathered rook in her pensive thought,27 is in her congenial element with the black pond and approaching winter night, but for the lonely whiteness of a single “out of season” swan (21). The whiteness of the swan, reverberating the later image of “dry frost covering the window” of the poet’s wound is a reminder of passing love (22). Thus, white, as in Munch’s The Kiss, in its intrinsic remoteness from demonstration, paradoxically takes on the rich, disquieting color of memory, while black is the muted, soothing element of oblivion in which the speaker seeks to efface herself. The speaker yearns to drag down the white reflection into dark to regain that oblivion. The sudden destructive 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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impulse disrupts the smooth flow of the poem and reveals the muffled depth of the speaker’s agitation. The rich expression of spectral white is brought out like lightening in Plath’s poem, “Crossing the Water.” Plath’s imagery in black and white, such as this one, is characterized by a hushed sense of alienation and longing in a tranquil nightscape. The black boat, lake, and trees create a pervasive atmosphere of extinguished consciousness, equivalent to death, into which people’s lives seem to drain out without struggle and sound, so that they become only two black, paper cutout people. Objects in Plath’s poems are often flattened and emptied, suggesting at times a wild barrenness, at times a soothing subterfuge in a minimum life, which is the case in this poem. Just as the poet sits oblivious in the dark, stars cast their light among the lilies. The lilies under the starlight are compared to expressionless siren. The soul is awoken in silent shock (160). The starlight that momentarily lit up the lilies also lit up the extinguished soul, with a painful sensitivity, to the seductive beauty of death, incarnated in the lily, the expressionless siren. The lily-siren rouses the speaker from the dark element of stupor into a momentary experience of otherworldly beauty before luring her into drowning. In the astounded soul, there is a tension between longing and distance. It seems that in Plath’s poems, the awakening to life and beauty invariably triggers the threat of death. The death impulse in “Winter Landscape, Rooks” is turned into the self-destruction in “Lorelei” before the beautiful marble sculpture of Lorelei, who is also depicted as a siren. Mist, moonlight, and the water’s reflection weave a world of dreams. As the marble turrets look down, reflections in the water float up. The clear, full singing of the sirens is already weighty enough for the mortal ear, but more shattering is their silence (194). The very beauty of their voices, too much for the mortals to bear, is felt as a threat, a siege, and a pitched wail of reefs in a nightmare (94). Their white-marbled beauty, in their peace, affects the poet like a riot, so that he cannot even drown peacefully into the dark but has to invoke the stone to haul her down (95). In these poems, which are built of predominantly dark and chimerical whiteness, white, as in Munch’s paintings, in the otherness of their beauty, is the disquieting element that disrupts the harmony of the dark existing within man and his environment and reminds him of deprivation—of a world he cannot enter or 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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has lost. White, more richly implicated in Plath’s poems, evokes an acute awakening to life which at the same time has a death seduction, because the speaker, alienated from the otherness of the beauty, can merge with it only through an act of self-destruction. The same feeling is enacted in the drama of color juxtaposition of red and white or black. The stark clash of original colors and their emotional connotations in Plath’ and Munch’s works often turn their landscapes into the mindscape of chagrin in which the split between the self and the threatening as well as alluring other cannot be erased unless through a symbolic act of self annihilation. Red, emerging out of the predominant dark in Munch’s paintings (such as Jealousy, Vampire, and Ashes) is the color of female body that tears open the shaded, innervated world of man. In his “Separation,” red spots open like bloody cuts on the black-cloaked man covering his heart from the pain of separation. In their shameless postures, the women in his paintings represent the vicious energy of life as well as the voracious, seductive agent of death that suck up man’s life. The converging of life energy and death in the color of red is also found in Plath’s poems—in the blossoming poppies, blackberries, and tulips, which are described as gaping mouthfuls of blood, whose intensity of life is too strong to bear, so that their very life threatens to devour the poet’s life. In “Poppies in July,” the poppies are described as hell flames that exhaust the poet to watch (203). They strike the poet as bloody mouth and bloody skirts (203). Envying their life, the poet wishes to marry such a wound—bleeding to sleep under the effect of its product, opium (203). The image of bleeding suggests that the awakening to life also elicits the hemorrhage of being. In “Poppies in October,” the natural brilliance of poppies breaks through a killing nature—among poisonous air and forest frost and exhausted men. The poppies are unrequested endowment of love that overwhelms the deprived poet with the fierce abundance of their life (240). However, the image of sanguine poppies is linked with a suicidal woman in an ambulance, whose blood is like blooming poppies (240). The poppies here are also an emblem of the spasmodic flame of life ignited by destruction. In the ecstatic converging of the forces of life and death, the poet loses herself in the life of the poppies and becomes one with them. Her shout is like the late open mouth of the poppies among forest frost and corn flowers in the frigid breath of early morning (240). 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Tulips describes the poet in the process of convalescence. The presence of death is represented by white, the ideal static world of a hospital in the stagnant chillness of winter. Tulips are a gift from the outside world that arouses the speaker from the stupor of death with an effect almost as death threatening. The poet feels the sanguine redness of the tulip scathing her and robbing her of oxygen (160). Apart from color symbolism, Plath shares with Munch the two opposite directions through which emotions are objectified: molten dissolution and frozen fossilization. In Munch’s Scream, the scream dehumanizes the man, whose physical contour is nearly dissolved into the cauldron of the sky. The image of a scream is often found in Plath’s poems and accompanied by the same physical transformation. In “Lady Lazarus,” the poet sees herself in a hallucinatory vision as a gold baby melting and bursting into a shriek (246). In Plath’s poems, the hallucinatory self-transformation takes the form of being burnt, torn to pieces, evaporating, becoming the arrow, the dew that flies into the red eye of the sun. In the vortex of warped space, everything is seen in its whirling distortion or speedy merging. The gaping mouth in Munch’s Scream is one of the most frequently occurring images in Plath’s poems. The mouth images uncontrollable and insatiable craving. It also refers us back to the ever menace of death by suffocation. It’s the yawning gap, an unfillable hole, the orifice of nothingness, the organ of human need turned into an instrument of destruction and death, which, conversely, appears as a voracious, all-engulfing mouth. The mouth is almost as often associated with ejection and rejection as it is with absorption. Nausea is never far away. Paradoxically, it is perhaps through the act of vomiting that the helpless and the abandoned come closest to the gesture of refusal and protest in this world. In the throe of nausea, the body repudiates itself as flesh. The exhibitionist nature of suicide in “Lady Lazarus” often revolts the critics, which is cited by Harold Bloom and Irving Howe as the sign of Plath’s sensationalism. However, beneath Plath’s sensationalism, theatricality, and self-aggrandizement, beneath her roughly jeering tone, is the wave of nausea directed both at herself and at the world. Through the sickness over her own sensationalism and theatricality, Plath pushes herself further toward the mortification of the flesh and the consequent repudiation of it, so that her spirit might be liberated. In “Fever 103,” 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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the proximity of self-blasphemy and self-glorification, virgin and whore, suggests that it is through the chastening process of blasphemy that the spirit may rise out of the flesh, hence the religious intonation of resurrection in the title of “Lady Lazarus.” Although Munch’s Madonna is also cast in the virgin-whore figure, she has no such moment of self-transcendence and is inevitably imprisoned in the body. In Plath’s “The Elm,” as it often happens in Munch’s painting, landscape is turned into bodyscape. The woman becomes the elm, the tree of mother, desire, and death. Like Munch’s Madonna, with deadly face and lush body contorted with desire and pain, tormented and tormenting man with her insatiable demand, the woman in this poem is also shown as victim and victimizer in the enslavement to a hopeless passion. In this poem, the use of bodyscape in identifying the woman and the elm, the image of sea as metaphor of drowning desire in which the woman is the devouring agent of death, can find its equivalence in Munch’s Lovers in a River. In this painting, a man’s head is strangled in a woman’s flowing hair, which is transformed into wild waves. The man is drowned by his desire for her, just as in Plath’s poem, the woman’s desire, imaged in the galloping horse, sends man to death. His head turns into stone. The woman in Plath’s poem, turned murderous by her need to hold the vanishing love, is possessed by a poisoned will, a will that expands to the whole universe, so that even the rain—the image of drowning desire— becomes arsenic. The use of bodyscape is crucial in building the passion of the poem. The identification of body, mind, and landscape suggests a compulsion that makes everything in the outside world a mirror of inner weather and makes it felt through the sharpest physical immediacy. Then the poet compares love to a shadow that she chases after. Shadow is a continuous presence in Munch’s pictures about lovers and sexuality. In his Attraction, two lovers captured in profile gazing at each other projected their mingled shadow on the background. In Consolation, the huge shadow thrown on the background by the lovers holding each other seems to be looming forward and shielding the lovers in its embrace. In Puberty, the girl’s sudden awareness of sexuality with its lure and terror is cast in the ghostly tangle of shadows on the wall. Shadow, in its insubstantiality, seems always to be on the verge of slipping away. In its 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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association with the myth of The Double, it takes on the uncanny nature of the murderous dependence of ego and its darker self. Thus, seen in all its different aspects—the pull of subconscious desire; the protective shield; and the fascination and terror of the primitive, ephemeral, and murderous dependence of lovers—love is a shadow, and the shadow is a perfect paradigm for the emotion of the poem. Then Plath writes, “She has suffered the crime of sunset” (192). Sunset suggests the evanescence of passion. In her desire to break up the barren isolation of ego in merging with her love, the physical self of the woman is torn apart. She is burnt, broken into pieces. The gaping mouth of a shriek, the scathing barren moon, the whole being turned into the habitat of a cry, all are striking reminiscence of Munch’s painting. The moon in Plath’s poems is often bald and barren, mirroring the sterility of emotionally deprived women. The fetus image in the following passage brings no maternal comfort, but fright. A momentary giving way to grief and tenderness demonstrates Plath’s characteristic mastery of tonal contrast, but it soon hardens into implacable self-destruction. The following group of images is hallucinatory. The face among the strangled branches is probably the moon, the mirror image of the wild, sterile woman, who is strangled in the branches of the elm, the tree of motherhood, desire and death. Her hardness, her petrified will of killing impulse brewed to cruelty bespeaks both destructive and selfdestructive impulses. There is no salvation, nor relief of suffering—no matter how she hides herself in the dark night of oblivion, or merges herself into a bloody sisterhood with the flaming life of the poppies, or to destroy to become one with the beloved. Passive surrender and active contra-aggression make no difference. Plath’s last poems reveal the tendency toward fossilization and the surrender to the ultimate insentience of death. Stones, skulls, and marbles that are already present in her earlier poems finally take over the whole field. In her earlier poems, there is still some impulse or outside stimulants for her to resist the fossilization. For example, the deadly codified adult world, imaged in the museum in “Morning Song,” can still be penetrated and let in a draft of wind by the resounding cry of the newborn baby. The cavernlike underground world of “Nick and the Candlestick” can still be melted by the warmth of the infant child. However, in her later poems, the deadened world in 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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the process of petrifaction is not only unresisted but also affirmed, as in her “Edge,” death is envisioned as a composure, a perfection, a world of art finally accomplished in the marbled beauty of the suicide woman and her children. In Munch’s bodyscape painting, “Girl’s Head On the Shore,” a girl’s head is turned into rock, suffering in immovability the eroding wind and sea tides. The texture of the wood print etches deep lines into the girl’s face and conveys a time-ravaged face. It is despair fossilized and turned into peace. The corrosive and petrifying effect of time is brought out movingly in Plath’s “Words.” In this poem, the redeeming power of poetry is also shown as turned into nullity with the passage of time. As to the impact of poetry, Plath’s poem “Words” used imagery that recalls Franz Kafka’s idea about books. About books, Franz Kafka once wrote in a letter, “The books we need are the kind that act on us like a misfortune, that makes us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that makes up feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation—a book should serve as axe for the frozen sea within us.”28 Like Kafka’s comment on the impact of words, Plath’s “Words” suggests that language moves us as if we receive a mortal wound, as if we were trees cut deeply by an axe. When moved by words, tears well up in our eyes as the saps of a tree wells up at the cut wound. Percussive language evokes in us rings like the echoes of the cutting sound. Its acute effect makes us feel as if we had been through a kind of death. The death is imaged in the white skull, covered gradually by green weeds. From the image of tears to the congealed form of rock and skull there is a progression toward fossilization through time, until it reaches the image of oblivion in green weeds. The image of the white skull gives away to the fixed, white star, symbol of fate. The sound of hooves, at first symbolizing the sound of words, also gives away to that of ticking time, compared to tireless taping of hooves. Many years later, words turn dry and gradually lose their meaning and affective power, becoming merely empty sounds. The only governing thing is the immovable fate of our life, which lasts much longer than the power of poetry. Plath’s poetry has a hallucinatory sense of physical immediacy from which no blow is cushioned. In her poems, the stimulants of life are inevitably commingled with death. Nature takes on a menacing otherness and becomes a haunted hall echoing the poet’s 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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nightmarish inner life. Plath shares with Munch a symbolic landscape which is a mirror of mindscape and sometimes turns into the sharp immediacy of bodyscape. Feelings of exile, despair, alienation, and death pervade their works, and their emotions experience the similar opposite processes of molten dissolution and frozen petrifaction. The emotional effect of their works is achieved through similar symbolic strategies. Plath’s mindscape, like that of Munch, is one of chagrin, and it is represented by the clash of original colors and symbolic emotions. In her poetry, Plath strives to merge the self and the other in that mindscape, but she cannot achieve it with anything short of her life.

H ai Z i’s Z agreus Hai Zi, originally named Zha Haisheng, was born in 1964 in the countryside of An Hui Province, China. He was accepted by the Department of Law at Beijing University in 1979. After graduation, he taught at The Chinese University of Law. On March 36, 1989, he committed suicide by lying on a railroad track at Beijing Shan Hai Guan at the age of only twenty-five. From 1984 to 1989, he had published a large amount of outstanding poetry, including short poems, long poems, and poetic drama. The 1980s, during which Hai Zi committed suicide, was an age that witnessed the converging of cultural ruptures within Chinese history: the burst of literary creativity and the high culture fever in the ’80s bespeak the intellectuals’ recovered confidence in the freedom of thought and their importance in social and political life after the catastrophe of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The intellectual renaissance underscores their desire to be reconnected to Chinese cultural roots, as much as an anxiety to catch up with Western ideologies that had been hitherto shut off from China. Caught between tradition and modernity (i.e., Chinese and Western influences), these complex—often contradictory—but overall optimistic attempts end in a mood of disillusionment and cynicism with the June Fourth crackdown and historical amnesia accompanying the onset of consumerism in the ’90s. Bei Dao survived the rupture through a vehement self-irony; Yang Lian through a grand intellectual fabric of myth evolved from the I Ching, which escapes both history and personal experience; and Duo Duo by blasphemy, promiscuity of form and tone, and 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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paradoxically, a sentimental return to boyhood life. All three poets were shielded by their expatriate experience. There is no irony, intellectual fabrication, blasphemy or cynicism in Hai Zi. His poetry seems to be an anachronism, even granted the fact that he died shortly before the June Fourth event. China has been through a great change, and the traditional countryside is disappearing with the large migration of peasants from villages to cities. Economic reform and consumerism are fast developing. Hai Zi’s nostalgia for the vanishing agricultural culture makes him an anachronism and an exile. His poetry still lives on in the traditional Chinese agricultural landscape and mindscape and the nineteenthcentury European idea of divine inspiration: the genesis of poetry is analogous to the genesis of the universe; poetry comes from a divine spark; the poet is no less than a god, and his limited human body consumes itself to feed that divine essence in him. In his poems we may find Nietzsche’s idea of Zagreus:29 the descent of the world from a mythical oneness and the throes of individuation; Hölderlin’s same idea of cosmic descent and departing gods. However, the combination of epic grandeur and elemental lyricism, as well as sacramental fervor of his poetry, is distinct not only from pastoral poetry but also from European Romanticism. As another contemporary Chinese poet Xi Chuan comments, We can use the two scriptures of Bible as a metaphor for the development of his poetry: his creation switched from the New Testament to the Old Testament. The New Testament is the head and The Old Testament is the beheaded hero. The New Testament is love, water and maternal, and the Old Testament is violence, fire and paternal. Therefore, the young girls in Hai Zi’s early poems became the singing Homer in Heaven. . . . His poetry begins with the lyrical, and through the narrative, arrives at the epic. He longed to build an immense empire of poetry: start from the Nile in the east, reach to the Pacific in the west, to the Mongol plateau in the north, and to India in the south.30

In Hai Zi’s poetry, the descent from mythic oneness and throes of fragmentation might be a distant echo of the cultural ruptures Hai Zi experienced. It is reflected in his poetic form and technique: clips of folk songs, legends, myths, rural or remote landscape are transmitted intermittently, among scenes of loss, degeneration and violence of city life. Like multilayered sound tracks, they are carried on a powerfully orchestrated current of emotions—the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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emotions of vagrancy, nostalgia, and lost love. In Hai Zi’s eyes, a poet emblemizes the quintessence of flame: one that in transience accomplished the internal fire of the sun and the hell. Hai Zi wrote a large number of his best poems from 1984 to 1989 and committed suicide afterward. Because he continuously wrote on the verge of death, the poetic persona in his poetry dissolved into the body of the world. He spoke no longer as an individual, sometimes not even as a human being, but frequently in the voice of the universe itself. For example, in “Earth Melancholy Death,”31 he speaks in the voice of the Old Earth itself that dies and regenerates through blood and mire, procreation, and the destruction of war. In “Sonnet: Moon at Night,” the poet, imaged as “a well the ancestor digs towards the descendants,” becomes gradually identified with the moon itself—“all misfortune originates from my deep, dark, and mysterious water.” Thus from the mute perspective of the moon, the poet gazes on “the village of mankind,” as if he were no longer a part of its community. In “Tibet,” the voice of “I” is that of Tibet—“a solitary stone filling up the sky.” In its intractable stoicism, despair and dignity, “no tears can turn me into flower / no king can turn me into throne.” In “Night Songs,” the image of the poet as a hunter carrying bow and arrows is conflated with that of the sun and night through poetic refrain, “The night songs on the celestial stairs / Night songs of the Heaven / Night songs sang of me / Put down the bow / I draw out a hill slope / The sun puts down the bow / Night draws out the hill slope.” His mythic persona reaches its peak in the heavenly chorus, “Messiah”: the poet-god was born from cosmic explosion, from the split-open sky and earth. He embodies the lost essence of the sky and the martyred sun. He is the father of mankind yet suffers boundless loneliness and despair because of his unshared apocalyptic vision and because of the split within his own nature—a split between his limited human existence and transcendental, celestial essence, which mirrors the cleaved-open sky and earth. In most of Hai Zi’s poems, “I” is a timeless, mythic persona. Hai Zi likes to cast this persona into blind poets or artists, no matter if it is blind Homer (“Four-line Poems”); or the blind, anonymous folk artists who are summoned at night onto a distant journey by the mysterious resounding of red drums (“Folk Artists”). Perhaps the reason that Hai Zi identifies himself as a blind artist is as what Borges says, “For one suddenly losing eyesight, the universe will 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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reveal its original face, which is endless.” Furthermore, he wrote his most fiery odes to the sun and the dawn at night. It was in the suffering long night of the soul that he was surrounded by the visions of heaven, visions that consumed his earthly body with pining. In this light, the death he sang of was a sacrificial offering to the dawn. In one of his poems, the mythopoetic “I” is a vagrant who develops his own religious creed in a barbaric tribe, traveling thirsty and hungry seven hundred years ago (“Seven Hundred Years Ago”). The mythic persona is also reflected in the kinship Hai Zi expressed toward all the short-lived and fiery genius in the world: Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Yesenin, and Pushkin. He dedicated poems to each of them. In poetic imagery, the apocalyptic vision of mythic oneness and throes of fragmentation is reflected in the imagery of mutilation and fragmentation recalling Nietzsche’s idea of Zagreus: the painful Dionysian rapture of being torn limb from limb—the collapse of individuation to recover the original cosmic oneness. In Hai Zi’s poems, we frequently encounter the images of split-open limbs (e.g., “Dawn” and “Spring, Ten Hai Zi”), bones hanging transparent like blue tree twigs reflected in the water (“Returning Home”), Mount Everest as the beheaded body still growing in this world (“Mount Everest”), the cleaved open sky and earth and the splinters of evacuated rocks (“Messiah”), the bleeding head of the sun (“Dawn”), and the river of lost souls (“Chinese Haiku”). The whole world is a wound, an incompleteness yearning for a lost unity. The poet is forever a vagrant harking back to a lost, imaginary homeland. Lost love becomes indistinguishable from the loss of homeland and the lost immediacy of nature. Despite the carnal exuberance of Hai Zi’s imagery which bespeaks of a love for life as acute as pain itself, bodily mutilation suggests on the other hand the sacrifice of transubstantiation—the material existence strives toward the immaterial and spiritual through sacrificial offering and death. That is why the imagery of Christ, cross, and immaculate conception plays such an important role in his poetry with its suggestion of the transubstantiation from flesh to spirit, from worldly existence to the divine—through poetic creation. Despite the instinctual power of his axe-hewn lyrics, Hai Zi is an audacious experimentalist with diverse art forms. The long poem “Messiah” is orchestrated as a heavenly chorus. Of other poems, 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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some of them employ the fiery impressionism of Van Gogh, the naïve surrealism of Lorça, and the tense, elliptical form of Haiku; some the rhythm and imagery of Chinese Northwestern folk songs, ballads, and even nursery rhymes; and some use English sonnets and odes. However, Hai Zi always distills his unique, powerful emotion that transforms these old forms. Typically, the power of his emotion and scope of vision break open these old forms and make them vehicles for new moods: In his “Chinese Haiku,” the succinct form of the haiku stanza creates a powerful tension with the expansive emotion and cosmic movement contained in it. The enigmatic link between haiku stanzas becomes perfect vehicle for his clipped imagery, which are at once disconnected and transmitted through distant echoes. The Chinese haiku is no longer the recording of fleeting enlightenment acquired from serene and daily observations that is found in the traditional Japanese haiku. The English form of sonnet and odes, such as “Sonnet: Moon at Night,” and “Odes,” acquires a cosmic dimension and primeval weight in Hai Zi’s poems, deviating from its usual, delicate expression of personal emotion, romantic love and dedication to individual beings. Hai Zi’s series of poems on death, in method, have an affinity with the fiery impressionism of Van Gogh in using nervous, fragmented, sometimes surrealistic images and brilliant coloring. In mood, they convey the same feeling of the propinquity of life and death: death is the over intensification of life—it is the result of a ferocious life energy that can no longer be contained in the individual life form and has to suffer an implosion of destruction to achieve the original unity. It makes us think of Hai Zi’s chosen way of suicide—under the wheels of the train—the most violent destruction of individual form. Death is the destruction of death, the final triumph of life. In one of the poems on death, death is figured in the broken-legged and fiery tiger drifting down at night, whose laughter breaks the plank of the coffin. In “Empress of Death,” another poem on death, it is the man picking sunflowers on the sleeping body of the poet, an act that transforms her into the empress of death. His two poems written two weeks before his suicide, “Season of Peach Blossoms,” and “Spring. Ten Hai Zi” are fiery in life force with their expression of love and pain couched in terms of spring, fire, Zagreus, and fate. The adaptation of various literary forms to forge his mythic vision and the underlying imagery of fragmentation underscore a poetics of exile—an 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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exile that is cultural as well as ontological in nature. Its cultural exile is reflected in the cosmic exile from a mythic origin. In Hai Zi’s poems that adopts the nursery rhymes, innocent folk song about desire and love is cast and transformed in the naïve surrealistic imagery recalling Lorça. The innocence, however, in accordance with the poetics of exile, is ruptured and striated with substratum imagery of death, burial, and a melancholy mood of reminiscence. For example, in his “Ballad,” the folksong rhythm and imagery are ruptured with its recurrent refrain, “little lantern, raise his buried eyes.” The naïve folk song is thus filtered through a much more sophisticated and well-seasoned poetic consciousness. Hai Zi’s “Holding a White Tiger She Walks Across the Ocean” builds a bodhisattva figure holding a white tiger crossing the ocean. The existential exile is reflected in the poetics of disparity: the grand serenity of the divine mother who transcends suffering, life and death forms a sharp contrast to the earthly world, which is saturated with suffering, sickness, and death. The accumulative, interlocking stanza builds a mother figure whose all-surpassing serenity implies a terrible beauty analogous to William Blake’s “Tiger,” the mysterious creator that accommodates good and evil, creation and destruction. Not only is the poetic persona in Hai Zi’s poetry mythic, but very often the landscape in Hai Zi’s poem is also mythicized and becomes a mirage reflection of its own past (“September”): timeless, still, stunned by the immense weight of time. The poet is an anonymous, passing figure driving horse through this landscape, no less ancient and legendary than the landscape itself. In “Night Song,” the poet is a past king already dead, sung in the folksongs spread in the night air of the landscape that was his kingdom during his lifetime. The poetics of exile is reflected in the distance between a land mirroring a past myth and its current loss and in the vagrant figure of the poet who suffers from an inexplicable heartache of lost love. The poet persona in Hai Zi’s poems is indeed an unfathomable one. “I” is very tangential to reality. Hai Zi often revives a painting, a piece of a folk song, or a legend into a living situation in which “I” plays a part, at the same time rupturing the archetypal situation, emotion, and imagery with a substratum, real-life, modern, and personal sensibility toward loss and death. Such a rupture underscores the essence of exile. Therefore, Hai Zi’s depiction 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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of emotion is never simply lyrical. While it has all the powerful impact of immediacy, it is at the same time aesthetically framed: the expression of felt emotion is very often framed in the situation or emotion of a well-known legend, fairy tale, or folk song, as an accompanying musical undertone to a more sophisticated, personal consciousness. The archetypal nature of his poetic situation, imagery, and mood as contained in legends and myth effects a literary iteration, reflected in the abundance of refrains in his poems and the consequent singing quality of his poetry. The poet has already become part of the literary tradition at the moment of his experience. The strong sense of cultural lineage is perhaps a subconscious reaction to the cultural rupture and rootlessness felt in the ’80s. In “The Chiming of the Clock,” the narration of love is fossilized into a fairy tale and becomes a metaphor for time, as implied also in the title image of the clock. “Dumb Back” presents a snapshot of a situation conflating the empirical and the mythical, legendary and fairy tale. Part of the lyrical appeal of Hai Zi’s poetry derives from its feeling of being a fragment, its feeling of being caught in the middle of a legendary and mythic situation, without beginning or end. The fragmented nature of myth also bespeaks exile. In its incompleteness and suggestion of an ineffable infinity, poetry becomes a measure of time. Its lyrical intensity thrives on implication and on its archetypal nature: on its being a small piece of an immeasurable tradition, of an endless continuation of human, or even nonhuman emotional history. “I want to tell the people who felt endless pleasure in life / They had rusted long ago on a shield in a ten thousand year cave.” Under Hai Zi’s seemingly simple lyrics, there are often several soundtracks and layered moods: one layer is the distant folklores, legendary love, mythic persona, which is timeless and locality-undefined; another layer is the more defined countryside, geographic hometown, innocent, physical love and labor; still another layer is the loss and degradation in the city and a more sophisticated, retrospective, and introspective consciousness. Thus his lyrics are truly polyphonic. After Hai Zi’s suicide, he was regarded by later contemporary Chinese poets and poetry critics as a saintly figure. His death is seen as a sacred sacrifice to preserve an idealist aura before China is overtaken by the flood of consumerism in the ’90s. His very anachronism—exile in his own country and age—makes him a monument against the shifting tides of social or literary currents. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Later poets have rarely recaptured the primeval passion and violently yoked unity of his apocalyptic vision, his godlike persona, as well as his axe-hewn, song-resonant, and absolute lyricism. Xi Chuan, a contemporary Chinese poet graduated also from Beijing University, wrote in his article mourning for Hai Zi, “This man who longs for flight was yet destined to die on the earth. But who can be sure that Hai Zi’s death is not another kind of flight, a flight that allows him to get ride of the long night, and the deeprooted suffering of the soul, in response to the sonorous call of Messiah?”32 It’s surprising to me that such a major contemporary Chinese poet who wrote in the ’80s has not yet been translated into English sixteen years after his death. It’s with deep reverence and love that I translated about one hundred poems by him in the hope that these poems written with blood may kindle the hearts of more readers, as it did for me, and that the deep love I feel toward them may be shared. In one of his poems, “Wheat Field in May,” Hai Zi, in his intense solitude and vagrancy, dreamed of reciting his poetry to the brothers all around the world, Sometimes I sit alone In the wheat field of May dreaming about all my brothers And see the cobbles in my hometown roll all over the river bank The arc of sky at twilight The earth covered with sad villages Sometimes I sit alone reciting Chinese poems for all my brothers Without eyes or lips.

With this translation, I hope the poet is still living among us, less alone.

E x il ed f ro m Tao ist Par adi s e: The S p l it Vo ic e o f G u C heng’s Poetry Gu Cheng, one of the representative poets of the school of Misty Poetry (蒙胧诗), moved to New Zealand in 1989 and lived a hermit’s life in a Taoist paradise of nature. However, in 1993, shocking news arrived in China about Gu Cheng’s violent homicide—he killed his wife with an axe—and his own later suicide. This section will examine how Gu Cheng’s Taoist aesthetic vision makes him an exile in his time and how ultimately he is an exile from a Taoist 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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paradise in which he had the strongest faith. Gu Cheng’s exile from Taoist paradise is reflected in the split voice in his poetry. In a way, he rehearsed his death long before its actual happening. Death is not so much an object of his poetry as a condition of his poetry. His last poems enact his exile and his final vision of separation via death through implicitly split voices: a Taoist, posthumous, omniscient self looks with detachment at his delimited, still living self. Among contemporary Chinese poets, Gu Cheng is probably the one who has best grasped and recreated the marrow of Chinese natural philosophy and classical Chinese poetry by his persistent creation through the pain of estrangement in a modern society of a transparent world of oneness. On the inheritance of tradition, Gu Cheng once said, Only by passing through the image can we reach the essence. Only by forgetting the form can we attain to the soul . . . Those people who believe in ancient meters and rhymes think the T’ang poetry depends on the pattern of dui zhang. This false conception engendered a large group of minor poets in the Ming and Qing Dynasty, and has its influence even today. They do not know “the highest sage has no method, the highest image has no form” . . . the movement of the great soul creates the best form . . . I think innovation is the best inheritance of tradition. Innovation is the essence of tradition. It is the best proof of the living power of tradition. Tradition grows in us, struggling, distorted, and sprouts into layer and layers of flowers.”33

The split and veiled voice in Gu Cheng’s later poems, especially in his anthology A Eulogy World, and his willful living of his poetics, resulting in violent homicide and suicide, might be considered as such a distorted flower growing out of tradition. A Eulogy World evokes, from the first poem, the noumenal world of transparent oneness in classical Chinese painting and poetry: 是树木游泳的力量是树木游泳的力量使鸟保持它的航程使它想起潮水的声音鸟在空中说中午树木的年龄芳香覆盖我们全身 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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It Is the Tree’s Capacity to Swim it is the tree’s capacity to swim that helps to keep the bird on the sailing course and recall the sound of the tides the bird speaks in mid-air it says: “noon” its tells: “the age of the tree’s crown” fragrance coats our whole bodies long and cool arms traverse the inner heart we swim in the wind taking shape in the silence we cannot see the earliest days at the earliest, there was only love34

In this poem, a liquefied world is crystallized by the technique of inversion and permeation, where sky and water pour into each other and merge into a reversed, transparent whole: trees “swimming” in the air, birds floating on their “sailing course,” air filled with fluttering leaves reminiscent of a tidal voice, birds speaking in a human language while human lovers are spellbound in silence. How often have we encountered such world of transparent oneness between the sky and earth in classical Chinese painting and poetry! We see it in the T’ang poet Wang Bo’s verse: “falling clouds in the sunset soar with lonely egrets, autumn water merges with sky into the same color.”35 We read it in Tang Wengru’s poem: “Breadth of the west wind ages Tung-t’ing’s waves. / Hsiang-chun’s hair, in one night, whitened. / Drunk, and it seems, the sky is in the water. / Skiff of pure dreams, weighs on the river of star.”36 We meet it in Emperor Hui Zong’s painting of crowding birds above the roof: in the watery limbo of sky light and damp ground, which become mirrors of each other, these birds in their hovering, strangely inverse shapes create an optical illusion as if suspended in their flight. And in a thousand other ancient Chinese paintings, mist-coated mountains stretch translucent, as if charged by an inner illumination, fading into the surrounding air. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


长长清凉的手臂穿过内心我们在风中游泳寂静成型我们看不见最初的日子最初, 只有爱情


The transparent world of inversion and permeation hints at our empirical world transformed by a perception from the other side of life—by an enlightened omniscience. The eulogy world is the original one in Chinese natural philosophy, which, in Gu Cheng’s alchemy of private symbolism, is merged with the Platonic world of idea, the distant world recovered only through recollection. The graft of the Western dualism on Eastern monism is made possible by the intrinsic ambivalence between physicality and metaphysics, image and emblem in Chinese natural philosophy. The light of the world of origin and idea emanates into all things: solid, material forms, in the enlightened eyes, are dissolved and restored to their transparent spirituality. At the origin, everything permeates into each other. Gu Cheng’s poems, in their clipped sentences, exploit the syntactic ambiguity of classical Chinese poetry, whose condensation and ellipsis often renders subjects unrecognizable. Verb of action, having lost a definite subject, like the center of a vortex swirls everything into a concentric movement. In Gu Cheng’s poems, the things closest to the center are animate nature, while man’s presence is the peripheral note in the cosmic chorus. The fragrance might be that of trees as well as that of a human body. The long cool arm might be that of a human being, a leafy branch, or a sea wave. The arm traversing the inner heart might also be the wind, which transverses the heart of the universe. The lost, earliest love might be sensuous human love, as well as the original, divine harmony. The staccato, telegraphic language of the bird is to become an important feature of Gu Cheng’s last poems. The loss of syntactic contiguity suggests Gu Cheng’s “cut-offness” in his effort to touch an original world untarnished by human communication. “Noon,” and “the age of the tree’s crown,” entranced sensuous love, all seem to suggest a moment of consummation transfixed in the Buddhist eternal present. However, this eternal present is paradoxically superimposed on a long vista of recollection suggesting an irrevocable loss. The sense of recollection is hinted at not only in the birds’ recalling of a tidal voice but also in the wistful ending: “We cannot see the earliest days. At the earliest, there is only love.” The eulogy world is at once realized at this moment and long lost. To explain this paradox, we come to the most crucial and subtle aspect of these group poems. For all his seeming simplicity and transparency, Gu Cheng’s poetic voice is split, layered, and veiled. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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As in the Buddhist view of man immediate after death, who resides for a short while in a limbo world between this world and the other, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Gu Cheng’s voice in these poems is often at once that of the living and a posthumous voice, at once imprisoned in material and flowing disembodied at large. It is the voice of a man speaking from the other bank of life, toward the self still trapped on this side. Because he is already in touch with the noumenal, he resides in the Buddhist eternal now, a perpetual moment of consummation; because he is still within this world, he experiences the estrangement from origin, the long-lost world glimpsed only through the endless vista of recollection. This duality explains his poetic voice as at once charged with feeling, impalpably detached, and veiled. Such duality of poetic voices also enacts the separation that is the essence of exile—an exile, as I will explain, that is both cultural and ontological. Often in his poems, in spite of a sense of release from this world, there is a lingering feeling toward it, for all the suffering of desire that is the inevitable lot of this life. However, this nostalgia is veiled already by the water of Lethe, so that it becomes as hazy as a flower imaged in a mirror, or the moon reflected in the water. “It is about three years ago,” Gu Cheng answered in his speech, “I’m waiting for the voice of Death.” In response to the audience’s question of the difference between his actual self and lyrical self in his poems, “I feel as if I as a person had already died, and become a ghost. Every time I dream, I dream of having returned to Beijing, standing in the street, not knowing where to go. But I’m not anxious either, because I’m already dead . . . it is as if looking from a place to the outside. Only looking. Nothing more.”37 Such feeling of self-split and self-observation again underscores a split subject and the mood of self-exile. The split, veiled voice in Gu Cheng’s later poetry may find a correspondence in The Dream of the Red Chamber, a classical Chinese novel much cherished by Gu Cheng. His comment on it unintentionally reveals the affinity of double perspectives between his poems and this classical novel—“tear-stained life of this world seen through the distance of former incarnations.”38 Jia Baoyu, the central hero in The Dream of the Red Chamber, shortly before he went into monastery, had already seen through the illusory nature of life on earth through his dream experience of the “realm of the great void.” The strange apathy he fell into underscores his inner 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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division between the enlightened self belonging to the other world and his self still trapped in this world. The projection into the future perfect tense of a posthumous consciousness contemplating the living self might have its far echo in the classical poet, Li Ho. It is the prevailing tense in A Eulogy World. Let’s look at his other two poems—“Accident” and “Burial Bed.” 事故房顶上又有了雪雪上又有了煤一千七百米的高空又开始闪烁琴说青春是一把琴不要弹它要抚摸它一千七百米的高空突然断了

Accident Over the roof there is again snow, Over the snow again coal. The sky above at one thousand seven hundred meters height Begins again to glisten The lyre says, Youth is a lyre, Do not strum it, Only touch it. The sky at one thousand seven hundred meters’ height, Suddenly slaps. (Translation mine)

As often happens with Gu Cheng’s later poems, a careful reader might be struck by the uncanny position of the speaker: from where does he speak? The scene is exclusively that of the roof and the sky. The height of the sky is given an uncanny precision among the ellipsis of all other details. The poem itself is suspended in the air, with its unaccountable repetition of “again”—after what? The symbolic image of the snapped string of a musical instrument has multiple allusions. One allusion is to a fable in Chuang 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Tzu: Zhao Wen is a famous gu chin (ancient lyre) master. But one day he stopped playing his musical instrument, for he realizes that to play one sound is to lose all the other sounds. Only in silence can all the sounds be complete.39 Another allusion might be one quoted by the classical poet Li Shang-yin in his Chin-se: According to the legend, the chin-se ordinarily has fifty strings. An emperor of the Chou Dynasty, unable to bear the too poignant music played by one of his favorites, ordered that the number of the strings be reduced by half.40 It might also contain an allusion to Gu Cheng’s favorite classical Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber: once, Dai Yu, a girl who cherishes a deep but unspoken love for Pao Yu, was overheard playing the Zheng by Miao Yu and Pao Yu. The music went higher and higher with the girl’s pent-up emotion. Miao Yu comments, “it cannot last long.” Soon after, the string really snaps. Miao Yu retreats in a hurry, foreseeing for an instant Dai Yu’s unrequited love and later death.41 The perspective in this poem is a hovering one somewhere from the sky, a presiding, omniscient, posthumous voice, which, in spite of its omniscience, has a taciturn, enclosed quality that makes it no more than a whisper to itself. It’s the kind of silence that occurs after the turmoil of human life is extinguished, together with life itself, so that the inanimate objects, mute relics of human passion, begin to emit sounds that are hitherto inaudible. The lyre says, “youth is a lyre / Do not strum it / but touch it.” In the elegiac serenity of the reminiscent voice is the memory of an unbearable passion. The title “accident” reverberates with two meanings: life as accident; the disaster of wholehearted commitment. Life itself is too much an accidental occurrence to bear much commitment. The whole sky reverberates with the sound of the broken string. It is a sound magnified by a retrieved memory. The person who suffers the accident—perhaps the poet himself—has lost life and consciousness. So the speaking voice is the remnant part of the poet, having miraculously survived the physical death that is diffusive in the air, looking dispassionately at a past moment of disaster. The snow is melting. Life disappears in a warm morning. “Again” suggests the undisturbed motion of the universe despite human tragedy. “Again,” without an accounted precedence, also suggests being cut off from an origin—the lack of origin intrinsic in Taoist philosophy. A large-scale deconstruction of Taoism 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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and Zen Buddhism as serene, holistic philosophy revolving on a concept of origin can be read in my previously published book, A Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy: Taoism and Zen Buddhism. The silence wherein all sounds are present and complete cannot happen until after life itself is lost in muteness. Is it a gain or a loss? 墓床我知道永逝降临, 并不悲伤松林中安放着我的愿望下边有海, 远看象水池一点点跟着我的是下午的阳光人时已尽, 人世很长我在中间应当休息走过的人说树枝低了走过的人说树枝在长

Burial Bed I know to descend forever is not grief In the pine woods lies my wish Below is the sea Seen from distance like a pool Little by Little following me is the afternoon sun beam Human hour ends Human world is long I should take a rest in the midst Those who passed say tree branches lowered those who passed say tree branches are growing. (Translation mine)

The interest of the poem lies in the last two sentences: “those who passed” is a euphemism for the dead. The word “pass” makes light of the vital fact of death, so that there is no clear distinction between life and death. The dead have a remnant consciousness: the lowered branch implies reconciliation and appeasement. Death is not cessation. The posthumous existence grows with the growth of branches. Even in the first stanza, the speaker, in spite of a clearly announced “I,” has already possessed a height of vision beyond that limited by life: the sea of life is seen from a distance and diminished to no more than a pool. The distance and height of vision belongs already to one who has traversed the boundary 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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between life and death. The descending of the speaker, drawing the afternoon sunbeam with him, becomes indistinguishable from the descending of the sun. Underlying “Ark” is the same nature of split in Gu Cheng’s poetic voice: 方舟你登上了, 一艘必将沉没的巨轮它将在大海的呼吸消失现在你还在看那面旗子那片展开的暗色草原海鸟在水的墓地上鸣叫你还在金属的栏杆上玩耍为舷梯的声音感到惊奇它空无一人, 每扇门都将被打开直到水手舱浮起清凉的火焰

Ark You have boarded a vast ship which will founder it will sink in the swell of the sea’s breathing now you still look at the flag the open stretch of winedark grasslands seabirds wail over the watery graves you still play on the guardrail thrilled by the sound of the deck stairs the ship is empty, every one of its doors will be opened till the cool flames rise from the crew’s cabins (GSP, 113)

Except in his very early poems, Gu Cheng rarely uses “I”—a linguistic feature in keeping with the omission of personal pronoun (the experiencing subject, very often the poet himself) in classical Chinese poetry, which disguises the division of a mythicized, omniscient self and a time-bound, limited self. Such disparity of voices bespeaks self-exile and exile from the Taoist ideal vision of unity. In Gu Cheng’s poems, the self-estrangement and split voice divided between two worlds are often denoted by a detached “he,” diminished through distance of time and knowledge and presided over by an unannounced, invisible “I,” large, diffused, vaguely sad and impassive in its posthumous clairvoyance. In this poem, for example, the distanced pronoun “you” signifies the split of the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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poetic persona: the unaware, careless, childlike self at the moment of disaster and a retrospective, postapocalyptic self who has miraculously survived his own physical death and looks at his past self with fatalistic impassivity. Through the mediation of this impassive, larger consciousness, the potentially violent disaster loses its emergency in recounting, as if veiled by the mist of dream—and the dream is no other than life itself. The sea elicits association with the sea of Samsara in Vedanta, which is the sea of life in this world that man has to cross to reach the other world. The idea of the illusive nature of this life is underlain by the unawareness of “you” on the sea of life. The casual and careless “you,” engaged in random sightseeing, contrasts sharply with the hidden emergency of the impending disaster. The vast ship, ghostly empty, also reinforces the poet’s vision of the empty and illusory nature of this life. The idea of illusion is further suggested by the superimposition of contrasting images: sea, at the beginning of the poem identified with the force of life with its “swelling” and “breathing,” is disturbingly superimposed upon by the image of death—the watery graves. The biblical ark refers to man’s fall and God’s punishment—to Gu Cheng, growing from child to adult is no less than a fall. This poem reverses the biblical allusion by making the solitary survivors of Noah’s ark drowned. However, after the depression of the dark prairie and watery grave, the feeling of deliverance in “every one of the doors will be opened,” and the suddenly bright and novel image of the cool flame—a lighted aquatic world that the drowned catches the last glimpse of—with its buoyant, transcendent force seems to suggest that drowning is the very path toward rising up and awakening to another realm of existence. The cool flame, compound image of the primary elements of water and fire (light), recurring throughout Gu Cheng’s poems, is the culminating symbol in Gu Cheng’s private symbolism. Water is aligned with eternal femininity; lost origin and ideal; and a liquefied, transparent world of oneness in the heightened perception. A mediating element between the insubstantial element of air and the substantial earth, water points to the true nature of this world, which is both void and being, emptiness and nourishing plentitude. Fire suggests the thirst of male desire, self-tormented hell created by desiring an unapproachable ideal, the purgatorial purification of killing desire through desire. The 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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wedding of water and fire symbolizes the consummating marriage of the believer and the believed—through death.

1 for many years, I have been living in the valley of your breath I built my own house fixed the hedge, listening to streams in low whispers fall into sleep. Among the pistils of purple flowers are transparent claws I feel time become docile climbing in gyres above my heard the sun is drowsy like a lion the sun is drowsy like a lion many bat flower shadows those rocks emerging only at dusk those words the rocks repeat to me those words the streams repeat to me white books and deep, deep forest 2 each day I drink from the stream I have a copper vase I know the east is inexhaustible, then so is the west. Sea water step by step invades my river mouth, lake shore thousand miles of white dune Eagles above the desolate city, my small cabin full of gears gold, happy gears thousand miles of sea water touches my face small seaweeds endlessly sway Ah my daily wish small seaweeds restlessly sway on the stairs you didn’t put coins on the round stone icy small fish are swimming you ebony dark eyebrows bow toward the dawn 3 I want the gold in your eyes gold mineral of the sun you have been a shepherd in a small island 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Seasons—Preserving Twilight and Morning

The Semiotics of Exile in Literature the red sea is your mouth you have been a shepherd in a small tropical island among distinct fern plants, dragging tired whips, the uncloseable fingers of the sun why don’t I love the silver line of your nose inches of silver smile, early morning beautiful abyss revealed beneath red heath the sonata of eternal night and shells are offering the morning do you hear the air the air is singing hymns to me coming from Rome with mineral dust under my feet, I’m today’s Bell God 4 closing the door on all sides my hand stretches toward your breath flies and old men on the street, scorching copper scorching in the noon, the night of the noon is unwilling to remove his finger, burning at night in deep solitude Ah flame, twilight belonging to the end My hand close upon your neck growing in the wind of your cool mountain mouth soundless on your smooth, steep cliff many many books, seasons beyond the stone gently I turn toward you my hair grows in curl fragrance Autumn comes. Autumn will bring many leaves (Translation mine.)

“For many years, I have been / living in the valley of your breath”—the image of bodyscape recurring throughout this long poem lives on the exalted analogy of World-as-Lover. “You become my heart,” writes Gu Cheng in another poem, “I become the world.” This poem, written considerably late by Gu Cheng, in a rare way recaptures a certain pure lyrical mood of his early poems. This return is emblemized by the resurging of an unsplit, lyrical “I.” However, if Gu Cheng’s praise of the world in “A Fantasia of Life” is his morning song of starting on the voyage of life, the eulogy world in “Seasons” is his twilight, valedictory song, “belonging to the twilight of the end.” Like most of Gu Cheng’s poems, the time flowing beneath the poem weds the contradictory sense of an irrevocable past and eternity. The word “preserve” in the title presupposes a lost past and places the poem in a mood of recollection, which suffuses even the first line: “for 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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many years, I have been / living in the valley of your breath.” However, eternity is implied in the circular, softened and melted time: “I feel time / become docile / climbing in gyres above my head.” Such disparity of time consciousness again bespeaks the implicit mood of exile from Taoist paradise. There is a tinge of mythological imagination in the image “the sun is drowsy like a lion.” The world in the poem is at once the mythological world of imagination; the real, physical world of plenitude; and the spiritualized world of transparency. The loose, run-on sentences, the alternation between long and short stanzas, and the transition of images from the infinite to the infinitesimal all aim to create a movement that alternates between expansion and contraction— like the selfsame deep breath of the wind blowing and the massive heart of the universe pulsating through ten thousand things. “Eagles above the desolate city / my small cabins full of gears,” “You have been a shepherd on a small island / the red sea is your mouth”: images in these lines exemplify the precipitating alternation between expansion and contraction, void and fullness, in the rhythm of the large rise and fall of sea waves. The simple juxtaposition of the opposites is the act of identification. In Chuang Tzu, we frequently see such identification of large and small: “sky and earth are like a grain of sand, while the smallest hair is like a mountain.”42 Like Whitman, Gu Cheng’s simple act of naming in this poem enacts the ritual of deification: a mere listing without any explanation, for as Zen believes, each thing, in its pure, untarnished state of existence, is always already complete and consummated. One thing is one Buddha, is one world. “Each day I drink from the stream / I have a copper vase / I know the east is inexhaustible, then / so is the west, step by step sea water / invades my river mouth, the lake shore / thousand miles of white dune.” There is a subtle fusion of subject and object in these lines: “I” am both the drinker of water and the river itself; the copper vase is my vessel for drinking, also my copper-colored body. “I” am filled with the water of the world. In the limited copper vase of my body contain infinitude. The moment when the sea water completely invades into “me” is the moment of self-loss and my death, a death implied in the white color of the dune, a death which is also an attainment to infinitude—implied in the dune’s thousand-mile extension. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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“Eagles above the desolate city / my small cabins full of gears / gold, happy gears.” The image of the gear in its golden luster gathers the sun rays, an image of happiness intensified by the further suggestion that my smallest movement is geared to the huge, cosmic movement. Not only does the breath of the wind blow through the poem, but also the heart of the universe pulsates beneath it, the rhythm of the sea steeps it, and the golden rays of the sun entrench it. The sunlight color of gold and silver runs throughout: “the copper vase,” the “golden gears,” “gold in your eyes,” “gold mineral sands,” “scorching copper,” “silver line of your nose,” “inches of silver smile,” “twilight belonging to the end.” Images merge smoothly into each other, enacting implicitly man’s transformation into nature: “thousand miles of sea water touches my face / small seaweeds restlessly sway / Ah, my daily wish / Small seaweeds restlessly sway on the stairs.” “I” am the sea weed, my body and heart floating in the current of the universe in which myself is lost without resistance. In the line “your ebony dark eyebrow bows toward the dawn,” the dark eyebrow refers both to itself and figuratively to the dark stretch of mountain before the dawn. The sonata of eternal night and shells are offering the morning do you hear the air the air is singing hymns to me from Rome with mineral dust under my feet / I’m today’s Bell God.

Just as the shell and bell in their emptiness reverberate the universal current, “I”—self-emptied, with my shell-like body—hear the vibration of the air, and “I” make my own life—the morning of my youth—a sacrificial offering. “Man’s life is like a bell,” writes Gu Cheng in his single novel, Ying Er, “at most times dumb; when the soul awakes, it rings, spreading into far distance.”43 We cannot help but admire Gu Cheng’s art of merging one image so seamlessly into another in the ending lines, where the image of human lover and sexual love is superimposed on and merged with the World-as-Lover: my hand closes around your neck growing in the cool wind of the mountain mouth soundless in your steep smooth cliff 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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many, many books, seasons beyond the stone gently I turn toward you my hair grows in curled fragrance autumn comes autumn will bring many leaves.

It recalls Gu Cheng’s paintings: the thin, almost invisible and unintelligible mass of curves in which eyes are entangled and merged with stars, arms are entangled with tree branches, and all grow endlessly, expressing anxiety, madness, longing, and eternity. The season of autumn with its fallen leaves is the season of both harvest and death, and in Gu Cheng’s heightened vision, they become identical. The image of books suggests the identification of the creator and the created: “I” and the world are books, ancient hieroglyphics that need deciphering. When “I” create my book of poetry, “I” live anew the earliest time when the world and “I” were created. To sum it up, Gu Cheng’s poetry continues and exacerbates the split intrinsic in Chinese natural philosophy. Found also in other literary and artistic forms coming under the influence of Chinese natural philosophy (as I examined in my previous book), such split reveals an exile from—rather than attainment to—the Taoist paradise. In Gu Cheng’s poetry, in subject, the confrontation of the omniscient / mythic and limited / historical self is often acted out through a posthumous consciousness contemplating a living self. In time, the conflict of mythic and historical time is brought into a truce by Gu Cheng’s projection of himself into a timeless, limbo realm. Such limbo state, in mood, is reflected in the limbo state shortly after death, often euphemistically a state of half sleep which emblemizes life as dream. Spatially, it is imaged in transitional place such as corridors and river mouth. Linguistically, it is in the diffusive trace of poetic logic, a pattern of abandonment as one’s last hold on words before sleep. Poetry becomes the record of the process of evaporation, a middle state between expression and the desire to annihilate all speech in a final unity. Another temporal strategy used by Gu Cheng to circumvent the conflict between mythic and historical time is to cast everything into a retrospective perspective, most notably his projection into the future perfect tense his own entire life and death. The compulsive retrospection bespeaks not only a need to obviate pain by projecting the pain 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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into the past but also a nostalgia for the origin. However, the nostalgia for an imaginary origin is always the desire to be somewhere else. The origin is originated by man, instead of being in the nature of things. The original lack is supplemented by a fictional self, a fiction sustained by the impossible chasm of death. Gu Cheng’s only fiction, Ying Er, exemplifies this compulsive retrospective perspective. Its narrative structure of Chinese box is essentially a structure of infinite retrogression. The novel is a loose gathering of miscellaneous voices and genres. The fractured novel reflects a fractured self that does not amount to a unified, omniscient consciousness. Peace is only achieved through the distance of retrogression. The poet’s death is chronologically described not at the end, but in the penultimate chapter of the novel, cushioned and distanced through the depersonalized eyes of farm animals. At the end of the novel, the scarlet flower, emblem of the poet’s disastrous death, opens against the tawdry scene of life’s festival, and the posthumous voice of the poet arises, displaced: “Look from here, the more distant, the more beautiful is our home.”44 Gu Cheng’s view emblemizes the ahistorical outlook of Taoist thinkers in their abrogation of historical origin in favor of a fabricated cosmic origin. Gu Cheng’s poetry and life brings into full light the aesthetic violence dormant in Chinese natural philosophy. The return to origin necessitates destruction—not only because man is inescapably a product of human history and civilization at odds with the origin defined by such philosophy but also because the Taoist origin itself is a fabricated aesthetic ideal that does not acknowledge the full extent of nature—including human nature and the nature of the nonhuman world. It is significant that in Gu Cheng as in Chuang Tzu, the ideal persona of Taoist “floating at ease” is often represented by the crippled or the misshapen. It underscores the paradoxical truth that integration is achieved through self-laceration. In language, Gu Cheng inherits the discontinuous syntax in classical Chinese. Language units are given a freedom as in classical Chinese poetry, only more anarchic. Sometimes, instead of reflecting the mobile relationship in nature, the anarchic tendency loses control and culminates in a maddening feeling of the selfprocreative penchant of language: the self-generating sounds and images procreate at a speed that actively annihilates the subject. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Toward classical Chinese literature Gu Cheng is ambivalent. On the one hand, he has a great admiration for its syntactic void and flexibility, which he feels reflecting an original nature with the limited perspective of “I” cancelled. He once commented on a poem by Bai Juyi in connection with his own life: When I reread carefully the life I’ve lived, I found that nothing was lost. When you leave yourself, you begin to see all of your life. All the spiritual essence of the T’ang poetry derives from this. “Red beans born (or bear) [in] the South, / in the spring sprouts tender branches.” Does the poem mean that the South was grown out of the red bean—because the red bean makes you remember the South—or the red beans grow in the South? In Chinese they are indistinguishable. Why indistinguishable? Because there isn’t the hindrance of the concept of “I,” let alone the social perspective of “we.” You’re only a “watch”—everything comes into one. You’re both the left and the right hand, both the South and the red bean.45

The syntactic void and flexibility in classical Chinese, however, as I have illustrated through detailed textual analysis of classical poems in Chapter 2 of my work, A Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy: Literature and the Arts, not only build an omniscient consciousness with a cancelled “I.”46 It is doubleedged in building both an omniscient consciousness and a highly subjective impression, which are often in conflict. Gu Cheng’s idealization of classical Chinese language is therefore one-sided. As a result, he did not see the conflicting visions already latent in classical Chinese poetry and the traditional philosophy, which only break out into more open and violent forms in his life and poetry. The same blindness is reflected in his view of Chinese natural philosophy as reflecting a nonteleological freedom, while ignoring that the social and historical context that produces such philosophy makes its freedom really fictitious in its flight from historical reality. The ancients are no freer than the modern people. While admiring its syntactic flexibility, Gu Cheng feels also the constraint of the classical Chinese poetry’s strict rhyme and tonal scheme. The very perfection of the classical Chinese poetry makes it intractable for the creative effort of modern poets. Cultural heritage is both nourishment and inexorable burden, like a difficult, distorted growth in him. Inheritance goes hand in hand with the desire to break free. The monosyllabic words, a normal linguistic 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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feature in classical Chinese, a feature lost in modern Chinese, has an alienated, staccato effect in Gu Cheng’s poems with their usual association cut off. It is as if in a wild effort to cut off the referentiality of the words, he might find them suddenly in tune with something else. The existential split that tears apart Gu Cheng’s life is not only that between an idealist and the world of reality: between the land of purity he desires and the commercialized, modern society with its inexorable demand on people to make a living at all, and its contamination of people in it, including the women he loves. The split, rather, is ontological and intrinsic and hence unavoidable and fatalistic. “The halo of the Buddha,” as Gu Cheng rightly recognizes, “requires the absolute renunciation of desire” (BB. 164). Gu Cheng’s desire for the idealized image of the girl, inevitably touched with sensual desire, both unites him and the real-life girl and alienates them. “I stand there growing strangely, even my fire is not clean” (Ying Er, 112). The narrator in Ying Er marvels at the ineradicable split in man imposed by the Creator, as he contemplates Gu Cheng, At this time, my heart sent out a twang of tremor. As if I see with my own eyes that merciless storm that transforms and moulds life. It alone can do it. It alone does it—with the flame from the abyss it harasses us, with invisible hand it plays on us, and changes our daily emotion. It gives us forms, and yet regards us as nothing. It puts into us the devil’s passion; at the same time the dream of heaven; a lucid human brain, and let these things meet . . . he (Gu Cheng) knows, so he is without regret, as always. This is what he tells me. He is devil. He is also leaves tossed in the devil’s wind. (Ying Er, 120)

Nature, in Chinese natural philosophy is a rather nebulous concept. According to Gu Cheng’s explanation in his synopsis of Chinese natural philosophy, in Chinese characters, the word for nature is a compound word, “zi,” according to him, means “Self,” and “ran,” a tonal void word denoting a gentle attitude of acquiescence. However, to realize the Taoist natural state often requires a violent negation of certain parts of nature within both man and nature. The world of nature Gu Cheng finds in the primitive forest of New Zealand is more of a jungle world in which the blind will to live struggles for survival (in the sense of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s recognition of the ground being of existence), rather 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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At that time, I had faith in Nature, as well as in my own original nature. I took for granted that I would get rid of all the tormenting thoughts as soon as I was in Nature. The natural beauty of my life will also reveal itself. Just as I wrote in my poem, “wind is waving its leaves, / grasses growing their seeds, / we stand without speaking. / This enough is beauty.” But all these are only imagination. In the real Nature, I encountered even more terrible destruction. Nature is not beautiful. There are mice, lice, not like the Nature we encountered on our vacation. Without electricity, water, and modern civilization, you have to struggle with Nature all day long. Everywhere in Nature are eating mouths. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is, in the Nature, I found my own nature does not, as I imagined, belong to the sky, or belong to me. It is blind, ruling over me like crawling ants and raving octopus. It cannot stop. (DGC, 43)

The inner conflicts in Gu Cheng are reflected in the permutations of conflicting philosophies in his poetry: the conflict between the monistic Zen Buddhism that identifies the phenomenal and the noumenal and the sharply dualistic Platonism that asserts the irreconcilability of these two. In a way, the disturbing effect of diverse cultures on Gu Cheng’s is also a reflection of his inner intrinsic conflicts. Gu Cheng’s escape to the primitive island in New Zealand is not only an escape from the modern world, from culture but also an escape from himself. The stone walls he built around his home were ineffectual, as what he wanted to shut out was within himself. He could not shut it out unless he himself could be turned into the stone. As he confessed, he often could not fall into sleep unless by running madly in the mountains and tiring himself out. At such times, he slept by holding a big stone in his arms. As manifested in Gu Cheng’s life and poetics, the Taoist ideal state of omniscience involves a radical self-laceration. Its aesthetics, exerted on others, leads to an idealization that is potentially violent in its truncation of the living originals. Side by side with the pervasive imagery of reversion and permeation in Gu Cheng’s liquefied, transparent world, is the imagery of truncation in the realization of an idealized beauty, which is most obvious in his idealization of the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


than the Taoist picture of harmonious universe presided over by an immanent divinity. Gu Cheng is baffled by it, and in it he recognizes the image of the conflicting desires within himself:


girl’s nature: “You’re so good / like a bunch of flowers, with invisible branches.” “All these flowers, /should not have earth / Let the earth miss her.” “The most important thing in poetic writing is to get rid of living.” Such truncation ultimately leads to a negation of life itself, culminating in Gu Cheng’s claim in his Ying Er, “I belong to death.” The full tragic signification of Taoist ideal state is appallingly realized through Gu Cheng, when such aesthetics are no longer confined to the contemplative realm, but carried out in living practice—in his suicide and murder of his wife. Gu Cheng’s list of favored foreign literature is significant: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In these diverse books, we might discern something of the same passage from self-tormented hell to the vision of heaven, and in fact, at moments, the inevitable entanglement and confusion between the devilish and the divine. In all the heroes in these books, the demon and the divine are twisted into mutual cause and effect. Tracing the evolution of Taoist philosophy from Lao Zi’s “doing nothing” to Chuang Tzu’s “doing everything” with their cultural reflections in various dynasties, Gu Cheng once said, “the highest sages in China may also be called demons” (BB, 200). The easeful floating—the purely mental freedom possessed by the ideal personhood envisioned by Chinese natural philosophy, when carried out in practice by the existential man with various desires, is a potentially terrible freedom. It is significant that even in the ancient times, Lao Zi’s vision of the ideal country was already retrogressive. The hermetic Tao Yuan-Ming’s Peach Blossom Spring is as fictitious, as dissolvable as an irrecoverable dream. In the same way, Gu Cheng’s pure land has no front path. It is a retrogressive childhood, which, since time is irreversible, can only be realized through death. And Death is also the ultimate silencer of the torturing din of inner conflicts. Gu Cheng is one of the rare cases of pure poets who believe so much in their ideas as to try, wistfully and willfully, to put into living practice their poetics. The renowned publisher of Meng Long Shi poets, Zhao Yi-Heng, once commented, “Gu Cheng’s poetics is a poetics of death. He has been praising Death, it is only inevitable that his last canto will be completed by his own death. . . . The pitiful thing, however, was the murder of his wife” (BB, 400). 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Death is praised by Gu Cheng, because it is the only bridge toward his noumenal world. Deserted by the women he idealized, loved and with whom he became disillusioned, Gu Cheng probably realized at last that Death was the only lover that cannot desert him. The Eulogy World is a liminal world, because the vision of the whole world is filtered through the last, poignant consolation of a posthumous consciousness. Gu Cheng’s traumatic split is not essentially due to modern society, which is often taken to have lost the soil for the ancient spirit. It’s true that Gu Cheng, with his idealistic Taoist vision of nature and life, is inescapably an exile from modern society. Taoist state of emptiness via doing away with intellect and knowledge also puts Gu Cheng ill at ease with the age of cultural fever in which he was situated, when hundred years of Western thoughts thronged into China in the short ten years. However, the conflicts are always there, intrinsic and irresolvable, only deliberately and wisely, perhaps also ominously, ignored by ancient Chinese philosophy and art. The space of ellipsis in the classical poetry and painting is a symbolic revelation as much as a disguise. The exile from Taoist paradise is implicated from its beginning—from Lao Chuang’s philosophy, through all the literary and art forms under its philosophical influence. Gu Cheng’s life and poetics only bring into violent, visible form such intrinsic, implicit conflicts. “Dark night gave me dark eyes / With them I seek light” (“One Generation,” GSP, 1). This early poem by Gu Cheng, in an ironically prophetic sense, envisages the ontological darkness—implied in the split, veiled voice in his poetry and darkly fulfilled in his tragic life and crime—looming on the path of his inexorable, thwarted search for the ideal defined by Chinese natural philosophy.



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4

Semi oti cs of Exile in Tragedy

This chapter studies the function of exile in tragedy. The pro-

tagonists in the three novels—Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy—are all socially marginalized. In Beloved, the racially ostracized heroine’s assertion for human dignity ends in violent infanticide. In The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy, the impoverished social outcasts’ aspiration for the material and spiritual implication of the American Dream brings about their destruction. In all these novels, tragic heroes are featured as ostracized loners in a boundary situation, wherein good and bad are inextricably mixed. In my study on Toni Morrison, I linked the heroine isolated in her moral uncertainty and damned glamour with the Western tradition of tragedy. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is also an ambiguous figure in both his admirable capacity for dream and the crass means through which he realizes his dream. So is Clyde in American Tragedy. Psychologically, according to Aristotle, tragedy effects the catharsis of pity and terror. The sublimity of tragedy is engendered through the dual nature of tragic heroes. In other words, they are demigods—larger than human in their heroic encounter with an external power, while at the same time damned by their human limitation. They suffer the primal contradictions between their human limitation and demigod character. The confrontation with the alien power either elevates them to a higher status through self-sacrifice or reduces them to a creaturely status when the blockage cannot be overcome. The tragic heroes are almost 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Chapter 3


always loners and exiles in their tragic obsession and knowledge. Tragedy, like the feeling of sublimity, is associated with the threatening and the unfamiliar. It flouts rather than confirms our conventional beliefs. Therefore, tragedy is emblemized by a semiotics of disparity and disjointedness characterizing that of exile. The three works are put into one chapter because they reflect the excluding aspects of American society hidden beneath its advocacy of democracy and equal opportunity at different periods of its history. The Great Gatsby reflects the mood of disillusionment in “The Lost Generation” writers with America’s newly gained material wealth, being a victorious country after the World War I, at the expense of spiritual values. Gatsby’s idealism makes him an exile in his wealth-corrupted society. He himself is not immune from such corruption. The bankruptcy of his pursuit of material wealth as a means of recouping his spiritual ideal bespeaks the intractable inequality of American society and the bubble of material wealth itself. An American Tragedy, set in the Great Depression, sharpens the crude struggle in man’s primitive instinct for material survival. The material wealth acquired by Clyde through the sacrifice of moral scruples and indeed through murder, is also shown to be a bubble that fails to improve his social status as it failed for Gatsby. Clyde turns out to be an exile from the rich society he aspires to be in despite his excruciating struggle. He is damned to be an exile not because of his idealism, as it is for Gatsby and “The Lost Generation” writers, but because the pursuit of material wealth is corrupted at the core and necessitates inevitably self-splitting and self-alienation in its pursuers. Beloved is set in Ohio—away from South—long after the Civil War, and yet the geographical and temporal distance from the memory of black slavery is shattered by the ghost-haunted house and the reincarnation of the killed baby. The heroine, Sethe, is isolated and exiled by both the white and the blacks. She is a resolute loner believing in her infanticide as the best deed of her life. The treasuring of an unforgettable wound and the unforgiving mood revealed therein seem to hint at Toni Morrison’s own vision of the irresolvable racial tension and her skepticism about black people’s awakening to racial identity and racial pride. It’s suggested that such racial tension and black people’s lack of racial pride and self-knowledge exist not only before their liberation but also after the Civil War, lasting till today.



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The time is destitute because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death and love. It’s destitute because the realm of being withdraws within which pain and love and death belong together . . . in which they belong together is the abyss of the being. —Martin Heidegger

In Moby Dick, Ahab observes, “Do not stare too long into the fire, lest it invert thee, blind thee.”1 The cover picture of Beloved captures the image of Sethe after she killed her babies in a flash of revelation: her eyes under the intense glare of light, look blind. As man cannot encounter the godhead unveiled without going blind, physical blindness in Western tragedies is paradoxically a trope for a shocking and keen perception beyond ordinary human vision. Tragic heroes endowed by affliction with heightened perception into life are often cast in blind figures, such as Oedipus, Ahab, King Lear, and so on, who have wandered the outskirts of ordinary human experience and come back with maimed eyesight. Such knowledge, seen in the light of ordinary human language and standards, is full of ambiguities and paradoxes. Western tragic writing from Oedipus Rex, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, King Lear, Hamlet, and Othello, to Tess of the D’urbervilles, Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Heart of Darkness, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov all bespeak a boundary situation in which all subterfuges of traditional values crumple and human spirit fumbles alone and reaches its own vision when human spirit is pushed beyond mortal endurance.2 Such vision often leads to destruction and self destruction, as it cannot be applied to ordinary human world. Moral ambiguity and paradox dominate such boundary situation: fervent believer is turned into infidel, faithful into blasphemy, love and humanistic ideal turned into destructive impulse. Good and bad are intertwined. Paradoxical situation and moral ambivalence abound in Western tragedies: Oedipus, the wise man and king who solves the Sphinx’s riddle and benefits his people is also the one that brings plague on his country. Faustus’s desire to transcend human limitation ends with his being turned into dust, the lowest in the cosmic hierarchy. Lear’s credulity in human nature turned into his misanthropic diatribe on mankind 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


B E LOV E D in the Tradi ti on of Wester n Tr agedy


on the storm-beaten heath. Othello’s consuming love for Desdemona give him to jealousy and murder. Tess’s tender and trustful nature hurls her onto the fate of a remorseless murderess. Dimmsdale, the tormented believer and secret sinner is tempted to whisper poison and blasphemy to his people. Ahab, who starts as one resolving to free human beings from the mystery of cosmic evil, becomes a demoniac persecutor that sends his crew to destruction. Kurz, the idealist and humanist, is turned into the macabre figure of Death that massacres thousands of native people. Raskolniv’s desire to rid social injustice makes himself a demagogue and a violent homicide. In the same light in Beloved, Sethe’s outrageous act of infanticide stems from her “too thick love” for them. The moral ambiguity is internalized in the tragic hero’s opposite pull between being a believer and an iconoclast. The tragic status of the heroes thus derives not from the strength of their belief, but from their capacity to sustain the terrible tension of moral and emotional uncertainty and accept the suffering in full store. They persist, in spite of their doubt, in their action that would bring about their destruction. In Beloved, only Sethe qualifies the status of a tragic hero because only she is able to confront and sustain to the last moment of her life the terrible tension of moral uncertainty, without seeking shelter in either apathy or cynicism or any facile traditional value system. Since the tragic heroes are those who have traveled to the outskirts of humanity, they are almost all loners either singled out by the curse of fate or isolated in their destructive obsessions and knowledge: the self-maimed Oedipus in exile, King Lear shouts in the rain-pelting heath, Ahab shut in under the cabin in his demoniac resolution and doubt, Dimmsdale hides in his reading room with the hidden letter eating into his bosom, Hester Prynn in her humble hut away from the Puritan community. However, these outcasts of society paradoxically shoulder the communal guilt or the burden of humanity. As Nietzsche observes, tragic heroes, like Atlas, carry the earth on their back. Many heroes are scapegoat figures, such as Oedipus and Hester Prynn, who suffer to expiate the communal guilt or fear. In Beloved, Sethe is such a scapegoat figure on whom the community projects their repressed, shadowy part of racial psychology and inheritance. She is ostracized not only by the whites but also by the blacks, because 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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the blacks cannot acknowledge what is in themselves revealed through her. Seeking spiritual safety, they sacrifice the scapegoat. Thus the tragic heroes are thrice unshielded as loners from their community, the subterfuge of traditional values, and the certainty of their own vision, which might have made their loneliness sustainable. In Beloved, Sethe is cut off from her community; from her children and her husband; from Paul D, the only man who might save her from the haunting past; and eventually from the certainty and self-justification in her crime. In its haunting writing hovering between realism, symbolism, and allegory, Beloved is close to the lineage of the great tradition of nineteenth-century American tragic writing. In this writing, paradox and ambiguity in the tradition of Western tragedy is reflected in somber symbolism. Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are not tragic writings, but in his distorted revelation of split psychology, they contain the germ for his contemporary and later American writers’ approach to tragedy. In Poe’s stories of grotesquerie, such as “Black Cat” and “William Wilson,” deep psychology, which is warped, split, and linked with sinful fascination, is projected externally into a phantasmal object or a human double. In Beloved, the enigmatic figure of beloved, instead of representing individual psychology, figures rather the distorted and divided racial psychology. The destructive dependence between double and ego explored in great depth by Poe can be found in Beloved’s paradoxical relationship with other characters. Poe’s preoccupation with inner split and his symbolic allegorical representation certainly find kinship in Hawthorne’s writing. What Beloved recalls most of all is the figure of little Pearl, the illegitimate daughter of Dimmsdale and Hester Prynn in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. In that novel, little Pearl is not only the walking symbol of the protagonists’ sin but also the deepest affirmation of their beings. She represents what they cannot escape, as she insists on her claim on acknowledgement through an unbreakable kinship. As to the affinity between Beloved and Melville’s Moby Dick, the narrative progression of Beloved can be analogized to the symbolic quest journey in Moby Dick toward a mystery lying at the center of existence. The mystery is unresolved at the end, and the attempt to come close that mystery only destroys the seeker. In Beloved, the journey is not a metaphysical quest as in Moby Dick, but a journey 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




backward and inward, toward the sum of individual memories, which constitute the racial memory—the repertoire of the difficult racial inheritance and identity. The journey is not a self-ordained quest as in Moby Dick. It is a voyage whose drift is almost against the voyager’s will, as all the characters shun above all their past charged with inarticulate pain, shame, and outrage. It is characteristic of the narrative structure of Morrison’s novel, as can be also found in The Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, to revolve around a central riddle, which is often derived from black vocal myth and legend. The riddle, like a magnet, absorbs the deepest deposit of racial psychology, their deep-hidden aspiration, delusions and frustrations, which are both beautiful and terrifying. Like the endlessly distracted and prolonged quest for the central enigma, the white whale in Moby Dick, the narration of Beloved is very much hampered, hesitant, hovering back and forth around a mystery, an unspeakably painful memory as personified by the uncanny figure, Beloved, until, gathering strength as the book progresses, it finally reaches the enigma and is drowned by it. In Beloved, the black inheritance is at first symbolized by the ghost-haunted house. The house figures the inhabitants’ past haunted minds. Freud traces the psychological source of the uncanny to the unwonted recurrence of repressed past. In Sethe we find the same pathological repression of memory, which however breaks loose from moment to moment. The unwonted recurrence of repressed past is figured in the uncanny atmosphere of the house. When Paul D, the last Sweet Home man returns to her life, the recurring memory is substantialized into the figure of Beloved, whose penchant for hearing stories prompts the characters to recall their past. In the process, the narration switches from third person objective narration to the multitude of firstperson narrative voices: Sethe’s, Denver’s, eventually Beloved’s voice striving out of its burial place, which suggest the characters’ gaining of identities and voices as the racial memory wells up. The multitude of voices finally amplifies into the collective singing of the black people in front of Sethe’s door, an unconscious ritual of racial propitiation and lamentation, equivalent to chorus in Greek tragedies: half-comprehending and sympathetic toward its central tragic hero. But from the moment Sethe is resolute to embrace Beloved wholeheartedly, Beloved devours her life up. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Beloved represents the difficult, conflicting racial inheritance and identity of the blacks, both life affirming and life devouring. It’s an inheritance of pain, shame and despair that turns the victim into victimizer, love into killing. Its very beauty and triumph, sharpened by deprivation, is linked with despair and destruction. It’s an inheritance hard to embrace or disown—like the figure of Beloved. The symbolic configuration of Beloved as the racial identity is suggested in the epitaph of the book: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.” Beloved represents the racial inheritance and identity that its people want both to acknowledge and to disown, to love and to loathe, and it is a conflict rising from the poignant sense that they are the abandoned people of God. The difficult black inheritance is suggested by the paradoxical relationship between Paul D and Beloved when she makes love to him. Her insistence on him to call her name elicits in him a flood of memories that is the sum of racial identity, so that he mutters to himself, “Red heart. Red heart. Red heart.”3 Beloved’s mesmerizing effect on Paul D in her sexual advance both attracts and repels him. The allusion to Lot’s wife hints at the danger of looking back at a difficult past. Beloved represents the racial identity embedded in the past memories that all the characters in the book try to escape but cannot. Beloved’s insistence on Paul D, against his revulsion, to call her the name Beloved externalizes Paul D’s inner compulsion to acknowledge and embrace the humiliating and life-affirming racial past and identity. Thus the lack of names in the books related to black life suggests the lack of racial identity. Names are denoted by impersonal letters or numbers or casual substitution: Paul D, Paul F, 124, Baby Suggs, Sweet Home. Paul D’s ambivalent feeling toward Beloved symbolizes his inner tension between his nostalgia for the racial past and his self-loathing as a black man: She is the “bitch,” but also his “red, red heart.” Paul D moves out of Sethes’ House after he heard about Sethe’s infanticide. His talk with Stamp Paid, an old man acquainted with Sethe’s past, further reinforces the implication that Beloved is a figure of racial past and identity. When Stamp Paid asks Paul D whether it was Sethe or Beloved who ran him off, the mention of Beloved elicits in Paul D a flood of memories, which is a sum of the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




pain, humiliation, as well as beauty and triumph of black life: Halle in the butter, chokecherry trees, Slaughter house, Paul A’s face, and “the loss of a red, red heart.” When Paul D asks with wet eyes how much a nigger is supposed to take, Stamp Paid says, “All he can. All he can” (235). Being driven out of the house by Beloved or by Sethe’s past crime amounts to the same thing. It’s the black inheritance and identity that he cannot embrace. The same paradoxical relationship is hinted in Sethe’s relationship with Beloved—deeply loving, mutually murderous. In Sethe’s dialogue with Beloved, the meaning of identity is evoked: “Beloved / You are my sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; You are me” (216). Sethe is Beloved’s face. Beloved is Sethe’s soul and core. Without her soul, Sethe’s face is frozen into a masque. Beloved’s constant demand of Sethe to smile at her awakens her response to life. “She is the laugh; I am the laughter” (212). Sethe is the impulse, Beloved the triumphant expression of that impulse. Once, Sethe’ s mother shows her the scar under her rib. She says if something happens to her, her daughter can recognize her by this mark, if not able to do so by her face. Just as Sethe’s hanged mother can only be recognized by the scar near her breast, Beloved is Sethe’s scar through which she affirms her human identity. It is paradoxical that her killing of her babies, which is called by Paul D as bestial, stems from the very impulse of asserting her human dignity and protecting her babies from the inhuman treatment she suffered. She accepts her fate, but she also defies it. In her flashing vision of the hopeless indignity of slave life, which is worse than death, she defies by “outhurt the hurter” (234). Her pride and defiance is akin to that of Oedipus, who pulls out his eyes to spite the fate he cannot escape, so that the only way of asserting the free human will against the enslaving circumstances of life is to devastate that fate. If Tess D’urbervilles is saved from moral irresolvability by her timely execution, Sethe is deprived of that comfort. She has to continue to live in the aftermath of her killing when the climactic moment of self-justification falls into moral ambivalence. In Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynn believes her sin has a consecration of its own, and yet acquiesces in the community’s verdict of her by living a life of humility. Likewise, Sethe is torn between the consecration of her sin and inescapable sense of guilt. Her guilt is reflected in her compulsive need to justify herself before Beloved. In killing Beloved, she simultaneously 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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asserts and cancels the racial identity she cannot live with. However, the killed comes back and haunts her ever after. No matter whether she chooses to embrace or deny that past, her choice would bring her destruction. Her tormenting dilemma is reflected in Beloved’s lifeaffirming and life-devouring effects on her. The relationship between Denver and Beloved suggests the same ambiguous relationship. Denver sucks her mother’s milk together with Beloved’s blood, a fact suggesting that Beloved represents her black inheritance. Denver feels Beloved is “more than her sister” (266). She is herself. When she plays hide-and-seek with Beloved and loses sight of her, Denver bursts into tears: “She is crying because she has no self” (123). However, seeing Beloved’s torment of her mother, she eventually stands apart from Beloved and breaks Sethe’s isolation by forming a loving relationship with the community. However, the communal love is not the solution to the difficult black inheritance either. At the end, when Sethe recoils at the sight of the white man who had saved her from being hanged, the crowd is confused and begins to accuse Sethe. This suggests that the black mass vision is still clouded: they do not understand what Sethe kills for— that slavery is worse than death and that the repercussions of its aftereffects live far beyond the system itself. There is no easy recompense or forgiveness for its damage. The racial identity half-consciously felt in the racial propitiatory singing sinks into oblivion as the memory of Beloved retreats from their minds. Beloved becomes a faint echo, some vaguely unsettling nightmare, which fails to work toward a full awareness that will bring about solution. The sense of paradox hidden at the core of Western tragedy is reflected in the imagery of this book mingling love, pain, and death—the mixed black inheritance, which is expressed in acute beauty in the remembrance of Sweet Home. Suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamore beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (6) 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




The image of “boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamore tree” is the full realization of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in which pity and terror are welded into beauty. In this image, life and death, love and cruelty, the beautiful and the terrifying contend their blaze in a mixed flame. Nietzsche sees the vision of life in Greek tragedy as “the terrible plant stemming from primordial suffering,” the dark abyss from which springs the compound fire of agony and ecstasy.4 It is significant that Beloved’s first appearance is in the drunken image, the Dionysian ground being of existence in which anguish and joy are mixed. Heidegger sees in the unconcealment of Being the oneness of love, pain, and death: Sethe’s killing of her baby contains all these ingredients. The process of unconcealment in this book is the process of rememory, which is not just recollection but also revision and recovery. All the accumulated experience of life is steeped in the synthetic process of memory, through which acute pain and beauty, longing for death and for life burn in the same vein. It is only through the gauze of memory and longing that Sethe discovers the poignant beauty of Sweet Home, where acts of cruelty and persecution ran rampart. When Baby Suggs asks her people to laugh and cry in short contingency, the polarities of emotion become identical. After Paul D leaves her, Sethe skates on the icy lake and falls, laughter and tears well up in her together. When Baby Suggs asks her people to love and touch their pain-wracked bodies and to dance and to sing, in their song they “woo death and smash it on the head.” (89) The clump of scars on Sethe’s back is excruciating pain blossoms into flowery trees. Her blood from the nursing breast is the “blossom of roses.” (93) The scar, described as “a shadowy curve of smile,” recalls the hanged runaway slave Sixo––his laughter of defiance above the fire, his dauntless laughter in the midst of scorching pain. The phrase “shameless beauty” captures the inextinguishable longing for life in spite of its shame, pain, and deprivation. However, the racial memory is charged with so much painful humiliation that they also try to escape from it. Flight is a recurrent ritual as much as the throe of birth in the book. However, Sethe gains her identity when she chooses not to run away anymore but to live at peace with her painful past. At the beginning of the novel, the past is still held at an unconscious, buried level. Paul D’s arrival awakens her to life, which is accompanied by pain. As he kisses the flowery tree on her back, 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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he touches her pain, the source of her life. However, Paul D fails eventually to give Sethe life, which is symbolically revealed through his failure to see the clump of scars on Sethe’s back as beautiful and his failure to acknowledge Beloved—Sethe’s painful past with its triumph and tragedy, which is the deepest affirmation of her being. Reading the book, one is tempted to regard Baby Suggs as the reference of value system. Her life-affirming preaching, both physically and spiritually intense, gains a moving power not so much from its being an affirmation because of anything, but from being an affirmation in spite of everything. However, her humanistic values are ultimately presented as defeated and incomplete. Her great heart collapses and she dies in apathy and disillusionment—with an empty dream of colors that barely substantialize in real life. Sethe has glimpsed that the keenest truth would bring her destruction even if she embraces or denies it. However, unlike Baby Suggs who retreats into the shelter of apathy, Sethe suffers in acute sensitivity and without flinch all the stings of her moral ambivalence––her consecration as well as guilt. There are moments in the book when her utter solitude almost gains a repose beyond touch. Then the inner split overtakes her again and she is finally eaten up by it. Like most tragedies, the war in Sethe is discharged only in death, however, not before she recognizes in Beloved, “she was my best thing” (272). Like the great tragedies in the Western tradition, Morrison presents a primordial vision of life that is crushing even as it is elevating.

A Comparative Study of A N A M E R I C A N T R A G E DY and T H E G R E AT G AT S B Y Striking similarities in theme, plot, and function of characters can be found between Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Both novels, through the rise of a poor boy to social prosperity and his eventual downfall, disclose the disillusionment with the material and spiritual implications of the American Dream. In both books, a girl from the upper class, desirable and inaccessible, embodies that dream and converges material prosperity with the ideal of love and beauty. In both books, the poor boy’s desire for social climbing is motivated by a past humiliation related to the spurn of a woman, and their social climbing necessitates a process of self-alienation and moral degeneration. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




In both books, a woman from lower social class, serving as thematic foil to the protagonists, after being seduced and abandoned, is killed in an accident. The protagonists in these two novels are either partly or completely wronged in paying their lives for a wry social justice. Both books reveal the complicit guilt of the society, the utter loneliness of the protagonists, and the crass insensitivity of the people surrounding them. Certain sympathy and understanding, in both books, comes from a minor character remotely related to the central characters, who, more than the protagonists, experiences a spiritual growth by reflecting on them. The remarkable similarity between these two books, however, also highlights the difference between them: one, in an expansive style with meticulous realistic details, reflects the harsh reality of the ’30s, while the other, in spite of the bitterness of social criticism and its oblique laconic style, is entrenched in the lyrical elegy of the Jazz Age. In the following pages, the similarities and differences of Dreiser’ and Fitzgerald’s novel will be examined in detail through which the categorical differences of naturalism, realism, and romanticism will be reconsidered, with an emphasis on the transgressive, interpermeating nature of these genres, especially of that between naturalism and romanticism. In this process, some other naturalist novels will be briefly introduced into this book’s range of study. At the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, through whose consciousness the whole story of Gatsby is filtered, relates Gatsby’s impossible love for Daisy with the American Dream. He associates the green light in Daisy’s room, which was the object of Gatsby’s daily ritual of contemplation, with the green island emerged to the eyes of the first Dutch settlers in America.5 For all its tawdry means, Gatsby’s romantic fixation becomes a sorrowful paradigm not only of hope for a new world cherished by those early pilgrims, who believed they could leave behind the shadow of evil and injustice in the old world, but also of the nature of human hope itself, its moving persistency and ontological destiny of being thwarted and evacuated by time. Because of the height of symbolic status the narrator grants to Gatsby, there is a remarkable difference in the narrative strategy— which will be dealt with later in this book—in The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy, in spite of their thematic concurrence in the disillusionment with the American Dream. With its “from 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Cabin to Whitehouse” myth, the American Dream seems to grant equal opportunity and promise of success to every struggling individual. On the one hand, the American Dream relies on spiritual notions such as democracy and equality; on the other, it has highly materialistic criteria for judging success. The emphasis on material success—its equivalence with social success and with individual worth—probably originated from the material aspect of struggle on the part of early pioneers in reclaiming the wild land and in developing an almost endless store of natural resources to build a new country. However, as time goes on, the early integration of material and spiritual values in the heroic pioneers decay into the later generations’ gross appetite for material luxury and comfort, an appetite that starts to exclude and supplant spiritual values. Daisy for Gatsby, as Sondra for Clyde in An American Tragedy, represents not only the privilege of material prosperity but also the ideals of beauty and love—so thoroughly have spiritual values been extirpated and supplanted by the material aspect of the Dream. Gatsby believes that with money he can win back Daisy. Clyde sets his uncle as his emulated example of self-struggling success. However, both failed disastrously, even with their bettered material condition, which suggests the recalcitrant inequality of the society, contrary to what the American Dream claims. Their failure also suggests that the Dream, in the process of its realization, has already been corrupted at the core, so that even when its shell is secured the value had been long lost; hence the forever alluring and receding mirage of the Dream—a hope for the future that has been lost, without the awareness of the pursuers, in some distant past. The Jazz Age is an age of extravagance—an orgiastic indulgence made compulsively frenzied under the death shadow of the First World War and made possible by America’s profit from the war. The ’30s is the time of Great Depression, with its unprecedented economic crisis spreading from America to the whole of Europe. The material expansion (with the loss of spiritual value) and contraction in both ages point to the hidden crisis in the American Dream itself. Thus it is not accidental that Fitzgerald and Dreiser coincide in the thematic concern of their novels. The alluring and receding mirage of the American Dream are personified, for the male protagonists, in the desirable but elusive image of Daisy in The Great Gatsby and of Sondra in An American Dream. Both are rich girls with assuming innocence, giving 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




infinite promise but procrastinating in fulfilling it, whose dazzling beauty conceals a faintly deceptive nature. Both of them betray and abandon the male protagonists in the crisis of their plight. Nick notices in Daisy’s exciting, silvery voice the sound of money. Every sight of Sondra caught by Clyde is an echo of all that stirs his unfulfilled aspiration for the future, especially in the scene when she allures him in the elusive game of dance. Both Clyde and Gatsby’s desire for social rise are motivated by a past humiliation related to the spurn of a woman—on account of their poverty. In the case of Clyde, it is Hortense, a vulgar version of Sondra with her false promises and abandonment. For Gatsby, it is, as always, Daisy. The social rising of both Clyde and Gatsby necessitates a process of self-alienation and moral degeneration. Part 1 of An American Tragedy in many ways functions as a miniature of what will happen in book 2, only sometimes the characters assume reversed roles in these two parts. The misfortune of Clyde’s sister, who was seduced and abandoned, foreshadows what will happen to Roberta in part 2. Clyde’s inferiority complex, humiliation, anxiety, and need in his affair with Hortense will be duplicated in the psychology of Roberta in her sexual liaison with him. Clyde’s reversed roles in part 1 and part 2, from the spurned to the empowered, suggests that his rejection of Roberta, who is cast in the same economical and psychological disadvantage as Clyde in part I, is a symbolic self-repulsion: a repulsion of the sentimental remnants in him to survive a harsh world, thus psychologically prepares for his coldhearted plan for murder. The reversed, structural repetition of part 1 and book 2 forms a vicious enclosure, which allows no exit (an excellent reflection of the naturalistic doctrine of social determinism). This suggests that in order not to be socially victimized like his sister, Clyde has to victimize Roberta, for to admit to the public his sexual relationship with her will sabotage all his newly gained material advantage from his uncle and throw him back into a social class in which misfortunes suffered by his sister and the spurn received by him are only too likely to happen. As for Gatsby, a shadowy background of his crime in rising to social success is hinted by the callous, gossiping people attending his party. A significant similarity between these two books is the technique of thematic foil to the male protagonists through a woman 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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character. Both Roberta in An American Tragedy and Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (the mistress of Daisy’s husband, Tom) after being seduced and abandoned in their desperate situation, are killed in an accident. Their suffering from inferior social and economical status acts as a thematic foil to the fate of the male protagonists. Clyde is partly while Gatsby is completely wronged in paying their life for a wry sense of social justice. The social justice is shown to be wry in both books because of the complicit guilt of the society. Although moths flying to the lamp suffer a fate of self-destruction that is partly their fault, the society is responsible for lighting the alluring lamp by inculcating a faulty value. Moreover, in both books, the rich, who are equally guilty, are protected from the law, while the socially vulnerable protagonists, in spite of their illusion of a bettered material situation, is sacrificed as scapegoat. In An American Tragedy, Clyde’s lawyer, Belknap, who comes from a rich family, is able to buy his way out of a strait in his sexual liaison with a girl, while Clyde cannot. Sondra, in spite of her association with Clyde, is shielded from public slander on account of her prominent family, while Clyde has to suffer all the sling of public insult from a mob of strangers who do not know any truth about him. In The Great Gatsby, Tom and Daisy can run away to a subterfuge after Daisy killed Myrtle in a car accident, while Gatsby is punished as a scapegoat. An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby also share the depiction of the protagonists’ utter loneliness, the crass insensitivity and lack of understanding of the surrounding people, and an end in a moral void. The prosecutor, Mr. Mason, disparages Clyde vehemently, not out of social justice, but out of an insidious plan to use Clyde’s case to advertise himself and secure a public support in the coming mayoral election. Under Mason’s disparagement, the court audience is worked up to a violent, mass aversion to Clyde even before listening to his defense. When Clyde is on the way to the death room, people gloat over his plight as if watching a melodrama. Even Clyde’s mother, in her self-righteous Christian morality, fails to see how her own narrow, joyless upbringing has contributed to Clyde’s desire to escape at all cost the kind of life she has given him. In The Great Gatsby, nearly all those pleasure-seeking people who have unscrupulously enjoyed Gatsby’s party desert him at the end, and in their utter callousness, they are unwilling to show up at his funeral. Gatsby’s father, like Clyde’s mother, in 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




spite of his love for his son, completely fails to understand him, and sets him up as an example of social success through diligence and self-discipline. The only understanding in these two books comes from people remotely related to the protagonists: Nick, the narrator in The Great Gatsby, and the priest in An American Tragedy, both of whom are impotent to help. Both books provide no corrective value system, leaving a sense of moral void and uncertainty at the end. Up to their death, Clyde and Gatsby have not experienced any significant spiritual growth. For the most time of the court scene, Clyde lies in an attempt to escape punishment. His instinct for survival far exceeds certain remnants of guilt he feels toward Roberta, including the moment he confesses to the priest to avoid a death penalty through his intervention. He is literally pushed into the execution room, having none of the calm and resignation in facing death, which might be born out of a repented, cleared conscience. As for Gatsby, he meets his death without any foreknowledge: in his swimming pool, he lies naked in his vulnerability and immersed in the watery element of dream, which had forsaken him long ago without his awareness. The two minor characters, Nick and the priest, more than the central characters, experience a spiritual growth and acquire a negative knowledge that will disquiet them for a long time. Faulty vision or blindness is hinted in both books to suggest a dream that has gone awry: for example, the huge post for spectacles in the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby suggests Gatsby and other people’s faulty vision in their replacement of spiritual values with material values. In An American Tragedy, Clyde’s mother— cast in the image of blindness—in her preach suggests her total misunderstanding of her son’s tragedy. The remarkable similarities between An American Tragedy and The Great Gatsby in a way highlight their categorical difference: An American Tragedy as a naturalistic novel, The Great Gatsby as a romantic story set in the framework of realism—the strategy itself being a figure of displaced romance. This difference is reflected in many aspects of their writing. An important difference is their narrative strategy. An American Tragedy, like many other naturalist novels, uses omniscient, third-person narrator, a fact that makes us consider whether it is more than an accident. Omniscient narrator creates a potentially 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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diminishing, or “looking down,” effect on the characters, as that of an omniscient god toward a human being that cannot be omniscient. With this kind of narration, the relationship between the readers and writer and the characters in a naturalistic novel is potentially one of condescension. This puppeteering of characters is in accordance with the theoretic doctrine of naturalism: the clinical, almost surgical analysis the characters are subject to in a naturalist novel presupposes the superiority of the readers and writer. Moreover, according to the various determinism played in naturalism, characters are puppets subject to forces out of their control, no matter whether the forces are biological, sociological, or psychological. The Great Gatsby, on the other hand, is characterized by an oblique, screened narration—the third-person limited narration. Most part of Gatsby’s story is filtered through the uncomprehending consciousness of Nick, who is the stranger-neighbor to Gatsby and comes to know him only gradually by piecing together bits of gossip, some direct contact that happens later, and Gatsby’s boyhood diary and the biased account of his father. The limited narration creates a sense of mystery and wonder around the image of Gatsby. The element of mystery and wonder, characteristics of romanticism, fits well the romantic nature of Gatsby’s aspiration. The atmosphere of remoteness and enigma created through such narration also suggests Gatsby’s moral superiority—in spite of his criminal background. With his persistent hope and belief, Gatsby looms larger than the surrounding people who are so callous in their pleasure-seeking that they have lost all beliefs. Gatsby’s superiority over his guests is suggested in the party scene, in Nick’s perception of him, “I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased.”6 Compared with the romantic fixation at the core of Gatsby’s being, which makes him more or less a flawed romantic hero, Clyde, claimed by his lawyer as a “mental and moral coward,” is a volatile figure who seems to have no core, not even the negative virtue of evil—an unreflective character shaped by the current of external circumstances in an instantaneous fashion. This trait in Clyde is in keeping with the naturalist writers’ predilection for primitive, unreflective characters, who are more likely to be under the control of biological, instinctive drives, rather than reflective 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




characters. While Gatsby’s actions are driven by his incorruptible dream (in spite of the corrupt means of realizing the dream) in a corrupt world, Clyde’s crucial actions are all driven by fear: his running from the car accident, his plan of murdering Roberta and putting it into action, and his lies in court to avoid punishment. Thus, unlike Gatsby, who is running toward something, Clyde is always running away from something: a significant difference between a romantic character led by an ideal and a naturalistic character urged on by pressure. While Clyde is more concerned with the material aspect of the American Dream (and the embodiment of that dream is decidedly changeable: his quick drifting from one woman to another is proof), Gatsby is occupied with the spiritual ideal of the dream, hence the unchangeability of his embodiment of that dream. Unlike Clyde, Gatsby has no lust for material possessions, except as a means of winning back Daisy. He always views them through Daisy’s eyes. They have no value unless through the attention Daisy showers on them. While Clyde tries every means to escape punishment for his partly accidental killing of Roberta, Gatsby has nothing to do with the killing of Myrtle and yet heroically shoulders the responsibility for the real culprit, Daisy. When he is rejected by Daisy for the second time, he is already spiritually dead; his later physical death comes almost inconsequential, suggested in his complete unawareness in his death. The last difference between Clyde and Gatsby, between the writing styles of the two books is a disturbing one. In spite of the naturalist novelists’ usual absolution of their characters of moral responsibility, as they are determined by forces not within their control, Clyde is certainly shown to be disturbed by the sense of guilt—reflected in his feeling of guilt in not helping his mother enough, his sorry feeling for his sister, his great hesitancy in murdering Roberta, his certain scruples in lying in the court. However, Gatsby, in many ways a “better” character, is shown to be completely free from the sense of guilt—in spite of his criminal background, his helping of Daisy to escape from the scene of a car accident after a person is killed, and his lie about his past. Pondering over the question of guilt leads me to reconsider the categorical differences of romanticism, realism, and naturalism in terms of the psychological stratum of superego, ego, and id involved in the three categories of writing. The result of my consideration is that, in spite of the common belief that realism is the intermediate 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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zone between romanticism and naturalism, there is a curious similarity between romanticism and naturalism in regard to the part of psychological stratum that is involved, which may result in a certain similar style of writing not shared by realism. Romanticism, with its emphasis on imagination and passion, and naturalism, with its obsessive interest in man’s instinct, both involve more of the id (unconscious part) of the writer’s and the character’s psychology. Realism, in contrast, with its mimetic description of a man’s quotidian life, reveals more of the ego (conscious part) of the writer and character, which is our visible, social self—the product of the negotiation between the superego and the id. The difference between romanticism and naturalism is that romantic writing tends to sublimate the id, while naturalist writers do not engage in such sublimation or idealization. Jung and Freud’s theories on the source of a writer’s creativity favor that of romanticism. According to Jung, the source of a writer’s imagination is collective unconscious. Freud identifies a writer’s imagination with daydream, which is the sublimation of the writer’s Id (the unconscious, unfulfilled desire) to the place of superego (ideal, conscience). Gatsby is not conscious of guilt, because, endowed with a romantic temperament, his desire (Id) is already sublimated into his ideal and his conscience (superego). Since his fixation in Daisy has already become his one ideal, his one conscience, it is not possible for his conscience to be ruffled by the impropriety of the means to safeguard this ideal. In other words, his romantic sublimation of desire excludes any sense of guilt. Clyde, a naturalist character with his desire unsublimated, is more likely to be troubled by the sense of guilt. Certain unexpected propinquity of naturalistic writing and romantic writing, thus, can be traced to the same part of psyche that is involved in the writer’s creation. The work of the unconscious in the characters’ lives, and in the writer’s creative activity, affects the writer’s descriptive style. Although naturalism is generally believed to have a scientific, documentary, and detached style, we often see unexpectedly the same tendency toward distortion, surrealism, supernatural phenomena, and violent incidents in naturalistic writing as in romantic writing. Naturalistic novels, in their obsessive interest in man’s instinctive nature, often allow the primitive instinct to play out to their limit without much prohibition of the realistic novels, as realistic novels do not have such an exclusive 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




interest in man’s deep instinct. Naturalistic novels’ obsession with man’s deep instinct naturally results in their narrative interest in constructing violent incidents. The staging out of deep instincts in naturalism often makes the writers adopt, perhaps unconsciously, the technique of symbolism and expressionism to exteriorize man’s deep psyche. The mere wording of “Ghost” entitling Ibsen’s play lends to it a supernatural, cryptic atmosphere, matching the play’s secret, ominous suppression of the insidious nature of the illness at the center of the play, which ends explosively in the utter paralysis of the characters’ psyche. Strindberg’s Father7 begins with the promise of a somewhat uneasily poised family comedy but ends with a nightmarish death-feud between sexes, wherein Laura almost assumes the gnomic grimace of female oppression. Therese Raquin8 follows scrupulously the naturalistic prescriptions of hereditary and environmental determinism in the first part but takes a centrifugal departure from them with its increasingly extravagant writings of ghosts and delirium in the second part that recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s grotesque psychological tales. Therese and Laurence’s tormenting sense of guilt is exteriorized in supernatural phenomena. At the end, the suicide of the main characters and the motif of revenge achieve certain somber grandeur of the primitive dramas such as Eugene O’Neill’s symbolist plays: Emperor Jones and Desire under the Elm. Stephen Crane broadens the naturalistic technique by introducing the method of impressionist painting to create his nightmarish and hallucinatory street life.9 It is worthwhile to spend a bit more space on the relationship between naturalism and impressionist painting, since the main representative of naturalist writing, Emile Zola, begins as an art critic advocating impressionist painters. More important, the switch from the objective, realistic style of early impressionist painting to the later expressionistic, postimpressionistic paintings seem to furnish a mirror for the same switch in the naturalistic writers. The influence of impressionistic painting on literature has been rather diverse and contradictory, potentially moving toward the polarities of subjectivity and objectivity. Its shimmering, nebulous effect influences such highly subject modern writers as Virginia Woolf, with her “luminous halo” of fluid, myriad impressions while its rigorous observation influenced the technique of camera eye in Dos Passos’s America. The range of its possibility, to a certain 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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extent, is similar to that of naturalistic writings. On the one hand, its emphasis on the careful observation of nature has an intrinsic affinity with the scientific detachment of naturalistic writing’s observation of human nature, and its method of dissolving outline and solid objects into myriad, fragmented brushstrokes also reminds us of the naturalists’ method of analysis and decomposition. Just as impressionistic painters dissect the solid object into prismatic-colored atoms, naturalist writers dissect human beings into the function of chemical atoms. The brilliance of primal colors in impressionist painting also suggests certain raw vigor of primitive materials in the naturalist writing. On the other hand, the liberation of bright, primal colors from the drab, uniform tint of academic painting allows the postimpressionist painters, such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, to express their violent, subjective world. Eventually they depart from the naturalistic-realistic style of earlier impressionist painters and create their expressionistic and symbolist painting. The naturalist writers’ change of style, from their earlier period of writing to the later period, sometimes within the same book, is strikingly similar to what happened to impressionist painting. The naturalists’ scientific interest in the instinctive part of human psychology (Id), which is beyond man’s conscious control and is the source of both man’s destructive impulse and creative energy, unleashed a primitive energy (as what the bright, primal color has done) in their writing. This primitive energy is reflected in the somber grandeur of disasters and other extraordinary events in their works. Rooted in the description of man’s deep instinct, naturalistic novels exhibit a potentiality for highly distorted and extravagant style as what we may find in expressionistic, surrealistic, and symbolist art, which also draws on man’s deep psychology. Frank Norris, the American naturalistic novelist, in claiming Zola as a Romantic writer, might have uttered some truth: The naturalist takes no note of common people . . . Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death . . . everything is extraordinary, imaginative, grotesque even, with a vague lot of terror quivering throughout like the vibration of ominous and lowpitched diapason . . . It is all romantic . . . closely resembling the work of 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng



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The choppy strokes in impressionist painting influenced Crane’s collage of short, nervous vignettes in his Maggie, a Girl in the Street. He “fractured experience into disorderly sensations in a way that shatters the old moral orders of reward and punishment.”11 The jarring effect of his mock epic style, like the discordant harmony of impressionistic use of contrasting primal colors to create a unified atmosphere, creates the unified atmosphere of a nightmarish, hysterical and hallucinatory world. Like the effect of visual distortion in their painting, which creates the sense of evanescent changes and tireless movements, what he creates is also a dramatically distorted world. Among the naturalistic writers studied in this course, Dreiser is probably the most realistic one. Even so, in An American Tragedy, there are scenes written in much more surrealistic style than what can be found in such a romantic-realistic novel as The Great Gatsby. For example, the description of the insidious beauty of the swamp lake, where Clyde plans to murder Roberta, with its dark, sticky surface, black firs, soft mud, its mesmerizing death lure, becomes no less than a mirror of the dark mire of criminal subconscious. Clyde’s feeling of being magnetized by it suggests the irresistible pull of the subconscious. Psychological determinism is constituted of man’s inability to control his subconscious. In this sense, Freudian theory of Id is a psychological determinism commensurable to naturalism. Moreover, the hair-raising “kit-kat” cry of owls,12 externalizing Clyde’s dark crime, fear, and guilt, almost possesses a stage effect as those similar strategies in Symbolist drama, such as the drumbeat in Emperor Jones that externalizes the tragic hero’s primitive terror. The schizophrenic dialogue within Clyde when he plans for his murder is also highly dramatic. While the description of the lake in An American Tragedy is a symbolic mirror of Clyde’s subjection to his criminal subconscious, the party scene in The Great Gatsby, with its superimposition of the tawdry and the idealistic images, elevates—as characteristic of romantic writing—desire (Id) to the (superego) ideal. “there was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


the greatest of all modern romanticists, Hugo. We have the same huge dramas, the same enormous scenic effects, the same love of the extraordinary, the vast, the monstrous, and the tragic . . . Naturalism is a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism.10

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his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars . . .”13 The mingling of the tawdry lights with the ethereal star and of the vulgar guests with the fragile image of the moth all suggest the dual nature of Gatsby’s dream—the tragic purity of his aspiration and the crass means through which he tries to realize it. Such superimposition of contrastive images also suggests the juxtaposition of realism and romanticism in the book. The lyrical mood is framed in the harsh realism of social criticism—the mixed style itself suggests misplaced romanticism. While The Great Gatsby, in accordance with its romantic temperament, ends with an elegiac lyricism of Nick’s contemplation about the irrevocability of dream, An American tragedy ends, with naturalistic harshness, in an unsettling hint of vicious cycle. The novel ends its description of another boy in place of the childhood Clyde, suggesting as long as the social situation is not changed, the same tragedy might happen again and again. The last image of the boy disappearing into a door is ominously reminiscent of Clyde’s disappearance into the door of the execution room.







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E ’ C R I T U R E F E M I N I N E and the S emiotics of Ex ile

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his chapter examines the relationship between the semiotics of exile and female discourse. In the three pieces of female writings studied in this chapter—Susanna Bombal’s The Final Mist, Marguerite Duras’s “Moderato Cantibile,” and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye—the prohibited and marginalized female desire is suppressed into soliloquy: their whispering, unconscious, digressive style mirrors the language of vagrancy and depicts the acute feeling of self-exile in female experience. Its digression and hesitancy is reflected in a diachronically deferred narrative. Such disparate narrative, however, revolves implicitly around a hidden, unspeakable center—the prohibited desire whose force was intensified rather than assuaged by repression and silence and explodes finally into female mythos that fuses the subject and object, life and death, and life and art. Although there is certain amount of scholarship devoted to the above-mentioned three short stories, very little criticism explores the relationship between their writing and e’criture feminine as expounded by Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva. This chapter uses e’criture feminine as theoretic backdrop, and examines the relationship between the semiotics of exile and female discourse. In Coming to Writing and Other Essays, using Clarice Lispector as an example, Cixous emphasized that a poetics of passivity and waiting characterizes e’criture feminine. Such passivity and



Chapter 4


slowness is the way through which female writers experience love via the experience of death: the experience of death creates a selfemptied moment for the world to flow into their creation. Such flooding moment of creation, which receives into its embrace the estranged world, is also the experience of love. It bears a strong resemblance of Heidegger’s philosophy—”the essence of being is letting dwell.”1 About passivity, she said, “(Female writing is) a practice of the greatest passivity. At once a vacation and a technique. This mode of passivity is our way—really an active way—of getting to know things by letting ourselves be known by them. You don’t seek to master. To demonstrate, explain, grasp. And then to lock away in a strongbox. To pocket a part of the riches of the world. But rather to transmit: to make things loved by making them known.”2 About slowness and waiting she said, “The slow time that we need to approach, to let everything approach, life, death, time, the thing; all the slowness of time that life must take in order to give itself without hurting us too much, all the time we must put in to reach the thing, to other, to attain it without hurrying it, to come close to it” (Cixous, 62). In my view, the three female writers demonstrate a poetics of passivity and waiting as expounded by Cixous. Such a poetics of passivity and waiting is reflected in a diachronically deterred but synchronically amplified narrative. This synchronically amplified narrative is realized through the cross-section of multiple perspectives, polychronicity, fragmentation, the layered discourse of silence and voice, the verbal and nonverbal, and the indeterminacy and anarchy of style resulting from the enactment of writing as a process. Such semiotic flux depicts the quintessential experience of self-exile within the female protagonists as divided subjects. On the linguistic level, it is also alienated and distinct from the symbolic order of male discourse. In these three stories, these tendencies in e’criture feminine are embodied in the marginalized and suppressed soliloquy of female discourse in depicting the intertwined theme of desire and death. The fictional world is often projection of an interior landscape, evoked through a prohibiting desire pending on death—in its intensity and threat of punishment—which blurs the distinction between self and object, fiction and reality, silence and voice, being and void, and life and death and often culminates in a madness of both characters and language. The projection of self ends often in an erasure 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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B o mbal’s Misty Wor ld: Sel f - P ro jec tio n and Self-Ali enati on In the preface to Bombal’s New Islands and Other Stories, Borges acclaims Bombal as a wonderful Chilean writer. Borges’s praise of Bombal is not accidental, for they share deep affinities in spite of their apparent difference. On the surface, no two writers can be more unlike each other. Borges’s complete detachment renders his depiction of man and time on a cosmic scale: all humanity is cast in one face, and the passage of time is counted in eons, through which human emotions are depleted to a stoical acceptance of fated, cosmic exile. Bombal’s writing is feminine, sensuous, and intimate. However, these two writers at the depth share a similar philosophy, which recalls Berkeley and Hume: the world is our consciousness, and our perception is inevitably confused with projection, a confusion that derealizes both the subject and the world. In The Final Mist, the repressed feminine desire is projected into a fog-bound world, a world cast in an atmosphere of oppression and fascination, recalling the nature of a spellbound dream. The protagonist observes how the fog infiltrates the house, obliterates the colors and contours of furniture, clings to her body and smothers everything into nothingness.3 The misty world is the realm of the uncanny, familiar, and strange: with its viscous and amorphous humidity, it is oppressive with sensuous intimacy suggesting the engulfing enclosure of female sexuality amounting to aphasia; in its insidious invasion and paradoxical sense of solidified thickness, it is also the alien—the allpervading—itself an impenetrable wall of death that evacuates the realm of the living. To the female protagonist-narrator, it is both self and the other, a world of projection, and with its blotted-out scene, a world put under erasure. The stranger that the female protagonist had a brief, silent sexual encounter in her night walk is a phantom “materialized” out of the fog world, a projection of the female protagonist’s desire rather than a real existence. The phantasmal nature of the stranger is hinted every time in his several appearances, with a progressive accentuation of its fictitiousness. Its first appearance is in shadowy 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


of self (sometimes the projected world as well); the inundation of subjective experience ends in the undoing of the subject.


form and linked with the protagonist’s silhouette, suggesting the nature of its existence as the protagonist’s self-projection: Transformed into vapor by the fog, the white light of a street lamp bathes the protagonist’s hands in its pale beam, turning them ashen, spread her shadow on the grass. And it is then, suddenly, that she saw a shadow of a young man standing right in front of her (BB, 15). His second time of appearance is cast in the image of wind. The verb “materialize” and the suddenness of its appearance and disappearance hint at its immateriality: As the protagonist describes in a hallucinatory passage, the young man appears to her with wildflowing hair during a storm, as if born by the fierce wind to her. When the protagonist recognizes him, she faints at his feet. As she was unconscious, he holds her in his arms and carries her off on that windy afternoon (BB, 22). The third time, its apparitional nature is explicated when it is seen by the heroine just emerging from the “luminous depth” of the water, with its “cavern of silence,” an aquatic world that is the dreamy female element as well as the alien element in its wonder-lit strangeness of beauty: “I was surfacing from those luminous depth when I spied, far off through the mist, a closed carriage approaching noiseless as an apparition. Swaying as they strained, the horses swerved between the trees and came clopping over the dead leaves without a sound . . . Then, leaning back, he disappeared before my eyes . . . it had evaporated in the mist like a phantom” (BB, 24). In Coming to Writing, Cixous characterizes e’criture feminine in terms of water, which coincides with Bombal’s submarine world: “Sinking into you own night, being in touch with what comes out of my body as with the sea, accepting the anguish of submersion. Being of a body with the river all the way to the rapids rather than with the boat, exposing yourself to the danger— this is a feminine pleasure. Sea you return to the sea, and rhythm to rhythm” (Cixous, 57). The silent repetition of the protagonist’s fascinated gaze at her nude body in the mirror and in the lake through the eyes of the stranger, who is her self-projection, suggests the autoimmersion of a retrogressive, female narcissism, enhanced by the “I” narrative. Characters are cast as the heroine’s alter ego (e.g., Regina). External scenes are progressively transformed into the physicality of female space with the heroine’s increased fixation of her sexual fantasy. For example, the description of the bedroom is cast in 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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the image of the womb and mirror, suggesting the projection and retrogression of female narcissism, “The bedroom was submerged in a blue twilight in which the mirrors, shining like miniature lagoons. . . . With the light-colored silk curtains drawn, the room by daylight was like a great pink tent full of shadowy corners and rosy light, where hours passed without anguish or irritation, where at times, enclosed in its hazy, womb-like warmth, I could imagine a heat-dazed army marching on dusty roads . . .” (BB, 30). In the female writing, the womb image, with its umbilical connection between the mother and fetus, is the archetypal image of the prelingual realm of primal unity, between self and object, creator and created, silence and language, and birth and death. It is a unity that reflects the traits of e’criture feminine. It represents the primitive plenitude, a world of oneness between the mother and child that children have to be estranged from in the process of growing up. It strikes a singular similarity with Kristeva’s female semiotics.4 Such semiotics signifies the remnants of prelingual stage, constituted of sound, rhythm, the incoherent babbling of children, poetic language, and the language of neurotically disordered people. It’s both within and outside the symbolic order, just as how women themselves are situated. Female discourse represents the silence or incoherent utterance of the prelingual realm. She is the other and the outsider who is threatening the rational order of language. Kristeva also emphasizes the importance of female body, especially maternal body in the construction of female subjectivity. Motherhood includes the symbiosis of both female and male temperament. Womb is not only the space shared by the infant and the mother but also the container of all movement and contradictions. In Coming to Writing, Hélène Cixous also writes, “My cosmic womb, I work on the worldwide unconscious, I throw death out, it comes back, we begin again, I am pregnant with beginnings” (Cixous, 48). Such unity is exactly the characteristic of e’criture feminine: a self-completed and autonomous femininity. In Bombal’s many stories, such autonomous femininity not only shares a magical sympathy with nature but also becomes a microcosm of the selfcompleted fertility of nature. For example, in the same collection, she describes in the short story “Braids” that “a woman’s hair springs from the most profound and mysterious source, whence is born the first trembling seed of life—evolving there from to 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




struggle and grow among many entangling forces, thrusting through the vegetal surface into the air . . .” (BB, 67). As the womb image contains all contradictions, it also contains both life and death. The erasure of the border between life and death is hinted at in the story “The Unknown” in the same anthology (a story that recalls Borges’s “The Immortals”), in which a group of pirates revived in the fairy-tale, undersea world (with its womblike ambience) from their death slumber are trapped in terror in their living-in-death state. In both “The Unknown” and “The Final Mist,” as characterizing Bombal’s other writings, there is the strange mixture of fascination with the fairy-tale beauty of a world, which evokes the background of Anderson’s “Daughter of the Sea,” and the anxiety and terror of being trapped in a claustrophobic living-in-death state. The myth of Narcissus certainly converges Eros and death, fascination and dread. As Kristeva proclaims, female writings are by its nature self-erotic. The phantasmal stranger in The Final Mist is no other than the projection of the female protagonist’s unsocial self. Through such projection the protagonist returns to the primitive femininity, the “cosmic womb,” “worldwide unconscious,” and becomes the symbiotic body of female and male temperament. The motif of Narcissism suggests the unity of the male and the female in the maternal body. The dreamlike flow of the stream of conscious also reflects the prelingual characteristics of e’criture feminine. In The Final Mist, with the accretion of the heroine’s fantasy about her stranger-lover, the real world becomes progressively eroded by fiction, suggested in the changed relationship between her and her husband under the impact of her fantasy. The labyrinthine streets also dissolve into a ghostly echo of that already ghostly realm where she first encountered the stranger. So necessary has he become to her that her sudden suspicion of his fictitiousness evacuates her whole life and withdraws from her the impulse to live. However, even its fictitiousness is rendered with an air of indeterminacy, for it does have another witness besides the narrator, only he mysteriously dies in water. Polychronicity is hinted at in the text: the fixation of fantasy and the elongated time of waiting, projected in the luminous underwater world where “time stops” (BB, 24), is broken at the end of the story by the sudden acceleration of time in the real world, when the protagonist is shown as being already an old woman. The jarring effect 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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of the two times brings to the surface the phantomlike nature of life itself. It reflects the huge disparity between the lack in reality and the imaginary plenitude and underscores the essence of exile in female existence. Kristeva’s female semiotics is both within and outside symbolic order. The final separation between the protagonist’s social self and the stranger, who is the projection of her unsocial self, bespeaks the inevitability of self-exile. The cover illustration of Bombal’s book is fantastically suited to the implications of her writing, with its fairy-tale aura of female narcissism and of self-projection into the strangeness of the other: a female nude sitting in front of a mirror, which reflects back the image of a large bird. It symbolizes the separation between self and its mirror image. In Lacan and Feminist theory, the mirror stage signifies the earliest consciousness of separation between self and mother. It is the beginning of self-exile.

Duras’s Narrative Symphony The fragmented, minimalist language of Marguerite Duras is like a piece of music diminished through the separation of many doors. It embodies Kristeva’s prelingual characteristics in female semiotics and Cixous’s female poetics of passivity and waiting with the fusion of the self and the other. Although the dialogues between her characters are often cast in lyrical soliloquy, they take on the hypnotized passivity of interior monologue, like recitation, or slow deciphering of some forgotten images in the dark. What matters is not the speaker but the space and the way the echo of the sound spreads in the space. Even the sound doesn’t seem to generate from the speaker, but from somewhere undefinable in the space, which momentarily transverses the emptied vessel of the speaker, to another place unknown. In spite of the dramatic form of the dialogue and the passionate intensity of emotions within speakers, there is a strange effect of depersonalization. Characters are often unnamed. Dialogue are meshed together, with speakers often unspecified, so that there is an occasional difficulty in matching the speaker with the speech. Without specified speaker, words, or indistinct morphemes, flow in the space, like fumbling in the dark for a door that cannot be found, although it knows there must be an exterior. Ultimately, in the works of Marguerite Duras, as in those of Woolf, there is a sublimity, as in Nietzsche’s idea of Greek 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




tragedy, born out of the destruction of individuation: individuals are notes, in the chorus of a universalized motif—oftentimes in Woolf; in Duras, it is the destructive passion of love. Anna’s tragedy in Moderato Cantabile, at the moment of its happening, has already been cast in a past death, which becomes the object of her and Chauvin’s artistic creation, and in the music of Diabelli Sonatina, with its tragic modulation of absolute passion. It is the height of vision, when the world becomes a piece of art and each life is part of it. It is in Nietzsche’s words that “the world is an aesthetic phenomenon.” “Only as aesthetic phenomenon is the world eternally justified.”5 Woolf says the same thing, too, “From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern that we are connect with this; that the whole world is a work of art . . . we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”6 Duras’s “Moderato Cantabile” is a marvelously layered baroque of feminine narrative ranging from the musical, pictorial, fragmented, and verbal level to the level of silence; these infiltrate, counteract, or complement each other and form polyphonies of love, desire, death, and madness. Each level of expression is characterized by repetition, which, like musical variations, lends to the story a formal dignity of a ritual, beneath its apparent random snatches of scenes. At the pictorial level, the consummation of desire through death is staged through the recurrent, daily apocalyptic grandeur of the sunset, which has almost a stage effect suggesting the fusion of art and life and entrenches the whole story in its explosive color of blood: “the whole sky was tinted by the last rays of the sun;7 “The pink sky exploded in a final burst of color” (MD, 65). It is reflected in the people who are the passion of Anna’s life: in Chauvin, “while he was drinking the sun was reflected in his eyes with all the exactitude of chance” (MD, 86); in the child, whose yawning mouth gathers the light of the sunset. It is the visual accompaniment to the passionate tragedy of Diabelli Sonata, “The sonata flowed on . . . it built and built, borne by his indifferent clumsiness to the limits of its power. And as the music built, the light visibly declined. A huge peninsula of flaming clouds rose on the horizon, its frail and fleeting splendor compelling other thoughts” (MD, 97). 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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At the musical level, as the preface introduction to this book comments, “Moderato Cantabile suggests a tempo and lyrical mode that are in direct contradiction with the violence of the crime, with the fierce desire that engulfs Anne and Chauvin” (MD, xiii). This tempo, coupled with the passionate Diabelli Sonatana, hints at “the tragic modulation of absolute passion, which Marguerite Duras holds within the formal confines of melody and rhythm . . . Anna and Chauvin, like two musical instruments, must repeat and relive, in a kind of purity and eternity, the movement inherent in the initial design” (ibid.). At the fragmented, verbal level, it is Anna and Chauvin’s projection of their own inner desire into reconstructing the tragic passion of the murdered woman and her culprit lover. The fragmented sentences—repetitive, indeterminate, and hesitant, and hemmed in with silence—exemplify Duras’s characteristic style with its use of blanks and suggest an untouchable hidden center on which the verbal expression revolves. This hidden center is Anna and Chauvin’s decided desire to relive the passionate necessity of the dead. It provides an illustration of Jacobson’s two kinds of aphasia—both the similarity disorder and contiguity disorder. Anna and Chauvin tell the tale, in a hypnotized, passive manner, as if drawing on a deep fountain of forgotten memories of their own lives. These memories, in the teller’s vicarious living of them, become present as well as future, a fated repetition, which promises no exit. Thus, the compulsive repetition in the manner of telling reflects the characters’ fated, tragic life. The hypnotized, disjointed, lyrical dialogue between Anna and Chauvin, which gives a paradoxical impression of a fierce passion as well as a stylized rigidity and impersonality, suggests the use of mask in Greek tragedy. Evolving from a fictitious tale to be a reality of the tellers, it has a striking similarity to Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad. Grillet’s story is a duet of the man’s effort of seduction by appealing to the woman’s lost memory and the woman’s initial resistance and later compliance. Anna and Chauvin’s reconstruction of the murder story also takes on a vicariously erotic approach: the current of the man’s speech is often directed toward Anna herself, with a verbal penetration into her room, her garden and her naked self; the current of Anna’s speech directs more toward the murdered woman and her lover, which, however, plays out her own desire for a fierce passion that can only be fulfilled 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




in death. Thus in their telling act the projection of self ends in an erasure—and in fact, violent annihilation—of self. As Cixous said, “Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time, work, desire inscribe in my body” (Cixous, 52). Anna’s desire, at the beginning, is always already a text inscribed in the constructed story of the murdering lover. The erasure and annihilation of the self happens not in the derealizing fog of Bombal’s story, but in the blinding light of universal, tragic passion whose only equivalent is found in the annihilating power of death. Their often disjointed dialogue, therefore, has a hidden confluence in their prohibited desire for each other, and this implicit desire is the hidden center of their dialogue, the discourse of silence. The baroque symphony of Duras’s narrative embodies Kristeva’s female semiotics, including both the self within the symbolic order (Anna’s restrained social self) and the self outside the symbolic order (the self projected into the murdered lover). Their final separation through the latter’s symbolic death suggests the inevitability of self-exile. Anna and Chauvin’s imaginative reconstruction, analogous to the creative activity of the author, suggests the erotic aspect of writing, which is a transgressive pleasure derived from the blurred distinction between reality and fiction and the subtle interpenetration of different layers of narrative. The apparent gaps and hidden reverberation between different natures of narrative, for example, between the verbal and nonverbal, pictorial and musical, is the pregnant silence in the interdit. As the reality of the murder splinters into fiction by becoming the object of Anna and Chauvin’s imaginative construction, the fictitious tale about others becomes the tellers’ reality, culminating in Chauvin’s speech “I wish you were dead” and Anna’s statement, “I am,” which swirls her into an identity with the murdered woman in her tale. The vicarious telling of Anna and Chauvin, which suggests the nature of the writer’s creative activity itself, allows the story to take on a self-reflexive quality of metafiction. The characters’ retelling and reconstruction of memory becomes an extended metaphor of the writers’ creative activity, which converges Eros and death. Writing is erotic because of the pleasure derived from the transgressive nature between fiction and life inherent in the creativity— in the stripping down of the writer’s self, giving away to the other, allowing love to invade and occupy, as Cixous describes: “You’re 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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detachment. You’re beyond lack: But you wander stripped down, undefined, at the mercy of the Other. And if Love comes along, it can find in you the unlimited space, the place without end that is necessary and favorable to it. Only when you’re lost can love find itself in you without losing its way” (Cixous 39). Such pleasure comes not only from the writer’s vicarious living of the characters’ passion but also, in the case of Duras, from writing, which transgresses the different natures of discourse—in her alliance of language and silence, the spoken and the unspeakable. Writing is death not only because the writer die vicariously with her characters but also because the finish of a novel marks an accomplishment, which provides a catharsis as intense as death, as the gratification of a sexual act, that simultaneously fulfils and erases the self. As Cixous said, “You must have been loved by death to be born and move on to writing. The condition on which beginning to write becomes necessary—and—possible: losing everything, having once lost everything. Writing—begins, without you, without I, without law, without knowing, without light, without hope, without bonds” (Cixous, 38). Thus, writing is a projection as well as an erasure of the writer’s individual identity, in an entwined desire and death, through which individual merges into the universal. Ultimately, as in Eastern religion, the Creator becomes the created, becomes the world. In this story, Anna and Chauvin, during their construction of the story about others (a metaphor of writer’s creativity), achieve at once self-annihilation and self fulfillment. They become a kind of medium, existing only as a way of transmission. Their bodies and language turned into pure musical instruments, strung into sound by the fingers of the world.

Morr ison’s Narrative of Ma dness in Blues and Jazz In both Bombal and Duras, the projection of the self under the impetus of desire for the other effects an erasure of self. Such erasure is expressed through the figure of death. In their novels, death is often an alliance with desire rather than an antithesis to desire. In such process, self projects the other and at the same time submits itself to the gaze of the other, thus it effects a self-dispossession of its own nature. Often this process derealizes both self and the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




other, subject and the world. In The Final Mist, the narrator’s narcissistic gaze at her self is through the eyes of the stranger, who is her projection. She has become so much the object of his gaze that the realization of his fictitiousness naturally derealizes herself. In Duras’ss Monderato Cantabile, Anna and Chauvin project their own emotions into constructing the murder story, resulting in being robbed of selfidentity as they become one with the tragic passions of the characters in their tale. It doesn’t end in a fade-out as in The Final Mist but ends in an apocalyptic passion eventuating in Anna’s vicarious death. The Bluest Eye diagnoses the disastrous effect of projection. Pecola projects her desire to get rid of her “ugliness” and misfortune through a pair of blue eyes, and she surrenders herself totally to its gaze, which ends in a complete self-denial and erasure of her own identity, whose natural outcome is madness. In spite of its elaborately contrived narrative form, this novel has a simple consistency in the choice of characters to serve as the thematic foil of warped racial identity to Pecola: Cholly’s projection of his insulted self into a loathing of his first girlfriend and his wife and Mrs. Cholly’s projection of her self-hatred into her indifference to her daughter, and her hatred of her husband. Geraldine, the mulatto, projects her desire to escape the black blood in herself into her loathing of blacks such as Pecola. The violence of the father and the indifference of the mother, racial discrimination and self-loathe of the black people force Pecola into an exile. Such exile, at the deepest level, is self-exile: she is a divided subject and her schizophrenic babble underscores the violence of the self assimilated by symbolic order of the father exerted on the self outside the symbolic order. Such violence is symbolized in the incestuous rape of the father. Layered discourse characterizing e’criture feminine is reflected in the juxtaposition of the white text of happy, middle-class life in the primer, with the reality of black life. The latter subverts and deconstructs the former. The novel opens with the American primer “Dick and Jane.” It is repeated three times. The first time it is in normal print, with punctuation, large and small letter cases, and spaces between the words. The second time the pace quickens: punctuation is taken out and it becomes a list of words in the style of stream of consciousness. The third time, not only the punctuation but also all the spaces between words are removed. A complete, coherent text of Dick and Jane collapses into urgent, incoherent babbling. The violence and madness of language is found in the typographically 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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contracted text of the primer, hinting at an atmosphere of urgency in the symbol of cultural rape (the invasion of space), as well as Pecola’s mind spinning into madness. When the concise, ordered sentences become more and more disordered and meaningless, we can feel the strong, negative impact white culture exerted on black people. Such an impact describes Pecola’s life: under the effect of white culture and its aesthetic value, Pecola lost her own subjectivity. Her self was totally replaced by the other, with the natural outcome of madness. Since all the other characters escape or erase themselves by projecting what they believe as the inferior part of themselves into the other, and Pecola, being the most helpless one, isn’t able to effect an outlet through projection, the unreleased other is clamped inside and results in self-splitting and madness. In Bombal and Duras’s books, the central event is often erased and suggested in silence through layered discourse. In Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the central character, Pecola, is not granted any narrative voice. Her story is deflected through the narration of Claudia, Paula, and the omniscient narrator. When at last her voice emerges belatedly, it takes the form of the interior monologue of schizophrenia. The language is broken and illogical—dream expression of the subconscious, very much in line with Kristeva’s prelingual characteristics in female semiotics. At this time, she has totally denied her self-identity as a black girl. The identity of the other replaced the self in complete madness. It realizes, in a negative sense, Cixous’s female poetics of passivity and waiting, with the fusion of the self and the other, sound and silence (interior monologue), life and death (death-in-living existence—madness). According to Morrison, this cushioned narrative is learned from Faulkner as well as from the blues and jazz. Blues is a slow, melancholy music describing the black people’s lives—their poverty, misery, loneliness, despair, and weakness under racial persecution. In the blues, the tragic is mediated through the trivial and the comic. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola’s friend, Claudia, said she was singing blues when she told Pecola’s story. The narrative of Bluest Eye also takes on the slow and melancholic tune of blues—which coincide with Cixous’s female poetics of slowness and waiting—while at the same time, mediate the tragic through the comic by choosing as narrator the innocent, half comprehending Claudia. In jazz, it always keeps on the edge of a vortex, with something underneath that is incomplete. What Morrison wants to create is the same effect of “something held 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




in reserve” and “there is always something open.” As she said, “If the action is violent, the language cannot be.” The use of the innocent narrator (Claudia) in the book, through her incomprehension, helps to foreground the trivial and the comic, thus mediates the violence of the central event—the incestuous rape. The slowness and marginality of blues and jazz music symbolizes the slow and delayed narrative of Bluest Eye. It embodies Cixous’s female poetics of passivity and waiting, which is a means of cushioning hurt and deviating stimulation in the self-revelation of the characters. The self-projective quality of e’criture feminine is an expression of desire, which, in either its highest form of fulfillment or its lowest form of destruction, is allied to death. Death is also the ever-present threat of punishment in the marginalized expression of prohibited female desire—so marginalized that it can only become the fragmented and silenced speech of soliloquy. In all the stories, characters have been through the most acute form of self-exile, an exile mirrored in the language of vagrancy: slow, digressive, unconscious, and whispering. Such language is realized in a diachronically deferred and synchronically amplified narrative that is composed of the cross-section of multiple perspectives, polychronicity, fragmentation, the layered discourse of silence and voice, the verbal and nonverbal, and the indeterminacy and anarchy of style resulting from the enactment of writing as a process. This language of exile, however, even within the solitude of its own expression, with entwined death and desire, is also the erasure and counteraction to the subjectivity of self-projection. The Eros and death inherent in the passion of writing, especially in women writers, although arising from an imprisoned self, paradoxically end in allowing them to transcend the limitation of feminine self and achieve a universal vision. For Bombal, it is the extension of individual, feminine narcissism to the mythos of femininity: a femininity that is in magic sympathy with the primitive fertility of nature. For Duras, it is the universal and fierce passion that turns individuals into part of a large piece of art—which is the world itself. In Morrison, it is in the realm of madness in which desire, death, love, and repulsion converge. The traceable projection of these women writers’ own lives in those of their female protagonists suggests that the Eros—the passion of writing—is rewarded by its nature of expiation: the writers, precisely through the vicarious death of the characters, are able to survive.



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Cosmic Exile and the Fourth Dimension in Escher, Borges, and Prou st

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his chapter studies the relationship between exile and time. The two writers studied in this chapter, Jorge Luis Borges and Marcel Proust, view man as a banished spirit in the monstrous chaos of infinity and depict man’s acute feeling of being exiled from his memory, respectively. Both writers are preoccupied by a cosmic exile in time that is ultimately redeemed by art—their construction of the fourth dimension in their literary creation can find analogy in the magic mirrors of M. C. Escher’s painting. The concept of the fourth dimension has been attracting contemplation from diverse directions like a powerful magnet: from the meditation of the philosophers and mystics to the calculation of physicists and mathematicians. Its overspreading waves change our view of time, of our mode of existence, knowledge, language, philosophy, science, and art. Science fiction plays an important role in popularizing the concept of fourth dimension. Science fiction writer E. A. Abbot’s Flatland, through the narrative of Square—a flatland commoner’s experience in the land of no dimension, lineland, flatland, and space—gives a humorous account of the hierarchical spatial consciousness.1 In this book, the basic method of analogy in studying the fourth dimension in relation to our third-dimensional world through the relation of the third to the second (flatland) can be 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Chapter 5


traced back to Plato’s illustration of the world of ideas by using the metaphor of cave and shadows. The methodology of analogy is adopted by the later fourth dimension philosophers such as Charles Hinton and P. D. Ouspensky, with the former depending more on geometrical models and the latter on the analysis of the psychological condition of receptivity. Another science fiction writer, H. G. Wells, unlike Abbot who treats the fourth dimension as a spatial concept, regards time as the fourth dimension. His Time Machine envisions that people can travel in time as much as in space.2 However, since according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity notes that traveling back in time requires a speed surpassing the light speed, and yet it is impossible to surpass the light speed,3 Wells’s time travel remains in the realm of speculation or consciousness except in the field of particle physics. The first true hyperspace philosopher is Charles Hinton. The important basis of his theory is Immanuel Kant’s identification of space and time as the condition of human perception and the consequent disparity between the phenomenal world of the thing-asperceived and the noumenal world of the thing-in-itself. Instead of dismissing our space sense as limitation, however, Hinton tries to educate and improve our space sense to make it the vehicle of perceiving higher reality. According to him, the root of our limited space sense is in “self-element,” which can be achieved through careful, selfless study of an arrangement of objects. By means of his model of colored cubes, Hinton tries to visualize his fourdimensional hypercube by configuring the sections that would be formed when the tesseract passes through three-dimensional space.4 Thus, Hinton’s concept of fourth dimension, which is different from that of Wells, is not time alone but space connected with time experience. Hinton’s time-oriented vision of a fourth dimensional body inspires the cubist artists’ attempt to give an all dimensional description of object through combined views of a moving three dimensional object caught at different moments. In fact, the strange blend of mystical idealism and mathematical conception of the world characterizing the cubists is a direct lineage of Hinton. By associating the fourth dimension with the Platonic ideal and Kant’s “thing-in-itself,” Hinton lends an idealist touch to hyperspace philosophy as the absence of the fourth dimension in our normal perception flaws our image of the true reality and 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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limits us to a three dimensional existence. The cubists believe that pure geometry reflects the basic architecture of the universe, as in rational learning, mathematics is considered the most abstract, speculative, and ethereal. Hinton’s concept of a higher reality provides the cubists rationale for dislocating the world of appearances and combining the dislocated elements into a new order.5 The mystical elements in the essence of cubism later develop into the illogical collage of realistic and dream space as dreams, in place of geometry, are recognized as providing possible access to higher reality. The most frequent kind of deformation or distortion in cubist painting was to break up a figure into geometrical facets, a technique directly related to the cubists’ rejection of perspective in favor of multiple viewpoints. Departing from the tradition of seizing natural objects from single angle under the law of perspective, the cubists shift the viewpoint of the object to different positions, at the same time dividing it into many fragments seen from various angles and rearranging these fragments. In Guillaume Apollinaire’s words, cubist painting “represents the immensity of space externalizing itself in all directions and at any given moments.” The multiple perspective and fragmentation in cubist painting finds its literary parallel in both poetry and novels. In poetry, it is reflected in the cubelike visual poetry of E. E. Cummings, the continuous changing perspective in William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,”6 Wallace Stevens’s obsession with multiple perspective that puts representation itself into question in poems such as “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “Man with the Blue Guitar,” and the collage of the fragments of different languages in T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” and Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” with their multiple voices and temporal layers. In novels, it is reflected in the multiple, fragmented narration of the novels by William Faulkner, Ford Maddox Ford, and Claude Simon. Dislocation of chronology and plot, split personality of characters, and multiple unstable narrative perspectives characterize such novels. Mental images, stripped of their original spatiotemporal coordinates, are shaped by and connected with other images in a baroque fiction. In the proliferating language of Faulkner and Simon, a single long sentence’s words branch in a variety of directions, linking diverse subjects and moments. Since hypercube in Hinton’s mathematic conception is the multiplication of three-dimensional cube in its rotation, repeated geometric pattern is abundant in cubist 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Cosmic Exile and the Fourth Dimension


painting. The syntax of repetition with small variation also characterizes the style of cubist writers such as Gertrude Stein. Metaphysical repetition is found in Borges’s concept of cyclic time. In Borges’s works, history mocks the human desire for progress. The repetition of history blurs the reality of any specific event or person, as it comes to mirror countless similar occurrences and people. Such repetition engenders a feeling of nihilism, oblivion, or labyrinthine entrapment. Similar kind of recurrence also evokes a dreamlike paralysis in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film Last Year in Marienbad. While Hinton’s approach is mathematical and logical, Ouspensky starts from the same approach but leans toward the psychological in his studies of consciousness until it is intimately linked with the Eastern religion and affirms an ultimate antilogic access to higher reality.7 Through the two dimensional analogy, which is popularized by Abbot’s Flatland, Ouspensky arrives at the conclusion that time, motion, and matter as we perceive them in the third dimension are illusory.8 Time, connected with motion, is our imperfect sense of space and will recede as our spatial understanding enlarges. The three-dimensional world is merely an imaginary section of a four-dimensional universe in which time exists spatially. The motion of our three-dimensional world, including the biological motion of birth, life, and death is only the illusory appearance of a unified, immobile, and constant reality. Higher intuition, which enables us to discern the four-dimensional world of noumenon, requires a sensitivity and a quality of emotion Ouspensky saw most clearly in artists and mystics. The mystic religious emotion of cosmic consciousness is also the highest manifestation of art. According to Ouspensky, the logic of infinity is incommensurate with the three-dimensional logic: “A is both A and not A,” and “everything is all.”9 Ouspensky’s real contribution is his redefinition of time through space. Since the flowing of time is illusion, the fourth dimension is time translated into space wherein past, present, and future exist simultaneously and in eternity. Ouspensky links his concept of the simultaneous time with the “eternal now” in Indian philosophy. His conception of the immobile and constant reality finds manifestations in Eliot’s searching for the still point wherein past, present, and future converge; in Faulkner’s abundant images of stasis, which transforms historical actions into either entrapping 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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or enduring states; in Stein’s frequent use of present participles, which suggests a continuous present; in Simon’s reference to film and painting, which stills action into isolated, static pictures; and in Grillet’s constant use of mathematic description to create the freezing frame effect.10 Ouspensky’s simultaneous time converged in a static reality is concurrent with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. According to Einstein, there is no absolute time in the universe—there is only the time associated with the individual observer, and that time depends on their state of motion relative to each other. Past, present, and future are relative terms. Space and time are inseparably linked in a continuum, a static space-time in which events do not unfold in time but exist completely. Synchronic freedom from space and time finds its expression in Carl Jung’s “collective unconsciousness”11 and Yeats’s “great memory”12 and underscores the moments of epiphany in the streamof-consciousness novels with their creative recollection of past. In these moments, the encountering of past and present creates a fusion transcending both realm of times and offers an intimation of timeless. Therefore, the contemplation of the fourth dimension involves diverse realms of knowledge. Our awareness of a higher reality, while it potentially dwarfs our three-dimensional world, also places us in a vantage point of observance. Perhaps the mixed feelings of awe and joy of discovery are comparable to someone standing on the edge of a precipice with the abyss beneath, threatening to swallow his or her petty existence beyond recall, and an expansion of sky above. With this theoretical backdrop in mind, in the following, I will compare three seemingly unrelated modern creators in the same context of the fourth dimension: the artist M. C. Escher and the fiction writers Louis Borges and Marcel Proust. Beneath Escher’s ingeniously constructed geometrical pattern, there is a childlike naiveté and awe in the kind of delight it evokes through its bazaar animals and dizzy optical delusion that interweave the different hierarchies of primitive existence into one. It is a retrogressive, exotic imagination—amoral as the child’s world— that weaves people in strange lands, imaginary animals, winged angels, and bat-devils into one tapestry, a reversible motif. It is a primitive cosmos in which day and night, sky and earth, imaged mythologically in migratory birds of black and white, revolve seamlessly into each other as on an uninhabited planet, where 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




time is not divided artificially into mechanical compartments. It is the primordial matter of grayness out of which the trajectory of ancient animals’ evolution hints in a single plane the layered fossil of geological eons. It is also that vertiginous surface where objects and its water reflection touch, with equal reality, like endearing cheeks: The withered, weightless leaves embrace the watery face of delusion, while the reflection of ramifying branches extends its fine arteries into the deep life of the autumn. It is also the cloud of birds, as they centripetally become denser and merge into the aboriginal center of energy—the sun. Or, it is the spirit of creation strives, through millions of years, out of the phlegmatic darkness residing in fish, to emerge into the daylight freedom of birds. Through his use of double contour, division of surface, inverted image, imagistic metamorphosis and approach to infinity, the painter Escher tries to capture the wonder of creation emerging from its vortex to the transmogrification of ten thousand things. His use of binary contrast and their magical merging give rise to a transcendent vision encompassing the creative power itself. Its infinite proliferation of forms reminds us of the ancient emblem of Taoism, yin and yang: enclosed in the circle of Tai Ji, this antithetical pair, in their mobile exchange, gives birth to manifold Nature. Therefore, despite his uniform division of surface, his geometric symmetry and regularity, Escher’s excessive intellectuality does not obliterate, but rather promote, his lyrical quality. Technically, Escher often forces the viewer to experience different spatial dimension at the same time. He uses regular division of planes, inspired by Moorish mosaic, which was composed of regular repetitions of geometric figures that could in principle continue into infinity to denote the milepost of infinity. He also uses mirror images to confuse the distinction between reality and illusion; double contour to confuse foreground and background figures; and the contrast of black/white, day/night, latency/manifest, and fuzzy/sharp into a self-enclosed yet infinite circulation.13 Similar combination of mathematical precision and delusive effect of fantasy is found in Borges. While what charges Escher’s painting is a childlike wonder that suffuses Borges’s stories is the exhaustion of the old burdened with infinity. Borges is well aware that the presence of infinity reduces everything into unreality, but he is possessed by the obsession of creating a world of such coherent phantasmagorias that the reader doubts the very reality on 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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which he leans. His world is the ciphered cosmos whose secret key cannot be found, personality dissolved into pantheism, time delusory. Matter disappears into reflection, dreams and images. Borges’s expression of infinity includes the vast spatial and temporal reaches, the interminable multiplication, and the endless path (lineal or cyclical), which weaves into a labyrinth: “A single man is all men. . . . I am god, hero, philosopher, devil, and world, which is a tiring way of saying that I do not exist . . . I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses: shortly, I shall be everyone. I shall be dead.”14 The nihilistic consequence of pantheism in Oriental belief, together with George Berkeley and David Hume’s meditation, which nullifies not only the objective existence but also the personality of the subject, forms Borges’s vision of man as a banished spirit in the monstrous chaos of infinity, a vision opposed to Ouspensky’s blissful vision of cosmic consciousness. “He realized that he was the same as others, that is, that he was no one or at best, a confused cries persisting in time and being exhausted in space.”15 Borges’s world is one of infinite multiplications—duplicating mirrors, innumerable hexagonal galleries, vast and abysmal ventilation shafts, circular stairs that unwind ceaselessly, labyrinthine construction of repeated galleries—all bearing the anguishing aspects of infinity in which men are like blind sleepwalkers encountering their annihilating fate. “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertium” is about a kingdom discovered through a mirror and an encyclopedia.16Everything in it is duplicated. Their language is devoid of substantive that denotes the stable existence of objects, which are summed up in redundant adjectives suggesting that they exist only in people’s perception. The fiction of this world gradually contaminates the reality of our world. In “The Garden of Forking Path,” Yu Tsun is lost in the labyrinth of his destiny. While a labyrinth of time and space surrounds the protagonist, he sees himself immersed in a world where images move and multiply endlessly.17 The labyrinth indicates not only the multiplicity of human destinies but also a cyclic novel, thus bringing text and life into one. As in the “Library of Babel,” the world is a book, and the book is the world.18 In “The Circular Ruins,” the dreamer discovers himself as the dream.19 Borges’s novel is often structured as one unreality enclosed in another unreality. “The Theme of Traitor 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




and the Hero” plays on the theme of the world as a theatre and reverses the normal relationship of fiction and reality by submitting reality to a piece of fiction.20 Hero is also the traitor, just as in “The Circular Ruins,” the dreamer is also the dreamed,21 or in “Death and the Compass,” the detective is the deceived, the hunter the hunted, the victim is the prey of his own plot.22 In Borges, as in Escher’s painting, every process is reversible, as in the mirror. Borges’s infinity is also expressed in infinite postponement and cyclical time. In “The Secret Miracle” the few seconds before execution is extended to a year.23 The exitless labyrinth in which man wanders erringly finally becomes the double symbol of the infinite and the chaos. The “Library of Babel” is a labyrinth, which alludes to the infinite. Through its corridors and stacks Men will travel, vainly searching for their justification. In “The House of Asterion,” Minotaur is imprisoned in his labyrinth that extends up to the whole world.24 The message from God Minotaur might be waiting for, as suggested in the text, is his own face, suggesting man’s self-imprisonment. Borges dismantles the reality of time by various means, going upstream against the temporal flow; exhausting the combinations of past, present, and future; modifying the past; rotating on the interminable wheel of cyclical time; diverting the same cyclical time, as well as subdividing it infinitely, detaining it, and negating it; and trying different hypotheses of eternity. All these tend to denote that time is a mental process. While Borges merges the split in the two American writers he likes—Edgar Allan Poe’s rational analytics (his detective stories) and passionate phantasmagoria (his ghost stories), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s self-imprisonment in a dream life and his moral didacticism—in other words, the intellectual and imaginative aspects, Proust is a resolute anti-intellectual impressionist: “Impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist.” “The ideas formed by pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen.”25 The disparate impressions in Proust’s novel are analogous to the vignettes of color in an impressionist painting, whose pattern cannot be recognized unless through certain distance (of time in Proust’s case). Also, like impressionist paintings, there is no hard-lined contour around the objects Proust describes; everything merges into the other, and the whole book is linked together through subliminal connections on a metaphorical level. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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At the beginning of overture, the writer is a self-exiled artist secluded in his own house, totally shut off from the outside world. In his aberrant daily routine, the distinction between dreaming and waking state, books and reader are blurred. Proust describes acutely man’s feeling of exile in time, which robs man of his memory. Only through involuntary memory and artistic creation can man recapture time and find a cosmic bliss that redeems his feeling of exile in time. One basic method of Proust in capturing the effect of involuntary memory is superimposition, which is symbolized in a chain of related metaphors—magic lantern, stain glass window, tapestry of Esther, flowers, the church of Combray, steeples, dream, Vinteuil Sonata.26 The mechanism of the magic lantern projection is essentially the superimposition of the past scene (depicted on the lantern) on the present reality (of the room). The transparent body of Golo overcomes all material obstacles by embodying itself in the room in a phantasmagoria image that is different from the two sources that engender it.27 It implies the superimposition of two realities that have the effect of vanquishing the contingency of material reality and producing a new transcendent vision, which is an emblem of the Bergsonian fusion of past and present moments that transcends both. Both the stained-glass window and tapestry of Esther have the similar metamorphosis as the magic lantern. The sunlight through the predominantly blue-toned stained glass engenders a rare and transient fire that shakes and waves in a flaming fantastic shower. Through the light, the tapestry’s colors have melted into one another to add expression, light, and relief to the pictures. All these superimpositions have a dreamlike movement. Dream itself speeds up time and merges scenes at different times or diverse scenes in normal discourse into one inexplicable picture. As to the little Madeline scene, the dried lime flowers that blossom in the tea emblemize the miraculous process of involuntary recollection in which the whole memory of Combray “blossoms” into being.28 The steeple in Combray attaches to itself the deposited composite of all steeples Proust has seen, so does the church. The merging of three steeples into one entity symbolizes graphically the ultimate merging of the multiple recurring themes into one structure—a cathedral novel. The text weaves a labyrinth of metaphorical cross-references that ultimately merge into one basic figure. Syntactically, the reader experiences time travel in one sentence: the text often combines into one long sentence the anticipatory 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng




and retrospective time, which unmoors readers from the habitual temporal-spatial axis. In the water lily description, the sentences travel within two pages through Dante’s four levels of meaning: literal, figurative, moral, and allegorical.29 From the analogy of wretched lives chained to habit, the water lily becomes the suffering ghosts in Dante’s poem and then becomes a vision of transcendence that merges change with harmony. Objects in Proust’s novel are either fossil of geological eras or animistic ones that hold in captivation the soul of the departed. The base of the church of Combray is time drenched and softened through centuries, so that they “exist in a four-dimension.”30 The human body itself has such a deep stratification of prehistoric memories that in the trance of dream, we return to the state of cave dwellers. The memories of the positions of his limbs during his many sleeps bring to his mind all the rooms the writer once slept in, and the memories of these rooms evoke his recollection of the people whom he had known in these rooms. Everything reflects the other and merges into a cosmic oneness, like the unified vision of sky and water when the water-garden of lilies reflects the blossom of sunset in the sky. Even in the nature of love, in the lover-viewer’s eye, a woman as the object of desire is not separated from the beauty of scenes, so that sexual love culminates in a universal passion for beauty in which the specific object of desire is lost. Proust’s nascent love for Gilbert is evoked by a field of hawthorn flowers, an event reverberating Swann’s emerging passion for Odette evoked by the music—Vinteuil Sonata. These two events are subtly brought into mirror reflection through the description that compares the distribution of the flowers to certain intervals in music. In the same way, Mr. Vinteuil’s consuming love for his infamous daughter, Odette, echoes Swann’s tormenting passion for her, the marriage with whom makes him a social outcast. The disparity between external appearance and inside reality is played through Mr. Legrandin and Miss Vinteuil. Thus, not only do images (i.e., events or situations) repeat themselves in the different contexts of the novel, but also different images are woven into an intricate web through the subliminal connection of their metaphorical implication. The implication is the effect of memory, the unification of dissimilar realities into an extemporal vision. In the complex web of mirror reflection, each image, character, and event functions as a sounding board 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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that gathers within itself a larger volume of reverberation. The extemporal vision stemming from this reverberation is the joy that transcends the suffering attached to their material contingency of time and space. The real life, according to Proust, is one lived in the literature, because only literature allows us this revision and recapturing of the lost time. And time has to be lost to be really possessed. The lost paradise is the only paradise. In summary, Borges, Escher, and Proust share the same selfreflective circulation of infinity as defined by the concept of the fourth dimension through which binary contrast are merged into a larger being. Both Proust and Borges recorded man as a banished spirit in time: a cosmic exile, however, that is redeemed by art and attains to a kind of pantheism—no matter it is the feeling of bliss in Proust or oriental nihilism in Borges.







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Artist in Ex ile D ivinely and D emo niaca lly Po ssessed

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his chapter examines the prototype of the artist in exile. It studies the relationship between artistic creativity and exile and how the semiotics of exile is reflected in the artistic form. E. T. A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” feature the protagonists as failed and exiled artists—exiled in the romantic sense of being alienated from the crowd due to their passionate obsession and eccentricity and in the antiromantic sense of being shut out ultimately from the romantic ideal of art. The semiotics of exile is reflected in the text of disparity—in its use of irony, the grotesque, and fragmentation and in the divided nature of the artist as both divinely and demoniacally possessed. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also depicts the protagonist—Stephen Daedalus—as an exiled artist. His self-exile from Ireland and its religion and politics is premise for his artistic creation. The semiotics of exile is reflected in its art of disparity—an image-charged narrative flow that may find analogy in the poetics of French symbolist poetry—in the medley of dissimilar images through symbolic reverberations, and in the divided nature of his muse in his poetry: the villanelle temptress who is both divine and demoniac.



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E. T. A. Hoffman’s two short stories, “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Kerespel,” in my view, reveal him as an antiromanticist rather than a representative of German romanticism—as he is traditionally labeled. Despite the apparent contrast of the hideously distorted vision of the first story and the thwarted beauty and pathos of the second, they betray unexpected similarity at close examination: the protagonists of both stories, Nathanael and Krespel, may be seen in the light of failed and exiled artists—artists banished from the ordinary crowd in the romantic sense in their eccentricity and passionate obsession, as well as in the antiromantic sense, as banished ultimately from the romantic ideal of art. The artist-protagonist’s self-split and the dichotomy of romantic art are projected into feminine antithesis—Klara/Olympia in “Der Sandmann,” Angela/Antonia in “Rat Krespel.” Both stories gravitate around the arresting metaphor of a woman as consummate artifice and the male protagonists’ worship and dismemberment of this artifice. These women, typological rather than individual, function as the passive reflection of the male protagonists’ obsession with their art and are at once unapproachable ideals and manipulated puppets to the protagonists. Both stories, with different emphasis, are cast in the area of propinquity between tragedy and grotesque. The motif of dismemberment, on physical and textual level, is the disturbing conundrum of both stories. This book will examine the nature of three pervasive elements functioning in these stories: Hoffman’s unique modes of irony, grotesque and fragmentation seen in the light of their confluence and departure from the pivotal, counterpart concepts in Schlegel’s romantic poetics. Both confluence and departure lend a self-reflexivity to Hoffman’s stories, which at once mirror and parody romantic pathos. Having all of Schlegel’s romantic premises, Hoffman’s departure dissolves them from inside. This book will also explore in these two stories how Hoffman’s use of irony, the grotesque, and fragmentation are interwoven with each other with a mutually intensifying effect. Irony presupposes opposites and tension. Traditional irony is a rhetorical device effecting local negation (i.e., the opposite of what is literally said). The romantic irony proposed by Schlegel turns 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


I rony, th e G rotesque, and Fr agmentati on i n th e Fig ure o f the Arti st i n “Der S a ndma nn” and “R at K res pel”

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a mere rhetorical device into metaphysics as it posits the indissoluble disparity between the absolute and the subject and the process of negation in irony as the dialectic toward self-transcendence in an alternation between creation and destruction, enthusiasm and skepticism, and authenticity and inauthenticity of the self.1 In confluence with romantic Irony, Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” are also structured around opposites that are embodied in the polarity of the protagonists’ artistic personality and the dichotomy and inner tension of romantic art. It is the nature of the romantic art or the romantic artist to be divinely or demonically inspired; its effect is seen in the chiaroscuro of temptation and peril to create or destroy, animate or petrify, and liberate or imprison. Like Schlegelian irony, the dichotomy in Hoffman’s irony originates in the unbridgeable discrepancy between the absolute and the subject. In a way, both “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” are the rewriting, in the mode of the grotesque, of the ancient Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex and in the motif of epistemological transgression, whose punishment is mutilation, madness, and bereavement. Drawing an analogy between human life and the automaton, “Der Sandmann” strikes a particular similarity with the ancient play in revealing the motif of man as a puppet of fate and paradoxically figuring a moment of destructively keen insight in blindness and loss of eyes. The name of Olympia calls forth the world of Greek gods. In fact, the names of Klara (enlightenment) and Olympia are more epistemological rather than erotic ones. The epistemological transgression in Hoffman’s two stories, as in Tieck’s “Der Runnerburg,” another story exploiting the romantic propinquity of delusion and poetic vision, is repeatedly figured in scenes of the protagonist-artist’s voyeurism of the forbidden. These voyeuristic scenes are at once erotic and epistemological. Freud interprets Nathanael’s childhood experience of peeping at his father and Coppelius as an Oedipal scenario staging the child’s witness of the primal scene between his father and mother. He also regards the puppet figure of Olympia as a projection of Nathanael’s status of subjection to his father.2 In the same vein, we might regard Krespel’s dream scene at the end of “Rat Krespel”—in which Antonia sings to Mr. B’s musical instrument, a blissful moment from which he is shut out—as an inverse of Oedipal scenario and Antonia’s violation of her father’s decree and her choosing of singing over life the same Oedipal rebellion against 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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the father. What might be the connection between the transgressive aspiration in romanticism and the erotic transgression implicit in Oedipal complex? We may answer this question by examining the nature of romantic transcendence and sublime. Kantian sublimity involves the ego’s confrontation with an overwhelming external power that causes a blockage in the ego’s mind. Sublimity is achieved when the ego, through the transcendence of pure reason, overcomes the threat by either subduing or identifying with the external power. In Romantic Sublime, Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, Thomas Weskel points out that, in the psychology of romantic sublime, the Oedipal complex is a figure of the superego’s fear (violating the father, which is a symbol of the overwhelming power) that has to be overcome to achieve the negative sublimity in romanticism.3 In “Rat Krespel,” the motif of epistemological transgression and punishment is figured in the romantic aspiration for supernal beauty, whose cost, in the typical sense of Keats and Poe, is self-consumption and self-destruction. The unique, rich timber of Antonia’s voice is acquired through the laceration of her physicality and consummates with her death. In Krespel’s dream, the peak of her singing is achieved through Oedipal aggression: the violation of father’s decree. The conflict between human voice and divine music in Antonia’s singing, which causes the death of her human frame in an attempt to reach a higher incarnation, is mirrored in the conflict within Krespel, between his human deficiency and romantic aspiration. To him, Antonia is the muse-figure mediating between him and the divine. The reversed Oedipal scenario staged in his dream suggests the transgressive nature of his artistic aspiration. The fact that this glimpse of artistic consummation can only take place in a dream, a bliss he is irrevocably shut out, suggests his ultimate inability to attain transcendence in his art. According to Schlegelian irony, because of the limitation of the subject in regard to the absolute, poetic inspiration is often felt as an alien force amounting to diabolical influence.4 Hoffman’s stories also exploit the divine or diabolical antithesis in the protagonists’ artistic personality and the poetic inspiration of romantic art. In “Der Sandmann,” Nathanael confides to Klara that the new surge of poetic inspiration for his gloomy and unnatural poetry seems to come from a diabolical possession. In “Rat Krespel,” a 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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professor attributes Krespel’s eccentricity to the human encounter with divine. Krespel also claims he is “playing the role of god” in intervening Antonia’s fate. However, not only is the epithet “diabolical” often attached to the description of him, but also there is the subtle but unmistakable allusion to the limp-footed, batlike image of the devil when Krespel, in narrating his story, “hop[s] around on one foot” with his black “crepe flapping about.”5 In my view, the diabolical in romanticism is not so much the opposite as the shorthand of god. This view perhaps explains why the demonized image of romantic artists, such as Krespel and Nathanael in Hoffman’s stories, are often cast as vulnerable in their crippling or dismembered state. Such implicit homogeneity within the dichotomy of divine and demon makes one rethink the entire categories of opposition characterizing romanticism. The abundance of opposition pertaining to romanticism is not, as being often thought, so much a reactive rebellion against Neoclassical norms, as what we might call an implosion from the inexorable strain the romantic aspiration for the absolute puts on the less human frame. It is precisely the protagonist-artist’s romantic aspiration for unification that causes fragmentation, their need to animate life that causes petrifaction, and their desire to liberate that brings about imprisonment. “Der Sandmann,” through Nathanael’s comic mistake of taking Olympia’s mechanical monotone as amorous sign, exploits and parodies the romantic idea of unity based on an inundation of subjectivity—an ego-centered reflexivity that makes the world an endless hall of mirrors reflecting the poet’s ego. Viewed under such a perspective, the external objects are robbed of reality and exist only as emanation of the self. The objects in the world, as it were, become organic parts of self. This unity based on the ego-centered consciousness is often revealed at sudden moments in its concealed fragility. Under such assault, in the eye of the alienated ego, the world turns out to be parts of self that are torn out and scattered around, hence the figure of dismemberment in “Der Sandmann.” The animating power of romantic imagination, manifested in the abundance of pathetic fallacy in romantic poetry, is also frequently shown to be self-projective. While imagination animates the outside things, these things, by being reduced to mirror images robbed of substance and their own independent lives, are at the same time phantomized and deadened. The sense of universal 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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unity based on a flooding expansion of self-projection gives rise to the feeling of buoyant liberation but is concomitant with the danger of seeing nothing beyond the self, which makes the self its own prison. In “Der Sandmann,” the petrifying effect of Nathanael’s obsession with his poetry becomes evident when he denounces Klara as an “automaton,” negates her of life because she doesn’t appreciate his poetry, and thus she falls outside his poetic projection. He falls in love with Olympia, who, being a complete echo of his poetic mood, functions as his narcissistic completion. The deadening effect of his artistic projection is revealed, however, when the living organism (a romantic trope itself, subsisting between creator and his art) formed between him and Olympia collapses. Olympia is revealed as a lifeless doll, whose dissected state reflects his own shattered ego and object status. In a sense, Olympia is a puppet not only of Spalanzini but also of Nathanael: since her life, spirit and “poetic soul” are the products of Nathanael’s selfprojection, she is also his creation. “Der Sandmann,” by hinting recurrently at cosmic dark power, the manipulating scientists, and Nathanael’s inhuman treatment of Klara in his obsession with his poems, suggests the analogous relationship between the creator and the created in three realms—religion, science, and art—and a diabolical creator as a puppeteer toward its creation in all these realms. Therefore, a victim of the Sandman, Nathanael becomes, in an uncanny way and without his own knowledge, himself an incarnation of the Sandman. In “Rat Krespel,” the creative-destructive dichotomy is also interwoven as mutual cause and effect. The destructive impulse often results from the ego’s desire to be united with a higher reality through an act of self-expulsion of one’s own lower nature. This self-expulsion is reflected in the abundance of self-lacerating impulse, projected onto the characters’ destruction of an external substitute. Thus Krespel breaks the wall to create windows, which hints at art as a glimpse into a higher world that liberates man from the imprisonment to his lesser self; he throws Angela outside the window, who is the music mutilator in himself; Antonia in her selfinflicted death chooses art over life. In trying to become one with the overwhelming divine influence incarnated in music, another psychological strategy, besides the self expulsion of one’s lower nature, is to subdue that divine influence through active negation. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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The sound of violin struck up and challenged the voice to a dazzling and fiery contest. One immediately knew that it was Krespel playing . . . Never before had I had any conception of such long-sustained notes, of such nightingale trills, of such crescendos and diminuendos, of such surging to organ-like strength and such diminution to the faintest whisper.” (173) The beauty of her voice feeds on the consumption of her body, whether it results from her overexerted herself in singing when she was too young, or whether it results from congenital weakness, Antonia suffers from an organic deficiency in her chest from which her voice derives its wonderful power and its strange . . . divine timber and by which it transcends the capacities of human songs. But it will cause her early death. (185)

The comparison of Antonia’s voice to the “Aeolian harp,” “nightingale” echoes the romantic yearning for a natural music above human creativity. The contest between voice and instrumental music in Antonia suggests an attempt at escalating negation in an alternation between nature and human creativity. It also suggests alternation between passive receptivity to divine influence (metaphor of Aeolian harp) and transcendence through active negation of that influence. Krespel’s attempt to subdue Antonia’s singing voice (female as the vessel of divine music) suggests the same attempt at transcendence through the negation of divine influence whose very power dims human creativity and reduces man to the despair of impotency. She is an ideal that he has to subdue and destroy to release his own enthralled creativity, enthralled in both its sense of intoxication and enslavement. In spite of the escalating negation manifested in “Rat Krespel,” Hoffman’s irony departs from romantic irony in that the antithesis ultimately collapses into nightmarish identity. With things furled around to meet and coincide with their opposites, the spiral transcendence in romantic irony becomes the impasse of circle figuring Hoffman’s irony. The climatic moments in both “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” are found in the protagonists’ eruption of madness figured in the impasse (the inability to transcend through 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


In “Rat Krespel,” the artistic ideal is the enthralling beauty of Antonia’s singing voice, which is brought into relief by the contesting sound of violin, a recurrent symbol of her as well as antithetical rival to her:


negation) of the circle: Nathanael’s fire-ring dance after the sight of Olympia’s dissected wooden body, and his vision of Olympia as automaton through a telescope and Krespel’s devilish hop in circles when he recounts Antonia’s story, as if to drag the narrator into “the black pit of madness.” Madness, as stated by Paul de Man, is the extreme form of irony.6 The hidden homogeneity of dichotomy is the intrinsic peril of romanticism as much as its attraction. Hoffman reveals this dark necessity within romanticism through the method of distortion. In Hoffman’s writing, distortion is often the detour of truth. In “Der Sandmann,” to Nathanael’s horrified eyes, the familiar, benign face of his father in the firelight was distorted into the hideous countenance of Coppelius; the rationalistic, intellectual Clara becomes the image of automaton (Olympia) through his telescope; the divinely beautiful Olympia becomes a dissected, lifeless doll. In Invention of Reading, Clayton Koelb comments on the contamination of language in “Der Sandmann” when figure of speech becomes literally realized. Nathanael’s denunciation of Klara as automaton calls forth the true automaton, Olympia.7 With the literalization of fictional language, reality is also contaminated by the logic of nightmare. Life does not subsume fiction, but fiction subsumes life. The fictional world under the spyglass puts the normal world under question. Might it not be that our normal eyes are also a kind of spyglass? And the normal vision of the world a distortion of the real, so that the hidden absurdity is camouflaged? Might not the grotesque exaggeration be a detour to reveal the true reality of the world? The irony of the fictional world under the spyglass eventually functions as the irony of irony, one that subverts the reality of our normal world into grotesque fictionality while establishing the fictional world under the spyglass as the true essence. The nature of life is revealed as nightmarish. The extreme form of Hoffman’s irony departs from romantic irony in that the superiority of authorial detachment presupposed in romantic irony (the creator’s superiority over and detachment from his creation8) collapses. In both “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel,” this collapse occurs through an involuntary, compulsive shift from the outside neutralized view to the inside madness. Although for the most part of “Der Sandmann,” a neutralized narrator seems to attribute the hideous figure of Coppelius or Coppola to Nathanael’s obsessive delusion, the last image of Coppola 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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in the text is independent of Nathanael’s vision or projection (since Nathanael has already fallen from the tower and died), as if he emerges out of the irresistible whirlpool of the language itself. In “Rat Krespel,” the narrative shifts happen when the narrator change his attitude from initial neutrality (his knowledge of Krespel through talks of the town) to aversion (as he becomes more involved in Krespel and Antonia’s lives) and then to an unquestioning sympathy with Krespel at the end after listening to his retrospective account whose truth, however, may not be warranted. Therefore, in the figure of the artistic protagonist caught in the lure and peril of his vision, “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” may be seen in the light of the self-reflexive mirror as well as parody of romantic ethos. In “Der Sandmann,” Nathanael’s grotesque mistake of taking an automaton’s empty echo as expressive sympathy of poetic souls parodies the romantic inundation of subjectivity and tendency toward pathetic fallacy. In “Rat Krespel,” the Keatsian consuming nature of supernal beauty either is realized in an uncertain dream vision through Antonia or falls short of its tragic glamour through its embodiment in the tragiccomic figure of Krespel. Krespel’s ultimate impotency, however, is rendered less in the mode of tragedy than of the grotesque. His humanity resides, at the end, in the suppression rather than persistence of his and Antonia’s artistic impulse. The departure of Hoffman’s irony from romantic irony suggests itself as the irony of (romantic) irony: the failure of romantic irony as the dialectic means toward transcendence. What is the connection between Hoffman’s irony, his mode of the grotesque, and the fragmented shifting narrative in these two stories? Irony, in meaning its opposite, posits a detachment between form and matter, which strikes a singular similarity with the grotesque: the grotesque is evoked as the familiar world suddenly appears as alienated. Irony, the grotesque, and fragments are also pivotal concepts in Schlegelian poetics. While irony in Schlegel’s poetics is the infinite, dialectic process toward the absolute, the grotesque, synonymous with the artistic form of arabesque in Schlegel’s works, with its endless curls also hints at infinity. Schlegel fragments suggest likewise infinity in its belief that nothing can be completed. The endless ramification in the arabesque also suggests the method of digression (hence textual fragmentation) and deferral of ending often found in grotesque writing. Moreover, 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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irony as the dialectic and grotesque as the fusion of the tragic and the comic in Schlegelian poetics also contain the common suggestion of the fusion of incompatible realms. This fusion of the incompatible, according to Wolfgang, is the predominant feature of the grotesque.9 Hoffman fulfils the classical aesthetics of the grotesque embodied in the arabesque, which combines the vegetative, animal, and human realms and fuses the animate and the inanimate. In “Der Sandmann,” the fusion of the animate and inanimate is found in the discovery that Olympia’s eyes are made out of Nathanael’s and the suggestion of symbolic identity of eyes and spyglass. Hoffman’s irony, in which things are turned into their opposite, engenders the feeling of the grotesque, because the grotesque also fuses the opposite and the incompatible: benign and malevolent, tragic and comic, divine and demon, nightmare and reality. The mildly rendered grotesque of Krespel is reflected in his mixed characteristics: awkwardness (he seems to be always in the danger of bumping into things) and ingenuity (he makes small toys for children out of bones), good nature (his attempt to save Antonia’s life) and ominous eccentricity (the effect of imprisoning her), destructiveness (dissection of violin, throwing Angela out of the window) and creativity (he built the best violin in his days), his comic expression (gay songs) of tragic emotion (his mourning for Antonia). The diabolical description around his image, linked with that of a cripple, suggests instead of the diabolical potency, his human vulnerability. It might be argued that tragedy may also contain such a combination of the incompatible, since the tension of opposition in romanticism is often rendered by the discrepancy between the absolute and the self, and the mode of tragedy often exhibits the same discrepancy. Why does Hoffman’s mode of grotesque fall short of tragedy? Tragedy differs from the grotesque in that tragedy confers a certainty of meaning and order that the grotesque does not. While Oedipus Rex affirms the order of the Olympic gods through the sacrifice of its hero and its motif of fate rests on a textual certainty, “Der Sandmann” offers no such order and certainty of meaning. Hoffman’s unique mode of irony and grotesque embodied in this story, in which things are simultaneously themselves and their opposite, bring about a collapse of norm, standard and meaning. In both “Der Sandmann” and 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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“Rat Krespel,” narrative is fragmented into shifting perspectives, none of which represent a central, certain view with which the readers may identify and trust. Therefore, while Schlegelian irony is intended as the escalating dialectic, and the Schlegelian grotesque, as the opposite to sublimity, is part of the same scheme of escalation, Hoffman’s irony and grotesque, although structured also around opposites, present the impasse of such ascendance. The destruction of romantic faith is partly achieved through the textual fragmentation, which, unlike Schlegelian fragments that are hinted as parts of a transcendent whole, are parts that won’t come together except through violent truncation and graft, like Coppelius’s brutal act of unscrewing Nathanael’s limbs and reassembling them disorderly. Often, dismemberment results from the very attempt of joining together. Nathanael’s eyes have to be plucked out to complete Olympia’s eyes. In trying to become one with his ideal other in Antonia, Krespel has to subdue her voice. To Schlegel, objectivity is achieved through the corrective balance of multiple subjectivities.10 To Hoffman, multiple subjectivities never coalesce into a meaningful pattern; rather, we see them in unjustified fusion or we see them splinter into further division. In Schlegel, the authorial intrusion that breaks down the fictional illusion exhibits the author’s superiority over his creation. In Hoffman, fictional illusion and the breaking of it are so interwoven that the readers do not know whether they are inside or outside illusion. Chaos and fragments in both Schlegel and Novalis’ poetics point to an ontological wholeness and order: a divine pattern does exist, only human eyes cannot perceive it because of their ineluctable limitation. In Hoffman, the very existence of such order, wholeness and pattern is denied. The pervasive motif of dismemberment taking place at a physical as well as textual level bespeaks Hoffman’s characteristic obsession. At the physical level, the dismemberment is in the dissection of Olympia and Nathanael’s bodies, in Krespel’s dismemberment of violins. Dismemberment has been the classical penalty for the artist-figure in their desire for primal unity—think of Dionysius, Orpheus, and Icarus. They have to experience the symbolic Zagreus to turn from the spiritual one into the manifestations of many. At the textual level, the dismemberment in Hoffman’s stories is embodied in the fragmentized narrative with frequent change of narrators (always unreliable). A patched narrative suggests a 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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narrative shifting frequently in uncertainty. The potential threat of the loss of narrative control created through textual fragmentation constitutes Hoffman’s unique mode of irony, in which the ironist loses his stance of detachment and narrates from the inside split of madness. It also constitutes Hoffman’s “verbal grotesque,”11 in which the narrative is swirled into the whirlpool of language that has acquired its own autonomy. As contrast to the authorial superiority in Schlegelian grotesque and irony, Hoffman’s verbal grotesque, like his irony, suggests the vertiginous, centrifugal loss of control. Thus we might see the connection between dismemberment and fragmentation on the one hand and the grotesque and irony on the other as functioning in Hoffman’s two stories. Dismemberment is prelude to random assemblage—as in the case of Nathanael and Olympia and in Krespel’s dissection and rebuilding of violin— the fusion of incompatible realms, which, in turn, is the essence of Hoffman grotesque and irony. The metaphysical suggestion of all three elements is an abysmal epistemological uncertainty. On the one hand, Hoffman’s irony, grotesque and fragments do suggest the profusion of chaos, dehumanization, lack of resolution in arabesque. On the other, unlike Schlegel’s concept of arabesque, which is self-contained at the same time fragmented, Hoffman’s story is not self-contained. Just as “Der Sandmann” doesn’t have a real beginning, “Rat Krespel” lacks a real end. The narrator in “Der Sandmann” confesses his inability to start the story and thus begins with the epistolary form in a makeshift start. In “Rat Krespel,” the suspended conflicts between the romantic aspiration for divine music and human dearth remain unresolved and only evaporate into the mirage of a dream vision. The fragmentation and dismemberment also find expression in “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel” in the self-multiplication through the schizophrenic projection of the protagonist’s divided self. While Klara and Olympia represent respectively Nathanael’s rationalistic-conventional and imaginative-poetic sides, Angela and Antonia represents the music mutilator and music creator in Krespel. The typological feminine figures undergo further division in that they themselves turn into their opposites: Klara and Olympia are ultimately indistinguishable; Angela is reformed; and Antonia herself manifests the split between impotency and creativity. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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This proliferation of opposites in Hoffman denies the possibility of transcendental wholeness envisioned by Novalis and Schlegel. While Schlegel’s theory of irony, grotesque and fragments, inherits and criticizes Fichte’s ego-centered absolute idealism through the dialectic means toward that ideal, Hoffman is far removed from German idealism—the theoretical basis of German romanticism. “Der Sandmann” and “Rat Krespel,” while functioning as a self-reflective mirror for romantic tropes and concepts, also hint at what is severely at stake in romanticism.

Fre nc h Symbo l ist Po etry and Imag ery i n A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN French symbolist poetry, a literary movement that originated in Paris in the last half of the nineteenth century and is represented by such poets as Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Valery, exerted a strong influence on Irish and British writing around the turn of the century. This essay attempts to trace the affinities between the aesthetics and poetic practice of French symbolist poetry and implicit principles of constructing imagery in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not coincidentally, the marginalized literary elite of the nineteenth-century Europe found its affinity in an exiled artist in the twentieth century—in Joyce and in his fictional double—Stephen Daedalus. Symbolism originated in France, which is defined as “the refinement of the art of ambiguities to express the indeterminate in human sensibilities and in natural phenomenon.”12 French symbolist poets use a highly private and complex kind of symbolization to capture fleeting, incommunicable, and ineffable feelings. Symbols lacking apparent logical connections are linked together to create a medley of imagery and evoke a hazy atmosphere of indefiniteness as great as the indefiniteness of life itself. These symbols are often “open-ended in its power to signify and polyvalent in its reception.”13 Synaesthesic imagery and the stress on the musical effects of words are characteristic of this school of poetry. Mallarme, the theoretician of French symbolist poetry, observes that the creation of symbols occurs in two ways. The first is from outside to inside: a haunting object permeates little by little the consciousness of the poet and is associated with a state of being of which the poet was not initially aware.14 In Portrait, objects haunt 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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through complex patterns of repetition. The recurrent images evoke a hypnotic atmosphere that attunes the mind to a receptive state. It is through this sensitized state that objects are dissolved of their materiality and permeate, in their fluidity, into the realm of inner being and become in time symbols of states of mind. This way of creating symbols is best illustrated in the former part of the first chapter, which traces Stephen’s forming mind in his childhood. On the surface, it is a raw record of isolated, elementary sensations in the rambling language of a child. However, at a deeper level, it contains all the central images recurring throughout the book: water, rose, bird, woman. They are buried seeds that are to sprout into light in later chapters. A passing sight of a peasant woman, “standing at the half door of a cottage with a child in her arm,”15 is to be repeated again and again in the later part of the book, absorbing into itself other spectral images of women: Eileen, the flower girl, and the peasant woman Davin meets are amplified and metamorphosed until they eventually emerge out of Stephen’s unconsciousness as an articulate symbol: “a type of her race and his own, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness” (198). The other direction of the image or mood association, according to Mallarme, is from the inside outward: a state of being or a nameless feeling is projected onto an exterior world, targeting an object or a landscape, which gives it embodiment.16 In a way, the long line of spectral women floating through this book is a projection or externalization of the different phases of Stephen’s inner development. Their insubstantiality makes them passive reflection of Stephen instead of assuming any real existence. For each stage of Stephen’s spiritual development, there is a corresponding woman: the child association of Eileen with “the house of gold, the tower of ivory,” which is the Biblical description of Virgin Mary, suggests Stephen’s naïve faith in religion in childhood. Mercedes represents the inaccessible dream of adolescence. When Stephen falls, Emma symbolically falls with him—in his repentance, he imagines her standing with him hand in hand before the Virgin Mother. The peasant woman, in a personal sense, reflects his stifled desire seeking release through sexual debauchery. The sea-wading girl is a dream vision imaging his artistic flight. Another example of creating symbols from inside outward is found in the imagistic expression of Stephen’s central conflict 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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between bondage and flight, which has a close affinity with Baudelaire’s central conflict of “spleen” and “ideal” in “Flowers of Evil.” As in Baudelaire’s poetry, “spleen,” the feeling of bondage to body, to the apathy and squalor of the world, and to the ennui and dilemma at the center of existence is often translated into the image of a closed room or a cell, a closed brain or a closed body. We find similar symbolic expression of such feeling in Portrait. In Joyce’s work, the claustrophobia of spleen finds expression in the embryonic gray water that surrounds him in childhood: the dark, cold, and damp corridors and halls at Clongowes; the labyrinth of dark alleys through which he seeks the ideal image of Mercedes in his adolescence; the enclosure of body—“the fetus” engraved on a school desk, which precipitates his fall; and the enclosure of the mind—“the cloister of mind” with which he terms his arrogant intellectualism in college. As in Baudelaire’s poetry, “ideal,” the romantic escape to the most distant part of the world in which human spirit can stand alone in its profound innocence is often translated as a sea voyage; Stephen’s artistic flight in his youthful idealism is also at the seaside, and the image of the sea-wading girl expresses strange, unashamed, and girlish innocence. Perhaps the most obvious affinity between the imagery of Portrait and that of French symbolist poetry is their saturation of synaesthetic imagery. Baudelaire, in his poem, “Correspondence” celebrates “the ecstasy of senses” in which “all scents and sounds and colors meet as one.”17 In Stephen’s kiss with the prostitute, the sense of touch is mingled with the sight, sound, and smell: “He felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor” (108). In the first chapter, Stephen’s mind in the process of forming floats from isolated elementary sensations of sight, smell, touch, and hearing to an imaginative fusion of these senses. For example, he wonders “whether all white things were cold and damp.” The fused sensations are not only an indication of a sensitive and imaginative mind and a temperament prone to every nuance of introspective observation; at a deeper level, they convey an undercurrent of emotional responses and value judgments. White, a traditional symbol of purity and goodness, when associated with the sensation of coldness and dampness, carries an undertone of insidiousness, visual deception, lethargy, and death and is consistently associated with the falsity of the priesthood. The white imagery throughout the book is tinged 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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with sinister connotations. Father Dolan’s hand that raises the pandybat—white and soft, agreeable both to sight and touch— almost tempts Stephen to shake hands with it, but turns out to be treacherous. In his repentance, Stephen’s vision of the white roses rising from the incense of the heart, in its obvious beauty and purity, foreshadows his later disillusionment. Thus the effect of synaesthesia is like a faint, half-drowned background music running throughout the book, shaping our emotional response to things almost without our awareness. The fusion of senses, in Portrait, as in French symbolist poetry, lends a fluid and permeating quality to the images. The subtle reverberation between elementary senses, on a metaphorical level, makes apparently innocent images often take on ominous undertones. The openness of the sea water, with colorful sea weeds swaying at its bottom, which evokes the infinite richness of life, provides Stephen with a background for his epiphany of artistic flight, however, in its touch—its “cool, inhuman undertone,” (“His flesh dreaded the cold infrahuman odour of the sea”; 181) is also subtle reverberation of the cold, slimy water that suffocates Stephen in his adolescent swamp of sexual urge. Thus the sea, even in its beneficence foreshadows the idea of drowning and retrogression, which will happen to Stephen in Ulysses, where Bloom finds him drunk in a brothel. In the last part of the book, the sight of the birds, exalted in their loneliness and exile, is a symbol of artistic flight out of the snare of the world. However, they have a shrill cry like “the squeak of mice” (243), which conveys to us unpleasant sensations harking back to Stephen’s experience as a child, when he is thrown into a ditch with a rat in it, and also to Parnell’s being rent apart like “rats in the sewer” (33). The relapse into the mire of sordidness, which is the subdued negative undertone of the bird image, anticipates Stephen at the beginning of Ulysses, when he was found drunken in a whorehouse. The permeating and fluid quality characterizing the imagery of French symbolist poetry is also reflected in Portrait in that images of contradictory emotional connotations fuse into each other. Moreover, since in French symbolist poetry, images are often open-ended in its power to signify, one image conjures up a plurality of meanings, which are often contradictory. In “Hymn 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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From Heaven or hell, O beauty, come you hence? Out from your gaze, infernal and divine, Pours blended evil and benevolence, And therefore men have likened you to wine.18

In this double-faced woman image, we can trace certain similarities in the spectral line of women in Portrait. Each of them at once partakes of the element of virgin and whore, devotion and betrayal, the satanic and heavenly, the erotic and the spiritual. They are not so much separate images, as transformation of one core image of woman. Each of them dissolves into another. Mercedes, being the virginal ideal of Stephen’s adolescence, is a continuation of Stephen’s childhood vision of Virgin Mary. However, to meet her image, Stephen has to transverse dark alleys and secret gardens, which are strong sexual images that anticipate the prostitute. There are subtle but unmistakable reverberations of these two women images. In his adolescent reverie, Stephen dreams about his encounter with Mercedes. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image, which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how: but a premonition, which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had “made their tryst,” perhaps at one of the gates or in some more “secret place.” They would be alone, “surrounded by darkness and silence”: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something “impalpable” under her eyes, and in a moment, he would be transfigured: “Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment” (67, italics mine). Similar words and images are ironically duplicated in Stephen’s encounter with the prostitute, which certainly takes place in a “secret place” that is “surrounded by darkness and silence.” In the prostitute’s arms he experienced a “transfiguration” ironically echoing what takes place in his imaginary encounter with Mercedes: “In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself” (107; italics mine). The impalpable subtlety of feeling Stephen anticipates in his encounter with 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


to Beauty,” Baudelaire thus addresses the tantalizingly beautiful woman, or perhaps some elusive idea of beauty itself:


Mercedes is reverberated in his kiss with the prostitute, wherein touch tapers away into something more intangible than odor: “He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips.” “Between the he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor” (108). As to other woman images, Virgin Mary, is linked ominously with the seductive peasant woman in their pregnancy. The villanelle temptress is the composite vision of all the former woman images in the book. As in French symbolist poetry, in Portrait, symbolic images lacking apparent logical connections are linked together to create a medley of metaphors and evoke a hazy indefiniteness and lambent fluidity. The peacock tail, the symbol of lechery, which Stephen envisions in his sexual debauchery; the vision of the stars in the void, the symbol of the ethereal, which Stephen envisions in his religious repentance; and the rose, the ambiguous symbol of the consummation of bodily life, Virgin Mary, and artistic creation, with their diverse connotations are mingled in the same description of their folding and unfolding motion in the book. In the same way, sexuality, religion and art are mingled in the image of women. In this book, the violent yoking of images comes from the tripal center of the book, sexuality, religion, and art. For example, the image of swooning occurs at first in Stephen’s sexual initiation under the guide of the prostitute, whose kiss is “darker than the swoon of sin.” It recurs in his fever of religious repentance, when he contemplates the picture of the sacred art, “the attitude of rapture in sacred art, the raised and parted lips and eyes as one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer, humiliated and fainting before her creator” (162). Eventually Stephen yields to the swoon of the freedom of aesthetic creation. Hearing the call from the sea-wading girl, he recognizes in it his lifelong artistic mission, “his soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea” (187). Another instance of the medley of images is found in the knifeengraved letter “fetus,” which evokes diverse directions of symbolic associations. At the first moment when Stephen saw it on a desk, it struck a secret chord in him, corresponding with the emerging sexual urge developing in his adolescent self. “Fetus” 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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also evokes the unborn Christ in Virgin Mary and the fetus in the peasant woman—the conscience of Ireland. On the artistic level, it presages the difficult birth of Stephen’s soul, his slowing awakening to his artistic mission, as he confides to Davin: “The soul is born. . . . It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I will try to fly by those nets” (220). The musical effect of imagery in French symbolist poetry is also rendered in Portrait. Verlaine and Rimbaud play a dominant role in their conscious effort to link phonetic structures with sequence of imagery, which is an extension of Baudelaire’s use of synaesthesia. Repeated images form a code as recognizable as scales in music. In Portrait, Stephen’s moments of epiphany are often expressed in a rising phonetic structure, which is soon translated in imagery sequence. For example, wandering between the church and Byron’s pub, torn between his choice of religion and art, Stephen finds that artistic impulse prevails in him. The triumphant moment evokes in Stephen a quick, exultant music, which is translated into a rapid succession of the images of wild lives—as wild and free as the burst of artistic creativity—and is crystallized into verse: It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triple branching flames leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight mood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from under the boughs and grasses wild creature racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves. “Their feet passed in pattering tumult over his mind, the feet of harts and hinds proud cadence from Newman: Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms.” (179)

The very penetration of the visual and the auditory in this passage evokes an exultant moment when barriers are broken down and the latent (music) is released unto the manifested (visible). The musical effect of imagery in Portrait is also embodied in the highly rhythmic prose presenting images. The rhythm is often created by the repetition of single words or phrases, which create a rocking motion like the lap of sea waves. For example, Stephen’s dream vision of the sea-wading girl is described in musical prose, 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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“One whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird: Her slate blue skirt were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird’s soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face” (185–86; italics mine). The rondo effect of the prose created through alliteration, repeated phrases and sentences presenting imagery are easily found in Verlaine’s poems, such as “endless ennui,” “tears flowing at my heart.” While in Verlaine’s poetry, the hovering phrases and lines create an enclosure of melancholy, which offers no exit of escape, in this passage, a magic spell of aesthetic trance is evoked. In both Verlaine’s poem and this passage, the musical quality of the prose creates a mysterious atmosphere in which solid objects are dissolved of their materiality and reality and become liquid dream visions or soul visions vibrating with symbolic suggestions. On a large scale, the musical effect of imagery characterizing French symbolist poetry is found in the orchestra of core images running throughout the book: water, bird, rose, and woman. The core images progress in the same way as the central image in Verlaine’s poem’s “endless ennui.” In Verlaine’s poem, the feeling of endless ennui is projected into the diffusive image of the glimmering waste of the snowfield, which is repeated, extended, and transmogrified into the glimmering, low, purple sky and the ravenlike cloud of the forest. The core images in Portrait, as that in Verlaine’s poem, like a musical motive emerges, develops and varies in its recurrence. The predacious bird image of heron and eagle in the beginning parts of the book, suggesting the perils of violation, later becomes the symbol of artistic freedom when Stephen rids himself of the manifold nets of his social surrounding. The enclosed gray water— at the beginning, an element of suffocation—later expands into the vastness of the sea, the element of liberation, and transforms into the mysterious element of inspiration surrounding Stephen during his creation of the villanelle poem. In Portrait, as in French symbolist poetry, there is the same breaking down of imagery into fragments, which, through a magic process of shuffling and reconstruction, are built into a new aesthetic object. This process is embodied in Debussy’s composition for Verlaine’s “moonlight” and Mallarme’s “The Afternoon of the Faun,” wherein shattered, discordant fragments collide and vibrate into 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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a mysterious wholeness of atmosphere. In Portrait, the magically composed vision finds expression in the composite image of animal and man: the bird-girl, the hawk-man, and the goatlike creature. Through this imagistic alchemy, complex ideas and associations are condensed into images. Stephen’s resolve to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (275–76) is embodied in the synthesis of images and the synthesis of the metaphorical meanings of these images. The dissection and synthesis of imagery is a close analogy of Freud’s illustration of the forming process of dreams. The dream vision of Stephen thus embodies these two processes. As a child, lying sick in his bed at the school hospital, Stephen has a strange dream, which is expressed in highly charged prose: He saw the sea of long and dark waves rising and falling under the moonless night. A tiny light twinkled at the pier head, and he saw a multitude of people gathered by the waters’ edge to see the ship that was entering their harbor. A tall man stood on the deck, looking out towards the flat dark land. By the light at the pier head he saw the sorrowful face of Brother Michael. He saw him lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters: —He is dead. WE saw him lying upon the catalfalque. A wail of sorrow went up from the people. —Parnell! Parnell! He is dead! (25)

In this passage, there is a composite vision of darkness; water; Stephen’s imagined figure of the gloomy ghost of Count von Browne, who received his death wound on a battlefield (17); and the face of Brother Michael, who is the medical man at the Clongowes school hospital. All of these are fragments of Stephen’s earlier impressions. The collage of these images condense complex symbolic meanings in a dream vision: the association of Parnell with Brother Michael, the medical man, suggests that Parnell is one who will cure the disease of Ireland. However, he received his death wound, like Browne, and was rent apart “like rats in the sewer” (33) in the dark water, the mire of Ireland and its religion. The temptress of Stephen’s Villanelle poem is the most prominent example of composite vision. Her image reverberates all the former images of women. The rose light surrounding her in Stephen’s imagination associates her with Virgin Mary, who is called in the Bible as “the rose of the world.” But the Virgin Mary in 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Stephen’s poem is reminiscent also of the destructive, sensuous Madonna found in Edvard Munch’s painting: heavy lidded, languorous, with a fetus in her hand, tormented and tormenting men with her insatiable demands. Rose is also associated with artistic creation—the green rose at the beginning of the novel, thus the temptress is at the same time associated with the sea-wading girl, the interior muse. This association is confirmed by the reverberation of the phrase, “The enchantment of heart” (155, 235), with which Stephen defines beauty with Lynch in their aesthetic discussion. Her waking from sleep, recalls the peasant woman Davin meets, a batlike soul awaking to her loneliness and secrecy, the conscience of Ireland. “Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm, odorous and lavish-limbed,” (242) recalls the prostitute. Thus, sexuality, religion (Ireland), and art, the tripal centers of Portrait, are converged into the image of the villanelle temptress. The villanelle poem, a strange blend of erotic, religious, and artistic imagery is strongly reminiscent of Mallarme’s “Afternoon of the Faun,” which analogizes the fleeting ecstasy of artistic inspiration to that of sexual consummation and in which the dedication to the elusive idea of beauty amounts to a religious fever. Both poems originate from the recollection of a dream vision and are accompanied by a musical mood—the raining notes of the flute in Mallarme’s poem, the “sweet music” in Stephen’s—and the playing on the manifold symbolic meanings of the “ideal fault of the rose.” In both poems, the elusive, insubstantial image of women is suddenly corporealized at the moment of sexual capture: the moment of copulation is also the moment when artistic impulse is crystallized into words—“in the virgin womb the world is made flesh” (236). Stephen, like Mallarme, regards his artistic career in terms of religion. As Mallarme sees the poet as a priest in a temple, causing the trembling of the veil between the known and the unknown and producing a sacred enigma,19 Stephen also regards himself as a “priest of eternal imagination,” who is “transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life” (240), in the same way as in the religious ritual of Communion, bread and wine are transformed into flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Coming to the link of the tripal centers of book—sexuality, religion (Ireland), and art—why are Stephen’s visions of art and religion (Ireland) converged symbolically in the double-faced woman, who is lit up by the contradictory beams of virgin and whore, the 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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heavenly and the satanic, and devotion and betrayal—a woman that he both loves and desires, yet has to relinquish? The double-faced woman is a projection of Stephen’s (Joyce’s) divided loyalty or sensibility as an exiled artist in religion and art. It is the common device of French symbolist poetry to project a large idea, often idea of life or aesthetic ideal, into the image of a woman. Stephen’s divided loyalty to the Catholic church in which he is brought up is obvious: while he rebels against the church, which, like the most infamous woman who has no scruple to sell those serving her (like Parnell), he is at the same time brought up with a religious disposition that is transmuted into his art. It is like Joyce has to leave Ireland with its corrupt church and yet draws obsessively to it in his writing throughout his life. The vision of art in the double-faced woman image—of devotion and betrayal, the heavenly and the satanic suggests that Stephen’s (Joyce’s) artistic vision, as that of Baudelaire, has for its premise the self-apotheosis of betrayal and profanity toward his native religion—the satanic glory of “non servium.” Stephen’s paradoxical feeling of desire and complaint about the sexual insatiety of his lover—“are you not weary of your ardent ways?”—as Robert Scholes points out, “Is half his self-dedication to a hopeless task and half a prayer for release from the pitiless muse and country whose service is his accepted destiny.”20 Thus Stephen, even in his gesture of renunciation of the symbolic temptress, takes what he renounces—religion and sexual love—with him, and through the alchemy of his soul, he makes them part of his art. In a negative sense, he cannot be free from what he renounces. His relapse into sexual license, into the feeling of guilt, toward his dead mother and the religion she represents, will be captured in Ulysses. In conclusion, the imagery in Joyce’s Portrait exhibits significant features of French symbolist poetry: in the way images become symbols and in the pervasive use of synaesthetic imagery, musical effect, and the medley of dissimilar images, which create a highly fluid and dreamlike, hazy atmosphere. The fluidity and haziness of the images, together with their intricate reverberation of meanings, render the imagery of this book a superb vehicle to convey Stephen’s amorphous and complex inner flow of feelings and sensations in the process of forming the mind of a young artist, who grows up to choose self-exile as an ordained path to commemorate his motherland. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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I ntro duc t i on 1. See Said, “Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.” 2. See Suleiman’s Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. 3. See Barthes, Camera Lucida. 4. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 5. 5. See Lu, “Zhao Xiang Zhi Lei,” (On Photography). 6. See Wang, Melody of Everlasting Regret. 7. See Handke, Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied. 8. See Byron, Don Juan. 9. See Nietzche, The Birth of Tragedy. 10. See Gu, The Selected Poems of Gu Cheng. 11. See Morrison, Beloved. 12. See Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. 13. See Dreiser, An American Tragedy. 14. See Bombal, New Island and Other Stories. 15. See Duras, Four Novels. 16. See Morrison, The Bluest Eye. 17. See Kristeva, Kristeva Reader. 18. See Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays. 19. See Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

C hapter 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Lu, “Lun Zhao Xiang Zhi Lei,” Complete Works of Lu Xun, 185-95. See Barthes, Camera Lucida. See Wang, Melody of Everlasting Regret. See Handke, Der Kurze Brief zum Langen Abschied. Wang, Melody of Everlasting Regret, 7. All the following quotations inserted parenthetically in the text are taken from the same source. 6. See Zhang, Love in a Fallen City. 7. Wang, Melody of Everlasting Regret, 7.



Notes

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

Notes Benjamin, Illuminations, 229 Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China, 247–81. Wang, Melody of Everlasting Regret, 384. Lu, “Lun Zhao Xiang Zhi Lei,” 287–88. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 31. All the following quotations inserted parenthetically in the text are taken from the same book, the same edition and will be cited as “CL.” Ibid Ibid. See Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. See Shen, “Three men and one woman.” See Su, Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas. Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily,” Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 119. See Wang, Wang Anyi Zhong Duan Pian Xiao Shuo Xuan Ji. Gang Yue, “Chang Ge Duan Hen Hong Ming Bu Bo,” from Tu Shu, 10. See Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Gang Yue, 10. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34. Wang, “Love in a Small Town,” Selected Stories by Wang Anyi, 128. Handke, Der Kurze Brief zum Langen Abschied, 4. All the following quotations inserted parenthetically in the text, unless specified, are taken from the same book. See Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. See Bergson, Matter and Memory. Piranell, Si Gira, quoted in Leon Pierre-Quint, “Signification du cinema,” L’Art cinematographique, op. cit., 14–15. See Barthes, Camera Lucida. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5. All the following quotations from Barthes are taken from the same source and will be inserted parenthetically in the text, cited as “CL.” Karasek, “Ohne zu verallgemeinern: Ein Gesprach mit Peter Handke,” 88. Michael Linstead, “Peter Handke,” in Modern German Novels, 164.

Chapter 2 1. Byron, Don Juan, canto 15, stanza 6. All the following quotations, unless specified, are taken from the same source and will be inserted parenthetically in the text. 2. See Barfoot and D’haen, Centennial Hauntings. 3. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony. 4. Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellanious Works of Friendrich von Schlegel. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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5. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 14. All the following quotations from Barthes are taken from this book and will be cited parenthetically in the text as “Barthes.” 6. Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 7. 7. Furst, Fictions of Romantic Irony. 8. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 10. 9. Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 41. 10. Conrad, Shandysm, 59. 11. See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. 12. Kayser, The Grotesque. 13. Heidegger, “What are Metaphysics?” Basic Writing, 106. All the following quotations from Heidegger inserted parenthetically in the text are taken from the same book, the same edition, and will be hereafter cited as “BW.” 14. Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 118. 15. Ibid., 128. 16. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For,” from Poetry, Language, Thought, 109. 17. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 106. 18. Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. 19. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 124. 20. Bloom, “Introduction,” Sylvia Plath, 3. 21. Howe, “The Plath Celebration: a Partial Dissent,” Sylvia Plath, 9. 22. Rosenblatt, Sylvia Plath, 27. 23. Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology. 24. See Grave, The White Goddess. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (The History Press, 1976). 25. Newman, The Art of Sylvia Plath. 26. Scheerer, “The Deathly Paradise of Sylvia Plath,” The Art of Sylvia Plath. 27. Plath, Sylvia Plath Collected Works, 21. All the following quotations inserted parenthetically in the text are taken from this book. 28. Kafka, in conversation with G. Janouch, quoted in Dore Ashton, Philip Guston, 9. 29. See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. 30. See Hai Zi, Hai Zi Shi Xuan, (Selected Poems of Hai Zi), intro. Xi Chuan. 31. For the English translation of Hai Zi’s poems, see Zeng, An English Translation of the Poems of Contemporary Chinese Poet Hai Zi. 32. Zha Haisheng. Hai Zi de Shi. (Poems by Hai Zi), intro. Xi Chuan. 33. Gu Cheng, Cheng de Shi, appendix, 401. 34. Gu Cheng, Selected Poems, 112. The following English version of Gu Cheng’s poems, unless specified, are taken the same book and the same edition, and will be inserted parenthetically in the text, cited as “GSP.” 35. Bo, “Prelude to Lord Teng’s Pavillion.” This line is translated by me. 36. Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


Notes

Notes

37. Cheng, “I’m waiting for the voice of Death,” Burial Bed, 229. The following quotations come from the same book, will be inserted parenthetically in the text, and cited as “BB.” 38. Gu Cheng, Gu Cheng de Shi, appendix, 400. 39. See Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, chap. 2. 40. See Cheng, Chinese Poetic Writing. 41. See Cao, Dream of the Red Chamber. 42. Chuang Tzu, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 58. 43. Gu Cheng, Ying Er. 44. Gu Cheng, Ying Er, 314. 45. Gu Cheng, Burial Bed, 121. 46. See Zeng, A Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy: Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 1. Melville, Moby Dick. 2. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy. 3. Morrison, Beloved, 117. All the following quotations inserted parenthetically in the text are taken from the same book and edition. 4. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 19. 5. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 182. 6. Ibid., 50. 7. See Strindberg, Six Plays of Strindberg. 8. See Zola, Thérèse Raquin. 9. See Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Street. 10. Norris, “Zola as romantic Writer,” Mcteague, 306. 11. Walcutt, “Stephen Crane” Stephen Crane’s Maggie, Text and Context, 131. 12. Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 532. 13. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 39.

C hapter 4 1. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writing, 29. 2. Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, 57. All the following quotations from Cixous are taken from the same source and will be cited parenthetically in the text as Cixous. 3. Bombal, New Island and Other Stories, 13. All the following quotations from Bombal are taken from the same source and will be cited parenthetically in the text as “BB.” 4. See Kristeva, Kristeva Reader. 5. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 39 6. Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 59. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


168

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169

Chapter 5 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

See Abbot, Flatland. See Wells, Time Machine. See Einstein, Relativity. See Hinton, Fourth Dimension. See Henderson, Fourth Dimension. Ibid. See Ouspensky, Tertium Organum. See Ouspensky, Tertiu Organum. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum. Henderson, Fourth Dimension. Jung, A Primer of Jung Psychology. 34. See Yeats, “Magic.” See Bruno, Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher. See Borges, “The Immortal.” Ibid. See Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertium.” See Borges, “The Immortal.” Ibid., “Library of Babel.” Ibid., “Circular Ruins.” Ibid., “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” Ibid., “Circular Ruins.” Ibid., “Death and the Compass” Ibid., “The Secret Miracle.” Ibid., “The House of Asterion.” Proust, Swann’s Way. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 35.

Chapter 6 1. Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative, 21. 2. Freud, “The Uncanny,” On Creativity and the Unconscious, 123–61. 3. Weiskel, Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, 83–107. 4. Handwerk, Irony and Ethicsin Narrative, 26. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


7. Duras, Four Novels, 64. All the following quotations from Duras are from the same source and will be hereby cited parenthetically in the text as “MD.”

Notes

5. Hoffman, Selected Writings of E. T. A Hoffmannn, 177. All the following quotations from Hoffmann are taken from the same book and will be inserted parenthetically in the text. 6. de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight, 216. 7. Koelb, Invention of Reading, 115–34. 8. Furst, Fictions of romantic Irony, 23–49. 9. Kayser, The Grotesque. 10. Hardwerk, “Objective as Intersubjectivity,” Irony and Ethics in Narrative, 31–34. 11. In The Grotesque, Wolfgang Kayser defines “verbal grotesque” through an example from Rabelais, as the profusion of language which suddenly acquires its own autonomy. 12. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1257. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 15. All the following quotations inserted parenthetically in the text are taken from the same book and edition. 16. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1257. 17. Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, 12. 18. Ibid., 30. 19. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encyclopedia, 1258. 20. Scholes, “Stephen Dedalus, Poet or Esthete?” PMLA, LXXXIX (September 1964): 484–89.



170

Abbot, E. A. The Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2005. Barfoot, C. C., and D’haen, Theo. ed. Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron, and Eliot in the Year 88. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. ———. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil. Translated by Roy Campbell. New York: New Directions, 1963. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1996. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Bombal, Maria Luisa. New Island and Other Stories. Translated by Richard and Lucia Cunningham. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinth: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Direction, 1964. Bruno, Ernest. The Magic Mirror of E. C. Escher. New York: Random House, 1976. Byron, Alfred. Don Juan. Edited by T. G. Steffan and E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Cao Xueqin. Dream of the Red Chamber. Translated by Chicheng Wang. New York: Anchor Books, 1958. Cheng, François. Chinese Poetic Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1982. Chuang Tzu. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968. Conrad, Peter. Shandysm: The Character of Romantic Irony. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Street. New York: Newland Press. 1930. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. New York: Back Bay Books, 1960. 10.1057/9780230113114 - The Semiotics of Exile in Literature, Hong Zeng


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Bibliography




Abbot, E. A. Flatland, 129 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 131 arabesque, 42, 149, 152 Bai Juyi, 85 Barfoot, C. C. Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot, 38 Barthes, Roland, 7, 11, 13–14, 28, 42, 44–46 Camera Lucida, 28 Pleasure of the Text, 33, 42 Baudelaire, Charles, 88, 153, 163 Flowers of Evil, 155 Bei Dao, 62 Benjamin, Walter “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The,” 28 Bergson, Henri, 25 Memory and Matter, 24 Berkeley, George, 112 Blake, William, 67 Bloom, Harold, 54, 58 blues, 125 Bombal, Susanna, 115–21 “Final Mist, The,” 115, 126 New Island and Other Stories, 165n14, 168n3 “Unknown, The,” 120

Borges, Jorge Luis, 64, 117, 129, 132, 133, 134 “Circular Ruins, The,” 135, 136 “Death and the Compass,” 136 “Garden of Forking Path, The,” 135 “House of Asterion,” 136 “Library of Babel,” 135, 136 “Secret Miracle, The” 136 “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertium,” 135 Byron, Alfred Don Juan, 33 Cao Xueqin Dream of the Red Chamber, The, 73, 75, 168n41 Chuang Zhou Chuang Tzu, 81 Church, Frederick, 48 Cixous, Hélène, 115, 118, 124, 125 Coleridge, 46, 47 cubist, 130, 131 Dante, Alighieri, 86, 138 Divine Comedy, 88 Debussy, Claude, 160 de Man, Paul, 148 Derrida, Jacques, 39 D’haen, Theo, 38. See also Barfoot, C. C.



Index

Index

Dickinson, Emily, 33, 48–53 “I felt a funeral in my brain,” 50 “It was not Death,” 53 “There is a certain slant of Light,” 48 “There Is a Maelstrom,” 53 Dos Passos, John America, 110 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Brothers Karamazov, The, 93 Crime and Punishment, 88 Dreiser, Theodore, 92 American Tragedy, An, 91 Duo Duo, 62 Duras, Marguerite Moderato Cantibile, 115, 121–25

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 29 Faust, 88 Wilheim Meister’s Apprenticeship, 29 grotesque, 42, 142, 149, 151–52 Gu Cheng, 33, 69–89 “Accident,” 74 “Ark,” 77 “Burial Bed, The,” 74, 76 Eulogy World, A, 70 “Fantasia of Life, A,” 80 “It Is the Tree’s Capacity to Swim,” 71 “One Generation,” 89 “Seasons—Preserving Twilight and Morning,” 79 Ying Er, 82, 84, 86

e’criture feminine, 116, 118, 126, 128 Einstein, Albert, 133 Eliot, T. S., 132 “Wasteland,” 131 Escher, M. C., 130, 133, 134 expressionism, 111

Haiku, 66 Hai Zi, 33, 62–69 “Chiming of the Clock,” 68 “Chinese Haiku,” 65 “Dawn,” 65 “Earth Melancholy Death,” 64 “Empress of Death,” 66 “Folk Artists,” 64 “Four-line Poems,” 64 “Holding a White Tiger She Walks Across the Ocean,” 67 “Messiah,” 64 “Mount Everest,” 65 “Night Songs,” 64 “Season of Peach Blossoms,” 66 “September,” 67 “Spring, Ten Hai Zis,” 66 “Sonnet: Moon at Night,” 64 “Tibet,” 64 “Wheat Field in May,” 69 Handke, Peter kurze Brief Zum Langen Abschied, Der, 7, 20–31 Hardy, Thomas, 93 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 93

Faulkner, William, 15, 20, 131 Sound and the Fury, The, 14, 21, 132 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 153 fin de siècle, 15 Fitzgerald, F. Scott Great Gatsby, The, 91, 101–13 Ford, Ford Maddox, 131 fragmentation, 142, 151 fragments, 42, 149 French symbolist poetry, 153, 159–60, 163 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 96, 109, 143, 161 Furst, Lilian Fictions of Romantic Irony, 39 Gang Yue, 18 Gauguin, Paul, 111



176

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 95, 136 Scarlet Letter, 93, 98 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 48, 49, 52, 53, 93, 116 “What Are Poets For,” 51 “What Is MetaphysicsÝ” 48, 49, 52 Hinton, Charles, 130, 131 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 141–53 “Rat Krespel,” 141–53 “Sandmann, Der,” 141–53 Hölderlin, 65 Howe, Irving, 54, 58 Hume, David, 117 I Ching, 62 impressionist painting, 110, 136 irony, 39, 41, 42, 45, 142, 148, 149, 151 jazz, 125 Joyce, James, 141 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 141 Ulysses, 156 Jung, Carl, 109, 133 Kafka, Franz, 61 Kant, Immanuel, 130 Keats, John, 29, 144, 149 Koelb, Clayton, 148 Invention of Reading, 148 Kristeva, Julia, 115, 120, 121, 124 Kroll, Judith, 54 Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, 54 Lacan, Jacques, 18 Li Ho, 74 Li Shangyin, 75 Linstead, Michael, 31 Lispector, Clarice, 115 Lorca, Federico García, 66, 67 Lu Xun, 7, 11

177

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 153, 154, 160, 162 “Afternoon of the Faun, The,” 160, 162 Mann, Thomas Magic Mountain, The, 30 Marlowe, Christopher Tragedy of Doctor Faustus, The, 93 Melville, Herman, 95 Moby Dick, 95, 96 Meng Long Shi, 88 Morrison, Toni, 91–101, 115, 125–28 Beloved, 91–101 Bluest Eye, The, 96, 115, 125–28 Song of Solomon, 96 Munch, Edvard, 33, 54 Ashes, 57 Attraction, 59 Consolation, 59 Jealousy, 57 Kiss, The, 55 Lovers in a River, 59 Melancholy, Evening, 55 Puberty, 59 Scream, 58 Tulips, 58 Vampire, 57 naturalism, 102, 106–13 Newman, Charles, 54 Art of Sylvia Plath, 54 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 63, 86, 94, 121–22 Norris, Frank, 111 Novalis, 29, 151, 153 Henry von Ofterdingen, 29 O’Neill, Eugene, 110, 112 Desire under the Elm, 110 Emperor Jones, 110, 112 Ouspensky, Peter. D. 132, 135



Index

Index

Pirandello, Luigi, 7, 9, 27 Plath, Sylvia, 33, 54–62 “Crossing the Water,” 56 “Edge,” 61 “Elm, The,” 58 “Fever 103,” 58 “Girl’s Head on the Shore,” 61 “Lady Lazarus,” 58 “Lorelei,” 56 “Morning Song,” 60 “Mount Everest,” 65 “Nick and the Candlestick,” 60 “Poppies in July,” 57 “Poppies in October,” 57 “Returning Home,” 65 “Winter Landscape, With Rooks,” 55 “Words,” 61 Poe, Edgar Allan, 15, 95, 136, 144 “Black Cat,” 95 “William Wilson,” 95 postimpressionist painting, 111 Pound, Ezra, 131 Cantos, 131 Proust, Marcel, 129, 133 Pushkin, Alexander, 65 realism, 112 Rimbaud, Arthur, 65, 153 Robbe-Grillet, Alain Last Year at Marienbad, 123, 132 romanticism, 102, 111–13 Rosenblatt, Jon, 54 Rousseau, Henri, 54 Schlegel, Friedrich, 42, 45, 142–44, 149, 151, 153 Scholes, Robert, 163 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 86 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 93 King Lear, 93 Othello, 93

Sheerer, Constance, 54 “Deathly Paradise of Sylvia Plath, The,” 54 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 29 Shen Congwen, 14, 15 Simon, Claude, 131–32 Sophocles Oedipus Rex, 93, 98, 143, 149 Stein, Gertrude, 132–33 Stevens, Wallace, 131 “Man with the Blue Guitar,” 131 “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” 131 Strindberg, August, 110 Father, 110 Su Tong, 14, 15 surrealism, 111 symbolism, 111 synaesthetic, 153 Tang Wengru, 71 text of bliss, 43 text of pleasure, 42 Valery, 153 Van Gogh, Vincent, 65, 66, 111 Vedanta, 78 Verlaine, Paul 153, 160 “Moonlight,” 160 Wang Anyi, 7–20 Love in a Small Town, 20 Melody of Everlasting Regret, 7–20 “Our Uncle’s Story,” 17 “Star Singer from Japan,” 17 Wang Bo, 71 Wells, H. G. Time Machine, 130 Weskel, Thomas, Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence, 144 Whitman, Walt, 81



178

Williams, William Carlos, 131 Wolf, Virginia, 110, 122 Wolfgang, 150 Xi Chuan, 63, 69 Yang Lian, 62 Yeats, William, 29, 133 Yesenin, 65 Zagreus, 62, 63, 151 Zeng, Hong

179

Deconstructive Reading of Chinese Natural Philosophy, A: Literature and the Arts, 85 English Translation of the Poems of Contemporary Chinese Poet Hai Zi, An, 167n31 Zha Haisheng, 62 Zhang Ailing “Love in a Fallen City,” 8 Zhao Yiheng, 88 Zola, Emile, 110, 111 Therese Raquin, 110



Index

The Semiotics of Exile in Literature

Basics of Semiotics (Advances in Semiotics)

The Semiotics of French Gestures (Advances in Semiotics)

Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E (Studies in Biblical Literature)

The semiotics of fortune-telling (Foundations of Semiotics)

The Heart in Exile

The Government In Exile

History of Semiotics (Foundations of Semiotics)

Semiotics in the United States

The FitzOsbornes in Exile

The Cavaliers in Exile

The FitzOsbornes in Exile

The Government In Exile

Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law

The FitzOsbornes in Exile

Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Advances in Semiotics)

The Cognitive Semiotics of Film

The Cognitive Semiotics of Film

Dictionary of Semiotics

Return of the exile

Return of the Exile

The Exile

The Cognitive Semiotics of Film

Exile

Exile

Exile

Exile

Exile

The Semiotics of Exile in Literature

Basics of Semiotics (Advances in Semiotics)

The Semiotics of French Gestures (Advances in Semiotics)

Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Israel in Exile: The History and Literature of the Sixth Century B.C.E (Studies in Biblical Literature)

The semiotics of fortune-telling (Foundations of Semiotics)

The Heart in Exile

The Government In Exile

History of Semiotics (Foundations of Semiotics)

Semiotics in the United States

The FitzOsbornes in Exile

The Cavaliers in Exile

The FitzOsbornes in Exile

The Government In Exile

Studies in the Semiotics of Biblical Law

The FitzOsbornes in Exile

Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology (Advances in Semiotics)

The Cognitive Semiotics of Film

The Cognitive Semiotics of Film

Dictionary of Semiotics

Return of the exile

Return of the Exile

The Exile

The Cognitive Semiotics of Film

Exile

Exile

Exile

Exile

Exile

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