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Alternate Life-Worlds
in Literary Fiction
Philologica Wratislaviensia: Acta et Studia
Edited by Zdzisław Wąsik
Advisory Board
Janusz Arabski (Katowice)
Jerzy Bańczerowski (Poznań)
Piotr Chruszczewski (Wrocław)
Andrzej Ciuk (Opole)
Anna Duszak (Warszawa)
Jacek Fisiak (Poznań)
Krzysztof Janikowski (Wrocław)
Norbert Morciniec (Wrocław)
Tadeusz Piotrowski (Wrocław)
Michał Post (Wrocław)
Stanisław Prędota (Wrocław)
Stanisław Puppel (Poznań)
Teresa Siek-Piskozub (Poznań)
Liliana Sikorska (Poznań)
Anna Stroka (Wrocław)
Aleksander Szwedek (Poznań)
Jerzy Wełna (Warszawa)
Ryszard Wolny (Opole)
Vol. 6
PHILOLOGICAL SCHOOL
OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN WROCŁAW
PUBLISHING
Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak
Zdzisław Wąsik
Teresa Bruś
(eds.)
Alternate Life-Worlds
in Literary Fiction
WYDAWNICTWO
WYŻSZEJ SZKOŁY FILOLOGICZNEJ
WE WROCŁAWIU
This volume basing on the peer-review principles has been published with
a financial support from Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław.
ABSTRACT. Ewa Kębłowska -Ławniczak, Zdzisław Wąsik, Teresa Bruś (eds.) 2011: Alternate
Life-Worlds in Literary Fiction. Wrocław: Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław
Publishing (Philologica Wratislaviensia: Acta et Studia. Vol. 6. Edited by Zdzisław Wąsik). 176 pp.
ISBN 978-83-60097-11-3
KEY WORDS: comparative literature, alternate worlds, constructivism, semantics of possible
worlds, literary fiction
Ewa Kębłowska -Ławniczak, Associate Professor, Institute of English Studies, University of
Wrocław; Associate Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Philological School of Higher
Education in Wrocław.
Zdzisław Wąsik, Rector, Professor and Head, Department of Linguistic Semiotics and
Communicology, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław;
Professor, Institute of Humanities, Angelus Silesius State School of Higher Vocational Education
in Wałbrzych; Professor, School of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; Visiting
Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Karkonosze State School of Higher Education in Jelenia Góra;
Bureau Member and Fellow, International Communicology Institute, Executive Office,
Washington, DC.
Teresa Bruś, Assistant Professor, Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Lecturer,
Department of Modern Languages, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław
© Copyright by Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu, Wrocław 2011
Typesetting by Zdzisław Wąsik
Language proof of English texts by Monty Vierra
Editorial reading by Sylwia Rudzińska and Barbara Woldan
Cover design by Beata Opala
ISBN 978-83-60097-11-3
WYŻSZA SZKOŁA FILOLOGICZNA WE WROCŁAWIU
ul. Sienkiewicza 32, 50-335 Wrocław
tel. +4871 328 14 14, fax. +4871 322 10 06, e-mail: wsf@wsf.edu.pl
Wydanie I. Nakład 200 egz. Ark. wyd. 11.
Table of contents
LESZEK BĘDKOWSKI Dziecko jako adresat i odbiorca Harry’ego Pottera.
Uwagi o sporze wokół „realistycznego świata magii” cyklu powieściowego
Joanne K. Rowling ..................................................... ………………………007
TERESA BRUŚ Alternate mental libraries and experience .............................. 021
ANNA BUDZIAK The contradictory flâneur – lost in the city and found in the
text................................................................................................................... 033
ANNA IZABELA CICHOŃ Alternative life-writing: V. S. Naipaul’s
Half a Life and Magic Seeds ........................................................................... 045
BEATA CISOWSKA Światy równoległe w powieściach dla młodzieży
(na przykładzie książek o Harrym Potterze i Artemisie Fowlu) ..................... 057
WOJCIECH DRĄG Ryder in dreamland: The construction of an alternative
reality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and its metaphorical capacity...... 065
ŁUKASZ GIEZEK Rewriting Oscar Wilde: Peter Ackroyd’s
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde ................................................................ 077
IZABELA GRADECKA Speaking softly in code: The queer perspective
in the works of Tennessee Williams ............................................................... 087
EWA KĘBŁOWSKA-ŁAWNICZAK Writing London in Neil Gaiman’s
Neverwhere: Digging in search of “raw material” .......................................... 099
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Table of contents
JUSTYNA KOCIATKIEWICZ Coping with the anti-Semitic universe:
The construction of alternate realities in Saul Bellow’s The Victim
and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America .................................................. 111
SŁAWOMIR KUŹNICKI Genetically modified future: Pre- and post-apocalyptic
visions of the world in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake............................ 121
JAROSŁAW POLAK The discontinuity of time: The world as a reflection
of individual mind in Philip K. Dick’s novel Eye in the Sky .......................... 131
MARCIN RUSNAK Blessings and curses of the silver screen: Film adaptations of
Coraline and Stardust by Neil Gaiman ........................................................... 139
MONIKA SADOWSKA Na granicy realności i fantastyki – przestrzeń
podzielona w Poczwarce Doroty Terakowskiej.............................................. 151
KAROLINA WIEREL Czym jest „kyś”? Literackie, językowe i kulturowe
konstrukty alternatywne w Kysiu Tatiany Tołstoj .......................................... 165
LESZEK BĘDKOWSKI
AKADEMIA IM. JANA DŁUGOSZA W CZĘSTOCHOWIE
Dziecko jako adresat i odbiorca Harry’ego Pottera.
Uwagi o sporze wokół „realistycznego świata magii”
cyklu powieściowego Joanne K. Rowling
STRESZCZENIE. Niezwykle emocjonalny spór, jaki towarzyszył publikacji cyklu powieści
Joanne K. Rowling, dotyczący oceny wpływu kreowanego w nich świata na dziecięcego czytelnika, wiązał się ściśle z uznaniem przynależności utworów o przygodach młodego czarodzieja do literatury dla dzieci i młodzieży. Spojrzenie przez pryzmat komunikacji literackiej na
stawiane w toku toczonych dyskusji tezy i wysuwane argumenty potwierdza istnienie silnej
zależności między odczytywaniem utworów pisarki a czynnikami pozatekstowymi, które determinują to, co bywa rozpoznawane (często błędnie) jako obecne w utworach o Harrym Potterze.
Ujawnia ono również, że podłożem sporu o świat ukazany w powieściach Joanne K. Rowling jest w istocie spór o rzeczywistość otaczającą współczesnego człowieka. Z refleksji nad
Harrym Potterem wyłania się bowiem obraz odbiorcy, którego kompetencje, potrzeby i reakcje odpowiadają nie specyfice wieku dziecięcego, ale obrazowi współczesnego dziecka jako odbiorcy kultury popularnej, a zarazem – co istotniejsze – odbiorcy akceptującemu model
życia i wartości preferowane przez kulturę ponowoczesną. Krytyczny stosunek do tej kultury, jako podważającej określone normy, zwłaszcza etyczne, uzasadnia negatywną ocenę
książek Joanne K. Rowling. Nie znajdują jednak potwierdzenia obawy o możliwość zagubienia przez dziecięcego czytelnika granicy między realnością a magią, kompetencje młodych odbiorców utworów pisarki (znających wiele analogicznych tekstów kultury) stwarzają
bowiem, jak się wydaje, bezpieczny dystans do magicznego świata cyklu powieści o Harrym
Potterze.
Częścią refleksji nad konstruktami alternatywnymi wobec naszego świata
(naszego pojmowania świata) pozostaje przekonanie o ważnej roli, jaką odgrywają one w procesie poznawania przez człowieka siebie i otaczającej go rzeczywistości. Jak zauważa Leszek Nowak (1995: 7): „Kto poważnie traktuje
kulturę, musi poważnie traktować elementarne jej doświadczenia. A jednym
z najbardziej elementarnych jest doświadczenie wielości światów”. Doświadczenie to jest nam dane po części dzięki dziełom sztuki, przedstawiającym – za
pomocą właściwych sobie środków – różne światy. Należące do powszechnych
i ugruntowanych w potocznej świadomości spostrzeżenie, że przedstawia je
literatura, znalazło wyraz w tradycyjnie stosowanych terminach i pojęciach, jak
„świat przedstawiony” czy „fikcyjna rzeczywistość”. Sygnalizują one istniejącą
nietożsamość świata rzeczywistego i świata ukazanego w dziele literackim,
uzasadniającą nazwanie każdej fikcji literackiej „konstruktem alternatywnym”.
Jego nośnikiem są zatem zarówno utwory należące do fantastyki, z którą zazwyczaj łączy się pojęcia: „alternatywny świat”, „alternatywna rzeczywistość”,
PHILOLOGICA WRATISLAVIENSIA: ACTA ET STUDIA 6
8
Leszek Będkowski
„historia alternatywna”, jak i teksty reprezentujące literaturę realistyczną. Wymienione typy twórczości różni jednak wyznaczanie przez nie odmiennych
relacji między światem kreowanym w utworze a rzeczywistością (obrazem
świata „realnego”).1 Literatura realistyczna, zakładając określoną kompetencję
odbiorcy o otaczającej go rzeczywistości, przedstawia światy imitujące tę rzeczywistość i proponuje czytelnikowi rozpoznanie w fikcyjnym świecie znanego
mu porządku prawdziwego świata. Z kolei utwory fantastyczne, budując „odczucie
fantastyczności” (Zgorzelski 1980: 23), „przekonują” odbiorcę, że prezentowane w nich światy nie odzwierciedlają świata rzeczywistego, ale są obrazem
(modelami) światów innych (odrębną kwestią pozostaje sugerowanie czytelnikowi określonego statusu tych światów) lub – jak w powieściach Joanne K.
Rowling – przedstawiają świat imitujący rzeczywistość, ale pozostający
w sprzeczności z wizją świata, która jest uznawana za prawdziwą.
Powieści o Harrym Potterze, lokując fantastyczne zdarzenia w rzeczywistości odpowiadającej współczesnej Anglii, należą do utworów sugerujących, że
wiedza czytelnika o rzeczywistości, wynikająca z racjonalnego (rozumowego,
naukowego) poznania i empirycznego doświadczania otaczającego go świata,
jest niepełna lub nieprawdziwa. Stąd zakładają one konieczność dokonania korekty wiedzy o realnym świecie, co łączy je z utworami należącymi do wąsko
pojętej fantastyki, zwykle utożsamianej, za sprawą szkicu Rogera Caillois (1967
[1966]), z fantastyką grozy lub literaturą antymimetyczną (Zgorzelski 1989: 145).
Ten typ twórczości, w odróżnieniu od fantastyki baśniowej, nigdy nie był zalecany dla dzieci, a właśnie spojrzenie na utwory Joanne K. Rowling przez pryzmat dziecięcego adresata stało się podstawowym – choć nie jedynym – źródłem ich niezwykle krytycznej oceny.
Refleksja dotycząca odbiorcy cyklu powieściowego o Harrym Potterze
wymaga uściślenia pojęć związanych z odbiorem i odbiorcą dzieła literackiego,
szczególnie z najwyższą wewnątrztekstową instancją odbiorczą, określaną mianem adresata utworu, zwaną również „odbiorcą implikowanym”, „odbiorcą
idealnym” czy „odbiorcą wirtualnym”. Jest ona rozumiana wieloznacznie nawet
w koncepcjach tych samych badaczy, o czym świadczą na przykład wypowiedzi
Umberto Eco, który swojego „czytelnika modelowego” pojmuje jako „odbiorcę
określonego przez tekst” i zarazem jako odbiorcę „zdolnego do współdziałania
w aktualizacji tekstowej w taki sposób, w jaki on – autor sobie to wyobrażał
i do dokonywania przy interpretowaniu takich posunięć, jakich autor dokonywał przy generowaniu tekstu” (Eco 1987 [1979]: 292). W takim ujęciu kompe1
Szczegółowego omówienia możliwych presupozycji dotyczących stosunku między znanym
porządkiem (kodu i świata) i porządkiem poznawanym (superkodu tekstu i świata przedstawionego) dokonał Andrzej Zgorzelski (1989: 143–146), przedstawiając własną propozycję
ponadgatunkowego zróżnicowania literatury w miejsce tradycyjnego podziału na twórczość
realistyczną i fantastyczną.
Dziecko jako adresat i odbiorca „realistycznego świata magii” Harry’ego Pottera
9
tencje odbiorcy byłyby wyznaczane zarówno przez implikowaną informację
tekstu, jak i przez informacje pozatekstowe.
Aby uniknąć zasygnalizowanej wieloznaczności, przyjęto następujące założenia i szczególną terminologię:
Pojęcie „adresat utworu” będzie oznaczać odbiorcę respektującego wyłącznie dane tekstu,
zawierające pewien schemat jego roli (Sławiński 1971: 51).
– Określenie „odbiorca (czytelnik) idealny” będzie oznaczać odbiorcę rekonstruującego takie
znaczenia utworu, jakie zostały mu nadane w momencie tworzenia. Jego obraz jest więc
wyznaczony w dużym stopniu przez „zewnętrzne wobec dzieła zespoły czy też systemy
norm” (Okopień-Sławińska 1976: 42) i obejmuje przede wszystkim domniemane intencje
autora.
– Adresat utworu, dysponując pełną informacją o posunięciach abstrakcyjnego nadawcy –
autora wewnętrznego (Balcerzan 1968: 19) – należy do kategorii „wewnątrztekstowych”,
z kolei odbiorca idealny jest kategorią „zewnątrztekstową”. Kompetencja adresata utworu
odpowiada jednak kompetencji „wyższych instancji odbiorczych” (Bartoszyński 1987: 185).
Oczywiście adresat utworu oraz odbiorca idealny są rekonstruowani, a właściwie „konstruowani”, w procesie interpretacji tekstu dokonanej przez konkretnego czytelnika (badacza). Z kolei powszechnie funkcjonujące wypowiedzi
czytelników, krytyków i badaczy literatury kształtują określony stereotyp odbioru i w pewnym stopniu wpływają na to, co bywa rozpoznane jako „istniejące” we wnętrzu danego utworu literackiego (Sławiński 1971: 42).
Wskazana zależność znajduje wyraźne odzwierciedlenie w niezwykle emocjonalnym sporze, wywołanym publikacją powieści Joanne K. Rowling, dotyczącym oddziaływania przedstawionego w nich świata na dziecięcego czytelnika. Tysiące wpisów na forach internetowych, liczne artykuły, a także publikacje
książkowe są świadectwem wciąż jeszcze toczonej dyskusji, która rodzi wiele
wątpliwości i przyczynia się do funkcjonowania stereotypowych sądów, zwykle
masowo powielanych także przez osoby zawodowo związane z edukacją polonistyczną. Spojrzenie na tę dyskusję przez pryzmat komunikacji literackiej,
w jakiej książki o Harrym Potterze uczestniczą ze względu na swój przekaz od
nadawcy do odbiorcy, pozwala zweryfikować pewne opinie oraz zaakcentować
często pomijane w dyskusjach aspekty odbioru wizji świata wykreowanej przez
angielską pisarkę.
Uczestników sporu, zazwyczaj formułujących skrajnie różne stwierdzenia,
łączy przekonanie o sukcesie utworów Joanne K. Rowling, znajdujące wymierne i obiektywne potwierdzenie w liczbach. Jak podaje Bartosz Machalica
(2007: 28), cykl powieściowy został przetłumaczony na ponad sześćdziesiąt
języków i opublikowany w przeszło dwustu krajach w łącznym nakładzie około
czterystu milionów egzemplarzy. Również w Polsce jego publikacja stała się
ogromnym sukcesem wydawniczym, ponieważ nakład wszystkich tomów po-
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Leszek Będkowski
wieści Joanne K. Rowling przekroczył w 2010 roku 4,8 miliona egzemplarzy.2
Przytoczone dane w pełni uzasadniają pojawienie się opinii, nazywających cykl
o Harrym Potterze „największym hitem wydawniczym końca XX wieku” (Malinowska 2002: 7), a nawet uznających powieści o młodym czarodzieju za
„największy sukces w dziejach przemysłu wydawniczego” (Radwan 2003: 108).
Niekwestionowane zainteresowanie utworami Joanne K. Rowling stało się
często podnoszonym argumentem na rzecz uznawania wykreowanej w nich
wizji świata za znacznie atrakcyjniejszą dla dziecka niż wizje oferowane przez
inne utwory literatury dziecięcej i młodzieżowej. Tym samym nierzadko wartościuje się cykl o przygodach Harry’ego Pottera, ceniąc jego „zdolność” przyciągnięcia dziecięcego czytelnika, dzięki której, w dobie kultury audiowizualnej,
młodzi odbiorcy „niespodziewanie” czytali książki liczące kilkaset stron. Powszechne jest również postrzeganie powieści angielskiej pisarki jako utworów,
które zachęciły dzieci nie tylko do czytania kolejnych tomów cyklu o Harrym
Potterze, ale także do lektury innych książek.
Do tak formułowanych opinii, funkcjonujących potocznie, należy podchodzić z ostrożnością. Świadomość wyjątkowej skali kampanii reklamowej, jaka
towarzyszyła sprzedaży utworów Joanne K. Rowling, skłania bowiem do zachowania dystansu wobec upatrywania ich sukcesu czytelniczego wyłącznie
w cechach opowieści o młodym czarodzieju. Uwagę zwracają także szczegółowe dane o liczbie sprzedanych w Polsce utworów pisarki, które mogą dowodzić
zmniejszającego się zainteresowania czytelników kolejnymi tomami powieści.
Wyraźna, bo sięgająca 40%, jest zwłaszcza różnica między nakładem pierwszego i dwóch ostatnich tomów cyklu (Harry Potter i kamień filozoficzny – 975 807
egzemplarzy, Harry Potter i książę półkrwi – 593 821 egzemplarzy, Harry Potter i insygnia śmierci – 605 867 egzemplarzy); przy czym liczba rzeczywiście
sprzedanych tomów może być dużo niższa (wszystkie są wciąż dostępne w księgarniach).
Wypada również zauważyć, że odnotowanie faktu przeczytania powieści
angielskiej pisarki przez niektóre dzieci, niechętnie czytające książki, może się
wiązać z wartościowaniem cyklu o Harrym Potterze wyłącznie przez uznanie go
za produkt atrakcyjny, co jednocześnie nie oznacza, że „wartościowy”. Z kolei
przekonanie o znacznym wpływie lektury powieści Joanne K. Rowling na
wzrost czytelnictwa wśród dzieci oraz na ich zainteresowanie w przyszłości
bardziej wartościowymi książkami, nie zostało oparte na badaniach ankietowych i danych statystycznych, dlatego z perspektywy czasu śmiało można je
uznać za jeden z charakterystycznych fałszywych mitów dotyczących tego cyklu.
Sygnalizowana niepewność co do istnienia jakiegokolwiek pożytku płynącego z przeczytania co najmniej jednej książki o Harrym Potterze, a także co do
2
Wszystkie przedstawione w niniejszym artykule dane liczbowe dotyczące nakładu cyklu
powieściowego o Harrym Potterze zostały uzyskane od wydawnictwa Media Rodzina.
11
źródła czytelniczego sukcesu całego cyklu, nie podważa faktu, że stał się on
bestsellerem. Jednocześnie już od momentu publikacji pierwszego tomu powieści utworom brytyjskiej pisarki towarzyszyło wyraziste i częste, także w Polsce,
formułowanie negatywnych sądów wartościujących, przekładających się na
określone postawy i reakcje społeczne. Przykładem tych ostatnich mogą być:
protest wyrażony przez mieszkańców Limanowej, który zmusił dyrekcję Limanowskiego Domu Kultury do odwołania filmowego, bezpłatnego seansu o Harrym Potterze, wniosek złożony do dyrekcji Szkoły Podstawowej nr 3 w Rzeszowie, w którym grupa rodziców prosiła, żeby zrezygnować ze zbiorowego
wyjścia klas na film, list mieszkańców Tarnowa do Wydziału Edukacji Urzędu
Miasta, postulujący zrezygnowanie z planowanego przez szkoły wyjścia do
kina. Z kolei w doniesieniach prasowych z zagranicy pojawiła się nawet informacja o paleniu książek Joanne K. Rowling na stosie, które miało się odbywać
w Alamogordo w Nowym Meksyku (por. Raczek 2002: 104).
Wprawdzie reakcja czytelników z Alamogordo należała do incydentalnych,
niemniej Harry Potter przez dwa kolejne lata (w 2001 i 2002 roku) znajdował
się na szczycie listy najczęściej kontestowanych książek, publikowanej przez
Stowarzyszenia Bibliotek Amerykańskich. Powodem było oczywiście przekonanie o szczególnie szkodliwym oddziaływaniu powieści pisarki na młodego
odbiorcę.
Najpoważniejsze zarzuty kierowane pod adresem książek o Harrym Potterze wiążą się z poglądem, że powieści Joanne K. Rowling stanowią atak na
chrześcijaństwo, propagują ideologię satanistyczną, okultystyczną i demonologiczną, oddziałującą silnie na dziecięcego czytelnika. Argumentem jest wskazywanie dostrzeżonych w cyklu licznych elementów odsyłających do tradycji
okultystyczno-demonologicznej i masońskiej, szczegółowo analizowanych przez
Aleksandra Posackiego (2006). Są one przy tym traktowane jako świadomie
użyte przez pisarkę w celu propagowania magii i ideologii, która za nią stoi
i która namawia do jej stosowania (Krajski 2002: 5). Jako pierwowzór głównego bohatera powieści Joanne K. Rowling bywa wskazywany okultysta-satanista
Aleister Crowley. Harry Potter jawi się także jako Antychryst, o czym ma
świadczyć między innymi symbolika liczb występujących w cyklu powieściowym (por. Posacki 2008: 18).
Odwołaniu do numerologii towarzyszy wskazywanie dostrzeganych
w utworach Joanne K. Rowling licznych antychrześcijańskich znaków i symboli, towarzyszących nawet tym postaciom, które z reguły są postrzegane jako
jednoznacznie pozytywne (Dumbledore). Dlatego – w opinii przeciwników
Harry’ego Pottera – dzieci czytające utwory o młodym czarodzieju są
„indoktrynowane oraz inicjowane w antychrześcijańską duchowość czy religię
gnozy, co może uderzać w ich wolność sumienia i wyznania” (Posacki
2007: 11).
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Leszek Będkowski
Wsparciem dla powyższych twierdzeń, lub licznych twierdzeń z nimi
zbieżnych, stały się wypowiedzi autorytetów Kościoła katolickiego. Przykładem może być opinia ówczesnego kardynała Josepha Ratzingera, który stwierdził, że utwory o Harrym Potterze są rodzajem „subtelnego uwiedzenia”, niepostrzeżenie oddziałującym na światopogląd odbiorców (zob. Kuby 2006
[2003]: 83). Także ksiądz Gabriel Amorth, oficjalny egzorcysta diecezji rzymskiej i założyciel Międzynarodowego Stowarzyszenia Egzorcystów, uznał powieści Joanne K. Rowling za niebezpieczne, jednoznacznie stwierdzając, że za
zjawiskiem potteromanii „kryje się podpis króla ciemności, czyli diabła” (zob.
Posacki 2006: 24).
Zarzuty dotyczące antychrześcijańskiej czy wręcz satanistycznej wymowy
powieści Joanne K. Rowling stykają się w dyskusji nad Harrym Potterem
z tezami prowadzącymi do wniosków nie tylko odmiennych, ale przeciwstawnych. Zawierają się one w przekonaniu, że utwory pisarki, szczególnie zaś tom
Harry Potter i Zakon Feniksa, pozostają przesiąknięte myślą chrześcijańską.
Niekiedy w losach Harry’ego Pottera dostrzega się nawet obecność odwołań do
losu Chrystusa (Gociek 2008: A25), a w postaci dyrektora szkoły magii, Albusa
Dumbledore’a – podobieństwo do Boga Ojca (Zalewski 2007: 58). Ogólnie się
podkreśla, że dysponujący odpowiednią wiedzą odbiorca odnajdzie w Harrym
Potterze wiele aluzji i symboli chrześcijańskich, co nakazuje radykalną rewizję
poglądów na wrogi stosunek powieści Joanne K. Rowling do chrześcijaństwa,
a nawet prowadzi do uznania ich za głęboko chrześcijańskie.
Propozycje odczytania cyklu o Harrym Potterze jako nośników przedstawionych tutaj znaczeń, które mają oddziaływać na światopogląd dzieci, trudno
uznać jedynie za ciekawostkę. Stanowią one przecież nie tylko świadectwo
funkcjonowania określonych, skrajnie różnych interpretacji powieści Joanne K.
Rowling, ale mają także charakter opiniotwórczy i w znacznym stopniu organizują dyskusję dotyczącą Harry’ego Pottera. Jej zakres i problem obecności
(nieobecności) utworów pisarki w edukacji szkolnej skłaniają do zajęcia stanowiska wobec przywołanych tez, wysuwanych przez przeciwników i zwolenników cyklu powieściowego o młodym czarodzieju.
Przede wszystkim należy podkreślić, że przeciwstawne argumenty, wymieniane przez obie strony sporu, są zdecydowanie bardziej świadectwem indywidualnych odczytań utworów angielskiej pisarki przez konkretnych odbiorców
niż dowodem na istnienie w nich określonych znaczeń. Owszem, proponowane
odczytania – ukazując możliwe konotacje związane z licznymi motywami powieści Joanne K. Rowling – sugerują „ujawnianie” cech ich autora wewnętrznego (przekazywanie ukrytych znaczeń i tez światopoglądowych) i tym samym
także adresata (czytelnik posiadający określone kompetencje), a nawet cech
autora (domniemane intencje) i odbiorcy idealnego (podatność na oddziaływanie określonych treści). Niestety, czynią to jednostronnie, bez uwzględnienia
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konwencji gatunkowej oraz w oderwaniu od cech kultury popularnej (także
postmodernistycznej), w której jest „zanurzony” współczesny młody odbiorca
literatury i której Harry Potter jest „klasycznym” wytworem. Tym samym najpoważniejsze zarzuty wobec utworów Joanne K. Rowling i głosy o ich chrześcijańskiej wymowie stają się przykładem braku adekwatności między rodzajem tekstu a jego odbiorem. Formuliczność krytykowanych (bronionych) powieści i rola obecnych w nich motywów (baśniowych, mitologicznych) jako
funkcjonujących w masowej wyobraźni implikują przecież określony sposób
czytania Harry’ego Pottera. Poszukiwanie w nim ukrytych „głębokich” znaczeń może się wiązać z opisywaną przez badaczy kultury popularnej pułapką,
w jaką wpadają badacze „odkrywający w dziełach prawdy, manifestujące jedynie ich erudycyjne kompetencje” (Kowalski 2005: 282). Co jednak najistotniejsze, zasadność wskazywanych kulturowych nawiązań (demonologia, satanizm
a symbole chrześcijańskie), nie prowadzi do potwierdzenia lub zanegowania
tezy o destrukcyjnym oddziaływaniu lektury książek Joanne K. Rowling na
światopogląd (psychikę) młodego odbiorcy. Konstatacje w tym zakresie, jako
dokonywane w płaszczyźnie socjologii literatury, nie powinny być bowiem
wyprowadzane ze spostrzeżeń dotyczących wewnętrznego porządku Harry’ego
Pottera, a jedynie poparte takimi spostrzeżeniami.
Istotnym argumentem dla wyrażanych opinii o szkodliwym wpływie cyklu
o Harrym Potterze na dzieci jest nie tylko dostrzeżona w świecie powieści obecność „magicznych” motywów oraz postaw (zachowań), które mogą być łączone
z okultyzmem i satanizmem, ale także, wskazane wcześniej, wykorzystanie
typu fantastyki wiążącego te motywy z „realnością” odbiorcy. Przeciwnicy
utworów Joanne K. Rowling zwykle więc przeciwstawiają im tradycyjne baśnie
(także twórczość Johna R. R. Tolkiena i Clive’a S. Levisa), twierdząc, że wskutek wykreowania w utworach angielskiej pisarki „realistycznego świata magii”
(Posacki 2006: 61), ich czytelnicy mogą zagubić granicę między realnością a tym,
co nierealne (Leszczyński 2002: 33). Tak sformułowany zarzut przypomina
zastrzeżenia wobec baśni wysuwane w XIX i na początku XX wieku przez pedagogów i wychowawców, którzy błędnie utożsamiali fantastyczne opowieści
z baśniami, nie dostrzegając konwencji baśni i potrzeb młodego odbiorcy, na co
wskazuje Dorota Simonides (1978: 114–115).
Wydaje się, że wątpliwości związane z „realizmem” Harry’ego Pottera
mają analogiczne źródło. Wynikają one z „nierozpoznania” współczesnych
tekstów kultury oddziałujących na młodego czytelnika i pewnego „zaskoczenia” konwencją gatunkową utworów Joanne K. Rowling, wywołującą obawy
przed „niebezpiecznym” łączeniem świata magii i rzeczywistości. Charakterystycznym elementem budującym tę łączność jest obecność w powieściach pisarki wypowiedzi „dodatkowego” nadawcy – tłumacza angielskiego oryginału
Harry’ego Pottera, budujących „autentyzm” przedstawionej wizji świata.
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Leszek Będkowski
W podjętej w ten sposób „grze” z odbiorcą pozorna niefikcjonalność fragmentów książki jest jednak równocześnie znoszona przez – czytelną dla młodego
odbiorcy – fikcjonalność całego utworu (cyklu). Chociaż bowiem współczesny
czytelnik, zwłaszcza dziecięcy, często nie rozpoznaje właściwie danej konwencji (baśń, mit, legenda, fantasy), to zazwyczaj bez trudu dostrzega konwencjonalność, nierzeczywistość literackich światów.
Wspólny świat czarodziejów i mugoli Harry’ego Pottera nie jest dla dzieci
bardziej realny niż świat baśni lub Tolkienowskiej wersji fantasy, na co dzień
bowiem są one odbiorcami tekstów kultury (literatura, film), które swobodnie
i w różnych proporcjach łączą rozmaite konwencje fantastyczne i realistyczne.
Z kolei gry komputerowe i RPG oferują realizm „uczestniczenia” w fikcyjnych
wydarzeniach, jak stwierdza Grzegorz (Leszczyński (2002: 32), w konfrontacji
z którym każdy świat ukazany w literaturze staje się odległy od realności.
Istnieje również trzeci aspekt sporu o negatywne oddziaływanie utworów
Joanne K. Rowling na dziecięcego odbiorcę dotyczący przekazywania przez nie
określonych wartości, zwłaszcza etycznych. Uwagę zwraca przede wszystkim
spostrzeżenie, że powieści angielskiej pisarki, ucząc akceptacji codziennego
„banalnego” zła, nie przygotowują dziecka „ani na spotkanie z dobrem, ani ze
złem” (zob. Czapliński 2004: 50).
Nie negując całkowicie zasadności ocen bardziej krytycznych, związanych
z zarzutami o budowanie przez Harry’ego Pottera negatywnego obrazu rodziny, nauczycieli, propagowanie relatywizmu etycznego czy prezentowanie dwuznacznych wzorców osobowych, należy zauważyć, że książki Joanne K. Rowling funkcjonują wśród tekstów, które pod omawianym tu względem można
uznać za równie lub nawet bardziej kontrowersyjne.
Przykładem jest powieść Małgorzaty Budzyńskiej Ala Makota, w której
obraz rodziców i rodziny ukazany z perspektywy nastolatki, zdaniem Anny
Krajewskiej „może przyprawić dorosłych o dreszcz grozy” (2006: 83). Wizja
świata oferowana przez przywołaną tutaj powieść realistyczną, a także współczesne utwory realizujące strategię narracyjną (łączoną z postmodernizmem),
opisywaną w ujęciu Violetty Wróblewskiej jako „konspirowanie z dziećmi
przeciw dorosłym” (2006: 114), okazuje się „mniej pożądana” wychowawczo
niż fantastyczna wizja świata Harry’ego Pottera. Wydaje się, że ten aspekt
sporu o powieści Joanne K. Rowling wiąże się więc nie tyle ze szczególnym
wyróżnianiem się utworów pisarki (spośród innych tekstów kultury) jako nośników negatywnych wartości i norm moralnych, ile raczej ze szczególnym
sposobem lektury, związanym z wyczuleniem na określone treści, po części
prowokowanym agresywną reklamą cyklu o Harrym Potterze.
Ponownie daje się zatem zauważyć istnienie niezwykle silnej zależności
między „odczytywaniem” powieści Joanne K. Rowling a czynnikami pozatekstowymi, które determinują postrzeganie tego, co „obecne” w powieściach pi-
15
sarki, zarazem zaś oddziałujące na konkretnego czytelnika. W zjawisko to wpisuje się również wypowiedź autorki na temat orientacji seksualnej Albusa
Dumbledora, w pewnym sensie „narzucająca” czytelnikom określony sposób
postrzegania (interpretowania zachowań, wartościowania) tej postaci.
W ten sposób, ujmując rzecz żartobliwie, ale zgodnie z regułami komunikacji literackiej, udaje się przybliżyć obraz idealnego odbiorcy Harry’ego Pottera:
jest nim czytelnik, który w toku konkretyzowania utworu będzie postrzegał
dyrektora szkoły czarodziejów jako geja. Niestety, bez odpowiedzi pozostanie
pytanie, czy postać szacownego nauczyciela Hogwartu została tak przez autorkę
pomyślana na etapie tworzenia świata przedstawionego, czy też mamy tutaj do
czynienia z dokonaną post factum, marketingową interpretacją własnego tekstu.
Uwaga o odbiorcy idealnym odsyła, podobnie jak cały spór o Harry’ego
Pottera, do pytania o założonego odbiorcę utworów Joanne K. Rowling, a także
do problemu ich wartościowania jako książek dla młodych czytelników. Należy
tutaj zaznaczyć, że niektóre powszechnie powtarzane opinie o adresacie i czytelniku idealnym powieści angielskiej pisarki budzą spore wątpliwości.
W wypadku czytelnika idealnego za rozstrzygające należałoby uznać zdanie
autorki, że jest nim rówieśnik tytułowego bohatera pierwszego tomu powieści.
Istniejąca zgodność wieku odbiorcy idealnego i wieku większości najmłodszych
czytelników konkretnych (są nimi dzieci z trzecich i czwartych klas szkół podstawowych) zdaje się wskazywać, że z punktu widzenia nadawcy (autora oraz
wydawnictw propagujących Harry’ego Pottera jako książkę bez ograniczeń
wiekowych), ogólnie nie doszło do anektowania powieści Joanne K. Rowling
przez zbyt młodych czytelników. Wniosek taki trudno jednak pogodzić z deklaracją pisarki, być może sprowokowaną zarzutami o obecność w jej utworach
przemocy i drastycznych scen, o zamiarze kierowania poszczególnych tomów
do odbiorców dorastających według Dagmary Kowalewskiej „razem z bohaterem” (2005: 388).
Idealnym odbiorcą utworów Joanne K. Rowling miałby być zatem rówieśnik Harry’ego Pottera z pierwszego tomu cyklu, czyli dziewięcio-, dziesięciolatek, który dorastając, otrzymuje każdego roku nowy tom przygód swojego
rówieśnika. Zarysowany w ten sposób obraz odbiorcy idealnego nie znajduje
jednak odzwierciedlenia w powieściach pisarki. Wyraźnej zmianie ulegają
w nich bowiem tylko dwa elementy. Jednym jest poszerzenie zakresu relacji
między postaciami o wątki erotyczne, drugi dotyczy zwiększenia liczby motywów dotyczących zagrożenia życia, śmierci oraz szczegółowości scen związanych z zagrożeniem i fizyczną przemocą, rozbudowywanych w kolejnych tomach. Niezależnie więc od często, być może bezpodstawnie, przypisywanych
autorce złych intencji, trzeba zauważyć, że kolejne części Harry’ego Pottera
otwierają dziecięcego czytelnika coraz szerzej na przemoc i grozę, a jeśli nie
otwierają, to przynajmniej zmuszają do obcowania z nimi. Idea stworzenia cy-
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Leszek Będkowski
klu utworów dla dojrzewającego odbiorcy, trudna do realizacji z powodów właściwości rzeczywiście zachodzącej komunikacji literackiej, nie znajduje zatem
potwierdzenia w kompetencjach adresata, które pozostają właściwie bez zmian.
Trudno jednak zakładać, że wykładnią dojrzałości czytelnika (a właściwie dojrzałości człowieka) jest zdolność przyzwyczajenia się do przemocy.
Niejasnemu obrazowi odbiorcy idealnego powieści Joanne K. Rowling
towarzyszy równie niejednoznaczny obraz ich adresata. Oczywiście przekonanie o „nastawieniu” całego cyklu na dziecięcego odbiorcę po części znajduje
uzasadnienie w cechach utworów o Harrym Potterze (fantastyka, humor, dynamiczna fabuła, elementy budzące lęk, szczęśliwe zakończenie, bohater rówieśniczy), łączonych z typową a zarazem atrakcyjną literaturą dla dzieci. Bliskie
dziecku są również obecne w powieściach liczne motywy (fantastyczne, baśniowe istoty i rekwizyty), potencjalnie znane młodemu czytelnikowi z otaczających go tekstów kultury (literatura, film, gry komputerowe).
Należy jednak zauważyć, że z wyjątkiem rówieśniczego bohatera analogicznymi cechami odznacza się znaczna część współczesnej literatury popularnej, w tym wiele utworów dla młodzieży, które mimo formalnego przypisania
do literatury „czwartej” pozostają bliższe utworom kierowanym do dorosłego
odbiorcy niż do dziecka. Na tle licznych zarzutów stawianych powieściom Joanne K. Rowling – jako nieodpowiednim dla młodego czytelnika – upatrywanie
adresata Harry’ego Pottera w dziecku budzi zatem uzasadnione wątpliwości.
Co istotne, nie wiążą się one wyłącznie z krytyczną postawą wobec powieści
o nastoletnim czarodzieju. Wskazują na to rozważania badaczki, poszukującej
w utworach Joanne K. Rowling wartości dydaktycznych cennych dla dzieci, ale
zarazem konstatującej, że adresatem cyklu może być, oprócz dziecka, także
człowiek dorosły (Kowalewska 2006: 69). Teza taka, świadcząca o błędnym
utożsamianiu adresata utworu z odbiorcą konkretnym, i zapewne mająca źródło
w obserwowanym profilu wiekowym czytelników powieści angielskiej pisarki,
nie powinna bynajmniej budować przekonania o istnieniu w Harrym Potterze
„dodatkowego” adresata. Powieści Joanne K. Rowling nie są bowiem utworami
dwuadresowymi – nie ma w nich wielopłaszczyznowości, która pozwalałaby na
określenie różnych adresów czytelniczych oraz odpowiadających im różnych
kompetencji i oczekiwań odbiorców. Popularność cyklu omawianych utworów
wśród dzieci, starszej młodzieży i dorosłych należy wiązać raczej ze zjawiskiem
homogenizacji współczesnej kultury, które, oddziałując na autorkę (kształt tworzonego tekstu) i czytelników (sposób odbioru tekstu), prowadzi do zatarcia
wyrazistości adresata powieści o Harrym Potterze.
Mimo przedstawionych wątpliwości można założyć, że utwory Joanne K.
Rowling powstawały z myślą o czytelniku dziecięcym i głównie w nim należy
upatrywać adresata jej powieści. Są one jednak wzorcowym wytworem współczesnej kultury popularnej i kultury ponowoczesnej, podlegającej homogeniza-
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cji, prefiguratywnej oraz relatywizującej wartości i normy moralne, są również
produktem kierowanym do potencjalnego nabywcy – młodego czytelnika
z przełomu XX i XXI wieku. Czynniki te wpłynęły na kształt kreowanego
w powieściach pisarki świata, który wiąże się nie tyle ze specyfiką wieku dziecięcego, ile raczej z obrazem współczesnego dziecka i aprobatywną postawą
wobec określonych zjawisk obserwowanych we współczesnej rzeczywistości.
Refleksja nad sporem wokół powieści Joanne K. Rowling prowadzi zatem
do uznania go przede wszystkim za spór między odmiennymi spojrzeniami na
dziecko i otaczającą nas kulturę. Rozważenie argumentów najczęściej przytaczanych przez uczestników tego sporu skłania do wejścia w rolę dziecięcego
odbiorcy, proponowaną przez cykl powieści Joanne K. Rowling, i skonfrontowania jej z kompetencjami współczesnych młodych czytelników. Przyjęcie
takiej perspektywy ujawnia zasadność krytycznej oceny utworów pisarki jako
eksponujących niepożądane normy zachowań, które mogą być bezrefleksyjnie
przyswajane przez dzieci, oraz jako ukazujących obraz rzeczywistości społecznej (relacje między postaciami dzieci i rodziców, uczniów i nauczycieli) mogący deformować (przez budowanie stereotypów) dziecięce postrzeganie realnej
rzeczywistości. Również udział w konstrukcji świata przedstawionego motywów związanych z przemocą stanowi cechę Harry’ego Pottera przemawiającą
przeciwko postrzeganiu powieści pisarki jako normy literatury dla dzieci.
Nie wydaje się jednak zasadne wiązanie negatywnego (potencjalnie) oddziaływania lektury utworów Joanne K. Rowling na dziecięcego czytelnika
z ogólnymi zasadami konstytuującymi fikcyjny świat (magia) i z typem wykorzystanej fikcji niemimetycznej (łączenie fantastyki i realności) lub szczegółowością w ukazywaniu tego, co sprzeczne z obrazem rzeczywistości. Wymienione cechy alternatywnego świata utworów angielskiej pisarki z pewnością czynią
go atrakcyjniejszym od światów tradycyjnych baśni, nie spowodują jednak, że
stanie się on „realistycznym światem magii”, z jakim współczesne dziecko bezsprzecznie może się stykać, będąc odbiorcą coraz liczniejszych interaktywnych
programów telewizyjnych odwołujących się do prekognicji. Świadomość fikcyjności utworu literackiego stwarza bezpieczny dystans wobec magicznej rzeczywistości Harry’ego Pottera, a znajomość analogicznych tekstów kultury
pozwala dzieciom na sytuowanie jej wśród wielu alternatywnych światów, które są rozpoznawane jako nierzeczywiste.
Wykaz literatury
Balcerzan, Edward 1968: Styl i poetyka twórczości dwujęzycznej Brunona Jasieńskiego. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.
Bartoszyński, Kazimierz 1987: O integracji badań nad tzw. komunikacją literacką. Pamiętnik
Literacki 1, 175–201.
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TERESA BRUŚ
UNIVERSITY OF WROCŁAW
PHILOLOGICAL SCHOOL OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN WROCŁAW
Alternate mental libraries and experience
ABSTRACT. This paper proposes to explore the notion of personal experience with reading
and after-reading of books and their impact on a configuration and presentation of modern
subjects who testify to having spent their lives in “the orgy of reading”. The paper posits that
in autobiographical and critical essays personal experience with books of others and therefore with those others happens in a mental library, an alternate formation within which the
writer as a reader and critic attempts to situate a pattern for self-understanding while charting
multiplicities of other views of the self. Showcasing modern uses of the alternate construal of
a mental library in Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Louis MacNeice,
the paper analyses the library as a place of metaphorical housing of the intimate seasons of
reading, housing of diverse books, their lives, and the lives of their readers. The paper argues
that such construals are driven by the desire for ultimate fullness of experience and imaginary personal satisfaction in the process of reaching the destination of selfhood.
In the poem “A Study of Reading Habits” Philip Larkin (1988: 131), a poet
and librarian, introduces a speaker who, having mapped three stages of his life,
concludes his brief exposing bio with a direct statement: “Books are a load of
crap”. In his observation (Larkin 1988: 131), such a strong interruption in the
narrative trajectory of a life of pleasures lived “with” books, prepares one for
a change through a discovery of different modalities of experience “away from”
books. In boyhood, the speaker recollects, “getting my nose in a book / Cured
most things short of school”. We learn that some time “later”, he (Larkin
1988: 131) was preoccupied to an unregretful degree, getting his hands on other
than textual corpuses. Speaking as their consumer, he confesses: “Don’t read
much now”. Even in what is a brief confessional poem, supposedly discrediting
in the end the value of reading, the reality of books, bad and good, simple and
complex, the speaker nevertheless summons the experience of reading to study
it and to configure and define his self and the value of books.
In this paper, I am going to explore the category of the personal experience
with reading and after-reading of books1 and their impact on the processes of
coordination and transformation of the experiencing subject. Notably, I am going to submit that in personal essays, the experience with books and therefore
1
The distinction between books and literature in the context of the essay is important. Graham
Good (1988: 35) argues here that literature “implies some kind of overarching unifying concept”, while books like Michel de Montaigne’s Essais are more personal and “consubstantial” with their authors. This topic is the subject of my discussion with reference to the article
of Virgnia Woolf (1968 /1924/).
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Teresa Bruś
with their authors was often construed as a mental library.2 It is an alternate
formation within which the writer as reader and critic attempts to situate a personal pattern for self-identification and self-clarification. A mental library, an
interior shelter constituted by language, is an inclusive place of personal selfcollecting and contact with others, an open and renewable site linking the sensual and the discursive. The library as a construal helps constitute and model
experience; it activates poetics of experience within which forms of fullness of
experience are articulated. Following Edward Casey (1993: 110), place is always “the first of all things”, is always “on the agenda at the first level of human experience”.
My argument is intended to showcase the libraries of influential twentieth
century writers like Walter (Bendix Schönflies) Benjamin (1892–1940), (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène) Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Virginia Woolf (born as
Adeline Virginia Stephen, 1882–1941), and Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) who
rely on the alternate construal of the mental library to legitimate their experiences of “the orgy of reading”.3 To attend to this modality of experience in the
transport from bios to autos of the autobiographical situation, the paper will
address Virginia Woolf’s positions on reading. Predating phenomenological
theory of the act of reading by Georges Poulet,4 Woolf assumed personality in
both the reader and writer. She treated the experience of the use of language like
reading to be driven by the ethos of friendship. She also confirmed in her critical essays as well as personal essays a moving openness and strong union with
the books collected in the library, a relationship in which she discerned lifedefining depths and a hybrid character of experience.
Many artists are concerned with the tension between what Wystan Hugh
Auden (1968: 12) calls the “primary world of our everyday experience” and the
secondary worlds “which we call works of art”5. But in directly autobiographical texts like personal essays, the juncture of the two worlds presents many un2
3
4
5
In the twenty-first century, the library becomes more of an archive, a frame, for a supplement
of experience. See Dominick LaCapra (2009) for a discussion of the significance of the archive especially in the context of trauma experiences.
I owe this phrase to Virginia Woolf (1968 /1922/: II: 35).
For this connection, I am indebted to Graham Good, who explains that Woolf’s treatment of
the book by the reader as a world of the other is the same, despite the fact that Woolf does
not apply phenomenological terms (1988: 113). Another distinction should be made with respect to Woolf’s more pronounced reservations about the book’s and therefore its author’s
autonomy and resistance to total immersion in the consciousness of the critic, which Poulet
takes for granted.
In The Struggle of the Modern, Stephen Spender called this world “The Alternate World of
Art”. By that he meant life “when it is intended that the processes of art are brought close to
borderline ecstatic or sexual experiences”, in which he includes “the exaltation of violence,
sexual relations, madness, drugs, through art which is regarded by the artists as a transition
towards the actual experience of these states” (1963: 87).
23
wieldy arrangements. Martin Jay (2008: 562) suggests that the concept of experience can take the forms of a cumulative narrative of development (Bildung);
an organically conceived aesthetic auto-creation; some derivative functions or
language structures, external and objective; or simply heightened attention to
perceptive elements present in pre-reflective phenomenological life. They all
bear most urgently upon autobiographical writings and have been engaged by
many writers experimenting with the openness and formlessness of the essay as
a form of self-experience.
Louis MacNeice’s mental library is the primary object of his personal essay
Modern Poetry (1968 /1938/). He reveals his mental library in three personal
stages, which he calls “Case-Books”: “Childhood”, “Public School”, and “Oxford”. These stages make up the major sections of his book; they cover a constellation of subject positions and their coordination and validation in the process of self-identification. Having configured the definite cases – the three principal seasons of the life of a child, reader, poet, and critic – he closes them.
MacNeice (1968) then feels pressured to abandon the cultivation of his poetic
self-aggrandizement for the involvement in life itself. Most significantly
though, he closes the cases to engage in full-fledged criticism of modern poetry
not as an impersonal academic critic but through “a personal point of view”
(1968: xxi). These carefully catalogued cases serve him as an aid in his efforts
to disengage himself from his past and attend to new fields of experience.
MacNeice’s abundant depository houses memories of individual books read
intensely, lazily, for snob reasons, or to find substitute sensations from them. It
houses anthologies and treasuries of verse purchased and catalogued like familiar and always available objects, as well as carefully preserved school papers
written on poetry. Unlike poetry, qualified in terms of what it has given him
(fantastic qualities, sexual arousal, escape, anarchic rebelliousness, enthusiasm),
these papers testify to assimilations but also negations and rejections of key
authorities produced as a result of the experience of reading. The “Case-Books”,
centered on poetry, authorize the poet as an experienced user of the most complex forms of language.
Reading as an act of autobiography is a subjective experience of language.
Writers believe that it is never as rich as we would want it to be, so we experiment with this object of experiencing by trying to atone for our lapses. We construe the object of our experience as more potent and much better than we know
it. This experience is always continuous with other experiences, leading to its
other forms. Books by others do not give direct access to experience, are not
reality in crudo, but they can solicit more aesthetic experiences. In multiple acts
of self-reinvention and self-testing, first construing the library, then penetrating
and unpacking its contents, the reader re-arranges and re-activates collections of
books in anticipation of the harvest of interiorized knowledge and multiple
24
Teresa Bruś
tracks of experience. Such personal, not real, libraries and, in the words of Walter Benjamin, their “prismatic fringes” (1968: 66), are penetrable, plural, and
open. They arbitrarily house books but also book-like creations.6
Thomas Carlyle in a very personal speech promoting the opening of the
London Library (in 1841) said that a good book is “the kind of resonance that it
awakes in our minds. A book may strike out a thousand things, may make us
know a thousand things which it does not know itself” (qtd. in Forster
1951: 307). He reinforces his appeal to the public housing of books with the
image of “the best of all universities” (qtd. in Forster 1951: 307). In the twentieth century, reading books no longer belonged to an accumulative and abiding
order of collective experience. It was no longer seen as a product of a strong
interaction between subjects and the world, but rather it was acknowledged
either as a necessity or an individualized and ephemeral project. For Virginia
Woolf, for example, cultivation of a library was almost a fetishistic metaphysical compulsion.
Many essayists of the twentieth century, infected with what Proust (1998
/1905/: 89) diagnosed as a “literary disease” of locating contentment in the land
of books, admitted that their inclination to reading made it harder to alternate
between personal experiences and experiences of subjects they read about, between the inside and the outside of books and their authors, between the immediate and temporal and the systematic and unified. Reading, reciprocal and mutual though hazy and indeterminate, is never entirely in the possession of the
reading subject; it is mediated through subjective experiences of the world by
others.7 This personal, experiential, and existential dimension of reading in lifewriting eventually amounts to a gain, or a sense of creative mastery. Woolf
described it as an increased power of “discernment” (1968: II, 25).
In “Unpacking My Library”, Walter Benjamin (1968: 59) speaks “whimsically” (as is fitting for the collector), but also tenderly of his unique collection
of books in terms of “everything remembered and thought, everything conscious”. He says he does not consider it for itself or by itself. He feels his collection originates a transfiguring practice through which the collected books but
also copies of books become “the pedestal, the frame, the base” for the reinterpretation of “fate”. Benjamin assumes that acquisition of books for one’s collec6
7
Walter Benjamin includes in this category personal family albums, stick-in albums, autograph books, portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracks, leaflets and prospectuses,
handwritten facsimiles or typewritten copies of obtainable periodicals (1968: 66).
Ernst Curtius (1997: 329) traces a variety of uses of the book as a symbol in his European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. He finds in Montaigne a very personal use of the book
as a topos of the “book of the world”. The essayist relies on the visual image of the mirror in
which one needs to look in order to see and get to know oneself well (329). I am bringing up
this example because of my focus on Virginia Woolf’s theory of reading based on the strong
influence of Montaigne.
25
tion begins with books written by the collector himself because, as he suggests,
writers write books as “they are dissatisfied with the books which they could
buy but do not like” (1968: 61). Not all books in one’s library are read; they are
nevertheless an important presence of a collection. They are also as responsibly
treated as other books. Non-reading is as important as reading. Some books,
“lonely and abandoned” elsewhere, are sheltered in the personal collection of
the collector where “the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves”
(1968: 64). As he brings them to light, so the books trigger a flood of memories
and images. Because the collection is always bound to the collector, it is his
personal library; without him, it loses its meaning; it is not transitive though its
individual items are transmissible – “inheritance is the soundest way of acquiring a collection” (Benjamin 1968: 66). The collector is responsible to make sure
that the objects in his collection “get their due”. Placed in a relationship of individual ownership, “the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects”,8
it is not the books but their collector who is animated, he himself “lives in
them” (Benjamin 1968: 67). This interiority of Benjamin’s library, created with
the books “as the building stones” (Benjamin 1968: 67), provides invisibility
and isolation. In this solitary enclosure, Benjamin grapples with fear and purifying glimpses of illuminating transcendence. Dominick LaCapra (2009: 64) sees
fear as a positive facet of such a visionary experience, both enabling and affirmative.
The library as a dwelling place presupposes not residence but being near as
in a place which facilitates observation. Dwelling places in Casey’s (1993: 115)
depiction, “range across a considerable gamut of styles and types, of uses and
destinies”, all dependent on the presence and inclinations of their inhabitants.
Whereas Benjamin refers to solid stones, Woolf (1968: II, 2) speaks of words,
“more impalpable than bricks” but translucent in the art of reading.9 In comparison, Marcel Proust, protective of his library’s solitary “encasement”, constructs
a carefully managed and impersonal décor. In his reading room, there is life, its
distinctive atmosphere experienced as a precondition “in receiving another’s
thought”, one which allows the mind its continuing inspiration (Proust 1998
/1905/: 142).
Reading is an “impulse having its origin outside ourselves, but received into
the very centre of our personal loneliness” (Proust 1998: 144). It is valuable
when we accept it as a “guide holding the keys that open the door to buried
8
9
Hannah Arendt (1958: 58) claims that in a discussion of property, the word “‘private’ immediately loses its private character, and much of its opposition to the public realm”.
Woolf says in Moments of Being “I have a feeling of transparency in words when they cease
to be words and become so intensified that one seems to experience them” (1985: 108). See
Good’s (1976: 112–134) analysis of this aspect of Woolf’s memoir techniques. Woolf extends the range of this transparency to after-reading, non-reading, over-reading, and rubbishreading.
26
Teresa Bruś
regions of ourselves” (Proust 1998: 144). However, when we think of the book
as a “material object which exists between the pages of a book, like honey made
by others” (Proust 1998: 144), then, if it is passively consumed, such a book
becomes very unhealthy. We see that these seemingly closed personal libraries
allow readers an interesting journey during which they can “experience an in in
the out or an out within the within” relationship (Casey 1993: 123).
In “Hours in a Library” (Woolf 1968 /1916/), “Reading” (Woolf 1968
/1921/), in two essays under the title “How Should One Read a Book?”(Woolf
1968 /1921/ and 2008 /1926/)10, and “Montaigne” (Woolf 1968 /1924/) – denying advancement of a fully-fledged theory of the art of reading – Virginia Woolf
develops a sustained, cogent series of theoretical positions to argue for ways of
commanding one’s private library as a place of intimate, and because of that
often intolerable, contact with people, great and common, and their rubbish and
superb writing. Like her father,11 having spent hours in her private library,
Woolf writes about its gratifying functions. She makes it an open and inclusive
place, replete with “the fruit of innumerable lives”, of “fullness and ripeness”
(Woolf 1968: II, 22). “A long low room” in the house is lined with real books,
difficult and inaccessible books, hybrid books, jolly, delightful, bad books, new
and classic, burnished and “stout blocks of divinity”. In Woolf’s library, “here
they all are” (1968: II, 12). This extraordinary excess allows adventuring, following “along uncharted ways in search of new forms for our sensations” and of
“the absolute certainty of delight” (Woolf 1968: II, 39).
Woolf’s library has a big window, an aperture inviting chance and illumination. But the library is also a bookshop and a bookstall, a multiplicity of choices
and arrangements. Such a construal is always potentially transforming because
it engages all our faculties. This quality allows her to speak of reading belong10
11
There are two very different essays under the same title “How Should One Read a Book?”.
The earlier one written in 1921 is published in Collected Essays (1968). The one published in
the collection Selected Essays (2008) was written in 1926. It does not appear in Collected
Essays. In this paper I refer to both these essays. I should explain that the history of publications of Virginia Woolf’s essays is very complex and deserves an extended study in itself.
Only two volumes of her essays were published during her lifetime: The Common Reader
published in 1925 and The Common Reader: Second Series published in 1932; both were
published by The Hogarth Press, the publishing house established by the Woolfs. After her
death, Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, edited and published four volumes of her essays
under the title Collected Essays, published for the first time in 1966. Its second impression
was published in 1968. Collected Essays includes all the essays edited by Leonard Woolf.
After he died, various publishers produced short and not always carefully edited selections of
Woolf’s essays in which they often included her articles and reviews.
Leslie Stephen begins his three-volume Hours in a Library (1892) with a long list of opinions of authors on the library, before he moves on to his carefully orchestrated study of famous novelists, which was praised by Woolf. His library is a place of preservation and repose, a sanctuary.
27
ing to the order of “the great moments of our own experience” which is always
informed by exchange, back and forwards movement, a setting apart she calls
“consecration” (Woolf 1968: II, 40).
Woolf’s library is also a “literature in the making”, an agora of “the immense volubility, this flood and foam of language, this “irreticence and vulgarity and triviality” as well as rubbish heaps (1968: II, 38). From all the heterogeneity and “multitudinous chaos”, from books breaking and bending, overflowing boundaries, breeding new species, irrelevant and not definite, new and second-hand, compounded additionally by the reading subject’s mental and emotional chaos, Woolf harvests ordering formations. They include the novel for
“the boldness of imagination”; biographies and memoirs as “sections of human
life in being” – though not “real books – that is to say, works of pure imagination”; and finally poetry, for its familiarity and persistence (Woolf 1968: II, 26).
In the library governed by her instinct, intuition, reason, and conclusions – these
three – serve as unquestionable supporting pillars. The essay “How Should One
Read a Book?” (Woolf 1921) opens the in of the library onto the fascinating out
of the open air, where the reader of autobiographical books looks into the open
windows of the houses and where the reader finds “how stimulating the scene
is, in its unconsciousness, its irrelevance, its perpetual movement” and that the
greater part of any library is nothing but the record of such fleeting moments”
(Woolf 1968: II, 5).
Woolf is mindful of the body in the library; when it is tired, it should rest,
stop reading, and look out elsewhere. Her library is not an accumulation of dead
sedimentary material, not exclusively “Honey and wax, the accumulation of
years” (MacNeice 1968: 160) but the “flood and foam” of potent ingredients,
the “lumber and wreckage and accumulation of time” (Woolf 1968: II, 2).
A large part of it, she says, is a “record of such fleeting moments in the lives of
men, women, and donkeys”, human life and its relics “cast out to moulder”
(1968: II, 5). Clearly, Woolf assumes that a stay in her library calls for effort,12
which entails an unavoidable transformation that comes with “repeated shocks,
each unfelt at the time, suddenly loosening the fabric? breaking something
away?” Woolf celebrates such an enterprise as experience (1968: II, 25).
Detailing the experience, Woolf proposes that the first reading of books
should be about abandoning oneself unreservedly to the book and its author.
And it is through “adventurous, broad”, and “true” acts of reading, when
“thrown this way and then that”, “wrenched and distorted”, that we can begin to
12
In her preface to the first edition of her essays, Woolf defines her intended reader as the
common reader who “reads for pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others” (in Good 1988:112). The demands she places on this companion are less than
“common”.
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Teresa Bruś
understand the books and get closer than before to understanding the meaning
of life (Woolf 2008: 67).
The first reading offers “the greatest pleasure and excitement”; from the
after-reading, we receive more profound and more lasting pleasure. This actual
reading is also always incomplete, distracted, and interrupted, “new impressions
are always completing and canceling the old, bringing the pleasure through
recognition of details. It is contingent and subject to fusion of opposite sensations, of “friction of reading” and “emotion of reading”, of bewilderment and
anticipation.13 Distance and “different pursuits”, without our awareness, create a
different process, which results in the complete “assembly” of parts previously
dispersed. When we read a book a second time, this process allows the formation of critical judgment. A new wholeness achieved through symmetry, proportion, and balancing, through criticizing and judging gives us “the book clear,
secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds” (Woolf
2008: 72).
The window in Woolf’s library implies the openness first onto a garden and
then onto the world outside. It invites the openness of the experience of reading
to “all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular” (Woolf
2008: 63). Profoundly subjective and yet essentially objective, experience can
never be possessed, cannot be a central binding perspective. The girl sitting in
the library window in the essay “Reading” is holding a book, but she says that
“instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape, not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and
fields and the hot summer sky” (1968: II, 13). Experience happens unexpectedly
as we actively search for it. The subject in the library enters relationships with
objects which are created by others and which by nature are not always identifiable. Opening a book, the subject opens up to new qualities which are potentially transforming and which produce experience as that which we have but
which is never quite ours. Leaving the library, we are not where we were when
we entered it.
As Martin Jay (2008: 20) explains, experience constitutes a point of convergence between private and public language, between the possible and the
inexpressible. In English, says Jay, the word “experience” means “emerging
from” (2008: 20). Experience is an attempt, an experiment, which in its original
root experientia is close to expereri; its root periculum points to dangers. But
the English word, what Jay calls the English “case”, does not throw sufficient
light on the key relationship between experience and the raw, unreflective im13
A parallel model of actual reading may be found in Proust’s writings. His reader of especially early books is somebody open to conditions of adventurousness. The substance of
reading often disappears behind daily incidentals. And it is the irrelevant which betrays the
strength of the bodily, the temporal, and the multiple of the reading experience.
29
pression or fresh observation as in Greek empeiria, the predecessor of experience. That is why to illustrate the distinctions operating in “experience”, Jay
turns to the German “case”, to two terms pointing to two distinctive facets of
experience. Erlebnis, un-integrated, lived momentary experience, direct and
shapeless, and Erfahrung integrated and more expandable process of learning
from experience. Erfahrung communicates the movement in time (Fahrt) and
the danger of journeying (Gefahr). Jay (2008: 570) sees in it a more public
character inclusive of otherness, of what one is not, and of a risk of loss of
safety. Because the word “experience” contains that which is experienced but
also the subjective process of experiencing, Jay (2008: 29) suggests it can be
used as a concept for the rupture between the subject and object. In his study of
Erfahrung, LaCapra (2009: 75), in turn, points additionally to its embrace of
critical thought and practice.
Woolf writes about the presence of her body in the library. She opens the
library outdoors to be able to expand the category of experience not only to
what is past and lost but to the present ephemeral moment. She found in Michel
de Montaigne’s Essais,14 his masterful “book of the self”, a flexible model of
observation in the notion of self-portraiture open to all.15 “The master of the art
14
15
In the theory of literature Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) is widely accepted as
the founder of the essay as a new literary genre, based on introspection referring to personal
experience. Original editions of Montaigne’s three collections of essays appeared successively in the second half of the sixteenth century, namely: 1580: Essais, livres I et II. Bordeaux: Simon Millanges; 1582: Essais, livres I et II. Bordeaux: Simon Millanges; 1587: Essais, livres I et II. Paris: Jean Richer; 1588 : Essais, livres I et II et III (plus de 600 additions
aux deux premiers). Paris : Abel Langelier ;. 1595 : Essais, éd. posthume, Paris, Abel Langelier, (établie par Pierre de Brach et Marie de Gournay, préface de Mlle de Gournay). It
should be added that the first phototypical reproduction of the Essais available in Bordeaux
exemplars, showing Montaigne's handwritten additions of 1588–1592, was edited and introduced by Fortunat Strowski in 1912 (Paris: Librairie Hachette). As the reference book serves
today the photocopied edition: Montaigne, Michel de 1965: Les Essais : Édition VilleySaulnier. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
There were several translations of these works into Enblish As the first one, to be mentioned
are: The Essayes. Trans. by John Florio. London: V. Sims, 1603. Among the others, Essays
of Michel de Montaigne ranslated by Charles Cotton and edited by William Carew Hazlitt
are available online in the Project Gutenberg Release #3600. Available online is the French
edition of The Montague Project, i.e., Viley edition of the Essays with Corresponding Digital
Page Images from the Bordeau Copy: Essais de Montaigne. Édition Villey-Saulnier avec
images digitales correspondantes de l'Exemplaire de Bordeaux. En prime: un moteur de recherche (www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/montaigne/) – editor’s note (ZW).
As pointed out by Ryszard Nycz (2007: 22), an interesting counter-proposal to Michel Montaigne’s “Book of the Self” constitutes .Michel Foucault’s conception of “experience books”,
which do not tell the truth about reality but transform, deform, and alter the world of subjects
into the world of others in relations to community practices. Nycz refers here to the formula
expressed in one of the parts of Foucaults book (1991 /1881/), Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, entitled as“How an experience book is born”.
30
Teresa Bruś
of life” thought of experience in terms of sharing, not secretly accumulating the
fruit of self-observation.
Montaigne is mindful of the dangers of overexposing private history. He
also avoids an undue identification with derivative forms of experience. In her
essay “Montaigne”, Woolf rehearses the essayist’s advice to “withdraw to the
inner room of our tower and there turn the pages of books” (1968: III, 20). She
accepts that “we may enjoy our room in the tower with the painted walls and the
commodious bookcases” but agrees that it is an insufficient and frustrating undertaking. “After solitude and concentration, the open air”, she says elsewhere,
possesses “indescribable fascination” (Woolf 2008: 68). For Woolf, “Movement
and change are our essence” (1968: III, 22). Thus, like Montaigne, Woolf writes
about the movement between the present moment of writing and reading and
ceasing to read and of other mental journeying.
The experience of reading as a journey takes Woolf from the absolute experience of childhood, where there is little self-consciousness and little if any
differentiation between the subject and the object, from retrieval of impressions
and all kinds of “fleeting shapes” of Erlebnis, to “hard and lasting” passing of
judgment (1968: II, 8). Like Montaigne, she responds critically to what she
reads. Her reflections, first as a friend and later as a severe judge felt as a hardening Erfahrung, presuppose other experiences and consideration of other people. Judging is the duty of the reader, one that she says requires preparation and
learning.
The good critic for Woolf is not some aimless aggressor, not the authoritative figure of the library, and not the “gowned and furred” controller but an
imaginative and creative reader. In her extensive library conceived as “spacetime”, she is able to link her earliest and latest selves, the avid childhood readers and the learned judges. In sum, for Woolf there are two experiences, on the
one hand personal and happy pleasure and interruptions and on the other an
organized complex of dimensions created, as she says, “to extend our intercourse beyond out time and province” (1968: III, 22).
Woolf’s model of reading is based on the assumption that real reading is
reading of “works of pure imagination” which is a very difficult task calling for
careful and frequent departures into practices involving reading inferior bodies
of texts like factual based biographies as well as non-reading, living out in the
open, observing other life activities. They serve as “the best way of rejuvenating
one’s own creative power”. She locates its utmost reserve in “the steeps of poetry”. This hierarchical approach, placing fiction right below poetry’s “extremities and extravagancies” and ranking non-fiction literature lowest due to its
“diffuseness”, “compromises”, “invasions”, and “slovenly sentences” (2008:
69), is a very personal ordering, a defense of experiences of a writer and reader
methodically and passionately cultivating her own creative power.
31
For Louis MacNeice (1968), the ultimate, most complete and extravagant
life experience is the experience of poetry. Reading, speaking, and writing are
orchestrated by the poet to condition and fortify his plea for poetry, which is
informed by critical faculty, both judicious and friendly. Like Woolf, MacNeice
feels the extremes of poetry should define the consciousness of man, should be
there in every man’s library. MacNeice practices what Woolf imagines poetry
does. She says poetry shelters that something “that has been shaped and clarified, cut to catch the light, hard as gem or rock with the seal of human experience in it … what is timeless and contemporary” (Woolf 1968: II, 26).
In the poem “The British Museum Reading Room”, MacNeice’s speaker
looks around the “safe and silent” world of the grand library, the world of “inverted values” and of cosmopolitanism. He is there reading not books, but people who come from everywhere. The Room gathers a wide spectrum of opposing human drives and inclinations: love and boredom, liveliness and neurosis,
wealth and poverty, business and passion, flamboyance and resignation. “Under
the hive-like dome”, surrounded by “walls of books”, he sees the readers
“folded up in themselves” (MacNeice 1979 /1939/: 161). “Honey and wax”16
collected over the years is available but not exciting to the speaker, and so he
leaves the famous Room. Outside, he finds life and movement. “Courting”,
“sweeping”, “talking”, and “puffing” pigeons animate the moment for him, as
does an image of a different gathering on the museum wall. It is the image of
“the ancient terror” picturing “heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces / The
guttural sorrow of the refugees”. Unlike honey and wax, the sorrow is not arrested, not precipitated; it “seeps” down, permeating his troubled consciousness
in 1939 but not necessarily the consciousness of men in the vast Room erected
to glorify the power of Western civilization. The last word in the three-stanza
poem is “refugees” (MacNeice 1979 /1939/: 161). MacNeice’s speaker, like
Larkin’s, seems done with books. He is anticipating exigency of a different kind
of experiencing and perhaps an alternative archiving.
References
Arendt, Hannah 1958: The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Auden, Wystan Hugh 1968: Secondary Worlds. London: Faber and Faber.
Benjamin, Walter 1968 [1968 /1955/]: Illuminations: Essays and Reflectiona. Edited and with an
introduction by Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books [(translation after reprint) Illuminationen. New York Harcourt, Brace & World /(originally published)
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag/].
16
Proust, as mentioned before, used the image of honey “made by others, to be possessed
merely by stretching out our hands to a bookshelf and passively digesting it in the mood of
bodily and mental torpor” (1998: 144).
32
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Casey Edward, T. 1993: Getting Back Into Place: Toward a New Understanding of the PlaceWorld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Curtius, Ernst 1997 [1948]: Literatura europejska i łacińskie średniowiecze. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych „Universitas” [Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: A. Francke AG-Verlag].
Forster, Edward Morgan 1951: Two Cheers for Democracy. New York: Harvest.
Foucault, Michel 1991 /1881/: Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Trans.
R. James Goldstein, James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e). Foreign Agents Series. Distributed by Autonomedia.
Good, Graham 1988: The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge.
Jay, Martin 2008 [2005]: Pieśni doświadczenia. Nowoczesne amerykańskie i europejskie wariacje
na uniwersalny temat. Kraków: Universitas [Songs of Experience: Modern American and
European Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press].
LaCapra, Dominick 2009 [2004]: Historia w okresie przejściowym. Doświadczenie, tożsamość,
teoria krytyczna. Trans. Katarzyna Bojarska. Kraków: Universitas [History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press].
Larkin, Philip 1988: Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
MacNeice, Louis 1979 /1939/: The British Museum Reading Room. In: Louis MacNeice 1968:
Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 160–161.
MacNeice, Louis 1968 /1938/: Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
MacNeice, Louis 1979 /1966/: Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.
Nycz, Ryszard 2007: Literatura nowoczesna wobec doświadczenia [Modern literature in the face
of experience]. In: Włodzimierz Bolecki, Ewa Narrocka (eds.) 2007: Literackie reprezentacje doświadczenia [Literary Representations of Experience]. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN /Państwowa Akademia Nauk/, 11–25.
Proust, Marcel 1998 /1905/: Days of Reading: I. In: Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, Olga
Taxidou (eds.) 1998: Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 140–144.
Spender, Stephen 1965 /1963/: The Struggle of the Modern. London: Methuen /London: Hamish
Hamilton/.
Stephen, Leslie 2007 /1892/: Hours in a Library. Volume I (of III). The Project Gutenberg EBook.
January 27, 2007. EBook #20459 /New Edition. With Additions in Three Volumes. London:
Smithm Elder & Co, 15 Waterloo Place, 1892/.
Woolf, Virginia 1968 /1916/: Hours in a Library. In: Virginia Woolf 1968: Collected Essays.
Volume II. London: The Hogarth Press, 34–40.
Woolf, Virginia 1968 /1921/: Reading. In: Virginia Woolf 1968: Collected Essays. Volume II.
London: The Hogarth Press, 12–33.
Woolf, Virginia 1968 /1921/: How Should One Read a Book? In: Virginia Woolf 1968: Collected
Essays. Volume II. London: The Hogarth Press, 1–11.
Woolf, Virginia 2008 /1926/: How Should One Read a Book? In: Virginia Woolf 2008: Selected
Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 63– 74.
Woolf, Virginia 1968 /1924/: Montaigne. In: Virginia Woolf 1968: Collected Essays. Volume III.
London: The Hogarth Press, 18–27.
Woolf, Virginia 1968 /1966/: Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. Volumes I–IV. London: The
Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia 1985 /1976/: Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. New
York: Mariner Books.
Woolf, Virginia 2008: Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ANNA BUDZIAK
The contradictory flâneur – lost in the city
and found in the text
ABSTRACT. The term which describes this vagrant figure entered usage in 1806, but even
then, its meaning was hardly stable. Only two years later the flâneur changed from the figure
of Monsieur Bon-Homme to a deplorable “loafer”; later, it metamorphosed into the dandyesque stroller allied to city exiles from the apache to the prostitute. The flâneur’s alliance
with a spectrum of outcasts is telling: in the flâneur, polished manners mix with tarnished
reputation – all is combined in an impossible synthesis. So, while the term is by no means
static, the concept itself is incongruous. This paper seeks to explore the attributes of this selfcontradictory figure. Is he like a badau, a gaper, or a more perceptive observer? Is he full of
sympathy or just driven by curiosity? Is he a detective scrutinizing the criminal or a trespasser protective of his own anonymity? Is he really a walking figure; or, perhaps, he is sedentary? And is the flâneur always a he? Seeking answers to these questions, this paper looks
at the flâneur through the prism of three related aspects: of visuality, gender and mobility.
Finally, it glances at the flâneur’s habitat, both in terms of an urban and textual environment,
and postulates that this alternate social and cultural construct, preserves its topicality, indeed,
because of its apparent incongruity. Because it is a paradoxical concept, made up of conflicting alternatives, it is also endlessly adaptable, with theoreticians alternately highlighting its
contrasted aspects. But as such, a bundle of alternatives, it would always provide an alternate
vision to the mainstream mentality, be it the nineteenth-century bourgeois ethos of usefulness or, paradoxically, its reverse – late twentieth-century consumerism. In the 19th century,
the flâneur was an outcast figure, a self-declared émigré from bourgeois society. He was
a cultural, and cultured, rebel allied with other figures that populated the margins of respectable city society. But as an outcast, a rebel, the figure at the margin, boasting aristocratic origins, he represented an alluring alternative to a gray capitalist; as a non-productive loafer, he
would contrast with an industrious bourgeois; as an artist and an art connoisseur, he heroically opposed the aesthetics of mass culture. But the flâneur’s impact and survival depended
not only on the force with which he manifested his difference. Himself an alternate social
and cultural construal, he was an embodiment of inbuilt alternatives.
Self-contradictory, riven by inherent contrasts, the very idea of the flâneur
developed through unexpected shifts.1 Nineteenth-century literature paints the
flâneur as he strolls in the city; in the words of John Jervis, he savors its “rest1
For the historical evolution of the concept, see Werner (2004: 1–27). Among Polish publications, the contradictory nature of flaneurism is briefly signaled by Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska
(1999), who stresses a rift between two version of the flâneur: on the one hand, an agitated
and anxious persona (as in Baudelaire and in Poe: the detective and the trespasser), and on
the other, the leisurely flâneur (as noted in Benjamin and epitomized by the man with his turtle on a leash). Jan Susina (2002), in turn, treats flânerie as if it were a recurrent phenomenon.
34
Anna Budziak
lessness and colour” (1999: 66).2 His nonchalance is embodied in the historical
dandy of the Regency period, the notoriously fashionable Beau Brummel. He is
the model behind the fictive decadent dandies – Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, and Max Beerbohm’s Monsieur Le V.; and his spirit is
captured by Baudelaire’s description of Monsieur C. G., as noted by Keith
Tester, a figure alluding to both Edouard Manet and Constantine Guy (1994: 6).
And yet, flanerian history stretches beyond the bounds of the 19th century. The
philosophers who taught on the streets, among them Socrates, also conform to
the description of a flâneur, as do, according to Dana Brand, the sixteenthcentury city strollers in London and the seventeenth-century readers of the Theophrastian character books (cited. in Werner 2004: 7) – the interpreters of that
ever-changing text which is a human face. The flâneur travels in time and
changes places as Tester describes in detail referring to different authors and
protagonists (1994: 1–21). The flâneur is also pictured by Michel de Certeau as
standing on the top of the World Trade Centre and conceptualized by Richard
Rorty as she nonchalantly flits through discourses, never satisfied. His figure –
chameleon-like (indeed, the flâneur has even changed sex), and his environment
– ever-changing, the flâneur survived into the 21st century.
Interestingly, this incarnation of a rebellious alternative preserved its validity by itself alternating within at least three categories: of visuality, gender and
mobility. Indeed, many aspects of flaneurism go under the catch-all term “visuality”: the practice of interpreting faces, the flâneur’s susceptibility to photography, the similarity between the flâneur and the detective, the flâneur’s artistic
capacity. Indeed, the flanerian practice involves the savoir of face-reading and
is linked with the nineteenth-century fascination with physiognomics. But the
roots of this interest go a lot deeper, to Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on
Physiognomy: Physiognomical Fragments for the Promotion of the Knowledge
and Love of Mankind published in 1772, and even further back in time, to the
art of physiognomics as developed by the ancients.3 To the flâneur, the city and
its inhabitants become the object of close scrutiny.
Compared to a badau (a mere gaper), the flâneur is “a … discerning observer” as James V. Werner states 2004: 103); in contrast to a gaper absorbed
in, yet mystified by, the city, the flâneur is an intellectual with an icy look: he
observes without the feeling of empathy (Tester 1994: 14) – such is the cold
flâneur in Baudelaire. But, then, Walter Benjamin’s flâneur has all the human
warmth; he cultivates the compassionate understanding typical of the badau,
rather than of the frigid and mentalist Baudelareian flâneur. This difference
between two concepts of flaneurism is reflected in Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s
conflicting interpretations of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”: Baudelaire unambigu2
3
On the city and the flâneur, see also Burton (1994), Blanchard (1985), and Ferguson (1994).
For the ancient physiognomics, see Evans (1969).
The contradictory flâneur – lost in the city and found in the text
35
ously identifies the flâneur with the convalescing observer seated in the café,
whilst Benjamin is ambivalent, attributing the flanerian features also to the
character which is observed – to “the unknown man” of the crowd (for details
see Rignall 1992: 11–13).
The above contrast starts a chain of incongruities in how the flâneur is perceived. To be a flâneur means to see and interpret; but this seer can also be seen. So, the opinions on how flaneurism alters in relation to the development of
photography are divided: John Jervis claims that photography enhances the
flanerian experience; Keith Tester, in contrast, argues that with the development
of photography, flaneurism was undercut. According to Jervis (1999: 280–291),
through spreading of what he calls the visual culture, photography – alongside
panoramas and daguerreotypes – enlivened the visual aspect of flânerie. Tester,
on the contrary, associates the development of photography, not with the growth
but with the demise of flaneurism. Namely, by offering pictures of plain verisimilitude, photography compromised the flâneur’s privacy; it undermined the
flanerian “playing with masks and incognito” (1994: 14–15), which had already
been undercut when Haussmann replaced Parisian arcades with wide-open streets.
To the historical flâneur, privacy was essential since it often allowed him to
escape his creditors. As pointed out by Benjamin, the flâneur was rather slow
paying his debts and rent (1973 [1969]: 47–48). Such was certainly the case of
this notorious dandy of Regency England, Beau Brummel, who squandered
a fortune and died penniless. The emphasis laid on preserving the flâneur’s
anonymity leads on to the question of the flâneur’s possible identification with
a trespasser. However, whether he is more of a hiding criminal or an exploring
detective is a difficult question. The identification of the flâneur with either the
pursuer or the pursued is rather problematic, as for example, in Edgar Allan
Poe’s “The man of the crowd”. It is not clear which of the two figures in the
story is the flâneur. Is it the convalescing man in the café, the observing one, or
is it the man who attracts the fascinated attention yet evades the observer’s scrutinizing gaze? In Poe’s story, walking and seeing are not the prerogatives of one
man. As I mentioned above, in Benjamin’s reading of this story the flâneur is
identified with the mysterious “man of the crowd”: the one that tries to hide in
the crowd, the one who is not at ease with his conscience and “does not feel
comfortable in his own company” (Poe 1996 /1840/: 48). The narrator describes
him as “the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be done” (quoted
in Benjamin 1973: 48). But, indeed, Benjamin seems to be in two minds on the
issue of the flâneur’s criminal past. He describes the flâneur not only as a man
burdened with the weight of his crime but also as a person endowed with
“criminological sagacity” (Benjamin 1973: 41); thus, the flâneur is a contradictory figure, both a criminal and a criminologist. This type of the criminologist –
or the observing flâneur driven by insatiable curiosity and the desire to read the
36
Anna Budziak
faces of passers-by – relentlessly pursues “the man of the crowd”, tracks the
suspect down and interprets his moves. Admittedly, then, the flâneur is a good
walker – as is “the man of the crowd” – but the art of flânerie also requires an
ability to interpret signs and a keen eye, hence the flâneur merges with the observing pursuant, and more explicitly with the detective, as in the figure of
Poe’s Detective Dupin, or as in Dickens’s The Uncommercial Traveller.4
A physiognomist, a seer seen, a criminal and a criminologist at once, the
flâneur can also be an artist. In the words of Tester, the flâneur is “empty”, like
an artist, and ready to absorb messages that the city sends (1994: 7). However,
Baudelaire makes it clear that not every flâneur is endowed with artistic capacity, that to be an artist means not only to absorb but also to transform and
imaginatively recreate. Thus, Baudelaire’s Monsieur C. G., from “The Painter
of Modern Life”, “has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur … He is looking for … ‘modernity’” (1996 /1863/: 142), for novel techniques, the emphasis
being on expression, not just on flowing impressions. The flâneur-as-the-artist
is an elitist persona. And as such it survived into the 20th century, though
changing a little on the way into a critic and a connoisseur (but then, the equating of the critic and the artist was also joyfully proclaimed by Oscar Wilde in
1890, in his “The critic as artist”). The connoisseurial aspect of flaneurism is
highlighted, for instance, by Stefan Morawski (1994), who contrasts the modern
flâneur with an unreflective consumer. As imagined by Morawski, the critical
flâneur is the opponent to mass culture, an artist or an intellectual, heroically
resisting the invasion of mediocrity. However, this elitist identification can
hardly hold too long. To Zygmunt Bauman (1994: 150–151), flaneurism takes
place in the shopping mall where the flâneur, it should be said, no longer looks,
but goes swivel-eyed; the creator thus declines to an unreflective consumer.
Yet another ambiguity shall be added to the ambivalences of flânerie: gender indeterminacy. In the beginning, flânerie was elitist and exclusively male.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the emotion-driven female – the
imaginary opposite of the decadent aesthete – beside the unfocused badau,
would be excluded form the practice of flânerie. Women – considered unable to
preserve distance and incapable of detachment, which was the necessary qualification for a flâneur – could only be conceptualized as active shoppers. As put
by Ferguson, the female would be “unfit for flânerie because she desires the
objects spread before her and acts upon that desire” (1994: 27). Then, the street
would be open to a female shopper, a female shop assistant selling goods and
4
For the linking of the flâneur and the sleuth in Poe, see Benjamin (1973 [1969]: 41,
48) and Werner (2004: 110–12). For the association of the flâneur with the detective in Dickens, see Rignall (1992: 63–64). Dana Brand sees the flâneur as “a precursor to [Poe’s] detective Dupin” (quoted in Werner 2004: ix).
37
the prostitute selling herself, exhibited to the flâneur’s gaze.5 Women’s exclusion from flânerie was not only physical, it would be also linguistic, with the
grammatical feminine of the word flâneur (flâneuse) designating a sofa on
which the male flâneur could comfortably recline.
Not the observer herself, a woman would not even be free to roam. This
sense of exclusion lasts well into the 20th century and is poignantly rendered in
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1977 /1929/). She remembers her
stroll through Oxford, with guards appearing only to close the gates behind her,
with men emerging only to put her off her track, and away from her train of
thoughts, as soon as she leaves the path and strays onto the venerated turf, the
area reserved for the musing dons. The strolling woman recollects her walk with
irony: “Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. . . . Gate after gate seemed
to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting
innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made
secure for another night” (1977 /1929/: 18). Whereas Woolf, in the year 1929,
asserts a woman’s right to an aimless walk, it should be noted that already the
last two decades of the 19th century had destabilized the gender identity of the
flâneur, with this figure becoming more and more exhausted and over-refined.
The flâneur’s masculine profile significantly softened in the aura of Decadence.
Such instability in the decadent flâneur’s masculine self, the watering down of
his maleness, can be exemplified with des Esseintes’s explicit indulgence in
Uranism, when the effete aristocrat “[gets] to the point of imagining that he for
his part was turning female” (Huysmans 1987 [1884]: 11).
Beside the gradual inclusion of women, the 20th century brings yet another
very significant change: the increasing role of static flaneurism. Actually, the
idea of a static flâneur emerged in the second half of the 19th century when
Baron Haussmann began the demolition of arcades and the building of the
broad, open boulevards. Flânerie, then, moved indoors and a new type appeared: a reclining, or a sedentary, flâneur as in Theophil Gautier (Ferguson
1994: 32–33). The sedentary position, however, had been taken yet earlier, by
the convalescing man from Poe’s “The man of the crowd”; and at the end of the
19th century it was assumed by Oscar Wilde’s narrator in “The sphinx without a
secret”. Also Max Beerbohm recounts his fleeting flanerian encounter with
Oscar Wilde himself; when sitting in a café in front of the Maison Dorée, he
caught a glimpse of the notorious arch-aesthete, which image then became
etched on his mind and recorded in his Letters to Reggie Turner (1964: 285).
This seated flâneur’s location is characteristic: not in the mainstream of the
flowing crowd, but at the wayside, taking the position of an outsider, though
still immersed in the city life which he keenly observes. Pleasure is taken in
superior vision rather than in ordinary walking since, as in the famous quip of
5
On the exclusion of women from flânerie, see Ferguson (1994: 27–29).
38
Anna Budziak
Honoré de Balzac “Voir n’est-ce pas savoir?” (quoted in Rignall 1992: 2), seeing entails knowing. This is the principle of flaneurism. But the art of taking a
look involves the acquiescence to step aside, to acquire the insight one needs to
assume a distance, to find a proper perspective.
The static flâneur of Gautier has its intellectual continuation, and reinforcement, in the 20th century. Indeed, this sedentary flâneur has two incarnations: an unreflective gaper and a philosopher. On the one hand, the flâneur is
revived as the twentieth-century badau-the-gaper. To Bauman (1994: 155), who
points out that the postmodernist flâneur “does not need legs to be a nomad”,
even TV watchers, the watchers of the world as “ensconced in the black sheath
of the videotape”, have something of the flâneur about them, as if the flâneur’s
mobility and flippancy could be replaced by flipping the channels, the remote
control in hand. Such tele-visual flânerie has its obvious extension in surfing the
internet.
On the other hand, the flâneur turns into a philosopher. The philosophical
line of twentieth-century flâneurs is eminently represented by Walter Benjamin.
But then, even this provisional beginning is fissured by a contradiction: Benjamin has the perspicacity typical of the dark Baudelairean flâneur, but, on the
other hand, he also has a very strong trait of sympathy characteristic of a badau
– though this sympathy, it must be said, comes from an intellectual who cautiously shies away into the distance. This position of remoteness is validated by
Benjamin’s concept of the flânerian experience as fragmentary and fleeting, an
experience, or Erlebnis, which (in contrast to a more permanent Erfahrung) had
to “remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life” (Benjamin 1992 /1968/
[1977]: 159). It should have no lasting influence on the flâneur’s life; for him,
every incident should be like a glimpse. Hence, this necessity of detachment
shields him from the city rush. The flâneur’s “consciousness ha[d] to be alert as
a screen against [invading] stimuli” (Benjamin 1992: 159). To retain that
“screen”, in Benjamin’s words, the flâneur “demands … elbow room”
(1973: 54). But this splendid aloofness has its dark side as well: it sometimes
takes the form of isolation and alienation. As noted by Peter Brooker
(1999: 117), such isolation was seen by Benjamin in the “‘heroic’ urban outcasts (the apache, dandy, rag picker, prostitute)”. The acute sense of isolation
which accompanies the flâneur is also stressed by Marc Eli Blanchard
(1985: 91), who notes that the flâneur sets off on his exploration having discovered “his own lack of identification with anything or anyone in particular”. This
sense of isolation is emphasized by Brooker (1999: 123), who attributes this
aspect of flaneurism to some postmodernist thinkers – to the “representative
outcasts or marginal figures: the vagrant, the refugee, the exile, and above all
the migrant and nomad – whose list comprises Edward Said, Gilles Deleuze,
Félix Guattari, Ian Chambers, and Michel de Certeau”. Then, to use the words
39
of Brooker once again, the “idea has gone walkabout, so to speak, leaving the
historical figure behind” (1985: 115):6 the nineteenth-century strolling flâneur
has metamorphosed into the twentieth-century sedentary, but also geographically mobile, intellectual. These academics and intellectuals combine in their
experience the flâneur’s sense of alienation and contingency. As seen by Stefan
Morawski (1994: 182), the flaneurism of academics, and of artists, is seen as a
revolt against “mass culture”; in turn, flaneurism is emblematic of the postmodern “extension of the world’s instability – of a fleeting quality of every moment”, as perceived by Bauman, (1994: 138–139).
But what happened to the city walk? Admittedly, in its refined mode,
flânerie becomes a lonely study of the ever-changing city scene; the ensuing
reflection is recorded in a text; the flâneur’s studied pose is transformed into the
philosopher’s cultivated isolation; and impressions gathered during a walk
metamorphose into textual passages. So, eventually, the city turns into a meandering, digressive text, and the walk is subsumed into the practice of writing.
The link between writing and walking, scribbling and strolling, is highlighted
also by twentieth-century explorations of nineteenth-century flaneurism, with
Keith Tester seeing flânerie as “one of the main narrative devices of [Baudelaire’s] Paris Spleen” (1994: 1) and John Rignall (1992: 11), claiming that
flânerie was a method of creation typical for Balzac
This identification of the architectural and the textual was also noted by
Benjamin who turned his attention to the genre of nineteenth-century physiologies of the city. In these texts, nineteenth-century flaneurism went beyond the
reading of the faces of passers-by and undertook the analysis of facets of the
metropolis: of Paris la nuit or of Paris á la table. In his Charles Baudelaire,
Benjamin links Lavater’s physiognomics to early nineteenth-century physiologies. He notes a parallel between the flâneur’s mode of living and the manner in
which these sketches were written, claiming that the “leisurely quality of those
descriptions fits the style of the flâneur who goes botanising on the asphalt”
(1973: 36). To Benjamin (1973: 39), these rambling physiologies were rather
inferior in style to Lavater’s disciplined physiognomies; but then, as the physiognomist frequently errs, drawing conclusions as to human character on the
basis of merely facial features, so the flâneur gets lost in the city maze. Bringing together the qualities of city physiologies and of the flâneur’s strolls, Benjamin openly asserted a relation between writing and walking.
Characteristically, the fragmentation and momentariness which he saw in
the experience of the Baudelairean flâneur, also constitute the qualities of his
own writings. The texts he wrote reflect his concern with a variety of tiny traces
or, in the words of Jordi Lovett (1993 [1992]: 208), his “passion for the frag6
Also Tester (1994: 1) notes that the flâneur “take[s] a number of walks away from the streets
and arcades of the nineteenth-century Paris”.
40
Anna Budziak
ments, remnants, miniatures, details, and the last vestiges of things”, so that,
through his treatment of a text, Benjamin, the illuminator of the flâneur, became
one himself. As put by Lovett, he “pursued the attitude of the flâneur to its ultimate consequences” (1993: 208), and he did so in the rhetorical sense. In Benjamin’s Illuminations, flânerie becomes a metaphor for reading and writing, and
the text is rendered in the metaphor of a city crowd: “the phantom crowd of the
words, the fragments, the beginnings of lines from which the poet, in the deserted streets, wrests the poetic booty” (Benjamin 1992: 162). Thus, the flâneur
has moved from the city maze to the labyrinthine text, his itinerary leading from
the Parisian arcades to arcane texts.
A similar comparison – the linking of the metropolis and the universe of
words – is made by Michel de Certeau (1993). De Certeau takes us to New
York. From there, he observes the city and muses on the city’s texturology. In
his words, New York is “the most immoderate of human texts”: the city is written in skyscrapers, with “the tallest letters”, and it features a “rhetoric of excess
in both expenditure and production”. It is written by the passers-by; the tours
and detours they take “can be compared to ‘turns of phrase’ or ‘stylistic figures’” (Certeau 1993: 152; 158). In de Certeau’s essay, the reader of this metropolitan text is positioned at the top of the World Trade Center, watching. He is
described with a metaphor of “a solar Eye looking down like a god”, “a celestial
eye” (Certeau 1993: 152–153).
De Certeau, like Benjamin, textualizes the city and, like Poe in “The man of
the crowd”, divorces seeing from walking when he asks, “Voyeurs or Walkers?” (1993: 152). But again, also like Poe, de Certeau is unclear as to the division and distribution of the flânerian attributes: are they reserved for the walkers
or for this static seer atop the tower? In Poe, the convalescing man in a cafeteria
and the enigmatic man in the crowd are clearly contrasted, but the flânerian
aspect is often attributed to both. In turn, de Certeau places his viewer at the top
of the World Trade Center and allows him to brood over the stories written with
the footsteps of the passers-by. In de Certeau’s textualized city, walking is writing, and seeing is reading. But which aspect – walking or seeing – is more distinctive to the flâneur? Is the flâneur down there or up-and-above? Or does the
flâneur, this time in de Certeau, simply assert his contradictory status once
again?
Contingency and the semantic aspect of flânerie bring these considerations
to Richard Rorty. Rorty did not expand on flânerie; he was not even a philosopher of the city. His intellectual adversary, Richard Shusterman, calls Rorty
a “campus” philosopher, in order to contrast his work with John Dewey’s who
is called “a philosopher of the polis” (Shusterman 1997: 80). And yet, Rorty’s
philosophy, for better or worse, is marked by the flânerian spirit, except that his
postmodernist flâneur – the ideal neo-liberal aesthete – does not roam the
41
streets, but traverses the textual world; if Benjamin and de Certeau turn the city
into a text, Rorty treats the text as the only city to explore. In fact, for him the
text seems more – it seems the only universe.
This universe is inhabited by the ideal neo-liberal aesthete, Rorty’s famous
ironist, the embodiment of the concept of the continuous rewriting of the self.
The intellectual ironist shifts through various discourses and re-presents her
selfhood in the languages, or vocabularies, which these discourses provide. It is
like a toy-kaleidoscope: as with each turn of the tube a new pattern emerges to
a perceiving eye, so with each turn of the phrase in self-description, one can see
a new facet of the self. Such “vocabularies” of self-description are various. In
his essay “Inquiry as Re-contextualization”, Rorty says that a new facet of the
self can arise within any context: “a new explanatory theory, a new comparison
class, a new descriptive vocabulary, a new private or political purpose, the latest
book one has read, the last person one talked to; the possibilities are endless”
(1991: 61). The flight through contexts is adventurous; the thrill comes from the
abundance and contingency of intellectual perspectives; and the aim of this
journey is acquisition of novel ways of rendering the self.
In Rorty’s words, “The work in question is that of enlarging oneself. That
requires being ready to be bowled over by tomorrow’s experiences – to remain
open that the next book you read, or the next person you meet, will change your
life” (2001: 3). The new book and the new person will provide a new context;
but then, is “the next person” only “a new context” to decipher, a sui generis
textual passer-by for the textual flâneur to read? Indeed, in his essay “Redemption from egotism” Rorty anticipates a critique of this venture, and expresses
a slight apprehension of the ethical aspect of his project of self-development, by
confessing that it may be rather exclusivist: a privilege of “aesthetes – leisured,
spoiled, morally irresponsible flâneurs” (2001: 18). With this apparently off-side
remark, Rorty equates flaneurism with its semantic aspect: he equates flaneurism with the practice of reading and interpreting and he indentifies the
flâneur with an intellectual in pursuit of the novel facets of her self – the self
which, like the idea of the flâneur, is endlessly open to re-descriptions.
An alternate social and cultural construal – and a bagful of alternative options – the flâneur is strangely non-aging. The movement inside the concept, the
continuous shifting from a specific meaning to its outright denial, accounts for
this idea’s unusual adaptability and, thus, its topicality. It comprises the vanities
of a leisurely loafer and the cruelties of Dorian Gray and Des Esseintes, the
detached curiosity of a cold observer and the empathetic look of a badau.
The flâneur has metamorphosed from a criminal to a detective, changed his
identity from a failure to an artist, to a connoisseur; however, in the 20th century, he declined into a bedazzled consumer and broke his links with the artist.
But then, the flâneur also emerges as its own opposite: the fastidious critic of
42
Anna Budziak
mass culture and the intellectual. Though often linked with the theories of visuality, the flâneur was ambivalent in his attitude to photography. Likewise, it was
uncertain whether the flâneur could change into a flâneuse. As the philosopher,
the flâneur found its famous incarnation in Benjamin, who synthesized the practice of strolling and the patience in sitting, the genius of exploration and writing,
having transformed the face reading into reading the facets of a metropolis. This
cognitive and semantic aspect of flaneurism is also emphasized in de Certeau
who, alongside Rorty, shifted flaneurism into a new, textual, environment. This
new breed of the flâneur explores the printed universe beside the one built in
stone, so that having grown in a town, the flâneur and flâneuse, eventually, turn
their steps towards the city’s alternative, into a written text.
References
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Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 136–144.
Bauman, Zygmunt 1994: Desert spectacular. In: Keith Tester (ed.), 138–157.
Beerbohm, Max 1964: Letters to Reggie Turner. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Hart-Davis.
Benjamin, Walter (Bendix Schönflies) 1973 [1969]: Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era
of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verso /London, New Left Books/ [Charles
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Brooker, Peter 1999: The wandering flâneur, or something lost in translation. In: Stan Smith,
Jennifer Birkett (eds.) 1999. Special Issue on Modernism. Miscelánea: A Journal of English
and American Studies 20, 115–129.
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De Certeau, Michel 1993: Walking in the city. In: Simon During (ed.) 1993: The Cultural Studies
Reader. London: Routledge, 151–160.
Evans, Elizabeth C. 1969: Physiognomics in the Ancient World. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 59/5).
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(ed.), 22–42.
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[À rebours. Paris: Charpentier]. Trans. Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Llovet, Jordi 1993: Benjamin Flâneur: The Arcades Project. In: Ingrid Scheurmann, Konrad
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Werk. In: Ingrid Scheurmann, Konrad Scheurmann (Hrsg.) 1992: Für Walter Benjamin. Dokumente, Essays und ein Entwurf, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, (210–225)
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243–263. In: www.stanford.edu/rroty/ redemption.htm. ED 02/2006.
Shusterman, Richard 1997: Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New
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Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat. Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 16.2,
188–200.
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Routledge, 1–21 (Chapter I).
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London: Routledge.
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Wilde, Oscar 1999b: The sphinx without a secret. In: Oscar Wilde 1999, 205–208.
Wilde, Oscar 1999: Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Centenary Edition. Glasgow: Harper
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Zeidler-Janiszewska, Anna 1999: Dryfujący flâneur, czyli o sytuacjonistycznym doświadczeniu miejskiej przestrzeni [A drifting flâneur, or on the situationistic experience of the city space]
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ANNA IZABELA CICHOŃ
Alternative life-writing: V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life
and Magic Seeds
ABSTRACT. A considerable amount of life-writing theory has been devoted to noncanonical self-texts which highlight problems related to the inevitable overlap of fact and fiction, self and other, actual experience and textuality. Critical attention has increasingly been
directed to the potential that autobiographical writing offers to its authors not only to reinterpret and recast their actual histories but also to construct and rehearse alternative versions of
their experiences and identities. The article proposes to view V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life (2001)
and Magic Seeds (2004), as alternate autobiographies, that is as autobiografiction – a genre of
life-writing which ostensibly fuses autobiographical content with fictional conventions
(Saunders 2010: 504). Naipaul’s novels tell the story of the protagonist’s failure and disintegration, a story which looks like an inverse tale to Naipaul’s real vicissitudes, a scenario
which, in some sense, appears more probable than the life Naipaul has actually lived. Fictitious as the two narratives are, they have autobiographical character for Naipaul: the stories
and identities they construct are intricately made up of the author’s self-representations, and
the topics they address accord with the concerns that Naipaul has been articulating throughout his lifelong oeuvre.
Since the day when modern autobiographical studies defined the genres of
their critical concerns at the beginning of the twentieth century, both the autobiographical practice and the critical approaches to life-writing have undergone
significant changes. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001: 113) notice, in their
Reading Autobiography, that it was Georg Misch (1878–1965) who inaugurated
the first wave of modern criticism of autobiography with his research in the
seminal book A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1950 [1907]).1 In their
opinion (Smith & Watson 2001: 120–121), it influenced the subject and direction of critical inquiries, and canonized certain texts. As a mattr of fact, after the
1950s the second wave critics declared autobiography a creative, not factual,
genre and postulated inclusion of life-writing into literary studies.
Smith and Watson (2001: 119) expose that the first wave theorists, like
Misch (1950 [1907]), perceived autobiography as a documentary form and
claimed that the criterion of a narrative’s truthfulness was consistency between
the text and biographical facts. The second generation of scholars, in turn, as
they state (Smith and Watson (2001: 125), for instance Georges Gusdorf (1956)
1
Continued as a publication of 4 volumes in 8 half-volumes: Georg Misch 1949 /1907/–1969:
Geschichte der Autobiographie. 4 Bände in 8 Teilbänden. Bern (1949 /1907/), Frankfurt am
Main (1959–1969): Schulte-Bulmke – editors note: ZW.
46
Anna Izabela Cichoń
and Francis R. Hart (1970), focused on the creative aspects of autobiography:
pointing to its literariness, reconceptualizing the genre and classifying it as
“‘art’ rather than ‘history’”, thus situating autobiography in the domain of literature. The 1980s, in the opinion of Smith and Watson (2001: 129), witnessed
another paradigm shift that came with the third wave of theorizing life-writing:
postcolonial and postmodern interventions “have amplified the possible modes
of self-writing and undermined canonical norms of autobiographical inscription”. As a result, more attention has been paid to variations of auto-texts where
questions about truthfulness to the subject’s biographical data give way to explorations of the textual and fictional nature of the self and where authors employ unconventional forms of self-expression.
The third wave of criticism has concentrated on the inevitable fictionalization of any self-representation and has shown, as Max Saunders (2010: 484)
contends in Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of
Modern Literature, that the interaction between autobiography and fiction is the
dominant mode of postmodern life-writing. Proliferation of autobiographical
sub-genres which blur the boundary between fact and fiction, self and other,
writer and reader in contemporary creative practice (such as heterobiography,
parabiography, and autofiction, to mention just a few) testifies to the authors’
simultaneous attraction to and unease with autobiography.2 Playfully experimental works, Alfred Hornung remarks in his discussion of autobiography in
International Postmodernism, highlight the fictive character of “any narrative
description of personal experience and reveal the illusory nature of traditional
autobiographies’ construction of narrative continuity and unfragmented personhood” (1997: 221). Thus, the understanding of autobiography has been broadened to include threshold forms in which authors overtly experiment with conventions and transgress them to “address their specific needs and to pursue their
respective purposes” (Hornung 1998: 1).
The traditional figures, such as chronological and teleological reconstruction of the past and the Cartesian notion of the subject, have been replaced by
modes of narration subordinated to redefined theories of subjectivity, according
to which the self is a “discursive formation” (Hornung 1997: 222), an illusion
constituted in discourse. As Smith and Watson have it, identity is “a fiction,
a hypothetical place or space of storytelling. A true self can never be discovered, unmasked, or revealed because its core is a mise en abîme, an infinite re-
2
Alfred Hornung gives a short overview of boundary-crossing techniques of postmodern lifewriting used by authors for self-expression, such as “autofiction”, “surfiction”, “postmodern
autobiography”, “postcolonial autobiographical fiction”, and “nouvelle autobiographie”
(1997: 222). In the glossary attached as an appendix to their study of life-writing, Smith and
Watson list over fifty subgenres of autobiography (2001: 183–207).
Alternative life-writing: V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life and Magic Seeds
47
gress” (2001: 132).3 If subjectivity can only be thought of as narratively constructed, Max Saunders argues, then “subjectivity begins to look increasingly
fictional”; consequently, “the sense of the constructedness and mediatedness of
autobiography conducts rapidly to a sense of its fictionality” (2010: 508).4
Viewed from this vantage point, autobiographical writing relies on imaginative
construction, not reconstruction, and the text itself becomes, to use Hornung’s
formulation, a “privileged site of identity production” (1997: 222). Autobiography, then, is an arena for creating and rehearsing multiple aspects of the self
which come into being when given a textual shape and which acquire meaning
in the process of articulation, that is, in autobiographical acts.
Autobiographical acts5 may be devoted to an interpretation of the subjects’
lives (their vicissitudes, choices, decisions, the consequences of their deeds and
views, the positions they have arrived at, their intellectual and artistic growth,
their spiritual and emotional experience, etc.), and to a scrutiny of the selves
they have become or preformed or created for themselves. But autobiographical
acts may also be devoted to contemplation of what has not happened in the subjects’ lives, of what has been missed, left out, or avoided, of the experience
which they did not have but which appears personal and private to the authors
to such a measure that they feel an urge to scrutinize it as their own, as their
alternative life-stories.6
Alternative life-writing may serve their authors as a space for imaginative
construction of the paths they have not trodden, of the opportunities they have
rejected, of the mistakes they have not made; as a space for reflection upon the
lives they could have lived but in ontic reality have not; as a projection of aspects of the self that may not be their own but that appear to them truthful to
their emotional attitudes, beliefs, and cultural situatedness. That is to say, autobiographical reflection need not be limited to imaginative recasting of the authors’ actual past but it may offer a possibility to ponder upon what has not
occurred.
3
4
5
6
As Smith and Watson write, developments in literary theory of the 1970s through the 1990s
led to a new attitude to life-writing: “Derridean deconstruction, Barthesian semiotics, and
Foucauldian analysis of the discursive regimes of power energized the dismantling of metaphysical conceptions of self-presence, authority, authenticity, and truth” (2001: 132).
Autobiography, as Saunders (2010: 7) explains, “cannot be kept entirely apart from fiction;
… however truthful or candid an autobiography might be judged, it is nonetheless a narrative, and shares its narrative features with fictional narratives”.
The concept of autobiographical acts is one of the key ideas in performative theory of autobiography, according to which subjectivity is not essentialist but constructed in and through
reiterative practices. The self that is traditionally seen as an entity that preexists the text is an
outcome of autobiographical representation (Smith & Watson 2001: 143).
The content of alternative life-writing may include not only purely imaginary versions of life
but also what Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan (2004 /1983/: 62) calls acts of omission and contemplated acts.
48
The kind of alternative autobiography described above focuses on inventing
versions of one’s life which were not unlikely but which in the author’s actual
reality did not take place. This sort of alternative narrative concentrates then on
a reflection upon how one’s life could have been furnished – on the alternative
roads that could have been taken, on the self-projects that could have been realized. But alternative life-writing may take as its subject matter not only a contemplation of the versions of lives that have not been lived but also a reflection
upon alternative self-portraits that emerge as a result of application of specific
forms of self-representation: particular techniques of storytelling, different
viewpoints and tropes of narrativization.7
Both of the terrains of alternative auto-narratives described above (that is,
those which test and rehearse alternative narrative content and those which
make use of alternative forms) are variants of what Max Saunders calls autobiografiction.8 Autobiografiction, as a subgenre of life-writing, relies on ostensible fusing of autobiography and fiction with the result that autobiographical
content (or, “spiritual experience”) is “displaced onto a fictionalized narrative
form” (Saunders 2010: 504). Autobiografiction occupies a position between the
autobiographical novel and fictional autobiography, being neither of them. The
term connotes “the literary relationship … between fiction and a self’s autobiography, rather than that between fiction and a self” (Saunders 2010: 7, emphasis mine).9 Thus the term highlights, on the one hand, the limitations of traditional autobiography which is expected to deal with one’s life-as-lived (thus
excluding that which ostensibly denies the facts of life) and, on the other hand,
experimental aspects of life-writing (specifically, the troubled relation between
history and fiction).
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds
(2004), as works of autobiografiction, address, on the one hand, interesting
7
8
9
Since Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (1973), it has perhaps become common knowledge that in verbal reconstructions of the
past “aesthetic form conveys a content or meaning that cannot be disentangled from the message it is designed to deliver” (Doran 2010: xxiii).
The term was coined by Stephen Reynolds and defined in his article for Speaker in 1906 as
“a record of real spiritual experiences strung on a credible but more or less fictitious autobiographical narrative” (Reynolds 1906: 28). In autobiografiction, the author “strings what
we may believe to be genuine spiritual experiences in a more or less fictitious but very credible autobiography” (Reynolds 1906: 29).
As Max Saunders ) (2010: 7) explains, the term autobiografiction requires a context where it
might be applied to carry out its classification role. The terms that could accompany it are
biografiction (when referred to biographical texts) and auto/biografiction (for the practice of
self-biography. The slash used in the word auto/biografiction “signals the interrelatedness of
autobiographical narrative and biography”, suggesting a fluid boundary between the two
genres. Auto/biografiction often “inserts biography/ies within an autobiography, or the converse, a personal narrative within biography” (Smith & Watson 2001: 184).
49
questions concerning the transformation of experience into narratives and, on
the other hand, relations between the author’s oeuvre, autobiography, and life.
Throughout his writing, he has been profusely using his own life as material and
inspiration for his work.10
Among Naipaul’s perennial topoi, Tobias Dörning (1998: 151) remarks,
there are colonial topographies: descriptions of non-European locations and the
“voyage beyond”, where travel is not merely “the life-as-journey metaphor”,
but a passage into a “promising solace and escape from an otherwise confusing
and confused colonial reality” (Dörning 1998: 152).11 The theme of the “voyage
beyond” in Naipaulian texts is linked to considerations of his estrangement from
his social, cultural and family environment; his sense of exile;12 his schooling in
English in Port of Spain and his desire to become a Western writer; his Oxford
studies, acculturation in England and the beginnings of his literary career. Naipaul has been rewriting these themes in ever new versions to the effect that
there are many accounts of his childhood and youth in Trinidad, his family relations, the role of his father who nurtured his literary ambition, his immigration
to Britain, the emotional cost of his success and the perseverance with which he
pursued his vocation.13
Naipaul’s second major theme is a meta-critical and self-conscious reflection upon his own writing. He has often commented upon the idiosyncrasies of
his art and stressed how important it was for him to acquire an ability to look
and see. For Naipaul writing is inseparable from looking, which he understands
10
11
12
13
Autobiographical orientation in Naipaul’s works has been broadly commented upon and has
become one of the major concerns in his criticism. As Hayward (2002: 3) writes, “Much of
his writing … makes use of autobiographical material, to provide overlapping accounts of his
life”. “[T]he writing of autobiography is for Naipaul an on-going project of self-invention”
(Hayward 2002: 72).
Naipaul notoriously refers to this journey as a voyage from the “periphery” to the “centre”,
which attitude, for many critics, testifies to his hostility towards the South and glorification
of the West (Nixon 1992: 3).
Naipaul often writes about his pervading sense of insecurity, which stemmed from his ignorance about his own and his family’s roots. This disquieting feeling motivated him to do research on the history of his ancestral India and the Caribbean.
Naipaul has turned contemplation of his literary career into a recurrent theme in his work.
His autobiographical writing always scrutinizes his literary beginnings (e.g. “Prologue to an
Autobiography”, The Middle Passage, The Enigma of Arrival, “London”, “Two Worlds”,
Letters between Father and Son). In his collections of critical essays, he frequently reflects
upon his unique achievement as an artist (e.g. The Overcrowded Barracoon, Literary Occasions, The Writer and the World). His fiction, with a varying degree of self-disclosure, addresses the struggles and anxieties of aspiring artists and the consequences of wrong artistic
choices. These writers-characters can be seen as his porte parole (e.g. the writers in The
Mimic Men, Finding the Centre, A Way in the World). Most compelling is perhaps the portrait of his father, a journalist with a writing ambition, famously depicted in A House for Mr.
Biswas.
50
as a visual and intellectual capacity.14 To get started as an author, Naipaul asserts, he had to gain knowledge and learn how to look at the surrounding reality
to make sense of it. He had to rid himself of his colonial habits of thought and
arouse in himself curiosity. Without knowledge, he asserts, reality appears unreal to the onlooker and has the quality of a fantasyland (Naipaul 2008: 54).
Acquisition of the ability to see helped him to “write [him]self out of ignorance” (Naipaul 2008: 54). In “Author’s Foreword” in Finding the Centre, Naipaul calls himself “a looker” and prides himself on having found his own methods of observation (1984: 11). As Dörning aptly remarks, “Naipaul here sums
up a story of individual accomplishment that culminates in establishing an independent point of view. Selfhood, in his writing, is achieved through visual capacity, and his original way of looking is claimed as a distinguished device”
(1998: 152). The significance of sight, perspective and point of view, Dörning
contiunues, are topical problems in post-colonial writing because they address
issues of “the authorizing power of visual perception” (1998: 153). But a colonial, once constituted in and defined by the gaze of the colonizer, may articulate
subjectivity through inventing and asserting viewpoints that would counter the
dominant power discourses (Dörning 1998: 150). Looking, then, produces
meaning and determines one’s cultural and political positioning. In Naipaul’s
work, his “way of looking” is a constituent part of his self-definition and a recognizably unique aspect of his art.
In 2001, V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize. Commenting upon his
artistic career in his ceremony lecture titled “Two Worlds”, he contended that
his success had never ceased to be a mystery to him. The impulse that motivated
him at the beginning was, in fact, very thin: it was his childhood ambition and
his uncertainly about who he was. To tame the uneasiness, he turned to writing,
which helped him explore his cultural locatedness. Writing, then, was for Naipaul a source of knowledge about himself and the colonial world. The profession offered him insights into the things he wanted and needed to learn in order
to define his self: “I had to do the books I did because there were no books
about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself” (Naipaul 2003 /2001/: 183, emphasis is mine: AIC). He
had no models to follow or, rather, the available ones were inadequate to give
14
It is perhaps common knowledge that writing and focalization are inseparable, but what
Naipaul has always stressed is that he had to find his own way of looking because the patterns that were available to him – the English and the Indian ways of looking – were not adequate for his purposes: they forced him into frames that he strived to avoid. He elaborates on
his acquisition of the ability to see in five essays published as A Writer’s People: Ways of
Knowing and Feeling (2008).
51
shape to his experience.15 Unlike European authors, who had a rich tradition to
measure themselves against, he was moving about in an empty terrain:
When I began I had no idea of the way ahead. I wished only to do a book. I was
trying to write in England, where I stayed on after my years at the university, and it
seemed to me that my experience was very thin, was not truly of the stuff of books.
I could find in no book anything that came near my background. The young French
or English person who wished to write would have found any number of models to
set him on his way. I had none. My father's stories about our Indian community
belonged to the past. My world was quite different. It was more urban, more mixed.
The simple physical details of the chaotic life of our extended family – sleeping
rooms or sleeping spaces, eating times, the sheer number of people – seemed
impossible to handle. There was too much to be explained, both about my home life
and about the world outside. (Naipaul 2003: 192)
Naipaul ended his address reflecting that there was some unreal dimension
to his achievement: his dream dreamt in the colonial Caribbean island appeared
to him, after five decades of pursuing the profession, as a prodigious fantasy,
a startling idea that had little prospect of success. Considering his impoverished
colonial background and his limited opportunities relative to his descent, he
could simply have failed. The fear of failure, of inability to start writing and to
carry on with new and original work had never left him, despite his accomplishment.
I am near the end of my work now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad
creatively to have pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way
in which I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my material,
every book has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed me; up to the moment
of writing I never knew it was there. But the greatest miracle for me was getting
started. I feel – and the anxiety is still vivid to me – that I might easily have failed
before I began. (Naipaul 2003: 195, emphasis is mine: AIC)
What saved him, Naipaul (2003: 195) concluded, was his talent, and “luck,
and much labour”. Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004) emerge as an
extension, in the form of fiction, of the ideas Naipaul lectured on in “Two
Worlds”. The books are about William Somerset Chandrum, whose lot looks
15
“I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the
history of the colony. I had to travel to India because there was no one to tell me what the
India my grandparents had come from was like. There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi;
and strangely it was Gandhi, with his South African experience, who gave me more, but not
enough. There was Kipling; there were British-Indian writers like John Masters (going very
strong in the 1950s, with an announced plan, later abandoned, I fear, for thirty-five connected novels about British India); there were romances by women writers. The few Indian
writers who had come up at that time were middle-class people, town-dwellers; they didn't
know the India we had come from” (Naipaul 2003: 191).
52
like a grim satire on Naipaul’s career.16 Willie is a Hindu who, since his childhood, when he was given English names (in commemoration of his father’s
encounter with Somerset Maugham) and sent to a colonial school, has always
thought of himself as having no place of belonging. He is emotionally detached
from his family and daydreams about journeying abroad. His dream comes true
when he goes to London to college.
In London, Willie has a feeling that he has found himself in a fantasyland.
This unreality, worse than the idealized image of England he had as a child,
disconcerts him but he has no need to sort out his bafflement and has no curiosity to learn or to inquire about anything. He is content with his new circumstances: sufficient material means, easy studies, freedom, new acquaintances,
and experience with women. He thinks that now, away from home, he may become, or pretend to be, whoever he wants to be, so he does not invest in genuine
self-fashioning. One of his poses is that of an aspiring author.
As John Maxwell Coetzee observes, “To the illiterate and semiliterate, becoming a writer is hard to distinguish from simply getting into print, that is,
being able to point to a block of printed pages with your name on the cover”
(2001). Willie’s idea of authorship is not much different either: he writes a book
in which he rewrites American authors’ short stories, giving them an Oriental
flavour. The book is published but it brings him neither fame nor money nor
even satisfaction. He realizes that he does not want to be a writer and that after
graduation he will have to make other plans for his future. But he is spared the
burden of taking responsibility for himself because he meets a girl, a colonial
from Africa, who wants Willie to accompany her home. He proposes and goes
to Africa, to his wife’s estate. Living on her money, in her house, he becomes
idle and frustrated. When, after eighteen years he realizes that he has been wasting his life, he tells his wife:
I am forty-one. I am tired of living your life. … When I asked you in London I was
frightened. I had nowhere to go. They were going to throw me out of college at the
end of the term and I didn’t know what I could do to keep afloat. But now the best
part of my life has gone, and I’ve done nothing. … I have been hiding for too long.
(Naipaul 2001: 227)
16
I discussed autobiographical traits of Naipaul’s work and commented upon Half a Life and
Magic Seeds as alternative auto-narratives in my former articles: “V. S. Naipaul’s identity
trajectories” (2010). In: A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity. Silvia
Schultermandl and Sebnem Toplu (eds.) Contributions to Transnational Feminism Series.
Berlin: LIT Verlag, 45–60; “New Maps in V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life and Magic Seeds”, and
“Construction of identity and the role of autobiography in V. S. Naipaul’s work” to be published in 2011 in, respectively, Proceedings of LIES 2010 Conference (Poznań) and Proceedings of IABA Europe 2009 Conference (Amsterdam). My focus now is on different aspects
of Naipaul’s two-part “series”, but the discussion includes some revised remarks on the relation between Naipaul’s life-experience and his auto-texts.
53
Willie’s marriage is over and he travels to Berlin to his sister. She detests
his lack of aspirations, his passivity and his indifference to social and political
matters and insists that he go to India to support revolutionaries there. This episode in his life ends up in disaster: he is sentenced to imprisonment and, years
later, deported to England on condition that he never return. Thus, Willie finds
himself in London again. When trying to make a new start, however, he has no
idea what would make his life worth living. England appears incomprehensible
to him; even more, he feels as if he himself were unreal. At the end of Magic
Seeds Willie resumes writing a letter to his sister but, as on former occasions, he
does not want to write about his anxieties. The message he contemplates but
stops short of writing is that “[i]t’s wrong to have an ideal view of the world.
That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unraveling”
(Naipaul 2004: 294).
Half a Life and Magic Seeds allude to Naipaul’s life, as presented in his
autobiographical writing, on the level of both events and emotional experience,
such as cultural disorientation, homelessness, colonial sense of inferiority, frustrations, and difficulties of the writing vocation. Willie’s descent, immigration,
voyages and search for fulfillment parody Naipaul’s route in a profoundly grim
manner, though not devoid of situational comedy.
Autobiographical traces are ostensible, hence hard to miss. At the same
time, however, Willie’s hardships – his life at the crossroads of the Old and the
New World, a life in transit caused by the colonial’s permanent condition of
uprooting – resemble the adversities of several Naipaulian protagonists in his
novels, for example Singh in Mimic Men, Jimmy in Guerillas and Lebrun in
A Way in the World. Because of Willie’s similarity to Naipaulian fictional protagonists, both books together could be conceived of as works based on and
imaginatively transforming the author’s life; still, the category “autobiographical” would have limited explicatory value.
Gillian Dooley (2006: 131) in her study V. S. Naipaul: Man and Writer
(2006) calls these two works “cautionary tales” that talk about the life that Naipaul feels he “narrowly missed”. Considering the way the narratives unfold, it is
easy to see what mistakes of Willie’s the famous author had not made, omissions that indeed saved him from disintegration. A brief answer is that Willie
lacks that which Naipaul identified, in his Nobel award lecture, as the source of
his own achievement. Willie has no talent, enquires about nothing, does not
wish to work hard, and has no luck. What Willie does have are the qualities
54
17
Naipaul scornfully describes as colonial, impoverished mentality: passivity,
fatalism, and lack of intellectual curiosity.18
The above diagnosis of the causes of Willie’s failure (or, by implication,
about Naipaul’s success) might perhaps have pedagogical value or could serve
as a label for Naipaul’s two novels as popular fiction with educational merits.
But does the pedagogical aspect of the novels adequately reflect their autobiographical character? In his review of Half a Life, J. M. Coetzee asks a pointed
question about the personal import of the tale for its author: “Why is Naipaul,
author of over twenty books and now approaching seventy, pouring his energies
into an alter ego whose distinguishing mark is that he has turned his back on
a literary career?” (2001). Coetzee’s supposition is that “Half a Life is a story
(one among several one can imagine) of where Naipaul might have gone if,
having exhausted his first fund of memories, he had, instead of secluding himself with his typewriter, followed his heart” (2001). The story of Willie’s disintegration, viewed as Naipaul’s alternate autobiography, appears as an awkward
narrative: if it were to express his real anxieties in the seventh decade of his life,
it would be full of self-pitying and melodramatic tensions.
But Naipaul, to paraphrase Coetzee, did not turn his back on writing and has
not exhausted his “fund of memories”, nor has he exhausted interest in his biography. Is Willie’s story, then, an exercise in imagination, “one among several
one can imagine”? What purpose could such a project serve? The devastating
effects of Willie’s failure and the somber tone of the narratives exclude the option that this pair of works is a postmodern game of inventing alternatives for
the sake of playful fabulation. Neither does it seem likely that the novels are
Naipaul’s meditation upon the uncertainties, exigencies, and contingencies of
life. Although in his Nobel speech he pointed to luck as one of the sources of
his personal success, good fortune is not a category to qualify the accomplishment of any individual life in the Naipaulian world.19
In the two books, Naipaul’s life-as-lived does not seem to be a major point
of reference. Written in the convention of alternate autobiography, both works
appear as a project of self-conscious reflection: under scrutiny here are the
transformations of Naipaul’s biography into his perennial themes. All the
threads in Half a Life and Magic Seeds hold Naipaul’s life and work together,
thus establishing a relation in which life-as-lived, self-life-writing and creative
(fictional?) writing are inseparable from one another and constitute an organic
17
18
19
Naipaul’s depictions of colonial peoples (as he calls them, “half-made societies”) always
highlight these deficiencies and it comes perhaps as no surprise that his pejorative attitude
and heartless remarks have provoked hostile reactions (Nixon 1992: 2).
Describing his milieu in Trinidad, he states, “We looked inwards; we lived out our days; the
world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about nothing” (Naipaul 2003: 197).
The colonial condition in his writing is a complete worldview, which means that the contingencies of life cannot account for radical changes in colonials’ circumstances.
55
unity, a oneness. A genuine and profoundly personal link between the two
books and the author consists then in the merging together of Naipaul’s life,
self-biographies, and art, the inseparable aspects of his personhood as expressed
in the idiosyncrasies of his style. Magic Seeds and Half a Life emerge therefore
as works of autobiografiction – a genre which problematizes the literary relationship (Saunders 2010: 504) between autobiography and writing, not between
autobiography and life.
References
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Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
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In: www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2001/nov/01/the-razors-edge/, ED 12. 2010.
Dooley, Gillian 2006: V. S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press.
Dörning, Tobias 1998: The Passage of the Eye /I: David Dabydeen, V. S. Naipaul and the Tombstones of Parabiography. In: Alfred Hornung (ed.), 149–166.
Georg Misch 1950 [1907] Conception and origin of autobiography. In: Georg Misch 1950: A
History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Trans. E. W. Dickes. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1–18, 339. [Einleitung: Begriff und Ursprung der Autobiographie. In: Georg Misch
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21]
Gusdorf, Georges 1980 [1956]: Conditions and limits of autobiography. Trans. James Olney, in
Olney (ed.) 1980: Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton, New Jersey:
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Hart, Francis R. 1970: Notes for an anatomy of autobiography. New Literary History 1 (1970),
485–511.
Hayward, Helen 2002: The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hornung, Alfred (ed.) 1998: Postocolonialsm and Autobiography. Amsterdam: Rodopi (Textet 19.
Studies in Comparative Literature).
Hornung, Alfred 1997: Autobiography. In: Hans Bertens, Douwe Fokkema (eds.), 221–233.
Misch, Georg 1950 [1907]: A History of Autobiography in Antiquity. Trans. E. W. Dickes. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul [Geschichte der Autobiographie. 1. Das Altertum. Leipzig,
Berlin: B. G. Teubner].
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 1985 /1984/: Finding the Centre. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books.
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 2001: Half a Life. London: Picador.
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 2003 /2001/: Two Worlds (The Nobel Lecture). Literary Occasions: Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 181–197.
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 2004: Magic Seeds. London: Picador.
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 2008: A Writer’s People: Ways of Knowing and Feeling. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Nixon, Rob 1992: London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Reynolds, Stephen 1906: Autobiografiction. Speaker 15 (336, 6 October), 28–30. In: www.kcl.ac.uk/ip/maxsaunders/ABF/index.htm ED 01/2011.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 2004 /1983/: Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge.
Saunders, Max 2010: Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern
Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Sidonie, Julia Watson 2001: Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
White, Hayden V., Robert Doran (ed.) 2010: The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1957–2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. In: www.books.google.pl/books?isbn=0801894808 ED 01/2011.
BEATA CISOWSKA
AKADEMIA IM. JANA DŁUGOSZA W CZĘSTOCHOWIE
Światy równoległe w powieściach dla młodzieży
(na przykładzie książek o Harrym Potterze
i Artemisie Fowlu)
STRESZCZENIE. W obu analizowanych cyklach powieściowych rzeczywistość przedstawiona – będąca przestrzenią, w której rozgrywa się akcja – jest światem równolegle występującym do świata normalnego (tradycyjnego, codziennego), oddzielonym od niego granicami, które mogą przekraczać jedynie wtajemniczeni. Światy te są dodatkowo zabezpieczone
czarami. Tylko jeden z tych światów wie o istnieniu drugiego, co powoduje, że ma nad nim
przewagę i może uczestniczyć w jego życiu, nie dając jednocześnie takiego prawa drugiej
stronie. Światy te są zorganizowane we właściwy sobie sposób, choć na podobieństwo świata normalnego, obowiązują w nich jednak inne zasady funkcjonowania znanych nam instytucji.
Między oboma cyklami powieściowymi istnieją jednak dwie podstawowe różnice. W książkach o Artemisie Fowlu świat podziemny jest całkowicie niedostępny dla osób z zewnątrz i ma
wyraźnie nakreślone granice dostępności nawet dla swoich mieszkańców. W serii o Harrym
Potterze do świata czarodziejów są dopuszczani zwykli ludzie, którzy spełniają określony
warunek – muszą wykazywać magiczne uzdolnienia. Druga różnica zawiera się w obszarze
prezentowanego świata. W powieściach o Harrym Potterze poznajemy właściwie cały świat
czarodziejski Anglii, a nawet otrzymujemy sygnały o istnieniu takich samych światów w innych częściach ziemskiego globu. Z kolei w książkach o Artemisie Fowlu terytorium, które
zostało opisane, jest bardzo ograniczone. Cykl powieściowy Eoina Colfera należy zresztą
uznać w większym stopniu za literaturę sensacyjno-kryminalną niż przygodową czy baśniową, tym bardziej że autor, bawiąc się konwencją, swobodnie zmienia w swoich książkach
toposy typowe dla baśni.
O powieści Harry Potter i kamień filozoficzny (Rowling 2000 [1997]) –
podobnie jak o kolejnych tomach z tego cyklu – pisano, że pojawiła się w czasie, kiedy obawiano się zaniku potrzeby czytania wśród młodzieży. Z kolei po
wydaniu książki Eoina Colfera Artemis Fowl (Colfer 2002a [2001]), stwierdzono, że bije się ona o rekord popularności na listach światowych bestsellerów
właśnie z powieściami Joanne K. Rowling. Wydaje się więc, że angielska pisarka zapoczątkowała epokę, w której każdą nową powieść dla młodzieży będzie się zestawiać z książkami o przygodach Harry’ego Pottera, porównywać
z nimi i oceniać z ich perspektywy, tym bardziej że Joanne K. Rowling dokonała (można przypuszczać – nieświadomie) rewizji poglądu krytyków, że mamy
do czynienia z kryzysem powieści dla młodzieży, końcem gatunku, jakim jest
literatura młodzieżowa, i że książki w ogóle są skazane na przegraną w walce
z grami komputerowymi, skutecznie wypełniającymi wolny czas nastolatków.
Należy jednak poczynić pewną uwagę w zakresie terminologii gatunkowej za-
58
Beata Cisowska
stosowanej wobec tych tekstów: powieść dla dzieci i młodzieży jest nazwą tyle
nieprecyzyjną, co nieadekwatną w stosunku do określonego za jej pomocą odbiorcy. Gdyby bowiem wszystkich czytających historie o Harrym Potterze nazwać „młodzieżą”, wówczas słowo to znacznie rozszerzyłoby swój zakres semantyczny. Dlatego najbliższe prawdy – przynajmniej z punktu widzenia rozpiętości wiekowej czytelników – wydaje się określenie „powieść dla młodzieży
i dorosłych”.
Nie ma potrzeby ani streszczać, ani klasyfikować tej opowieści – literatura
przedmiotu w tym zakresie jest niezwykle bogata i różnorodna. Znacznie istotniejsze wydaje się pytanie o to, dlaczego właśnie ta powieść stała się bestsellerem literackim i co sprawiło, że z taką niecierpliwością oczekuje się kolejnych
tomów i adaptacji filmowych. Odpowiedzi jest kilka. Pierwsza z nich zakłada,
że opowieści o chłopcu-czarodzieju zaspokajają odwieczną tęsknotę każdego
człowieka – chęć odnalezienia i pielęgnowania w sobie dziecka przez wiarę
w czary, magię i (typowe rozwiązanie dla baśni) zwycięstwo dobra nad złem.
Ten ostatni element rekompensuje dorosłym rozczarowanie zwykłym, normalnym życiem, w którym bardzo często zakończenie nie jest takie, jakiego by
oczekiwali.
W świecie dziecka wiele rzeczy jest niezwykle prostych, jednocześnie jednak omnipotencja dziecięca komplikuje sporo spraw, mały człowiek nie potrafi
ich bowiem wytłumaczyć i właściwie zinterpretować bez dorabiania naiwnej
ideologii. Harry Potter, choć obdarzony niezwykłym talentem, przewyższający
rówieśników odwagą i wewnętrzną siłą, naznaczony doświadczeniami, jakich
nie powstydziłby się żaden dorosły, jest tak naprawdę dzieckiem, które z wieloma rzeczami nie umie sobie poradzić. Warto przypomnieć myśli, jakie towarzyszyły chłopcu, gdy po raz pierwszy został zaproszony do przyjaciela – Rona
Weasleya:
Ale tym, co Harry’emu wydało się najbardziej niezwykłe, nie było mówiące lustro czy
hałasujący ghul: był to fakt, że tutaj wszyscy zdawali się go lubić. Pani Weasley załamywała
ręce nad stanem jego skarpetek i starała się wmusić w niego cztery dokładki przy każdym
posiłku. Pan Weasley prosił, żeby Harry siadał przy stole obok niego, bo mógł wówczas
bombardować go pytaniami o urządzenia mugoli, na przykład o to, jak działa hydrant albo
poczta (Rowling 2000 [1998]: 49).
Dziecku, któremu nie pozwalano najeść się do syta, któremu nie wolno było
rozmawiać przy stole, z którym rówieśnicy – zastraszeni przez kuzyna Dudleya
– nie chcieli się bawić, sympatia okazywana przez obcych ludzi wydawała się
czymś zdumiewającym, Harry Potter był bowiem przekonany, że nie sposób go
lubić.
Innym wytłumaczeniem fenomenu cyklu powieści o Harrym Potterze może
być tkwiące w każdym człowieku pragnienie doznania cudu, który jest często
traktowany na równi z czarami, czego dowodzi odległa historia czarownic palo-
Światy równoległe w powieściach o Harrym Potterze i Artemisie Fowlu
59
nych na stosach (cud uzdrowienia, macierzyństwa po okresie niepłodności czy
odnalezienia bliskiej osoby były kojarzone z czarami). Także dziś, gdy nie potrafimy racjonalnie wyjaśnić określonego zjawiska, odwołujemy się do cudowności albo sięgamy po coraz powszechniej stosowane terminy „paranormalny”
czy „parapsychiczny”. Rzadko jesteśmy jednak w stanie przyznać, że prawdopodobnie doświadczenie i wiedza, jakie posiadamy, nie są w stanie uzasadnić
tego, co wymyka się naszemu rozumieniu rzeczywistości, że wiemy zbyt mało,
a pewne sytuacje przekraczają nasze możliwości pojmowania i definiowania
otaczającego świata.
Można założyć, co więcej, że im bardziej ścisły i sceptyczny umysł, tym
bardziej pragnie doznać czegoś, co zaszłoby na jego oczach i czego w żaden
sposób nie potrafiłby wytłumaczyć. Przykład książek Joanne K. Rowling dowodzi, że na co dzień doznajemy takich właśnie czarów, ale skutecznie je bagatelizujemy, jak bowiem wytłumaczyć to, że klucze, które zawsze odkładamy
w to samo miejsce, znikają zupełnie tak, jakby były zaczarowane? Oczywiście
nie są zaczarowane, tylko my jesteśmy roztargnieni, zabiegani, zamyśleni.
Tymczasem powieść Joanne K. Rowling wyjaśnia nam, jak to jest naprawdę:
– A po co właściwie czarować klucze, żeby się kurczyły? – zapytał George.
– A, to takie żarty z mugoli … – westchnął pan Weasley. – Sprzedaje im się klucz, który
kurczy się tak, że właściwie znika, więc nie mogą go znaleźć, jak im jest potrzebny …
Oczywiście, bardzo trudno kogoś o to oskarżyć, bo żaden mugol za nic w świecie nie
przyzna, że jego klucze kurczą się do zera … Będzie przysięgał, że wciąż je gubi. Mugole
zrobią wszystko, żeby tylko nie uwierzyć w istnienie magii, nawet jak spotkają się z nią
twarzą w twarz … (Rowling 2000 [1998]: 45).
Trzecim powodem tak dużej popularności powieści Joanne K. Rowling i Eoina Colfera jest to, że przedstawiona w nich rzeczywistość – będąca przestrzenią, w której rozgrywa się akcja – jest światem równolegle występującym do
świata normalnego (tradycyjnego, codziennego). Granicę między tymi dwoma
światami stanowią w Harrym Potterze i kamieniu filozoficznym (Rowling 2000
[1997]) pub Dziurawy Kocioł i mur rozstępujący się pod wpływem czarów.
W Artemisie Fowlu (Colfer 2002a [2001]) z kolei świat równoległy występuje pod powierzchnią ziemi. Zwykli śmiertelnicy, nazywani w powieści „Błotnym Ludem”, nie wiedzą, że kopiec ziemi może być ukrytym wejściem do szybu, którym wróżki przemieszczają się do swojego świata i z powrotem. Światy
te są dodatkowo zabezpieczone czarami – teren Hogwartu jest inaczej widziany
przez mugoli właśnie dzięki zaklęciom – lub warunkami niepozwalającymi
przeżyć w nim człowiekowi – temperatura i ciśnienie w książkach Artemisie
Fowlu). Tylko jeden z tych światów wie o istnieniu drugiego, co powoduje, że
ma nad nim przewagę i może uczestniczyć w jego życiu, nie dając jednocześnie
60
Beata Cisowska
takiego prawa drugiej stronie.1 Umiejętność czyszczenia pamięci jest powszechnie wykorzystywana przez bohaterów obu powieści.
W Artemisie Fowlu chodzi jednak o coś więcej, niż tylko o uczynienie czarów niedostępnych ogółowi. Mieszkańcy Podziemnej Krainy zupełnie inaczej
wyglądają, ukrywanie się podczas kontaktów z normalnym światem jest więc
konieczne, żeby nie wzbudzać sensacji, a nawet paniki. Dlatego wróżki (które w
powieści są przedstawiane odmiennie niż w tradycyjnej konwencji baśniowej)
wykorzystują tarcze ochronne w celu zachowania niewidzialności.
Tarcza ochronna to niezwykle szybkie wirowanie wokół własnej osi, które
sprawia, że człowiek widzi tylko lekko drgające powietrze. I w tym właśnie
kryje się odpowiedź na pytanie o to, czemu nie zobaczyliśmy nigdy wróżki –
nie mieliśmy kasku, który by je wykrywał, ale oczywiście każdemu z nas zdarzyło się zobaczyć drgające powietrze, tylko że tłumaczyliśmy to zjawisko racjonalnie (słońce, upał, rozgrzane cząsteczki powietrza). Światy te są zorganizowane we właściwy sobie sposób, choć na podobieństwo świata normalnego.
Obowiązują w nich jednak inne zasady funkcjonowania znanych nam instytucji,
czego przykładem może być działanie sowiej poczty w powieściach o Harrym
Potterze.
Między oboma cyklami powieściowymi istnieją jednak dwie główne różnice.
W książkach o Artemisie Fowlu świat podziemny jest całkowicie niedostępny
dla osób z zewnątrz – jest zamknięty i ma wyraźnie zakreślone granice dostępności nawet dla swoich mieszkańców. Współpraca (czy może raczej kontakty)
następuje jedynie w wypadku zorganizowanej przestępczości. Dobrze ilustruje
to fragment z drugiej części cyklu o Artemisie Fowlu:
[N]ależy przyznać, że w SKR [Siłach Krasnoludzkiego Reagowania] przemyt urósł do rangi
poważnej bolączki. Nie chodziło nawet o kontrabandę jako taką, gdyż przemycano głównie
nieszkodliwą tandetę – ciemne okulary znanych firm, płyty DVD lub automaty do cappuccino.
Problem polegał na sposobie pozyskiwania tych artykułów. Rynek przemytniczy został
opanowany przez goblińską triadę B’wa Kell, która podczas wypadów na powierzchnię
Ziemi poczynała sobie coraz bezczelniej (Colfer 2002b [2001]: 22).
Właśnie tworzenie innego, alternatywnego świata jest podstawowym wyznacznikiem literatury fantasy, tym bardziej że, jak dotąd, brakuje jednoznacz1
Do zabezpieczenia świata czarodziejów przed niewtajemniczonymi służy w Harrym Potterze
Ministerstwo Magii, którego funkcje wyjaśnia Hagrid:.
– Ale co to Ministerstwo Magii robi?
– No ... ich główne zajęcie polega na ukrywaniu przed mugolami, że są jeszcze w tym kraju
czarownice i czarodzieje.
– Dlaczego?
– Dlaczego? Sam pomyśl Harry, co by to było! Przecież każdy ma jakieś problemy i chciałby je załatwić za pomocą czarów. Nie, lepiej niech nas zostawią w spokoju (Rowling 2000a
[1997]: 72).
61
nej definicji tego gatunku literackiego (można się oczywiście odwołać do zabawnego stwierdzenia Andrzeja Sapkowskiego, który powiedział, że fantasy
jest tym, co opatrzono etykietką z napisem „fantasy”). Elementem wspólnym
dla wszystkich powieści należących do tego gatunku jest jednak z pewnością
alternatywna rzeczywistość. Rzeczywistość ta nie musi być określona geograficznie (choć niekiedy jest) czy historycznie (co niekiedy się zdarza), istotne jest
przede wszystkim to, że jest opozycyjna wobec znanego świata i że często odwołuje się do pierwszego gatunku literackiego, z jakim czytelnik zetknął się
w dzieciństwie – do baśni.
W cyklu powieści o Harrym Potterze do świata czarodziejów są włączani
zwykli ludzie, którzy spełniają określony warunek: muszą wykazywać magiczne uzdolnienia. Zostają wówczas zaproszeni do Szkoły Magii i Czarodziejstwa
w Hogwarcie. I tu, niestety, pojawia się pewna nieścisłość. Z jednej strony,
Ministerstwo Magii robi wszystko, żeby nie dopuścić do ingerencji mugoli
w świat czarodziejów, z drugiej zaś strony – mieszkańcy zwykłego świata wybrani do Hogwartu nie są zaskoczeni listem potwierdzającym ich przyjęcie
w poczet uczniów szkoły. Skąd jednak wiedzieli o możliwości studiowania
magii i dlaczego, skoro nie wierzą w czary (choć posiadają pewne predyspozycje w tym kierunku), bez zdziwienia akceptują zaistniałą sytuację? Na to pytanie nie znajdujemy jednak odpowiedzi w powieści.
Druga różnica między równoległymi światami w omawianych cyklach powieściowych zawiera się w obszarze prezentowanego świata. W książkach
o Harrym Potterze poznajemy właściwie cały świat czarodziejski Anglii, a nawet otrzymujemy sygnały o istnieniu takich samych światów w innych miejscach ziemskiego globu. Czytelnik zyskuje również możliwość stworzenia sobie pełnego obrazu życia czarodziejów, poznaje bowiem ich społeczność, pracę,
domy rodzinne, szkodniki niszczące ogrody, prasę, sklepy, apteki, banki, rozrywki, a nawet przysmaki i słodycze. To sprawia, że wypełniony szczegółami
świat magii staje się światem skończonym i zamkniętym. Taka kreacja pozwala
skonkretyzować tę przestrzeń, wejść w nią w wyobraźni i utożsamić się z postaciami. W tym właśnie upatruję podstawowej przyczyny popularności cyklu
powieściowego o Harrym Potterze.
W książkach o Artemisie Fowlu terytorium, które poznajemy, jest bardzo
ograniczone. Wyznacza je działalność służb SKRZAT,2 stąd też poruszamy się
po obszarach niedostępnych często także dla zwykłych wróżek. O codziennym
ich życiu wiemy właściwie niewiele. Drobne informacje są podawane w pewnym sensie przy okazji wprowadzania innych, ważniejszych faktów. Dowiadujemy się na przykład tego, że w celu podtrzymania swojej magicznej przyrodzonej mocy wróżki muszą co pewien czas wychodzić na powierzchnię ziemi
2
Ppisownia oryginalna występuje w powieści.
62
Beata Cisowska
i odprawiać rytuał, a także tego, że w ciągu kilkusetletniego życia mogą urodzić
tylko jedno dziecko. Intersujący jest zwłaszcza wspomniany rytuał, gdyż do
jego przeprowadzenia muszą być spełnione określone warunki: wróżka podczas
pełni księżyca musi zerwać owoc ze starego dębu rosnącego w zakolu rzeki
i zakopać w innym miejscu. Aby tego dokonać, musi wydostać się na powierzchnię ziemi, a to samo w sobie jest już niebezpieczne. I właśnie ten rytuał
wykorzystał Artemis Fowl, żeby porwać wróżkę i zażądać za nią okupu.
Książki Eoina Colfera należy tym samym uznać za powieści w większym
stopniu sensacyjno-kryminalne niż przygodowe czy nawet baśnie, tym bardziej,
że pisarz, bawiąc się konwencją, celowo zmienia w nich znane toposy baśniowe. Czytelnik przywykł już do pewnych strukturalnych rozwiązań, ale w cyklu
o Artemisie Fowlu gra się z utrwalonymi przez lata tektur stereotypami, co dobrze ilustruje następujący fragment:
Zaciągnęła pod szyję suwak matowego, zielonego kombinezonu i zapięła kask. Nowe
mundury SKRZAT były bardzo szykowne, całkiem niepodobne do archaicznych kostiumów,
jakie służby policyjne musiały nosić w przeszłości. Pludry i trzewiki ze sprzączkami! Jak
babcię kocham! Nic dziwnego, że w folklorze ludzkim postacie skrzatów przedstawiano tak
groteskowo. Swoją drogą, może to i lepiej, że nie rzucały się w oczy – gdyby Błotni Ludzie
wiedzieli, że słowo „skrzat” to naprawdę SKRZAT – Specjalny Korpus Rozpoznawczy do
Zadań Tajemnych, elitarna jednostka SKR, Sił Krasnoludzkiego Reagowania – na pewno
podjęliby kroki, żeby go zlikwidować. Niechaj rasa ludzka zachowa swoje stereotypy
(Colfer 2002a [2001]: 38–39).
Należy w tym miejscu dodać, że świat krasnoludów stał na bardzo wysokim
poziomie rozwoju technicznego, inaczej niż społeczność czarodziejów, która
była raczej staroświecka. O ile jednak wszyscy czarodzieje mieli dostęp do różdżek, czarów czy proszku Fiuuu, o tyle tylko nieliczne krasnoludy korzystały
z fantastycznych urządzeń, na przykład ułatwiających podróże.
Nie na tak dużą skalę, ale także nietypowo wykorzystuje się znane baśniowe rozwiązania w cyklu powieści o Harrym Potterze. Świat magii jest bowiem
podzielony jeszcze na dwa inne światy: magii białej i magii czarnej. To, co
dotychczas funkcjonowało w świadomości dziecka jako złe, należy tutaj do
dobrego i bezpiecznego świata; odpowiednikiem czarownicy w książkach Joanne K. Rowling jest wiedźma, czarownica zaś nie jest postacią nacechowaną
pejoratywnie.
Podsumowując, można stwierdzić, że równoległe światy występujące
w omawianych książkach są zabiegiem, który wyniósł oba te cykle powieściowe nad pozostałą literaturę dla dzieci i młodzieży. Oddzielenie dwóch różnych
rzeczywistości, nie zaś przemieszanie atrybutów magicznych z normalnością
sprawia, że ich siła oddziaływania na czytelnika jest większa. Poza tym w ten
właśnie sposób dzieci (i nie tylko) umacniają w sobie przekonanie, że najwięk-
63
szą magią w życiu jest miłość, przyjaźń, zaufanie i oddanie bliskich – bez
względu na to, w jakim świecie się żyje.
Wykaz literatury
Colfer, Eoin 2002a [2001]: Artemis Fowl. Tłum. Barbara Kopeć-Umiastowska. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo W.A.B. [Artemis Fowl. London: Viking].
Colfer, Eoin 2002b [2001]: Artemis Fowl. Arktyczna przygoda. Tłum. Barbara Kopeć-Umiastowska.
Warszawa: Wydawnictwo W.A.B. [Artemis Fowl. The Arctic Incident. London: Puffin].
Rowling, Joanne K. 2000 [1997]: Harry Potter i kamień filozoficzny. Tłum. Andrzej Polkowski.
Poznań: Wydawnictwo Media Rodzina [Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc].
Rowling, Joanne K. 2000 [1998]: Harry Potter i komnata tajemnic. Tłum. Andrzej Polkowski.
Poznań: Wydawnictwo Media Rodzina [Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc].
WOJCIECH DRĄG
Ryder in dreamland: The construction of an alternative
reality in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and its
metaphorical capacity
ABSTRACT. This article is a study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled in the light of the
concept of alternative construal. It aims to demonstrate that the peculiarly malleable world
constructed in the novel can be interpreted as an alternative reality, governed by the logic of
a dream narrative. A brief commentary on the experimental aspects of the novel, as well as
on its rather puzzled critical reception, serves to locate it in opposition to Ishiguro’s earlier
works, which are possessed of a number of qualities associated with historical realism. The
brief analysis of the dreamlike elements of The Unconsoled is based on the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation. The reality surrounding the narrator is examined in
terms of a solipsistic projection of his anxiety-ridden psyche. The article attempts to explore
the metaphorical capacity of the alternative reality of the novel, favouring the interpretation
of The Unconsoled as an illustration of certain mechanisms of human memory. Among the
issues addressed in the latter part of the article are the significance of the past in the present,
the memory of trauma and the role of misremembering. The persistence of a traumatic event
in memory is analysed with reference to Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia. The
essay concludes with a brief consideration of the extent to which Ishiguro’s novel – by conjuring up a highly subjective reality of ego projections – problematises the possibility of an
objective reality.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s fourth novel (1995) marks a new beginning in his literary
output and represents a step into a previously unexplored territory. Following
the warm reception of A Pale View of Hills (1981), An Artist of the Floating
World (1986) and the spectacular success of The Remains of the Day (1989),
Ishiguro sought new means of artistic expression. The first three novels, all
praised for their skilful handling of historical realism, elicited an abundance of
critical response that misinterpreted them as novels whose major ambition is to
comment on the sociopolitical context of certain events surrounding the outbreak of the Second World War. These literalist interpretations overlooked the
broader significance of the novels and ignored their metaphorical capacity. In
his fourth novel, Ishiguro’s intention was to create an alternative fictional realm,
so alien that it could not be mistaken for a realist narrative.
The neat and apparently seamless structure of the first three novels is replaced here by a disjointed narrative smoothly drifting between realism and
fabulism, which – unlike the first three novels – has its origin in what the author
calls “the messy, chaotic, undisciplined … [and] undignified side” of his writing
self (Wong & Shaffer 2008: 41). The Unconsoled was received by Frederic
66
Wojciech Drąg
Holmes (2005: 12) and other critics as “a radical departure” from the mode of
writing represented by his previous works. In an interview quoted by Holmes
(2005: 13), Ishiguro argued that deviating from realism allowed him to explore
themes that are of “broader significance” and greater allegorical potential. The
oneiric world conjured up in Ishiguro’s novel is governed by the laws of its own
making – it substitutes, in Gary Adelman’s words, “the fantastic realism of
a dream narrative” for traditional realism (2001: 167). The aim of this article is
to demonstrate that the dreamlike realm of The Unconsoled can be interpreted
in terms of an alternative reality whose structure and logic serve as a metaphorical illustration of the mechanisms of human memory.
1. The alternative reality of The Unconsoled
Throughout over five hundred pages, The Unconsoled documents the visit
of a celebrated British pianist named Ryder to an unspecified central European
city. What initially appears to be yet another musical engagement is gradually
revealed to be an event of crucial importance to Ryder’s personal and professional future. The novel takes the form of the pianist’s first-person account of
the three days leading up to the concert, during which the narrator interacts with
the inhabitants of the mysterious city, who curiously evolve and begin to assume the characteristics of his family, old-time friends and himself at different
stages of his artistic career. The maze-like city increasingly resembles a projection of Ryder’s mind, rather than a real location. From the very first scene, the
reader realises that the fictional realm of the novel is governed by a peculiar
logic, frequently reminiscent of that of an anxiety dream.
1.1. The first scene as the gateway
The opening scene (Ishiguro 2006 /1995/: 3–17) is worth a closer examination as it encapsulates the atmosphere and the poetics of the alternative reality
constructed throughout the text. The novel begins with Ryder’s arrival at the
deserted lobby of a “gloomy” and “claustrophobic” hotel. When the receptionist
finally appears, he is startled to discover that the newly arrived guest is Ryder
himself. On the way to his room, the pianist is accompanied by an elderly porter
named Gustav. Although their journey on the lift should only take a few moments, the porter engages Ryder in an absurd conversation which takes up six
pages and centres on the difficult condition of the local community of porters.
At one point during the lift’s interminable ascent, Ryder asks about a Miss
Hilde, whom Gustav has just mentioned. Instantly, he turns and realises that the
woman is standing right behind him. Hilde Stratmann hastily introduces herself
as the person responsible for organising his visit. She intimates that Ryder has
Ryder in dreamland: The construction of an alternative reality
67
missed an important meeting in the morning and refers to the “tight schedule”
of the pianist’s stay. Evidently unaware of there being any schedule for his visit,
Ryder is too embarrassed to admit his ignorance and decides to request it at
a more convenient moment. He never does, which becomes the source of recurrent rushes of panic and the persistent fear that he constantly ought to be somewhere else instead. When the elevator eventually stops and Ryder is shown to
his room, he is suddenly struck with the realization that he cannot recall anything about this visit. About to doze off, Ryder feels increasingly certain that the
hotel room which he has just been shown to is “the very room” in his aunt’s
house near the border of England and Wales where he lived as a child (cf. Ishiguro 2006: 16).
The first scene can be read as a gateway into the alternative reality presented by The Unconsoled. It introduces a number of peculiar laws and facets
that define the fictional realm of Ryder’s narrative. Several pages into the opening scene, the reader begins to realise that they have entered a reality governed
by the logic of a dream. Among the dreamlike aspects of the fictional reality of
The Unconsoled which are introduced in the first scene – but also feature
throughout – are the juxtaposition of the probable and the improbable (the
length and subject matter of the conversation on the lift) and the presence of
unlikely coincidences (such as Miss Stratmann’s sudden appearance at the moment her name is uttered).
Of central importance to the logic operating in the reality of the novel is its
use of temporal and spatial compression. The former mechanism is at play in
the elevator scene, where the characters’ impossibly long conversation is meant
to take place during a brief journey to a higher floor of the hotel. The rest of the
novel abounds in similar episodes where time appears to flow in slow motion
and is possessed of an extraordinary fluidity and elasticity. Ryder’s conviction
that his hotel room is in fact his childhood bedroom has been interpreted by
critic Barry Lewis (2000: 108) as an example of spatial compression or a displacement of space.
The mysterious foreign city where the novel is set is revealed in the course
of Ryder’s narration to be populated by several old-time British friends, whom
he encounters in utterly unlikely circumstances. It also contains places and objects that Ryder knows intimately from his childhood years, such as his parents’
old car, which he discovers abandoned in a field (Ishiguro 2006: 260–261). The
implausible parallels between the alien central European city and the familiar
locations of Ryder’s youth bring critic Barry Lewis to the conclusion that the
unnamed city is merely “a displaced England of his memory and imagination”
(2000: 110).
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Wojciech Drąg
1.2. The reality as a projection
A closer exploration of the setting of Ryder’s narrative provides further
arguments in evidence of the hypothesis that the reality constructed in the novel
is a projection of the narrator’s mind rather than a picture of an “objective” reality. Throughout the three days filled with wanderings around the city, Ryder is
confronted with a variety of eerie sites, including claustrophobically narrow
alleys, empty, desolate spaces, a deserted palace on the hillside and a massive
wall in the middle of a street, preventing him from reaching the concert hall.
Most locations strike Ryder as bleak, rainy, deserted and shrouded in darkness.
Pico Iyer has referred to the novel’s settings as “maze-like” and “sepulchral”
(1995: 22).
As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that the atmosphere of the settings evoked by Ryder’s narrative corresponds with his own emotional condition. Shao-Pin Luo describes the emotional landscape of The Unconsoled as
defined by “profound disappointment, disillusion and desolation” (2003: 70).
Among the sentiments that permeate Ryder’s narration are anxiety, panic and
anger. The pianist is repeatedly seized by anxiety about his upcoming performance, his parents’ presence at the concert and the many little obligations that are
constantly hovering over him.
Several scenes in the novel suggest Ryder’s emotional coldness bordering
on sterility, which appears to be projected onto the reality of the novel and, consequently, on the behaviour of other characters. The world surrounding Ryder,
dominated by frigidity and emotional paralyisis, functions as a mere reflection
of his own condition. The fictional realm of The Unconsoled can thus be interpreted as a meticulously constructed mindscape operating according to the logic
of a dream narrative and hence allowing for a greater insight into the depths of
the protagonist’s unconscious.
1.3. A dreamlike reality
The logic governing the reality of The Unconsoled is permeated by elements of the dreamlike. The novel as a whole has been described by Lewis
(2000: 108) as a “narrative that cannot be naturalised without recourse to the
topsy-turvy twists of dreams”. Ishiguro himself has stated in interviews that the
novel uses dream as a “model” and is rooted in “dream grammar” (Wong &
Shaffer 2008: 114, 209).
Ryder’s dream grammar is structured according to the two basic Freudian
mechanisms of dream-work: displacement and condensation. In his seminal study
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (2008 /1999/ {1965} [1899–1900])
deems them essential to converting the dream’s latent content to its manifest
content and thus effectuating a dream distortion (Freud 2008: 235). Displace-
69
ment is used in psychoanalysis as a term denoting an act of transferring qualities
of an emotionally charged object onto another object, which results in a marked
discrepancy between the alien form of the dream and its familiar meaning.
The gap between the manifest and the latent content is attributable to the
work of censorship. The role of condensation, in turn, is to compress different
psychic intensities into a single dream narrative. Freud (2008: 211) defines the
task of the psychoanalyst as that of “translating the symbols” of manifest content, which is “presented in hieroglyphics” into “the language of the dreamthoughts”, which corresponds to the dream’s latent content.
Consequently, the task of the literary critic approaching The Unconsoled
could be to regard the alienating content of Ryder’s narrative as an expression
of underlying emotional turmoil. Such an approach is highly productive insofar
as it affords tools to account for the ubiquity of absurd content in the novel. At
issue here is Freud’s statement that “a dream frequently has the profoundest
meaning in the places where it seems most absurd” (2008: 271).
One of the most insightful attempts to unravel the dream grammar of The
Unconsoled in search of more profound psychological motivations is Lewis’s,
(2000) Freudian analysis of Ryder’s narrative. The critic singles out displacement as the key to unlocking the broader significance of the novel. Lewis conceives of the implausible plot of Ryder’s narrative as the product of his conflicted psyche – as a manifest content concealing the latent psychical crux. In an
attempt to get to the core of the narrative, the critic puts forward an elaborate
study of how Ryder endows other characters with his own qualities (as well as
those of his significant others) and has them re-enact his wounds from the past
and his anxieties about the future (Ishiguro 2006: 111–114).
What appears to lie at the heart of Ryder’s decentred dream is his profound
emotional and professional insecurity rooted in his conflicted relationship with
his parents and his sense of having disappointed their hopes. Lewis concludes
that although the reality enveloping Ryder could be interpreted as a “projection
of [his] unconscious”, its status is still elusive; and he suggests that instead of
“dreaming within his life”, the narrator appears to be “living within a dream”
(Lewis 2000: 124). If so, who is the dreamer? Lewis admits, in consequence,
that the novel does not suggest any definitive answer to that question.
A similar thread of interpretation is taken up by Gary Adelman who perceives the plot of The Unconsoled as “a seismographic record of Ryder’s psyche” (2001: 168). The characters populating the solipsistic realm of the novel
are not full-blooded creatures but mere “ego projections” of the narrator himself. The reality of Ryder’s dream could therefore be read as an externalisation
of his inner life through a variety of “doubles” who impersonate the conflicted
sides of the pianist’s split and anxiety-ridden psyche (Adelman 2001: 178).
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Wojciech Drąg
Among the most notable dreamlike characteristics of the realm of The Unconsoled are the occurrence of coincidence, the fluidity of time and space and
the prevalence of wish-fulfilment.1 The major point of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is the assertion that the latent content of each dream narrative
represents the fulfilment of a wish. In Ryder’s narrative, the work of wishfulfilment can be traced in a variety of episodes where the pianist describes his
small triumphs and appears rooted in his pervasive delusions of grandeur. The
ultimate manifestation of that mechanism is the closing section of the novel,
which sees Ryder adopt his complacent frame of mind despite the absolute fiasco of all his professional and personal endeavours.
The characteristically dreamlike ubiquity of coincidence is enacted in the
numerous scenes in which Ryder accidentally encounters his bygone friends
although he finds himself in an alien country. Certain characters evolve
throughout the play, gradually assuming the qualities of Ryder’s family. Gustav’s daughter Sophie metamorphoses into Ryder’s wife and her son Boris –
into his little boy. In the novel’s peculiarly malleable world of shifting identities, space and time also remain fluid and indeterminate, as has been noted in
the discussion of the opening scene. Certain episodes rely on familiar dream
patterns, such as the panic of getting lost, the fear of being late for an important
event or the dread of being unprepared for an exam, which further strengthens
the oneiric qualities of the novel’s alienating reality.
1.4. The laws of the alternative reality
Whether taken at face value or read as a projection of the narrator’s unconscious, the world of The Unconsoled may be regarded as an alternative construal, for it constitutes a self-contained universe operating according to its own
distinct and imaginative set of rules. Absurd and outlandish as some of the episodes in the novel may seem, they do form an integral part of a peculiarly coherent reality. Despite all its unexpected twists and glaring deviations from
strict realism, The Unconsoled is not set in a fictional world where virtually
anything could happen. Ishiguro has said in an interview that such reality would
be “meaningless” and that he, therefore, felt the need for the reader to discover
that the fictional realm of the text is governed by “new laws”, which have supplanted those of realism. The Unconsoled’s strength as a novel rests on its
achievement in constructing an alienating reality which, although unrealistic in
terms of actions and events, retains a necessary degree of coherence and integrity. “If Ryder … suddenly grew wings and flew off on page 300 that would
1
The following paragraph is a brief summary of the argument contained in my article (Drąg
2010), Elements of the dreamlike and the uncanny in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.
Pbublished in the journal Styles of Communication 2.
71
seem as wrong as it would in, say, a Henry James novel”, comments Ishiguro
(Wong & Shaffer 2008: 132). Yet the boundaries between what is probable and
improbable in Ryder’s narrative remain rather fluid, very much like the mechanisms operating in dream fantasies.
The great amount of detail provided by the narrator and the linear progression of his tale may tempt readers to try to interpret the novel as a work of realism and explain the eccentricities of the plot by the psychological instability of
the unreliable narrator. This, however, appears to be a misguided approach
since it overlooks or marginalises the increasingly evident solipsism of the narrative. The futility of applying the standards of “objective” reality to critically
assess the novel is facetiously exemplified by Lewis who quotes one reviewer’s
reaction to an early passage where Ryder is watching 2001: A Space Odyssey
and describes in detail certain scenes involving Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner. Instead of taking the actors’ presence in the film (in which they did not in
reality perform) as a hint that the The Unconsoled is governed by an alternative
realism, the critic pointed it out as “an editorial oversight” (2000: 126).
The protagonist’s immersion in an alternative world has encouraged several
critics to draw parallels between Ishiguro’s novel and Lewis Carroll’s children’s
classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.2 Shao-Pin Luo, for example, notes,
“Ishiguro has constructed in The Unconsoled, as in Alice in Wonderland, an
alternative world, with its numerous mirrors and doorways, with alternative
rules and random possibilities. This is a world where the landscape takes on
a dreamy quality” (2003: 76–77). However, as Lewis observes, where Alice is
aware of having found herself in a different world and marvels at its vagaries,
Ryder takes the baffling reality for granted and passively accepts its rules
(2000: 124). In that respect, Ryder’s attitude appears to reflect that of a dreamer
who is unaware of there being a different, and more authentic, reality out there
and who, therefore, unconditionally accepts the terms of the dream.
2. The metaphorical capacity of the alternative reality
As noted in the opening section of this article, Ishiguro admits that his recent tendency to depart from realism is rooted in the belief that non-realist techniques of narration are more conducive to alerting the reader to a metaphorical
dimension of the novel and to exploring themes of “broader significance”. The
author has also pointed out, in an interview quoted by Sim, that the decision to
2
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wiedly known under the title as Alice in Wonderland, is
a novel written by the English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), which arose in 1862 and was published for the first time in
1865. For more additional information see, inter alia, Lenny's Alice in Wonderland site:
www.alice-in-wonderland.net/alice1a.html – editor’s note: ZW.
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Wojciech Drąg
withhold any specific information about the time and location of the events
dramatised in The Unconsoled was intended to enable the text to “take off at
[the] metaphorical level” (2010: 60).
There is no critical consensus as to the allegorical significance of the novel,
as the text contains clues which allow for several different interpretations. Critics have suggested the readings of the novel as a metaphor for the Freudian
sphere of the unconscious, for the crisis of postmodern culture, the passivity of
existence, the mechanisms of self-delusion and, perhaps rather surprisingly, for
the modern book trade market. The last part of the article will be devoted to the
analysis of the novel as a metaphorical rendition of the workings of human
memory.
2.1. Metaphors for memory
The notions of remembering and forgetting underpin the texture of Ryder’s
narrative. The problematisation of memory is introduced in the already discussed opening scene of the novel, where the pianist is recurrently confronted
with the paralysing fact that he does not remember why he has arrived in the
city and what is expected of him. Further, Ryder’s amnesia is extended to remarkable proportions as he fails to recognise his wife and son. Gustav, the porter who accompanies Ryder in the lift scene, is later revealed to be his father-inlaw although not a flicker of recognition passes through Ryder’s mind during
their lengthy conversation. The same pattern occurs with all the childhood and
university friends whom the pianist encounters in the streets of the city, as well
as with old familiar locations – first a blankness, then a vague glimmer of recollection.
In his review of the novel, Richard Rorty notes that Ryder behaves almost
as if he was deprived of long term memory (1995: 13). Not only does the narrator barely remember anything from the distant past, but he also constantly forgets the events that he himself has recounted in his narrative. In an interview,
Ishiguro presents a metaphorical reading of Ryder’s amnesiac condition: if the
pianist’s four-day visit to the city is interpreted as a compression of a lifetime,
then his behaviour may be seen as standing for the human inclination to abandon (or forget) certain ideals cherished in youth, long-term resolutions and the
promises given to others (Wong & Shaffer 2008: 133).
Memory operates in The Unconsoled on two planes: the events recounted
by Ryder in the narrative present and the interspersing flashbacks from his
childhood. The latter are not very numerous but afford a profound insight into
the narrator’s psyche. Most of them hint at some unspecified wound which may
have been the source of his parents’ furious quarrels, which always occupy the
background of Ryder’s recollections. With other characters of the novel understood as projections of the pianist’s past, the scenes depicted in the present may
73
also be interpreted as belonging to the sphere of Ryder’s memory. Lewis argues
that, unlike in Ishiguro’s first three novels, here the protagonist’s experiences
are not repressed but “erupt into consciousness” and are projected onto the
events of the plot (2000: 104).
The characters are thus, as Beedham points out, mere “conduits for Ryder to
remember and forget, judge and censor his own past” (2010: 114). According to
this view, the five hundred pages of Ryder’s disjointed narrative is a desperate
(and ultimately frustrated) attempt to confront and come to terms with the
ghosts of the past.
2.1.1. The past in the present
By populating the novel with Ryder’s projections of himself at different
stages of his artistic career and using them to re-enact the crucial turning points
of his past, Ishiguro manages to introduce a highly innovative technique, which
allows for dissecting the mechanisms of memory in the narrative present. The
novel constructs a reality where to perceive is to remember. As a result, Sim
argues, “the past is intermeshed with the present” and memory underlies the the
texture of the narrative (2010: 66).
Apart from the “Doppelgängers” in disguise, the past speaks to Ryder
through the long-forgotten friends, mysterious locations and objects which he
constantly stumbles upon wherever he goes. The landscape of the novel,
through which the past, in a sense, speaks to the protagonist, can be interpreted
in terms of prosopopoeia, a figure which endows an inanimate or dead object
with the power of speech.
The voice of the past oscillates between nostalgic (such as Ryder’s discovery of his parents’ abandoned old car) and oppressive (Ryder’s vivid memories
of his parents’ frequent quarrels). In most situations, however, the narrator of
The Unconsoled appears to be haunted by a past which he would much rather
forget.
2.1.2. The wound
The haunting spell of the past is metaphorically embodied in the figure of
the uncanny wound which afflicts Brodsky, an elderly conductor for whom the
concert is a chance for a spectacular comeback after years of alcohol-induced
depression. The peculiarity of Brodsky’s wound consists in its refusal to heal.
Aware of the inescapability of the pain that it inflicts, the conductor admits to
“touching” and “caressing” the wound in the hope of achieving “consolation”
(Ishiguro 2006: 313).
The wound becomes Brodsky’s “old friend”. as it has accompanied him for
most of his life. Ishiguro interprets the wound as a metaphor for the matters that
have been broken beyond repair, the psychological injuries that, once sustained,
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Wojciech Drąg
can only be “caressed” but never “healed” (Wong & Shaffer 2008: 116). The
only attainable palliative is a certain kind of consolation: a career, a fulfilling
relationship, music. “[H]eal the wound? … [T]hat [is] an impossibility…. All
I want, all I ask for now is a consolation”. Brodsky confesses to Ryder (Ishiguro
2006: 313). The ultimate frustration of the endeavours to soothe their wound –
encapsulated in the utter fiasco of the concert – leaves Brodsky, Ryder and the
other characters unconsoled, hence the novel’s title.
Brodsky’s attachment to his wound is of a self-destructive nature, which is
revealed in the scene following the conductor’s literal and metaphorical collapse while conducting the concert. Miss Collins, a former partner with whom
he desires to reunite, publicly denounces Brodsky’s injury as “nothing special at
all” and “the one true love” of his life. She accuses him of always “tending” his
wound and dispels his hopes of succeeding again as a conductor, for his music
“will only ever be about that silly little wound” (Ishiguro 2006: 498–499).
Sim interprets Brodsky’s relationship with the wound as an unhealthy obsession with grief and relates it to the psychoanalytical notion of melancholia
(2010: 64). In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” of 1917, Freud
defines the latter as “a pathological disposition” which represents the failure of
the work of mourning, whose aim is to “sever bonds” with the lost object and
transfer libido onto its substitute (Freud 2006 /2005/ [1916–1917]: 310–311).
Unlike mourning, melancholia is a “disorder of self-esteem” as the loss of the
beloved object results in the partial loss of the ego (Freud 2006: 311). Whereas
mourning culminates in the dissociation from the lost object, melancholia leads
to a permanent fixation on it and a hyper-investment of the related memories
((Freud 2006: 312).
The conductor’s failure to confine the wound to the realm of the past (and
thus to complete the work of mourning) may be seen as a symptom of the destructive condition of melancholia. Sim (2010: 64) invokes Miss Collins’s
statement that she herself and Brodsky’s musical ambitions are mere “mistresses” that he “seeks consolation from” and her conclusion that the wound is
Brodsky’s “one true love” (Ishiguro 2006: 498–499) as a diagnosis of his pathological devotion to the lost object and the resulting inability to transfer his attachment onto any of its possible substitutes. The characteristically melancholic
decline in self-esteem and propensity for self-reproach may account for
Brodsky’s prolonged alcoholism. His waning sexual capacity could be regarded
as a metaphorical illustration of the impotence and inertia which are the effects
of his destructive psychological condition.
If one accepts the previously suggested interpretation that the characters of
The Unconsoled are mere projections of Ryder’s psyche, then Brodsky (an old
musician whose promising career has collapsed) may be seen as a projection of
Ryder’s anxiety about his professional future. The pianist’s persistent wound, in
75
turn, may be interpreted as an externalisation of Ryder’s fear that his own
childhood wound shall, likewise, never heal.
2.1.3. Misremembering
Taken as a whole, Ishiguro’s novel could also be interpreted as a metaphor
for the manipulative capacity of memory. The innumerable slips, blends, omissions and displacements illustrate the extent to which memory mechanisms
disguise and re-work past experiences to render them more palatable. Peter
Childs (2005: 139) considers The Unconsoled as “Ishiguro’s most explicit treatment of creative misremembering and the anxiety the individual pours into
trying to come to terms with the past”. In the reality of his dream, Ryder is invariably lost and inert – more acted upon than acting, yet, in retrospect, he
views his actions as voluntary and purposeful. Attaching false significance to
the randomness of past actions is an instance of such creative and orderenhancing misremembering.
Matthew Beedham (2010: 116) argues that Ryder’s strategy hinges on
“wallpaper[ing] over the painful moments of his past” struggling to suppress
rather than confront his demons. The metaphor of remembering as covering
rather than uncovering the past may cast some light on the significance of Ryder’s surname. According to Adelman (2001: 178), in turn, the surname is
a reference to Albert Pinkham Ryder, an American modernist painter famous
for repeatedly reworking his canvases to the point that they eventually cracked
from the surplus of oil and varnish. The pain that Ryder-the-musician attempts
to cover and re-paint resurfaces under the guise of doubles, displacements and
conspicuous erasures.
3. Conclusions
Concluding her analysis of The Unconsoled, Shao-Pin Luo points out that
“by providing a ‘fantasy’ world, Ishiguro shows that the ‘real’ world is forever
shadowed by the possibility of alternative worlds and alternative lives”
(2003: 77). Far from being a mere exercise in the non-realist mode of writing,
The Unconsoled, with its rich metaphorical capacity, can be interpreted as an
ambitious attempt to construct a rival reality whose quirks are meant to illustrate the logic governing the mechanisms of memory.
In the review of Ishiguro’s next work, When We Were Orphans (2000),
John Carey (2000: 45) argues that the novel endeavours to portray “the labyrinth of reality which realism has simplified”. Such is also the ambition of The
Unconsoled: by constructing an alternative world, to problematise and enrich
our understanding of the “objective” reality, by exposing the chaotic, frag-
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mented and essentially unreliable nature of our mental processes, to undermine
the very objectivity of the reality we perceive around us.
References
Adelman, Gary 2001: Doubles on the rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Critique 42, 166–180.
Beedham, Matthew 2010: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism:
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carey, John 2000: Few novels extend the possibilities of fiction. This one does. Sunday Times 2,
April, 45.
Childs, Peter 2005: Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Drąg, Wociech 2010: Elements of the dreamlike and the uncanny in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Styles of Communication 2, 31– 40.
Freud, Sigmund 2008 /1999/ {1965} [1899–1900]: The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce
Crick. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press {Trans. James Strachey. New York:
Avon} [Die Traumdeutung/Sigmund Freud; Leipzig : F. Deuticke].
Freud, Sigmund 2006 /2005/ [1916–1917]: Mourning and melancholia. Trans. Shaun Whiteside
/London: Penguin Books/. In: Adam Phillips (ed.) 2006. The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin, 310–326 [Trauer und Melancholie. Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche
Psychoanalyse 4 (6), 288– 301].
Holmes, Frederic M. 2005: Realism, dreams and the unconscious in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.
In: James Acheson, Sarah C. E. Ross (eds.) 2005: The Contemporary British Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 11–22.
Ishiguro, Kazuo 2006 /1995/: The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber.
Iyer, Pico 1995: The butler didn’t do it, again. Times Literary Supplement 28 April, 22.
Lewis, Barry 2000: Contemporary World Writers: Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Luo, Shao-Pin 2003: “Living the wrong life”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s unconsoled orphans. Dalhousie
Review 83.1, 51– 80.
Rorty, Richard 1995: Consolation prize. Village Voice Literary Supplement October, 13.
Sim, Wai-chew 2010: Kazuo Ishiguro. Oxon: Routledge,
Wong, Cynthia 2005: Writers and Their Work: Kazuo Ishiguro. Horndon: Northcote.
Wong, Cynthia, Brian Shaffer (eds.) 2008: Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi.
ŁUKASZ GIEZEK
Rewriting Oscar Wilde: Peter Ackroyd’s The Last
Testament of Oscar Wilde
ABSTRACT. On the basis of Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde the article
presents the notion of the subject as a discursive formation, i.e., the self emerging as a result
of telling a story. Since the main character of the novel is a real historical personage, the article focuses on exploring the process of fictionalization resulting from constructing the subject within narrative structures and also investigates signals suggesting that imagination creates a truth “larger than that of biography or history” (Ackroyd 1993 /1983/: 121). By focusing on the narrator’s understanding of bygone days at the moment of writing the life story,
the narrative underscores that the past and self are malleable; both are endowed with new
significance as they are being turned into a tale. Wilde’s life becomes a self-consciously stylized apologia abounding in intertextual references. Citationism brings to the foreground the
novel’s metafictional concern with narrative techniques used to create a story and with the
role of art and imagination in constructing the meaning of the actual world. Paired with the
novel's metafictional character, the strategy of turning historical figures into characters of the
story and of emplotting actual events within the larger narrative involves the second-level
reader in considering literary aspects of historical writings. As a result, the reader questions
their reliance on historical narratives to present the truth as it was. The Last Testament posits
the self’s confinement to discourse and dispersion of truths; however, the narratorprotagonist discerns the possibility of attaining the ultimate truth in contemplation and creation of art. Wilde dreams of entering artworks and transcending his life and self. Indeed, one
might argue that an anagogical reading prompts the reader to believe that the playwright
passes into the domain of imagination and speaks through Ackroyd in the apologia.
In Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde an alternate construal is being created right in front of the reader’s eyes as the eponymous narrator-protagonist, the famous historical personage, begins to write his memoir in
the hope of finding the answer to the troubling question, “Who was Oscar
Wilde?” (Ackroyd 1993 /1983/: 5). Being exiled in France, Ackroyd’s Wilde,
unlike his historical counterpart, does not finish his literary career with The
Ballad of Reading Gaol but sets about creating the final masterpiece in which
he explores the problems of (re)creating one’s self in a narrative that can give
meaning to the expired past and preserve the integrity of the self.
As the narrator-protagonist provides constant self-conscious commentary on
the process of shaping his identity within the story that he is telling, The Last
Testament becomes a metafictional novel, a story about the writing of a story,
and, crucially, about recreating the past, about the status of the cultural icon that
Oscar Wilde now is, and, on a more general level, about the constructedness of
history and its inaccessibility outside the realm of language. What is more, the
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Łukasz Giezek
concern of the novel with the textual status of Oscar Wilde (he now exists as
a discursive construct) opens up the possibility of an anagogical reading.
Namely, the protagonist’s wish to enter the realm of fiction created by the
imagination and existing outside the flux of time seems to have been granted
and realized in and through the novel itself, for in the meticulous and masterly
recreation of Wilde’s style, Ackroyd appears to have realized one of his protagonist’s assertions about the imagination: “an amusing fantasy has more reality than a commonplace truth” (1993: 24). In other words, the style of The Last
Testament of Oscar Wilde enables us, according to Ackroyd (1993: 121), to
suspend our disbelief up to the point where, again realizing the protagonist’s
own words, one would be “quite astounded” if it was not authored by Wilde
himself.
Therefore, in what follows I will firstly present the process in which Wildethe narrator resolves the problem of self-definition by turning his life into
a story. Then I will explore the metafictional twist, i.e., the strategy which turns
the character’s memoir into the commentary on the novel itself and on the status
of historical personages as textual constructs.
The Last Testament of Oscar Wile has the structure of a journal where individual chapters form daily entries spanning the period between 9 August and 30
November 1900, i.e., Wilde’s stay in Paris, ended in death resulting from the
worsening of an ear infection. The narrator self-consciously reveals his purpose
for writing his confessions, and then he describes his childhood and moves to
his embarking on a literary career, the rise to fame, the fall brought about by the
accusations of illicit conduct, and ends with the present situation of the expatriate. His story reaches its conclusion as Maurice Gilbert records incapacitated
Wilde’s words until the day he dies.
In line with historiographic metafiction’s underscoring of the made-up and
open character of history, Wilde’s journal highlights the constructedness of lifewriting, its fictive dimension, and the accessibility of the past only as a text. As
Bosie and Frank Harris read the memoirs, the latter accuses Wilde of inventing
facts, and “stealing lines from other writers”, to which Wilde replies, “I rescued
them” (Ackroyd 1993: 161).
The narrator-protagonist is aware that interesting fiction surpasses facts,
that “Nature always follows Art” (Ackroyd 1993: 121). What is more, when he
speaks of The Portrait of Mr W. H., it turns out that he replaces the hegemony
of the truth that should directly correspond to reality, with a truth, or a multitude
of truths, that result from the interpretation and arrangement of texts: “It is of no
concern to me if the facts were accurate or inaccurate: I had discerned a truth
which was larger than that of biography or history, a truth not merely about
Shakespeare but about the nature of all creative art” (Ackroyd 1993: 121). Furthermore, Wilde-the narrator explicitly mixes fact and fiction by incorporating
Rewriting Oscar Wilde: Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
79
within the fabric of his apologia both newspaper clippings and fables. As noted
by Susana Onega (1998: 31) in Peter Ackroyd, the latter ones function as comments, as the amplification of meaning contained in the life-story. The inclusion
of the overtly fictional tales in the protagonist’s journal highlights the narrative
aspect of facts, posits that narratives define reality, that art may reveal a truth
“larger than that of biography” (Ackroyd 1993: 121).
Hence, the protagonist’s past has no fixed, unchanging essence; it is invented in the present, takes shape as the narrator spins his tale, and it is subject
to his embellishments. Its affinity with fiction is underscored in the already
mentioned accusation of Wilde stealing from other writers, which for the narrator is a “rescuing” attempt: one cannot avoid the influence of other texts in the
Library of Babel, in the reality not of immediately accessible objects but inescapably mediated by language. One’s past then is a story, a fiction constructed
and existing only in the present moment of recollection.
Fittingly, the idea of linear development, of growth, of transition from a less
to a more enlightened state of self-awareness appears to be yet another fiction
that helps the storyteller to construct a meaningful narrative. In “Autobiography”, Alfred Hornung (1997: 221) states that in the traditional autobiographical
writing “the chronology of one’s life is retrospectively reproduced in a continuous narrative text with the aim of constructing a unified whole”; therefore, life
seems to be unfolding ever deeper layers of meaning, leading the protagonist on
the way towards a better, fuller, wiser self.
The categories of progress and personal growth seem to be inevitable in
such a perception of the self, yet as the postmodern variants of self-writing underscore its affinity with fiction and its dependence on narrative conventions, so
the development is revealed as another narrative strategy. Namely, the beginning, where the process of change turns out to be transparent only in the ending,
and one’s present instance of writing who he/she is determine what changes
needed to have occurred to lead to this state. As Mark Freeman writes in Rewriting the Self (1993: 30), “this new relationship being created between the
past and the present occurs in the present, in the moment of writing: the ‘ending’ we are, therefore, determines both the beginning and indeed the essential
nature of how we came to be”. Thus, the progress along the irreversible arrow
of time seems to be lacking in substance. It is rather a manner of organizing
one’s self into a coherent whole that emerges in the present act of recollection,
and in Freeman’s (1993: 20) view “there is a sense in which the end leads to the
beginning, the outcome in question serving as the organizing principle around
which the story is told”.
Accordingly, the movement of Wilde’s life-story appears determined at the
moment of writing, for even his usage of the term “apologia” implies a humbled
stance, a justification of the ways of the sinner. The protagonist writes of con-
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necting the past and future “with simple words” (Ackroyd 1993: 3), and he
wishes to redefine himself from the current, fresh perspective, untainted by
earlier lies and posing (Ackroyd 1993: 3); thus, we may already discern the
character interpreting his earlier existence as deplorable. As Wilde narrates his
life, he lives in Paris, deserted by most of his friends after the lost trial and imprisonment. The character assumes the name of Sebastian Melmoth and perceives himself as an exile whose mistake was to “demonstrate to others that
their ideals are illusion, their understanding all vanity” (Ackroyd 1993: 17).
Hence, he assumes the role of a scapegoat, punished for presenting to the public
its own sins; he has been estranged from society, given to excess, and therefore
misunderstood. Fittingly, this trait underlies his entire existence and the transformations he undergoes: we see him speak of his solitary childhood, alienated
adolescence, and the choice to pursue fame and praise despite the recognition
that they are “empty things” (Ackroyd 1993: 30), all in line and amplifying the
role of the outcast. The protagonist “knows now” (Ackroyd 1993: 30, italics are
mine: ŁG) the meaning of his choices; therefore, he confirms the determination
of the beginning by the closure.
In fact, Wilde often outwardly underscores that his destiny is written by the
end, and that he inevitably follows the fortune until the fall, like a fated tragic
protagonist: “the point of all tragedy is the heedlessness of the tragic hero: even
when he has seen the curse, he runs towards it willingly. Of course I had no one
to weave beautiful songs out of my destiny – but, then, I have always been my
own chorus” (Ackroyd 1993: 29).
The outcast’s story reaches its peak during the trial, which, from the current
vantage point, constitutes for Wilde the end of his old personality, the moment
when he wishes to “become like a child, and speak simply for the first time”
(Ackroyd 1993: 145), as opposed to the old self which “gilded each day with
precious words and perfumed the hours with wine” (Ackroyd 1993: 3). The fall
and the wish to change come before the recognition of the way towards salvation; namely, the protagonist understands that only unselfish love can redeem
him, the sharing of suffering, and “sympathy with the pain of others” (Ackroyd
1993: 156).
In the thread of the narrative, the recognition is followed immediately by
a miracle, i.e., the arrival of a new prison governor who allows Wilde to have
books which will “protect” the narrator and let him experience joy again. As
after leaving prison the protagonist cannot write anything except The Ballad of
Reading Gaol, he deems this stage as the ultimate death of the previous self (“I
had died as an artist” [Ackroyd 1993: 163]). Thus, the journal is nearing the
end, or, as I have argued, the beginning, the point from which Wilde organizes
the past. It is also the moment of the final transformation, where the narrator
marvels “at the inexhaustible fullness of things which before I tried to master
81
and control” (Ackroyd 1993: 165), and where he perceives simple, everyday
occurrences (a boy playing with his dog and people helping each other [Ackroyd 1993: 165–166]) with utmost attention, as sources of constant wonder,
details which “will last for ever” (Ackroyd 1993: 166).
The journal then traces the transformations that have led Wilde to his present stage as an outcast embracing the quotidian and marveling at its simplicity.
He underscores at many junctures that it is his current perspective that allows
him to see the significance of past events, to interpret them in such a way that
they form “the thread of life” (Ackroyd 1993: 154), a meaningful narrative of
maturation. Accordingly, he creates the tale of a heedless tragic hero rising to
fame, which spells his own alienation and destruction. Thus, history and development are unveiled as narrative constructs, fictions that allow one to preserve
the continuity, the coherence of one’s self; and, in fact, Wilde highlights that the
journal helps him fight the fall into a dementia resulting from the fear of solitude he has experienced during the confinement (Ackroyd 1993: 152). The story
then posits the inescapability of weaving one’s subjectivity within the framework of tales with their selection, omissions, and construction of meaningful
“facts” out of chaotic events. The idea of the development is employed as an
organizing tool allowing one to weave tales that traditionally lead to the resolution of all enigmas presented at the beginning.
Once Oscar Wilde’s life becomes a narrative, it is open to interpretation; its
truth is revealed as not universal but rather subject to the storyteller’s viewpoint.
The narrator himself explicitly highlights the open aspect of history, as only
from the current perspective does the past acquire a logical dimension, is turned
into the story of a tragic hero’s mistakes that lead him to the inevitable fall. Now
the narrator thinks of his deeds as “sins” (Ackroyd 1993: 78), and with clarity
denounces his behavior marked by the love of praise and recognition despite the
knowledge of their base aspect.
Further self-deprecation highlights the present viewpoint’s clarity of vision
and its role in ordering the past, as for instance, betraying those who are the
closest to him is attributed to a selfish devotion to pleasure (Ackroyd 1993: 92).
The protagonist’s commentary on his introspective reflection is also a comment
on the novel itself, on the strategy used to build the impression of a coherent
subject. In fact, as The Last Testament, in a metafictional manner, applies formulas while foregrounding their textual aspect, it makes readers aware that they
are dealing with the subject as, what Alfred Hornung (1997: 222) calls, a “discursive formation” rather than an unmediated whole.
Accordingly, the plot advances towards the dénouement, even though the
closure indeed opens the story. And although the narrator-protagonist acknowledges the fictional aspect of such a movement, he still adheres to it, in line with
Freeman’s reaction to possible falsification of the past as it is recollected: “Can
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we not say, in fact, that the reality of living in time requires narrative reflection
and that narrative reflection, in turn, opens the way towards a more comprehensive and expansive conception of truth itself?” (1993: 32). Thus, perhaps paradoxically, the narrativization of one’s past seems to constitute a way of preserving the stability of one’s self and a means of arriving at some kind of truth about
who one is, namely, that the apparent unified whole is a result of narrative procedures.1
The intense self-awareness of the process of turning Wilde’s life into a story
reflects the theories of Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon. White (1978) connects history with literature in Tropics of Discourse as he speaks of occurrences
and facts undergoing emplottment, that is, the encoding within structures that
give meaning to historical developments, which corresponds to what Freeman
has to say about the role of narrative in the shaping of one’s coherent identity.
Hutcheon (1987) underscores the absorption of history by historiographic metafiction and the self-reflexive focus on the process in which the past is being
told. This implies that in historiographic metafictions the past acquires the uncertain status of a text whose contents have undergone the process of selection
and organization, characteristic of any narrative.
By reexamining and changing known historical facts, Ackroyd’s novel expands or revitalizes the past instead of focusing on its teleological aspect. Accordingly, the casting of Wilde as the main character accentuates the enclosure
of history within narrative formations: he is not a mere background character
validating the historical setting of a fictional story but the most prominent
speaker outwardly subverting our conception of historical truth about Oscar
Wilde. Accordingly, the idea of ontologically grounded truth is undermined;
instead, each emplottment presents different truths.
What is more, as Hutcheon argues, the intentional falsification of facts
“foreground[s] the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error” (1987: 294). This strategy then shakes the reader’s trust in the historical accuracy of the narrator and
indirectly asks the analytical reader to examine how that trust has been established. The model reader is thus asked to inspect the role of narrative conventions, such as the use of the formula of maturing character, the imitation of
Oscar Wilde’s prose style, and the function of historical details (abounding in
the novel) in strengthening the verifiability of the represented world. The inclu-
1
In “A Knack for Yearns: The narrativization of history and the end of history”, Susana
Onega (1995: 16) comes to a similar conclusion about the role of historiographic metafictions’ overt fictionalization of history: “once literature refuses to hide its fictionality … the
literary text ‘lies’ less than history – or philosophy or any kind of discourse – precisely in
that it explicitly lays bare its own rhetorical status.
83
sion and manipulation of facts about the past points to the role of language and
narrative formulas in recovering the expired empirical past.
At this stage, the strategy of the text may be outlined with some clarity:
Ackroyd’s Wilde, the narrator of his journal, finds that the only way towards
a coherent and rounded self, towards a revelation “Who was Oscar Wilde?”
(Ackroyd 1993: 5), is by narrative means, by turning his life into a story, which
will inevitably bear affinity with other stories of maturation and self-definition.
On a metafictional level, it becomes a commentary on the status of real historical Wilde, on his inaccessibility outside verbal accounts, outside language. This
suggests that, in attempts at depicting (knowing as opposed to experiencing) the
world, we can never gain access to the truly real and that we reside in the prison
house of language. But, then the novel also intimates that the realm of the
imagination reveals a more tangible and more defined conception of truth:
a vivid representation of Wilde that we would never glimpse in a slavish pursuit
of unattainable historical accuracy.
Indeed, the personage of Wilde created in The Last Testament appears to be
endowed with psychological depth, stability, and continuity of the self thanks to
the introspective process of tracing his journey from adolescence up to the present. Paradoxically, the development towards an enlightened self does not seem
to have any other existence but as a narrative strategy that has a venerable tradition in the literature of fact (e.g., St Augustine) and of fiction (novels of maturation). And yet, it is not only the awareness of the generic convention in which
the narrator is striving for self-expression but also the very style of writing, the
use of the fabric of language, that remind us that the real Wilde is now inescapably mediated by words.
Indeed, at the end of his introspective journey, the protagonist himself admits that “perhaps even in this journal I am not portraying myself as indeed
I am” (Ackroyd 1993: 171). The postmodern doubt about absolutes and the
rejection of the totalizing truth are evident. Yet the narrator does not despair
about the diversification of truth, but affirms the power of discourses, the realm
of narratives in and through which one becomes defined. Fittingly, Wilde admits the fictionality of his memoirs in a way that intertextually connects his
attempts with another artist troubled by the inability to render reality in a work
of art. In fact, it is in the use of stylistic devices such as simile, metaphor, and
parable that Wilde the narrator is able to articulate the complexity of his self
and, at the same time, make it vivid and tangible, because he places himself in
the context of existing literary models, within the great artistic tradition to
which the reader can relate, with which he or she can notice the implied connections and achieve a fuller understanding of this created personage.
Hence, in his inability to represent his true image, Wilde becomes Timanthes (Ackroyd 1993: 171). The creation of his last poem, The Ballad of Reading
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Gaol, becomes Orpheus’s head torn by the Maenads yet still singing as it
“floated into oblivion” (Ackroyd 1993: 169). The death of the old personality
and rebirth after the time in prison are to be the resurrection of Lazarus (Ackroyd 1993: 145).
Wilde is the protagonist of his own fantasy tales; as he says, “I exist in
every character, although I cannot pretend to comprehend the forces which impel them forward” (Ackroyd 1993: 122). What is more, the narrator in his plight
of an exile becomes the character of William Butler Yeats’s2 “The crucifixion
of the outcast”3 (1894), abandoned even by the beggars (Ackroyd 1993: 99). He
becomes “Melmoth the Wanderer” (Ackroyd 1993: 16), another pariah who was
hated for showing others that “their ideals are illusion” (Ackroyd 1993: 17), and
St. Julien, the despised prophet who, upon turning into a beggar, was declared
a saint (Ackroyd 1993: 1). Additionally, in his decision to write the memoirs,
the apologia, Wilde joins the ranks of De Quincey, Newman, Shaw, and St.
Augustine.
It is through the use of these analogical stylistic devices that the narrator is
able to arrive at self-definition. Their most frequent use illustrates that Wilde is
helpless without the existing literary tradition, that reality and any kind of truth
are inevitably mediated by language. However, the possible despair at the inability to get to the truly real is superseded by the joyous celebration of language and literary models with which Wilde is able to connect and through
which he is able to express himself. In fact, while the narrator recounts his incarceration, the literal prison becomes nonexistent thanks to language: “I read
Dante and walked with him in the Purgatory ... the prison shades fell away and
I was standing in the clear, bright air. The texture of language itself, like the veil
of Tannith in Flaubert’s delicate novel, clung about me and protected me” (Ackroyd 1993: 157).
For the narrator, the products of the imagination operating in language constitute a reality far more vivid, tangible, and lasting than the realm of the real.
When he comments on The Portrait of Mr W. H., the book concerned with the
identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Wilde states, “It was of no
concern to me if the facts were accurate or inaccurate: I had discerned a truth
which was larger than that of biography or history, a truth not merely about
Shakespeare but about the nature of all creative art” (Ackroyd 1993: 121). The
narrator-protagonist is aware that interesting fiction surpasses facts, that “Nature always follows Art” (Ackroyd 1993: 121), and he replaces the hegemony of
the truth that should directly correspond to reality, with a truth, or a multitude of
truths, that result from the interpretation of texts.
2
3
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Nobel Prize winning Irish dramatist, poet and writer.
Published as one of the short stories: in: The Secret Rose, by W. B. Yeats, with illustrations
by J. B. Yeats. London: Lawrence & Bullen, limited, 1897 – editor’s note: ZW.
85
Moreover, shortly before dying, Wilde finds solace and peace in listening to
and entering other narratives with the worlds they sketch; thus he wishes to
“enter the noisy thoroughfares and dilapidated courtyards of Balzac’s4 imagination” (Ackroyd 1993: 181). Wilde longs to be submerged in the world of imagination, live eternally with other writers in their creations. This realm is constituted by the perpetual domain of books that remain in constant dialogue with
one another for in Wilde’s vision, “Dante walks in exile at the same time as
Augustine speaks in the market place of Tyre, and Samson is led into the air by
a boy” (Ackroyd 1993: 181). Furthermore, the protagonist wants to enter
a painting he saw once in the Louvre, and thus become fused with the artist in
the world beyond time: “to enter another man’s heart. In that moment of transition, when I was myself and someone else, of my own time and in another’s, the
secrets of the universe would stand revealed” (Ackroyd 1993: 181).
In consequence, Wilde of The Last Testament implies the existence of a
unifying domain created by works of art, products of the imagination, visual or
written narratives. This transcendental textual reality allows one to transgress
and transform the material world. An illustration of that is offered in Wilde’s
interpretation of the story of St Procopius, whose suffering grew larger in “each
succeeding legend” until his relics brought about miracles. The narrator concludes, “it was the legends that worked the miracles, not the bones” (Ackroyd
1993: 180); therefore, he affirms the power of words and belief over the domain
of objects.
To sum up, it is sensible to elaborate on the strategy of the text, of that abstract figure that Umberto Eco (2004 /1994/: 14) calls “the model author”. The
historical personage who is also the narrator protagonist of his journal finds in
story-telling the only way in which he can solve the enigma of his personality,
build a coherent, unified image of his self, and thus save himself from fragmentation and from the dissolution of his subjectivity. This is a metafictional comment on the status of the past and of historical figures: they are constructs existing now through and within language, in narratives that make their lives comprehensible and relatable. What is more, the character posits that products of the
imagination, linguistic constructs, constitute a higher, eternal reality, a domain
in which the reader may encounter authors existing, like Wilde, “in every character” (Ackroyd 1993: 121) they created. As a metafictional comment, this belief opens for the reader the avenue to an anagogical interpretation, namely that
the real Wilde indeed has transcended into the realm of imagination and that he
speaks through Peter Ackroyd in The Last Testament. Importantly, in the journal’s final entries, the narrator feels as if he were himself and another, “curiously apart from my writing, as though it were another hand which moves, another imagination I draw upon” (Ackroyd 1993: 180). Hence, we may suggest
4
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), original name Honoré Balssa. French journalist and writer.
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that the figure of Ackroyd, the novel’s author, has merged with the narratorprotagonist to the point that the latter experiences another presence writing him
into shape. Indeed, in Metafiction and Myth, Susana Onega (1999: 40) offers
such a metaphysical reading, as she observes the emergence of “the Absolute
Logos”, the perpetual realm of art, into which Wilde makes “his transcendental
escape, while Ackroyd’s accurate and loving recreation of the style and voice of
his strong predecessor could be interpreted as conclusive evidence that the master did manage to enter the heart of the younger writer, and continues to speak
through him”. The anagogical interpretation appears irrational. It seems to be
the result of a slight shift of focus from the implied despair at the inability to get
to the real within our language-mediated consciousness to the liberating joy
stemming from assurance that the world created in language, in imagination,
supersedes that of objects; that this is the realm of the truly real. The novel does
not provide a definitive answer as to which interpretation it wants the reader to
choose, but I hope to have demonstrated that it does indeed offer this choice.
Namely, the past is now accessible only as a linguistic construct. Therefore, it is
imperfect and must be scrutinized with doubt and a sense of loss; or we may
follow Wilde in his fevered dream of the construct offering a reality that is more
defined, tangible, and everlasting.
After all, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde is the expression of the
imagination where different voices – of Ackroyd, Wilde, St Augustine, and
countless others – speak in unison through the figure of the all-embodying
narrator-protagonist. In the final vision of The Last Testament, Wilde discerns
that, in admiring a work of art, we enter the artist’s vision, and, in that meetingspace, in the Absolute Logos, we become fused with other selves and different
realities, beyond time.
References
Ackroyd, Peter 1993 /1983/: The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. London: Penguin Books.
Eco, Umberto 2005 /1994/: Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
(Originally delivered at Harvard for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1992 and 1993).
Freeman, Mark 1993: Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative. London: Routledge.
Hornung, Alfred 1997: Autobiography. In: Hans Bertens, Douwe Fokkema (eds.) 1997: International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 221–233.
Hutcheon, Linda 1987: The Pastime of Past Time. Genre. 20 (3–4), 285–305.
Onega, Susana 1995: A Knack for Yearns: The narrativization of history and the end of history.
In: Onega Susana (ed.) 1995: Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 7–18.
Onega, Susana 1998: Peter Ackroyd. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers.
Onega, Susana 1999: Metafiction and Myth. Columbia: Camden House.
White, Hayden 1978: Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
IZABELA GRADECKA
Speaking softly in code: The queer perspective in the
works of Tennessee Williams
ABSTRACT. The objective of the paper is to present an insight into selected works of Tennessee Williams demonstrating the cultural and literary codes that the author employed to
covertly discuss the matter of homosexuality. Since Tennessee Williams lived and created in
times of intense political oppression of the gay community, he could not write about homosexuality openly. Under the assumption that anyone who was homosexual was a threat to
American society and its security, the social policies of the Cold War era infamously ruined
professional and private lives of many gay people. Consequently, as discussing homoeroticism in public was incriminating, it posed a problem of artistic self-expression for many homosexual writers. The desire to touch on as vital and intimate a sphere of life as sexuality,
however, especially when it was repressed, urged some writers to find ways to discuss the issue indirectly or even cryptically. Tennessee Williams was one such writer. Owing to the recent intense growth in the discipline of gay studies and the contributions of such vital queer
theorists as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to gay literary criticism, there appears
a new scope of alternative interpretations of Williams’s works. Based on the studies of these
scholars as well as literary critics like Dean Shackelford and Philip Kolin, inter alia, this paper discusses the mechanisms that Williams’s works operate through to suggest latent homosexual content. The works of Tennessee Williams that are the subject of the study are his
full-length and one-act plays: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Not About
the Nightingales, and Auto-da-Fe. The selected dramas epitomize the codes Williams employed to communicate the politically forbidden matter. The analysis of the rhetoric of the
dramas encompasses the submerged homosexual plots, significant recurrent motifs, symbols,
and intertextuality of the gay male subculture. The encoded homosexual discourse is manifested through Williams’s playing with the perspectives and gender stereotypes of his readers. The paper seeks to demonstrate that Williams challenges socially established perceptions
of sexual identity, undermines the traditional erotics of stage presentation, and directs the
audience’s gaze towards the male body. Ultimately, the creative achievements of the playwright serve to reestablish Tennessee Williams as a gay playwright: one who not only found
a method and means to communicate with the initiated readers but accounted for the complexity of gay sensibility and subjectivity. In the face of the still developing field of queer
criticism and the on-going reassessment of socio-historical contexts of literary works, the
analysis offers an alternative, less discussed, but potent literary perspective on Tennessee
Williams’s writings.
The dramatic canon of Tennessee Williams,1 although extensively analyzed
and critiqued, remains underestimated in respect to its contribution to gay literature. The playwright’s commentary on the issues of homosexuality, though
highly symbolic and enigmatic, proves to be a long dismissed but immanent
1
Born Thomas Lanier Williams (1911–1983).
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Izabela Gradecka
aspect of his creativity. Exploring the homosexual discourse of Williams’s
plays, inherently ingrained in the social and emotional depths of the author’s
literary output, may well suggest the alternate construal of the author’s work –
the perception of his writing through the lens of queer culture.
Williams’s voice in the question of same-sex love was virtually not recognized by straight audiences until the early 1970s, when the author, encouraged
by increasingly liberal moods in America, decided to disclose his homosexual
orientation publicly. The most prolific and successful period of his writing career – the 1940s through the 1950s – coincided with strongly conservative social and political mores in America, considerably inhibiting the playwright’s
outspokenness. In the eyes of society, influenced by the national propaganda,
a homosexual was a degenerate and a security risk.2
Consequently, for Williams as an artist, the Cold War era and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s policy of persecuting homosexuals along with communists
obviously imposed restrictions on his literary expression. Since the government
security apparatus at the time possessed the power to degrade any public figure
suspected of homosexuality and preclude them from pursuing their jobs, Williams feared not merely losing his audience but ruining his career. He remained
to a large degree reserved about the issues of homosexuality. Nevertheless, even
though he was restricted by the taboo and censorship of the time, Williams
wished to communicate his thoughts and concerns with the repressed and victimized gay community.
Williams managed to develop a language of ambiguity and suggestion that
was capable of expressing the prohibited matter. While the literary allusions and
references to the gay subculture were inconspicuous for the mainstream audience, and ignored or simply disapproved of as inappropriate by critics and
scholars of the time, recent reexaminations of Williams’s dramatic canon allow
one to observe that the playwright virtually designed a code to smuggle homoeroticism into his dramatic output.
What I will try to argue in this paper is that the playwright does speak for
the socially discriminated homosexual minority in a camouflaged way. He does
so by applying submerged homosexual plots, recurrent motifs, symbols, and
intertextuality, as well as proposing character and stage presentation techniques
2
Public fear of homosexuals escalated in America of 1950s. Revelations made by Senator
McCarthy in February 1950 about subversive individuals working in the structures of the
State Department were followed by public announcements that those considered to be
a threat to the national security were homosexuals (cf. Johnson 2004). It was believed that
gay people, being afraid of disclosure, were especially vulnerable to blackmail and bribery
and thus more likely to reveal restricted information or betray the country’s interests (Monty
Vierra: personal communication: July 19, 2011). According to David K. Johnson (2004: 1–14),
the events marked the beginnings of the Lavender Scare in the United States and incited
common fear and persecution of homosexuals reaching beyond the question of public service.
Speaking softly in code: The queer perspective in the works of Tennessee Williams
89
that remain opaque to the majority of the spectators but are meaningful to the
few initiated ones. I will point to Williams’s disguised attempts to challenge the
socially established notions of sexuality to disturb the common hegemony of
heterosexuality and focus on repressed same-sex love.
Williams’s hidden discourse of gay love rests substantially on peripheral
plots and characters. Weaving in evocative language and portraying culturally
conceived pretences of homosexuality, the playwright structures these elements
as a powerful code of homoeroticism. Male characters show traits that either
suggest their effeminacy or define the person as an eccentric and an outcast. As
homosexuality could not be spoken of in the American theatre of the author’s
time, there also appears an abundance of understatement and suppression of
matters inherently connected with homosexual eroticism. A Streetcar Named
Desire, a play written specifically for the broad American public, epitomizes the
most subtle and inconspicuous codes that Williams avails himself of. There is
no literal mentioning of homosexuality, yet the subject matter becomes perceptible when the protagonist reminiscences about her past. Blanche DuBois introduces the homoerotic subplot to the play by recalling the memory of her late
husband Allan:
There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness, and tenderness that
wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking – still – that thing
was there. (Williams 2000: 527)
For gay readers/spectators of Williams, the author’s language employed to
describe Allan is clearly signifying. The code of character features presented
here is reproduced in many other of his works. Sensitivity, graciousness, charm,
and distinction comprise a vital part of the homosexual subtext of his plays.
Williams does not explicitly describe Allan as gay yet covertly strengthens the
reader’s assumption by having Blanche comment on the issue by meaningfully
leaving the essence unspoken:
Then I found out. In the worst of possible ways. By coming suddenly into the room that
I thought was empty, but had two people in it ... the boy I had married and an older man who
had been his friend for years ... (2000: 527)
The playwright consciously suppresses the content that could scandalize the
audience and exposes the insinuations that signal his dialogue with the initiated
reader. Hence, when portraying the rendezvous between the men, Williams
indicates that this is an affair of an older and a younger man. He echoes the
archetype of a gay romance between a mature, sophisticated, and sagacious man
and a handsome, innocent youth willing to admire and follow his patron. That
image, as suggestively portrayed in literature and culture since antiquity and as
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Izabela Gradecka
invariably used by Williams in his drama and fiction, is a clear implication of
homosexual subtext in the play.
A relevant element of Williams’s latent gay discourse in the play is the motif of a dead poet. Poetry is a prominent attribute of the gay characters in his
work – lonely, refined, and of poetic insight, yet usually dying before or in the
drama. Allan embodies all of those features. He is a poet, a man of distinguished beauty and delicacy. Feeling lonely because of his otherness, confused
about his desires and misunderstood, he commits suicide after he is exposed by
Blanche, who screams out in public: “I saw! I know! You disgust me” (Williams 2000: 528). It seems clear that the misunderstood poet in Williams’s plays
signifies his own emotional and social problems as a homosexual in conservative American society, and that what he portrays in the play is the omnipresent
prejudice against gay people.
One of the most potent facets of drama in which to code the homoerotic
subtext is the erotics of stage presentation. As John Clum (2002: 2) asserts, “one
crucial aspect of gay male drama … is the presentation of the male as the object
of the audience’s gaze and desire”. Thus, in A Sreetcar, the erotic gaze of the
audience is redirected from the female figure to the male character. It is Stanley
that is featured in the play as the object of desire. It is his action that builds up
the erotic tension on stage. Both Stella and Blanche finally become overwhelmed by Stanley’s sexual allure. Blanche appears to denounce the “brutal
desire” that Stanley represents and wishes to drag her sister away from the man,
but she ultimately exposes her own attraction to him, saying, “The only way to
live with such a man is to – go to bed with him!” (Williams 2000: 508). Stella,
on the other hand, does not deny that she is thrilled by Stanley’s “animal force”
and admits that “there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the
dark – that sort of make everything else seem – unimportant” (Williams 2000:
509). Emphasizing the sexual attraction of the female characters towards
Stanley Kowalski, Williams exposes his own homosexual fascination with men.
As in many of his plays, also in A Streetcar, Williams reaches from mere
hints and suggestions of homosexual problems to a profound discussion of how
gender and sex are conceived in a heteronormative society. Dean Shackelford
(2000: 135) asserts that “not only do his main concerns seem rooted in a homosexual sensibility, but also his characters call into question the whole notion of
‘natural’ gender roles and the ‘naturalness’ of what Adrienne Roch has referred
to as ‘compulsory heterosexuality’”. The playwright veils his commentary on
the suppression of the gay community in the meaningful contrast between normative and subversive sexual behaviors. Williams demonstrates how heterosexuality – the only right and natural option according to society – disqualifies
any deviations from that norm. Both Stella and Stanley embody the oppressively normative society. Stanley is everything that a man should be according to
91
the straight mid-century America: a breadwinner, an epitome of virility and of
“natural, healthy” sexuality. Stella, likewise, represents the traditional woman
who finds herself perfectly suited for the role of a loyal and devoted wife that
society assigned to her. Hence, one could argue that there is a striking contrast
between Stanley and Stella, a model heterosexual and fertile couple with a baby
on the way, and Allan and Blanche, a “degenerate” man and promiscuous woman, destabilizes the notions of commonly understood gender and sexuality.
The message behind the configuration of sexual identities that Williams portrays here seems to precede and perhaps foreshadow Judith Butler’s theory of
gender performativity.3
According to Butler (1993: 111), the social “heterosexist economy” aims to
guard the position of heterosexuality as the only natural sexual orientation and
in order to do that it “disempowers contestatory possibilities by rendering them
culturally unthinkable and unviable from the start”. In accordance with that
theory, Allan and Blanche fail to conform to their gender roles, and, in consequence, they are rejected by society. Gay men commit suicide and oversexed
women are confined to mental institutions. Williams clearly raises his voice on
the question of intolerance and against the overpowering conformism that disturbs the lives of homosexual people to a degree that they live closeted, burdensome lives or go as far as to commit suicide.
In order to touch on the question of homosexuality and the normative social
standards that denounce it, Williams undertakes a camouflaged discussion of
gender roles that, as artificially constructed by language and hegemonically
negotiated by the society, force gay men to hide their real sexual identities. The
queer theorist and critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2008: 68), identifies the phenomenon as “hiding in the closet”. While problematizing hiding in the closet as
a contemporary stigma of gay people and discussing it as a re-appearing trope in
the works of gay writers, she emphasizes that living a life of secrecy and constant concern about disclosure “has given an overarching consistency to gay
culture and identity” throughout the twentieth century.
Williams, being himself compelled to stay in the closet long into his writing
career, well understood the problem. It seems highly viable that, because the
closet defined the lives of so many gay people at the time, the playwright introduced that motif to a number of his works, raising the gay problem but without
stirring public opinion. Consequently, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among the
symbols and signals of homoerotic subtext, the closet may be considered a leading trope for the discussion of coded meanings. In order to discuss the character Brick Pollitt as a potentially closeted homosexual, I will use the definition of
3
As Butler (1993) explains, gender and sex roles are artificial constructs imposed on us by the
society. They are identities created by discursive powers of language and oppressively negotiated by the heterosexist economy of the contemporary world.
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the closet as formulated by Dean Shackelford. According to Shackelford (2000:
136), the closet may denote:
A hidden secret, which may or may not be revealed to the self or others, a disguise and
pretence to protect the self; a means of escape from the everyday world of harsh reality; or
a shell of protection to lie to or avoid the rejection of others.
From the very beginning of the play, Brick seems to be hiding from others.
He is presented as a withdrawn, troubled man seeking relief in alcohol. He detaches himself from his family and does not communicate his thoughts or feelings, as if building an imaginary protective space inaccessible to the outside
world. As it gradually becomes clear, Brick’s withdrawal is an effect of his
sorrow over the suicide of his close friend, Skipper. Feeling guilty, as he rejected Skipper’s romantic feelings, Brick desensitizes himself drinking alcohol.
Most importantly, being cold and indifferent to his wife and remaining in
a childless marriage, Brick causes everyone around him to speculate about his
possible homosexuality. He is desperately trying to protect himself against the
accusations, and one can observe a revealing panic in his behavior. In a conversation with his father, he starts to be overly paranoid about the fact that he is
suspected to be homosexual. To disguise his own potential latent homosexuality, he shows his disgust with gay men, offering a list of homophobic abuses:
You think so, too? You think me an’ Skipper … did – sodomy! – together? You think we did
dirty things … You think that Skipper and me were a pair of dirty old men? … – ducking
sissies? Queers? (Williams 2000: 947)
Williams (2000: 945) describes the scene with attention to the last detail in
order to convey the very subtle suggestion that Brick is a self-denying gay man:
“[his] heart is accelerated; his forehead sweat-beaded; his breath becomes more
rapid and his voice hoarse”. The man is clearly terrified of being identified as
homosexual. He seems to manifest what Sedgwick (2008) refers to in her Epistemology of the Closet as “male homosexual panic” – a defense mechanism
and a direct consequence of the fear of being acknowledged as gay or of being
subject to homophobic discrimination. By having Brick continuously aggressively deny the assertion that he might be gay, Williams emphasizes Brick’s
fear of being “outed” as a homosexual and offers his gay readers the motif so
fundamental for the gay lifestyle – the closet. It is worth pondering over the
similarity between the uncertainty of Brick’s disclosure, of his fear and defensive attitude towards it, and the frightful interrogations of potentially gay men
by the security apparatus of the United States. The playwright captures here the
most essential experience of the gay community in the Cold War era and discusses “the structures of secrecy and disclosure that organized postwar gay
experience” (Corber 1997: 115).
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The gay theme of Cat on the Hot Tin Roof does not limit itself to the
protagonist alone. Before introducing the main characters of the play, in the
notes for the designer, Williams (2000: 880) offers the description of the symbolic stage design that clearly foreshadows the gay theme in the play:
The set is the bed-sitting room of a plantation home … it hasn’t changed much since it was
occupied by the original owners of the place, Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, a pair of old
bachelors who shared this room all their lives together. In other words, the room must evoke
some ghosts; it is gently and poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved
a tenderness which was uncommon.
The playwright presents the set that was once a nest of a gay romantic
relationship to then introduce the reader to a distressed married couple, Brick
and Margaret Pollit, who inhabit the place. It is their “big double bed”
(Williams 2000: 880), echoing the erotic relationship of the past owners, that
becomes the center of the play. It is here that the main character’s closet is at
risk of being forced open for everybody to see.
In order to weave in the homoerotic subtext, Tennessee Williams makes
vivid the technique mentioned earlier in the paper. He centers the reader’s attention on gay male subjectivity, transferring the audience’s erotic gaze from the
female character to the sexually attractive male protagonist. Maggie the Cat, as
the critics nicknamed Margaret, is the one in the play that tries to win Brick’s
attention. Although she feels unloved and ignored by Brick, and herself speculates about his homosexuality, she cannot stop loving him. In the upsurge of
emotions, she desperately admits:
I can’t see a man but you! Even with my eyes closed, I just see you! Why don’t you get ugly,
why don’t you please get fat or ugly or something so that I could stand it? (Williams 2000:
892)
Making Maggie desire Brick so badly and admire his muscular body, Williams manipulates the reader’s point of view. Shackelford (1998: 108) observes,
“As Maggie gazes on her beloved Brick’s body, the audience itself is so directed”. Williams, himself enchanted with Brick’s carnality, directs also the
audience’s erotic interest towards the character, thus letting the reader know
about the gay undertone of the play. Additionally, he once again undermines the
socially created power relations between a man and a woman. By showing the
female making advances on the indifferent man, begging him for affection and
yearning for sexual pleasure, he portrays a subverted version of what society
believes is a gender defined, natural sexual behavior. Williams breaks the social
decorum in his play in order to expose the narrow mindedness and forced prudishness of American people in the sphere of human sexuality, at the same time
alluding to the consequential intolerance of society to sexual minorities.
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Another covert signal of homoerotic subtext in the play is Big Daddy’s
potential homosexuality. The father, while not anxious about Brick’s possible
homosexuality, confides in his son that he has “knocked around” himself in his
time and suggests that the time spent on the plantation taught him tolerance. To
emphasize the allusion, the playwright endows that scene with a note for the
director: “The following scene should be played with great consternation, with
most of the power leashed but palpable in what is left unspoken” (Williams
2000: 945). For initiated readers who are familiar with Williams’s canon, the
fact that Big Daddy was a protégé of the gay couple and became an heir of their
plantation clearly signals a submerged homosexual plot. Williams offers here
the motif inscribed in homosexual literature – the “economics of desire”
(Bruhm 1991: 524), a theme recurrent in his works denoting the circumstances
in which body and homosexual desire become commodities. Moreover, Big
Daddy suffers from a disease that is recurrent in Williams’s works. Bowel cancer frequently poses as a signifier of homosexuality in the playwright’s work; it
is an ailment of latent gay characters in Williams’s short stories “The Mysteries
of Joy Rio” and “Hard Candy”. Robert J. Corber (1997: 121) observes that the
disease has been interpreted by the critics as the suggestion of Big Daddy’s
homosexual past or as a sign of his repressed homosexuality. It confirms Williams’s intention to link the idea of homosexual repression with bowel cancer,
suggesting that homosexual desire, when held back and kept in secret, may
damage the individual’s physical and emotional well-being.
The author’s lesser-known and discussed one-act plays provide firm evidence of the author’s consistency in his attempts to force the issues of homosexuality and homophobia to the surface. Even as early as in 1938, in his play
Not About the Nightingales, Williams noticeably alludes to social attitudes concerning homosexuality. (The play was written in 1938 but discovered and published in 1998, a few years after the author’s death). Introducing the issue,
once again, only via a peripheral character and a marginal, elusive episode,
Williams appears to comment on the social standards that reproduce the distorted portrait of a homosexual and that victimize gay people as members of society. Williams introduces the audience to a man that could be defined as gay but
largely according to popular hetronormative standards. Queen is one of the inmates in a large American prison. The playwright presents the man as a delicate, effeminate man, speaking in a high tenor voice, and preoccupied with the
loss of his manicure set that was thrown away by one of his co-prisoners. While
these are stereotypical homosexual features perceptible for an average American theatregoer, Williams’s gay audience must be able to decode the message
that is hidden underneath the obvious.
First, the depiction of the gay character that Williams offers his readers,
though appearing to be a one of ridicule, is in fact deliberately employed by the
95
playwright to expose the common fallacy about gay people as weak, pathetic,
and effeminate. The clichéd stereotype of a gay man is a recurring motif in
many other plays of the author and is often used to manifest the playwright’s
personal critique of cultural misconceptions of homosexuality.
Second, the very title of the play conceals a word heralding homoerotic
code. The word “nightingale”, with seemingly no relevance to the plot, according to Lyle Leverich (1995: 404) carries weight as being the author’s personal
code for homosexual desire. As a matter of fact, “nightingales singing” is an
expression that Williams (2006) repeatedly used in his Memoirs to denote homosexual encounter. To ground the argument, Richard Kramer (cited in Kolin
1998: 83) quotes the definition of the word from the Dictionary of Symbols and
Imagery, where nightingale signifies “ecstasy carrying one beyond the present”.
Queen appears to be disregarded by other men in the prison. During the
play, the character repeatedly expresses sorrow over his own life, saying, “All
my life I’ve been persecuted by people because I’m refined … because I’m
sensitive … Sometimes I wish I was dead” (Williams 2000: 114). The above
quote is a critique of social prejudice against homosexuals and a hint about the
tremendous effects it had on young homosexuals. Many of Williams’s gay
readers may certainly read his allusion to the increased numbers of suicide cases
that were noted in the 1940s and 50s during Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt and
the infamous Lavender Scare pervading the United States.
Auto-da-Fé is another one-act drama, authored by Williams, that displays
the discussed codes of homosexuality. Although words like homosexual or gay
are not uttered in the play, from its very beginning Williams offers his readers
suggestive allusions to gay history and culture. The first signifiers of the gay
subtext are hidden in the title and the setting of the play. Auto-da-fé is a word,
originally denoting a common ritual of burning at stake, a frequent retribution
for those accused of heresy. However, as Williams’s gay audiences might be
aware, in medieval times auto-da-fé was also a frequent punishment for the sin
of sodomy. This is a fact noted by Louis Crompton in his Homosexuality and
Civilisation (2006: 296). Also David Greenberg (1988: 311) states in his book,
The Construction of Homosexuality, that “though the Inquisition was primarily concerned with religious apostasy, it put the heat on sexual deviation too”.
There were “fifty-two executions for sodomy in Seville between 1578 and
1616” (311). In this respect, the title adds to the overall gay undertone of the
play. The setting of the play, New Orleans, is evocative as a city widely known
for its history of being a place of moral and sexual freedom. In Williams’s time,
the city was considered a haven for the various outcasts of society, people with
nonstandard lifestyles and sexual orientations. Thus, the setting of the play also
foreshadows the discussion of homosexuality.
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Putting forward the symbols of homoeroticism in the opening of the play,
the playwright introduces the reader to the story of Eloi, a distressed and deeply
troubled man that distinctively mirrors the set of character and behavioral features that Williams employs to designate his repressed gay characters. The protagonist represents a stereotype of a gay man: a mama’s boy who at the age of
thirty still lives with his overprotective and domineering mother. Since he is
presented as an excessively anxious and agitated man, haunted by unwarranted
health problems, a psychoanalytical reading suggests that Eloi’s body rebels
against the repression of his latent desires. His behavior appears largely unreasonable. Obsessed over other’s immorality and corruption, he becomes intensely excited. In conversation with his mother, the man bursts out, “This town
should be razed …condemned and demolished … Condemn it I say! And purify
it with fire” (Williams 2000: 363). Answering his mother’s remarks that such
way of thinking is absurd, Eloi replies, “I have a good precedence for it … All
through the Scriptures are cases of cities destroyed by the justice of fire when
they got to be nests of foulness!” (Williams 2000: 363). The above words are
a reference to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that, as culturally associated with the practice of sodomy, vividly bring the issue of homosexuality
to the surface of the play.
The structure of the play is based on the main character’s paranoiac fear of
disclosure. It is homosexual panic that drives the turn of events in the play. Eloi
is burdened with a secret. He obsesses over his own privacy and is convinced
that somebody searches through his belongings. As the man later on confesses,
the matter that bothers him so deeply is a lewd photograph that he accidentally
discovered at work and did not dispose of. It portrays two naked figures and,
according to Eloi, “passes beyond all description” (Williams 2000: 368). He
explains that the photograph comes from a letter sent by a university student to
an opulent antique dealer and that it fell out of the envelope.
Describing the circumstances of the troubling incident, Williams purposefully uses the language of evasion and does not let the reader know what inadmissible image was enclosed in the mail. He does not specify the sexes of the
two naked figures, yet he notes that the two people involved in the situation
were a younger and an older man, passing a remark that clearly implies a relationship understood in the gay circles as a symbol of a homosexual bond. When
Eloi visits the student, apparently to admonish him against enclosing perverse
content in mail, it is suggested that the student misunderstands Eloi’s intentions
and probably propositions the man for sex. As Eloi confides in his mother, “The
sender began to be ugly. Abusive. I can’t repeat the charges. The evil suggestions! I ran from the room” (Williams 2000: 369). Confronted with the truth of
his homosexual desires, Eloi feels threatened that the truth might come to light.
Since that incident, he feels uneasy and overly suspicious. He admits that he
97
intended to report the situation to the authorities but he felt paralyzed. The
longer he postpones taking proper action, the more delusional he becomes about
being monitored and having his closets searched. Ultimately, Eloi cannot bear
the emotional and psychological pressure. Overwhelmed by homosexual panic,
Eloi locks himself in the house and sets fire to it, executing the punishment of
auto-da-fé on himself.
Auto-da-Fé touches on the dilemmas that were inherent in the lives of homosexual men in mid-century America. It discusses the question of selfacceptance for gay people and the problems ingrained in living a closeted and
repressed sexual life; it points to the destructive social attitudes towards homosexuality. It is perhaps the most articulate and revealing play of Williams, as the
symbolism that the playwright proposes seems acutely dense and vivid. In
effect, it becomes palpable that the playwright speaks out in code about the
issues that were most fundamental and pressing for the gay community in the
twentieth century.
Gay criticism and scholarship in queer theory that emerged in the 1980s and
1990s are divided over the interpretation of Williams’s enigmatic and vague
writing. Among the critics who acknowledge Williams’s contribution to the gay
literary canon and esteem his bold critiques of oppressively heteronormative
society of mid-century America, there are those who claim that the playwright’s
evasive treatment of homosexuality is informed by his internalized homophobia.
As the works of Tennessee Williams are reexamined with particular respect
to their coded meanings, accusations of homophobic attitudes on the part of the
playwright neglect to acknowledge the socio-historical context of his creativity
and the complexity of homosexual subjectivity that Williams constructs in his
writing. The playwright not merely manages to circumvent the taboo of the
epoch in which he lived, but he subverts the mainstream ways of thinking about
gender and sexual desire. With deep insight into the problems of gay people, in
times of most intense political correctness, Tennessee Williams courageously
portrayed the social and psychological complexity of homosexuality and brought
into the theatrical heritage the precedent of doing so.
References
Bruhm, Steven 1991: Blackmailed by sex: Tennessee Williams and the economics of desire.
Modern Drama 34 (4), 524–530.
Butler, Judith 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
Clum, John M. 2002: GLBTQ Modern Drama. In: www.glbtq.com/literature/williams_t.html ED
04/2009.
Corber, Robert J. 1997: Tennessee Williams and the politics of the closet. In: Robert J. Corber,
Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 107–134 (chapter four).
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Crompton, Luis. 2003: Homosexuality and Civilisation. Harvard: Harvard University.
Greenberg, David. F. 1998: The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Johnson, David. K. 2004: The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians
in Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kolin, Philip C. 1998: Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance. Westport:
Greenwood.
Leverich, Lyle 1995: Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 2008: Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California.
Shackelford, Dean 1998: The Truth That Must Be Told: Gay Subjectivity, Homophobia, and
Social History in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Tennessee Williams Annual Review I, 113–119.
Shackelford, Dean 2000: Is There a Gay Man in This Text?: Subverting the Closet in A Streetcar
Named Desire. In: Michael J. Mayer (ed.) 2000: Literature and Homosexuality. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 135–159.
Williams, Tennessee 2000 /1945/: Auto-da-Fé. In: Mel Gussow, W. Kenneth Holditch (eds.) 2000:
Plays 1937–1955. New York: Library of America / New York: “New Directions”/.
Williams, Tennessee 2000 /1954/: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth.
Holditch (eds). 2000: Plays 1937–1955. New York: Library of America.
Williams, Tennessee 2000 /1938/: Not About Nightingales. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth.
Holditch (eds). 2000: Plays 1937–1955. New York: Library of America /First performed on
March 5, 1998 at London's Royal National Theatre/.
Williams, Tennessee 2000 /1947/: A Streetcar Named Desire. In: Mel Gussow and W. Kenneth.
Holditch (eds. Plays 1937–1955. New York: Library of America /Staged in the United States
in 1947 in Boston and New York/.
Williams, Tennessee (author), John Waters (Introduction) 2006 /1972/: Memoirs. New York: New
Directions Publishing /Williams, Tennessee Memoirs (originally entitled Flee, Flee, This Sad
Hotel) New York: Doubledy/.
EWA KĘBŁOWSKA-ŁAWNICZAK
Writing London in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere:
Digging in search of “raw material”
ABSTRACT. The present article seeks to explore Neil Gaiman’s alternate construal of London in Neverwhere – a fantasy novel referring to both the nineteenth-century sewer subgenre and to Henry Mayhew’s sociological study, London Labour and the London Poor –
with its pervasive difficulty to place the city either conceptually or visually. Seeing London
becomes, first and foremost, an encounter with the invisible, a gift of vision and a pursuit of
a phantom always on the move but, ultimately, unfathomable. Absence of a tangible organising image, I argue, is a consequence of painful placelessness revealing, more tellingly indeed, an underlying impossibility of ontology. Thus the novel focuses on the act of writing
as reading “in ruins”, which consists in tracing the “bits” of raw materiality, memory and
spectrality, on relaying legacies, reconfiguring constellations of “textual” events and regimes. The city emerges from the process as a spectral machine apprehended through its
revenant traces, present through a disquieting anamnesis – a city of the mind though not
a utopia. It seems that Gaiman’s London appeals to the mind’s eye by evoking the seemingly
tangible grid topography of the underground – called the “red skeleton” in Julian Barnes’s
Metroland – but offers, ultimately, very little to the eye. More pertinent in the proposed construal is the ethical dilemma of responsibility.
A Dark World, the Underside, London Below, the other London, as well as
London Above or just London, present us with examples of what can easily be
termed alternate or alternative construals – clusters of interpretations, explanations or translations. Julian Wolfreys (2004: 5) points out that “writing [London
or any other city] should be understood as also a reading but a reading in ruins,
a reading always in the wake of signs that have already departed, always coming after those signs belatedly and yet always in pursuit of them”.
Reflecting on the first volume of his Writing London, Wolfreys remarks that
the “city arrives ceaselessly, hauntingly as this formless form …, it returns with
a demand for awakening and activation, thereby opening to the good reader the
act of writing London as both response and responsibility” (2004: 21). Hence
writing London means writing after John Gay, William Blake and Charles
Dickens1 as well as after Henry Mayhew and Georg Simmel.
Writing the capital city of Great Britain consists not only in an interplay
with after-images and clichés but also, as Iain Sinclair seems to propose in his
London writing, in alluding to, adding, discussing and using the diverse materi1
See Wolfreys (1994) for an analysis bringing Blake and Dickens together.
100
ality of the city, side by side with the existing discourses, as “raw material”2 for
the city’s reinterpretation (Schlaeger 2003: 50). The process, then, consists in
reinvention rather than in reassembling the widely available collection of scattered metaphors – often synecdochic or metonymic, inevitably indicative of
totalities and therefore promoting still another globalization of urban memory.
Writing London may boil down to a reconstruction of a series of closureoriented grids – which often happens – but when conceived as a performative
response “in the wake of signs”, such writing brings into focus the forgotten not
only as historical material, but also as an act of responsibility. In the latter case,
the ethical gesture emerges in an effort to admit the other to speak for itself
within the premises of the new construal.
Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (2005a /1996/) originated as a BBC project on
which the author started working with Lenny Henry in March 1991. The result
was the well-known urban fantasy series, first aired in 1996 by BBC Two. The
novelization followed soon, since it was written, according to the author, during
the television show’s production and transmission so that the material, cut in the
process of shooting, could be reinstalled in a book form (Gaiman
2005b: n. pag.).
In his comment on the process of writing the novel, the author reveals its
most obvious afterness in relation to the series. However, perhaps more importantly, Gaiman speaks also on the origin of the whole project in the BBC “Interview with Neil Gaiman”, where he admits that the idea was to write a 1990s
2
The idea of “raw material” – verbal, visual, and aural – re-emerges as the visual motif of
ruins, waste and remains (see Kazuo Ishiguro) whose function of citation becomes an attempt to include the ruined pieces of bygone art and cultural systems, in order to challenge
the sense of exhaustion. A good example of this approach is the minimalist musical 1995
composition, City Life, by Steve Reich. The 24-minute piece is scored for a collection of amplified musical instruments and digital samplers playing back a wide variety of sounds and
speech samples. Most of the samples were recorded by Reich himself in and around New
York and include car horns, air brakes, car alarms and other sounds associated with the city.
An interesting London-based experiment is the Tate Thames Dig, a project commissioned for
Tate Modern and exhibited in 1999. Mark Dion’s project incorporates aspects of archaeology, ecology and detection. His work consists in beachcombing London’s foreshore and
fishing out what seem to be the remains and waste disposed of and carried by the physical
and symbolic River Thames. Further on, Dion employs taxonomic scientific systems to provide objective criteria for classification. In the course of the process, it becomes obvious that
these principles are contingent upon our value systems and thus rooted within our social
structures. By re-enacting the processes of scientific research, the artist questions the premises upon which these activities are based and provides an entirely alternate vantage point for
urban discussions as well as for the activation of the city. Finally, there is Bruce Nauman’s
Raw Materials Unilever project commissioned for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It is a babble
of sound pieces, declamations and justifications which, like the earlier 2000 project, come
under the heading of “I Do, I Undo, I Re-do”.
Writing London in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere: Digging in search of “raw material”
101
fantasy set among the London homeless.3 Gaiman explains that he objected to
the idea, on what seems to have been ethical grounds, stating that by producing
an attractive popular series he “could have made it really cool to be homeless”
and would thus confuse young viewers.
What the authors of the BBC project probably envisaged was an activation
of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor in the frames of contemporary popular fantasy writing rather than in the genre of either a regular
documentary or the lighter but still more serious sewage fiction.4 The task might
have been both ethically ambivalent and technically difficult, though, on the
other hand, Henry Mayhew’s nineteenth-century study conceptualizes the city,
prevailingly as her people, thus allowing the fantasy part of the project to provide, in accordance with genre strategies, for the location. In urban discourse,
London Labour is ranked high amidst the early sociological studies based on
diligent empirical fieldwork. Still, Mayhew seems to be more than a social researcher, reporter or author of the famous “characters”.
Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, in their “Introduction” to the 2008
edition of London Labour, emphasise the significance of Mayhew’s interviews,
bringing up, in particular, the author’s sensitivity to the language of the poor as
well as his unique, at that time, method of interviewing where he “succeeded in
presenting the poor through their own stories and in their own words” (O’Day
2008: xiv). Apart from the openly intertextual bridging via Richard Mayhew,
here a character on loan – a technique persistently yet ambiguously used by
Gaiman throughout his entire book to collect bits and pieces of the city – it
might be possible to select further relics the spectral machine5 of Neverwhere’s
London brings back to life or activates. Most significant, however, is the ethical
gesture of responsibility for the other, which Henry Mayhew and Neil Gaiman
share in their London construals and which grants otherness, whatever the nature of its marginalisation, with a right to its own voice.
The idea that writing London is indeed “a reading in ruins”, always “in the
wake of signs that have already departed”,6 is confirmed, more explicitly, by the
second epigraph preceding the text of Gaiman’s fantasy novel, while the first
3
4
5
6
The interview was included along with the extra material added to the BBC 2007 edition, the
complete series.
According to David L. Pike (2005), in the middle of the nineteenth century, the tendency in
the English sewer genre is to rationalize, so that very often the space of London Under itself
is no longer associated with the naturalistically depicted filth and disease of its workers,
though it may serve as s synecdoche of general corruption. Pike points to the fact that the Parisian sewer tour did preserve the mythologies and charm of entering an underworld but, apparently, had its equivalents only in English satirical writing which found the Parisian pleasures perverse (Pike 2005: 214–215).
David Ashford (2009: n. pag.) introduces the term in this context in “The Ghost in the Machine: Psychogeography in the London Underground 1991–2007”.
It is a reference to Wolfreys – quoted in the opening paragraph of the present article.
102
epigraph defines the sub-genre of the text as fantasy rather than sewage fiction.7
There is an explicit reference to Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s The Napoleon of
Notting Hill. So it is the second epigraph, of greater interest for the present discussion, that contains an excerpt from “The Lyke-Wake Dirge”, a traditional
song whose title refers to a watch or vigil held over the body of a dead person
during the night before burial or between the death and the funeral.
The epigraph can refer to both Richard Mayhew, the eponymous characterguide who disappears in the London underworld, and, in-between, to the London he is about to enter, leaving behind his “small Scottish town” (Gaiman
2005: 1).8 Richard’s descent into the underworld of London Below, when referred to the absent sign/trope of the ancient journey, conforms, in some measure, to the principles of late nineteenth-century London urban discourse, where
tropes of katabasis often contradict rationalist reportage with its insistence on
sewers as a world apart but one under complete scientific control of the civilised
world Above.
Thus the reading and/or writing of London, guided by Richard Mayhew,
can be followed as a heroic journey, a “quest” (see Gaiman 2005: 154), in the
course of which the main character indeed becomes or is called a warrior. At the
same time, however, there emerges a counterpointing shadow story in which
Richard’s loss of identity and tourist exploration of the underworld turns him
into an Amateur Sewerman.9
Still further, stories can be generated due to the opening dirge which evokes
the atmosphere of a traditional vigil. And thus Richard – who becomes an invisible, ghostly figure, to the inhabitants of London Above and an Anima Sola
travelling through the flames of Purgatory – overcomes the dangers, including
the walk over Night Bridge he encounters in an afterlife, thus constructed due to
an act of charity. This medieval gesture signifies an acknowledgement of kinship with the homeless and the invisible. In the film script Richard defines his
assumed identity of a charitable person, more explicitly addressing his diary in
a naive, but also mock-confessional, tone:
7
8
9
The epigraphs precede Neil Gaiman’s “Introduction to this text” in his Neverwhere. The first
epigraph consists of a brief quotation from G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill:
“I have never been to St John’s Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night
of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle”
(1904: 83). The second epigraph, placed under the first, quotes a fragment of the traditional,
anonymous dirge whose full version in Yorkshire dialect can be found in Moorman’s collection of poems reprinted by Kessinger (2004: 115–116) as well as made available to readers
in the earlier 1916 edition by Gutenberg Project.
Imagining the city as a body – a living organism, inscribed skin as well as a corpse – is
traditional and not unusual in the latter part of the twentieth century urban literature, for example in Sara Kane’s Skin or Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography.
Pike refers to this figure of an Amateur Sewerman (2005: 225).
103
Dear Diary.
On Friday I had a job, a fiancée, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes
sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good
Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancée, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of
hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal
fruit fly. 10
However, within this narrative of a quasi-heroic journey, Anaesthesia, another object of charity and Richard’s cicerone, cannot be saved. Richard’s entrance into London Below commences, significantly, with “doors” in plural and
openly invokes “possibilities” and worlds (see Gaiman 2005a: 3) as opposed to
Herbert George Wells’s (1906) short echo-story entitled “The door in the wall”
which leads, unmistakably, from the street to one place only: to the Garden of
Eden. The ontology of Gaiman’s London Below remains uncertain.
The dirge Neverwhere opens with directs the reader’s attention to the lyke,
the diseased body on display, which – as in Peter Ackroyd’s London: the Biography – can be the anthropomorphised city in flames or city in ruins. Thus
allegorised and phoenix-like, London can be imagined as turning repeatedly to
ashes while any reading or writing that takes place in the wake of what is already absent – or in the process of departure – reveals, potentially, either a sacred place or a non-place. This ambiguity undermines the reader’s optimism
and expectation of a happy ending the fantasy genre might promise.
In the urban discourse, allegorical representations are often caught up in
a repetition of dominant tropes. This refers also to writing London. Several of
these well-known clichés pervade Gaiman’s construction of London in Neverwhere. In the late nineteenth century they are often Babylon, Sodom, the purgatorial labyrinth or a version of the Dantesque inferno.
Introducing urban discourse to contemporary crime fiction, Ralph Willett
recalls such regulative images as Bazaar, Jungle, Organism and Machine
(1996: 11–13) all of which, supposedly, reduce the city’s opacity and mobility
rendering it legible by imposing an invisible scopic regime of mastery that
Willett, following de Certeau, defines as panoptic (Willett 1996: 11). However,
what is originally meant to facilitate the representation and/or construction of
a city in writing paradoxically invites urban myopia which hinders an unbiased
rendering of the actual city. And this is, to some extent, a blindness that afflicts
also Gaiman’s writing.
Referring to Mayhew and Maerus, Wolfreys states that writing the city “entails a commitment to the visible” (2004: 40), even though the imagined is also
present. The title of Gaiman’s novel puns on time and place challenging the
commitment Wolfreys has in mind – never and nowhere – suggesting gaps in
both time and place as well as a compromise with or superiority over the option
10
The quotation follows the film script of Neverwhere. The Complete Series. BBC 2007.
104
of taking place “anywhere” and “anytime”. The latter would imply an even
greater degree of abstraction, globalization and, finally, de-ontologisation.
A symptom of the signalled-above, reduced interest in particularity, in the “raw
materials”, is Richard’s attempt to take London “for granted” as if London had
no specificity or mystery to be revealed (Gaiman 2005a: 11).
Apart from the topographical dislocations, the vertical arrangement of city
variants and a distinction between London Above and London Below Gaiman
introduces are, additionally, indicative of hierarchy and of traditionally myopic
symbolism, which may be reversed, though the suggestion of a dichotomy is
likely to persist. London is perceived as “contradictory” (Gaiman 2005a: 10)
with a balance of good and evil and the common knowledge that there is “a price
that all good places have to pay” (Gaiman 2005a: 11).
In his diary, Richard Mayhew sets out to familiarize and write down London Above with the help of a metaphorically protective attribute of a white umbrella with a map of the London Underground on it – an attempt to rationalize
time and space (in a timeless and placeless city) but also a symbol of his tourist
alienation and capitulation as autonomous observer.
Like the tropes of Babylon and Jerusalem, the maps of London, which proliferated in the nineteenth century, both reveal and conceal the city. Henry
Mayhew’s, the sociologist’s, panoptic maps documented the population in terms
of its density, intensity of ignorance and criminality but, in the nineteenth century, there were also skeleton maps documenting the new ways – tunnels, the
sewage system and the underground – which differ considerably from balloon
views of the city perceived as an equivalent of the landscape. The existing
maps, Schlaeger claims, pretend to be complete (2003: 56). The contemporary,
idealizing, abstract and colourful skeleton map of the Underground serves Richard as a scaffolding for guided knowing, reading and writing of the city of London but it fails to inform about ghost stations and bubbles of time:
When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible,
with only the Tube map, that multicoloured topographical display of Underground railway
lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map
was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape
of the city above. (Gaiman 2005a: 9–10)
Originally imagined as grey or black, a Blanchard Jerrold and Gustav Dorè
London that Richard remembers “from the pictures he had seen” (Gaiman
2005a: 9)11 transforms itself into a colourful disarray of gold, green and maroon
11
William Blanchard Jerrold was the son of Douglas Jerrold, whose daughter, Jane, married
Henry Mayhew in 1844. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustav Doré cooperated in editing and printing, among other things, views of the changing city of London. Their London: A Pilgrimage,
conceived in 1868, is a forgotten classic of journalism, whose illustrations are also used in
105
taxis, ignored monuments and “unpalatial” palaces. A projection of the map
image, the city remains predominantly abstract with the exception of names of
underground stations: Crouch End, Chalk Farm or Earl’s Court (Gaiman
2005a: 9). The historical expansion of London following the 1570/71 opening
of The Royal Exchange, which Richard recalls, renders the city as a living organism devouring or “absorbing” villages and is compared to an amorphous
pool of mercury (Gaiman 2005a: 10), a monstrous, apparently organic flow,
waiting to incorporate the story-teller (Gaiman 2005a: 10–11).
The danger of the increasing urban formlessness is interrupted by Jessica,
Richard’s fiancée, whose sightseeing obsession imposes on the city still another
grid. They are the orders of exhibition and of commerce – essential aspects of
London season – in which the difference between Tate Gallery and Harrods
becomes inconspicuous but which grant the observer with a brief moment of
voyeurism and proximity.
Instantly reduced to an exhibit in Jessica’s plan, Richard can, in commercial
terms, only make a “perfect matrimonial accessory” (Gaiman 2005a: 12) for the
young woman, whose expertise in city life, organising exhibitions and managing collections makes her responsible for Mr Stockton’s angel collection and
travelling exhibition.12 Finally, though already textualized, Gaiman’s London
Above has hardly any topography or familiar urban design. Nevertheless, the
actual City of London with its financial institutions is appointed as the centre
“where it had all begun” (Gaiman 2005a: 10).
Imaginary high-rise office blocks replace the former castles and cathedrals
– signs that have already departed and whose echoes can be found in London
Below. The office blocks are the new seats of power whose gates are guarded
(Gaiman 2005a: 19) and premises bounded by walls (Gaiman 2005a: 23). Occupied by such corporate entities as Mr Stockton (Gaiman 2005a: 21), the new
centres impose the invisible order of exchange legitimising Jessica’s breech of
engagement in purely commercial terms: “as of now” (Gaiman 2005a: 26).
Within the order of exchange, dominant in London Above, the homeless of any
London we imagine become invisible.
12
editions of Mayhew’s four-volume London Labour. A new edition of Jerrold and Doré, with
a Preface by Peter Ackroyd, was published in 2005.
Mr Stockton collects otherness imposing his rationalist and business-oriented concept of
order on the exhibits. Richard’s collection of trolls is accepted by Jessica because, to her, it is
reminiscent of Stockton’s in its eccentricity. However, at some point, we are told that Richard “did not really collect trolls” (Gaiman 2005a: 13) but found them. Hence, they seem to
be surreal lost objects, objet trouvé, and the whole collection is a matter of chance rather than
of either commercial or aesthetic decision. Therefore, Richard’s predilection for the other
which surfaces in his final decision to re-enter London Below, whose floating markets ridicule the market economy of London Above, is anticipated in his peculiar understanding of
collectorship.
106
London Under, the other city “a few steps from Oxford Street” (Gaiman
2005a: 44), is a constellated image produced from and producing London traces, a spectral machine apprehended through anamnesis or recollection rather
than discovery. No ontology can be assigned to the city, though not as a result
of its excessive usage of abstractions but due to its predominant undecidability:
conceptual, temporal and spatial indeterminacy.
Labyrinth becomes the condition of the other city from the very beginning,
while prosopopeia as a sound landscape – a flow of voices from different times
and places – provides location for dialogues with the dead (the forgotten and the
homeless). They are the voices/associations Gaiman’s Lord Portico, a contemporary Prospero, tries to accommodate in his door-less associative city-house.
London Under seems capable of accommodating unobtrusively a multiplicity of
worlds bringing together, perhaps in an associative or psychogeographic manner, constellations of signatures and objects. London Under contains numerous
traces of the city’s materiality accumulated and distributed regardless of their
origin and historical location, both temporal and spatial.
There are numerous references to the sewers, tunnels and underground rivers with their sewer folk. Accompanied by Carabas, Richard enters the Underside through a manhole (Gaiman 2005a: 47). Later we read about World War II
tunnels (Gaiman 2005a: 93); cellars under a Victorian Hospital; life under Nottinghill flyover (88); the brick sewer under Park Lane (211); “red brick cathedral sewers” (267) – a trace identifying a dislocated centre; the often unspecified underground rivers (228); and the historical Great Stink followed by a reference to the decisions of the 1858 Parliament.
There is also a confusing heap of names of London Underground stations,
which refer the reader to locations along Central, District, Bakerloo, Northern
and Piccadilly lines and including, for instance, Tottenham, Charing Cross,
Embankment, Angel, White City, Hammersmith, Earl’s Court, Blackfriars and
several other stations. The names can simply function as names of train stations
on Richard’s “handy map” but they also become bubbles of time past (White
City) or characters and imaginary locations, for instance Shepherd’s Bush, Earl’s
Court or Angel.
In the course of the spatially and temporally puzzling peregrinations, it becomes obvious that the geometrical skeleton map fails as a guide. To make
things more complex, the underside invades London Above by incorporating its
material fragments. Among them, there are the remnants of the old London
Wall with its background of Roman history (Gaiman 2005a: 281) as well as
important landmarks such as Harrods, the British Museum, Big Ben and roof
tops, including Old Bailey’s (a pun on a Robinson-like character) which offers
a long view of London Above. Dislocated temporally and spatially, they no
longer function as heritage studied by antiquarians but are reduced to raw mate-
107
rial. Along with this precarious materiality, often discarded by the world Above,
London Under contains traces of well-known signs, myths and fictions whose
inter-art status, or intertextuality, is evident even if transformed. Among these
relics, there is the Tower of Babel:
Richard looked out of the open lift door. They were hanging in the air, at the top of
something that reminded Richard of a painting he had once seen of the Tower of
Babel, or rather of how the Tower of Babel in the painting might have looked were
it inside out: it was an enormous and ornate spiral path, carved out of rock, which
went down and down around a central well. (Gaiman 2005a: 291)
Further on, the traveller hears about and experiences encounters with the
sinking cities and the myth of Atlantis, the Cyclopean/Roman story of urbanity,
the beasts living under large cities, Angel’s Castle functioning as both prison
and citadel, Shakespeare’s Macduff and the “Blackfriars” emerging as either
characters – some of them literally black – or as the theatre passed on to the
King’s Men and, finally, with John Milton’s Great Hall.
None of the above-mentioned ordering textual material or the evoked conceptual grids contains London Under, and thus the construct seems to successfully resist being grasped or located. The Marquis de Carabas admits that the
“labyrinth is one of the oldest places” (Gaiman 2005a: 307) but not the oldest.
Still, it is the trope that remains most efficiently analogous to the materiality of
the underside and like the Babel Tower does manage, paradoxically, to comment on London Above:
It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and
sewers that had fallen through the cracks over millennia, and entered the world of
the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and
through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards.
They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit
streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place:
and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself. (Gaiman 2005a: 308)
This labyrinthine construction resembles the early “dust holes” which Dickens remembers as a horrifying form of burial practiced in nineteenth-century
London (Shelston 2005: 77–93) and other overcrowded cities. The Underside,
however, is not so much a necropolis (the opposite of acropolis) as mundus,
a concept that yokes more efficiently otherness with waste.
Lost fragments, dust and ruins reappear throughout the process of writing,
that way justifying what is included into the text of recollection: the memories
in walls (Gaiman 2005a: 81), the crowd going through a grill to a market offering waste for sale (Gaiman 2005a: 108), Croup and Vandemar’s dilapidated and
dank basement filled with wreckage (Gaiman 2005a: 143–144), fogs in bubbles
of time (Gaiman 2005a: 229) and the Earl’s library in which Richard recognizes
108
“a tiny empire of lost property” with, among other things, “hockey sticks,
a wooden leg … a lava lamp, various CDs, … assorted pairs of dentures,
watches” (Gaiman 2005a: 160). It all contributes to an image of London, if an
image can be cooked together at all. Barely readable texts do exist in urban
poetics. According to Wolfreys, and perhaps also to Gaiman, it happens that
“London hovers … on the surface of writing” and its “other encrypted communicative function … is inaccessible” (2004: 17).
Reading and/or comprehending and thus writing the city in Neverwhere is
possible only through osmosis and white knowledge, “which is like white noise,
only more informative”, a fact Richard discovers already at the very outset
(Gaiman 2005a: 10). White knowledge and white noise imply that the alternate
construal embraces a whole spectrum of impulses which are not preselected and
therefore are comparable with Nauman’s Raw Materials, Reich’s City Life or
Dion’s Thames Dig.
Additionally, “white noise” is a reference to chaos theory, where the experience of the urban, in writing and in reading, is like a chaotic system. Chaos,
often a misleading term, does not assume disorder but the operation of an alternative sense of order, plottable though easily affected by minute disturbances
called “noise” and therefore unpredictable.13
White noise, seemingly uninformative, cuts through the background and is
used for testing as well as enhancing concentration. The floating markets of
Gaiman’s London Under, where visitors barter waste and the useless – the noise
– and where auditions are held instead of interviews, as if to emphasize the theatrical aspect of rehearsing, remain inconceivable in commercial terms: nebulous and formless in their lame parody of urban symbols of The Royal Exchange and the arcades.
The labyrinth in Neverwhere appears equally disappointing; instead of hiding a mystery, it only obscures access to the Sphinx-like Angel Islington whose
androgyny indicates further ambivalence – beyond gender problematics. Islington’s home, like Sant’ Angelo Castle, serves as a provisional and complex centre, a prison and a burial place in the form of a quasi-mausoleum. Islington, the
Miltonic Lucifer or a Blakean angel roaming the fields of the poet’s New Jerusalem, staking out the territory of London from Islington to Marylebone, notoriously fails as a defender of cities: under his protection they sink.
13
Numerous literary texts, including Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) or Theatre de Complicite’s Mnemonic, were influenced by James Gleick’s Chaos (1987) and its alternative concept
of order. Hence the expression “white knowledge” which is used in SF literature and refers
to information acquired without conscious effort, as explained in Barrett’s The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (2006: 394) where the example is Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The
term does not appear in John Clute’s Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995).
109
Analogously to James Thomson’s “The city of dreadful night”, Gaiman’s
Angel-warrior fails as a symbol of an already departed reality and disintegrates
into a Sphinx-like figure of Melancholia – signifying the wound of enigma and
loss. As a result, Richard Mayhew achieves nothing in the logic of quest. Hence, he abandons both the office towers and the penthouse panoptic long view
granted to him, ironically, as a reward on his arrival in London Above. From
now on the “real city” remains beyond his reach as the ethics of city life Richard discovers re-defines citiness as life in the presence of radical otherness.
As a result, any imaginable authorship of the city construal Gaiman proposes
must be annihilated, made and unmade in a myriad of fragments. In a gesture of
circularity, Richard Mayhew re-enters London Below to experience the city
Under – the otherness, the alternate citiness around and in himself and the city
he is, finally, ready to accept.
References
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Blanchard, Jerrold, Gustave Doré, and Peter Ackroyd 2005: London: A Pilgrimage. London:
Anthem Press.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 1904: The Napoleon of Nottinghill. London and Beccles: William
Clowes&Sons.
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Gaiman, Neil 2005a /1996/: Neverwhere. London: Headline Book Publishing Group.
Gaiman, Neil 2005b: Introduction. In: Neil Gaiman 2005a, n. pag.
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Macmillan.
JUSTYNA KOCIATKIEWICZ
Coping with the anti-Semitic universe:
The construction of alternate realities in Saul Bellow’s
The Victim and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
ABSTRACT. The issue of anti-Semitic sentiments in pre-World War II America is a sensitive one in the country whose official ideology proclaims general equality of its citizens and
racial, religious and cultural neutrality. Nevertheless, the impact of anti-Semitic prejudice
was particularly obvious in the first half of the twentieth century, resulting in attacks on Jewish property and even lynches, and culminating in the war policy of the Roosevelt administration. The Jewish response to American anti-Semitism is recorded in the novels by Bellow
and Roth. The former, published in 1947, constitutes an immediate reaction to the accelerating prejudice against Jews and thus may earn the name of Bellow’s only commentary on the
Holocaust. The latter, written sixty years later, offers a more detached and therefore bolder
rendition of the fears and anxieties plaguing the American Jewish community during the
Second World War. The temporal distance separating the two texts may be responsible for
the obvious differences in the approach to the subject of anti-Semitism: where Roth imagines
a fictional version of the American history with Lindbergh winning the 1940 election and
turning America fascist, Bellow presents an individual plight of Asa Leventhal trying to understand his position in the contemporary America. However, it is important to note the similarities of the devices both authors use and of the narrative strategies they employ to render
the ambience of mid-twentieth century America: both Bellow and Roth construct alternate
realities in which their characters experience a radical turn from the familiar; both Bellow
and Roth create protagonists lost in the oneiric universes which they try to make sense of; finally, both Bellow and Roth resort to the notion of conspiracy or plot to mitigate the harshness of their vision and tone down the potential bitterness of their assessment of the times.
The issue of anti-Semitic sentiments in America is a sensitive one in a country whose official ideology proclaims general equality of its citizens and racial,
religious, and cultural neutrality. Nevertheless, the impact of anti-Semitic
prejudice was particularly obvious in the first half of the twentieth century,
“kindled … by the immigration of two million Jews from Russia and Eastern
Europe”, which resulted in “an expanding Jewish economic and political
sphere” (Goldberg 2001: 15). The rising numbers of Jewish immigrants coincided with portentous social and political changes in the United States, and, as
Leonard Dinnerstein (1987: 257) observes, “Relatively latent in ordinary times,
anti-Semitism intensifies in periods of social and economic crises”. Thus
“[s]ocietal changes in the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the
anxieties during the second World War intensified and exacerbated attitudes
that had already manifested themselves earlier” (Dinnerstein 1991: 212).
112
Justyna Kociatkiewicz
In their study of anti-Semitism in America, Harold Quinley and Charles
Glock (1983: 2–5) analyze a list of negative features combined into a stereotypical image of the Jew that has developed ever since the Civil War; the image
includes wealth, dishonesty, lack of ethics, clannishness, pride, conceit, powerhunger, pushiness, and intrusiveness. Referring to the 1920s and 1930s, Dinnerstein offers a wider perspective to this stereotype: anti-Semitism is a major aspect of “bigotry and intolerance” of the American society of the interbellum
period, characterized by “expressions of hostility toward the foreigner and the
outcast” (1991: 213). With their upward mobility surpassing that of other immigrants and interpreted as dangerous to the WASP status quo if not “reined in”,
Jews were particularly prone to become objects of racial hatred (Dinnerstein
1991: 213). The widespread belief in the superiority of the white race was
strengthened by the fear of Jews “as both capitalists determined to take over
control of the economic system and communists who wanted to undermine
American values” (Dinnerstein 1991: 214).
As a result of these prejudices, Jews were excluded from social and patriotic
organizations as well as resort and residential areas, and they were banned from
“desirable employment fields, and many of the northeastern universities” (Dinnerstein 1991: 215). In the 1930s, German Nazi ideology fortified American
distrust of Jews: “Exclusion of Jews from privileges and communal enterprises
intensified”, Dinnerstein notes, as did attacks on Jewish property and lynchings
(1991: 217).
In the beginning of the Second World War, the German American Bund
was active, as was Charles A. Lindbergh’s America First, supported by Henry
Ford’s virulently anti-Semitic periodical Deerborn Independent and Father
Coughlin’s equally inimical weekly radio broadcasts. Even the attacks on President Roosevelt’s policies carried anti-Semitic overtones. The pace at which
these hostile sentiments accumulated led to a “frenzy of panic” when “many
Jews thought that what happened in Hitler’s Germany might very well occur in
the United States as well” (Dinnerstein 1991: 212).
The scope and threat of American anti-Semitism as well as the Jewish response to it are at the core of two novels by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth,
namely, The Victim and The Plot Against America. The former, published in
1947, constitutes an immediate reaction to the accelerating prejudice against
Jews and thus may earn the name of Bellow’s only commentary on the Holocaust. The latter novel, written sixty years later, offers a more detached and
therefore bolder rendition of the fears and anxieties plaguing the American Jewish community during World War II. The temporal distance separating the two
texts may be responsible for the obvious differences in the approach to the subject of anti-Semitism. Whereas Roth imagines a fictional version of American
history, with Lindbergh winning the 1940 election and turning America fascist,
Coping with the anti-Semitic universe: The construction of alternate realities
113
Bellow focuses on the individual plight of Asa Leventhal trying to understand
his position in the post-World War II America.
Roth’s novel may be seen as a continuation of the author’s concerns displayed in his fiction of the 1990s. Derek Parker Royal claims that “America as
an idea, America as a promised land, America as a refuge” has always been the
focal point of Roth’s fiction, but his later works “concern themselves more significantly with the dynamics underlying historical identity” in order to explore
“the ways in which history reveals the fiction behind the American dream”
(2008: 120).
The Plot Against America definitely continues to challenge “notions of an
idealized America, innocent and uncomplicated by contradictions or ambiguities” (Royal 2008: 121), and it does so by examining the influence of politics on
the individual life. That this life happens to be a boy’s life is extremely important, because the incidents of the public arena are here filtered through the mind
of the grown up narrator remembering his confusion and fears as an eight-yearold child. The understanding of a larger historical and political context of the
horrors of his childhood does not alleviate the sense of anxiety with which the
narrator reminisces about the past. To the contrary, the anxiety seems to surface
particularly when the narrator confronts the willingness on the part of the Jewish community to absorb the American way of life, to conform to the American
middle-class values and ethics, and to foster the American dream, which gradually displays its ugly underside.
The idealized vision of America as a safe haven that the narrator cherishes
as a child is tainted by the Americans’ easy acceptance of anti-Semitic ideology,
ominously suggested by little Phil’s dream, in which black swastikas unexpectedly mark his precious stamps (Roth 2005: 43). The vision is then completely
overturned as Phil’s family is forced to accept the notion that their homeland is
neither safe nor promising nor welcoming to them.
Bellow’s concern with his single protagonist results in the critical tendency
to universalize Asa’s experience. Out of fifteen book-length studies of Bellow’s
fiction, only five use the term “anti-Semitism” with reference to The Victim
(Cohen 1974: 40, Porter 1974: 30, Goldmann 1983: 11–12, Wilson 1985: 69).
Keith Opdahl notes more generally that the novel addresses the issue of “racial
and religious prejudice” (1967: 51), and Robert Kiernan calls it “a work of its
period” in that it addresses the issue of inborn expectation of suffering and victimization (1989: 28).
The remaining eight studies define the theme of the novel as “the casting off
of self-imposed burdens by [the hero’s] learning to accept himself” (Clayton
1971: 139); the “nature of guilt” (Scheer-Schäzler 1972: 18); the “search for the
human” (Rodrigues 1981: 35); “the burden of guilt and responsibility” (Dutton
1982: 22); “the relation between the accidental and the connected, the contin-
114
gent and the necessary” (Bradbury 1982: 44); “la culpabilité” (Lévy 1983: 52);
the necessity of facing the shunned reality of evil, suffering, passion, shame and
disorder (Pifer 1991: 52); and “crisis and self-examination” (Hyland 1992: 16).
However, it is within the context of the American Jewish experience of the Second World War that Bellow’s text becomes particularly interesting as a mirror
of the anxieties of its times directly addressed in Roth’s novel: the problem of
racial purity insisted upon by the white majority, and the latter’s complaints
concerning Jewish appropriation of the white man’s culture and social position;
the ambivalence of ghettoization, which is a way of both isolating and preserving the Jewish community; the uneasiness about mixed marriages that may expose Jews to severe social criticism; prejudice and persecution in the workplace;
the overwhelming sense of alienation; and the desperate willingness to fit in.
It is also important to note the similarities of the devices both authors use
and of the narrative strategies they employ to render the ambience of midtwentieth century anti-Semitic America. Both Bellow and Roth construct alternate realities in which their characters experience a radical turn from the familiar; both authors create protagonists lost in the oneiric universes which they try
to make sense of; and both resort to the notion of conspiracy or plot to mitigate
the harshness of their vision and to tone down the potential bitterness of their
assessment of the times. This paper aims at exploring these analogies in three
areas: the alternative, the oneiric, and the conspiratorial.
The alternative
Bellow’s novel is set in a recognizable New York of the early post-war
period. The historical references include the hardships of the Great Depression
during which Asa is unemployed and reduced to the state of poverty, then his
slow rise to a better economic standing during the war when, as he puts it, “millions of us [were] killed” (Bellow 1996: 131), and the time of relative stability
afterwards. The geographical references are as obvious: Asa works in Manhattan, takes South Ferry to Staten Island to visit his brother’s family, and goes to
Central Park Zoo with his little nephew. Yet this New York is de-realized or denaturalized in the first paragraph:
On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok. The whole continent seems to
have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to
have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric
fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which,
a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky. (Bellow
1996: 1)
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Thus, Bellow creates an alternate New York, a place of oriental heat and
oriental mystery, its population fierce and frenzied, its civilization alien and
inscrutable. As any place of the Far East, New York may become a scene of
exciting adventure, but it may also expose the protagonist to perils or death. The
recurring images of heat and humidity offer a sense of physical oppression that
complements the sense of spiritual oppression experienced by the protagonist.
For Asa, it is not only the weather that is different: his wife is out of town,
which makes him feel insecure; their otherwise tidy apartment grows messy and
slovenly; and again the physical chaos is paralleled by moral imbalance when
the Leventhals’ marriage bed is tainted by a prostitute’s presence. Finally, his
daily routine is thwarted by two surprising and unwelcome incidents that further
push Asa out of his complacency: one is his nephew’s illness, the other the appearance of his acquaintance, Allbee, and his unexpected claims.
Both incidents indicate to Asa the presence of realities that he does not
know much of and which he instinctively dislikes: the Christian Italian
neighborhood his brother’s family lives in and the passing glory and growing
decrepitude of the WASP life style that Allbee represents. Leventhal does not
comprehend the superstitions of his sister-in-law, nor does he sympathize with
Allbee’s complaints, and his unfriendly and defensive attitude is reinforced
when he is made to feel his incompatibility.
In Roth’s obviously alternate version of American history, the stress is
placed on change as well. Young Phil Roth, whose memoir the novel is fashioned to be, has led a sheltered life in the environment shaped by American
values, which suddenly lose all their impact. Lindbergh’s ascendancy to the
presidency affects the political world when America becomes an ally to the
Axis, celebrating Hitler’s victories over international communism in Russia and
welcoming Joachim von Ribbentrop to the White House.
When America implements its own policy against Jews, allegedly trying to
absorb them into the mainstream, hundreds of thousands of American citizens
must revise their allegiance to the American ideals and consider emigration to
Canada in order to either fight Nazi Germany or simply survive. The horror of
what Phil witnesses stems not from the pace of the change as much as from the
ease with which such a change may be effected. American anti-Semitism is not
an unexpected turn to a foreign ideology – rather, it is a systematic institutionalization of sentiments very much alive among gentile Americans.
As the political world interferes with his own life, Phil must undergo more
immediate changes that transform his existence. He must face his father’s gradual, reluctant loss of idealism; he must grow up fast to become the protector of
the family whose members grow apart and in which children are exposed to
unprecedented parental violence (Roth 2005: 172, 209, 203); he must witness
the dissipation of the neighborhood of which he too may be to blame. These
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private concerns culminate in Phil’s recounting of his father’s and brother’s
journey across America to save a Jewish child relocated to the mid-West. As
they move across a land torn by anti-Semitic riots, the Roths register a new
image of their homeland, no longer a land of promise and opportunity but a land
of “ominous cities, … faded billboards, … tiny filling stations, … dilapidated
timber shacks” (Roth 2005: 360), and a perilous wilderness of alien countryside
dominated by their fear of “upright American Christians unleashed by the acting
president of the United States” against their co-citizens (Roth 2005: 357).
This transition from hope and comfort to despair and fear is accompanied
for Phil by the growing awareness that he has spent his childhood in an alternative universe in which the Roths and their neighbors are fully integrated, sharing
the Protestant work ethic and pride of ownership, speaking English as their only
tongue, and celebrating national holidays, an alternative universe in which Phil
could share “that huge endowment of personal security that [he had] taken for
granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an
American city in an America at peace with the world” (Roth 2005: 7).
The truth Phil realizes is that all the above is available only in a ghetto outside of which there is threat of exclusion and danger of extinction. More than
that, Phil’s parents each experienced anti-Semitism: his mother suffered a
“circumscribed youth as a neighborhood outsider” (Roth 2005: 9), and may now
doubt the degree of “Christian charity” which may be extended to the only Jews
in a neighborhood dominated by a Bund-occupied beer-garden which steadily
becomes a metaphor for the entire country. His father remembers the very factual case of Leo Frank, lynched in 1915 for an alleged rape of a thirteen-yearold girl, and worries lest his son’s artistic interest in a gentile girl be mistaken
for erotic attraction, which might lead to his death. It is important that this reference is made at the end of the novel: as fictional anti-Semitic riots break out
threatening the lives of Jewish American citizens, as fictional secrets of Lindbergh’s fictional presidency are disclosed, Roth recalls the real incident countering fiction with fact, the alternate with the actual.
The oneiric
The alternative worlds that the protagonists enter in both cases bear a specific dream-like quality. This oneiric quality dominates the two subplots of The
Victim. In the first, his brother’s apartment that Leventhal visits is dark, its
rooms claustrophobic, its corridor twisted, its atmosphere dominated by
sickness and impending death. Leventhal cannot communicate with his sisterin-law, Elena, whose mental make-up is alien to him; he cannot communicate
with her mother because she speaks Italian only. This lack of sharing or exchange strengthens in Asa the sense of estrangement, and his evident loathing of
117
Elena’s ways is coupled with the suspicion that he is judged and condemned on
the basis of his racial identity. Similarly, in the second subplot, Allbee usually
appears late at night, unexpected and unannounced, his shabbiness and pallor
making him a ghost. Like a ghost, he haunts Leventhal with his presence and
claims, which Asa considers insane, at the same time fearing they may be valid.
Leventhal’s attitude to and treatment of Allbee is highly ambiguous. Despite his censure of Allbee’s physical and moral decrepitude, Asa seems fascinated by the spectacle of the human fall he may have caused. Although Leventhal feels innocent of Allbee’s charges, he fails to either confirm or abrogate
them. His inability to either accept or reject Allbee’s statements or to silence
Allbee effectively suggests a kind of mental stupor, a spiritual inertia out of
which Asa cannot free himself.
When despite his misgivings Leventhal invites Allbee to stay in his apartment, he seems to admit a degree of guilt for the undeserved appropriation of
Allbee’s position in life, while at the same time he feels manipulated into accepting the blame for Allbee’s failure, a blame he calls unreasonable (Bellow
1996: 158). The hesitation and passivity on Leventhal’s part add to the dreamlike character of the incidents, as does the climactic scene when Allbee attempts
suicide by letting out gas in Leventhal’s kitchen, nearly killing them both.
The rendition of the scene deserves more attention. Leventhal awakens from
an absurd dream surrounded by a strange odor, aware of somebody’s presence
in his apartment. The nightmare seems to continue as, “feeling stifled, … his
heart nearly burst[ing] with fear … [h]is terror like a cold fluid” (Bellow
1996: 253), Leventhal fights Allbee “by the swinging light” and makes him
disappear like an apparition. Finally, he collapses on the bed and goes back to
sleep. Thus Asa’s struggle to regain control of his life is carried out as if in
a dream, illuminated by hallucinatory fluctuating light, accompanied by utmost
terror. One may wonder to what extent Allbee’s choice of the means of death
suggests the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps, not an unlikely association in a novel whose protagonist is constantly identified as one of “you people” and who identifies himself as one of millions that were killed.
The suddenness of changes that Roth’s narrator-protagonist experiences and
the pace of deterioration around him also bear this oneiric quality. Phil’s world
is literally turned upside down, the familiar disclosing a horrible underside of
violence, mutilation, and death. Phil is too young to understand everything correctly in a world in which even the adults are denied the time for analysis and
the comfort of comprehension. His imagination is overpowered by a sense of
dread and dissipation, and eventually, to preserve remnants of harmony and
security for himself and his family, he is given to lies and deception that he
thinks lead to the death of his neighbor.
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Like Leventhal, Phil is ready to accept blame that is not directly his; unlike
Leventhal, he has little means to attain control over incidents – and when he
does, the result is disastrous. If we allow that Allbee’s suicidal attempt endangering Leventhal’s life calls to mind the horrors of the Second World War, then,
in his desire to extricate himself from his plight, Phil enacts the experience of
many European Jewish children during the same period. He abandons his family to seek refuge in a Catholic orphanage, in the process losing his most cherished treasure, his stamp collection.
The escapade is carried out at night. Although Phil claims that “there was
nothing impulsive or hysterical driving [him], nothing melodramatic about [his]
decision, nothing reckless” (Roth 2005: 232), he cannot remember a single
event between his stealing out of the apartment and waking up the following
morning in a hospital bed with a concussion, and his actions are attributed to
day-dreaming or somnambulism. Similarly, all the major incidents in the novel
that touch Phil – election results, family arguments, his escape, anti-Semitic
riots, re-appearance of Phil’s estranged aunt, or the action to save Seldon Wishnow – take place at night and demand unconventional behavior, the horror
streak added when Phil has to descend to the cellar which he considers frightful
and haunted. Thus, presented from the child’s perspective, the 28 months between Lindbergh’s presidential victory and Roosevelt’s comeback after Lindbergh’s mysterious disappearance are a nightmare from which one wakes only
to the tribulations of everyday ordeals.
The conspiratorial
Conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking play the major role in the construction of the alternate realities of Bellow and Roth. In The Victim, conspiracy thinking is directly linked to Allbee’s anti-Semitism. Allbee sees his misfortunes as grounded in the slow but steady replacement of WASP ideals and
WASP culture by Jewish pushiness, avarice, vengefulness, and nepotism. Unlike Allbee, Leventhal refrains from naming the forces controlling his destiny,
but he fears and is threatened and oppressed by whatever governs his life, be it
the hereditary insanity he fears, the poverty he is daunted by, or the anti-Semitic
prejudice he rages against.
Allbee’s constant complaints against the powers in control and Leventhal’s
endeavors to complacently ignore them indicate the degree to which both have
lost faith in human agency. They are playthings of “whoever runs things” (Bellow 1996: 264), an unknowable, all-powerful, and hostile entity that directs
their lives. The belief that human fate is determined by external forces beyond
human control or understanding is, as Timothy Melley (2000) eloquently argues, at the root of conspiracy thinking.
119
Conspiracy in Roth’s novel is used primarily to alleviate the bleakness of
the author’s vision of a fascist America. Linbergh’s presidency is after all the
result of the Germans’ cunning plan to keep America out of war. The plot
against America is identified as such in Roosevelt’s fictitious speech of 1942 –
“a plot being hatched by antidemocratic forces here at home …, a plot to suppress the great upsurge of human liberty …, a plot to replace American democracy with the absolute authority of a despotic rule” (Roth 2005: 178) – and in
Walter Winchell’s fictitious congressional campaign speech later the same year
– “The Hitlerite plot against America” (Roth 2005: 260).
What the politicians opposing Lindbergh suspect is soon substantiated by
Mrs. Lindbergh’s story of how America was manipulated by Nazi Germany.
However, the story comes to the Roths through Phil’s aunt, an over-excitable
woman of little authority in the family, and it is never made public as such,
which makes it more like rumor than fact, food for those who would relocate
the blame for America’s turning upon its own ideals onto a distant enemy. At
the same time, Roth would have his readers remember that history is “the unfolding of the unforeseen” (2005: 114) over which man has no control and
whose impact may destroy man completely. The individual is again seen as
a mere plaything of forces he cannot govern nor comprehend, his only power
being to accept the bitter consequences of their influence.
Conclusion
One may argue to what extent literature reflects current social or political
issues. It cannot be denied, however, that both Bellow and Roth focus their
novels on the issue of anti-Semitism, or that they use similar strategies to approach the problem. They first obscure the immediacy of the anti-Semitic reality. They create alternate universes markedly different from those of readers’
experience, universes dominated by the oneiric and subjected to conspiracies
unraveled or intuited by the characters. Bellow and Roth then punctuate the
fabric of fiction with direct references to painful and shameful facts, the 1915
lynching of Leo Frank or Jewish casualties of World War II, thus indicating the
urgency of the issue and denying their readers the comfort of distancing themselves from it.
References
Bellow, Saul 1996: The Victim. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bradbury, Malcolm 1982: Saul Bellow. London: Methuen.
Clayton, John Jacob 1971: Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
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Cohen, Sarah Blacher 1974: Saul Bellow’s Enigmatic Laughter. Urbana: Universtiy of Illinois
Press.
Dinnerstein, Leonard 1987: Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Dinnerstein, Leonard 1991: Antisemitism in Crisis Times in the United States: the 1920s and
1930s. In: Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (eds.) 1991: Antisemitism in Times of Crisis.
New York: New York University Press, 212–226.
Dutton, Robert R. 1982: Saul Bellow. Revised ed. Boston: Twayne.
Goldberg, Robert Alan 2001: Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Goldmann, L. H. 1983: Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience.
New York: Irvington Publishers.
Hyland, Peter 1992: Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Kiernan, Robert F. 1989: Saul Bellow. New York: Continuum.
Lévy, Claude 1983: Les Romans de Saul Bellow: Tactiques Narratives at Strategies Oedipiennes.
Paris: Klincksieck.
Melley, Timothy 2000: Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America.
Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.
Opdahl, Keith Michael 1967: The Novels of Saul Bellow: An Introduction. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Pifer, Ellen 1991: Saul Bellow: Against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Porter, M. Gilbert 1974: Whence the Power? The Artistry and Humanity of Saul Bellow.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Quinley, Harold E., Charles Y. Glock 1983: Anti-Semitism in America. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
Rodrigues, Eusebio L. 1981: Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul Bellow's Fiction.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Roth, Philip 2005: The Plot Against America. London: Vintage.
Royal, Derek Parker 2008: Contesting the Historical Pastoral in Philip Roth’s American Trilogy.
In: Jay Prosser (ed.) 2008: American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 120–133.
Scheer-Schäzler, Brigitte 1972: Saul Bellow. New York: Frederick Ungar.
Wilson, Jonathan 1985: On Bellow’s Planet: Reading from the Dark Side. Rutherford: Farleigh
Dickinson University Press.
SŁAWOMIR KUŹNICKI
UNIVERSITY OF OPOLE
Genetically modified future: Pre- and post-apocalyptic
visions of the world in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and
Crake
ABSTRACT. Bioengineering together with moral dilemma connected with its processes
seem a pressing question nowadays. Responding to it, in Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood
tries to propose at least some possible answers, solutions and warnings. Doing so, Atwood
provides the readers with a dystopian vision that, despite solid roots in the history of this
genre, is highly original. The article begins with a brief presentation of dystopia and its most
characteristic features, and then proceeds to Oryx and Crake, in which Atwood shows two
alternative visions of the future: one directly before the apocalyptic end of the world, and the
other one just after the ultimate downfall of the present civilization. Both the visions appear
to be strongly determined by the genetic experiments which characterize the contemporary
world. Additionally, displaying generic playfulness so typical for Atwood’s, both the literary
projects mark the originality of the writer’s imagination. For example, the pre-apocalyptic
reality, although clearly described as a future one, differs from the today’s world only in details. Hence, one of the dystopian visions Atwood faces the readers with is actually what one
already sees and knows, only with a few exaggerations. On the other hand, the second dystopia of Oryx and Crake, the vision of the world after its ultimate end, seems a more traditional
one. However, also here the novelist tries to break the conventions of dystopia, and instead
of a picture of a total regress she proposes a kind of heaven on earth, only with a small crack
being a universal conscience of the dying world. In other words, what Atwood shows in
Oryx and Crake is an unavoidable sequence of events and, simultaneously, literary alternate
construals that not only co-exist in her novel, but complete each other thus creating a picture
of the future.
Bioengineering is a highly important issue nowadays; no wonder Margaret
Atwood has made it one of her main interest areas. Being the most prominent
Canadian writer, she is also an ecological philosopher advocating an environmentally friendly way of life in both her writings and her statements. What is
more, she also initiates voluntary environmental actions and takes active part in
them. For instance, in the last chapter of her 2008 non-fiction book Payback,
about the symbolic, literary, and ethical understandings of the term “debt”, she
both presents the problems connected with the environmental degradation of the
Earth and suggests some solutions.
Nonetheless, it is in Oryx and Crake from 2003 that she concentrates on the
problematic ethics and unsure outcome of such scientific procedures as genetic
modification and cloning. Doing so, she provides us with a dual dystopian vision that seems highly original. Simultaneously, Oryx and Crake can be described as a perfect example of what Atwood calls speculative fiction, i.e., writPHILOLOGICA WRATISLAVIENSIA: ACTA ET STUDIA 6
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Sławomir Kuźnicki
ing about the future to actually comment on the present. Additionally, the Canadian writer extends the possibilities of traditionally understood dystopia
mainly by incorporating the fast pace and the quest motif into the plot of her
novel; that is why she also describes Oryx and Crake as “an adventure romance” (Atwood 2004: 516–517). In other words, not restricting herself blindly
to the core rules of the genre, Atwood proposes a kind of an intertextual game
with dystopia.
John Anthony Cuddon’s (1998: 957) briefest definition of utopia describes
the literary phenomenon as “the idea of a place where all is well”. Respectively,
Chris Ferns (1999: 107), suggesting its strong ironic quality on the one hand
and direct plausibility on the other hand, defines dystopia in the following way:
Where utopian fiction stresses the difference of the society it depicts, often obscures the
connection between the real world and its alternative, and rarely indicates how such an
alternative might be created, the dystopian writer presents the nightmare future as a possible
destination of present society, as if dystopia were no more than a logical conclusion derived
from the premises of the existing order, and implies that it might very well come about
unless something is done to stop it.
Jean François Lyotard (1989: 6) adds to this definition the fact that dystopia
became especially important in the 20th century, i.e., in the era of totalitarianism. This is not surprising, because utopias reflect the progress (and dystopias –
regress) of civilizations in a very convincing way, being at the same time a capacious means for the author’s thoughts and concepts. As Fredric Jameson
(2009) notices, “For the most part, dystopia has been a vehicle for political
statements of some kind: sermons against overpopulation, big corporations,
totalitarianism, patriarchy, not to speak of money itself”. However, the modern
experience of totalitarianism constitutes only one half of the utopian/dystopian
set of characteristic, the second one being human nature. Ferns (1999: 106)
comments on it in the following way: “[E]ven were the institution of a benevolent utopian state possible, the consequent resolution of social problems would
deprive its citizens of the challenges necessary to sustain progress, and that they
would consequently lapse into a state of decadence that would render them easy
prey to more vigorous, if less perfect societies”. Consequently, utopia/dystopia
always constitutes a representation of some kind of a general ideology: either
picturing the perfection that is impossible to achieve or warning about its complete negative reversal.
Among some of the most characteristic features of the genre, Richard Gerber (1973: 4) enumerates its man-made setting, which means it is always a place
created by human beings. This feature differentiates utopia/dystopia from myths
or folk tales and, simultaneously, brings it closer to the issues of civilization:
“In the creation of Utopia man imposes his will on the imagination, and the
non-existent ideal country loses its mythical force and becomes a device, a con-
Genetically modified future: Pre- and post-apocalyptic visions of the world
123
struct, a fiction. Spontaneous imagination and traditional belief are replaced by
the fictive activity of logical thought” (Gerber 1973: 4). The greater relevance
of the plot to current concerns also differentiates utopia/dystopia from science
fiction. Samuel R. Delany (1970: 60) seems to propose a definition that has
a chance to reconcile both the terms: “Events that have not happened include …
events that will not happen: these are your science-fantasy stories. They [also]
include events that have not happened yet … These are your cautionary dystopias”. Interestingly enough, Delany’s differentiation of dystopia and science
fiction supplements Gerber’s general remarks about utopian/dystopian fiction:
In utopian fiction there has to be further concreteness, the writer cannot leave the question as
it is, but, by giving substance to a mere speculative possibility, he has to convert it into an
imaginative reality. His statements are, however, not meant to be taken as accurate
predictions, but only as indicators of one possible development among many, or of some
essential development where the minor details do not matter. (Gerber 1973: 15)
This definition corresponds with Ferns’ (1999: 15) differentiation between
utopia and dystopia, where the critic states that in the latter “dream is transformed into nightmare – a nightmare in which technological progress, hitherto
glorified by writers from Bacon to Wells as central to the realization of the utopian vision, becomes the means to a totalitarian end”.
Rationality, another feature of speculative utopia/dystopia, does not exclude
some fantasy aspects, as the idea of immortality seems to play a very important
part in this genre. No wonder that from such a standpoint come apocalyptic
visions which imagine both the destruction of mankind and the rise of a super
figure, a god-like individual, e.g., a mad scientist: “[I]n the very far future the
superman may be considered as immortal, and therefore godlike, or as godlike,
and therefore immortal” (Gerber 1973: 27).
Nevertheless, the notion of immortality, very often juxtaposed with apocalyptic events of various origins, finds its new realization in the idea of survival.
Here, “we may see the last representatives of mankind engaged in the struggle
against an inexorable fate, slowly or rapidly defeated by the inimical forces of
nature” (Gerber 1973: 30). It is probably this point in utopias/dystopias at which
science replaces religion: “Things do not remain a mystery any longer. Nature is
turned into an object for experiments. The natural scale of values disappears.
Ethical relativism takes its place. Science becomes absolute” (Gerber 1973: 57).
In other words, in future societies it is science that becomes the new religion, or
at least an equivalent of it, which finds its justification in Fredric Jameson’s
words who states that “science and ideology are … not incompatible, [and]
a scientific proposition can at one and the same time be used for ideological
purposes” (Jameson 1994: 77). Consequently, science can mingle with religion
because people need to be ruled and organized in a way even stronger than before; the issues of total control, propaganda, and discrimination of individuality
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Sławomir Kuźnicki
so frequently pictured by many a dystopian writer simply derive from this
viewpoint. No wonder, since “[u]topian imagination is preoccupied with the
inhuman giant town, the symbol for the undifferentiated, uprooted mass” (Gerber 1973: 64); and because of this megalomania “there are the perfect laws,
which have to be strictly obeyed” (Gerber 1973: 68), of course with the stress
on obeying. The same way of thinking can be seen in Ferns’ words who states:
“The basic premise of dystopian fiction, of course, is rooted in the assumption
that the utopian ideal is inherently repressive – that the establishment of the
machinery of the State repression nevertheless has its origin in a genuinely utopian impulse” (Ferns 1999: 141). Once again, the close interdependence between utopia and dystopia becomes obvious.
Not differentiating yet utopia from dystopia, Gerber proposes an interesting
division of the whole genre into two sub-genres, i.e., arcadian and scientific
utopias. Despite more than one exception, mainly gathered around the meaning
and usage of the term science, this distinction seems valid. The scientific utopia/dystopia can be defined as follows: “[It] accepts the fact that man is no
longer in a state of nature, that a modern society has to be complex, and that this
organization requires a great deal of social planning. … the scientific utopia is
led to use a considerable amount of applied science in order to deal adequately
with a modern complex society” (Gerber 1973: 47). Consequently, the human
factor, including the profound faith in some possibilities of our species, becomes emphasized here. Obviously, it does not mean that in the arcadian type
one cannot encounter science and the broadly understood manpower, for “in the
arcadian utopia the scientific method, the thought applied to the building of
utopia, is used to abolish every kind of scientifically rigid construction within
utopia” (Gerber 1973: 47).
In other words, it is all about creating a heaven on earth, mainly with the
metaphorical help from and in the name of some kind of a god; as Ferns adds:
“Utopia then, may be defined as both a good place, an ideal (or at any rate,
more perfect) society, yet at the same time one that does not exist – desirable,
perhaps, but at the same time unattainable” (Ferns 1999: 2). Nevertheless, it
would be hardly plausible to achieve such a goal (or just to aspire to achieve it)
with a complete rejection of the opportunities that science creates and thus,
simultaneously, Gerber considers this type of utopia/dystopia literarily weaker:
a “reactionary wish-fulfillment” (Gerber 1973: 48). The same, the term “arcadian” should be treated in a highly ironic way, underlining only some general
anti-scientific trends and suggesting a possibility to exploit man-made science,
but, of course, only in a justified cause and only by those who decide about it.
This ironic factor, however, brings us closer to the literary tools characteristic
for a more dystopian type of writing, most of them gathered around the term
“parody”.
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Consequently, when it comes to strict differences between utopian and
dystopian writing, the notion of parody, and its interplay between those two, has
to emerge, for dystopia very often retells the positive vision as a kind of distortion, both ironic and tragic at the same time. As Chris Ferns notices, “[I]t is only
in the twentieth century that dystopian fiction, combining a parodic inversion of
the traditional utopia with satire on contemporary society, begins to take on the
kind of mythical resonance that underlines the appeal of the traditional utopia
from the time of More on” (Ferns 1999: 105).
No wonder that according to Ferns, the greatest advantage of dystopia over
utopian writing is its “free[dom] from many of the narrative limitations of the
traditional utopia” (Ferns 1999: 111). Additionally, creating dystopian pictures
of the near future – and it is most frequently the near future that constitutes
a dystopian vision – the writer can exaggerate the present in a way that is not
restricted by any superior rules. Therefore, personal freedom of an individual,
portrayed as a society representative, becomes violated in the most outrageous
and sophisticated way: “in dystopia all the resources of modern technology are
employed to ensure that privacy is kept to an absolute minimum” (Ferns
1999: 113).
The issue of technology and science evokes Jean François Lyotard’s criticism of the overwhelming computerization of society; as the French philosopher states, “scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge;
it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative” (Lyotard 1984: 7). The
same, dystopian writing reveals a kind of a tension, or even a clash, between
traditional community values and the new scientific approach, the very tension
being the propeller of the whole genre.
These are only a few basic features of utopian/dystopian fiction; now let us
see how Margaret Atwood uses and abuses – a literary method very typical for
her, as Linda Hutcheon points out (1988: 138) – all those characteristics in her
Oryx and Crake. In this novel, Atwood tells the story of Jimmy/Snowman, an
apocalypse survivor recounting the events of the years directly before the biological catastrophe. From his teenage years in the Compounds, highly modern
and strictly guarded areas inhabited by society’s elite, Jimmy has a close friend,
Crake, a brilliant scientist disgusted by the decadent, brutality-driven, and overpopulated world he is living in. That is why Crake, at that time a literary incarnation of a mad scientist, decides to put an end to the mess by destroying the old
order of things and proposing a totally new version. He manages to achieve his
first goal by inventing a fatal virus, and the latter by creating a biologically enhanced human species, noble savages perfect in every aspect, that were to replace the already annihilated people.
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Atwood’s exploitation of the dystopian fiction is then double: her novel is
set both before and after the bio-ecological apocalypse, man-made, of course.
The world before its ending is the world of the near, unspecified future, although we can find in it many objects and trends that we are already familiar
with, as the author stated in the radio interview, “all of the things in the book
that people may think are weird, and they may think I just made them up – some
of them already existed when I was writing the book” (qtd. in Flatow 2004).
In other words, contemporary genetic engineering together with natural
environment violation constitute her greatest influence of Oryx and Crake, and
probably the most striking realization of this concept can be seen in the various
new transgenic creatures generated by the scientists of Atwood’s future. The
splices vary from unimportant species of giant butterflies, rakunks (raccoon +
skunk) and wolvogs (dogs + wolves) to more serious pigoons – huge pigs with
human-tissue organs in their bodies:
The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of fullproof human-tissue organs
in a transgenic knockout pig host – organs that transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but
would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there
were more strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys
and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that
could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host animal could be reaped of its extra
kidneys; then, rather than being destroyed, it could keep on living and grow more organs ….
(Atwood 2003: 22)
Such half-hidden indifference and pure commercialization of genetic material, which in western culture is traditionally regarded as something even sacred,
raises definitely more vital ethical issues, where the popular saying “we are
what we eat” gains a completely new meaning, both terrifying and ironic (in
a gallows-like mood, also typical for Atwood). Moreover, it also shows a contemporary tendency in genetic engineering and finds its reflection in how Lyotard defines such trends: “Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such
things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by
incomplete information, ‘fracta,’ catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is
theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and
paradoxical …. It is producing not the known, but the unknown” (Lyotard
1984: 60). Definitely, the ultimate outcome and conclusion of such a way of
thinking can be noticed in the Paradice Project, a paradoxical and catastrophic –
to enumerate just two of Lyotard’s adjectives – attempt to achieve immortality.
Since behind the Paradice Project has to stand someone extraordinary, the
already mentioned figure of a mad scientist, we have to focus on the person of
Crake: “the biological scientist, who espouses a purely empirical approach
which devalues imagination, mortality and art …” (Howells 2005: 177). Being
a mysterious figure dressed in black, even his nickname has a highly original
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explanation: “Crake is dialect for crow and if, anywhere in fable and myth,
there are no stories that do this bird any credit, Atwood simply adds to its discredit” (Elliott 2003).
Undoubtedly, Crake is a genius, but he is a genius deprived of morality,
a genius for whom the very concept of ethics has only aesthetic and sentimental
values which he despises: “‘Immortality,’ said Crake, ‘is a concept. If you take
“mortality” as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it,
then “immortality” is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the
fear, and you’ll be…’” (Atwood 2003: 303). This unfinished sentence makes it
clear that for Atwood it is not science itself that is the greatest source of all evil
but only, again, the human, man-made factor: “As a novelist, Atwood is as
much engaged with the psychological and emotional complexities of her protagonists as she is with science, and it is the interaction between these two
forces which provides the dynamics of the plot” (Howells 2005: 174). Simultaneously, in a way opposing one of the characteristics of dystopian fiction (especially the one linked with the scientific variation of the genre), she tries to devaluate science: “What [science] is not, is something that can give us the answer
to essentially metaphysical and religious questions, such as why are we here?”
(Atwood qtd. in Bantick 2003); or maybe hers is the attempt to reconcile the
conflict that, according to Lyotard, still exists between science with narratives
(1984: xxiii).
The issue of total control is the next feature of the pre-apocalyptic dystopia
as seen in Oryx and Crake. The society of Atwood’s imagination is divided into
two contrasting categories: those who possess power (or are directly useful for
the power), i.e., mainly scientists, live in closed and strictly guarded areas called
Compounds; all the rest dwell in what is left from the 20th-century big cities,
here named “pleeblands”. In a far too optimistic and child-like way, this division can be explained in the way Jimmy’s father describes it to his then young
son:
Long time ago, in the days of knights and dragons, the kings and dukes had lived in castles,
with high walls and drawbridges and slots on the ramparts so you could pour hot pitch on
your enemies …, and the Compounds were the same idea. Castles for keeping you and your
buddies nice and safe inside, and for keeping everybody else outside. (Atwood 2003: 28)
Of course, this is only partly true as the safety and well-being of the Compounds’ inhabitants are strictly connected with their utility in genetic engineering. Simultaneously, there is also a direct political dimension added to this idea:
as Fiona Tolan states, “Life in the Compounds contains myriads residual references to twentieth-century America” (Tolan 2007: 277), which inscribes the
book in Atwood’s long-lasting critique of the so-called American Dream and
everything that stands behind this notion. On the other hand, dangerous and
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polluted “pleeblands” offer its dwellers (as well as amazed visitors from the
better world, and the novel is narrated from the perspective of such protagonists) definitely more freedom and sometimes brutal truth: “Real musicians on
the street corners, real bands of street urchins. Asymmetries, deformities: the
faces here [in pleeblands] were a far cry from the regularity of the Compounds.
There were even bad teeth” (Atwood 2003: 288). The Compounds’ dwellers are
relatively safer and wealthier, that is true, but they are also very limited, at least
as far as their real perception of the world is concerned.
The most obvious way to circumvent all the safety–freedom restrictions is
the virtual reality, which is nowadays definitely one of the most important interest areas of Atwood’s. As Carol Ann Howells (2005: 175) states, “Though Atwood does not venture into the cyberspace territory …, she does explore the
psychological effects of living in a high-tech world of artificially constructed
reality”. When young, Crake and Jimmy, his best friend and the indirect narrator of the novel, play computer games almost all the time. Then they switch to
just surfing the Net, where they find such sites as hedsoff.com, “which played
live coverage of executions in Asia”; alibooboo.com “with various supposed
thieves having their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick-wearers being
stoned to death by howling crowds, in dusty enclaves that purported to be in
fundamentalist countries in the Middle East”; and the like: “Shortcircuit.com,
brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best; they showed electrocutions
and lethal injections” (Atwood 2003: 82–83).
Later on, there come porn sites, also including child pornography. Howells,
referring to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, comments on it in the
following way: “In Atwood’s satirical version of a world where everything is
a reproduction of a vanished original, human beings are alienated not only from
their environment but also from themselves” (Howells 2005: 176). That is why
pornography, together with paedophilia and prostitution, as seen from
Jimmy/Snowman’s perspective, is presented in a surprisingly neutral way, deprived of any emotions. The same, it is a sign of the fact that “in Oryx and
Crake violence and pornography have been entirely normalized within popular
culture” (Tolan 2007: 285). What Atwood pictures here is the last possible
phase of the decadence, “globalisation’s endgame” (Tolan 2007: 277), a stage
that cannot have any possible continuations, because it is the ultimate end itself.
That was the world as seen and experienced by Crake; it does not have to
come as a surprise that he, the mental superman, decided to put an end to all this
and at least to try to start anew. Here, at the point of the new beginning, two
factors have to meet: Crake’s Paradice Project and Atwood’s post-apocalyptic
dystopia. The latter cannot exist without the former, and vice versa, and the key
to this equation is the new breed of people: the already mentioned Crakers, as
well as the notion of immortality that stands behind them; as Gerber remarks:
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“The mere prolongation of life would be pointless if there was no progress
achieved …. Longer life secures a higher mentality, and both together assure for
the individual a wealth and variety of experiences that in our world can be
experienced by the group” (Gerber 1973: 28). However, when it comes to this
wide scope of possible experiences, the case of the Crakers seems a bit different, since what Crake generates in his new people is rather the conscious displacement of some influence areas, such typically human drives as the urge to
define, or at least to worship, some kind of an Absolute. It is especially vivid in
the case of art and religion when we can see his ultimate defeat; as Crake reminds Jimmy: “‘Watch out for art … As soon as they start doing art, we’re in
trouble’. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake’s view.
Next they’d be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife,
and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war” (Atwood
2003: 361). And it is Jimmy, or Snowman as he tends to call himself in the new
reality, probably the last survivor of the old people that at some point becomes
idolized by the Crake’s improved clones: “[Crakers’] ‘new’ world is not in any
sense a new Eden but a ruined place shadowed by a long history of oppression
and brutality, from Genghis Khan, Dachau, from Rwanda back to the sack of
Jerusalem” (Howells 2005: 183). Therefore, Atwood’s conclusion seems absolutely disillusioned, as her vision of the post-apocalyptic world is far more terrifying than its starting point, i.e., the veiled present.
The better version of our species, namely Crakers themselves, also appears
to disappoint: both by the alluded prognoses concerning their probable development, and their childish unawareness of the surrounding reality that is pictured as barren and dangerous wilderness. However, the writer’s point is quite
clear: “dystopia enables the novelist to safely examine repressive or in some
way negative scenarios before they possibly happen, and in so doing provides
an ‘acting out’ of a potential cultural development on a more fully imagined,
individual and emotional level than would otherwise be available to theorists”
(Tolan 2007: 296). Indeed, suggestive, detailed and logically constructed, Atwood’s warning serves its purposes.
The scenery of the new world after the annihilation of (almost) all mankind
is then far from deserving the name Eden. It is the world after the ultimate biocatastrophe, the 21st-century apocalypse, where Jimmy, “a castaway of sorts”
(Atwood 2003: 41), simply but dramatically tries to survive the attacks of unidentified bio-enhanced animals, as well as the extremely severe weather conditions that slowly but surely seem to overtake him. Nevertheless, it is this dystopian vision of the novel that, at least according to Howells, is “foreshadowed”
by the chronologically previous one (Howells 2005: 174), the one being just
a small exaggeration of the high-tech modernity-obsessed times we are living
in. Whether that is or is not true remains open to discussion, but Howells
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touches here the crucial point of relevance or immediacy: as in the case of all
utopian/dystopian writing, it is definitely easier to feel the power of Atwood’s
slight excessiveness in the pre-apocalyptic sections of Oryx and Crake than the
total detachment of the chronologically later events. As Richard Gerber states,
“[an] anti-utopian view makes a more plausible appeal when the near future is
considered” (1973: 40). Therefore, such a method seems completely understandable, especially when one remembers the term “speculative fiction” (Tolan
2007: 273–274) that Atwood uses (not only) in the case of Oryx and Crake, and
by which she understands discussing the solid contemporary present while only
pretending to write about the future. In other words, it is almost always the
here-and-now references that can influence or even possess readers’ imaginations more vividly and more thought provokingly.
References
Atwood, Margaret 2004: Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context. PMLA 119/3, 513–517.
Atwood, Margaret 2003: Oryx and Crake. London: Bloomsbury.
Bantick, Christopher 2003: Atwood tackles future fears. Sunday Tasmanian. In: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail ED 11/2010.
Cuddon, John Anthony 1998: The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.
London: Penguin Books.
Delany, Samuel R. 1969: About Writing: Five Thousand One Hundred and Seventy Five Words.
Extrapolation 10/2, 52–66.
Elliott, Helen 2003: A perverse way flays the future. The Australian. In: http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail ED 11/2010.
Ferns, Chris 1999: Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Form, Gender in Utopian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Flatow, Ira 2004: Interview: Margaret Atwood discusses science concepts used in the various
novels she’s authored. Talk of the Nation / Science Friday. In: http://web.ebscohost.com/-
ehost/detail ED 11/2010.
Gerber, Richard 1973: Utopian Fantasy. London: Routledge.
Howells, Coral Ann 2005: Margaret Atwood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutcheon, Linda 1988: The Canadian Postmodern. Toronto: Oxford University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 2009: Then You Are Them. London Review of Books. In: www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n17/fredric-jameson/then-you-are-them ED 11/2010.
Jameson, Fredric 1994: The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lyotard, Jean François 1986 /1989/: Defining the Postmodern. In: Postmodernism: ICA Documents 4. London: Free Association Books, n. pag..
Lyotard, Jean François 1984 [1979]: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tolan, Fiona 2007: Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
JAROSŁAW POLAK
OPOLE UNIVERSITY
The discontinuity of time: The world as a reflection
of individual mind in Philip K. Dick’s novel
Eye in the Sky
ABSTRACT. Though Philip K. Dick did not experience much critical attention during his
lifetime, the critical reassessment of his prose has only intensified since his death in 1982. In
his writing, Dick was concerned with fundamental philosophical issues; he probed the
boundaries of reality and studied the conditions of human existence. Influenced by the ideas
of philosophers ranging from Plato and Heraclitus to Hume and Kant as well as by explorations of modern physicists such as Wolfgang Pauli, Dick subjected their theories to close
scrutiny and undertook to implement them in his novels. Such broad intellectual background
allowed Dick to explore alternate construals in a variety of forms. This article examines
Dick’s alternative construals, focusing on one of his less known and acclaimed novels, entitled Eye in the Sky (1957). The theoretical background for this analysis is provided by Paul
Ricoeur’s theory of time and narrative, in particular, by his discussion of narrative identity
and the relationship between fictive and life narratives. This article explores various ways in
which Dick’s text undermines the notion of memory and repetition as reliable agents of mediating time. Moreover, the paper analyses the construction of the alternative universes in
terms of Ricoeur’s notions of prefiguration (mimesis1), configuration (mimesis2) and refiguration (mimesis3). Moreover, this article investigates the ways in which the American writer
produces a rupture in the fabric of time and speculates about the nature of rules by means of
which temporality and historical reality operate. Dick achieves this effect by placing an emphasis on the world as conceived and constructed by an individual mind and the phenomenological perception of time and reality and consequently demonstrates the influence of narratives on human life.
Though Philip K. Dick did not experience much critical attention during his
lifetime, the critical reassessment of his prose has only intensified since his
death in 1982, and Dick has become the focus of what Lawrence Sutin calls
“one of the most remarkable literary reappraisals of modern times” (1996: ix).
Influenced by a wide range of philosophical ideas, Dick explored in his writings
the boundaries of reality and studied the conditions of human existence. His
broad intellectual background allowed him to create and investigate alternate
construals in a variety of forms.
In The Man in the High Castle, Dick employs a form of alternate history
where the Axis Powers won World War II. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch deals with an alternative reality constructed by the means of “Perky Pat
layouts”, through which a realm resembling lost life on Earth is temporarily
recreated by colonists on Mars. Moreover, this work explores the idea of multiple private universes all contained within one created by a god-like entity,
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Palmer Eldritch. In Time Out of Joint, Dick recreates the America of the fifties,
which is both physically constructed for and psychologically induced in the
mind of the novel’s protagonist, Ragle Gumm. Counterclock World depicts
a world where cosmological and phenomenological time flow in opposite directions contrary to human experience.
Regardless of the specific literary convention employed or the nature of the
alternate world constructed in a particular text, the American writer produces
a rupture in the fabric of time and speculates about the nature of rules by means
of which temporality and reality operate. This article examines Dick’s (1957)
alternative construals, focusing on one of his less known and acclaimed novels,
entitled Eye in the Sky.
The analysis touches on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of time and narrative, in
particular on his discussion of narrative identity and the relationship between
fictive and life narratives. This article explores various ways in which Dick’s
text undermines the notion of memory and repetition as reliable agents of mediating time. Moreover, the paper shows the construction of the alternative universes in terms of Ricoeur’s notions of prefiguration (mimesis1), configuration
(mimesis2) and refiguration (mimesis3) (cf. Ricoeur 1990 /1983/: 52–90; Simms
2003: 83–87).
Eye in the Sky opens with a description of the explosion of the Bevatron,
a sort of particle accelerator, an event set in the novel’s primary reality on October 2, 1959. The text flashes back to show Jack Hamilton, a young electronic
engineer from a guided missile factory being interrogated about the pro-leftist
sympathies of his wife, Marsha. Dismissed because of Marsha’s alleged communism, Jack goes with her and Charlie McFyeffe, a chief of security at Jack’s
ex-company, to witness the tests of the Bevatron. The explosion that occurs
sends them, together with a group of four other sightseers and their young AfroAmerican guide, Bill Laws, from their observation platform down into the beam
of accelerated particles. The accident suspends the characters’ experience of
cosmological time and throws them into four successive alternate universes
subordinated to the logic of a subjective world narrative constructed by the person closest to recovering consciousness at a given moment. In order to return to
the consensual environment, the characters have to reconstruct the rules that
govern a particular hallucinatory realm; only then can they bring it to dissolution in hope of restoring the primary reality.
After the accident, Jack Hamilton regains consciousness in a hospital and
discovers that all the victims of the accident have suffered only minor injuries,
suspiciously minor considering the ferocity of the explosion in the Bevatron.
Jack and Marsha have a “nagging sense that something basic [is] out of place”
but initially attribute it to the shock caused by the traumatic event (Dick 2003
/1957/: 23).
The discontinuity of time: The world as a reflection of individual mind
133
During the ride home from the hospital, Hamilton is stung by a bee, an incident to which he attaches no significance until later, when it helps him to uncover the nature of the universe he currently inhabits. Jack and his wife invite
another accident’s casualty, Joan Reiss, to their home where Hamilton has an
argument with his guest and, as he lies to and offends the young woman, a shower of locusts descends on him. This occurrence, unfeasible in the novel’s primary reality, forces the characters to acknowledge that the realm they presently
dwell in is governed by laws different from the ones that they have been habitually accustomed to. The customary preconceptions about reality no longer hold
in this world, and Hamilton has to rediscover what Ricoeur calls the semantics
of action and defines as human “competence to use in a meaningful way the
entire network of expressions and concepts” such as “project, aim, means, circumstances”, consequences, et cetera (1991: 28).
Moreover, not only the “conceptual network of human acting” (Ricoeur
1991: 28) but also his own behaviour seems unfamiliar to Hamilton. Much to
his own surprise, he engages in a conversation about animals’ lack of soul. After he wakes up in the morning, he tries to pray just to realize how awkward and
unnatural this activity seems for him; as Dick writes, “a needling outrage displaced his humble contrition” (2003 /1957/: 36). Jack’s indignation stems from
the fact that his worldview is purely scientific; kneeling seems to him an “undignified, unworthy posture for an adult” (Dick 2003: 36). He recalls that the
“last time he dipped into religion of any variety was in his eighth year” (Dick
2003: 36). In order to grasp the mechanics of this universe, he engages in a “labored reading” of this world’s holy scripture called Bayan of the Second Bab,
but it brings only the abstract realisation of the subject’s complexity (Dick
2003: 36).
Forms and protocols required to address the deity called Bab are for Jack of
the same order as arranging a discussion with his ex-employer, a high-ranking
military official. However, because the narrative is “committed to the possibility of a certain closure of meaning” and its concern is coherence and structure
(Wood 1991: 6), Jack, together with Bill Laws, soon discovers that this world
“makes sense”, in that it has its own rules and laws (Dick 2003: 34). This unity
is guaranteed by emplotment, a central feature of what Ricoeur terms mimesis2.
Emplotment constitutes such a configuration of events, agents and objects in the
field of action that brings those, often heterogeneous, elements into order and
renders them meaningful (Simms 2003: 84–85).
Similar to what Karen Hellekson observes in the case of Dick’s other novel,
The Man in the High Castle, the alternate construal here results in the refiguring
of the past and not in its reassessment; the process of repetition, which typically
provides grounds for understanding reality, becomes highly problematic
(2001: 62–75). Hamilton and other characters have to reinterpret the narrative
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composition that constitutes their world at a given moment through the process
that Ricoeur termed as mimesis1 and defined as the ability to ask questions concerning the semantics of action and pertaining to reasons, agency, cause and
effect relations, and the symbolic mediation that – according to the French
thinker – “gives an initial readability to action” (1991: 29).
Through the workings of mimesis1, Laws and Hamilton unveil the specific
configuration of the elements of the narrative established by the emplotment. In
this realm, blasphemy and hateful comments bring an immediate punishment,
usually in the form of insect attack; charms and relics possess healing powers;
vending machines work on the principle of miracle; prayers mend broken cars;
and most surprising of all, the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Jack, dismissed from his job for Marsha’s pro-leftist sympathies, visits
Electronics Development Agency, where he seeks employment as an engineer.
He tries to follow the concepts from his primary reality, but the process of repetition fails. Jack learns that in this world’s narrative the professional duties of an
electronics engineer include maintaining a communication line between the
Earth and Heaven. Some other tasks of technicians include “piping grace for
every Bablite community in the world” and building “mosques, temples, [and]
altars” (Dick 2003: 48).
Moreover, Jack discovers that engineering is a dangerous profession as the
whimsical Lord gives vent to his wrath at professionals with lightning. The
equipment EDA works on comes straight from Heaven and obtaining it requires
“a mighty lot of praying” (Dick 2003: 48). The questions Hamilton is asked
during his job interview concern only his moral status, and not his knowledge or
skills, and the final decision of hiring him depends on a randomly chosen passage from the holy Bayan of the Second Bab. As an employee of a company
supervised by the deity, Jack’s salary consists of “four linear units toward [his]
Salvation” credited to him every ten days (Dick 2003: 50). He also learns that
his material needs will be provided for, as long as he does not “run short on
faith” (Dick 2003: 50).
Outside the EDA building, a group of technicians employed there accuse
Hamilton of being a heathen and want to subject him to an ordeal by fire. The
young engineer convinces them to resolve the disagreement on a scientific basis, and the conflicted parties decide that each side will have to answer one
question pertaining to applied and theoretical electronics. However, Jack initially does not realise that in this alternate reality information can be delivered
to and removed from the human mind by the whimsical deity. His opponent,
Brady, is the Champion of One True God, and the Lord answers his prayers
depriving Hamilton of knowledge that constitutes the core of his being.
Jack learns that he has to abide by the body of rules governing this realm
and finally manages to defeat his adversary by resorting to the Bayan of the
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Second Bab and accusing all the technicians of acting out of jealousy, which
results in their damnation.
In this incident, Jack undergoes the process of construction of his narrative
identity. Ricoeur describes the formation of such identity as a “constructive
activity”, resulting from the narrative understanding; therefore, the narrative self
is not imposed on the subject but discovered in the process of reading
(1991: 32). The episode portrays Jack successfully resisting the attempt of
having an identity imposed on him and establishing his own self instead. This is
possible only due to his understanding of this universe’s narrative which he
acquired through the analyses of both his experiences in this realm and the text
of the Bayan of the Second Bab.
The other characters of the novel, less acquainted with the binding narrative
structure, suffer partial loss of their identity. Marsha, in punishment for her
alleged communist affiliations, turns into a grotesque monstrosity, with a bloated and shapeless body, stringy fibres instead of hair, and chipped, blackened
nails. Bill Laws, as all Afro-Americans in this world, speaks in a dialect and
“shuffles” (Dick 2003: 50).
As the novel progresses, Hamilton discovers that the person standing behind
this subjective reality is the “white-haired war veteran”, Arthur Silvestre (Dick
2003: 16). Jack confronts Silvestre, which results in a fight against angels which
appear to defend the old man; in the course of the struggle, Arthur is rendered
unconscious and simultaneously the heavenly creatures disappear and the alternate realm is brought to dissolution. However, it soon transpires that the present
reality is nothing more than another alternate construal constituted by another
mind and its subjective narrative of the world. The characters soon uncover the
creator of this realm in the person of Edith Pritchet. In her vision of the world,
only “friendly, helpful, [and] saccharine sweet” things exist, the rest is simply
annihilated (Dick 2003: 124).
People become sexless; factories disappear, together with smog, car horns,
and everything else which Pritchet finds intolerable. In this universe, newspapers contain only a women’s section and do not report on the Cold War because
Russia does not exist. The function of the company that Jack works for is not an
economic venture but consists in delivering culture to the masses. In this realm,
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory defines humans as “healthy and uninhibited” only when they exhibit “no curiosity or interest in sexuality” and describes sex as a “sublimation of the artistic drive” (Dick 2003: 125). Sexual
desire is a mere surrogate form for “the basic, fundamental human urge toward
artistic creativity” (Dick 2003: 125).
This time, the characters, well aware of the nature of the world they are
forced to inhabit, quickly learn how to employ its rules against its creator. Edith
abolishes not individual, specific items, but whole categories of objects, and
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bound by the inherent logic of her own narrative the woman falls prey to the
very convention she has established. For a narrative to preserve unity and plausibility, the process of its configuration (which Ricouer termed as mimesis2) has
to endow the connections between its elements with a relation of necessity (Ricoeur 1990: 64). Hence, when a given phenomenon becomes envisioned in
Pritchet’s mind as disagreeable, the causal continuity of her narrative requires
from her to obliterate the entire class of the phenomena. The characters suggest
to her, at an ever-increasing rate, an unending catalogue of objectionable items,
which results in the final and complete dissolution of Edith’s world.
What follows is a realm that none of the characters, except Joan Reiss, perceive as normal. This universe, described by various critics as truly Lovecraftian in nature (Fitting 1983: 226; Freedom 1995: 7; Vest 2009: 72), is driven
by Joan’s paranoid suspicion that everything and everyone wants to take her
life.
The characters become trapped in Hamilton’s home, assaulted by everyday
objects, and finally by the house itself, as it transforms into a living creature that
wants to feed on its inhabitants. They free themselves, and outside the building
they encounter Joan Reiss, which results in the most significant change of the
characters’ identities. Defined by Reiss’s paranoid narrative of the world, they
metamorphose into insect-like creatures. In an immediately ensuing fight, the
woman is fatally wounded, and as she is slowly dying the characters turn
against each other. Certain tragedy is averted by Joan’s death, which brings her
vision of reality to an end.
The last alternate construal depicted in Dick’s novel presents another dark
image of reality – this time driven by the narrative of a struggle between
“blood-smeared capitalist[s]” and the working class (Dick 2003: 207). The authorship of this world picture, with its houses of prostitution, metallic screech of
jazz, armed soldiers wandering aimlessly, revolutionary slogans, riots, wild
killings and lynching, massacres and bloodsheds, is initially attributed to Marsha, who was accused by Charlie McFyffe of communist sympathies in the
novel’s primary reality. However, when McFyffe undergoes a metamorphosis
into the magnificent figure of “Comrade Commissar” with a massive chest,
arms like pillars of muscle, a square jaw, and eyes flashing righteous fire, it
transpires that this particular realm is his creation.
In the course of a violent fight that ensues between the characters, Charlie is
rendered unconscious, and the characters seem to return to the cosmological
flow of time. They regain consciousness in the Bevatron among the heaps of
concrete and the shards of metal and glass. The following narrative closely resembles the novel’s initial consensus reality; yet, as some critics have pointed
out, the text provides a space for an alternative understanding (cf. Butler
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1995: 78–79; Fitting 1983: 230; Jakaitis 1995: 180; Palmer 2003: 208; Vest
2009: 80).
Through various alternate construals created in his novel Eye in the Sky,
Dick engages in a discussion about the influence of subjective narratives on the
construction of consensual reality and human identity. By forcing his characters
to live in, read, and interpret variously constructed worlds, Dick enables the
reader to achieve a deep and innovative understanding of the relationship between the narrative and the lived experience. This correlation is crucial for Ricoeur’s notion of mimesis3, which he describes as the intersection of the world
of the text and of the world of the reader, a reconfiguration of life by the narrative (1990: 52; 1991: 26; Simms 2003: 87).
In Eye in the Sky, Dick explores a new dimension of Ricoeur’s thesis that
through “the act of reading [the reader] constructs the unity of the traversal from
mimesis1, to mimesis3, by way of mimesis2” (1990 /1983/: 53, italics are mine:
JP). The novel externalizes the subjective narratives of the world and configures
them as a lived experience for the characters, which unveils the workings of
Ricoeur’s categories of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration both
within the text and in the reality outside it.
Dick’s text repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to the relation between
the narrative and reality. In McFyffe’s universe, words fall from the sky and
literally become lethal. In Silvestre’s vision permeated by Bab, a prophet
Horace Clamp plans a holy war against Hamilton’s primary reality in the form
of television programmes, movies, books, and recorded testimonials. Moreover,
the longer Dick’s characters reside under the influence of a particular narrative
or the more radical the vision of the world a given narrative delineates, the more
completely assimilated they become.
Most significantly, however, the fact that McFeyffe’s subjective worldview,
namely his unfounded accusations against Marsha, infects the novel’s primary
reality suggests that this reality is subjected to the same processes as the alternate construals created by the individual narratives. Thereby, Dick’s text points
to the fact that the mechanisms governing literary narrative and reality are identical and differ only in the extent of the individual’s influence on the lived experience. Dick not only reveals that the semantics of action and human identity are
defined by social, cultural, political, and economic narratives but also exhibits
narrative’s power to create alternative realities that affect consensual environment. Dick foregrounds such understanding and awareness of narrative in Eye
in the Sky by forcing the reader to experience the world as conceived purely and
constructed only by individual minds of his characters which, as Hellekson observes, “reinforces subjectivity of time over [its] ‘mechanical and uniform’”
understanding and “throws the notion of reality … into flux” (2001: 63).
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References
Butler, Andrew M. 1995: Ontology and ethics in the writings of Philip K. Dick. Diss.University of
Hull. British Library Electronic Theses Online Service (Ethos). http://ethos.bl.uk ED
06/2010.
Dick, Philip Kindred 2003 /1957/: Eye in the Sky. New York: Vintage.
Fitting, Peter 1983: Reality as ideological construct: A Reading of five novels by Philip K.Dick.
Science-Fiction Studies 10, 219–236.
Freedom, Carl 1995: Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.
In: Samuel J. Umland (ed.), 7–18.
Hellekson, Karen 2001: The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press.
Jakaitis, Jake 1995: Two cases of conscience: Loyalty and race in The Crack in Space and
Counter-Clock World. In: Samuel J. Umland (ed.), 169–196.
Palmer, Christopher 2003: Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul 1990 /1983/: Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Trans. Kathleen Mclaughlin, David Pellauer. London: The University of Chicago Press. [Temps et recit. Paris: Seuil].
Ricoeur, Paul 1991: Life in quest of narrative. In: David Wood (ed.), 20–33.
Simms, Karl 2003: Routledge Critical Thinkers: Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge.
Sutin, Lawrence 1996: Introduction. In: Lawrence Sutin (ed.) 1996: The Shifting Realities of Philip K.
Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. London: Vintage, ix–xx.
Umland, Samuel J. (ed.) 1995: Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press.
Vest, Jason P. 2009: The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick. Toronto: Scarecrow Press.
Wood, David 1991: Introduction: Interpreting narrative. In: David Wood (ed.), 1–19.
Wood, David (ed.) 1991: On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. London: Routledge.
MARCIN RUSNAK
Blessings and curses of the silver screen: Film
adaptations of Coraline and Stardust by Neil Gaiman
ABSTRACT. In recent years one was able to witness a great commercial and critical success
of film adaptations of fantasy stories – The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series may
serve as two brilliant examples. Once special effects and digital programming made filming
virtually any imaginable scene possible, Hollywood began to get more and more attracted to
speculative fiction as a source of inspiration. This paper will examine Coraline and Stardust,
assessing their strengths and weaknesses as movie adaptations. It will reflect on the elements
which have been left out or added in the process of adaptation – for example, additional
characters (Wybie in Coraline) or characters whose role was significantly expanded (Captain
Shakespeare in Stardust) – and consider possible reasons for such alterations. Finally, it will
investigate the influence such changes might have on the symbolism involved in the stories
as well as study to what extent the same interpretation can be put on both the screenplays and
the novels of Coraline and Stardust.
With the ground-breaking success, both critical and commercial, of film
adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, Hollywood came
to understand the potential behind fantasy stories. What once had seemed an
unfilmable material could finally be done due to digital programming, special
effects, and larger budgets.
Numerous adaptations of other works followed: three parts of Clive Staples
Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956), Christopher Paolini’s Eragon
(2002), Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (1995)1, and others. However,
even such widely acclaimed adaptations as Peter Jackson’s version of The Lord
of the Rings provoked controversies. As most agree that, in relation to book
originals, films constitute alternate construals – a sort of variation on the story
and a retelling done by means of a different technique of presentation – all alterations to the story itself prove problematic. Therefore some critics bemoaned
scenes being skipped or added, others disagreed with visual representations or
the choice of actors; yet others considered the film a misinterpretation of the
original story.
This paper will focus on movie adaptations of two fantasy stories by Neil
Gaiman, the author of such works as American Gods (2001), Good Omens
(1990; written in collaboration with Terry Pratchett) or the Sandman comic
1
The adaptations being respectively Andrew Adamson’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008), and Michael Apted’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
(2010); Stefen Fangmeier’s Eragon (2006); and Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass (2007).
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book series (1989–1996). The discussion will cover Young Adult novels Stardust (1999) and Coraline (2002) as well as their same-titled adaptations from
2007 and 2009 respectively; it will assess their strengths and weaknesses as
filmic versions. It will reflect on the elements which have been left out or added
in the process of adaptation and consider possible reasons for such alterations.
Finally, it will investigate the influence these changes may have on the reading
of the stories as well as study to what extent the same interpretation can be put
on both the movies and the novels of Coraline and Stardust. The aim is to suggest that both stories – although enriched in some aspects – have been impoverished or distorted by the filmmakers as far as features such as depth and educative value are concerned.
Let us begin with a brief summary of both plots. Stardust tells the tale of
Tristran Thorn, a boy on the verge of manhood who ventures into the magical
realm of Faerie in order to find a fallen star. The star turns out to have taken the
form of a beautiful lady called Yvaine and – not surprisingly – is not very happy
about being captured and dragged to some faraway hamlet. Obviously, the journey they undertake is full of peril – as there are some who want the fallen star
for their own malicious needs – and during its course Tristran and Yvaine learn
to love each other.
On the other hand, Coraline – often compared to Carol's Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland – has little to do with romantic love and fantastic quests. Its
protagonist, a young girl named Coraline, moves with her parents to a big old
house in the countryside. However, they do not live alone: the house is big
enough to accommodate some other, quite remarkable tenants.
Coraline's parents are hard working people who pay little attention to their
daughter and – as it is summertime – the girl is extremely bored. The twist in
the tale comes when she finds a secret door which leads to another world; seemingly an alternative version of the one she lives in. It is in this alternative world
that she meets her other parents – people who treat her with love and affection.
However, a dark shadow lingers over this universe of superficial bliss: everyone
there has buttons instead of eyes. When Coraline returns to her real home, she
finds out that her mother and father are gone and that she will have to fight
them back from her other parents.
Before moving to the analysis of the film adaptations of these two stories, it
might prove beneficial to take a closer look at the very issue of transforming
novels into movies. Disputes between those who expect a film adaptation to be
as close to the original as possible and those who argue for the artistic freedom
of both directors and screenwriters are not restricted to the multitude of fans. It
is also film and literary critics who often cannot agree on the actual purpose and
acceptable form of an adaptation.
Blessings and curses of the silver screen
141
Andrzej Weseliński in his book The Modern Novel and Film says: “Some
critics claim that adaptation of fiction into film is committed to a complete fidelity, while other critics contend that film and literature are separate artistic
entities and, therefore, a film adaptation is independent of its source”
(1999: 25). However, the most up-to-date research seems to suggest that the
latter is critically more acceptable. In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon
provides a definition of adaptation as “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works, a creative and interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging” and “an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted
work” (2006: 8–9). She also emphasizes the fact that “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative – a work that is second without being secondary”
(2006: 9).
Although infidelity to the original works of art has been criticized by nonacademic audiences for years, most scholars dealing with the theory of adaptation agree that introduction of some changes is inevitable, especially when
a text is transferred from one medium to another. J. Dudley Andrew presents the
opinion of a famous Hungarian film critic, Béla Balázs, as follows: “The filmmaker who delves into another artwork for his subject matter does nothing
wrong so long as he tries to reshape it via the form-language of cinema”
(1976: 87).
Andrew observes that a similar view is expressed by a French critic, Jean
Mitry: “Hence the impossibility of true adaptation. One may try to retain in
a film the structure of a novel but one must do this by means quite foreign to the
novel and to the reading experience” (1976: 208). Weseliński also criticizes the
fidelity approach – according to which the adaptation should be as close and as
true to the original as possible – by stating:
First, [the fidelity approach] tends to ignore the idea of adaptation as an example of
convergence among the arts. Second, it fails to make a serious distinction between what may
be transferred from novel to film and what will require more complex process of adaptation.
Third, it marginalizes those production determinants which are not relevant to the novel but
may have a strong impact on the film version. (Weseliński 1999: 27)
Therefore, infidelity in the process of adaptation should not be deemed inappropriate or unacceptable – on the contrary, it is essential if the transformed
text is to be successful. Most critics imply that the filmmakers should adhere to
the spirit, tone, and meaning of the original and not so much to its structure and
individual elements of plot. This is, to some extent, similar to one of the most
popular theoretical approaches to translation – the concept that the aim of the
translator is not to find the equivalent of a given word, but to reproduce the
sense, the feeling, the content of the whole. Linda Hutcheon writes that “[j]ust
as there is no such thing as a literal translation, there can be no literal adaptation” (2006: 16). She comments further on this issue by saying: “[t]he adapted
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text, therefore, is not something to be reproduced, but rather something to be
interpreted and recreated, often in a new medium. It is what one theorist calls
a reservoir of instructions … that the adapter can use or ignore” (2006: 84).
However, there are limits to the alterations the filmmakers carry out while
adapting a work of art. Andrew claims that the changes which are a result of the
transfer of the story from one medium to another should not deprive the text of
its uniqueness, of the features that make it stand out (1976: 175). One might say
that what matters is not the change, but its effect on the final work of art – what
one may and should consider is whether the director's touch enriches the story
or impoverishes it; whether the changes give it a new meaning, and if yes, then
what this new meaning is.
Toby Miller, the editor of A Companion to Film Theory, writes in the introduction to his work: “each time a director selects a location or angle, or asks for
a script to be rewritten, she or he is operating from various implied understandings of space, time, vision, and meaning” (2004 /1999/: 3). What the critics
seem to imply is that as long as various elements of the story benefit from these
“understandings”, the adaptation – independently of its fidelity to the primary
text – may be considered successful.
In case of both Stardust and Coraline, the script altered numerous elements
of the original story: some changes are minor details (such as the color of protagonists' hair or – in most cases – a line of dialogue) and will not be discussed
here, while some prove to be of significance. Still, one may easily divide the
latter type into the changes which result directly from the transfer of the story to
a different medium and the changes which influence the reading of the story
itself.
Stardust was adapted into a film in 2007 by Matthew Vaughn and featured
several well known actors such as Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire
Danes, and Mark Strong. At the moment of its appearance, reviewers varied in
their opinion about Vaughn's work: Stephen Holden (2007) disliked the choice
of actors and called the film a “sprawling, effects-laden fairy tale with the thundering stamina of a marathon horse race”; James Christopher (2007), on the
other hand, pointed to the actors as the saving grace of this “mad fairytale”
whose plot is “pure gibberish”.
What the audience actually get is an adventure story set in a fantastic universe, including a very distinct love theme, and filled with – not only, but
mostly – black humor. This last feature is the first of the important elements in
which the adaptation differs from the original. While the humor present in the
novel is subtle, ironic, and intelligent, the one viewers encounter in the film is
very straightforward, full of sardonic remarks, and comes close to the verge of
what some might consider bad taste. There are plenty of examples: the dead
sons of the Lord of Stormhold comment on the deadly fight between their alive
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brothers as one might comment on a sport event; one of the ghosts always appears with an axe stuck in his head; Lord Septimus pretends to have been poisoned and treats the attempt at his own assassination as something hilarious.
However, the humor in the film is not restricted to mocking death only: the
film is perhaps supposed to be much funnier than the book and in many cases it
is so. One may find many additional scenes, which result in a burst of laughter
and are not to be found in the novel: when Tristran gets beaten by a guard who
is not only old, but rather ancient, or when after a terrific run through the forest
he manages to catch up with a riding coach, to jump onto it… and rebound from
it. Probably the funniest scene in the film comes with the character of Captain
Shakespeare (played by Robert De Niro), the leader of a pirate-like crew of
lightning hunters. Instead of a ruthless corsair, he turns out to be an effeminate
aficionado of music, cooking, and female clothing. What is more important, the
comical effect would be most probably lost if he was not played by De Niro,
a world-famous actor with a reputation for roles of rough, highly masculine, and
often brutal characters.
However, with Captain Shakespeare one might move to the discussion of
changes which influence the reading of the story. De Niro's character helps Tristran and Yvaine for two reasons: firstly, because he wants to learn as much
about England as possible and he can get this knowledge from Tristran and,
secondly, because he enjoys the company of young, interesting people. His
counterpart in the novel, Captain Johannes Alberic, aids Tristran and Yvaine
because he is a member of the mysterious Fellowship of the Castle. Gaiman
uses him in a way that allows the readers to get a glimpse of a theme which
otherwise is not spoken of explicitly, that is the fight between good and evil
(2009 /1999/: 183).
While the movie is full of characters whose actions are motivated by some
sort of their own gain, the novel hints at the fact that there are two groups fighting one another: the Lilim being the evil faction and the Fellowship of the Castle being the good faction. This way, Tristran's quest is placed in a broader context, and the help he receives from the captain of lightning hunters seems more
justified.
Tristran himself acts differently in the film and in the novel. In the adaptation, he is less helpful, naive, and kind-hearted than in the original. When he
needs to leave the star alone for a couple of moments, in the book he takes her
word not to run away, while in the film he chains her to a tree. When the star
escapes in the novel, Tristran is given advice by a nymph, who says, “'If you
had kept her chained, and she had escaped her chains, then there is no power on
earth or sky could ever make me help you … But you unchained her, and for
that I will help you'” (Gaiman 2009 /1999/: 142). Similarly, in the movie version, he obtains Lord Primus’s help because he is insistent and pitiable, while in
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the novel he earns it by aiding Primus in trouble (Gaiman 2009 /1999/: 144,
150). Therefore, Tristran’s eventual success is not so much a result of his virtues and deeds as of Providence.
The finale of the movie is what seems most controversial in comparison to
the original. The screenplay offers an ending much more elaborate, more entertaining, filled with action, tension, and lots of fighting, while the novel comes
nowhere near such a powerful climax. However, it may seem that the filmmakers exchanged one thing for another – in this case meaning for action.
Firstly, the movie lacks the idea – which is present in the novel – that the
witch-queen fails in capturing the star because of the curse she herself has cast
beforehand on one of the other characters; the final failure turns out to be her
own fault. Secondly, Tristran, whose coming of age the story is supposed to
show, does not fully rise to the challenge in the film: while his ally, Lord Septimus, is fighting three witch-queens on his own, instead of aiding him, Tristran
is hiding in the back of the hall.
In the novel, Tristran symbolically proves that he has reached adulthood by
refusing to carry out his mother's bidding and by deciding to lead a life of his
own, in his own way – and that is absent in the movie as well. Finally, the idea
of the cost that the good have to pay to defeat evil and deserve future prosperity
is nowhere to be found in the movie. Tristran's and Yvaine's wounds are fully
healed and after successful rule both of them move to live forever as stars on
a night sky. In the original Stardust, Tristran has little use of his burnt hand until
the end of his life (Gaiman 2009 /1999/: 246–247), and after his death, Yvaine
is in for a lonely eternity of walking with a limp (Gaiman 2009 /1999/: 248) –
as she cannot die, nor move back to her original domain, the sky.
As far as differences between the novel and the film are concerned, there is
one more, fairly important, which should probably be mentioned. It is the idea
of the retreat of magic, the phenomenon that theorists of Tolkien would call the
“thinning”. Just as in The Lord of the Rings, the novel Stardust shows us
a world from which the magic is slowly escaping, or at least moving away from
the village Wall and the gap between the realms of humans and of the Faerie.
One of the characters, Madame Semele, says about the customers at the
market during which the beings from both sides of the wall are able to meet and
barter: “Fewer of them and fewer of them every nine-year … Mark my words,
soon enough this market will be just a memory” (Gaiman 2009 /1999/: 228–
229). The other sign of thinning comes with the ever-lasting rule of Yvaine at
Stormhold – rule which ends the thousands-of-year-long succession of the
Lords of Stormhold. In the adaptation, no such thing can be found: as mentioned before, Tristran and Yvaine ultimately become stars, and there is no sign
of a growing barrier between the two worlds as most of the Wall’s folk attend
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the crowning ceremony of Tristran's and Yvaine's hand in hand with the folk of
the Faerie.
What the viewers of Stardust get is, therefore, a highly entertaining film,
offering more humor and action than the book original. However, the changes
in Tristran’s character, blurring of the theme of the fight between good and evil,
as well as the lack of the novel’s depth constitute a noticeable drawback and
most probably result in a different reading of some aspects of the story. Linda
Hutcheon observes that “themes are perhaps the easiest story elements to see as
adaptable across media and even genres or framing context” (2006: 10–11). If
one agrees with such a stance, the changes introduced by the filmmakers of
Stardust seem both impoverishing to the story and difficult to explain.
Coraline was adapted into a film in 2009 by Henry Selick. Made as a stopmotion 3D movie, it combined one of the most traditional types of film animation with cutting edge technology. As a result, the film was a box office success
comparable to Stardust,2 but it received much greater acclaim, winning several
prestigious awards and being nominated for an Academy Award.
The filmic departures from the novel Coraline are in most cases of a similar
sort. Just like the black humor in Stardust, there are some aspects of the movie
that are hardly present in the book original, and yet their presence seems to have
little influence on the reading of the story. Firstly, the atmosphere of the film is
much more gloomy and scary, especially when combined with the powerful,
frantic music score. Secondly, the meeting between Coraline and Wybie and the
frightening shreds of information he gives her are very much in the mood easily
found in horror films. The tension is yet increased by the grotesque appearance
of some characters (e.g. Mr Bobinsky, much more prominent than in the book)
as well as the ominous quote from Hamlet during the performance of Miss
Spink and Miss Forcible. One would probably agree that the film has much
more potential as a bloodcurdling story than the book original, while retaining
most of Gaiman's subtle humor.
Moreover, these traces of horror in the film Coraline are accompanied by
other strictly cinematic features: the other world, to which the protagonist finds
the secret passage, is presented as full of magic and wonders, while the one
found in the novel appears much more ordinary. Obviously, the idea behind this
change was to entertain and amaze the young audience; the purpose was also
most likely to excuse additional scenes of fighting straight from an action movie
– dramatic and breathtaking, but meaningless in terms of the interpretation of
the entire tale. Whether the film truly benefited from such treatment remains
uncertain, as Mike Ashley in his paper “Coraline – A Quest for Identity” states
2
According to Box Office Mojo, a website devoted to the box office results of films.
<http://www.boxofficemojo.com/>
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that the story presented in the book makes a huge, shocking impression precisely because the fantastic remains intangible and sublime (2007: 172).
The adaptation offers a handful of other changes which prove significant.
The first of these is the aforementioned character of Wybie, Coraline's new
friend, who is completely absent in the novel. He constitutes a cowardly, halfcrazy male counterpart to the rather down-to-earth, self-confident protagonist,
and yet – until the finale – it seems that his only reason to be there is to provide
Coraline and the audience with chilling insight into the history of the house.
Why one should consider his presence in the film so important shall be discussed a bit further on.
Secondly, Coraline – similarly to Tristran in filmic Stardust – is presented
in a different light than in Gaiman's masterpiece. As Richard Gooding observes,
her greatest problem and characterizing feature is the boredom that she has to
face in the new house, with parents who are so occupied with work that they
have no time for her, and she is simply lacking a playmate (2009: 396). However, what seems perfectly plausible in the book provokes controversies as far
as the film’s script is concerned – if she really needed a playmate, she should
act differently once Wybie enters the stage.
Nothing of that sort takes place, and as a result the perception of her character must differ in the film and in the novel. In addition to her being a bored
child, in the adaptation there is an aura of selfishness around her, best visible in
her relation to other characters. Coraline is not worried when her other mother
sews the other Wybie’s mouth so that he keeps silent; nor does she care about
her real parents’ feelings when she decides to take a plunge into the other world
behind the secret door. Most importantly, near the finale of the story, she throws
the cat – another of her allies – at her other mother, which enables her to run
away. In the novel, she waits for the cat to pass the threshold and only then
closes the door to the other world (Gaiman 2003 /2002/: 153-154). In the adaptation, she does not hesitate and closes the door as soon as she is safe. How her
ally manages to get to the real world remains a mystery.
Finally, the very end of the story is changed, and, although the difference is
nowhere as huge as in the case of Stardust, this departure from the original is
extremely significant. The entire issue of constructing or losing one's identity,
which seems integral to the novel and which is discussed in detail by such
scholars as Mike Ashley (2007) and David Rudd (2008), turns out to be incidental and of minor significance in the film. In the book the final success of
Coraline is due to her own creativity, cunning, and courage, and the ultimate
defeat of her other mother is accomplished by means of a trick.3 In the movie
3
Rudd states that Coraline defeats her other mother because she is able to prove her maturity
by pretending to be childish, which is of great importance in the light of the entire issue of
identity (2008: 167).
147
however, the audience receives another scene of physical struggle in which it is
only thanks to the unexpected arrival of Wybie that Coraline stays alive and
may rejoice after such fateful events.
Philip Pullman, in his review of Gaiman's novel, writes, “there is the tender
and beautifully judged ending; and above all, there is Coraline herself, brave
and frightened, self-reliant and doubtful, and finally triumphant” (2002). It may
seem that the filmmakers deprived their work of these two elements, swapping
them for what one might find in a multitude of other stories: a fight in which
a boy and a girl defeat the agent of evil thanks to cooperation.
In his review, David Edelstein (2009) says that “Selick botches the climax
by having the boy roar back and deprive Coraline of her ultimate triumph” and
it seems a well-justified opinion. J. Dudley Andrew provides the following
opinion of a French critic, André Bazin: “Bazin implies that the masterworks of
world literature were cut down like so many redwoods to be fed to the sawmills
in Hollywood and elsewhere. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo necessarily came out looking exactly like one another; worse, they
looked like every other film of the period” (1976: 175). The case of Coraline
seems disturbingly similar: the elements of the film that contribute to its
uniqueness are here rejected or diminished so that the plot may become more
like that of the numerous other productions of the day.
As far as the story’s ending is concerned, one might add one more feature
which is changed. In the book, the final reunion between Coraline and her real
parents is described in a way which implies that their future relationship might
prove different than before. Although nothing is said directly, compromises are
made by both sides: the parents show their daughter more affection and pay
more attention to her, while she becomes more patient and obedient.
In the movie, the compromises are made by one side only: it is the parents
who begin to treat Coraline better, they buy her things she wants, and throw her
a party with the food she likes. In the adaptation, the heroine is presented as
a triumphant winner who gets all, and one cannot be sure whether she has actually learned anything from the entire adventure.
It seems obvious that such changes provide the audience with a different
story than the one known from the book. What is important, the differences do
not necessarily have to be the result of the process of adaptation. J. Dudley Andrew states, “The story can be the same if the narrative units (characters, events,
motivations, consequences, context, viewpoint, imagery, and so on) are produced equally in two works” (1984: 103).
However, that is not the case with Coraline, just as it is not with Stardust.
Selick and his crew show the protagonist's selfish behavior as something normal
and acceptable. Moreover, while Coraline is surrounded with friends and allies
who are willing to risk a lot for her sake, the filmmakers do not demand a simi-
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lar sacrifice on the side of the protagonist. Coraline is a heroine who is often
offered help, but for an ordinary spectator it might prove difficult to say what
she has done to deserve such devotion.
Just like Stardust, Coraline’s adaptation is similar to the original, but in no
way identical. From a critical point of view that is a preferable situation, as
Linda Hutcheon writes that an adaptation “is not a copy in any mode of reproduction, mechanical or otherwise. It is repetition but without replication, bringing together the comfort of ritual and recognition with the delight of surprise
and novelty. As adaptation it involves both memory and change, persistence
and variation” (2006: 173). While some changes, mostly those resulting from
the transfer of the stories to another medium, may prove beneficial to both productions (humor and ending full of tension in Stardust, gloomy atmosphere in
Coraline), there are a number of departures from the original stories which are
difficult to understand or explain.
Presenting the protagonists in a different way; forcing them to make different choices; and attributing different consequences to their actions – all of this
leads to an altered reading of the entire stories. Moreover, the changes that reduce the uniqueness of the two tales and bring them closer to other productions
(vide the ending of Coraline) can hardly be treated as anything but an impoverishment of the original text.
In his review of Coraline, Philip Pullman writes, “Gaiman is too intelligent
and subtle to invoke the supernatural” (2002). It seems that the filmmakers invoked a bit too much of everything in their effort to make the movies entertaining and lost a bit of the subtle depth and richness that are responsible for the
respect Gaiman’s output receives nowadays from critics and fans alike.
References:
Andrew, J. Dudley 1976: The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London: Oxford University
Press.
Andrew, J. Dudley 1984: Concepts in Film Theory. London: Oxford University Press.
Ashley, Mike 2007: Coraline – A quest for identity. In: Darrell Schweitzer 2007. The Neil Gaiman
Reader. Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press, 171–174.
Christopher, James 2007: Stardust review. The Times. In: http://entertainment.timeson-line.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/article2678884.ece ED 08.2010.
Edelstein, David 2009: What you see is what you get. New York Magazine. In: http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/53785/ ED 08.2010.
Gaiman, Neil 2003 /2002/: Coraline. London: Bloomsbury.
Gaiman, Neil 2009 /1999/: Stardust. New York: HarperCollins.
Gooding, Richard 2009: “Something Very Old and Very Slow”: Coraline, uncanniness, and narrative Form. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 33(4), 390–407.
Holden, Stephen 2007: When Stars (Celestial) Fall, and Stars (Hollywood) Fly. The New York
Times. In: http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/movies/10star.html ED 08.2010.
Hutcheon, Linda 2006: A Theory of Adaptation. New York, London: Routledge.
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Miller, Toby 2004 /1999/: Introduction. In: Toby Miller, Robert Stam 2004 /1999/: A Companion
to Film Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1–8.
Pullman, Philip 2002: Review of Coraline. Guardian. In: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/31/booksforchildrenandteenagers.neilgaiman ED 08.2010.
Rudd, David 2008: An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman's Coraline and Questions of Identity. Children's
Literature in Education 39, 159–168.
Selick, Henry, dir. 2009: Coraline. Laika Entertainment/Focus Features.
Vaughn, Matthew, dir. 2007: Stardust. Paramount Pictures.
Weseliński, Andrzej 1999: The Modern Novel and Film. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu
Warszawskiego.
MONIKA SADOWSKA
UNIWERSYTET ŚLĄSKI W KATOWICACH
Na granicy realności i fantastyki – przestrzeń
podzielona w Poczwarce Doroty Terakowskiej
STRESZCZENIE. Poczwarka Doroty Terakowskiej jest odpowiedzią na towarzyszącą człowiekowi od zawsze potrzebę marzenia. W powieści, lokującej się na granicy fantastyki i realności, pisarka przedstawia trzy przestrzenie, zbudowane na zasadzie opozycji i nierozerwalnie ze sobą splecione, w których koncentruje się akcja: dom, strych i rajski („alternatywny”) ogród głównej bohaterki powieści, niepełnosprawnej Myszki (tak dziewczynkę z
zespołem Downa nazywa pieszczotliwie matka). Artykuł dotyczy przede wszystkim relacji
między światem rzeczywistym bohaterów powieści a stworzonym przez dziewczynkę światem alternatywnym, wykorzystującym popularny w kulturze europejskiej motyw rajskiego
ogrodu czy ikonę kultury popularnej – plastikową lalkę Barbie, łącząc tym samym w sobie
to, co rzeczywiste, z tym, co wyobrażone. Myszka, przebywając na strychu, początkowo jest
jedynie obserwatorem kolejnych etapów stworzenia, analogicznych do etapów stworzenia
świata opisywanych w Księdze Rodzaju. Wkrótce jednak zaczyna czynnie współuczestniczyć
w jego tworzeniu (doradza Głosowi) i modyfikowaniu elementów już powstałych. Pojawiające się zwierzęta i rośliny, a także postaci prarodziców, stanowią połączenie przeżyć i doświadczeń, przeniesionych przez Myszkę z realnego świata. Powieść staje się w ten sposób
nie tylko próbą zmierzenia się z niepełnosprawnością dziecka i z nietolerancją otoczenia, ale
także wariacją na temat przynoszących nadzieję i mnożących się w nieskończoność światów
alternatywnych.
„Zdolność marzenia jest talentem koniecznym” – stwierdza Jan Błoński
(1975: 17) w Przedmowie do Wyobraźni poetyckiej Gastona Bachelarda. To
właśnie ona pozwala dotrzeć badaczowi do intymnej istoty „wyobrażonego”
i dzięki niej przedstawiany w obrazach mikrokosmos „poszerza się do obrazów
pałacu, labiryntu lub ogrodu … albo pomniejsza do ascetycznej jamy, piwnicy
czy szałasu” (Błoński 1975: 18).
W Poczwarce Doroty Terakowskiej można zaobserwować trzy przestrzenie,
zbudowane na zasadzie opozycji i nierozerwalnie ze sobą splecione, w których
koncentruje się akcja: dom, strych i rajski („alternatywny”) ogród głównej bohaterki powieści, Myszki. Ponieważ w pierwszej kolejności ciało, w drugiej zaś
– dom wyznaczają podstawowe egzystencjalne doświadczenie w porządkowaniu świata, stając się jego centrum, punktem, jak wskazuje Piotr Kowalski
(2007: 85), do którego odnosi się wszelkie inne relacje, mieszkanie człowieka
w ujęciu Michała Głowińskiego (1990: 139) urasta do rangi uniwersalnego modelu w budowaniu obrazu Wszechświata.
Z kolei motyw ogrodu, będący zwykle według Marzenny Jakubczak jedynie
„unikalnym sposobem przekształcenia natury, przejęcia kontroli nad życiodajną
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mocą ziemi i poddawania jej regułom obranym przez człowieka” (2002: 43),
w tym wypadku staje się swoistą formą wymknięcia się regułom ograniczającym człowieka, próbą ucieczki w lepszy świat, otwarty na inne możliwości,
łącząc w sobie to, co rzeczywiste, z tym, co wyobrażone.
Konstrukt alternatywny (kolejna wyobrażeniowa trawestacja rajskiego
ogrodu), któremu w dużej mierze jest podporządkowana powieść Doroty Terakowskiej, obnaża mechanizmy kultury, którym – chcąc nie chcąc – poddaje się
każdy z nas. Samo pojęcie alternatywnego konstruktu zawiera definicję ucieczki, odejścia od przyjętych norm i uwarunkowań, zapowiedź pewnego nowatorskiego rozwiązania, które w dość dużym stopniu zastąpi i zrekompensuje
wszystkie braki występujące w niezbyt przyjaznej dla człowieka rzeczywistości.
Szczególnie w literaturze konstrukt alternatywny, przyjmujący często formę
snutej opowieści (a momentami alternatywnej baśni), niejednokrotnie pełni
funkcję terapeutyczną, z jednej strony, obnażając nasze wewnętrzne potrzeby,
pragnienia, z drugiej zaś strony, uwalnia tkwiące w nas głęboko obawy i lęki,
paradoksalnie uzmysławiając czytelnikowi, że ucieczka w świat alternatywny
jest tak naprawdę niemożliwa. Mikroświat bohaterów (szczególnie Myszki)
wpływa na makroświat, ten z kolei (zdominowany przez różne media, popkulturę, mechanizmy reklamy) wpływa na odczucia i wrażenia występujące w mikroświecie bohaterów. Symbioza obu tych światów jest nieunikniona i pozbawiona innej alternatywy.
Z pewnością niezwykle interesujące są momenty mediacji i przejścia –
przekraczania granicy między światem zewnętrznym i wewnętrznym, jednocześnie zaś między fantastyką i realnością. W tym wypadku światem realnym będzie skrupulatnie i precyzyjnie nakreślona – na wzór świata współczesnego
czytelnikowi – codzienność niepełnosprawnej Myszki i jej rodziny (ze wszystkimi ograniczeniami i przeszkodami, które uniemożliwiają jej uczestniczenie
w życiu społecznym).
Z kolei fantastyka w Poczwarce reprezentuje pierwotne znaczenie tego
słowa, odpowiadające światu fikcyjnemu, wyobrażonemu przez Myszkę, zawierającemu elementy baśniowości i cudowności, o których pisze na przykład Roger Caillois (1967: 36). Tym samym odbiega od dwóch dominujących w kulturze odczytań pojęcia „fantastyka”: fantastyki naukowej, charakteryzowanej
między innymi przez Antoniego Smuszkiewicza (1982), i fantastyki grozy,
skupiającej się przede wszystkim na „mechanizmach grozy” oraz na typologii
tematów i motywów odczytywanych przy użyciu terminologii psychoanalitycznej (Brzostek 2009: 9).
Jak zauważa wspomniany wyżej Kowalski (2007: 101): „Na granicy dzielącej świat zewnętrzny i wewnętrzny znajdują się otwory, które umożliwiają przemieszczanie się między tymi różnymi przestrzeniami. Otwarte drzwi mogą
łączyć, zamknięte – izolować dwa różne światy: obszary żywych i umarłych,
Na granicy realności i fantastyki
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ziemian i bogów. Oznacza to, iż drzwi, brama, wrota wiążą się nie tylko z fizycznym przekraczaniem granicy, ale także z wszelkimi przejściami i przekształceniami”.
Myszka, będąca jeszcze dzieckiem, podobnie jak inne „istoty «bezpłciowe»,
niedojrzałe i nie ukształtowane, może posiadać zdolności magiczne i wróżebne,
jako że łatwo znajduje kontakt z innym światem (a także zwierzętami), skąd
pochodzi wszelka wiedza o przyszłości” (zob. Kowalski 2007: 117). Dzięki tym
zdolnościom jest w stanie wkroczyć w alternatywną rzeczywistość, a przez
swoje doznania i doświadczenia pochodzące ze świata realnego – wpływać na
jej kształt.
Wędrówka Myszki ma charakter wertykalny, rozpoczynając się pokonaniem schodów, mimo że były one stanowczo „zbyt kręte dla niewprawnych nóg
dziewczynki; zdaniem mamy, żadne schody nie były dla niej dobre” (Terakowska 2001: 63), a kończąc schronieniem w upragnionym azylu – na strychu:
„Schody nie były tak straszne, jak obie sądziły, a poręcz, o dziwo, znajdowała
się na tyle nisko, że Myszka swobodnie do niej sięgała” (Terakowska 2001: 64).
Dziewczynka pnie się (por. Siwiec 2007: 252) po schodach, odzwierciedlających jej próbę dotarcia do doskonalszego świata sferycznego. Bohaterka stopniowo odkrywa „ambiwalentną prawdę o świecie, pokazując, że istnieje w nim
również rozkład i śmierć, wydawałoby się, opozycyjny w stosunku do życia
porządek. Tymczasem obie kategorie tworzą nierozerwalną całość. Śmierć nie
stanowi zaprzeczenia życia, lecz jego uzupełnienie, a nawet wręcz warunek
egzystencji” (Rzepnikowska 2005: 224–225), czego dowody znajdzie zarówno
na ziemi, jak i w momentami „zbyt” idealnym rajskim ogrodzie.
Przestrzeń w Poczwarce Doroty Terakowskiej ma charakter różnorodny
i nie ogranicza się tylko do jednego obszaru – wyraźne dostrzegamy relacje
i zależności zachodzące między poszczególnymi miejscami. Co więcej, w powieści nie dominuje ani czasowość, ani przestrzeń, ale obie się przenikają, tworząc harmonijną całość, podobnie jak świat fantastyczny ze światem realnym.
Można to dostrzec między innymi w równoległości zdarzeń.
Słowa padające w przestrzeni realnej, nawet te pozornie bez znaczenia,
znajdują swoje odbicie w świecie fantastycznym (bywa, że zależność ta zachodzi także w odwrotnym kierunku). Refleksy te są jednak dostrzegalne tylko dla
osób uważnie patrzących. Świat „widzialny istnieje po to, by zdobić piękno snów”
(Bachelard 1975: 183), a uważny czytelnik chwilami może dotknąć tajemnicy
świata, człowieka, tajemnicy życia i przemijania, przeżywając kontakt z obszarami niedefiniowalnymi: prawdą, pięknem i dobrem (Leszczyński 2006: 44).
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1. Strych – otwarcie na alternatywę
W myśl rozróżnień poczynionych przez Jana Błońskiego:
Dom buduje się jako istota rosnąca, strzelista i odnosi do świadomości pionu; albo jako twór
zamknięty, dośrodkowy, skoncentrowany… Opiera się wtedy o – religijnie znaczące –
poczucie środka. Zarazem jednak nie wolno zapomnieć, że dom … poety marzony jest przez
dzieciństwo i podświadomość. Tym samym piwnica i strych, kuchnia i sypialnia bogacą się
tysiącem znaczeń… [podkreślenie moje] lub raczej budują się tysiącem znaczeń
jednostkowych i powszechnych (Błoński 1975: 18).
W każdym domu znajdują się dwa newralgiczne punkty, w które dziecko
zwykle obawia się wybrać samotnie, to znaczy bez opieki rodzica, a mianowicie: piwnica i strych:
… każde z nich budzi w nas inny rodzaj lęku. Dziecko pod pieczą matki żyje w pośredniej
części domu. … W tych dwu miejscach światy są tak bardzo różne. Z jednej strony mrok, z drugiej
– światło, z jednej – głuche szmery, z drugiej – ostre odgłosy. Widma z góry i widma z dołu
mają różne głosy i różne postaci. Pobyt w każdym z tych miejsc barwi się innym odcieniem
trwogi. I nieczęsto zdarza się dziecko, które nie bałoby się ani jednego, ani drugiego.
Piwnica i strych mogą stanowić niejako aparat do wykrywania nieszczęść zrodzonych
z imaginacji owych nieszczęść, które na zawsze wyciskają piętno na podświadomości
(Bachelard 1975: 311).
Strych nie był miejscem znanym Myszce, ponieważ jej mama chroniła ją
przed „groźnymi miejscami” (Terakowska 2001: 62–63). Chroniąc ją przed
takimi miejscami, uniemożliwia jej przez to także odkrywanie nowych światów
– bo przecież każde, najmniejsze nawet odkrycie wiąże się z odrobiną niebezpieczeństwa. Jak zauważa Gaston Bachelard (1975: 313): „Jeśli ktoś miał to
szczęście, że wspinał się na rodzinny strych wąską drabiną lub schodkami bez
poręczy, wciśniętymi między ściany – z pewnością na całe życie pozostanie mu
piękny zapis w marzycielskiej duszy. Dzięki strychowi dom urasta wzwyż,
uczestniczy w powietrznym życiu gwiazd. Poprzez strych dom współżyje
z wiatrem”.
Pisarka odwołuje się do wspomnień i wyobrażeń tkwiących w pamięci
i podświadomości prawie każdego czytelnika. Skąpany w elektrycznym świetle
i odarty w ten sposób z tajemniczości, strych Myszki przypomina strychy innych domów, istne „muzeum – rupieciarnię” (Bachelard 1975: 313), ukrytą
przed oczyma postronnych „dziedzinę życia zasuszonego, życia, które trwa
dzięki temu, że zasycha” (Bachelard 1975: 313) – pokryty kurzem świat,
w którym „wszystko ulega niejako zawieszeniu” (Bachelard 1975: 313):
Strych po zapaleniu światła wyglądał nieciekawie. Był zagracony, stały tam stare meble po
dziadkach, zbyt zniszczone, by można było ich używać. W kartonowych pudłach tkwiły
przedmioty, które Ewa z Adamem uznali za nie pasujące do ich nowego domu. Z paru pudeł
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wysypały się książki i leżały na podłodze od czasu, gdy kilka lat temu Ewa szukała Księgi.
Dziś pokrywała je zamszowa warstwa kurzu (Terakowska 2001: 65).
Na krótką chwilę jednak, zanim światło zostaje zapalone, strych – „co trwało krótko, może trzydzieści sekund, zanim ręka mamy trafiła na kontakt – był
miejscem niezwykłym” (Terakowska 2001: 65). Miejsce zazwyczaj opuszczone
i traktowane przez ludzi przede wszystkim jako graciarnia, tli się tajemnym
życiem, a jedwabiste zasłony czerni skrywają w sobie niejedną tajemnicę odmiennych, nieodkrytych jeszcze światów, odcieni i barw:
W ciągu tych trzydziestu sekund Myszka zobaczyła rozległe pomieszczenie, w którym czerń
przybierała tak różne odcienie – od ciemnej szarości pajęczyn po lepką, gęstą sadzę – że
zdziwiła się, ile ma barw. Do tej pory czerń była tylko jedna: ciemna noc bez gwiazd,
skrzydła gawronów na śniegu lub futerko kota. Tu, na strychu wydawało się, że czerń tworzy
różnorakie zasłony, oddzielając od siebie odmienne światy. A słońce poprzez wąskie okienka
wpuszczało w niektóre z tych światów długie promienie i Myszka zdążyła zobaczyć dziwne,
roztańczone, złociste stwory, złożone z niezliczonej ilości drobinek wirującego pyłu. Stwory
przybierały różne kształty i były jak żywe. Wszystko to znikło wraz ze sztucznym światłem
płynącym z zakurzonej żarówki i tylko tam, gdzie skośny dach łączył się z podłogą, gdzie
przycupnęła resztka czerni, pozostało coś z tamtego, pełnego życia, tajemniczego świata
(Terakowska 2001: 65–66).
Po tym, jak matka zostawia córkę samą, po chwili zasłony opadają, jedna
po drugiej, spełniając tym samym pragnienie Myszki i pozwalając jej na poznanie, a czytelnikowi – na stopniowe odkrywanie alternatywnego świata bohaterki:
Strych znowu zmienił wygląd. W świetle żarówki był miejscem pospolitym, zagraconym
i Myszka nie widziała w nim nic ciekawego. Ale gdy ponownie otulił się mrokiem – zobaczyła
zasłony czerni. Najpierw tę najbliższą, rozbieloną słabym światłem, które biło z małego
okienka; nie tyle szarą, ile popielatą jak gołębie, które przysiadały na ich dachu. Za nią
widać było kontury drugiej, w kolorze doskonałej szarości, jak garnitur taty. Trzecia miała
barwę późnego zmierzchu (Terakowska 2001: 69).
Czerń w świecie ludzkim, pełnym nieokreślonych lęków i strachów, zdaje
się je wszystkie uosabiać i nieodmiennie wywołuje skojarzenia związane ze
śmiercią i z końcem. Z kolei z punktu widzenia wybierającej zamknięcie Myszki – strych staje się azylem dla niezliczonych obrazów wyobraźni, co więcej
„mogłoby się zdawać, iż sny są tym śmielsze, im azyl ciaśniejszy” (Bachelard
1975: 314). W końcu zasłony rozsuwają się niczym kurtyna w teatrze, ustępując
miejsca nowemu żywiołowi – wirującym, skłębionym i przelewającym się masom wody: „Woda bulgotała, huczała, śpiewała i gdy rozsunęły się już wszystkie zasłony mroku, nawet ta w kolorze miękkiej sadzy – wydawała się zalewać
całą przestrzeń. … Gdy wpatrzyła się w skłębione masy wzburzonej wody,
stwierdziła, że w jej wirowaniu, przelewaniu się, w tym dzikim, żywiołowym
tańcu jest jakaś prawidłowość” (Terakowska 2001: 71–72).
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Myszka, przebywając na strychu, początkowo jest jedynie niemym obserwatorem kolejnych etapów stworzenia, odpowiadających etapom stworzenia
świata opisywanym w Księdze Rodzaju – z zachwytem więc wpatruje się
w „bezkresny błękit, nie mający początku ani końca” (Terakowska 2001: 72).
Podziwia postępujący proces doboru kolorów nieba: „do wypłowiałej niebieskości, do zwiewnego błękitu, głębokiego szafiru i zapowiadającego noc granatu doszły kolory szare lub rozbielone, jak chmury” (Terakowska 2001: 74).
Tutaj również po raz pierwszy doznaje obecności tajemniczego Jego, czując
jego życiodajny oddech i słysząc również śpiewny huczący Głos, który przemawia „bardziej muzyką niż słowem” (Terakowska 2001: 73).
Choć Myszka nie ma odwagi zapytać, do kogo należy Głos, instynktownie
przeczuwa wyjątkowość i nieskończoność tego tajemniczego miejsca, a także
niewidocznej „Osoby”, która je stwarza (można w tym wypadku potraktować tę
„Osobę” jako idealizującą projekcję nigdy nieuczestniczącego w życiu Myszki
ojca):
Myszka instynktownie czuła, że ta przestrzeń, choć rozwiera się tylko dla niej, istnieje
również bez niej, a ktoś – ten niewidoczny On – wciąż coś w niej stwarza. Błądzi i myli się,
poprawia to, co stworzył, a to coś czasem ulatuje daleko, ustępując miejsca nowej,
poddającej się Jego woli pustce, z której wyłaniają się kolejne stwarzane światy. Myszka już
wiedziała, że TO trwa bez końca. I nie ma początku. Nigdy nie miało (Terakowska
2001: 91).
Towarzyszące jej w drodze na strych i niczym niezachwiane poczucie bezpieczeństwa sprawia, że Myszka czuje się w tym miejscu szczęśliwa: „Myszka,
wspinając się na strych, była szczęśliwa. Z każdym krokiem zbliżała się do
rozległej, niczym nie ograniczonej przestrzeni, która wyłaniała się przed nią,
ledwie zamknęła za sobą drzwi. Wkraczała w bezpieczny, cichy mrok, o różnej
gęstości i barwie” (Terakowska 2001: 90).
Mimo kolejnych wizyt na strychu, dla Myszki nadal pozostawały tajemnicą
ramy czasowe nowo poznanego świata. Choć się starała, nie potrafiła zrozumieć, dlaczego
przestrzeń na strychu nie ma początku i końca i jakim cudem tak się dzieje, skoro po
zapaleniu żarówki strych stawał się pomieszczeniem zamkniętym od ściany do ściany, od
skosu do skosu, a wąską, wolną ćwiartkę podłogi wyznaczały stare meble nieznanej babci.
Jednak to wszystko znikało, gdy rozsuwały się kolejne zasłony szarości i czerni z miękkiego,
widoczno-niewidocznego splotu, utkanego – jak sądziła Myszka – z pyłu wirującego
w świetle lampy. Pył miał różną gęstość i ta gęstość nadawała barwę zasłonom. Podniecona
Myszka usilnie wypatrywała najdalszej kurtyny, tej czarnej jak sadza, poza którą rozciągały
się niewyobrażalne przestrzenie (Terakowska 2001: 90–91).
Powstający na strychu alternatywny świat Myszki jest nieustannie karmiony
tkwiącymi w jej pamięci obrazami. Początkowo to „pośrednie” kreowanie świata przypomina raczej bierne odtwarzanie materiału zawartego w notesie wizual-
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nym (Burek 2008: 28) bohaterki – najlepiej odtwarzane są wspomnienia i informacje nabyte przez nią niedawno. Dopiero z czasem dziewczynka zaczyna aktywnie uczestniczyć w dziele „stworzenia”, sugerując Głosowi, co może w nim
poprawić. Tak jest na przykład w wypadku monstrualnych „drzewokwiatów”
czy czerwonej trawy:
I nagle czerwona trawa powstrzymała swój płynny wzrost; przestała falować i znieruchomiała,
a jej cieniutkie łodyżki przypominały teraz antenki z plastiku, nie rośliny. I nagle zaczęła
zmieniać kolor. Najpierw zrobiła się fioletowa, w najbardziej agresywnym, głębokim
odcieniu tej barwy, której Myszka szczerze nie lubiła, gdyż wydawała się jej smutna.
– Oooch… – powiedziała zmartwiona. – Proszę cię, nie rób fioletowej trawy. …
I znowu morze trawy zaczęło zmieniać kolor. Wyglądało to tak, jakby ktoś ogromnym
pędzlem kładł na miękkim fioletowym dywanie rozległe zielone, soczyste plamy. Myszka
odetchnęła z ulgą (Terakowska 2001: 92–93).
Jak podkreśla Aleksandra Burek,
zdaniem współczesnych psychologów, tożsamość może mieć charakter narracyjny, może
być konstruowaniem historii, odtwarzaniem przeszłości. Tak pojętą tożsamość rekonstruują
pamiętniki, wspomnienia. We współczesnej literaturze pojawia się coraz więcej
wspomnieniowych lub reportażowych poszukiwań własnej tożsamości. Autorzy odtwarzają
pamięć z urywków pamięci własnej, ze wspomnień innych, z pozostałych z przeszłości
pamiątek. Jednak podstawą autonarracji jest przede wszystkim pamiętanie, pamiętanie
siebie. Tak jak często pamiętanie uważane jest za podstawę odpowiedzi na pytanie: kim
jestem? Pamiętanie daje wówczas świadomość swojego miejsca w świecie, społeczeństwie,
kulturze (Burek 2008: 20).
Myszka w swoim „rzeczywistym” życiu ma nieustanny problem z odnajdywaniem własnej tożsamości, a przede wszystkim z zapamiętywaniem i pamiętaniem siebie. Alternatywny świat pozwala jej odkryć swoją tożsamość.
Z czasem sięga kolejno po pewne elementy swoich wspomnień i na ich podstawie kreuje nową rzeczywistość: „Ogromne znaczenie odgrywa tutaj szczegół.
Mozaika szczegółów z naszej przeszłości stanowi rodzaj konstrukcji, wymagającej użytkownika o określonej zawartości pamięci. Pamiętanie przecież nie jest
jedynie odtwórczym procesem, ale też wytwórczym. Jest rekonstruowaniem
i jednocześnie konstruowaniem wydarzeń, doświadczeń, przeżyć” (Burek
2008: 65). To szczegół właśnie staje się jednym z pomostów łączących teraźniejszość z przeszłością i rzeczywistość z alternatywą (Burek 2008: 31).
Wyobrażeniowy obraz wytworzony przez Myszkę „nie jest zatem «słabszym» czy «bledszym» przedmiotem, zapisanym w naszej pamięci przez postrzeżenie. Jest przedmiotem uzupełnionym, dotworzonym przez wyobraźnię”
(Błoński 1975: 11). Kreując alternatywną rzeczywistość na podobieństwo tej
już istniejącej, Myszka snuje przypuszczenia, że istnieje jeszcze wiele innych
krążących w kosmosie możliwych „szalonych” rzeczywistości, być może tak
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samo niepełnych, z tak samo nie do końca przemyślanymi i dobrymi rozwiązaniami:
Czuła, że On stwarza, bo tylko to umie robić; czyni to bez przerwy, próbując stworzyć coś,
co będzie idealne. Ale Mu nie wychodziło. Fioletowa i czerwona trawa lub drzewokwiaty
były dowodem na to, że często się mylił. Myszka nie zdziwiłaby się, gdyby się okazało, że
gdzieś, daleko stąd, szybuje w głębi nieba inna ziemia, z czerwoną trawą i monstrualnymi
kwiatami o zdrewniałych, potężnych pniach. A może z czymś jeszcze dziwaczniejszym?
I może nie jedna ziemia, lecz kilka? Całe mnóstwo szalonych światów? … Światy z gazu lub
kamieni; albo z materii twardszej niż kamień. Światy z życiem – i bez życia. Z życiem
sprawiającym wrażenie snu wariata lub tak zwyczajnie, że nie do wytrzymania. Światy
mknące w niezmierzonej pustce Kosmosu, układające się w spirale lub, jak klocki jego,
w wyszukane lub wynaturzone konstrukcje. Światy, które uciekały ze strachu przed Nim, nie
wiedząc, co On jeszcze z nimi zrobi w tym nie kończącym się procesie stwarzania, lub wręcz
przeciwnie: światy, które garnęły się ku Niemu, skupiając w gęste galaktyki. Światy, które
zawsze Go szukały – i nigdy nie umiały znaleźć. Lub znajdowały Go – ale nie tam, gdzie był
(Terakowska 2001: 117).
O ile realny świat, w którym przyszło żyć Myszce na co dzień, pozostaje
niezmienny – ten sam ustalony od lat rytm dnia, niezmienne otoczenie, ta sama
izolacja od świata zewnętrznego – o tyle będący projekcją Myszki świat alternatywny na strychu podlega ciągłej ewolucji, mimo że czas tam płynie w wolniejszym tempie, nie przekraczając dnia siódmego. Alternatywna rzeczywistość
pozwala zmierzyć się Myszce z czymś, co zwykle sprawiało największą trudność dzieciom z zespołem Downa – mianowicie z akceptowaniem zmian. Dla
Myszki zmienność strychu była procesem naturalnym: „Zmienność tego
wszystkiego tu, na dole, była niepokojąca i nieprzewidywalna. On stwarzał tam
wszystko wciąż od nowa i od nowa, więc oczekiwanie na kolejną zmianę było
częścią harmonii panującej w Ogrodzie. Zmiany na dole zbyt często przynosiły
niedobre zakończenia” (Terakowska 2001: 242).
2. Ogród Myszki – idealizacja wyobrażeniowa nasycona
popkulturą
Matka nie jest w stanie zrozumieć Myszki, ale ma nadzieję, że ma ona własny świat, który pozwala jej uporać się z rzeczywistością: „– Nie wiem, jaką
Myszka ma wyobraźnię – stwierdziła rzeczowo Ewa. – Może dużą. Może jej
w ogóle nie ma. Nie znam jej wewnętrznego świata, choć wiem, że istnieje. Nie
wiem, co dzieje się w tym świecie” (Terakowska 2001: 199). Ogród, którego
początek znajduje się na strychu, podlega ciągłym zmianom, wywołując zmienne uczucia Myszki i pozwalając na ich ciągłą ewolucję – każde stworzenie zdaje
się całym sobą odpowiadać twierdząco na pytanie o sens istnienia: „Ogród poruszał się. Trawa falowała na wietrze, gałęzie drzew wyciągały ku Myszce zielone palce, dżdżownice pełzały, a krety wyrzucały w górę kopczyki miękkiej,
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ciepłej ziemi; błyszczące żuki o twardych pancerzach wymijały majestatycznie
nerwowe mrówki, a dojrzałe jabłka spadały z drzew i turlały się, nim znieruchomiały w zagłębieniach ziemi” (Terakowska 2001: 156). Początkowo dziewczynka jest nim zachwycona, ale z czasem dostrzega pewne mankamenty
w jego doskonałości, co więcej – to właśnie jego „doskonałość” staje się jego
największą wadą:
– Ta trawa jest zbyt zielona – zauważyła, wpatrując się w szmaragdowy kobierzec pod
swymi stopami. …
Zaczęła rozglądać się i widziała coraz więcej dziwnych cech Ogrodu, które wcześniej jej
umknęły. Pnie jabłoni były równiutkie i zbyt brązowe, choć powinny być spękane i szare,
a niebo nad jej głową miało nieprawdopodobną barwę intensywnego szafiru. Gdy się w nie
wpatrzyła, poczuła, że od natężenia koloru bolą oczy.
Kolory kwiatów wśród traw były niezwykle jaskrawe. Tak jaskrawe, że musiała zmrużyć
swoje okrągłe, wszystkowidzące oczy. Zwłaszcza pomarańczowe nagietki wyglądały jak
odblaskowe światełka samochodu taty.
… „Nie, to jest zbyt wspaniałe. To przypomina obrazki z mojej książki z bajkami. I jeszcze
coś… nie pamiętam, co…” (Terakowska 2001: 161–162).
Ogród ma jeszcze jedną cechę, która sprawia, że Myszka jest bezgranicznie
szczęśliwa, przebywając w nim – po zjedzeniu „rajskiego” owocu, dziewczynka
traci swoją zwykłą, wiążącą się z rodzajem jej niepełnosprawności ociężałość
i może się wreszcie poruszać i tańczyć, tak jak inne dzieci w jej wieku:
Rzeczywiście, po raz pierwszy w swoim krótkim życiu Myszka nie czuła nic. Nie czuła
ciężaru niezdarnego ciała. Nie czuła braku koordynacji rąk i nóg. Nie czuła strużki śliny
sączącej się z kącika ust, ani cienia grubych powiek, zawsze opadających na źrenice. Ba, nie
wątpiła w to, że oczy ma teraz duże i okrągłe. I przepełniona nie znanym sobie poczuciem
własnej urody, okręciła się na czubkach palców, jak baletnica, którą widziała w telewizorze,
a z jej ust, zamiast bełkotliwej mowy, wypłynęła melodyjna, dźwięczna fraza:
– Tatusiu..! Patrz! (Terakowska 2001: 159).
Bohaterka powieści Doroty Terakowskiej ma zwykle trudności z porozumiewaniem się, nawet z ludźmi ze swojego otoczenia. Nie jest w stanie wypowiadać pełnych zdań. Jedynie matka, choć także nie zawsze, jest w stanie interpretować wypowiadane przez nią słowa. Myszka z tego względu dzieli więc
przestrzeń na tę „na dole” i tę „na górze”. Alternatywna przestrzeń na strychu
pozwala jej na pełne wyrażanie swoich odczuć i potrzeb:
Na dole Myszka najpierw coś widziała, a dopiero potem w jej mózgu pojawiała się nazwa,
w dodatku nie zawsze trafna. Niekiedy pojawiało się wiele różnych nazw i musiała
zdecydować się na jedną. Wybierała nie zawsze prawidłowo. Tu, na górze, wzrok i myśli
biegły obok siebie, w jednej parze, równiutko, płynnie, nie natrafiając na żadne przeszkody,
a wybór właściwego słowa nie nastręczał żadnych trudności (Terakowska 2001: 208).
W wypadku związków wyidealizowanego ogrodu z rzeczywistością niezwykle istotną rolę odgrywają elementy przenikające z jednego świata do dru-
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giego. Pierwszym z takich elementów jest pojawienie się w Ogrodzie pary ludzi
(Adama i Ewy), stworzonych „na obraz i podobieństwo” Barbie i Kena: „«Jest
okropna», pomyślała, nie odrywając oczu od Kobiety. «Jest równie okropna jak
Barbie…»” (Terakowska 2001: 210). Dla ludzi współczesnych plastikowa lalka
Barbie stała się swoistą ikoną popkultury. Wciela się przecież doskonale w różne postaci i reprezentuje sobą różne kobiece role społeczne. W pewnym stopniu
jest także odzwierciedleniem narcystycznego podejścia do rzeczywistości
współczesnych i odbiciem tego, w jaki sposób Myszka postrzega nieakceptujących ją ludzi:
To, co Barbie sobą przedstawia, uzależnione jest też od tego, na co pozwala jej plastikowa
postać. Barbie nie ma męża, córki ani syna; nie ma też szefa, nauczycieli, pastora, rabina ani
księdza, nie ma sąsiadów. Jej świat obraca się wokół niej i jej przyjaciół, łącznie z Kenem,
jej chłopakiem. Barbie jest zatem kwintesencją krańcowego indywidualizmu w żeńskiej
postaci. Może być wyalienowaną córką, reprezentować skrajny narcyzm, wyizolowanego lub
absolutną monadę. Jednak dla większości ludzi Barbie jest przede wszystkim kobieca
(Rogers 2003 [1999]: 21).
Paradoksalnie, przywołanie przez pisarkę wizerunku Barbie jako przedstawienia idealnego kobiecego popkulturowego piękna, pozbawionego zmarszczek
i skaz, a jednocześnie trwale zdeformowanego przez brak pochwy i „duszy”,
zdaje się dodatkowo podkreślać niepełnosprawność głównej bohaterki powieści, która mimo bogatego wnętrza, przez otoczenie jest postrzegana przez pryzmat swojego niepełnosprawnego ciała.
W ogrodzie Barbie (Ewa) także nie ma dziecka ani męża (wraz z Adamem
są sobie całkowicie obojętni), jest jedynie sztuczną lalką o pustych oczach, dopóki nie przyjmie zaoferowanego jej przez Myszkę zakazanego owocu. Dopiero
zjedzenie go spowoduje powstanie „przyziemnych skaz na tej idealnej konstrukcji” (Czubaj 2003: 13) i umożliwi jej „ludzkie”, choć wypełnione trudnościami życie.
Nie raz i nie dwa wspominano o wiecznej młodości Barbie. … Przez cały jednak czas
figura Barbie pozostaje niezmienna, podobnie jak pozbawiona zmarszczek skóra, włosy bez
cienia siwizny i ciało bez skazy. Barbie przecież nie dorasta. Wcale nie odpowiadałoby to
konsumentom. Na podobnej zasadzie jej wizerunek wyklucza ciążę, bo w pewnym
momencie łączy się ona z rozdętym brzuchem; poza tym Barbie musiałaby mieć pochwę.
Ale Barbie pomimo swej poprawności z punktu widzenia mody nigdy nie była poprawna
z punktu widzenia anatomii (Rogers 2003 [1999]: 190–191).
Ogród do pewnego stopnia jest odbiciem wyglądu Barbie – również jest
wyidealizowany, nie podlega żadnym zmianom, wszystkie żyjące w nim zwierzęta to osobniki dorosłe i w równym stopniu doskonałe – w ogrodzie nie ma
młodych zwierząt. W pewnej mierze nawiązuje to do przedstawianego w reklamie masowej i kulturze popularnej „konsumpcjonistycznego ekstremum,
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w którym wyidealizowane ciała tworzą hiperrealny świat, gdzie olśniewające
wizerunki ukazują ciało o doskonałych kształtach, nieskrępowane niczym
i obdarzone nieograniczoną energią” (Rogers 2003 [1999]: 182).
Relacja zależności między światem alternatywnym i światem rzeczywistym
działa także w drugą stronę. Wraz z rozwojem fabuły rodzice Myszki natrafiają
w „realnym” świecie na pewne fragmenty rzeczywistości pochodzące z „tajemniczego” Ogrodu Myszki, nie są jednak w stanie ich odpowiednio przyporządkować. Tak jest między innymi z trawą, która wyrosła na trawniku ich domu
w ciągu jednej nocy, różowym piórem flaminga, jabłonką, przypominającą
szumem swoich liści rodzicom Myszki o córce po jej śmierci, czy wreszcie
kwiatem z ogrodu, który swok niecodzienną barwą przykuwa uwagę Ewy:
– Skąd masz ten kwiatek? – spytała Ewa, gdy schodziły ze strychu. W zaciśniętej dłoni
Myszki tkwił pomarańczowy nagietek.
„Pomarańczowy? Niemal parzy… Jest jak odblaskowe światełko roweru”, pomyślała Ewa
i odruchowo stwierdziła: „Takich kwiatków nie ma”. …
– Nie sadziłam kwiatów w ogrodzie – powiedziała Ewa zmęczonym głosem, gdyż nagle
uświadomiła sobie, że nie hoduje kwiatów od tylu lat, ile ma ich Myszka (Terakowska
2001: 224–225).
Zachęcona przez Myszkę, Ewa podąża za silnym zapachem kwiatów i odnajduje swój skrawek tajemniczego Ogrodu, w odgrodzonym fragmencie posesji. To w nim kiedyś, jeszcze przed narodzinami Myszki, budowała własny alternatywny świat (ogród), a dodatkowy mur miał ją odgrodzić od ciekawskich
oczu, oferując iluzję poczucia intymności i bezpieczeństwa:
Zbliżyły się do furtki w murze. Najpierw Ewa poczuła zapach. Silny i podniecający.
„Chwasty pachną mocniej od kwiatów?”, zdziwiła się i pchnęła furtkę. Weszły do środka.
Zapadał zmierzch i wszystkie barwy były trochę zgaszone, a mimo to kwiaty świeciły jak
nagietek w jej dłoni. Było ich mnóstwo. Rozsiały się wszędzie nierównymi, naturalnymi
rabatami, przypominającymi kwietną dżunglę. Pomarańczowe nagietki, żółte irysy, chłodne
bławatki, gorące od czerwieni róże, porażające bielą lilie… Tylko gdzieniegdzie rosły
pokrzywy, ale nie sprawiały wrażenia chwastów; Ewa osądziła, że rosną, gdyż ktoś chciał,
aby rosło to wszystko, co pragnie wyjrzeć z ziemi na świat. I to wszystko razem pragnie
wydawało odurzający zapach, przy którym gasła nuta najbardziej wyszukanych perfum
(Terakowska 2001: 226–227).
W Poczwarce Doroty Terakowskiej zostały opisane dwa alternatywne światy, otwierając także możliwość powstania kolejnych, aż do nieskończoności.
Mimo że się przenikają i w pewnym stopniu są od siebie zależne, nie mogą
jednak zbyt długo koegzystować. Wstępując do świata alternatywnego, bohater
musi dokonać wyboru i zdecydować, czy w nim pozostanie, czy też wróci do
realności. Tak się dzieje w wypadku alternatywnego Ogrodu Myszki, Adama
i Ewy, którzy sięgają po zakazany owoc i decydują się na życie na ziemi:
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Myszka … Już przeczuwała, że istnieje nieskończona liczba Ogrodów, z nieskończoną liczbą
Adamów i Ew, którzy pewnego dnia – nie wbrew Niemu, lecz z Jego pomocą – opuszczają
to miejsce i idą na dół, do ludzi. Już wiedziała, że On wciąż stwarza i stwarza kolejne
Ogrody, kolejnych Adamów i Ewy, wierząc, że pewnego dnia stworzy istotę, z której
naprawdę będzie zadowolony. Na razie wciąż Mu się nie udawało. I dlatego w każdym
Ogrodzie rosło zakazane drzewo – tylko po to, aby jego mieszkańcy mogli złamać Jego
zakaz i odejść, gdy znowu Go rozczarują (Terakowska 2001: 289–290).
Myszka również musi dokonać wyboru, choć jest on okupiony śmiercią i nie
pozwala na powrót do kochających ją rodziców (dopiero w momencie śmierci
Myszka zostaje zaakceptowana przez ojca). Obiecywany jej przez Głos ogród
jest pełen innych przypominających Myszkę Darów Pana, wolnych już jednak
od cierpień i smutku. Sam ogród wreszcie:
To już nie … Ogród, w którym mama mogła coś zmienić pilotem od telewizora. Już nie
można było rozjaśnić ani przyciemnić jego barw; ułożyć go, jak puzzle, z kawałków
obrazków, oglądanych tam, na dole, i przypadkowo wydobywanych z pamięci. Już nie
można było wpłynąć na kształt jego świateł i barwę trawy. To był już tylko Jego Ogród
i żadne słowa nie były zdolne go opisać. Nie było w nim jabłoni ani żadnych drzew. On sam
był drzewem. Nie było czarodziejskich owoców wywołujących cudowną przemianę. On sam
był cudowną przemianą (Terakowska 2001: 313).
Po lekturze Poczwarki pozostajemy z budzącą nadzieją obietnicą dalszego
ciągu: „– Ssstrychy nie mają Końca, tak jak niessskończone sssą tajemnice
i marzenia, i niessskończony jest lęk” (Terakowska 2001: 311–312).
Wykaz literatury
Bachelard, Gaston 1975 [1960]: Wyobraźnia poetycka. Wybór pism. Tłum. Henryk Chudak, Anna
Tatarkiewicz. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy [La poétique de la rêverie. Paris:
Presses Universitairs de France].
Błoński, Jan 1975: Przedmowa. W: Gaston Bachelard,1975 [1960]: Wyobraźnia poetycka. Wybór pism.
Tłum. Henryk Chudak, Anna Tatarkiewicz. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy [La
poétique de la rêverie. Paris: Presses Universitairs de France]. 6–24.
Brzostek, Dariusz 2009: Antropologia fantastyki grozy. Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika.
Burek, Aleksandra 2008: Zakryta przez ciało. O refleksach platońskiej idei pamięci w kulturze
współczesnej. Kraków: Zakład Wydawniczy „Nomos”.
Caillois, Roger 1967 [1966]: Od baśni do science-fiction. Tłum. Jerzy Lisowski. W: Roger Caillois 1967 [1966]: Odpowiedzialność i styl. Eseje. Wybór Maciej Żurowski. Tłum. Jan Błoński,
Krystyna Dolatowska, Aleksandra Frybesowa, Leszek Kukulski, Jerzy Lisowski. Warszawa:
Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 31–65 [« De la féerie à la science-fiction. L'image fantastique ». En: Roger Caillois 1966: Images, Images … Essais sur le rôle et les pouvoirs de
l'imagination. Paris: Jose ́ Corti, 17–59.
Czubaj, Mariusz 2003: Wstęp do wydania polskiego. Plastikowa bogini konsumpcji. W: Mary R.
2003 [1999]: Barbie jako ikona kultury. Tłum. Ewa Klekot. Warszawa: Warszawskie Wydawnictwo Literackie „Muza” SA [Barbie Culture. London: SAGE Publications], 7–24.
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Głowiński, Michał 1990: Mity przebrane: Dionizos, Narcyz, Prometeusz, Marchołt, labirynt.
Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Jakubczak, Marzenna 2002: Ziemia. W: Krystyna Wilkoszewska (red.) 2002: Estetyka czterech żywiołów. Ziemia, woda, ogień, powietrze. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac
Naukowych Universitas, 11–69.
Kowalski, Piotr 2007: Kultura magiczna. Omen, przesąd, znaczenie. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo
Naukowe PWN.
Leszczyński, Grzegorz 2006: Baśń: rytuał przejścia (rite de passage). W: Grzegorz Leszczyński
(red.) 2006: Kulturowe konteksty baśni. T. 2. W poszukiwaniu straconego królestwa. Poznań: Centrum Sztuki Dziecka w Poznaniu, 41–68.
Płaszczewska, Olga (red.) 2007: Dziedzictwo Odyseusza. Podróż, obcość i tożsamość, identyfikacja,
przestrzeń. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych „Universitas”,
243–265.
Rogers, Mary R. 2003 [1999]: Barbie jako ikona kultury. Tłum. Ewa Klekot. Warszawa: Warszawskie
Wydawnictwo Literackie „Muza” SA [Barbie Culture. London: SAGE Publications].
Rzepnikowska, Irena 2005: Rosyjska i polska bajka magiczna (AT 480) w kontekście kultury ludowej.
Toruń: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika.
Siwiec, Magdalena 2007: Przestrzeń onirycznych ogrodów: Krasiński i Nerval. W: Maria CieślaKorytowska, Olga Płaszczewska (red.) 2007: Dziedzictwo Odyseusza. Podróż, obcość i tożsamość, identyfikacja, przestrzeń. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych „Universitas”, 243–265
Smuszkiewicz, Antoni 1982: Zaczarowana gra. Zarys dziejów polskiej fantastyki naukowej. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.
Terakowska, Dorota 2001: Poczwarka. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
KAROLINA WIEREL
UNIWERSYTET W BIAŁYMSTOKU
Czym jest „kyś”? Literackie, językowe i kulturowe
konstrukty alternatywne w Kysiu Tatiany Tołstoj
STRESZCZENIE. Artykuł jest próbą interpretacji powieści Tatiany Tołstoj Kyś, szczególnie
zaś jej tytułu, który nie ma swojego desygnatu w języku ani autorki, ani polskiego czytelnika, co otwiera szerokie pole do dyskusji. Konstrukcja literacka powieści, osadzona w konwencji postapokaliptycznej, umożliwia rozważania nad istnieniem bytów innych niż ludzkie,
przy użyciu narzędzi, których dostarcza humanistyka. Analiza zmierza do pogłębienia znaczenia słowa jako środka komunikacji nie tylko międzyludzkiej, ale także postludzkiej. Jest
to perspektywa ukazująca inną przestrzeń, inną kulturę, inny język świata ukształtowanego
po Wielkim Wybuchu, zamieszkałego przez istoty nie tylko ludzkie (wygeneratów, ludzików, Pekińczyków, Czeczeńców). Byty inne niż ludzkie w antyutopijnej wizji Tatiany Tołstoj są pretekstem do mówienia o kondycji człowieka i humanizmu. Autorka artykułu zastanawia się nad alternatywnością bytów nieludzkich, opierając się na przykładach bohaterów
i konstrukcji językowych z Kysia. Język powieści i stosowany sposób komunikacji odzwierciedlają miejsce tych istot w ontologii świata literackiego, ale konsekwentnie budowane
przez Tatianę Tołstoj odniesienia do rzeczywistości pozaliterackiej sprawiają, że dystopia ta
jest ironiczną wizją kondycji człowieka żyjącego przed Wielkim Wybuchem, a więc czytelnika współczesnego. Jest to perspektywa nowej wieży Babel, stanowiącej klucz do rozumienia powieści Tatiany Tołstoj, w której nie ma alternatywy dla procesu komunikacji bytów
humanoidalnych. Porozumienie jest oparte na kodach oralności i pisma, które są jednocześnie prawdą i jej zaprzeczaniem.
Przedmiotem niniejszego artykułu są konstrukty alternatywne występujące
w Kysiu Tatiany Tołstoj. Fabuła książki została osadzona w konwencji fantastyki postapokaliptycznej. Jest to literacki świat po „Wielkim Wybuchu”, czyli
katastrofie, która zmienia środowisko życia istot żywych, a nawet tworzy je od
początku. Czytelnik dowiaduje się podczas lektury, że fabuła Kysia jest oparta
nie na dominacji człowieka, ale istot (mutantów), które można określić mianem
„postludzi” (pojęcia tego będę używała wobec rzeczywistości, w której dominują byty nieludzkie). W kulturze czytelnika są one nazywane humanoidami, cyborgami, mutantami, klonami, robotami.1
Tatiana Tołstoj poddaje jednak w wątpliwość to, kto jest człowiekiem –
nawet w wypadku przedstawicieli gatunku Homo sapiens występujących
w Kysiu. Istoty, które przeżyły Wybuch, są w powieści nazwane przez nie-ludzi
„Dawnymi”. Ich niezwykłą właściwością (mutacją) jest zatrzymanie procesu
biologicznego starzenia się. To „Effekt Dawnych”. W świecie po Wybuchu
1
Termin posthumanizm, jak przyjmuje Monika Bakke (2010: 337–339), jest podstawą konstrukcji kategorii „postludzi”.
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Karolina Wierel
każda istota ma swoją niepowtarzalną cechę – fizyczną i psychiczną. Autorka
wszystkie mutacje nazywa „Effektami”. Konstrukcja postludzi jest oparta na
kreacji bytu alternatywnego. Każdy bohater Kysia ma swój Effekt, ale jest on
alternatywny tylko dla czytelnika, nie zaś dla bohaterów książki. Jest to „inność” zmienionej proporcji istnienia. W świecie po Wybuchu nie istnieją takie
same stworzenia.
Dawni stanowią nieliczną mniejszość wobec innych istnień występujących
w Kysiu: „ludzików”, „wygeneratów”, „Pekińczyków”, „Czeczeńców”. Wymierającym gatunkiem są przedstawiciele gatunku Homo sapiens, a rozwijają się
różne istoty postludzkie, które można nazwać ogólnie „homohybrydami”.
1. Homo sapiens i „homohybrydy”
Wygeneraci – istoty, które w systemie społecznym omawianego świata
literackiego zostały zdegradowane do roli postludzi – są tymi, poza Dawnymi,
którzy przeżyli katastrofę. Kim byli w dawnym świecie? W nowym pełnią
funkcję zwierząt pociągowych. Można ich porównać z końmi, które istniały
przed Wybuchem, a teraz są gatunkiem występującym tylko jako słowo bez
desygnatu.
Wygeneraci to istoty osobliwe, poruszają się bowiem na czterech lub na
dwóch nogach. Potrafią również mówić, ale ich język jest nasycony słowami
niecenzuralnymi. Wygeneraci określają rzeczywistość, poszukując analogii
między tym, co istnieje wokół nich, a tym, co pamiętają z czasów przed Wybuchem.
Proces analizy elementów rzeczywistości, które są obce, odbywa się, według Clifforda Geertza (2005 [1983]: 32), przez „pojmowanie tego, co mniej
czytelne, poprzez to co bardziej klarowne, metodą «tak jak» (ziemia jest magnesem, serce pompą, światło falą)”. A tytułowy kyś? Do tej kwestii jeszcze
powrócę.
Benedikt, główny bohater Kysia, urodzony po Wybuchu, wiele miejsca
w swoich rozważaniach poświęca wygeneratom. Jest przekonany, że nie są oni
ludźmi, lecz „bydlętami”. Zaczyna mieć jednak wątpliwości, kto jest człowiekiem. Czy Benedikt z Effektem w formie ogonka, którego się pozbył, żeby być
bardziej „ludzki”, czy może jego żona i jej rodzina, którzy u stóp mają długie
pazury? Czy też wygeneraci, którzy fizycznie bardziej przypominają istoty żyjące i dominujące w świecie przed Wybuchem? Mamy tutaj do czynienia z kolejną alternatywą, gdyż ustalenie, kto jest bardziej ludzki, zależy tak naprawdę
od stanu świadomości i od wiedzy Benedikta.
Wraz z rozwojem akcji obserwujemy zmianę sposobu percepcji bohatera,
następującą za sprawą lektury nowych książek. Czytelnik być może uzna, że
bardziej „ludzcy” są jednak wygeneraci, którzy mimo odpychającej fizjonomii,
Czym jest „kyś”? Literackie, językowe i kulturowe konstrukty alternatywne
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wulgarnego języka i odrażającego zachowania w większym stopniu przypominają przedstawicieli gatunku Homo sapiens, choć asocjacją słowa „wygenerat”
jest określenie „degenerat”.
Kolejną grupą bytów, najbardziej liczną, są istoty urodzone po Wybuchu.
O ich inności stanowią różne mutacje, czyli wspomniane już Effekty. „Jedne –
ręce niby zieloną mąką obsypane, jakoby w chlebiodzie grzebał, inszy – skrzela, jeszcze inszy – grzebień koguci abo co tam jeszcze” (Tołstoj 2004
[2000]: 15). Istoty urodzone po Wybuchu zostały przez pisarkę nazwane „ludkiem”, „ludzikami”. Tak również mówią o sobie sami przedstawiciele tej grupy
społecznej. Główny bohater, Benedikt, jest jednym z ludzików.
Poza tym istnieją jeszcze grupy marginalne, żyjące poza osadą – Pekińczyki
i Czeczeńcy. Są to społeczności izolowane od większości. Mieszkają one na
peryferiach osady (Pekińczyki) lub gdzieś daleko, na stepach (Czeczeńcy). Perspektywa spotkania z przedstawicielami tych grup jest dla ludzików przerażająca, gdyż w tym świecie wszystko, co przychodzi z zewnątrz, może być kysiem.
Czytelnik, którego proces percepcji rzeczywistości literackiej opiera się na analogii do świata przed Wybuchem, może dostrzec podobieństwo do systemu
społeczności plemiennej i jej stosunku do relacji „ja – obcy”, „my – inni”. To,
co moje (nasze), jest oswojone, dobre. To, co jest poza moim światem, zostaje
nacechowane negatywnie, budzi lęk i poczucie zagrożenia.
Należy wspomnieć, że o przynależności do danej grupy istot stanowi nie
tylko wygląd, ale także język. Język Pekińczyków jest niezrozumiały, tak „obcy”, że grupa ta nie jest traktowana jako godna szacunku, ale utożsamiana przez
większość ze zwierzętami. Z kolei Czeczeńcy są postrzegani przez mieszkańców Fiodoro-Kuźmiczowska jako inny gatunek, który używa czasem słów niezrozumiałych dla opisywanej społeczności. Ponownie język, poza wyglądem,
stanowi cechę, która świadczy o przynależności do określonej społeczności
i identyfikacji z nią.
2. Alternatywność zwielokrotniona
Cechy tworzące alternatywność świata literackiego Kysia wobec przestrzeni
pozaliterackiej są widoczne na poziomie konstrukcji tekstu, języka i kreacji
świata literackiego. Powieść Tatiany Tołstoj można uznać za alternatywność
zwielokrotnioną. Użycie słowa „alternatywność” konotuje wiele znaczeń, na
przykład w wypadku logiki matematycznej może się wiązać z traktowaniem jej
jako sumy logicznej. W potocznym rozumieniu pojęcie „alternatywa” narzuca
konieczność wyboru między dwiema wykluczającymi się możliwościami.
Podstawę rozpatrywania alternatywności w Kysiu stanowi język. Uproszczony, ocierający się o wulgarność, odzwierciedla stan umysłu istot. Wpływa to
na alternatywną wizję kultury odtwarzanej po katastrofie: inne byty ludzko-
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Karolina Wierel
nieludzkie, inny świat, inny język, inna kultura. Niezależnie jednak od tego, jak
mocno podkreślalibyśmy inność tych elementów względem świata opartego na
perspektywie antropocentrycznej, będziemy musieli przyznać, że wspólna jest
ich przeszłość. Zarówno dla bohaterów, jak i dla czytelników. To oś łącząca
świat istot urodzonych przed Wybuchem i po nim, bohaterów powieści i czytelników.
3. Co oznacza „kyś”?
Tatiana Tołstoj za tytuł swojej książki przyjęła słowo, które w języku rosyjskim nic nie znaczy, choć – jak pisze w posłowiu do polskiego wydania powieści jej tłumacz Jerzy Czech – „Rosjanie słyszą w nim więcej niż my [Polacy]”
(Czech 2004: 284). Nie mając określonego znaczenia w obu językach, słowo to
zapewnia jednak możliwość interpretacji, zmieniającą się wraz z lekturą antyutopijnej wizji przyszłości w Kysiu.
Słowem, które – także według Jerzego Czecha – kojarzy się z tytułem powieści, jest „ryś”. Takie wyobrażenie o tajemniczym kysiu mają również bohaterowie książki. Stworzenie to jest utożsamiane ze zwierzęciem zamieszkującym lasy. Jest to jednak raczej hipoteza oparta na opowieściach starszych (ludzi),2 nikt bowiem nie wie, jak wygląda kyś, a „zobaczyć go nie można” (Tołstoj 2004: 7). Coś jednak o nim wiadomo: „Siedzi na ciemnych gałęziach
i krzyczy tak dziko i żałośnie: kyyyś, kyyyś! … Ot, pójdzie człek do lasu, a kyś
mu na plecy z tyłu: hop! I kark zębami: trrrach! Najważniejszą żyłkę wymaca
pazurem i przetnie, a wtedy cały rozum z człeka wyleci” (Tołstoj 2004: 7).
Na podstawie tego opisu rysuje się w wyobraźni bohaterów utworu (i czytelnika) obraz zwierzęcia (stwora), które w odróżnieniu od rysia, jego pozaliterackiego odpowiednika, żywi się częścią niematerialną człowieka – umysłem
lub duszą, ale nie ciałem. Ofiara po spotkaniu z kysiem żyje, jest jednak w stanie „oderwania od rzeczywistości”. Zachowuje się jak lunatyk. Kysia można
więc zinterpretować jako wyobrażenie zbiorowe siły, która odbiera istocie jego
byt społeczny w świecie postludzkim.
Ofiary kysia nie są społecznie akceptowane. Główny bohater, Benedikt,
twierdzi, że byłoby lepiej, gdyby one umarły, nie żyją już bowiem w społeczeństwie, są uzależnione od swoich bliskich, a często stają się barbarzyńską,
z punktu widzenia czytelnika, rozrywką dla innych mieszkańców FiodoroKuźmiczowska. Kyś dla bohaterów powieści Tatiany Tołstoj jest straszniejszy
2
Stwierdzenie takie w ustach istoty, która urodziła się po Wybuchu i ma Effekty, skłania
czytelnika do stwierdzenia, że ci, którzy nie noszą śladów mutacji, nie są uważani za ludzi.
Podczas lektury okazuje się jednak, że w Kysiu nie ma istot, które nie miałyby Effektów,
gdyż w świadomości urodzonych po kataklizmie nawet Dawni mają swój Effekt – nie ulegają procesowi biologicznego starzenia się. Śmierć następuje w wyniku tragicznego zdarzenia.
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od śmierci. „Kiedy się zdarza taka straszna rzecz z człowiekiem, że kyś go wyssie, żyłkę pazurkiem przerwie, to lepiej, żeby prędzej pomarł, lepiej niech
w nim bąbelek pęknie, i koniec” (Tołstoj 2004: 91).
Wyobraźnia zbiorowa, jak wynika z powyższego cytatu, utożsamia duszę
z „bąbelkiem”. Na tej podstawie można wysnuć wniosek, że w Kysiu Tatiana
Tołstoj przedstawiła wyobrażenie demonicznej siły nadprzyrodzonej rzeczywistości postludzkiej, która jest dzika, mieszka w ciemnym lesie i kojarzy się
z krwiopijnym zwierzęciem przypominającym dzikiego kota (na przykład
wspomnianego rysia).
Idąc tym tropem, odnajdujemy podobieństwo w zachowaniu ofiar rysia,
a także dostrzegamy pewien związek z występującym w mowie potocznej wyrażeniem „mieć (dostać) kota” – dotyczy ono osób, które postradały zmysły,
zachowują się irracjonalnie (Müldner-Nieckowski 2003: 324–325). W Kysiu
przywołanie kontekstu frazeologicznego pogłębia możliwości interpretacyjne.
W kulturze kot jest symbolicznie przypisany obrzędowości związanej z czarami, tajemnym praktykom magicznym, sferze zakazanej, ezoteryce. Żaden rosyjski słownik frazeologiczny nie potwierdza jednak istnienia odpowiednika tego
wyrażenia.
W rzeczywistości literackiej opisanej przez Tatianę Tołstoj nie pojawiają
się niektóre gatunki roślin i zwierząt, ale są one znane czytelnikowi. Wskutek
Wybuchu prawdopodobnie wyginęły psy, konie i właśnie koty. Licznie zaś
występują inne gatunki zwierząt, które przystosowały się do nowego środowiska. Są to na przykład myszy. Ich obecność czytelnik wartościuje zazwyczaj
negatywnie.
Mieszkańcy Fiodoro-Kuźmiczowska na dużą populację gryzoni patrzą jednak jak na łaskawość losu i bogactwo gospodarcze: „Przecie mysza – to nasze
wszystko! I pojeść, i odzież ze skórek skroić, i na targowicy dadzą za nią, co
chcesz” (Tołstoj 2004: 152), „mysza to podstawa naszej egzystencji” (Tołstoj
2004: 166). Być może więc kyś jest alternatywnym bytem łączącym cechy kota
i rysia – alternatywą zwielokrotnioną wyobrażeń czytelnika.
3.1. Kyś to nie koń
W świecie Kysia, jak już wspominałam, wyginęło wiele gatunków roślin
i zwierząt. Należą do nich również konie. Słowo „koń” odnalezione w książkach przez jednego z „przepisywaczy książek”, nie jest znane ludzikom. Najwyższy Basza – Fiodor Kuźmicz – objaśnia im, że koń to latająca mysz, czyli
nietoperz. Nieporadność tłumaczenia przez Wielkiego Baszę, czym jest koń, nie
jest prawdą tylko z punktu widzenia Dawnych, wygeneratów i czytelnika. Bohaterowie powieści znają słowa, ale brakuje im odpowiednich desygnatów,
szukają ich więc w miarę możliwości w otaczającym świecie.
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Konsekwencją braku wielu elementów rzeczywistości sprzed Wybuchu jest
swoboda budowania wyobrażeń i nadawanie dowolnego znaczenia słowom
nieznanym bytom postludzkim. Ludziki znają brzmienie słów: „koń”, „asfalt”,
„uniwersytet”, ale z punktu widzenia Dawnych (i czytelnika) wypowiadają je
niewłaściwie, łamiąc zasady ortoepii i zmieniając ich znaczenie. Dlatego czytelnik słyszy o „łuniwersytetach”, „mjodzie”, „asfaldzi” czy „markietache”. Są
to puste słowa, bez desygnatów w nowej rzeczywistości. Alternatywność użycia
niektórych słów przez bohaterów książki jest celowo prowadzoną przez Tatianę
Tołstoj swoistą grą językową z czytelnikiem (o czym będzie jeszcze mowa
w punkcie 5 niniejszego artykułu).
3.2. Kyś to nie kot
Aby poszerzyć zakres znaczeń słowa „kyś”, warto wskazać inne paralele
między powieściowym światem sprzed Wybuchu a światem czytelnika. Rosjanie
przywołują kota, używając słowa „kis” („kis kis” – polski odpowiednik „kici
kici”), które służy także, podobnie jak w języku polskim, odstraszaniu – „a kysz!”.
„Odpędzić go! Blady jest taki, cielisty, bez farby nijakiej, jako zmierzch abo
ryba, abo skóra na brzuchu kota, między nogami” (Tołstoj 2004: 187). Ofiara
zaatakowana przez kysia zachowuje się irracjonalnie – płacze, krzyczy, nieludzko i nieustannie zawodzi, wydając z siebie dźwięki typu „kyyyyś, kyyyyś!”.
W przywołanym wyżej cytacie główny bohater odpędza stwora, który czai
się gdzieś blisko niego, już nie w lesie. Wraz z rozwojem akcji czytelnik dostrzega swoistą ewolucję wyobrażenia kysia. Łączy się ona z rozwojem duchowym Benedikta, który jest spowodowany edukacją czytelniczą bohatera. Im
więcej Benedikt czyta, tym bliżej niego jest kyś, który dodatkowo zmienia swoją postać. Wychodzi z lasu i zaczyna czaić się pod jego domem. Benedikt sądzi,
że aby go odegnać, wystarczy, jeśli przestanie o nim myśleć: „Zgroza to co? …
kiedy o kysiu pomyślisz, to jest zgroza. Dlatego, żeś sam, bez nikogo. I do ciebie – zbliża się... Nie! Myśleć nawet strach” (Tołstoj 2004: 127).
Zmiana wyobrażenia Benedikta o kysiu zachodzi wraz z podjętą przez bohatera nauką czytania i coraz większą liczbą przeczytanych książek, niewątpliwie wpływających na poziom jego świadomość. Benedikt po awansie społecznym, który nastąpił wraz z poślubieniem córki Głównego Sanitarza, Oleńki, ma
nieograniczony dostęp do księgozbioru, który jest strzeżony przed innymi
członkami społeczeństwa niczym najcenniejszy skarb. Im więcej Benedikt czyta, tym częściej odczuwa obecność kysia.
Z perspektywy czytelnika bohater zaczyna doznawać stanu psychofizycznego przypominającego rozstrój nerwowy, stan depresyjny lub objawy schizofrenii. Szarpie włosy, krzyczy, wykonuje nieskoordynowane ruchy, po czym
popada w stan odrętwienia, coraz rzadziej kontaktuje się także ze światem zewnętrznym. Jego jedyną aktywnością życiową jest czytanie, później zaś nieod-
171
parta potrzeba powiększania księgozbioru. Lektura staje się dla Benedikta alternatywą egzystencji. W książkach odnajduje spokój duszy i ciała. Odpędza
(oswaja) kysia. Problem pojawia się w momencie, gdy kończą się zasoby biblioteki, Benedict przeczytał bowiem wszystko – od poradników szydełkowania
po dzieła Platona. Wtedy w głównym bohaterze budzi się kyś. Za pomocą osęka
odbiera właścicielom książki, przecina cienką arterię żylną i kładzie kres ich
istnieniu. Kyś nie jest więc na pewno udomowionym kotem, ale dzikim zwierzęciem – mroczną stroną istoty postludzkiej. Czy przez to bliższym czytelnikowi – człowiekowi?
4. Post-homo lector3
Pisarka, egzemplifikując topos homo lectora i księgi (Maleszyński
1982: 35), zwraca uwagę na ambiwalencję procesu czytania. Z punktu widzenia
Dawnych, ale zapewne także czytelnika, obcowanie ze słowem pisanym kształtuje życie duchowe, rozwija intelektualnie. W Lekcjach ciemności Dariusz Czaja (2009: 175) poddaje jednak literaturę srogiej ocenie: „Literatura oprócz swoich innych wcieleń, może funkcjonować także jako mocno podejrzany ekshumacyjny gest. Przywraca do życia, reanimuje zaistniałe już realnie przerażające
fakty i odrażające kreatury, każąc przejrzeć się im dokładnie. Innymi słowy,
urządza nam mocno dwuznaczny spektakl pod hasłem: przeżyjmy to jeszcze
raz”.
W Kysiu mamy do czynienia z analizą funkcji literatury oraz transpozycją
toposu księgi i homo lectora poza sferę oscylującą wokół człowieka. Czytają
istoty, których status ontologiczny zapewne nie pozwala na umiejscowienie ich
w kategoriach ludzkich: „Czyta sobie człek, wargami rusza, słowa rozbiera
i jakoby od razu w dwóch miejscach przebywał. Niby siedzi abo leży, nogi
podkuliwszy, abo ręką w misce gmera, a przecie insze światy widzi, dalekie abo
takie, co ich całkiem nie masz, a widzi jako żywe. Biegnie człek, abo płynie,
abo na saniach pędzi … ile książek tyle żywotów różnych przeżyje!” (Tołstoj
2004: 161).
Zacytowane słowa Benedikta wskazują na rozważania natury quasifilozoficznej nad procesem czytania, ale wzniosłość i głębia myśli zostają zmącone przez język bohatera. Tatiana Tołstoj, kreując świat literacki, posłużyła się
językiem, który można nazwać alternatywnym, gdyż nie jest to język będący
kodem komunikacji charakterystycznym dla czytelnika. Można powiedzieć, że
jest to język zdegenerowany równie mocno jak istoty zamieszkujące świat po
3
Termin zaczerpnięty od Tadeusza Witczaka, na którego powołuje się Dariusz Cezary Maleszyński (1982: 35), określając w ten sposób człowieka oddającego się lekturze z pasją i poczuciem uświęcenia tej czynności.
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Wybuchu – postludzie. Uprawnia to więc do nazwania go językiem postludzkim. Na początku powieści materia słowa adekwatnie oddawała charakter świata Fiodoro-Kuźmiczowska – była tak zdeformowana, jak umysły i ciała zamieszkujących go istot. Kod językowy kreujący obraz rzeczywistości pełni
funkcję mimesis świata postludzkiego (jaki język, taki świat).
5. Nowa-stara wieża Babel
Kategorie użyte do opisu języka zostały zaczerpnięte z teorii językoznawczych, które reprezentują perspektywę antropocentryczną. Należy pamiętać
o analogii w konstrukcji świata czytelnika i dystopii stworzonej przez Tatianę
Tołstoj. Mamy tutaj do czynienia z alternatywnością zwielokrotnioną i analogią
skumulowaną. Dochodzi do spotkania dwóch istot, które reprezentują dwie
odmienne kategorie istnień, a więc „inności” stosunku do otoczenia, języka
i przeszłości.
Sytuacja braku porozumienia może być rozpatrywana w kategoriach gry
językowej Ludwiga Wittgensteina. Pojęcie gry jest jednak tylko słowem, które
otwiera kolejne podobieństwa znaczeń z innymi kategoriami języka. W Dociekaniach filozoficznych Ludwig Wittgenstein (2000 [1953]: 52) pyta: „W jaki
sposób zamknięte jest pojęcie gry? Co jest grą, a co już nią nie jest? Czy możesz
podać granice? Nie. Możesz je wytyczać”, wskazując, że „gra” jest „pojęciem o
rozmytych brzegach”, ale dzięki temu można mu nadawać różne znaczenia.
Wytyczenie jednolitych granic pojęciu „gry” zamyka jednak możliwość
porozumienia – każda istota rozumna inaczej postrzega sens tego słowa, ponieważ wyznaczyła mu inne granice. Analogiczna jest sytuacja kontaktu językowego dwóch istot w Kysiu. Kiedy Dawny pragnie kontaktu z istotą urodzoną po
Wybuchu – z ludzikiem, mamy do czynienia z sytuacją gry językowej, którą
autorka prowadzi nie tylko między swoimi bohaterami, ale także między narratorem a czytelnikiem. Sytuację tę dobrze ilustruje fragment powieści, w którym
Dawny Nikita Iwanycz, niczym męczennik za wiarę lub naukę, zostaje skazany
na spalenie na stosie (analogia do inkwizycji oraz Index librorum prohibitorum
jest inspirującą możliwością interpretacji omawianej powieści):
Zadymiło trochę, uniósł się biały, żrący dym, ale bez ognia, bo zwilgotniałe po deszczu drwa
nie chciały się zająć.
– Pen-zinem trzeba by – zaczęto gadać w tłumie. – Pen-zinem chlusnąć.
– BENzyną – krzyknął z wierzchołka rozeźlony Nikita Iwanycz. – Ile razy mam mówić,
uczyć: BEN, BEN, BENzyna! Barany!
Benedikt, który ślozy kułakiem ocierał, szarpnął się, jakoby to jego wołano po imieniu.
– Wszytko jedno już, Nikito Iwanyczu! Cóż za różnica...
– Nie, nie wszytko jedno! Nie wszystko jedno! Czy tak trudno opanować ortopepię? (Tołstoj
2004: 276)
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Dialog bohaterów wskazuje na sytuację braku porozumienia. Słowo opisujące tę samą rzecz jest wypowiadane inaczej. Odmienna artykulacja odzwierciedla w tym wypadku także stan wiedzy bohatera (i czytelnika) o właściwościach opisywanego przedmiotu. Wiedza czytelnika z zakresu chemii i fizyki
pozwala jednak przewidzieć skutki użycia tej substancji. Mamy tutaj do czynienia z grą językową, która jest prowadzona między czytelnikiem i bohaterami
oraz między samymi bohaterami. Dotyczy ona jednak różnych kwestii.
W pierwszym wypadku – zrozumienia, czym jest słowo „pen-zin”. Czytelnik,
aby to pojąć, powinien z powyższego fragmentu, jak i z wcześniejszej lektury,
skojarzyć, że chodzi prawdopodobnie o benzynę. Jest to gra w odnajdywanie
analogii między światem skonstruowanym w powieści a światem pozaliterackim.
W drugim wypadku mamy do czynienia z grą, w której każdy gracz jest
wygranym/przegranym. Stawką jest odgadnięcie, co gracz ma na myśli, mówiąc
„pen-zin”. Dawny wie, co oznacza słowo „pen-zin”, ale uważa, że nie jest to
nazwa właściwa, gdyż istnieje inne (jego zdaniem – właściwe) słowo, które
nazywa tę substancję: „benzyna”. Pochodzi ono z innej rzeczywistości, która
jest już historią.
Pozostali uczestnicy wydarzeń nie rozumieją, dlaczego stojąc w obliczu
śmierci, Dawny interesuje się kwestią artykulacji słów. Jest jeszcze czytelnik,
który z kolei niekoniecznie może rozumieć irytację Nikity Iwanycza, ale wie, że
kraje skupione w organizacji OPEC (o czym także jest mowa w powieści) mają
wiele wspólnego z produkcją benzyny, a nie „pen-zinu”.
Przez niewłaściwą wymowę i zniekształcenie wyrazu „ortoepia”, wypowiedzianego jako „ortopepia”, zostaje wzmocniony groteskowy charakter refleksji
Tatiany Tołstoj nad gatunkiem ludzkim, którego reprezentantem jest Dawny –
Nikita Iwanycz. Ironię sytuacji podkreśla ewentualna wiedza czytelnika o tym,
że ortoepia zajmuje się poprawnością wymowy słów.
Analiza konstrukcji języka bohaterów Kysia wskazuje, że być może żaden
z możliwych wariantów – czy to w wypadku rozumienia słów, czy też w kwestii artykulacji wyrazów, przez bohaterów powieści – nie jest właściwy. Alternatywność zakłada wybór między dwiema wykluczającymi się możliwościami.
Być może perspektywa autorki zakłada alternatywę rozumianą w kategoriach
hermeneutycznej tajemnicy.
Rozumienie słów przez Dawnych czy głównego bohatera (a także czytelnika), jak się wydaje, nigdy nie jest właściwe, nie ma bowiem właściwej formy
żadnego słowa. Zależy to od tego, kim się jest, do jakiego gatunku się należy.
Każda istota ludzka i postludzka posługuje się mową, czy jednak pragnie porozumienia z rozmówcą, czy też chodzi tylko o czynność wypowiadania słów?
Czy istnieje alternatywny sposób porozumienia, poza słowami? Tatiana Tołstoj
w Kysiu zastanawia się i nad tą kwestią, ale jej bohaterowie (i czytelnik) nie
znajdują jednoznacznej odpowiedzi.
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Karolina Wierel
Warto tu przytoczyć wypowiedź Umberto Eco z rozdziału „Dwa modele
interpretacji”, pochodzącego książki z 1990 roku Limiti dell’interpretazione
[Granice interpretacji], który w języku polskim ukazał się w wyborze tekstów
pt. Czytanie świata:
Każdy przedmiot ziemski lub niebiański skrywa jakąś tajemnicę inicjacyjną. Jednak,
jak twierdziło wielu hermeneutyków, wyjaśniona tajemnica inicjacyjna niczemu nie służy.
Za każdym, razem, gdy sądzimy, że odkryliśmy tajemnicę, będzie ona nią tylko wtedy, kiedy
odsyła do innej tajemnicy, w ciągłym ruchu ku tajemnicy ostatecznej. … Ostateczna
tajemnica nie ma racji bytu. … Myśl hermetyczna przemienia cały teatr świata w zjawisko
lingwistyczne, odbierając jednocześnie językowi wszelką zdolność komunikacyjną (Eco
1999 [1990; 1985; 1984]: 10–11).
Podążając tym tropem, można podjąć próbę odpowiedzi na tytułowe pytanie i stwierdzić, że kyś to tajemnica gry słownej, a więc tajemnica istnienia.
A zatem można przyjąć twierdzenie, że: „Prawda jest ukryta. Badanie symboli
i zagadek nie prowadzi nigdy do prawdy ostatecznej, lecz przesuwa tylko tajemnicę na inną płaszczyznę. Skoro tak przedstawia się stan człowieczy, zatem
świat jest owocem błędu” (Eco 1999: 13). Taka jest także tajemnica Benedikta,
którą bohater chce odkryć w tafli wody. Kiedy został nazwany kysiem, szuka
potwierdzenia tego faktu w swoim odbiciu:
Dotknął uszy. Zwyczajne. Obmacał poliki. Zdjął łapeć, obejrzał nogę, ale i ona
zwyczajna, z wierzchu biała, pode spodem ciemna od brudu, w końcu to noga. … Nie, nie
jestem kyś. Nie!!! A właśnie, że jesteś. … To wszystko on – nie ma spokoju. Podkradł się
z tyłu – i uszy przyciśnięte i płacze i marszczy blade liczko, oblizuje szyje zimnymi
wargami, a szuka pazurem, żeby żyłkę zaczepić. Tak, to on. Zepsuł mnie... aaa. Zepsuł
(Tołstoj 2004: 271).
Analizując tajemnicę granic istnienia i odkrywania, można nawiązać do
koncepcji odbicia lustrzanego według Umberto Eco zawartej w rozdziale
„O zwierciadle”, który pochodzi z książki Sugli specchi e altri saggi [Po drugiej stronie lustra i inne eseje] z roku 1985, umieszczonej we wspominianym
wcześniej wyborze tekstów tego autora pt. Czytanie świata (1999: 67). Wprawdzie w Kysiu tafla wody pełni funkcję zwierciadła, można to jednak odczytywać
jako poszukiwanie odbicia nie zewnętrznego obrazu, ale tego, co jest w środku.
Co (kto) jest w Benedikcie?
W nawiązaniu do Umberta Eco, można przyjąć, że zwierciadło jest zjawiskiem – progiem, które wyznacza granice między wyobrażonym a symbolicznym. Początkiem kształtowania przez człowieka obrazu swojego istnienia jako
bytu jednostkowego jest moment, w którym niemowlę zobaczy własne odbicie
w lustrze. Druga faza to mieszanie obrazu z rzeczywistością, a następna –
uświadomienie sobie, że chodzi o wyobrażenie odbicia jego samego.
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Pojęcie odbicia czerpie z imaginacji, jak można powiedzieć w nawiązaniu
do Umberto Eco (1999: 15). Należy więc tutaj przyjąć, że Benedict jest owładnięty potrzebą odkrycia tajemnicy, choć wizualnie jest nadal Benediktem.
Zmiana zaszła na poziomie słów niewypowiedzianych, które ciągle krążą wokół
pytania o tajemnicę. Benedikt w finale powieści poszukuje księgi, „gdzie
wszystko jest powiedziane” (Tołstoj 2004: 276).
6. Coś się kończy
Przeświadczenie o błędzie, jaki kryje się w tajemnicy istnienia człowieka
i stworzonego przez niego świata, zostało przeniesione przez Tatianę Tołstoj do
rzeczywistości literackiej, w której współistnieją byty ludzkie i nieludzkie.
Prowadzą one nieustanną grę kulturową za pomocą słów. Można uznać tę powieść za kolejną literacką interpretację opowieści biblijnej o wieży Babel.
Nie ma alternatywy dla gry językowej, poza nią są bowiem kolejne gry
i kolejne tajemnice. Czym więc jest kyś? Zwierzęciem? Uczuciem lęku przed
nieznanym? Mefistofeles z Fausta Johanna Wolfganga von Goethego wypowiada słowa, które mogą być pomocne w rozwikłaniu zagadki kysia: „Jam jest
duch, co zawsze przeczy! I całkiem słusznie, bo dzieło stworzenia. Zaprawdę
warte jest zniszczenia; Lepiej mu było nie powstawać” (Goethe 2006
[1831]: 56). Może lepiej milczeć? Niech mówią słowa przez literaturę, tworząc
historie alternatywne.
Wykaz literatury
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tutaj - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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