Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 ARS AETERNA Self and Eternity Constantine the Philosopher University Faculty of Arts Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 1 ARS AETERNA Názov/Title ARS AETERNA - Self and Eternity Vydavateľ/Publisher Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre Filozofická fakulta Štefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitra Tel.: + 421 37 64 08 455 E-mail: kangl@ukf.sk Adresa redakcie/Office Address Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre Dekanát FF UKF Štefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitra Tel.: +421 37 6408 444 E-mail: dekanatff@ukf.sk Šéfredaktor/Editor in Chief Mgr. Alena Smiešková, PhD. Asistent editora/Editorial assistant: Mgr. Simona Hevešiová, PhD. Redakčná rada/Board of Reviewers Prof. Bernd Herzogenrath (Germany) Doc. PhDr. Michal Peprník, PhD. (Czech Republic) Doc. PhDr. Anton Pokrivčák, PhD. (Slovak Republic) Mgr. Petr Kopal, PhD. (Czech Republic) Redakčná úprava/sub-editor Mgr. Simona Hevešiová, PhD., Ing. Matúš Šiška Jazyková úprava/Proofreading Andor Skotnes, Marcos Perez Náklad/Copies: 50 Počet strán/Pages 99 ISSN: 1337-9291 Evidenčné číslo: EV 2821/08 (c) 2011 Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre 2 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS On Man, Eternity and Dostoyevsky … Interview with Professor Andrej Červeňák Mária Kiššová 5 Self on the Verge of Eternity. Iñarritu’s art of cinema Alena Smiešková 17 Self, Eternity, and Oral History Andor Skotnes 34 ’We don’t become refugees by choice.’ Memories of Exile Teresa Meade 41 Between Imitation and Self-relection – the Postmodernist Rendering of Oscar Wilde’s myth in Will Self’s Dorian Petr Chalupský 48 The Passion: Eternal Past Reconsidered Diana Židová 62 Samsaric existence - the concept of inite eternity Miroslava Obuchová 70 Reviews 89 3 ARS AETERNA This issue is dedicated in honour of Prof. PhDr. Andrej Červeňák, DrSc. (22 May 1932 – 11 February 2012) who devoted his life to Literature, Humanity and the Quest for Eternity and inspired many others to do likewise. 4 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 On Man, Eternity and Dostoyevsky … Interview with Professor Andrej Červeňák Mária Kiššová “God exists only if he exists in a human heart. The same can be said about Eternity.” Andrej Červeňák It is a great honour to present Prof. PhDr. Andrej Červeňák, DrSc. in the sixth issue of Ars Aeterna, which focuses on eternity and the self. Andrej Červeňák is a Slovak literary scholar with a life-long devotion to literature and humanity. His attempts to study and disclose the working of the human psyche and soul as presented in literature have been reflected in several monographs, papers and scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and Slovak literature. His ideas have been developed in the framework of anthropocentrism, interdisciplinarity and comparative study of which he is a strong advocate. Professor Červeňák’s major publications include A. S. Puškin – človek a básnik (A. S. Puškin – Man and Poet) (1989),Tajomstvo Dostojevského (The Mystery of Dostoyevsky) (1989), Dosto­ jevského sny (Dostoyevsky’s Dreams) (1998), Človek a text (Man and Text) (2001), Človek v texte: Dostojevskij a esteticko-antropologická koncepcia literatúry (Man in a Text: Dostoyevsky and Esthetic-Anthropological Concept of Literature) (2002) Začiatky a konce, (Beginnings and Ends) (2002). MK Tzvetan Todorov, in his work Life in Common: An Essay in General Anthropology writes about the reception of art: “The beauty of art includes complex perception because it arouses not only the senses but also the sense: the sense by which human experience enriches art. In this way art gets closer to other forms of intellectual and spiritual experience. When I read a book which impresses me, a book by a philosopher or a scientist, a poet or a novelist, I feel that I become part of a relationship which enables self-fulfilment through the mere contact maintained through the power of thought or inexhaustibility of an image: it is as if my existence were literally expanding.” What does the experience of reading mean to you? Andrej Červeňák For me, listening to and reading fairy tales in my childhood was an escape from reality to the realm of dreams which – the other way round - affected reality so that the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of folk tale characters might win. Treading with them over the seven hills and seven valleys I also discovered other worlds, other people, another reality, different 5 ARS AETERNA from the one which I experienced in a poor little village house. Later – in my youth – reading stirred my fantasy so that I could participate in the joys and sorrows of literary characters. I wanted to help them in their miseries and troubles, unaware that it was them who helped overcome my life feelings and emotions, thoughts and visions. As an adult, I understood that I had become a product of reality, dream and fantasy, which connected me with three worlds – the natural world, the social and the transcendental, with three subjective truths (the truth of heart, reason and will), with three deities in all religions, etc. Literature and art - the roads towards the Absolute - showed me how to apprehend life’s vicissitudes as small relativist matters in the context of the Infinite. It is possible that the roots of my interdisciplinary understanding of literature, culture and art reach as far as that… One of my most powerful reading experiences has been a short story by Dostoyevsky The Dream of a Ridiculous Man… In his dream the protagonist experiences joy and happiness from contact with people who live in a world that resembles the one before the Fall of Adam and Eve on the planet Sirius. Brotherhood of all people flourishes, joy and happiness of one person is joy and happiness of all. The character asserts that he saw the Truth and after coming back from the realm of dream he decides to spread this Truth in real life. He believes that people can be happy on our planet also – consequently, they called him a ridiculous man. Were we indeed ridiculous? 6 You have been devoted to the professional study of literature for a few decades. Could you tell us what shaped your interest in Russian literature in particular? A Č My relationship with Russian literature had a prologue: during the First World War my grandfather fled to the Russians, who sent him to the hinterland to work on the soil of Russian landowners. When he came back and tottered on the stony Slovak soil, he stopped from time to time, set his eyes to the east and looking at me and my brother, he sighed: “Oh, Russia, Russia, Russia … that divine chernozem … to have that here …” For that reason, after the Second World War I went to the Greek Orthodox grammar school in Prešov – later renamed the Russian grammar school. There I encountered Pushkin for the first time and he has astonished me by his harmony and universality for all my life. There I read also Dostoyevsky for the first time (but really just read and did not understand). My diploma work at the Faculty of Arts at the Comenius University in Bratislava was on the harmony of life, man and literature (Rhythmical prose in the work by Leskov); my PhD. thesis was about the poetry of life, man and literature (Vajanský and Turgenev). Only the dramatic-tragic events of 1968 (for seven years almost in the street) threw me into the embrace of an advocate of the humiliated and insulted – F. M. Dostoyevsky. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Russian literature is univocally related to and inspired by the traditions of mysticism, the supernatural, spirituality and mystery. All these traditions are closely associated with the use of symbols. Could you tell us more about the significance of symbols in Russian literature? Is it possible for today’s readers to understand the symbols of the past fully? A Č Words in a work of art can have the feature of a sign, icon or symbol. The same may be said about a literary work; and the interpretation (of a word and of a work) depends on the reader. Are Gogol’s Dead Souls, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Korolenko’s The Blind Musician symbols, icons or signs of the Russian and panhuman reality? There was an adaptation of Dead Souls in the Nitra theatre, in which the characters (notably Chichikov) uttered contemporary slogans about how to lie, steal and get rich. An artistic image of great depth and power (an image as a sign, icon and symbol) is inexhaustible; it will communicate till manceases to exist. Our students attended a lecture on Tolstoy and they were shocked when the tragedy of Anna Karenina was explained by a lecturer as a tragedy of eroticism and sexuality. We understood it as … a sign, icon and symbol of two ethical problems: what is more important in a woman’s life – desire for love or responsibility as a mother? … Russian literature is a condenser of an immense spiritual power; it can be compared to a breath-taking symphony (what is an image of symphony – is it a sign, icon or symbol?) of various musical instruments. Some of them express anthropological depression, others mean social protest, the third group may stand for spiritual contemplation, the fourth one panhuman solidarity, the fifth group … As the symbols of the abovementioned and of other aesthetical-spiritual energies they symbolise a temporal form of man and his timeless symbolical variability. A small man … worthless man … man-god of Russian literature is not insignificant only in terms of serfdom and political absolutism – as we learnt at school – but he is also small when he faces natural and cosmic eternity. The elements of mysticism, of the supernatural, spiritual and mysterious arise somewhere there. In the Bjørndal trilogy, by the Norwegian writer Trygve Gulbranssen, one of the characters – Old Dag – says: “To see life from above as a short passage of road between the eternity we come from and the eternity we go towards – that is the first sight we need so that we may understand the connection”. This issue of Ars Aeterna pursues the topic of eternity. What does eternity mean to you? A Č The problem of eternity is associated with the eternity of the Universe, Nature and Man. Everything that has a beginning has also an end. However, as Dostoyevsky said, the beginnings and the ends are unknown to us. Everything that has no beginning does not have an end either – it is eternal. Only Deurg (the Creator) of 7 ARS AETERNA everything is eternal – God, or gods – thus claim the believers. He created the Universe, Life and Man that are … eternal or just temporal? Believers are content since they trust everything is in God’s hands. But the sceptics, atheists and scientists need evidence. However, objective evidence does not exist and likely will never exist. We know (thanks to the signals that have reached us after millions of light years, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments) less than 10 per cent of the universe. And what about the other 90 per cent? What laws of the quantum cosmology are valid there? We used to have a theory of the origin ofthe Big Bang, yet there might have been an infinite number of Big Bangs. It seems that “energy compressed to a maximum” (and science claimed that energy is related to matter) could be the energy of anti-matter (of dark matter and black holes). In order to understand the essence of dark matter and its energetic power, scientists decided to move their focus to the universe. If this power is controlled and brought to the Earth, it could replace all forms of energies known today. The possibility that the Universe, Life and Man would become eternal then cannot be eliminated. Some scientists are convinced that man and humankind would experience this form of eternity as inhabitants of all planets in the universe. This reminds me of Merezhkovsky, who claimed that there used to be the humankind of the Father, which deserved the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the destiny of Atlantis; now there is the 8 humankind of the Son, who suffered and delivered mankind from suffering, so that it also deserved something else, something more; this humankind will be followed by the humankind of the Spirit which will last forever. So this way of understanding eternity also exists. Scientists (Davies, Hawking, Toepler and others) claim that man will have to save himself by the journey to the universe. However, today’s Homo sapiens has no preconditions for that – will he mutate? Russian philosopher Fyodorov was convinced that the meaning of life on Earth is that all sons of all times joined together, brought sons, fathers and mothers of all times back to life and lived eternal life on all planets of the universe. Do you know a more fantastic idea of eternity? What kind of eternity will that be – physical, Christian (eternity of human souls) or Muslim (eternity of reincarnated people)? It is fascinating to read the ancient myths and to learn that people had similar dreams in all places of the world. Be it Sumerians, Egyptians, Jews or Aztecs, Brazilians, etc., they all believed in their gods, longed for eternal life, spread the same ideas and thoughts. For instance: “The Word became earth” (Heraclitus, 700 years before John the Baptist) – “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God” (John the Baptist). All religions preached the idea of eternity, differing only in ways they imagined it (from the cult of Phallus as a life-giver to nirvana – immortality of the human soul), etc. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 How do you interpret eternity in the wider context of Russian literature? A Č Classic Russian literature is anthropocentric in its essence. Man is a medium through which the authors submerge into his natural animality (the romanticism of Dostoyevsky), social misery (Shchedrin), spiritual transcendence (Dostoyevsky), historical tragicality (Tolstoy), etc. They all examine “man as a mystery” (Dostoyevsky), but each of them uncovers only a part of his universality. Why is each writer’s perception of man different? Religions are out of the discussion here as all is determined by God. Science offers hundreds of explanations: already at the moment of the Big Bang, entities (para-energies) originated which predetermined everything; human bodies contain all forms of life which have ever existed, even those which have ceased to exist (anthropic principle); human genotype – from the humanoids to Homo sapiens (a concrete Andrej); human DNA (22 chromosomes, 11 from each parent); prenatal life, practices of mankind and socialisation of genotype to phenotype; social realisation during lifetime etc. Then what conditioned the character and activity of Lermontov, Turgenev and Artsybashev and their “children” – Pechorin, Bazarov and Sanin? What makes them temporal and what eternal? I do believe that man is eternal. Man’s brain (millions of brain cells and billions of synapses which connect all cells) - as a Demiurge of everything that exists above the nature – is a “god-like” Creator. Is it possible that God or the Universe or Nature would throw - after man’s death - such an entity (para-energy, metaenergy) to the waste container of the Earth? Think of Alyosha Karamazov and Andrei Bolkonski lying on the ground (Alyosha embracing it as a mother “Syra Zemlya”, Bolkonski bidding farewell to life); when they stood up they were different men (Alyosha fell to earth as a dreaming youth and stood up as an adult combatant). What did their contacts with the stars, with the universe, mean? Thematic characters (Onegin, Pechorin, Zosima) feel the fire of stars within themselves (contact with eternity) but also the croaking of frogs in earthly swamps (contact with transience). As a literary scholar you have been exploring the works of F. M. Dostoyevsky for many years. How is eternity depicted in his works? A Č God exists only if he exists in a human heart. The same can be said about Eternity. People are heirs of the history of the Being, but they are also the anticipation of its Eternity. Mitya Karamazov is mortal; he is a rake of the decaying reality of the 19th century, but he is also an eternal intermediary of mythological culture and civilisation (he is an heir of Danaus, a father of fifty daughters). Alyosha Karamazov is a Russian youth who flees from sinful reality to the monastery, but he is also as eternal as Christ since he prepares the ground for the arrival of the mangod Myshkin. Ivan Karamazov is a child of Bazarov, yet he is also the son of scientistic travellers to the realm of stars and cosmic kingdoms. 9 ARS AETERNA Man’s eternity is in his fight for tomorrow and in his dream of Eternal Eldorado, Kitezh and Paradise on Earth … God – the Father created man in his image and this creation (creativity) became man’s (with the help of God’s Son) way to God. Nietzsche fought so that man returned to God and became Man-God. He rejected the god who betrayed this mission in human hearts, and pursued the unity of God and Man. Dostoyevsky made God and Satan equal in their fight over man, in the arena of his soul. Did he feel the same as our ancestors who preached the unity of Eros and Eris, love and hatred, peace and war, hostility and friendship of Neikos and Philotes in human hearts (Empedocles)? Talking about Dostoyevsky and his meditations upon human life, I would like to quote a few more sentences from the work of Gulbranssen. These are the last words of Old Dag, his testimony and life truth: “What we struggle for and what we want to achieve is joy in this life … and peace … with eternity. And only one road leads there, a road inside, through the goodness of heart. We can see it now … after all life … and it was spoken by him, who has the right to say so … he, who is for us … when everything within usextinguishes … The road to the meaning of life leads through reason and thoughts to his commandments … There is no other way except … through Christ…” Are there any links between this message and the philosophy of Dostoyevsky? 10 A Č Yes, the road to eternity leads through human hearts. The heart asks man to love everything – lilies of the valley that wake up in the morning and birds which sing, a howling wolf and a crying man (the starets Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov) – but first and foremost it asks to love Christ. But other virtues (Satan), such as egoism, pride, envy, and hatred “rampage” in a human heart also, not only love.When Dostoyevsky’s first wife Isaeva was lying on her deathbed, Dostoyevsky meditated: “Masha is lying there, on the table. Shall we ever see each other again? To love your neighbour as yourself – as the Gospel asks – is impossible. The law of nature prevents it, the law of the self”. Christ preached and he lived accordingly. The Grand Inquisitor (The Brothers Karamazov) acts as Christ’s deputy on Earth, but he preaches something, and his acts are contrary to his words. He reproaches Christ that he could feed hundreds of people with a few loaves of bread but he let man starve and die in starvation; that he could make miracles but he refused to do it to subjugate the Tempter; that he could rule in the name of the mighty Father, yet he died helpless on the cross. However, if Christ executed those three potencies – bread, miracle and power – he would humble man and make his free choice for God impossible; on the other hand, he enabled the powers of Evil to enslave man for a piece of bread (practices by social potentates), to blind and humble him by “miracles” (this is done by the myth-forming and technical creators of “miracles”), so that the mighty of this Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 world would rule over the weak in the name of various demagogies. For this reason the Grand Inquisitor asks Christ, his institutional ruler, to leave and not to interfere with matters which he (a man) in His name (in the name of God) pursues. In his name (in the name of the Inquisitor) thousands of god-fearing people perished. But the Inquisitor was an heir to the history of humankind (for instance, the Roman Senate accused about 7, 000 devotees of the Dionysian Mysteries and sentenced them to death in 186 B.C. – Merezhkovsky). Christ says nothing. He kisses the Inquisitor on his ninetyyear-old lips and leaves. What does that kiss mean? There are hundreds of interpretations. What is yours? What significance did Christ and his teaching have two thousand years ago and what is its significance today? What is different and what stayed the same? What kind of Christ is being preached today in hundreds of teachings and religions (there are more than twenty registered in Slovakia)? Goodness in human hearts? For me, the Christological motif is principal and crucial in Dostoyevsky’s work. Christ connects what is incompatible: man and God, transience and eternity. It seems to me that today’s culture does not know how to handle the person of Jesus Christ. What is your interpretation of Christ or Christological motifs in Dostoyevsky’s writing? A Č Dostoyevsky was concerned with the problem of man and Christ during all his life. Even though he explored Christ in the characters of Myshkin, the starets Zosima, Alyosha Karamazov and the peasant Marey, he felt and perceived him always at the creation of every character. Even Makar Devushkin (from the debut Poor Folk) acts in the name of Christ as a symbol of goodness in his heart. Even Raskolnikov (the novel Crime and Punishment) - who preaches that man has the right to commit one small evil act (to murder a man) in the name of a thousand deeds of goodness – in the end of the novel he awakes from the madness of the idea and adheres to Sonya Marmeladova and the Gospel (she reads to him about the resurrection of Lazarus). God created man in His image; he expelled him from Eden after he committed sin, but he gave him a chance to come back. From the perspective of science, the purpose of the origin of the universe was to create conditions for the origin of life, the purpose of life is to create conditions for the origin of man; what is then the purpose of man? That is the question of the logic of cosmic evolution. Scientists ponder over the perspective of two billion years for man on Earth, and for that reason other scientists ponder that man has to prepare for life away from this planet; thus man must change not only as a psychologicalmaterial being (mutation of Homo sapiens into Homo cosmicus?), but also as a spiritual being (para-physical, metamaterial, trans-material, etc.). Cannot immortality and eternity be found in this? Prince Myshkin (Christ, Valjean and Don Quixote in one character) was preparing in his life for something like 11 ARS AETERNA this; people were pleased, yet when they noticed how far they had gotten from God and the Christ of Goodness, Truth and Love, they killed him as they once killed Christ. Dostoyevsky was a believer, but his faith was not dogmatic, it was philosophical, transcendental, cosmic, mystical, etc. One of the well-known sentences of Dostoyevsky is his comparison of a man to a mystery. One of your monographic works has the title Tajomstvo Dostojevského (1991) (The Mystery of Dostoyevsky). Mystery implies mystique, secret knowledge; but on the other hand it also incites the eternal desire for knowledge. In what way has Dostoyevsky remained a mystery to you? A Č In the monograph Mystery of Dostoyevsky, which was to be printed in 1971, but was actually only printed after twenty years (in 1991), I read and approached the life and work of Dostoyevsky in three ways – I considered him as an advocate of the humiliated and insulted (social concepts), as a seeker of the Absolute (Christian-philosophical concepts) and as an analyst of human consciousness and subconsciousness (Freudian-naturalistic concepts). That was my polemic with the monologism of the era. I tried to uncover man as a mystery that has been reduced by the times to a social being (the substance of man is his place in the system of production). “The world dostoyevskiad” showed something different, so during the period of normalisation – as a man of the year 1968, a docent and vice12 dean, I was thrown out into the street … Dostoyevsky remains a mystery not only for his work but also for his life. I have been thinking until now when did Dostoyevsky (a poor man in social terms, a Petrashev revolutionary, in Siberian exile and a prisoner …) become Dostoyevsky – a prophet, looking into the history of man and his future. When? Wasn’t it at the minute of his death, when his whole life was revealed before his eyes? Standing at the place of his execution, he had just two minutes left – what did he feel in those moments? In the novella Katerina (The Landlady), written in the preSiberian period, the character thought in terms of whole epochs; after the experience of the moment of death he started to think with micro-particles of subconsciousness, consciousness and superconsciousness. What do our ancient emotional and thinking moments of life mean? In the novel Idiot, a lady – a confidante of the Tsarina though sentenced to death by human envy - was at the guillotine. She bows her head under an axe and begs the executioner - “Please, wait a while, sir, just a while.” What this while meant for her we don’t know. What “the” while meant for Dostoyevsky we know from his work and life. At the beginning of the 20th century a great admirer of Dostoyevsky, a writer and critic V. Rozanov (he wrote a comprehensive study on Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor) rejected the past but didn’t accept the future either. He created the philosophy of the moment, the philosophy of “now”: what was was, what will be – we don’t know, Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 there is just now, this very moment … When I travel around Slovakia and I see billboards which “scream”: eat this and that, send emails, do sports, experience and enjoy this life (this moment), I think of Rozanov and Dostoyevsky. Have they anticipated life as a moment or is it just me thinking so (my receptive consciousness)? Your next monograph focuses on dreams in Dostoyevsky’s works. Dreams have very specific significance in different cultural spaces and they touch upon the sphere of the unknown which we cannot control. How does Dostoyevsky use dreams? A Č After its publication (1999), my monograph Dostoyevsky’s Dreams (Dostojevského sny) met with a big response (I have recorded more than twenty reviews and responses to the publication). Human dreams are among the greatest mysteries of man. Its scientific explanations (nervous system, functioning of brain cells, thalamus and hypothalamus, etc.) do not explain the ontological substance of a dream: what is it that we can see, hear and feel in a dream? What kind of reality is that? It resembles the entity of the first three minutes after the Big Bang, when “Spirit” has already ceased to be spirit and “primordial matter” is not yet matter (it is “spirit-matter”). A dream seems to be a fossil from the time when there was NOTHING, out of which originated SOMETHING and from that EVERYTHING. In the process of cosmic evolution such an entity settled into three basic constants of the Being – to the universe, into life and into man; out of which three communication systems developed – the cosmic communication system, the biological communication system and the anthropological communication system. There is an ontological connection between them – they are interconnected and they transmit (exchange) information. That’s why we have dreams which react to the reality we experience, dreams which are panhuman and we have also dreams which are cosmic. To think that those have nothing in common with our lives is a mistake. Man is a product of the universe, of life and anthropoids; these three “producers” don’t take their eyes of him at all. Because of that, each dream we have (even the most fantastic one) is about ourselves … Three dreams of Rodion Raskolnikov represent three types of dreams – natural (drunkards beating a little horse that small Rodya tries to protect), social (a dream Rodion has after the murder of an old woman and which negates logic of his reason) and a cosmic dream (at the end of the novel) sent by the universe in the form of the “trichina”, which infect each pseudo-realist (all of them) who murder/s all other people. What an image of the Apocalypse! This dream only managed to stop man and mankind, who in the name of infallibility and logic excuse any crime. Reason (pseudo-reason) as the greatest enemy of everything and everyone!? In the series of lectures called Interdisciplinary Dialogues at the Faculty of Arts, CPU in Nitra, you gave a lecture about the relation between 13 ARS AETERNA Einstein and Dostoyevsky. They have many things in common even though it doesn’t have to be obvious at first sight. Einstein claimed repeatedly that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He considered it to be the source of all true art and all science and to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is – according to Einstein - as good as dead: his eyes are closed. A Č When I read Einstein’s words that “Dostoyevsky gives me more than any scientist …” I suddenly felt the truth. Both of them based their ideas on Planck (light isn’t emitted in waves but in quanta – the quantum theory of light, but not only of light …), by which all three of them (first, Dostoyevsky, then Planck and finally Einstein) anticipated the quantum structure of the universe (the planets exist as individual cosmic quanta kept in unity by gravity and repulsion). The three brothers Karamazov – as cosmic, biological and anthropological quanta of mythological, religious and scientific civilisation – live their own individual life but they also form the unity of the panhuman “Karamazovian”. Each character in Dostoyevsky’s novels has a single separate voice (M. Bakhtin called Dostoyevsky’s novels polyphonic), independent (as a phenomenon) from any other voice, but unified (in the essence) with all voices. These facts inspired Einstein who refused the Absolute and declared the Relative truth. There is no absolute truth. Everything depends on the system 14 of coordinates in which the truth exists or should be asserted (what is true in one system may be untrue in the other). When N. Bohr raised the problem of complementarity (two contradicting “untrue” views can be “true” in the same system of coordinates) in 1927, and thus opened the discussion with Einstein; both scientists referred to Dostoyevsky, to his seeming paradoxes that anticipated the scientific discoveries of Planck, Einstein and Bohr. There is a link between a polyphonic novel, the theory of relativity and the theory of complementarity that brings together science and art and anticipates an interdisciplinary scientific-artistic way of thinking that can get to the beginning of all beginnings. . Erich Maria Remarque in his novel The Black Obelisk writes: “Time, space and the law of causality are the Veil of Maia which conceals our free view”. In this perspective, the physical and real thus become the obstacles to true knowledge. Do you think that art - which disrupts time, space and causality easily - can lead to “real knowledge”? A Č In the Slovak context, the Veil of Maia, related to the work by Švantner, was discussed in a very inspiring way by professor Števček. Schopenhauer found it in Indian philosophy – man wants to live fully, but there is the Maia Veil between me and you, between a phenomenon and its essence, between dream and reality, which (the veil is our lack of knowledge and ignorance of the real truth) prevents it. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Bohr had been inspired by an old Chinese legend about a Sage who saw a Divine butterfly in his dream that also saw him in a dream. When the Sage woke up, he was bewildered: What would happen if the butterfly woke up first? He had an idea: two images (of a man and of a butterfly) seem to be contradictory, but they are actually supplementary and alternate. Dostoyevsky described a similar situation in his story The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: the main character refuses the absurdity of real life and accepts an ideal image of the world in a dream; yet he eventually accepts the absurdity and he even decides to transpose it to the ideal image of the world in a dream … Human reason splits the World and Man into separate parts (man into body and soul, heart and lungs, paediatrics and neurology), but the parts create the unit and the unit is a sum of individual parts. The idea of the “pan-science” and the theory of everything - which are based on the subject of man as the Whole, the Absolute - originate nowadays. All distinctions between science and art (theosophy advocated the unity of science, art, philosophy and religion a hundred years ago) are being disposed of. We are at the beginning of … what? Are we at the beginning of a new era of humankind which permeates to the bottom of bottoms of the micromacro-mega-reality? Society has been often criticised for hypocrisy and insincerity. One of the characters in the abovementioned novel The Black Obelisk states if man did not pretend, he would be crucified. Is our reality indeed so dark? A Č Evil has seized the world to an extent unseen until now. We didn’t know, for instance, the true lies and false truths of our Gorillas, the truth of the mighty in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. The law of nature rules – a wolf is right, not a lamb; the stronger devour the weak. What will come next? More than a hundred and fifty years ago Dostoyevsky elaborated the idea of “the double”. He wrote that he “didn’t find any other deeper idea”. Unsuccessful Goladkin I meets his double Goladkin II who is successful. Some hundred years after this, Buber came up with the idea that the meaning of human “I” is given by human “Thou”. Man is not what he thinks he is, but he is an intersection of several other forms of “you” which create some idea (a model, an image of his “I”). An authentic private person and the very same modelled social person is not the same man (let’s recall the principle of complementarity). Man is a mystery, as Dostoyevsky said, and he will always remain so. He doesn’t pretend; he just seems to be different depending on the system of coordinates from which he is observed. E. M. Remarque is right in a way that Evil in man would want to crucify him. Dostoyevsky preached (ethical or ontological?) transformation of man who would give up his “I” for “You” and “You” give up your “You” for “I” – both will perish but they will be created instantaneously as new born-again people. Is it utopia or is it a way towards man’s eternity? 15 ARS AETERNA And a bit of humour: reality may be dark because everything was actually created from dark matter, or antimatter … You emphasise that literature conveys the message “of man about a man – for man”. That is its major significance. The focus thus lies in humanity, humanness, in goodness. Goethe once said that Art deals with that what is difficult and good. Could you mention a few literary works that you consider being the ultimate expressions of art and which offer us the touches of eternity? A Č I really understand literature and art as the “aesthetic-anthropological and spiritual activity of a man, to man, for man” – that is a concept which has been developed through my brushes with dramatic life, through brushes with theatre and contacts with Russian literature, foremost with Dostoyevsky. It is based on three pillars – anthropocentrism, interdisciplinarity and comparative studies which I have been dealing with all my professional life. “The concept of three” forms its backbone and it integrates the triad of man (for example motivation for his activity on the levels of genotype – phenotype – nootype), the triad of objective reality (the universe – nature – society), three styles (descriptive – iconic – operative), three kinds of values (natural – social and cosmic-spiritual), etc. Everything in a literary work is human. And literary science should be human also. The study of – let’s say – oxymoron 16 or counterpoint just for oxymoron’s and counterpoint’s sake (their use, systematics, types, etc.) is nonsensical; using gentler words is a baby’s rattle. To understand the character and functions of oxymoron and counterpoint means to understand correlative entities in a man, for a man. This anthropomorphism has affected almost all scientific disciplines – there is anthropological cosmology, philosophy, semiotics, biology, etc. The world and man are – thanks to the rationality of science but also thanks to the irrationality of human actions – in danger. “SOS” – that is a calling of God, a vision of eternity, faith and love towards everything and everyone … There are authors – whom I reread constantly – who lead up to such positive, creative (and not negative and destructive) feelings: Dickens and Shakespeare, Dante and Cervantes, Balzac and Goethe, Švantner and M. Urban, Mickiewicz and Ťažký, Tužinský and many others. From Russian literature it is mainly Pushkin, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. Life on today’s Titanic asks everyone and everything (interdisciplinarity, synthesis, koine) to unite and rescue man. Will that happen? Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Self on the Verge of Eternity. Iñarritu’s art of cinema Alena Smiešková Alena Smiešková received her PhD. from Comenius University in Bratislava. She is currently editor-in-chief of the Ars Aeterna journal and works as the head of the Literary Section at the Department of English and American Studies, at the Faculty of Arts, at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra, Slovakia. She has published articles and chapters in books on American ethnic writing, American film and the Holocaust. Recently, she has published a monograph on Philip Roth, one of the most important living American writers: Mýtus. Realita. Rozprávanie. Prípad Philip Roth. (2011). She translated a book for young adults by Lauren Oliver: Before I Fall (2010, translation: Kým dopadnem, 2011) Abstract: The article discusses one of the most influential contemporary directors Alejandro González Iñárritu and his films from the perspective of the concept of eternity. It focuses on the interpretation and analysis of three of his films as they offer the confrontation of the Self and time. The article presents the director as a director “without borders” and examines formal and conceptual qualities of three Iñárritu’s films: Amorres Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003) and Biutiful (2010). It discusses some specific filmic elements such as the employment of conceptual metaphors, inbetweenness of characters and principle of collage/ montage as a narrative technique. The above quoted poem by 18thcentury poet William Blake was used as a motto for our conference on the Self and Eternity. It is no coincidence. This tiny, brief poem in a few lines expresses the thoughts of philosophers of many centuries before, on the Self when confronted with eternity. The poem To see a World in a grain of sand, A Heaven in a wild flower, An Infinity in the palm of your hand and an Eternity in an hour. captures the possibility to experience the dynamism of life, its beauty and intensity in minute details of the world, as Blake states in the poem: in “a grain of sand, in a wild flower”. When Blake juxtaposes infinity with the momentary, he makes any hierarchic temporal relations relative. The line “To see … 17 ARS AETERNA An infinity in the palm of your hand” presents the ecstasy of the moment, when touching one’s hand erases the past, present and the future, blending them in one infinite continuum. Blake’s words are an invocation of eternity, which represents original and infinite temporality, and which in precious moments can be replaced by the moment of self-being when, as Blake puts it: [one can see] an eternity in an hour. Such illumination makes soul immortal. It comes to the inquisitive Self to question and criticize and reflect on the given patterns of the world. It is the philosophical Self, which is not satisfied with the world already containing answers. In the view of Ancient philosophers such Self carries within the sparkle of immortality, it contains ‘divinity’. (Olšovský, 2011, p. 270) As art has been always close to philosophy my article analyses the oeuvre of one of the most striking directors of the present time, Alexandro González Iñárritu. His films render contemporary situations with the pure intensity and insistence of time momentum, where his protagonists experience the Self on the verge of eternity. Alexandro González Iñárritu: Director of the Other. “Director without Borders”. Alexandro González Iñárritu is a contemporary Mexican film maker. He has become an attractive asset of the American independent movie scene after achieving success not only in Mexico but also internationally with his first film Amorres Perros (2000). Before Amores Perros brought him critical and commercial acclaim, he had worked as a DJ in one of the most popular radio stations in Mexico City, taken a film course and worked as a commercials director for TV. As Littger suggests in his book of conversations with contemporary American directors, Iñárritu, as well as Michel Gondry, David Fincher, Peter Segal and Bryan Singer, belongs to the group of self-made directors. (2006, p. 145) Though he has made only four feature films so far, he has been one of the most influential film directors of recent times. 18 His first film Amorres Perros won numerous awards and prizes including the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the American Film Institute’s International Film Festival, the British Academy Film Award for Best Film not in the English Language, and 11 sections of Ariel Awards, also known as the Mexican Academy Awards. The film introduced to world cinema actor Gael García Bernal, who had previously appeared in Mexican soap operas, but soon became one of the most internationally renowned actors.1 Then Iñárritu wrote the script and directed a segment “Mexico“ which was featured in 11’09”01―September 11 made by 11 film directors from countries all over the world about the sadly infamous collapse of the Twin towers. He had become a filmmaker much sought by Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Hollywood. His first film 21 Grams (2003) stars two Academy Awardwinning actors, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro, and Naomi Watts, who had starred just one year before in David Lynch’s film Mullholland Drive (2002). As King claims: “In industrial terms the film lies between Hollywood and more formally independent domain.” (2004, p. 85) It was distributed by Focus Features, which is an offshoot of Universal Pictures, and is considered one of the so-called “Hollywood Independents.” (Tierney, 2009, p. 113) As Tierney continues further on in her article on Iñárritu it is interesting to note that the “Hollywood Independents” have produced English-speaking feature films by non-US directors in the last few years2. (ibid.) Three years later Iñárritu directed, produced and wrote the script for the film Babel (2006), which saw him awarded the Best Director Award in Cannes and starred two widely acclaimed actors, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchet, and rising young Japanese star Rinko Kikuchi3. It was also distributed by an offshoot of a big Hollywood studio, Vantage Paramount. Iñárritu’s latest film Biutiful (2010) for which Javier Bardem, who played the protagonist Uxbal, received the Best Actor Award in Cannes and an Academy Award Nomination, was distributed by Focus Features as well. As Tierney claims “these industrial shifts” also changed the stylistics of mainstream cinema and brought into the mainstream the aesthetic strategies of independent cinema. (ibid.) It is one of the reasons why she calls him a “director without borders” and argues that Iñárritu erases geographical, aesthetic and industrial borders between Mexico and the United States. (2009, p. 103) In her view Iñárritu employs stylistic strategies that are not nationally specific. In my view Iñárritu’s artistic answer to the question of global identity is similar to what Serge Gruzinski, at the end of his book What Time is There, proposed: “the only way of getting to grips with the globality that surrounds us and overruns us” is to “belong to many worlds and at many times without seeking to reduce them or standardize them”. (2010, p.160) The protagonists in Iñárritu’s films belong to many worlds and at many times. His cinematic presentation in no way reduces or standardises them (the character and their worlds); on the contrary, they strike us with vivid persuasion and credibility and at the same time oddity and authenticity. Geographically, the setting of his films moves around the globe: Amorres Perros (2000) situated in Latin America, in Mexico City, 21 Grams (2003) in an unidentified American town in the USA,4 Babel (2006) in Morocco, the United States, Mexico and Japan, Biutiful (2010) in Barcelona. Picking up Tierney’s metaphor of a director without borders I assert that protagonists in these films occupy the little known territory, the territory In-betweenness. 19 ARS AETERNA that is “in-between”. If we consider a border or a limit as a line delineating and identifying the difference between the inside and outside, continuity and discontinuity, centre and periphery, proper and improper, insider and outcast, then these characters occupy the territory “in-between”. Gloría Anzaldúa, an American Chicana writer, would call the territory “borderlands” (or in Spanish “La frontera”) in a sense that people who inhabit the territory belong to neither of the systems they are involved in. They can be attributed multiple roles, thus being fully accepted in neither of the systems, or move in times from one system to another thus to be excluded from either one. It is the territory that is obscured to the general eye, rarely presented, at times unpresentable. In the language of logic it is the territory that is neither A nor non-A, and is referred to as the excluded middle. As an example I would like to discuss his first film Amorres Perros. In my opinion what made for the international acclaim of the film was precisely the roughness and openness that disclosed the emotional intensity and depth of the depicted stories as well as the “in-betweenness” that characters in their social roles occupied. Similarly to 21 Grams and Babel the film is “… structured around an accidental event whose effects branch off in different directions to weave a human tapestry of independent and but interrelated lives.” (Deleyto, C., Del Mar Azcona, M., p. 20) The three films can be characterised as multiprotagonist films, a genre, which at present has its own thematic, 20 narrative, and visual concerns. I would like to propose here a reading in which the films circle around a conceptual metaphor, a central sign that is the key to the interpretation of their theme, way of narration, and visual style. Following the sign viewers can weave together the independent lives of the movies’ multiple protagonists. In the film Amorres Perros dogs function as such a sign. The film is based on three independent stories: the story of Octavio, a poor young man who lives in Mexico City and wants to get out of the slums with his brother Ramiro’s wife Susana; the story of supermodel Valeria, who wants to start a new life with her lover Daniel; and El Chivo, a professional killer, whose background as an antigovernment guerilla is briefly outlined. Their three lives intersect at the beginning of the film in a tragic accident. Iñárritu arranges the stories of the protagonists into several segments, which are dislocated from linear narration and fragmentally assembled. In this way the viewers can see them either as living in between two systems (e.g. official and unofficial) or as transferring from one to the other (e.g. insider/ outsider) thus moving beyond existing normative borders. As was mentioned above, in all three stories the central reading can be derived from the appearance of a dog in circumstances intrinsic for a particular character. Dogs in general are understood as the closest friends to humans. They share many noble qualities with humans, such as loyalty and sensitivity. The relationship between a dog and its Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 master very often lasts beyond the grave. The personality of the master affects the dog’s behavior as well as it is said the master starts to look like his or her dog after some time. These generalisations work for the protagonists of the film; their dogs reflect on who they are and how they can deal with their lives. Octavio, who dreams of an escape from a rough and uncultivated life, earns the money for the escape at dog fights. The platform of dog fights is an illegal business that attracts people (exclusively men) from lower social classes, and outlaws to earn money and enjoy brutal fights full of violence and blood. Octavio moves between two social models. On one hand he wishes for a stable, straight life with the love of his life, his brother’s wife, on the other hand he exposes his beloved dog to danger and cruelty because he knows this way he can earn money for the life he dreams about. On one hand stability, conformism, Catholic values of family, on the other hand crime, violence, cruelty. He does not belong to either of these systems. He is a sensitive, emphatic man and even though he knows how to move around in the world of crime, he does not belong there. He wishes for a good life with a woman whom he loves, but this woman is married to his brother and as it appears later in the film, in spite of his brother’s abuse she still loves her husband. Octavio has all the predispositions to be a good father, good husband and a caring supporter of his ideal family and yet, this is not the world to which he belongs. In this respect the scene where he waits for Susanne at the bus station, full of expectations of a new beginning, discloses his delusion at best. His dog and his dog’s life are the analogy, a metaphor of his master’s destiny. Similarly, the way Octavio treats his dog (he cares for him, trains him, yet does not hesitate to expose him to danger and violence) foreshadows Octavio’s delusive expectations that he could break from the constraints of poverty, social exclusion and discrimination to become free. Valeria’s story is the simplest of all to decode. We could say that Iñárritu employs this in many respects stereotypical example to make a sharp contrast with the brutality and coarseness of the other two stories. Valeria is a supermodel who has just recently moved to a new flat with her lover David. Her world is clearly delineated through several scenes and shots: she appears on a TV show, receives all the glamour and fame of a celebrity, she is shown a new flat where she is about to move with her lover (who is going to leave his family, his two daughters, for her); billboards featuring her beautiful body are visible all over the city. But is it really her world? The media world Valeria represents is only the world of appearances and surfaces. That world appropriates her body and uses it as a commodity. How much and for how long does she belongs to it? Not only does the tragic accident that severely injures her leg change her status from a desired supermodel immediately to an unemployed woman, but it also complicates her relationship as well. Is her world really the new flat she started to occupy with her lover? Does his decision to leave his family free 21 ARS AETERNA him from his other bonds, thus making him free and happy for a relationship with Valeria? Iñárritu is very abrupt and clear about this. The flat that was supposed to be Valeria’s new world becomes a trap that extinguishes not only her lover’s desire, it also grasps her pet dog, which seemed to be the only intimate and understanding being she shared a relationship with. The disappearance of the dog, whose appearance stereotypically matches our expectations about a dog a supermodel could own, under the unfinished floor in the flat, is devastating for her and the idea that it could be eaten by rats who she can hear in the silence at night unnerves her. Then the flat and dog both function as metaphors for Valeria’s life. The material one, an unfinished and possibly treacherous flat, implies the impossibility for Valeria to integrate fully into its environment. The scene when an already injured Valeria in an invalid chair circles around the flat and hole in the floor in search of her beloved pet is one of the most bizarre and ironic in the film. The physical metaphor, her dog, embodies the qualities and a type of relationship she longs for, thus its loss implies the impossibility for Valeria to have such a relationship and eventually the exclusion from the world of safe and simple things, when her leg has to be amputated. The professional killer El Chivo lives alone, hiding as a bum. For years the only companions to him have been the dogs he finds on the streets, dogs that he treats, trains, and loves above all. El Chivo lives beyond the border of what we generally imagine as civilised 22 society, yet he preserves some of the most innate humane qualities: kindness, empathy, care, and bondage. It is paradoxical that similarly to Octavio and Valeria, his best qualities are invested disproportionately. Being a professional killer, he gets paid for killing people. As an outlaw, living on the edge of the society, he invests his affection exclusively in his dogs. One of the deepest moments in the film, which tests viewers ability to sympathise with a character not because they know whether he is good or bad, but because they feel with him because he is a human being, is when El Chivo comes back home to his hiding place, which is an old and dilapidated house, and finds all his dogs dead or injured, and bleeding. He has to kill those who would not survive and takes care of the one that can make it. It is, “by chance”, Octavio’s dog, whom he took away during the accident and whom he had already cured from dog fight wounds. It seems that Octavio’s dog is the strongest, the one that can survive many afflictions, similarly to his master now, El Chivo. At the end of the film it is El Chivo who escapes and finds a way out from the netherworld his life had been so far. He comes back to his face, which he had been hiding for years, and with the money he has, is open to a new life, a new beginning and a new identity. The closing shot is one of the examples of the cinematic sublime Iñárritu has exercised in his films. The camera shows in a long shot the landscape, uninhabited, just the cracked, dry earth and the sky. The scene is shot through blue-tinted lenses, which together with Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 the music score adds to the melancholic quality. The restrained composition of the shot includes only life elements and two figures from the back moving to the horizon. The two of them are El Chivo and his dog. El Chivo has crossed the borders of different worlds several times. First, when he, a university professor, had been excluded from official life as an antigovernment supporter and became an outcast; a second time as an outcast when, in order to sustain a certain kind of living, he was forced to become a professional killer – an outlaw, it was then he died in the eyes of that first (official) world. Eventually, he crosses the boundary again when he appropriates a new identity to enter and join the world to which he had been dead for a long time. What the cinematic shot presents is a frame within a frame. Understanding image as a window to the intelligibility of the world, the frame of a shot is a line separating the image from reality, thus making the reality more understandable through the image. (Petríček, 2009, p. 38) The line of the horizon within the image replicates the line of the intelligibility of the world, at the same time being a line which constantly moves further away when we move closer. The horizon in the image is there not only for El Chivo to approach, yet it always remains inaccessible, it is there also for viewers, as a constant reminder of the secret of the world. The first three of Iñárritu’s films are typical for the fragmentation of time and space in a story. Under the name ‘collage’ the principle has been known as an ancient art technique and received its prominence mainly in the arts of the 20th century. As Gregory L. Ulmer maintains, collage has become “the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation” in Western Art in the 20th century. (1998, p.84) Originally, the technique involved attaching various materials to the surface of an artwork, thus transferring them from one context to another. A collage-like principle was also employed in early cinema, especially by film experimenters such as Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith. The technique is called montage and refers to the organisation of shots by an editor attributing individual shots with a significant position in a narrative line. Therefore, the narrative line is free from any logical and linear constraints and the shots acquire meaning as they conflict and collide. As a result both collage and montage destabilise the traditional homogeneity and integrity of a work of art and correspond to a new understanding of time and space in both modernism and postmodernism. The difference between public and private time and the way our consciousness, specifically our memory deals with the split and how our mind filters the outside world at the threshold of our consciousness were the themes and topics discussed in literature as well as in the philosophy of the early 20th century. Philosophers such as Henry Linearity vs. Collage 23 ARS AETERNA Bergson and Edmund Husserl, writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner were either formally or conceptually preoccupied with the new role the Self plays within time. The theme of time, the possibility that our mind can construct and perceive different realities5, has been further developed by postmodern thinkers and in postmodern art. Artistic examples would include genres of science fiction and cyberpunk, where possibility of time travel and cosmic travel, the presentation of virtual reality became bountiful settings and themes. The film narration changes as a result of time and space fragmentation. It is mainly perceivable in the genre of multiprotagonist films. The rising popularity of the genre has been observed since 1990 as a departure from traditional single protagonist movies (del Mar Azcona, 2010, p. 3 - 4). These films are characterised by several protagonists, who have “similar narrative relevance” to the interpretation of the film, as a result narrative integrity of films falls into pieces.6 (ibid. p. 2) Iñárritu does not create in a vacuum. His works are deeply rooted in the circumstances of the contemporary world and what before was just the genre of science fiction, now he admits has become our reality: “I think that we have been exposed to many different media now – the kids are now basically dealing with three, four, five realities at the same time: they are watching CNN and are reading the treadmill at the bottom of the screen, then a friend calls from New York while they are receiving 24 an e-mail from New Zealand…And the virtuality that we are now living in makes our minds more prepared to deal with stories that are nonlinear – you can be playing with several realities.” (Littger, 2006, p. 190) The preparedness of the viewer is a precondition to receive the narrative that “is inspired as much by postmodern society as by other texts.” (Deleyto, del Mar Azcona, 2010, p. 23) Those other texts, as Iñárritu publicly admitted several times, are not Tarantino’s films, who he has been compared with, but William Faulkner’s novels. (Ohchi, 2009, p. 5) Critics say that if 21 Grams (2003), Iñárritu’s second film, had not been shot in its specific form, it would be a cheap melodrama. (King, 2004, p. 84) But is not so with many other films, which we consider the finest examples of contemporary cinema? Kieslowski’s Blue (1993), Refn’s Drive (2011), Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), to give just a few examples. The story is usually simple, almost banal, sometimes lacking rational links for the motivation of characters, yet, together with all the other technical elements that contemporary film can employ: music, camera angles and types, new forms of editing, enhancements and shades of colour, and a specific narrative form, makes for the astounding final result. “It’s like everything else. Tequila you have to serve in a small glass, because the flavor is different if you serve it in a tall glass; or whiskey or champagne they have their own form. And I think sometimes form is intrinsic to the essence of the thing” says Iñárritu in an interview with Littger (2006, p. 188) Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 This is true about his multiprotagonist movies; the form and the content are interlocked, one cannot be without the other; if chance, which puts together the protagonists in an existentially edged moment is a triggering element, it is also an element of the thematic concern and visual style. Directors, writers, artists make up complex art works, intricate, weblike forms and then critics come and disentangle them to make them intelligible in linear interpretations. The position of the viewer in the cinema differs though. When watching the film 21 Grams for the first time with no help of a critical synopsis or interpretation, a fresh, pristine viewer in the “age of innocence” experiences the totality of an intuitive response to a discourse and visual configurations that can be overwhelming, beyond comprehension or which s/he had never thought before as presentable. The viewer is able to sustain the weight of the “unbearable lightness” precisely because s/he is just the voyeur of the cinema silver screen, the frame, which corresponds to the human desire for the intelligibility of the world. Because the frame, as it has been suggested above, “allows to distinguish the framed image from the outside environment in some way”. (Petříček, 2009, p.38) It also ‘organises’ the separated slice of ‘reality’, and in this way every image separates the intelligible from the unintelligible. (ibid., p. 39) As Petříček further develops this idea, “the intelligibility is a precondition for a survival of a human being in a non-human environment, as if a rational substitute of an instinct: to put someone in a picture or to be a picture of something means to have a survey and elementary orientation, to understand bluntly, to be acquainted with something.” (ibid.) The viewer thus can “be put in a picture” regarding the phenomena, which outside of the frame would appear chaotic, incomprehensible, crushing with their weight the individual consciousness. Moreover, the viewer is in an active, participatory role; in the case of a multiprotagonist film it means s/he assembles the fragments (of time and place), the ‘preexisting messages’ into an intelligible story.7 I have suggested above that each of Iñárritu’s films centres around a conceptual metaphor that allows for making analogies and contrasts and makes his films accessible to reading from different points of view. In 21 Grams such a metaphoric sign is the heart. The three protagonists are linked through the concept of the heart in the following way: Jack Jordan is an exconvict who lives in Memphis and has turned to Christianity for help. He lives with his family, a wife and two children, what is now a pious life, supporting young convicts in their search for love. Love is Jesus, as many times symbolised by the throbbing, radiating heart in Catholic churches. Driving his car he accidentally kills Cristina Peck’s husband and her two little daughters. Cristina is a former drug addict and in the new situation she finds herself heart-broken. Paul Rivers is a university professor who is suffering from a severe heart condition. The only possibility for him to live is a heart transplant; 25 ARS AETERNA he receives the transplanted heart from Cristina Peck’s husband. King argues that the film occupies a “hybrid position”, industrially (I have pointed out to that above) and also in terms of form and content. (King, 2005, p. 80) On one hand its narrative structure and the use of film stock is alternative, very much in the tendency of American independent cinema, on the other hand the storyline “might seem closer to the stuff of somewhat implausible melodrama.” (ibid.) The heart has become one the most profane symbols. Traditionally the heart symbolised the core of the human being - its intellectual, emotional and spiritual centre. The shape of the heart, which we can find as a pictorial symbol in many representations, has, however, nothing to do with the actual shape of the physical heart inside one’s body. We only rarely imagine the shape of our heart and in idiomatic expressions such as broken heart, from the bottom of my heart, heartless, aching heart; its physical reality escapes our mind to be subconsciously transformed into stylised hearts found in box of chocolates, postcards, text messages and emails – clichéd symbols of love and affection. It seems incredible to realise how intricate, precise and carefully constructed the most vital muscle of our body is. In a linear cause-and-effect rendition the storyline of 21 Grams may seem to be “somewhat implausible melodrama”, however, the central sign of a heart allows for a different reading of the film. Visually and conceptually the film renders presentations of the 26 unpresentable. Idiomatic expressions, which are accepted as customary, and familiar structures of language in everyday speech acquire a bitter edge when experienced with a real impact. They are incorporated in the film as a discourse or visual configuration. For example, in the scene where Cristina goes through the scraps of clothes, the only physical remnants of her daughters, who only hours before had been integral part of her life, it “tears her heart out”. When Paul’s heart is transplanted he is given another chance to live. He follows Cristina, knowing that her husband’s death made his life possible. After several “random” encounters she eventually agrees to have lunch with him. She is confused by his attention, puzzled because as she says: “I haven’t spoken to anybody in months. …You can’t just walk up to a woman you barely know and tell her you like her…” When he tells her the truth about his motivation she is angry but later she “takes him into her heart”. Jack got his second chance as an ex-convict to teach others about love, sympathy and support. Although he ran away from the site of the accident he knows that he deserves punishment and in this way “his heart is in the right place”, he turns himself in. In the final scene Paul shoots himself because his heart “stands still” literally and figuratively. After the accident Cristina goes swimming regularly, engages herself in routine activities, yet her heart is broken and bleeding. Paul, literally and figuratively, “follows” his heart. His new transplanted heart belonged to Cristina’s husband; he follows Cristina Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 when he finds out who had been the donor and later on his affection for her develops. At the end of the film we get to the “heart and soul” of what the film communicates, as Paul, in a voiceover, says: 21 grams is the measure of our lives, it is the exact weight a human being loses at the moment of death, “at the heart of 21 Grams is a concern about questions of identity, of measuring that which seems ineffable – the essence of life, or what makes us distinct, unique as individuals.” (King, 2004, p. 80) Precisely measuring that which is ineffable and framing it in powerful images makes for the films sublime quality. As the film concludes the last shots show a kaleidoscope of images, from the past, present and future of the three protagonists. Some of them viewers have seen, but now they are presented with a new, different perspective – to see what was then hidden, like in a shot from the swimming-pool where we eventually see what Cristina’s smiled at, her sister’s middle finger being shown, or we follow Paul as he dies in hospital, his heart giving up, or we see that Cristina, pregnant with Paul’s child, can enter her daughters’ room eventually, and Jack as he returns home to his family. The last seconds of the film show an abandoned pool behind the motel where Jack, Paul and Cristina met in an act of revenge. The camera screens the pool covered with blue plastic, unused, out of order, as the snow falls. Falling snow flakes and a truck that passes the pool are the only indicators of passing linearity of time. Time is a Gift of Eternity. What does it mean to live and what does it mean to die? The third example I would like to discuss is Iñárritu’s latest work, the film Biutiful (2010). Although Biutiful does not follow the structure of a multiprotagonist film it bears certain characteristic affinities with previous Iñárritu’s works. We see the protagonist, Uxbal, between two worlds. Terminally ill, he is a man in a liminal stage between life and death; he knows he is dying; but he also has paranormal abilities and can talk to dead people shortly after they die. In this way he already knows the afterworld, which for the rest remains an enigma. The theme of Iñárritu’s previous films: absent fathers recurs also in Biutiful. Uxbal did not know his father, who had moved to Mexico before Uxbal was born, and died there never seeing his sons. Uxbal takes care of his children, a daughter and a son because he and their mother are separated (she suffers from manic depression and is unfaithful to him with his brother). As a dying man he knows they will be left in the world alone. The third element, which links together Iñárritu’s films, is the active involvement of viewers in the construction of the meaning in the film narration. Unlike Iñárritu’s first three films the structure of this one is traditionally linear. With one exception: the beginning and the ending of the 27 ARS AETERNA film. The first and the last scene in the film reduplicate. One illuminates on the other and in their replication the film comes the full circle. It also accentuates the film’s central theme – the confrontation of a man with his own mortality. Circular form is thus equally intrinsic to the content. The circle as a sign recurs in the film: as an object – a ring, in the microstructure of the first and final sequence, and as a discourse – auditory and semantic, the sound of the sea, waves. Circle as an old symbol of life and eternity echoes the protagonist’s struggle with time. But what is time? Can we as human beings, bound to the linearity of life finitude, answer this question? Miroslav Petříček, the Czech philosopher, says time is one of the oldest and most intricate philosophical problems. Philosophy has always tried to answer what is contested by time and what is beyond time: “what is temporal and what is on the contrary timeless, eternal.” (Petříček, 2009, p. 36) We perceive time as movement. But what is it that passes? Where does it go? In general there are three elementary time divisions: the past, present and future. But to remember the past, we need to have memory and thus in the process of remembering the past what comes to existence in the present moment is the past; Petříček calls it the “present past”. (ibid.) What is the future? Our hopes and desires as they come to life in our mind in the present, therefore the future can exist only as the present future. In his view, the present does not exist, it is that which has just passed or the one that is coming right now. But 28 can we confront in our consciousness that nothing, which the present is? Can we confront it now? Petříček answers no, we can do it only in eternity. But how can we imagine eternity? Are we able to imagine eternity that is the past, present and the future at once? (Petříček, 2009, p.) I will withhold Petříček’s interpretation of eternity and its relation to time for a moment and I will let the language of literature give us the answer. In a recent novel Indignation (2008) Philip Roth, one of the best living American writers, sets up the following situation. In one of the opening chapters he uses a flash-forward temporal manipulation and constructs what it means for his protagonist to face the weight of the past, the now and the future simultaneously. “What happened next I had to puzzle over for weeks afterward. And even dead, as I am and have been for I don’t know how long, I try to reconstruct the mores that reigned over that campus […] that fostered the series of mishaps ending in my death at the age of nineteen. Even now (if “now” can be said to mean anything any longer), beyond corporeal existence, alive as I am here (“here” or “I” means anything) as memory alone (if “memory”, strictly speaking, is the all-embracing medium in which I am being sustained as “myself”), I continue to puzzle over Olivia’s actions. Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component? […] And would death have been any less terrifying if I’d Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 understood that it wasn’t an endless nothing but consisted instead of memory cogitating for eons on itself?” (Philip Roth, Indignation, p. 54, 2008, Slov. translation 2009) Thus are we able to imagine eternity? Petříček says: “As human beings we cannot withstand eternity, that is all being in one moment, all the past, all the present, all the future as if in one point. If eternity showed us all being at once, we would collapse under the sight that would be so ineffable and unbearable. Therefore, eternity gave us time because we can experience gradually all being, and eternity. Time is the only way for us how to perceive the totality of being.” (Petříček, 2009, p. 26) From this point of view “time is a gift of eternity” Petríček adds, making an analogy with a famous line by William Blake. (ibid.) Time is a “symbol”, a “sign” that shows that we are mortal human beings. Then what is the relation between time and eternity asks Petříček? “Eternity is the depth of time. It is the depth of its secret. Time originates in eternity and it returns to eternity.”(Petříček, 2009, p.37) The last sentence in the previous paragraph verbalises traditional pictorial representations of eternity and infinity, such as lemniscus, a mathematical symbol of infinity, Uroboros - the ancient symbol of a snake eating its own tail, Shrivatsa – the Tibetan knot or Moebius strip. At the same time it also describes the introductory and final sequences of the film Biutiful. Time, personified in the protagonist Uxbal (time is a sign, a symbol of our mortality), which viewers perceive at the beginning of the film, is the future of the protagonist, but we cannot know it in the first moments of the film narrative. The scene duplicates at the end to finalise the infinite loop. This time the camera shows more, the same way as the viewer already knows more. It is a new perspective, a different point of view, which, however, heads for the beginning to cancel itself eventually. “The future is the beginning to which time returns to cancel itself: eternity is within time as its [time’s] truth and desire. “ (ibid.) This is convincingly so for the first and final moments of the film. The surreal sequence allows us to follow Uxbal on the verge of his own death. His desire to meet his father is materialized. He meets him in eternity. The truth of the opening and final sequences, however, lies elsewhere. Viewers’ participatory role to the reading of sight (image) and sound in the introductory and final film sequences can be compared to the creative role viewers play in the construction of meaning in Iñárritu’s first three films, which employed a collage-like principle. The sound – voices in the first minutes though they come as if off-screen – corresponds with the image (two hands in a mime-like performance) and it is clear the sound and image occupy the same space. The two hands metonymically refer to the bodies viewers cannot see and thus involve the viewers in the meaning construction, asking questions about who they belong to and in what way they are related, and what the significance of their presence in the specific moment of time is. Because the precise meaning is withheld from the viewers almost to 29 ARS AETERNA the end of the film, the hands function primarily as pure aesthetic objects whose beauty is foregrounded and implicitly communicates the beauty of the moment’s significance in time. Everything in the sequences of my discussion duplicates as if to give another meaning to either the formal or contextual aspects in presentation. The voices discuss the following: “Is it real? That’s what my father told my mother… I never thought I would touch a real diamond… It’s yours my love. Really? I always saw mom wearing it on this finger. She said it wasn’t real.” Without knowing the context, and regardless of any specific circumstances, what acquires primary significance in the scene is the emotional and aesthetic intensity. The scene is very intimate. Two hands function conceptually as the symbol of human bondage. In minimalist representation the communication on the screen moves beyond the limits of human fallibility. It is the example of sublime beauty recurrent in Iñárritu’s films. Even without any contextual frame of reference, which is not dissimilar to the construction of meaning in Iñárritu’s earlier films, the viewers recognise the weight of the moment, which aspires to eternity. Time is a gift of eternity. The voices discuss the ring. The symbol of eternity. Endless repetition. The exchange of generations. The question of its authenticity illuminates also on the moment, time itself. Is it real, what happens, does it happen for real? The possible and the imaginary meet. 30 The following sentence of the dialogue: “Your mother never heard that sound” does not correspond with the image. Although the temporal synchronicity is attained, the space changes and the voice of the protagonist sounds offscreen. It does not belong to the space whose image the viewers can see on the screen. I have mentioned above that Uxbal belongs to two worlds in the film coded in two different mise-en-scenes. The mise-en-scenes represent incompatible worlds. The distinguishing marker between them is the way humans are placed within time. In one time matters, in the other time is insignificant. The protagonist moves between them effortlessly, alluding thus to the liminal stage he finds himself in. One of them is the diegetic world –the world of the story. There the dialogue about the ring between dying Uxbal and his daughter take place. The other one appears on the screen introduced with the sentence referred to the above and it is the hypodiegetic world, the world within the world of the story. The essential quality of montage as a narrative strategy used in Iñárritu’s earlier films is that juxtaposing shots makes them conflict and collide and it is from the collision that the meaning is produced. Here, within one shot sight and sound are juxtaposed to illuminate on one another and from that reflection meaning is produced. With the words “Your mother never heard that sound” the mesmeric and mesmerising landscape comes into view. It is the netherworld of the blue colour, which also recurs in other of Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Iñárritu’s films. A forest covered with bluish snow and vertical trunks of trees look like a maze. The sound comes from a different ontological system and its epistemology has to be gained in the process of creative reconstruction. The dialogue continues: “What sound? The sound of the sea. When I was young there was a radio station that played sounds of the sea. The gigantic waves. The sound frightened me. Why did it frighten you? The bottom of the sea made me afraid. All the things that live down there.” During the dialogue the camera moves along the landscape, in addition to voices we can hear the sound of the sea, the voice imitates the sound but it is still unclear. The camera falls on an owl lying on the snow in a close-up. We can see a feather fluttering on it, as if the sound which was mentioned and which we could hear caused the feather to move in the air. Two things happen here; the owl – as an object and also symbolic sign – is presented and juxtaposed with a word: frighten. How does the word frighten and owl correspond, the viewers ask. Why is the speaker afraid of the bottom of the sea? Iñárritu carefully constructs the vision of the netherworld through auditory, visual and conceptual devices. The rumbling sound of the sea, the snow covered forest with no beginning and end, and the owl. In certain religions the owl is understood as the guardian of the underworld, the keeper of the spirits, protector of the dead. The sound of the sea, evoking infinite depth and infinite dimension was the source of Uxbal’s primal fear in childhood, which assumed full meaning on the verge of his death. The past and the present are fully interlaced, the present meets the future. “Daddy? Daddy?” The voice of his daughter comes from a different time and different space. Uxbal has entered the afterworld. We see him from the background and another figure of a young man coming to him through the forest. At the beginning of the film the epistemology of these characters is concealed, the voice saying daddy could belong to a young man, addressing the older one. The same way as the death is the enigma, as the reason why the sound of the sea evoked fear, we do not know who and in what circumstances is addressed. In the final replica of the introductory sequence at the end of the film the voice says “daddy” three times. The third time we hear the voice is frightened because the father does not respond. When a close-up of Uxbal’s face (Javier Bardem) appears on the screen it is visibly paler and looks like a death mask. In a conversation with the young man they speak fragmentarily with no context, but of the things they both obviously know. The young man has been in the territory for a while, he is more knowledgeable, though physically younger: “You shouldn’t wear a ponytail here. You look like a fox. It scares the owls.” At the end of the film it is obvious that the past and the present come together with no future awaiting, just eternity. Uxbal and his dead father meet in the place where no time reigns but owls are the guardians. 31 ARS AETERNA Iñárritu has confirmed again with his latest production that he remains a director who shifts and reorganises geographical, industrial and specifically aesthetic borders. Although the narrative strategy in the film Biutiful differs from his earlier oeuvre he remains faithful to the authentic and impressive way of presenting our contemporary world. Similarly to the previous films he sees the world as complex, heterogeneous, where the way things are connected is not always explicable, where the classical causality saying what is fate and what is coincidence, who is guilty and who is innocent, is almost impossible to define. The Self overcomes death in eternity, but is death the only limit the Self needs to overcome? The story of Uxbal, as Iñárritu says, is “not about death. It’s about life. It’s a hymn to life.” (The Telegraph interview) The worlds Iñárritu constructs make it possible to think that death is a frontier uniting all limits and that overcoming death in moments when the soul acquires the sparkle of immortality we overcome all limitations we face during our lives. Endnotes: Bernal starred later in Motorcycle Diaries (2004) , The Science of Sleep (2006) , Mammoth (2009) 2 e.g. Swimming Pool (2003) by French director Francois Ozon 3 She recently gave a brilliant performance in Japanese adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s novel: Norwegian Wood (dir. by Hung Tran, 2011). 4 It was shot in Memphis, in one of the poorest metropolises in the South of the United States. 5 In modernism private and public, in postmodernism multiple worlds 6 e.g. Gosford Park (2001), Love Actually (2003), Crash (2004), My Blueberry Nights (2007), Vantage Point (2008) 7 Geoff King in his article on 21 Grams gives a detailed account of the film’s composition and how the seer perceives and models the narrative in a linear sequence. He for example points to different camera media used in the film to differentiate between the settings, or such minute details as color shades framing stories of particular protagonists, or their visual appearance (beard, shaven, unshaven) to distinguish among diverse time layers. For more detail see: King, G. (2004, p. 88) 1 32 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Works cited: » Deleyto, C., Del Mar Azcona, M. (2010) Contemporary Directors. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press. p. 154 » González Iñárritu, A. 2010. Biutiful. Los Angeles: Focus Features/ This is That Productions » González Iñárritu, A. 2006. Babel. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures/ Paramount Vantage » González Iñárritu, A. 2003. 21 Grams. Los Angeles: Focus Features/ This is That Productions » González Iñárritu, A. 2000. Amorres Perros. Mexico D.F.: Altavista Films » Gruzinski, S. 2010. What Time is There? Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press. p.216 » Littger, S. 2006. The Director’s Cut. Picturing Hollywood in the 21st Century. New York, London: The Continuum Publishing Group Inc. » Ohchi, S. 2009. William Faulkner and Alejandro González Iñárritu: The Fragmentation of Time and Space in a Story. The Faulkner Journal of Japan. Number Eleven. November 2009. The William Faulkner Society of Japan. http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/wfsj/journal/ no11/EJNo11.html » accessed on February 14, 2012 » Olšovský, Jiří. 2011. Slovník filozofických pojmů současnosti. Praha: Grada Publishing. pp. 333 » Petříček, Miroslav. 1997. Úvod do (současné) filozofie. Praha: Hermann & synové. p. 178 » Petříček, Miroslav. 2009. Myšlení obrazem. Praha: Hermann & synové. p.201 » King, G. 2004. Weighing up the Qualities of Independence: 21 Grams in Focus.Film Studies: An International Review. Issue 5 November 2004, Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 80-91 » Thierney, D. 2009.Alejandro González Iñárritu: director without borders.New Cinemas 7:2. pp. 101- 117 doi: 10.1386/ncin.7.2.101/1 » Ulmer, G.L. (1998) The Object of Postcriticism. In: ed. by Foster, H. The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New Press. pp. 83 – 111 » Alejandro González Iñárritu interview for Biutiful: » http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8288951/AlejandroGonzalez-Inarritu-interview-for-Buitiful.html downloaded on Feb 11, 2012 Alena Smiešková Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky Filozofická fakulta UKF v Nitre email: asmieskova@ukf.sk 33 ARS AETERNA Self, Eternity, and Oral History Andor Skotnes Andor Skotnes, Ph.D., is Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Society at The Sage Colleges in Troy and Albany, New York, USA. During fall semester 2012, he was the Fulbright Scholar in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Constantine the Philosopher, Nitra, Slovak Republic. Previous to this, from September 2000 to June 2001, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Americans Studies at the University of Tokyo and Japan Women’s University in Tokyo, Japan. From 1985 to1990, he was Assistant, then Acting Director of the Columbia University Oral Research Office, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. His most recent book, Race and Class Struggles on the Middle Ground, Baltimore and Maryland, 1929-1942, will be published by Duke University Press in Fall 2013. Abstract: This paper explores the nature of oral history as a methodology useful to many disciplines, and its relationship to the self and eternity. While teaching as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra, Slovakia, during the fall of 2011, I presented a version of this paper at the conference sponsored by my adoptive Department of English and American Studies. The theme of the conference was “Self and Eternity,” a theme that can be approached from many philosophical and disciplinary perspectives. One of my interests is oral history, a field in which I have worked for over a quarter century. It struck me immediately that “Self and Identity” has everything to do with oral history, so I decided to reflect in my conference presentation (and subsequently in this paper) on the conference theme from this perspective. I want to start by defining oral history 34 broadly as the collection by means of recorded interviews of personal testimony on life (and hence historical) experiences. Given this definition, the relation of oral history to the self seems evident. For the informant or interviewee, an oral history interview gives her or him the opportunity to reminisce about and create stories out of remembered perceptions of the past, to explore the self—indeed, to construct and reconstruct the self. Participation in a good oral history interview is, for the interviewee, often enlightening and sometimes profound. New understandings of the self are discovered or, more precisely, created. Such understandings can be particularly intense and surprising for interviewees who don’t regard themselves as Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 historical actors, who “don’t understand why you want to interview me—I’ve never done anything interesting.” The experience of an interview can help interviewees develop awareness of their selves as shaped by a range of historical processes, and as shaping a range of historical processes. I don’t want to overstate the case by claiming that oral history can be transformative for the interviewee, but sometimes it can be, in at least small, incremental ways—and occasionally in big ways. This transformative potential is, on the one hand, why activists in community history and organizing projects have used oral history to reclaim and reconstruct the historical memory of subaltern selves and communities. And it is why, on the other hand, psychologists and psychiatrists use something very like oral history interviewing to help patients develop understandings of inner processes of history and the self. For interviewers and researchers, oral history interviews also have to do with the self in a somewhat different way. Like all forms of personal testimony, oral history provides a window—albeit a mediated one—into individual lived experience, and by extension into the interior of historical processes. Unlike other forms of personal testimony, such as autobiographies and memoirs, oral history gives the researcher the power to probe that interior by asking questions and by guiding the interviewee in creating understandings of lived experience that the latter may never have considered. While there are dangers in such a power, it can greatly enhance knowledge of the lived experience of history, especially the history of those groups of people on the lower levels of the social pyramid, who are less like to leave personal testimony in any other form. Oral history therefore gives us very valuable access to the inner history of the self from, as some social historians put it, “the bottom up.” Finally, by way of introduction, I want to briefly discuss oral history’s relationship to the second part of the conference theme, eternity. From the point of view of interviewees, recorded oral history interviews allow them to leave accounts of their life experiences— and thereby a bit of the themselves— as a legacy. This possibility is often a profound motivation for interviewees, especially those engaged in family oral histories where their testimony may be passed down to future generations of kin, but also to those who participate in other types of interviews. Early in my career as an oral historian, I was employed by a major, archivalbased oral history project, to do a long interview with a White Southern man, then in his seventies, who had been a life long activist in the U.S. civil rights, labor, and progressive movements. Although I had never met him before, I found him to be wonderfully warm and articulate. And to say that he was passionate about his interview is to seriously understate the case. He was inexhaustible (and I, though much younger than he, wasn’t). Our interview lasted many intense hours over three days and was remarkably rich and detailed. Later I learned that, although it wasn’t evident at the time, he was very 35 ARS AETERNA ill when I interviewed him. He died not long afterward. In retrospect it is clear that he saw this interview as his gift to posterity, to, in a sense, eternity. This realization was very moving to me, and I hope that I helped him reach his goal. I don’t want, however, to continue to dwell “philosophically” on oral history and the conference theme. Rather I want to discuss on more practical levels what oral history is, and how it can help us to explore the inner history of selves, and provide rich legacies for posterity. I want to start this discussion, though, by indicating some things that oral history is not. Despite the claims of some of its most enthusiastic practitioners, it is not in any sense an autonomous academic discipline, nor is it a sub-discipline of history or any other discipline. It is something much more modest—a methodology, a tool by which we can tease out certain kinds of insights and understandings. It is though a creative tool that can be very useful to many disciplines: obviously to history and the social sciences, but also to literature and the arts (more on that later). It is also necessary to indicate that oral history is not the study of oral tradition, although the two may sometimes overlap. The latter has to do with stories, values, and knowledge that are handed down orally, generation to generation. The former, as indicated above, has to do with oral accounts of lived experience. Oral history comes in many shapes and sizes. A brief survey interview, a radio or television news interview, even a job interview, can all be considered oral history, and can all produce useful historical information. However, the 36 type of oral history interview that elicits the most intriguing testimony, and yields the deepest insights, is the life history or life story interview. Life story interviews tend to be long (often hours long) and open ended; they encourage the interviewee to reminisce freely, to reach back into his/her memory for details, to develop complicated and nuanced stories about his/her life. A life story interview is like a wide-ranging conversation, in which experiences are recalled, tales are told, and the past is probed. But is a very particular type of conversation. In most good, everyday conversations, the participants swap stories. In a life story conversation, only one of the participants—the interviewee—tells the stories. The other—the interviewer—frames and guides the conversation, asks the questions, follows up, and, most importantly, catalyzes. A life story interview is a very asymmetrical conversation. Why do life story interviews often produce the richest personal testimony? The best answer I can give to this question is to offer an example and a short excerpt of such an interview. A couple of years ago I did an interview with an alumnae of my school, Russell Sage College. She graduated in 1950, and, at the time of the interview, was in her late seventies. The overall purpose of the interview was to record her memories of college experiences, and to get her account of how these had impacted her life. However, in good life-story style, I began by asking her about her early years. She told me that she grew up in a middle-class, Jewish Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 family in eastern Massachusetts. Her father manufactured soda pop, and, after Prohibition was lifted in 1933, distributed a regionally brewed beer. Her mother raised the children, looked after the home, and operated as the secretary-treasurer of her father’s business. Her father was protective of the children, and he wouldn’t allow her to ride a bicycle—something she rues to this day—because the family lived on a heavily trafficked route to Boston. During her adolescence in the World War II years, she was a girl scout and was “gung-ho” for service work, so she became a volunteer “plane spotter”; she recorded the fly-overs of every plane she could find from her position at the top of one of the town’s highest buildings. She learned to identify many types of planes by their shapes (although she did not recall exactly why they had her do this). Additionally, she described her town as a “port of embarkation” for troops leaving for the war overseas, and related how her father “clamped down on where I could go and what I could do” because there were so many soldiers and sailors around. It was, she said, “the last ditch for them” for they were about to ship out, so her father wanted to make sure that she was “OK.” Nevertheless, despite strict paternal oversight, she found ways to explore the diversities of her community: We lived in front of—it sounds bad but it wasn’t—the building behind our house was a bowling alley and a dance hall. All of the big name bands used to come in, in the afternoon or the morning or the day before the night they had—I guess today they call it a gig. And so I met such people as Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey and Gene Krupa –I met that whole array of people who were popular at that time. And the story that I love is the one about—oh, now I won’t remember his name. The fellow with the very raspy voice… Interviewer: Jimmy Durante? No, no, no, a bandleader. A Black fellow. Interviewer: Louie Armstrong? Exactly! Interviewer: You met Louie Armstrong? Louis Armstrong! When I met Louis Armstrong what happened was, there were a couple of us—we were just high school kids, or maybe in the eighth grade. But anyway, we used to go up there in the afternoon, because we knew all these name bands would be there, and we could 37 ARS AETERNA get their autographs. And so I approached Louie Armstrong, and they were busy sitting at a table, and I asked him if I could have his autograph. To this day I remember exactly what he said. [in a deep, gravely voice] “Don’t bother me, babe, can’t you see I’m gambling?” [raucous laughter] Interviewer: Really? And I never got his autograph! Interviewer: That’s very funny. There was gambling there, too? No. But they had time to waste, and they were only going to play in the evening, and this was in the afternoon. And in my high school yearbook, I have the autograph—not that I’m such a fan of any of these things now, but this was then—of Cab Calloway! Interviewer: He played there also? He played there also! And Glenn Miller. Anyway, it was interesting. This excerpt, and the account of an early life in which it is embedded, and indeed the whole interview of which it is a part, offers data and insights for all kinds of analysis and reflection— historical, sociological, anthropological, psychological, linguistic, gendered— and it offers material for a range of literary and artistic endeavors. There is no room here to further probe the possible uses of this interview; I simply want to offer it as an illustration of the rich potential of the open-ended, asymmetrical conversations of life story interviewing. In this paper, I have alluded a number of times to the potential that oral and life story interviewing has for literature and the arts, a potential that has been realized increasingly, if without much 38 fanfare, in recent decades. In closing, I want to focus on this potential, both because it is less obvious than the potential that oral history holds for the social sciences. Moreover, the “Self and Eternity Conference” was sponsored by a department that combines American Studies and English language literature, and I would therefore like to link oral history more explicitly to literary practice. However, instead of attempting some sort of survey in this regard, I want to focus on oral history and one literary/artistic field: theatrical performance. Oral history has contributed to the dialogue, themes, and plots of theatrical productions from guerilla and street theater, to plays presented in fancy big US city venues (and subsequently video-recorded Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 and broadcasted). Perhaps the bestknown examples of the last are Anna Deveare Smith’s “documentary theater” pieces. Her plays, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, were oneperson performances, based on her extensive interviewing of participants and witnesses to two racially-charged incidents, in which she spoke the words and inhabited the personas of her informants. The results were, by all accounts, dramatic and moving. But I also want to write a few words about the other end of the spectrum— about a more modest and localized blending of oral history and theater. Several years ago at my college, my colleague Leigh Strimbeck, a theater professor, gathered a group of undergraduate women (Russell Sage College is an all-women’s school) to study, gather data, and collectively create a play that, in Strimbeck’s words, “looks with compassion and humor at the tyranny of the media towards women’s bodies, the struggles young women have with this issue and their attempts to see themselves and others in a different, more empowered way.” Together the group interviewed some 125 women between the ages of five and eighty-three about this topic, then they took their testimony and created the play, Mirror, Mirror. This play has been performed many times since its creation in 2008, mainly at colleges and high schools, with a cast that has changed over time; as the cast changed, so did the play, for new testimony was elicited, and new dialogue written. Because the play draws so heavily on interviews—not full-blown life story interviews, but shorter ones of a lifestory type—it resonates powerfully with the women in the audiences. Performances have almost always been followed by lively discussions between the cast and those who viewed it. Mirror, Mirror is of course similar in character to the famous and internationally performed Vagina Monologues by Eve Enser. However, an important difference between the two plays is the close relationship between the cast of Mirror, Mirror, the testimony that the dialogue is based upon, and, in many cases, the original informants themselves, which gives this play an exceptional immediacy, intimacy, and authenticity—and an exceptional authority in its depiction of lived experience. There is of course much more to say about oral history and its many uses and products. But my purpose here has been simply to suggest some of the ways that oral history and life story interviewing can enable us to probe the inner dimensions of the experiences of the self. The degree to which oral history realizes its potential in this regard, and the degree to which it engages eternity, however, will depend largely on the creativity of the projects and practices of those of us who employ this methodology. 39 ARS AETERNA Endnotes: Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror, New York (Anchor Books, 1993); Fires in the Mirror [DVD], Monterey Video, 2009, Twilight: Los Angeles, New York (Anchor Books, 1994); Twiligh:t Los Angeles [VHS], PBS, 2001; clips of both plays are available online on YouTube. 2 On Mirror, Mirror, see http://leighstrimbeck.com/mirror-mirror/ (accessed 1 February 2012); Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues, New York (Villard, 2007) and “The Vagina Monologues,” http://www.randomhouse.com/features/ensler/vm/ (accessed 1 February 2012). 1 Andor Skotnes Professor of History Chair, Department of History and Society The Sage Colleges USA email: skotna@sage.edu 40 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 ’We don’t become refugees by choice.’ Memories of Exile Teresa Meade Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture, Union College, Schenectady, NY. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including A History of Modern Latin America (2009), A Companion to Gender History, ed. (2006, 2004), A History of Brazil (2010, 2004) and ‘Civilizing’ Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City (1997). Abstract: This paper will examine the self in transition: the life of an individual uprooted from her homeland, forced into exile, and eventually re-settled in another country. The paper is a part of a larger project that seeks to explain not only Mia Truskier’s life, but to answer questions about the lives of refugees. What kind of a world do refugees encounter? Is there any similarity, over time and place that marks the refugee process? My talk explores the self in transition: the life of an individual uprooted from her homeland, forced into exile, and eventually re-settled in another country. From the outset I want to emphasize that this is a work in its infancy. In this paper I am presenting a few ideas, inviting feedback, and, for now, refraining from specific conclusions. This paper contains most of what I delivered in person at the Self and Eternity Conference; minus the taped interviews. I have noted in the text where I had inserted the interviews, and hopefully the gist of what the interviews stated will be apparent. My subject is the life of one woman, Mia (Tlusty) Truskier, who escaped from Poland in 1940 at the age of 19 and settled after the war in the United States. From an upper middle class Jewish family, Mia and her 23 year old husband, Jan Truskier, Jan’s mother, Regina (1889-1968), and Jan’s 17 yearold cousin Ryszard Landau (b. 1922), who was orphaned when his parents and 9-year-old younger sister were killed in the German bombing of Warsaw, made their way to Rome, Italy where they lived out the Second World War under semi-clandestine circumstances. These four people escaped from Nazioccupied Warsaw in April 1940 on the basis of Bulgarian visas that, although costly, were found to be invalid because they had been issued by an “honorary” rather than an “official” Bulgarian consul. As luck would have it, the worthless Bulgarian visas nonetheless allowed the group to purchase transit visas good for 24 hours in Italy. Mia’s mother, Paulina (Szurek) Tlusty (1898-1957), did not leave with her daughter for Italy because she hoped that her husband, 41 ARS AETERNA Zygmunt Tlusty (1895-1942), and 22 year-old son, Tadeusz Tlusty (1916-87), who had joined the short-lived (one could say non-existent) Polish army to repel the Nazi invasion, would return to Warsaw. They never returned. Zygmunt Tlusty, Mia’s father, died as a result of the harsh conditions he endured in a Soviet work camp in Archangiels, where he and other Poles were imprisoned as a result of the agreement that divided Poland between the USSR and Germany in late September 1939. Mia’s mother, Paulina, herself only 42 years old, remained in Warsaw throughout the war working with her brother-in-law, Feliks Gradstein, forging and distributing false identity papers for Jews and others who were trying to leave. As Jews passing as gentiles, Paulina and Feliks were in tremendous danger doing what they did. Feliks died in the bombing before Warsaw was liberated. Paulina left the city when the Soviet army entered, traveling on foot and with what rides she could get, until she reached Rome and joined her daughter and her family there. When the war ended, Paulina immigrated to England where she lived and worked until her death in 1957. After the War, Mia and her immediate family settled in California. In California Mia was, and still is at the age of 91, involved in various progressive causes. I came to know Mia through my husband, Andor Skotnes who is a longtime friend of her son, Peter. She became a of interest to me because I was writing a book on the US Solidarity Movement with Latin American liberation movements, 19602000. I interviewed Mia about of her 42 longtime work with East Bay Sanctuary, located in Berkeley, California. The East Bay Sanctuary is an organization today that provides legal and material assistance to refugees seeking asylum in the US from political, economic and racial oppression in their home country. The bulk of this population is from Central and South America, but today includes many refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Mia does this work, because, as I quote her in the title to this talk, “’We don’t become refugees by choice.’ In the course of interviewing Mia I determined to change the topic of my book from a study of the sanctuary and Latin American solidarity movement to a biography of one of its strongest advocates: Mia Truskier. My study of Mia touches on the conference theme of “eternity,” in so far as an her live demonstrates that an individual’s identity is never eternal. One needs, sometimes, to change, falsify, and adapt new identities in order to survive. To illustrate, Mia Truskier has worked for several decades in the US providing assistance to refugees, most of who have entered the US illegally and made their way to the little office in Berkeley. She has done so because she too was an illegal alien at one time: she escaped from Poland where her identity as a Jew placed her in great danger, and stayed in Italy illegally, but when Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, she, and her family became “illegal enemy aliens.” A part of her story in Europe centers on how she was helped, and helped herself, while her story in the US is one of her work to help other refugees, who are likewise struggling Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 to help themselves. The story of Mia, and of her mother, Paulina, raises other questions, including the motivation of individuals who choose to step outside their comfort zone to take risks to help others in dangerous circumstances. In sum, how does the self transform under perilous circumstances such as war and repression? In addition, I am writing a biography that seeks to explain not only one life, that of Mia Truskier, but also that of the world and political circumstances around her. Mia’s story and that of her family members provides the human face of a much larger narrative about a place the historian Timothy Snyder has called “the bloodlands.” The areas of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus are where the vast majority of civilian casualties occurred in World War II, either gassed in Nazis ovens, shot and buried in mass graves, worked to death and starved. As Snyder’s book demonstrates, the distance of time and especially space, has allowed those of us in the West to explore and discuss the two powers who divided Poland, the Soviets and the Germans, in detached comfort. Historians have sparred and theorized about who was worse: Stalin or Hitler. But the civilian populations, who lived under and died as a result of the policies of both these men were not at liberty to debate this question. They endured the sufferings of those years as part of a single historical moment. As Snyder argues: “During the consolidation of National Socialism and Stalinism (1933-1938), the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland (1939-1941), and then the German-Soviet war (19411945), mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region.” (Snyder, 2010, p. viii) Thousands, including the members of the Tlusty and Truskier families, fell victim to the murderous policies of each of these regimes Finally, the main sources for my work so far include about 15 hours of recorded interviews that I conducted in December 2010 and August 2011. I lived with Mia while doing the interviews, thus talked with her constantly about her life, perused photographs, looked at her many art projects, and scanned the collection of letters and documents in her house in Berkeley. At 91 Mia is mostly housebound, frail and with aches and pains, but very alert mentally. She watches the news, keeps up a fairly active correspondence and talks on the phone with friends and relatives in Polish, English and Italian. Mia Tlusty, later Truskier, grew up in Warsaw in the apartment building owned by her parents, located on Nowogrodzke Street, 17. She attended one of the best secondary schools for girls in Warsaw. It was a municipal school, of which there were five for boys and one for girls. She graduated at the top of her class. Despite this Mia was refused admission to the architecture university in Poland because of a well-known, but unspoken, quota on Who is Mia Truskier? Why did she leave Poland? 43 ARS AETERNA Jews. Because her family had financial resources, she left Poland to attend the Federal Institute of Technology School of Architecture in Zurich, Switzerland. In Switzerland, Mia met Jan Truskier (1917-88) who was from a very wealthy Polish Jewish family. Like Mia, they were assimilated, non-observant Jews and did not practice any religion. Mia only met Jan when they were in architecture school in Zurich, mainly because the Truskiers spent less time in Warsaw and Jan was not in the same social circle as the Tlustys. The Truskiers had houses and relatives in other parts of Europe, and they traveled often. As evidence of their prestige and connections, Jan’s uncle, Abraham Adolf Truskier (1871-1941), was a major political activist and one of the few Jewish members of the Polish Parliament, and the only one at the time he was in office. Adolf died in the Warsaw Ghetto. [AT THIS POINT IN THE PRESENTATION, I PLAYED A SHORT SEGMENT FROM THE TAPED INTERVIEW: Mia describes her school in Warsaw, her decision to enter the university in Zurich, and how she met Jan. She also gives us an idea of anti-Semitism in Poland and the international nature of the university in Switzerland.] When the war broke out in September 1939 Mia and Jan were both home on vacation from university. After the invasion, Poland was divided between the Soviet Union, which claimed the eastern half, and Germany, which claimed the western half. Mia and Jan determined to leave, and married in January 1940 in a Catholic church after converting to Catholicism, purely for the purpose of obtaining visas. Mia asserts that she would never have converted to Christianity under normal circumstances, but given the limited options her family faced in 1940, she and Jan did so in order to escape Poland. Traveling with these papers, Mia, Jan, and Jan’s two relatives left Poland in the spring 1940, hoping to get back into Switzerland (they could not), to a relative of Mia’s in Milan, or to any safe destination. According to Mia, “When you are running from a forest fire, you don’t stop to wonder whether there might be a precipice at the edge of the forest.” Drawing on money the Truskiers had maintained (clandestinely) in a Swiss bank account, and mostly on the basis of Mia and Jan’s work, they were able to live out the war years in Italy. At various points, they encountered considerable risk. While Italy did not enforce anti-Semitic laws as did Germany, it was allied with Nazi Germany and as such subject to periodic and capricious anti Jewish policies. Their status as Polish exiles, presumably Christians, was never questioned, although their situation was never without risk. Mia recounts witnessing the partisan bomb blast in the Via Rasella, which killed 32 German Getting out of Poland 44 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 soldiers. At Hitler’s express orders the Nazis retaliated by rounding up and shooting over 200 Italians, specifically targeting Jews, and burying them in a mass grave outside the city. The retaliatory action, referred to as the Fosse Ardeatine or Ardeatine Tombs, sought to silence Roman opposition to the Nazi occupation and suppress the growing anti-fascist resistance movement. (Portelli, 2003) Given that Mia worked and lived near the site of the bombing, even witnessed it, she was in danger. Mia’s father, Zygmunt Tlusty and her older brother, Tadeusz, who was in medical school, answered the mandate calling on all men between the ages of 16 and 45 to join the Polish army to resist the German invaders. Mia emphasized that her 45-yearold father agonized over leaving his wife in Warsaw, but felt it was his obligation to join this fighting force because he was a very patriotic Polish citizen and proud of his young nation, politically in existence only since 1918. As it turned out, no organized Polish military, certainly one capable of resisting the Wehrmacht, existed and most of these men, and their families who accompanied many of them, were killed on the roads outside Warsaw. In the ensuing chaos, Tadeusz and Zygmunt took refuge with some friends at their house in Lwów (now L’viv and in Ukraine). Eventually they were sent to a Soviet work camp in Archangiels, on the White Sea. Tadeusz’s girlfriend and later first wife, Wanda Szenwald (1910-?), made her way to Lwów and then was forced on with them to Archangiels. The three remained in this work camp under very difficult and arduous conditions until 1941 when Germany invaded the USSR and the camps were dissolved. In 1942 the three were loaded on trains to Kazakhstan, where Zygmunt died as a result of the conditions he suffered in the work camp. He is buried there. Tadeusz was picked up by the British army, was sent to Beirut to finish medical school, and served with the British until the end of the war, as did a large number of Polish nationals. He settled in England after the war and died in 1987. Wanda Szenwald Tlusty and Tadeusz divorced, both remarried, and Wanda went back to Poland after the war and little is known of her life in Poland except that she remarried and had children. [AT THIS POINT IN THE PRESENTATION, I PLAYED A SHORT SEGMENT FROM THE TAPED INTERVIEW: The first excerpt is Mia describing her father, his pride in Poland as a nation, and his reasons for answering the call-up to resist the Nazis. In the second excerpt, Mia reads from a letter that Wanda sent to Paulina in which she describes the conditions in the work camp. Finally, a third selection is Mia explaining to me that she was able to send packages to the camp, at least for a while.] Life in the Soviet Work Camps 45 ARS AETERNA Paulina’s Story - Warsaw during the War It is Paulina’s letters to Mia that provide the unique piece of this story. Writing in a code that she and Mia developed over a period of time in their correspondence, Paulina describes Warsaw throughout the war, both day-to-day events and, to the extent possible, the fate of friends and relatives and her own work in underground activities. Together with a secretary at Holy Cross Catholic Church Paulina falsified baptismal records, which, in turn, her brother-in-law Feliks Gradstein, distributed. Gradstein, the widowed husband of Zygmunt’s sister Stella, would take the streetcar through the Ghetto, jump off in the middle, and make his way to contacts there. Mia does not know whether they worked with a group of people or not, but Feliks may have. The latter survived until the last days of the war when he was killed in the Soviet bombing of the city. (For a discussion of the Polish Underground and the forging of identity papers, see Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The Past Within Me by Simha Rotem (Kazik), trans/ed. Barbara Harshav (from Hebrew) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Rotem likewise describes obtaining baptismal certificates from a contact in a Catholic parish in Warsaw, but does not name the Church.) [AT THIS POINT IN THE PRESENTATION, I PLAYED A SHORT SEGMENT FROM THE TAPED INTERVIEW: Mia describes the secret code that Paulina devised in order to communicate with her in the letters she wrote from occupied Warsaw to Mia in Rome. Life in Italy and Mia’s Art Another part of the story, which I will end with today, is that Mia and her husband Jan were refugees, but they had resources. They had money, not a lot, but enough and they were skilled. Mia and Jan both worked in Rome during the War (they eventually obtained work permits), lived in a nice pension facing the old wall of Rome. They ate in a dining room with a crosssection of Italian military and European exiles, German SS officers, refugees, aristocrats and all kinds of people from all over Europe. Today the pension has been converted to the very ritzy Hotel Splendide, on Via Porta de Pinciana in 46 the Veneto section of Rome. Mia sold her crafts to an elegant specialty store, Myricae, which still exists. Mia is a very skilled craftswoman and she made nativity scenes, lamps, and Christmas trees that were carried in Myricae. The high end store, run during the war by Teresa Massetti, is at Via Frattina, 36 near the Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Steps). In addition, Mia took classes in architecture at the University. She was unable to register formally for the courses because of her illegal status, but she did continue her formal education. Jan eventually got work as an architect, and they were able to Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 support themselves with these jobs. [THE CONCLUSION IS A VIDEO TAPE OF MIA TRUSKIER: In the video Mia exhibits a number of photographs of her family that she saved from Poland, and she also shows a number of pieces of art that she brought from Italy. The video demonstrates her dogged resourcefulness in Italy. Finally, she shows a number of art works that she has made for fundraisers and benefits at the Oakland, California East Bay Sanctuary. This video clip illustrates the continuity between her life as a refugee in Italy and her work as an advocate for refugees today.] Works cited: » Snyder, T., 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Random House, Inc. » Portelli, Alessandro. The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 Teresa Meade 4 Harding Avenue Delmar, New York 12054 USA email:meadet@union.edu 47 ARS AETERNA Between Imitation and Self-relection – the Postmodernist Rendering of Oscar Wilde’s myth in Will Self’s Dorian Petr Chalupský Petr Chalupský received his PhD. from the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. He is currently the Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Education of Charles University, where he teaches English and British Literature, Literary Studies and Literary Theory. Specialising in modern British fiction, his research interests include in particular the image of the city and its culture in contemporary British literature. He has published articles in journals and conference proceedings, most recently “Crime Narratives in Peter Ackroyd’s Historiographic Metafictions” in the European Journal of English Studies (Routledge, 2010), and contributed to Beyond 2000: The Recent Novel in English (Wałbrzych, 2011) and Literary Childhoods: Growing Up in British and American Literature (Pardubice, 2008). In 2009 he published a monograph The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night: The Image of the City in the Works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Abstract: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) has inspired many artists to render or remake its story of the classical myth of everlasting youth and beauty, the result being countless stage adaptations and film versions rather than literary attempts at rewriting the novel. Will Self’s Dorian (2002) creates an analogous story to Wilde’s by setting it exactly one century later in time, in 1980s and 90s London. The aim of this article is to present Will Self as a writer and to demonstrate that rather than an imitation or a shocking provocation, Dorian represents an original metafictional literary experiment which, apart from rendering Wilde’s novel, explores a wide range of themes, such as the psychogeography of London, the role and influence of mass media in contemporary Western consumer society, and the eternity of human imagination and creativity. I say what I mean, although I seldom mean what I say. (Henry Wotton, Dorian, 144) 48 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 The theme of art as a means of capturing, preserving and thus eternalising its object’s beauty and wisdom is as old as humankind and its need to express life experience in a creative and imaginative manner. In literature this is most likely best expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnet XVIII in which the poet confidently assures the young gentleman to whom the poem is addressed that his youthful beauty will forever be preserved from decay and death in the “eternal lines” of the sonnet. However, at the same time, people have always toyed with the idea that it would actually be much more desirable if one could remain young and beautiful instead of the artefact, and have looked for some device which would take the burden of growing old off their shoulders. This conceit is most famously dramatised in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which shows the devastating consequences of what follows when the eponymous protagonist’s wish to retain his innocent-looking youth and charm while his portrait would bear all the evidence of his moral corruption and physical degradation is granted. The alluring promise of Wilde’s story together with its elaborate, intellectually and aesthetically profound style have made both the novel and its author a cult, a timeless myth of human vanity and vulnerability and its gifted creator, which have fascinated artists of all kinds ever since. While the various theatre and film adaptations are almost impossible to count, literary reactions have proved to be a more demanding challenge due to the original’s stylistic and linguistic exceptionality. Therefore, despite the postmodernist fondness for parody, paraphrases and pastiche, the attempts at rewriting Wilde have been quite rare. A highly sensitive and successful one is Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), a fictional diary the writer supposedly kept in Paris during the last weeks of his life. The work cleverly combines real historical personages and events with fictitious ones, but its true mastery rests in Ackroyd’s ability to adopt and recreate Wilde’s language and style teeming with images, metaphors, puns, paradoxes and aphorisms, which “provides conclusive evidence that Ackroyd’s ‘strong predecessor’ did manage to transcend his mortality” (Onega, 1998, p.34). A different attempt at recreating Oscar Wilde is Jeremy Reed’s novel Dorian: A Sequel to the Picture of Dorian Grey (1997), which, as its title suggests, follows up the original story and brings together its fictional characters with that of their maker: having survived the mutilation of his portrait but repelled by the ageing process, Dorian Gray flees with Lord Henry Wotton, who has left his wife, to Paris in 1897, where in one of their nocturnal wanderings they accidentally meet Oscar Wilde who has just been released from prison and now is a master of the occult arts. This encounter has a redemptive effect on Dorian, but he eventually dies in Venice where he is planning to secretly marry an adoring young man. Like Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Reed’s Dorian is a notable stylistic and narrative achievement rather than an ingenious story which could rival that of Wilde. 49 ARS AETERNA Will Self’s Dorian (2002) represents yet a different attempt at creative reworking of Wilde’s work as it neither tries to adopt his style nor imagines the novel’s continuation. It can be compared to a similar literary project, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), Peter Ackroyd’s rendering of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein (1818). Both Ackroyd’s and Self’s novels are set in specific historical contexts and feature a mixture of fictitious and reallife personalities, both are set in London which plays a more determining role than that of mere setting, and both have surprising endings that turn their main plot into a playful narrative conceit. However, while Ackroyd moves Shelley’s story only a few years forward in time to the period roughly between 1811 and 1814, Self’s version takes place exactly a century later than its model, between the years 1981 and 1997. The novel thus imagines what the story of The Picture of Dorian Gray might be like if it were happening at the end of the millennium. It is subtitled “an Imitation,” and Self accordingly adheres to Wilde’s novel by keeping to its symbolism, central plot line, main characters and their names and placing them into the historical, social, cultural and political framework of predominantly 1980s and 90s England. Dorian depicts the social milieu of that time’s upper-class London gay community, with all its characteristic features, including promiscuous sexual behaviour, drug abuse and decadent lifestyle. Basil Hallward is a conceptual artist, a Warhol acolyte, who does not paint the Adonis-like Dorian Gray, but makes a video installation entitled 50 Cathode Narcissus which captures the young man’s beauty on nine monitors. Dorian does not fall in love and betray a poor actress, but a black male homeless drug addict and prostitute, Herman. The revenge is not attempted by his brother, but by his gay skinhead lover nicknamed Ginger; Wotton, Hallward. Dorian and their likes do not smoke “heavy opium-tainted cigarettes” (The Picture of Dorian Gray, p.8) or take opium, but are addicted to a range of soft and hard drugs such as marihuana, cocaine, amphetamines and heroin. And the community is not infected by syphilis, but by HIV and AIDS. Self sees the 1980s and 90s as time of political, social and moral decline and decadence in England, a period reminiscent of the fin de siécle a century earlier. This parallel is introduced at the very beginning of the book, claiming that the two periods had in common “a Government at once regressive and progressive, a monarchy mired in its own succession crisis, an economic recession both sharp and bitter” (3), which only emphasises the eccentricity of the secluded social milieu the story takes place in. There are, however, several divergences between the two novels which in effect set the modern version free from the limits of its model’s narrative framework and plot construction, namely its language, the role of London within its narrative framework, its relation to the outside historical reality and its playfulness, culminating in the final twist. The novel’s subtitle is therefore rather ironic and as such refers to a playfully postmodern variation of Wilde’s original which is more than its Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 mere imitation. It is symptomatic that the book originated as a screenplay, but as Self was nearing its completion he felt the limitation of the form and decided to go on working on the script and turn it into a novel, “which allowed him to retain creative control” (Hayes, 2007, p.149). In order to accomplish such a challenging project, he necessarily needed the space and other possibilities, linguistic and narrative, that only the genre of the novel allows. Self commented on the relationship between Dorian and The Picture of Dorian Gray by saying that the first is not only a modern imitation of the latter but also “a homage […] The Picture of Dorian Gray is the prophecy and Dorian is the fulfilment” (McCrum 2002). The aim of this article is to demonstrate that Self’s Dorian is a far more complex literary accomplishment than its title and subtitle suggest: it is not only an inventive and imaginative rendering of the original, but, simultaneously, its organic continuation which celebrates, apart from the classic’s myth, the eternity of human imagination and the very process of creative writing. The essential problem a writer reworking The Picture of Dorian Gray faces is the choice of language. He/she can try to imitate Wilde’s figurative language, full of evocative passages based on countless images of sight, smell and motion and thoughtful conversations abounding with irony and sarcastic gnomic statements, a language that refers to taboo topics only indirectly in hints and innuendos. Or he/she can create a language of his/ her own that feels more appropriate to the historical and social framework of a modern version. In Dorian, Self opts for a peculiar combination of these approaches. On the one hand, he narrates his story in a crude voice, full of argotic and slang words--a language that does not avoid straightforward descriptions of obscene or otherwise provocative scenes, from pornographic delineations of sexual orgies to detailed accounts of the process of taking, and the effects of, hard drugs. That the novel employs discursive means much unalike Wilde’s is made clear in its very first paragraph, where instead of the scents and odours of flowers in Basil’s studio, the reader is presented with the coarse-sounding characterisation of the hedonistic and affluent environment in which the main protagonists live: When the reader is astonished, the writer is in accord with himself – the language, the city and the real-life events in Dorian Once you were inside the Chelsea home of Henry and Victoria Wotton it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night-time. Not only was there this crucial ambiguity, but the seasons and even the years became indeterminate. Was it this century or that one? Was she wearing this skirt or that suit? Did he take that drug or this drink? Was his preference for that cunt or this arsehole? (3) 51 ARS AETERNA Such choice of language well reflects the novel’s cast and makes their utterances and values more plausible and lifelike. As the writer himself used to be a drug and alcohol addict for most of the time period that the novel’s story depicts1, he uses much of his own experience in evoking the atmosphere and customs of the London drug community. The various slang terms for drugs and drug paraphernalia give an air of authenticity to the speech of their dealers and users in the same way as the vulgarisms and pornographic scenes help evoke the decadent and bohemian lifestyle of the upper-class gay community during the “roaring” 1980s. In a world where homosexuality and drug abuse are no longer taboo topics, Self logically sees no reason why his language should depict them only indirectly. On the other hand, Self does use more elaborate language registers on several occasions to show Henry Wotton’s distinctive turn of phrase, and in the descriptions of London and its particular areas. Self’s Wotton is probably the character who most resembles its model – egotist, irresponsible, indifferent, but also smart, witty, and, most of all, eloquent and well-spoken. Therefore, his speeches often contain the aphorisms, bons mots and paradoxes of a sharp-eyed observer of life. Some of the phrases are in fact identical with the original: “A man can be happy with a woman as long as he doesn’t love her” (133). Some are almost identical: “[W]e are in an age when appearances matter more and more. Only the shallowest of people won’t judge by them” (20), 52 compared to “Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”; or “When you fall in love […] you join the league of the self-deceived” (101), compared to“the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties”. But most of them are altered variations adapted for modern times and the story’s purposes: “Everyone who isn’t a pseudo-intellectual loves television – it’s so much realer than reality” (66, emphasis in original), compared to“I love acting. It is so much more real than life”; or “When the doctors disagree, […] the patient is in accord with himself” (125), compared to“When the critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself”; or “I’d give up doing drugs altogether, if I wasn’t afraid of other people taking them without me” (34), compared to “There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up”. And there are many more of them, some rather difficult to spot if one is not well-acquainted with Wilde’s text. This perpetual oscillation between the language of crude realism and conversational witticism gives the novel a special dynamism, and invites it to be read as an independent text that communicates with and comments on, rather than imitates, the original. The second instance when the language of Dorian abandons crudity and assumes a poetic dimension is when different areas of London where the action takes place are described. Will Self is a London writer and the city has always been one of Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 the crucial concerns of his writing, which explores the “interlocking relationships between place, identity and cognition” (Hayes, 2007, p.7). He is often ranked, together with writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, as a representative of “psychogeography”, a narrative that strives to point out the special effects a particular locality might have on the psyche and the behaviour of people connected with the location, by discovering a link between the geography of the area and its reflection in one’s consciousness. When moving around Chelsea, Dorian feels the interconnectedness between his psyche and the area’s atmosphere and architecture: As a writer, Self has been repeatedly compared to Martin Amis, and this passage reminds a reader of Amis’s loose London trilogy, Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995), where he also uses the combination of the city and its weather as a metaphor for the states of mind of his characters and the whole of society.. Self’s descriptions of London thus always transcend the mere physicality of the place by attributing it a psychological dimension whose lines of force help him draw an imaginary map which captures the city’s mental topography. When, for instance, he describes the area of Battersea, his language displays a great deal of psychogeographic discursive markers: Then he could hear nothing save the scream of his own shredded psyche through the taut steel rigging of consciousness. He knew from experience that when his own encephalogram grew spikier – with both the amplitude and the frequency of his brain waves mounting – he also observed the strange weather in the streets deteriorating. Tight isobars were ruled across the shopfronts on the King’s Road and Fulham Road, while the frightening vortices of low-pressure cyclones formed over Redcliffe Gardens and Edith Grove. (169-70) No amount of imperial landscaping can cover up this malodorousness, the swamp that lies beneath the pleasure gardens and the miasma percolating through the run-down ornamental terraces. […] The city, feeling itself to be moribund, is simplifying its routines, deaccessioning its most solid and durable possessions in favour of sentimental trinkets and plastic gewgaws. It wants to move into a gigantic granny flat, where – while still preserving the illusion of independence – it can have all of its practical needs taken care of. (62) 53 ARS AETERNA When the city’s topographies become the subject of Self’s narration, the language changes immediately into what is one of his idiosyncrasies: employment of a broad range of vocabulary, which might be viewed as both impressive and annoying by the reader, resulting in recurrent layering and juxtaposing of diverse, often seemingly incongruous, imagery--a style that “often leaps between journalistic declarative sentences and rapid verbal riffing, expanding the dimensions of his extended metaphors and descriptive catalogues” (Hayes, 2007, p.4). London in Dorian is made simultaneously present, yet absent, at every step – even though the novel features numerous descriptions of the city, it is mostly perceived from a detached perspective, as Wotton and Dorian inhabit a world where their only touch with the city’s ordinary life is achieved through drug dealers and kept workingclass lovers. As a result, many images of the city are seen through the windscreen of their expensive cars or windows of their luxury houses. Their city is thus an abstract one, merely a stage set of the spectacular performance of their extravagant lives: “Henry Wotton drove his five-litre Jaguar around central London as if he were at the wheel of a powered lawnmower, and the city itself but a rough oblong of lawn, to the rear of a romantically ruinous country house. A lawn planted with stucco models of famous metropolitan buildings, perhaps one-tenth scale, between which he piloted his vehicle at once lazily and wildly” (25). When the heavily equipped police are facing 54 rioters in the streets, Dorian reluctantly interrupts watching his image on one of the Cathode Narcissus monitors only to take a glance from the window: “The reflection of the riot flickered yellow and red on the smooth tan screen of his perfect face as he stood, legs apart, giving the correct formal shape to his immaculate Japanese kimono” (50). Wotton’s and Dorian’s attitude to the city is a condescending one, as they almost never personally encounter its real manifestations, remaining safely secluded in the material attributes of their social status. Self’s fiction often presents the city in terms of a protagonist, both familiar and enigmatic, one that is always ready to interfere in the story and change the course of events. “Dusk fell over the summertime city like a hunter’s net weighted with the threat of nighttime. London mewled and thrashed, then, becoming completely entangled, lay still, awaiting its chance to lash out again” (137). In Dorian he goes even further than this, for there is even a character called London who becomes a metaphorical embodiment of the major social issues the city was coping with in the late 1980s and 1990s: the person nicknamed London is a black, second-generation immigrant drug dealer and addict. Moreover, the rich men’s protective seclusion from the city proves highly insufficient, and it this very drug dealer and addict that infects them with the fatal virus. The languages and discourses Self employs in Dorian, in order to depict London’s various meaning levels within the novel’s narrative framework, signal the multi- Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 faceted role of the city as it (unlike in The Picture of Dorian Gray where it serves by and large as the setting) alternately becomes a virtual reflection of its dwellers’ consciousness as well as a significant catalyst of events, and occurrences in their lives. Spanning the sixteen years between 1981 and 1997, Dorian is embedded in its historical time through a series of indirect means and references: important events or known personages are often discussed or hinted at in conversations, but, most importantly, they are presented in media and in the characters’ commentaries on them. As the electronically mediated virtual reality determines the very plot construction, Self deliberately chooses the story of the most prominent media icon of this period, Lady Diana Spencer, to bracket his. She not only participates in the same charity projects as Dorian, but even sends flowers to his funeral. “Diana, as blonde, ingenuous and seemingly indestructible as Dorian himself, is glimpsed at the key points where her career intersects with his […] all mediated, like Dorian’s video-portrait itself, via the deadpan glamour of the TV screen” (Bartlett, 2002). Set in the early golden era of electronic media, the televised images of her fate permeate the novel, intertwining thus the two myths, a classical one with a modern one, into a social satire of life in the age of Baudrillardian third-order simulacra. They for the first time coincide during the royal wedding which Dorian, Wotton, Campbell and Herman watch shortly before they indulge in sexual and drug orgies, during which Herman infects them with HIV. “As Diana walks up the aisle of St Paul’s, Dorian is enjoying an afternoon of shared needles and ‘what can only be described as a conga line of buggery’ in Knightsbridge. And as she slips her finger into the Windsor ring, so the conga line is infiltrated by AIDS” (Heawood, 2002). As the novel progresses, other fragments of Diana’s media image glimpsed on television are interwoven into its story: her shaking gloveless hands with a HIV-positive gay man at a pioneering AIDS clinic at London’s Middlesex Hospital in 1987, her visit to another HIV/AIDS hospital ward accompanied by Barbara Bush in July 1991, the frank public confession about her husband’s unfaithfulness during an interview with BBC’s Panorama on November 20, 1995, and her death in a car crash on 31 August 1997. At the same time, Dorian leads his double life of private debauchery, moral degradation and public deception through ostentatious acts of charity, while thanks to the monitors he retains his once immaculate beauty. A parallel is thus drawn between Dorian’s and Diana’s deadly progresses, both marked by wrong choices, pretence, hypocrisy and succumbing to the power of electronic media. The fact that “Lady Di” is the stage name of one of the kind-hearted transvestites who truly help Basil when he finds himself at the bottom in New York, while Dorian is enjoying the privileges of the Manhattan well-off artistic and bohemian circles, only underscores the parallel’s irony. One of the meaning levels of the novel is a satirical parable about the power and nature of electronic media in the 55 ARS AETERNA modern Western world, conceived through the character of Henry Wotton and his attitude to television. He is aware of the deceptive hyperreality of the televised images sponging on “the most intense, carnivorous, predatory voyeurism” (12) of a society infused with the values of commercial consumer culture, whose potential of appearing “realer” than life allows them to not only to simulate but eventually to substitute the reality in which the viewers supposedly live. Wotton represents a poignant and outspoken commentator on the medium. Moreover, when referring to Princess Diana, he always uses contemptuous or offending epithets and labellings taken from commercial TV or tabloid press discourse, which metaphorically outline the ridiculous, ever-changing and often paradoxical image of the princess in the media, such as “the Princess of Bulimia”, “Fatty Spencer”, “Royal Fag Hag”, “Her Royal Regurgitation”, “the Princess of Clothes”, and “Thickie Spencer”. At the same time, claiming that her every “particular act – her grazed heart crying out for a Band-aid, while she shops ‘til every last equerry drops – constitutes the very Zeitgeist itself ” (108, emphasis in original), he points to that time period’s obsession with such a mediated hyperreality. Even though Lady Diana did actually learn what to do to have the media on her side, the inevitable hypocrisy and double-life this involved only intensified her unhappiness, loneliness and despair, and made her once again a convenient target for 56 further assaults by the media. While Dorian transforms himself into a “social chameleon” (107), assuming various identities and performing different roles in order to disguise the unscrupulousness of his character, Diana is made a victim of similar unscrupulousness by the media. Symbolically, in the early 1997 Cathode Narcissus successfully penetrates into commercial television advertisements and pop videos, becoming a “digital virus” (271), thus suggesting the ultimate abandonment of the last ethical principles of media – a few months later media were at the centre of Diana’s untimely death during a hysterical hunt by paparazzi. Yet even a tragedy is a treat for the media for it fits perfectly into their semi-fictional portrayal of the princess; as Wotton notes, “so perfect is this marriage between fact and fiction, so ideally mythic” (274, emphasis in original). The stories of Dorian and Diana are thus of reversed mechanisms: while the first can live the wondrous eternal myth of his life undisturbed because the electronic medium sets him free by taking on itself all the undesired consequences, the latter is forced to live a myth the media co-fashioned for her -- and they were willing to chase her to death when she finally chose to live a life of her own. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 On self-relection considered as one of Self’s ine arts – postmodernist playfulness in Dorian A crucial aspect of Will Self’s Dorian, in which it definitively departs from being a mere imitation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, is its postmodernist playfulness in the form of intertextuality and, above all, metafictional commentary through the problematisation of the novel’s narrative authority. Besides reworking the original novel, Dorian contains numerous quotes from and allusions to other texts, both non-literary (such as the references to Schopenhauer’s writings), and literary. We can find there Joris-Karl Huysmans’s famous novel Á rebours (1884), which as the “yellow book” crucially forms the personality and view of life of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, because Wotton “fancies himself as de Montesquiou, the real-life model for Des Essientes, the decadent hero of Huysmans’s novel” (56). In order to describe Basil’s vain New York pursuit of artistic inspiration, Wotton compares his friend to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (85). When commenting on popular culture’s increasing obsession with various manifestations of violence, Wotton ironically subverts the key premise of de Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827) by claiming that “[m]urder shouldn’t be considered one of the fine arts; rather it’s one of the wilder forms of popular entertainment” (217). When Dorian and his friends are sharing needles during a group drug taking session, lines about mingling of bloods from John Donne’s poem “The Flea” are quoted to evoke the “strange blending of the essences of the five men” (67). Donne’s notorious metaphysical poem of cooing and seduction is once again referred to when Dorian fiendishly “seduces” Basil into taking drugs after five years of abstinence. And when in Los Angeles Gavin is persuading Dorian to come back with him to London, planning that he will “light out for the territory” because he cannot imagine he will “miss the old bastard that much” (196), the statement brings to mind both the original quotation at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), as well as Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic non-fiction Lights Out for the Territory (1997), in which the author walks the streets of London looking for its obscure and hidden signs and patterns, revealing thus a disturbing side of modern urban life. The main act of Self’s narrative playfulness in Dorian is the final metafictional twist, partly reminiscent of that of Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), which by pointing out the novel’s fictitiousness redirects the reader’s attention from the story to the process of writing, and the question of narrative authority. Like McEwan, Self scatters a few prompts in the text which suggest that Wotton is more than a character. At the beginning of the book the narrator notes that “Henry Wotton could have written a brilliant book about the life and times of … Henry Wotton”. And Wotton himself admits that he would have written a roman à clef if he had lost his car keys (41), only 57 ARS AETERNA to lose his car keys repeatedly in the subsequent story, indicating that the reader might anticipate obtaining a key to Self’s variation of the roman à clef genre that he/she is reading. When at the end of the story Gavin asks Wotton why he told the revenge-driven Ginger where to find Dorian, and thus “decided that Dorian should die” (217), Wotton steps out of being only a character in the story and assumes the position of a writer, explaining that getting Dorian killed is not retribution but “a kind of symmetry we seek, a rounding off of events” (218). Symptomatically, the only response to this comes from Cal Devenish, a once promising writer of one successful novel2, who claims of Wotton’s story of Dorian’s eternal youth while the video installation ages in his stead-- this “portrait riff […] has the resonance of a modern myth” (219) because it makes its protagonist “the icon of an era in which everyone seeks to hang on to their childhood until they’re pressing furry fucking teddy bears against wrinkled cheeks” (220, emphasis in original). This is not only an assertion of Wotton’s narrative authority, but also Self’s ironic comment on his own novel. This passage, at the same time, leaves the problem of the succession of the story’s narrative authorities unsolved, as Wotton’s statement, “Whatever my faults, I have at least lived my life at first hand, rather than filtering it through this paper as part of a literary experiment” (220), poses a question of whose lines the reader is actually reading – whether there is yet someone else between Wotton and Self. 58 It is the Epilogue where the novel turns truly hilarious and self-reflexive. At first, Wotton dies leaving two copies of his novel, one of which his wife Victoria gives to Dorian. The Epilogue starts with an innocent joke presenting two poles of how people might feel when they are used as characters in fiction: Dorian is furious because he has been portrayed negatively while Victoria finds it amusing in part because she has been made richer and more successful in it. This is followed by an open act of self-praise by Self when even the outraged Dorian must admit that “despite his poetic licence Henry had displayed a powerful turn of phrase in his writing” (261). After that, the “real” Dorian is presented, including his attempt at psychological analysis of the motivation behind Wotton’s literary spitefulness. However, he is soon troubled by a mysterious inner voice that appears to be Wotton’s narrative voice, informing Dorian that they are “all inventions of one sort or another […] I don’t think you should feel too bad about the way things have turned out” (276, emphasis in original). It is at this point that the novel reveals that at least part of the Epilogue was Dorian’s attempt at completing, or even correcting, Wotton’s novel from his perspective--an attempt destined to fail for being artless and implausible as is ironically reflected in Wotton’s narrative voice’s criticism: “your dog was a badly-drawn touch – no one would’ve believed that you had one; you aren’t the faithful type. And as for the Gray Organisation, frankly, Dorian, your fantasy of business prowess Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 is – well – laughable” (277). Henry Wotton then metamorphoses into his new incarnation, this time being Ginger who has eventually come to kill Dorian. However, Ginger is an even less probable narrative authority than Dorian, a mere joke, which could be repeated endlessly, made by the only true narrative authority behind the novel – Will Self. Dorian thus employs a similar strategy as Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989), where three characters also strive to assert control over the narrative, only to be shown as puppets in the hands of the author in the end. I don’t think we should feel too bad about the way things have turned out – conclusion “I don’t write fiction for people to identify with and I don’t write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people” (quoted in Hayes, 2007, p.1), says Will Self and Dorian only confirms his words. The unique combination and juxtaposition of the quotidian and mundane with the surrealist, absurd and extraordinary is what forms the essence of his writing, which he himself labels as “dirty magical realism” (quoted in Hayes, 2007, p.5). For all its sexual explicitness and frequent argotic verbosity, Dorian is undoubtedly a provocative if not downright shocking text and as such might not be to everyone’s liking. Yet this aspect of the novel should not overshadow its other meaning levels. It is, above all, a puzzling, self-reflexive text, an inventive narrative experiment adapting a classical myth while, at the same time, commenting on the very process. On top of that, it provides a fresh and piercing insight into some of the much-concealed mechanisms and traumas of the contemporary Western consumer society. Golomb (2003, p.74) observes that Self’s fiction creates a community defined by his peculiar themes and eccentric and dubious characters, “at once personal and impersonal, often springing from his own experiences but not confined by them” (Golomb, 2003, p.84). It is a community the reader needs to get used to at first, but, as Dorian demonstrates, once he/she does, it proves worth the effort. Deliberately “concerned with the avoidance of predictability, precedent or classification” (Bradford, 2007, p.52), Dorian exemplifies a variant of the writerly novel, foregrounding “both language, refusing to treat or use it as a transparent window on the world, and the activity of writing: games are played on the reader, frames broken, the conventions of fiction exposed and the ontological status of fictional characters is questioned” (Alexander, 1990, p.167). Although it starts as a pastiche, a late-twentieth-century version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, thanks to its many differences and its author’s idiosyncrasies, (namely, the use of various language registers, the role of the city, the parallel relation 59 ARS AETERNA between the story and its cultural and socio-political externalities), and its playful narrative conceit, the novel assumes sociological, psychological and metafictional perspectives, and addresses a range of new themes, which makes it more than an imitation of Wilde’s original. These include the theme of 1980s and 90s London homosexual and drug subcultures, the psychogeographic determining influence of London’s atavistic and hidden forces and patterns on the visible manifestations of the city life, the role 60 of electronic mass media in fashioning and shaping the celebrity culture, and the hyper-consumer culture’s infantile obsession with youth and youthful looks. Moreover, by suggesting the potentially never-ending succession of narrative authorities in the story, Self points to an implicit yet equally significant theme – the eternity of art and literature. The novel can thus also be read as an original paean to limitless human creativity and imagination, which can do far more than simply preserve beauty. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Endnotes: 1 Will Self is infamous for snorting heroin even on board John Major’s jet during the election campaign which Self was covering for the Observer in April 1997. He decided to quit completely a year later. 2 The character of Cal Devenish also appears in Self’s short story “The Nonce Prize” from Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998) and his novel The Book of Dave (2006). Works cited: » Alexander, M. 1990. Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction. London: Edward Arnold. » Bartlett, N. 2002. Picture of ill-health. The Guardian (12 September, 2002). Available at: » http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/shopping.fiction (Accessed 11 October, 2011). » Bradford, R. 2007. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. » Golomb, L.A. The Fiction of Will Self: Motif, Method and Madness. In Lane R.J., Mengham R., Tew P. (eds.), 2003. Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 74-86. » Hayes, M.H. 2007. Understanding Will Self. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. » Heawood, J. 2002. The sincerest form. (29 September, 2002). Available at: » http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/29/fiction.features2 (Accessed 11 October, 2011). » McCrum, R. 2002. “Self analysis.” The Guardian (29 September, 2002). Available at: » http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/29/fiction.willself (Accessed 11 October, 2011). » Onega, S. 1998. Peter Ackroyd. Plymouth: Northcote House. » Self, W. 2003 (2002). Dorian. London: Penguin Books. » Wilde, O. 1994 (1891). The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books. Petr Chalupský Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Education, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic email: petr.chalupsky@pedf.cuni.cz 61 ARS AETERNA The Passion: Eternal Past Reconsidered Diana Židová Diana Židová is a PhD. student at the Department of English and American Studies, Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra. She is currently working on her dissertation concerning literary works produced by later generations of emigrants of Slovak/Rusyn origin in America. Her previous research was based on Thomas Bell’s remarkable novel Out of This Furnace in which she pointed out its multifaceted classification with emphasis on immigrant novel, and stated imaginary and geographical boundaries which still perpetuate between Slovak and American literary academia. Her interests therefore mainly include the variations of ethnic identity found in Slovak diaspora in the literature of the 20th century. Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze how the concept of the eternal past can be disrupted by the postmodern narrative mode, using historical and fantastic features, in the novel The Passion (1987), written by a contemporary British writer Jeanette Winterson. It raises questions about who gets to tell the (hi)story of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Emperor; Henri, a cook; and Villanelle, a cross-dressing Venetian. The paper also discusses the subversion of the gender roles, resulting in Henri’s failure to accept reality, and Villanelle’s decision to abandon her lover. Introduction Jeanette Winterson’s entry into Slovak bookshops seems like the result of a difficult and long-term journey. Readers can find only her mythological story about Greek heroes Atlas and Hercules, set in the 21st century in the title called Weight (1995), in Slovak translation1. However, a winner of The Whitbread Book Award for her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1984), the Prix D’Argent, of the Cannes Film Festival for the script of this novel, and many others, Winterson offers many more books, and simultaneously addresses a wider range of topics than 62 apparently realized in Slovakia. Born in Manchester, Winterson was adopted by orthodox Pentecostal Christian parents. As she claims on her website, she was not meant to be clever, and reading literature for a girl from a working class was dangerous. Later on, after she fell in love with a girl at the age of sixteen, her exodus from her home became only a matter of time. She then worked in different places, including a lunatic asylum and a theatre, while studying English at Oxford University. Deeply affected by the Bible, which was one of the six Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 books in her house, and the only one she was allowed to read, Oranges, her first-fruit, has become a great success. What makes Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit interesting is Winterson’s concept of writing. Here she clearly reviews her life journey from childhood to maturity, while exploring nuances of her sexuality in contrast to Christian surroundings. What is more, through writing, her “ongoing interest in the very nature of storytelling and Reconsidering the Past its centrality to the way we all struggle to make sense of our lives” (Rennison, 2005, p. 187) develops and becomes much more visible in her subsequent novels. Not only the storytelling, but history, family life, love, desire, the future, and boundaries are discussed in her later works such as The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body (1992), Gut Symmetries (1997), The Powerbook (2000), and others. In British literature of the last few decades, authors such as Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and many others are inclined to use historical background as a framework for their writing. In fact, the preoccupation with this topic can be traced back into 1970s. However, Philip Tew (2007, p. 125) writes about “crisis of the genre” when he observes that: Without any doubt, literary works raise a question of great importance by reconstructing, reorganizing and more often than not parodying historic events and characters. Hence it must be taken into consideration that factuality is not at all the primary aim of such fiction writings. What one might recognize as important is, on the contrary, subjectivity and playfulness, opening discussions of the texts to innumerable interpretations. What is more, strategies such as repetition, parallelism, allusion and others, disrupt a narrative’s continuity, causing that one element involved in the text invokes and rejects at the same time. It generally means that writers present the narratives in such a way that one does not know whether to take advantage of, and interpret, historical facts mentioned in the books which may or may not be based on truth or facts. Conversely, fantastic elements in the texts normally make up the atmosphere, and their explanation is far more […] the historical past [is] interfused both with the present, and with the imaginary and supernatural modes of interpreting reality. This kind of reworking of long-established modes of narration, in order to synthesize apparently irreconcilable qualities within the imagery, marks out one major strand of contemporary novels that transform history, parable and myth into something contemporaneous. (ibid.) 63 ARS AETERNA elusive. In addition, modes of writing vary from realism through magical realism to fairy tales. Such modes at their best part can be seen, for example, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses. Interestingly, in Midnight’s Children he intentionally rechanges some historical facts to confuse the reader. As a result, opening scene reassures the reader that perplexity of Saleem, the main character, is quite frequent in the novel: “I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do” (2006, p. 3). In A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, Julian Barnes questions the process of history making: “History isn’t what happened. The Passion History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another.” (Barnes, 1989, p. 242) In discussing storytelling, one must mention Graham Swift’s Waterland in which the author speculates about connection between past and future in the depiction of the world history, particularly as they influence family history and vice versa. On the whole, it is a (wo)man affected by the historical shifts and it is his/her life being re-told and re-shaped as it is observed in The Passion, too. Jeanette Winterson’s novel, The Passion, comprises four parts. The first part “Emperor” is the narrative of Henri, a twenty- year old servant in Napoleon’s service living in France. Henri is a close observer of Napoleon’s character and his biggest admirer. The next part “The Queen of Spades” follows Villanelle’s footsteps in Venice, the city of mazes. Born with the webbed feet, a daughter of a boatman, Villanelle has supernatural power, for instance, she can walk on water or live without a heart. More than her webbed feet highlight her masculine tendencies: she is passionate about cross-dressing and gambling in a casino where she works. Here she meets a redheaded woman who becomes her lover. After her heart is stolen, Villanelle’s only goal is to get it back. She finds the heart in the following part, “The Zero Winter”. In Russia she meets Henri and tells him that she has married a man who sold her as a prostitute to Russian soldiers. They together wander, pretending to be Polish, back to her home in Venice. She then sends Henri to steal her beating heart back from the woman who keeps it in a jar. Henri from the very first minute of their meeting falls in love with her and, Villanelle, because of the sympathy she feels for him, does not resist his rather feminine affection. In the last part, “The Rock”, however, Henri is accused of killing Villanelle’s husband and is put in a madhouse which leads to his fatal end. The Passion is regarded as one of Winterson’s best novels. The book was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of fiction in 1987. Her novel has been categorized many ways, such as, “a quixotic blend of historical fantasy and magical realism” (Bradford, 64 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 2007, p. 121), “superficially a historical novel” (Rennison, 2005, p. 187), “a new ‘grotesque’ form” (Meyer Middleton, 2003, p. 213), and “historiographic metafiction”2 (ibid., p. 214). Without rejecting the previous characterizations, a grotesque, a common description of fairy tales, might be acceptable, too. It has already been mentioned that authors use storytelling as a specific device in postmodern books. This device is used in The Passion, too, when different characters echo phrase: “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.” (Winterson, 2004, HENRI VILLANELLE feminine static masculine dynamic p. 5)3 Obviously, the purpose of this recurrent expression is to highlight magical elements in the work, because it occurs right after a story which is very unlikely to have happened. As one may learn from the characters of Henri and Villanelle, Winterson organizes her work on a contrastive basis. Thus, it is necessary to compare the most distinctive traits of the two characters to prove that the author’s aim lies in the subversion of the gender roles. fixed sensitive weak loose sensible strong As it is seen from the image above, Henri does not fulfil generally approved gender expectations. His weak body construction foreshadows his forthcoming failure: I wanted to be a drummer. The recruiting officer gave me a walnut and asked if I could crack it between finger and thumb. I could not […] The cook sized up my skinny frame and reckoned I was not a cleaver man […] He said I was lucky, that I would be working for Bonaparte himself, and for one brief, bright moment I imagined a training as a pastry cook building delicate towers of sugar and cream. (P 5) By the same token, Villanelle is not able to realize her female nature because of her inability to settle down. However, one must not understand this concept as a schematic one, because Winterson’s portrayals are not black and white. In fact, Henri in his uncontrolled, passionate way kills the cook, Villanelle’s husband, and cuts out his heart; Villanelle is shocked at such brutality and starts to cry. But in the end, it is she who leads him home: “I raised my head fully, my knees still drawn up, and saw Villanelle, her back towards me, a rope over her shoulder, walking on the canal and dragging our boats.” (P 129) 65 ARS AETERNA It is passion which initiates the routes taken by Napolen, Henri and Villanelle. At the same time, it is passion which changes history in the form of re-telling, re-writing, and re-reading the stories of lives. By writing a diary Henri recollects his memories from the historical point of view, and a reader can get to the previous life of a young boy raised by a religious family. Having no other relatives, Henri feels happy inventing his past in his imagination: “Everyone else in the village had strings of relations to pick fights with and know about. I made up stories about mine. They were whatever I wanted them to be depending on my mood.” (P 11) Winterson makes us aware that Henri’s story is not a trustworthy one, therefore longing for a totalizing genre of a historical novel would be problematic and misleading. Despite the fact that some historical facts are unquestionably visible, such as Napoleon and Joséphine, one must not forget that the postmodern mode of writing sets different goals than factual description. Hence, looking at this novel as a fiction seems to be the most suitable option. In addition, Henri’s narrative from the very beginning of the novel reflects his naivety, as when he contemplates the nature of belief after calling for the signs from God, without any response. “I can’t be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers [mother’s] I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I’m not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.” (P 9-10) Furthermore, Henri’s feminine attitude affects his notion of the future. The act of writing a diary makes it possible for him to reconstruct the past, and history as well. It must therefore be recognized that Henri is predetermined to be weak and sensitive, focusing on his feelings and dreams. What is more, Winterson uses irony to mock his limited knowledge: “I learned the word ‘intellectual’ which I would like to apply to myself.” (P 9) Yet, Holmes admits that his notebook could “offer an ontological reference and validity.” (qtd. in Tew, 2007, p. 127) In contrast, Villanelle is a very strong woman with a steady character, always acting courageously. One can observe that in Villanelle, Winterson created a woman without any weak parts, except her passion. Still, one may argue that her sense of passion is somehow controlled. This is seen at the end of the story when she leaves the woman she longed for before, the one who I wanted to be a drummer. The recruiting officer gave me a walnut and asked if I could crack it between finger and thumb. I could not […] The cook sized up my skinny frame and reckoned I was not a cleaver man […] He said I was lucky, that I would be working for Bonaparte himself, and for one brief, bright moment I imagined a training as a pastry cook building delicate towers of sugar and cream. (P 5) 66 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 stole and kept her heart. She comes to a conclusion that this relationship would set strict boundaries and thus suffocate her: “I have had affairs. I will have more, but passion is for the single-minded.” (P 145) Abandoning her house and going in search of other ways of life not only speaks to her dynamic and unsettled nature, but it clearly points to her as the true heroine of this novel. On this basis it may be inferred that what one is able to witness is Winterson’s ongoing contrastive approach in the depiction of Henri and Villanelle. If one still persists that this is a fairy tale, it should be noted that such an upside down story could be invented only in a postmodern world, where men become women and women become men. Still, it is probable that Winterson is here inspired by Angela Carter’s specific approach in re-creating traditional fairy tales.4 One of the characteristics showing quite precisely Winterson’s intensions in differentiating the characters is their capacity to think about the shape of snowflakes. As Henri expresses his thinking, “They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?” (P 42-43) The evidence seems to indicate that Henri continually re-questions the wonders of life, and consequently feels deeply affected by them. One wonders, is it his naivety which looks for answers or is it something disordered in his mind? On the other hand, Henri’s questions might be perceived as characteristically mythic: “Myth lives entirely by the presence of its object – by the intensity with which it seizes and takes possession of consciousness in a specific moment. Myth lacks any means of extending the moment beyond itself, of looking ahead of it or behind it, of relating it as a particular to the elements as a whole.” (Cassirer, qtd. in Tew, 2007, p. 128) Nevertheless, Villanelle seems to be much more at ease when speaking about snowflakes: “She […] said the Russians could hide under the snowflakes. Then she said, ‘They’re all different.’ ‘What?’ ‘Snowflakes. Think of that.’ I did think of that and I fell in love with her.” (P 87-88) “The Zero Winter” part of the book indicates a shift in Henri’s awareness when he resolutely decides to abandon Napoleon’s footsteps for good. “I don’t want to worship him any more. I want to make my own mistakes. I want to die in my own time.” (P 86) What does he mean by ‘his own time’? It may be inferred that Henri refers to the time not connected with Napoleon. In other words, he totally resists being a part of Napoleon by his willingness to create a history of his own. To be quite exact, Henri loses his faith and his passion because Napoleon’s power decreases, and he sees the effects of the war in Russia, too. As Meyer Middleton reports, “here the Napoleonic Wars initially direct the narrative.” (2003, p. 213) As Henri suggests, “You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.” (P 43) Hence, by playing and trying he is still motivated to find someone different to admire. At the end one can see Henri’s longing for a fixed life when he does not want 67 ARS AETERNA to go with Villanelle and to abandon his room on the rock, his plants, his garden, and his thoughts. Henri becomes more contemplative and philosophical, thinking about his love to Villanelle in the madhouse. Now it is Villanelle who is put on the pedestal. However, she refuses to become his wife, and thus Henri redirects his passion toward himself in the end. He chooses a life on the one hand of re-reading his notebook, repeatedly deconstructing his past, on the other hand, he continues writing, “so that I will always have something to read.” (P 159) On this basis it may be observed that Henri is not given the potential to see the world clearly. After all, he was not created to be a hero in this story. His function is to collect material for writing (hi)story, to create something which is his only, and, finally, to have a right to invent his own passion. Nonetheless, this passion predestines his failure and he becomes enclosed in his own world. Susana Onega in her monograph on Jeanette Winterson cites Carl G. Jung’s treatment of schizophrenics to argue that Henri might not be insane in the ordinary way. She is convinced that “Henri is not a madman but a ‘mythmaker’” (2006, p. 75). All in all, the resolution seems to indicate that while Villanelle is free of her passion, Henry follows the fate of his emperor Napoleon Bonaparte – and becomes lost, forgotten and figuratively buried in the land of his own mind, on the rock. A common phenomenon in British fiction in the last few decades has become the use of history and its shaping power. Many significant writers such as Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift and others write in their works about historical changes, effects of past on future, and they highlight the act of re-writing, re-telling, and re-reading when constructing their own books of (hi)stories. Although the historical background in their novels is crucial, it is the wo(man) who affects the cycle of life and at the same time is affected by the never-ending flow of life. Jeanette Winterson in her novel The Passion incorporates history, fantasy and myth creating in a multilayered fiction about Henri and Villanelle during Napoleonic Wars. By subverting gender roles, the feminine and the masculine specifics are markedly “I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making. Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself. My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.” (P 157-158) Conclusion 68 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 altered. Henri’s fixed attitudes toward the future as well as his sensitive and naive nature predestine his failure. His lack of strength to cope with reality is contrasted with the great willingness to love and be loved. Nevertheless, the target of his emotional longing, Villanelle, is not possible to attain. Villanelle, being a strong woman, refuses to hold on to steady passion by reconsidering her faithfulness, and therefore sets out on another journey, somewhere in the unknown world. Endnotes: The book was entitled Ťarcha and published by Slovart in 2005. For an explanation of the term “historiographic metafiction” see Hutcheon, L., 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge. 3 All subsequent references in the text are to this edition of the novel. 4 Angela Carter published The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories in 1979, a collection of stories based upon fairy tales and folk tales. 1 2 Works cited: » Barnes, J., 1989. A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. London: Vintage. » Bradford, R., 2007. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. » Meyer Middleton, K. Jeanette Winterson’s Evolving Subject: ‘Difficulty into Dream’. In: Lane, R., Mengham, R., Tew, P.. (eds.), 2003. Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 210-225. » Onega, S., 2006. Jeanette Winterson (Contemporary British Novelists). Manchester: Manchester University Press. » Rennison, N., 2005. Contemporary British Novelists. Oxford: Routledge. » Rushdie, S. 2006. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage. » Tew, P., 2007. The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum. » Winterson, J., 2004. The Passion. London: Vintage. Diana Židová Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky Filozofická fakulta UKF v Nitre email: diana.zidova@ukf.sk 69 ARS AETERNA Samsárická existencia – konečná večnosť Miroslava Obuchová Miroslava Obuchová, PhD. studied Slovak Language and Literature and Ethics at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. She finished her PhD study in 2010; the topic of her thesis was Theravada Buddhism. Miroslava Obuchová is currently working at the Department of General and Applied Ethics at the Faculty of Arts (CPU in Nitra). Her lectures and professional interests focus on the basics of Buddhism, ethics in intercultural dialogue and tolerance as an ethical issue. Abstract: The paper focuses on the reception of existence through the lens of the Buddhist thought concept, its awareness and knowledge, and understanding of its problematic character, which determines and also establishes the final phase of the Eightfold Path leading to the end of suffering. The term suffering is one of the key notions in Buddhism, as it is – together with finiteness and non-disposal of its essence “I“ – the main attribute of the Path which may be observed in everyday empirism based on true observation. A brief explanation of other relevant terms cannnot be ignored either, including those of kamma, samsara and nibbana. Focusing on them we will try to prove or disprove the hypothesis that Buddhism leads to indolence and passivity due to its first noble truth (life is suffering). Podľa buddhizmu je existencia charakterizovaná tromi elementárnymi vlastnosťami – je pominuteľná (aniččá), neuspokojivá, t. j. plná utrpenia (dukkha) a bez ‚ja‘, bez svojej vlastnej podstaty (anattá), čiže „telesnosť je pominuteľná, cítenie je pominuteľné, vnímanie je pominuteľné, mentálne formácie sú pominuteľné, vedomie je pominuteľné. A to, čo je pominuteľné, je podrobené utrpeniu. O tom, čo je pominuteľné a je podrobené utrpeniu zmien, o tom nemôže vo vzťahu ku skutočnosti nik povedať: ‚Toto som ja, toto patrí mne, toto je moje ja‘“ 70 (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 25). Tento prístup sa dotýka piatich skupín javov, nech sú akékoľvek, teda na všetkých úrovniach času, bez ohľadu na akúsi kultiváciu, vlastné či cudzie. V intenciách buddhizmu je existencia, resp. jej elementárna a dominantná vlastnosť – utrpenie – kombináciou piatich javov – tzv. khandhá. Tento pojem je preto pre buddhizmus jedným z kľúčových. Prostredníctvom neho totiž dochádza k selekcii, diferenciácii jednotlivých fyzických a psychických javov, z ktorých je zložený nielen svet ako taký a tiež akýsi vesmír našej Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 osobnej skúsenosti, ale aj ten-ktorý jednotlivec, vďaka čomu potom možno lepšie porozumieť samotnej samsáre a príčinám jej ‚rozvinutia‘. Sú to totiž práve ony, o. i. na podklade ktorých sa ako konzekvencia minulých žiadostivostí a lipnutí rodí vždy aktuálna existencia. Prostredníctvom nich sa zase udržiavajú momentálne túžby, pridŕžania sa na svojom zdanlivo individuálnom živote. Tým sa formuje zárodok ďalšej inkarnácie, pretože prítomnosť týchto javov kumuluje k sebe vždy ďalšie a ďalšie hmoty, materiály, čím eskaluje i vôľa k životu1. Medzi javy, ktoré sú človekom reflektované ako jeho individuálne, osobné ‚ja‘, čo je však podľa buddhizmu iba nesprávne nazeranie na realitu práve cez jej zastieranie kvôli lipnutiu na týchto skupinách povrchných a klamlivých zložiek, patria telesnosť, cítenie, vnímanie, vedomie a mentálne formácie. Pod skupinu telesnosti (fyzické a fyziologické javy, procesy) patria štyri elementy, vo všeobecnosti známe ako živly, t. j. oheň, voda, zem a vzduch, o ktorých sa však v tejto súvislosti hovorí ako o prvkoch pevnosti, tekutosti, tepla a pohybu. Sú buď interným (vnútorne prežíva-ným), alebo externým elementom, a prostredníctvom kammy sú prítomné, hoci nie v identickom pomere, v čomkoľvek hmotnom – ako v osobnej telesnosti, tak vo vesmírnej matérii, v organickej aj anorganickej hmote so všetkými jej procesmi či stavmi. Prvkom pevnosti sú napr. vlasy, nechty, zuby, koža, mäso, šľachy, kosti, mozog, srdce, pľúca, žalúdok a i. Prvkom tekutosti je v tele prítomná tekutina, ako napr. krv, žlč, hnis, pot, tuk, slzy, sliny, hlieny, moč a pod. Akýkoľvek kammou nadobudnutý zahrievajúci, vysušujúci alebo spaľujúci oheň v tele je prvkom tepla a prvkami pohybu sú všetky nahor a nadol stúpajúce či klesajúce vetry, nádych a výdych, a tiež pohyby ovplyvňujúce údy atď. (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 20–21). V buddhizme sa rozlišujú tri druhy cítenia, a to cítenie príjemného, nepríjemného a ani príjemného, ani nepríjemného. V súvislosti s vnímaním sa artikuluje šesť útvarov – vnímanie tvaru, pachu, chute, zvuku, hmatu a predmetu mysle. Na úrovni vedomia (vedomie so všetkými jeho úrovňami, tzn. vedomie samotné, podvedomie, poznávanie, intelekt, rozum, duchovný intuitívny vhľad alebo vnor, nadsvetské stavy vnímania, cez stav oslobodzujúcej iluminácie a bezsmrtný stav, až po stav nibbány) sa rozlišuje šesť jeho typov, konkrétne – vedomie tvaru, pachu, chute, zvuku, telesného vnemu a tzv. vedomie mysle, čo znamená uvedomovanie si konkrétnych zmyslov (NYANASATTA THERA, 1992, s. 46). Mentálnymi formáciami (charakter utvárajúce mentálne a emočné formácie) sú myslené všetky zložené, príp. podmienené činnosti mysle2, ktoré sú (spolu s vnímaním a cítením) inherentné v každom jednom okamihu činnosti vedomia. Najviac relevantné sú tri z nich – zámer (četaná), zmyslový kontakt (phassa) a pozornosť (manasikára), pričom je to práve zámer (tzn. upriamenosť na jednotlivé zmysly, vrátane predmetu mysle), ktorý je akýmsi spúšťačom či faktorom utvárania, a tým pádom udržiavateľom v samsáre. 71 ARS AETERNA Samsára býva zvyčajne prekladaná, či dokonca reflektovaná ako kolo existencie, kolobeh znovuzrodení, čo sú však synonymá, ktoré možno za plnohodnotné rozumieť iba v rámci istých obmedzení3. Všeobecne možno konštatovať, že samsára je, na rôznych stupňoch, resp. úrovniach existencie považovaná za proces strasti, nestálosti, za cyklus, reťazec neustáleho opakovania inkarnácií, tzn. opätovných bytí, prejavujúcich sa na poli strastiplného života, čiže na akejsi osi zrodenie–starnutie–smrť, klamlivosť a nepokoj, pričom vo všetkých týchto kvázi komponentoch existencie je inherentný neodmysliteľný prvok utrpenia. Toto však nie je dôkazom toho, že by bola samsára v konečnom dôsledku bezcieľna, ale v rámci jej pochopenia vyvstáva tiež problematika samotnej existencie, ďalej kauzality a inkarnácie. Odpútanie sa od tzv. tvoriacej hmoty, ktorá je udržiavateľom v samsáre, od vôle k životu, nie je jeho zavrhnutím alebo útekom pred ním. Zriecť sa sveta znamená netúžiť po uspokojovaní svojich zmyslových túžob a lipnutiach, a teda upriamovať pozornosť skôr na duchovnú tvorivosť, na cestu poznania. Na nej je dôležité uvedomenie, že ani jeden z prvkov nie je skutočným ‚ja‘, nepatrí jedincovi, vždy je iba tou-ktorou skupinou a tým-ktorým prvkom, tzn. pevnosti, tekutosti, tepla a pohybu, a to, čo býva označované ako individualita, je v skutočnosti iba nepretržite sa opakujúcim procesom rôznych psychologických a fyziologických, pominuteľných a v konečnom dôsledku tiež neuspokojivých, neuspokojujúcich javov. Samotný jedinec teda nie je 72 tým, čo označuje ako svoju telesnosť, vedomie, vnímanie, cítenie či mentálne formácie. Jedným z kľúčových cieľov je preto na základe pochopenia náuky o ‚nie-ja‘ eliminácia žiadostivosti, ktorej vyvrcholením bude potlačenie spomínanej vôle k životu, túžby po ňom. Tým ustane proces závislého vznikania, prejavujúceho sa na poli nevedomosti4. Na jej podklade sa totiž rodí nielen sankhárá v zmysle piatich skupín javov, ale aj ich ‚produktov‘, výtvorov, akými sú napr. predstavy o svete. Rovnako to platí pri utrpení, tzn. ak sú sankháry predispozíciou k utrpeniu, ich odstránením možno utrpenie eliminovať. Sankháry sú o. i. nielen tým, čo spôsobuje ďalšiu existenciu, ale sú konzekvenciou činnosti (opäť prejav závislého vznikania). Snahou je preto odstrániť všetky sankháry a ich orientácie, čiže negovať sankháry ako také. Ak má byť totiž definitívnym cieľom nibbána, potom nemožno odstraňovať iba zameranosť sankhár na negatívne a príklon k dobru, ale usilovať sa neutiekať ani k pozitívnemu. Aj to totiž na jednej strane podlieha nestálosti, a teda nie je vylúčená zmena k prežívaniu negatívneho vnímania, na strane druhej je ale negatívnym hneď od počiatku, pretože to, čo zdanlivo, primárne reflektujeme ako svoje pozitívne vnímanie, v skutočnosti v nás taktiež (či už v zmysle obavy, strachu atď.) evokuje pocity ťaživé, strastné. V súvislosti so samsárou a primárnymi inkarnáciami do jednotlivých ríš existencie vyvstáva elementárna otázka po počiatku5, resp. metafyzických súvislostiach ako takých. Je fakt, že podľa Pálijského kánona a iných textov, ktoré Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 možno považovať za jedny z primárnych v rámci buddhizmu, Gautama toto odmietal reflektovať s odôvodnením, že ide o udržiavanie sa alebo chytanie sa do sietí klamlivých, bludných názorov, špekulatívnych myšlienok, zbytočných či neužitočných otázok, tzn. takých, ktoré sú jedným z negatívnych komponentov pri dosahovaní nibbány, keďže aj tak nie je možnosť ich definitívneho overenia a konečného, nepopierateľného záveru6. Nevidel osoh v usilovaní sa o upanišádové splývanie attá s brahma (okrem toho, v konečnom dôsledku sa s týmto názorom ani nie celkom identifikoval), v úvahách nad otázkami života a smrti, impulzom k vzniku sveta atď. Napriek tomu, explanácia pojmu ‚ja‘7, minimálne pokus o ňu, je namieste, pretože v nemalej miere zasahuje ako do pochopenia kammy, tak i seba samého. Ako už bolo naznačené, ‚ja‘ v intenciách buddhizmu je ponímané nie celkom identicky k upanišádovému výkladu brahmaattá8. Človek v sebe (pod vrstvou povrchového ‚ja‘, tzn. v našom ponímaní ega) nemá akési skutočné ‚ja‘, attá, o ktorom by sme mohli uvažovať ako o samostatnej a nesmrteľnej entite alebo duši, ktorá je tým elementom, ktorý zostáva aj po zániku tela a ktorá sa uchováva v podobe ďalších inkarnácií a v nových telách. Pod nánosom týchto zložiek nie je v skutočnosti nič, čo by bolo možné považovať za pravú podstatu človeka. Typickým príkladom používaným aj Minaříkom je analógia s vozom alebo domom. Voz tvoria kolesá, oje; dom je zložený z trámov, brvien, strechy atď., kde je však voz alebo dom sám o sebe? (DAVID- NEELOVÁ – MINAŘÍK, 1993, s. 73)‚ Ja‘ je teda podľa buddhizmu iba iluzórna predstava, existenciu ktorej možno pripodobniť k etikete. Čiže tak, ako etiketa je/nie je tým produktom, ktorý označuje, tak ‚ja‘ je/nie je osobou, dušou. Attá nie je odolné voči akýmkoľvek zmenám, rovnako ako nie je večné a zbavené utrpenia. Argumentácia, ktorá sa v súvislosti s dokazovaním objavuje, je založená na prístupe logiky, čo je ďalším dôkazom toho, že Gautama reálne mohol odmietať špekulácie a že jeho reflexia sveta je vystavaná najmä na poznávaní skutočnosti a nie viere, fideizme. Konkrétne – „ak je J predpokladaným ‚ja‘ a T definíciou tohto ‚ja‘ ako niečoho trvalého, blaženého a nepodrobeného vôbec žiadnej zmene, a dosadíme S k označeniu ‚stredného termínu‘, piatich skupín skúsenosti, zo sylogistického vzorca potom vyplýva, že ak je ‚ja‘ trvalé, blažené a nepodrobené vôbec žiadnej zmene, ale päť skupín uchopovania je nevečných, neuspokojivých a podrobených zmenám, tak päť skupín nie je ‚ja‘, resp. je ‚nie-ja‘“ (NYANASATTA THERA, 1992, s. 51). Znamená to teda, že tak, ako je chybný predpoklad, že ‚ja‘ je piatimi skupinami, tak je mylný i ten, ktorý ‚ja‘ považuje za čosi transcendentné a stojace nad nimi. Hoci buddhistická koncepcia taktiež rešpektuje pôvodný starý dualizmus, v dôsledku ktorého vyčleňuje attá z pominuteľného tela, tzn. prisudzuje mu atribút nesmrteľnosti a nemennosti, na rozdiel od Upanišád ho nepovažuje za prvok usilujúci sa o splynutie s brahma, čiže so ‚všehomírom‘, ale za niečo, čo stojí ako mimo tela, tak aj mimo sveta. Dôkazom tohto pos73 ARS AETERNA tavenia mimo svet je, že hoci je nemennou ideou duševného žitia, pravou podstatou, človeku práve pre procesy ustavičných zmien nie je dopriate prežívať pokoj. Optimálnym sa v tejto veci zdá byť postoj považujúci problematiku attá – anattá za zbytočnú, zbytočne udržiavajúcu človeka v spleti neistoty a skepsy, v dôsledku ktorých sa potom spomaľuje jeho aktivita na poli dhammy a na osemdielnej ceste, čo by tiež mohol byť moment uvedomenia si nezmyselnosti lipnutia na sebe samom a na odklone od egoizmu smerom k ontológii celku. Gautama sa (a ani od členov svojej sanghy to nevyžadoval, práve naopak) na rozdiel od upanišádových mysliteľov primárne nekoncentroval na reflexie, autoreflexie či kontemplácie o identifikácii attá, tzn. individuálnej duše s dušou tzv. ‚všehomíru‘. Zaoberal sa najmä človekom, jeho vyslobodzovaním sa zo samsáry, pričom o každom z jej členov je pritom dokázateľné, že je pominuteľný a podliehajúci utrpeniu. Napr. telo je ,nie-ja‘. Ak by totiž telo bolo ‚ja‘, neviedlo by k trápeniu a bolo by možné ovládať ho podľa svojho želania9. A tak, ako je pominuteľné všetko to, čo spadá pod atribút telesnosti, nevečným je taktiež všetka skutočnosť, pretože ak by neexistovala možnosť jej definitívnej konečnosti, stratilo by na relevancii viacmenej celé buddhistické učenie, predovšetkým jeho tretia a štvrtá ušľachtilá pravda (utrpenie možno odstrániť; k odstráneniu utrpenia vedie osemdielna cesta). Buddhizmus reflektuje ‚ja‘ výlučne ako proces, ako spleť mentálnych funkcií10, ktorých povaha je v podstate neosobná, prázdna, aj keď 74 človek to tak v dôsledku svojej nevedomosti a lipnutia na predstave, na (iluzórnej) idei čohosi vlastného, intímneho nevníma. Avšak i napriek tomu – mimo týchto momentov mysle samostatná entita ‚ja‘ neexistuje11. Čiže náuka anattá predstavuje tvrdenie, podľa ktorého je bytie jednotlivca a bytie sveta vnímané ako proces neustále sa meniacich javov, a nič, ani dohromady, ani osobitne netvorí žiadnu entitu ‚ja‘/ega, resp. dušu, podstatu či vlastníka. Je to len neosobná a neuzavretá jednotka12. Tak, ako je iba procesom neustálych zmien a bez akejkoľvek podstaty alebo nekončiaceho, nezanikajúceho ‚ja‘ bytie sveta (zdá sa, že jediným oporným pilierom je prítomnosť ontologicky daného utrpenia), tak je i bytie človeka iba procesom neustále sa meniacich javov, zárukou čoho je jeho kammický potenciál. Ak dôjde k jeho vyčerpaniu, nastane ukončenie týchto procesov, a tým pádom dôjde k oslobodeniu človeka z reťazca samsáry. Pojem prázdnoty je potom v buddhizme jedným z kľúčových13. Na ilustráciu vnímania nepodstaty, prázdnoty býva uvádzaný príklad s Gangou, tzn. „dobre vidiaci človek hľadí na nespočetné bubliny, ktoré sú unášané prúdom Gangy, pozoruje ich a dôkladne skúma. Keď ich dôkladne preskúma, poznáva, že sa javia ako prázdne, duté a bez podstaty ako pena. Presne rovnakým spôsobom prevádza mních pozorovanie všetkých telesných javov, cítenia, vnímania, formácií a stavov vedomia, či už sú minulé, prítomné alebo budúce, vlastné alebo vonkajšie, hrubé alebo jemné, vznešené alebo nízke, vzdialené alebo nízke. Pozoruje ich a dôkladne Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 skúma, a keď ich dôkladne preskúma, poznáva, že sa javia ako prázdne, ničotné a bez akéhokoľvek ‚ja‘“ (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 26). Toto možno implementovať aj na oblasť pravého poznania – prečo človek, ktorý ho nadobudol, na ničom nelipne. Je to predovšetkým vďaka tomu, že či pozoruje niečo príjemné, nepríjemné alebo ani príjemné, ani nepríjemné, zakaždým si naplno uvedomuje fakt nestálosti, vďaka ktorému netúži, neutieka sa, nestrachuje sa, a tým plynule sleduje cestu k nibbáne. Avšak buddhizmus tieto úvahy o ‚ja‘ považuje za súčasť tzv. nemúdreho uvažovania (rovnako ako tomu bolo v prípade otázok z oblasti metafyziky a pod.). K rozhodnutiu sa pre zmenu vo svojom živote, k uvedomeniu si strastiplnosti existencie a života ako takého nie je nevyhnutne potrebné poznať odpovede na otázky typu – Som? Ak som, kto som? Čo som? Čím som bol? Budem po zániku svojho fyzického tela? Je ‚ja‘ mojím ‚ja‘, alebo nie je, a mnohé iné. Prirodzene, na istých miestach im značnú mieru relevancie, bezpochyby, priznať treba14, v konečnom dôsledku ale neexistuje žiadne ‚ja‘, ani nič, čo by tomuto ‚ja‘ patrilo alebo prináležalo. Jeho ilúzia sa však môže prejavovať rôzne. Či už v podobe bludného presvedčenia v dualitu, v rámci ktorej človek verí v nesmrteľnosť ‚ja‘ (vo forme duše) po zániku fyzického tela – tzv. eternalizmus, alebo ako viera v intenciách materializmu síce sa utiekajúca k nedualite, ale napriek tomu klamlivo nástojaca na tom, že ‚ja‘ je niečo vlastné, niečo, čo je hlavným usmerňovateľom a indikátorom ľudského života – tzv. anihilacionizmus (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 46). Napokon je dôležité vedieť, že táto ilúzia ‚ja‘ je spolu so zlovôľou, lipnutím a žiadostivosťou jedným z tých prvkov, ktoré sú vlastne kľúčovými udržiavateľmi v strastiplnej samsáre, v utrpení15. Pochopiť, že utrpenie je v živote ustavične prítomné, že sa mu v zásade nemôžeme vyhnúť, pretože prestupuje existenciu každej bytosti, hoci v rôznych podobách a tvaroch, je zároveň kľúčom k postupnému napĺňaniu zmyslu, ktorým je o. i. úsilie o harmonizáciu života napriek tejto skutočnosti. Prostriedkom, ako dôjsť k takémuto poznaniu, resp. ako sa s ním vysporiadať na úrovni optima, by malo byť čisté poznanie, ktoré je v buddhizme označované ako pravé, tzn. také, ktoré stojí na najvyššom stupni osemdielnej cesty a ktoré je mimo akúkoľvek temporalitu, priestor, prežívanie osobného šťastia alebo strasti, a tiež mimo individuálnu vôľu jednotlivca. Utrpenie je princípom sveta a Gautama sa k nemu stavia v intenciách tohto presvedčenia už pri formulovaní svojej prvej vznešenej pravdy, t. j. celý život je utrpenie16. Ani v dôsledku tohto zdanlivo pesimistického presvedčenia sa však Gautama neusiloval o jeho priamočiare negovanie, pretože len život vo svete vedie k naplneniu, resp. cieľu, tzn. iba životom v súlade s pravým poznaním a konaním, ktoré prestúpi každodennú existenciu, možno ukončiť samsáru. V prípade, že by sa človek dokonca rozhodol odísť z takéhoto života napr. prostredníctvom suicídia, odporovalo by to Gautamovej strednej ceste17. Utrpenie je teda skutočné, čo je 75 ARS AETERNA dokázateľné každodennou empíriou. Rovnako je tiež faktom, že aj udalosti a javy primárne sa javiace ako bez utrpenia a strasti, sú nimi v konečnom dôsledku presiaknuté a nemožno ich od reality utrpenia separovať18. Rovnako ako pri samsáre, ani pri dokazovaní utrpenia nemožno vyvodzovať závery iba s ohľadom na jeden konkrétny život. Dôležité tiež je nevzťahovať pojem utrpenia výlučne na fyzickú bolesť a na reminiscencie viažuce sa k nepríjemným zážitkom počas aktuálne prežívaného života, ale na všetko, čo mu podlieha a čo spôsobuje. Pod utrpením treba spoznávať i nemožnosť dosiahnuť trvalého uspokojenia, keďže všetko podlieha ustavičnej zmene, a tým pádom teda tiež, ako sme už hovorili inde, aj stavy šťastia sú vlastne zárodkom neskoršieho utrpenia alebo tzv. smädu po živote19. Kto je však meradlom utrpenia? Ak je ním samotný človek, resp. bytosti jednotlivých ríš existencie, potom sa vynára otázka, či azda nie je svet iba takým, akým ho človek vníma prostredníctvom svojich zmyslov, a či v momente eliminácie zmyslov, resp. piatich skupín javov zostane. Na jednom mieste sa dokonca doslova píše: „[...] Ako ďaleko siaha šesť oblastí dotykových, tak ďaleko siaha subjektívny svet, a ako ďaleko siaha subjektívny svet, tak ďaleko siaha šesť oblastí dotykových. Ak je šesť zmyslových oblastí odstránených úplne a bez stopy, je odstránený i subjektívny svet, subjektívny svet nie je“ (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 79-80). V tomto prípade je ale na mieste akcentovanie, že úryvok pojednáva výsostne o svete subjektívnom, čo v konečnom dôsledku 76 nehovorí nič o svete ako takom, o svete objektívnom. Toto stanovisko je totiž bližšie skôr Upanišádam, od ktorých sa buddhizmus v nejednom bode odklonil. Ak by tak tomu nebolo, znamenalo by to, že utrpenie je vlastne iba preludom, pričom jeho odstránením by zároveň došlo k vyslobodeniu sa zo sveta. Avšak buddhizmus reflektoval svet ako miesto s objektívne prítomným utrpením, tzn. dôležité bolo prostredníctvom pravého poznania a konania v intenciách osemdielnej cesty usilovať sa o dosiahnutie nibbány, čo znamenalo i zánik kammického potenciálu a následné pričinenie sa o ukončenie samsáry. V rámci pripustenia možnosti, že by okrem tohto nám známeho sveta predsa len existoval aj svet posmrtný, je oprávnené uvažovať nasledovne – konaním pozitívnych činov, ktoré sú vo vzťahu k mravnosti, múdrosti a meditácii žiaduce, zabezpečuje si vlastne človek svoju posmrtnú účasť v nebeskej sfére, resp. v nebi. Ak by ale bolo pravdivé buddhistické stanovisko, znamenalo by to, že po zániku tela (odhliadnuc teraz od kammického potenciálu, resp. energie, ktorá sa bude ďalej inkarnovať podľa svojich zásluh) síce nebude jestvovať žiadna duša vstupujúca do neba, avšak bytosť si zabezpečí minimálne (napriek všadeprítomnému utrpeniu) pokojný život už tu na zemi, tzn. život v intenciách pravého poznania a konania. Navzdory niektorým interpretáciám, ktoré na buddhizmus hľadia cez snahu neprežívať ani negatívne, ani pozitívne emócie, domnievame sa, že takéto tvrdenie nie je celkom oprávnené, a to minimálne s ohľadom na texty Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 v Dhammapadame: „Z milého sa rodí radosť, z milého sa rodí strasť, kto sa zbavil milého, nemá radosť, ani strach“ (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 79-80). Človek teda síce v konečnom dôsledku nemá lipnúť ani na pozitívnych konzekvenciách svojich činov, rozhodne sa im ale nemá brániť, ba dokonca do istej miery je prirodzené, že z nich prežíva radosť, pretože ich konanie je vlastne plnením si svojej povinnosti. Avšak na druhej strane nie je správne prežívať enormnú radosť z piatich skupín javov, keďže utiekanie sa k nim, lipnutie na nich je udržiavaním sa vo svete plnom utrpenia, a tým pádom by sa vlastne radoval zo strasti. Treba si teda udržiavať istú mieru odstupu, alebo inak povedané – zachovávať si stav nelipnutia, nežiadostivosti, stredu. Za zdroj žiadostivosti20 býva považované predovšetkým cítenie, avšak treba zdôrazniť, že nielen cítenie samo o sebe, ale cítenie spolu s nevedomosťou, čo je evidentné najmä pri uvážení toho, že i človek, ktorý dosiahol stav nibbány, môže mať pociťovanie. Vďaka svojmu dosiahnutému poznaniu už ale na ňom nelipne, tzn. správa sa v intenciách pravej mravnosti, a rovnako tiež nelipne a netúži po ďalších existenciách (v prípade, že by tá aktuálna bola príjemná). Túžba býva najčastejšie definovaná ako túžba po živote. Tá by mala byť odstránená v celej šírke, pretože inak by bol človek „ako strom, ktorý bol porazený, ale ktorého korene zostali neporušené, vždy rastie, a tak znova rastie i utrpenie, pokiaľ nebola túžba úplne zničená“ (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 123). Znamená to, že človek sám je vlastne príčinou seba samého, iba od neho samotného závisí, či sa bude naďalej inkarnovať do života plného strasti a utrpenia, alebo či dosiahnutie stav vyvanutia, nibbány. Na druhej strane, človek môže mylne identifikovať nibbánu so smrťou. V takom prípade sú potom jeho obavy pred ňou opodstatnené21. Znamená to totiž, že ak nedosiahol pravé poznanie (napokon, v dôsledku toho vlastne vedie taký život, aký vedie), môže mať, či už z viery v posledný súd alebo zo skutkovej odplaty, oprávnený strach. Napokon, žiadostivosť je vlastne aj pôvodcom samotného utrpenia, čo je stanovisko druhej ušľachtilej pravdy, či skôr odpoveďou na otázku, ktorá sa pri nej núka, a síce – čo spôsobuje vznik utrpenia22. Buddhizmus rozlišuje až tri typy žiadostivosti – zmyslovú žiadostivosť po uspokojovaní svojich najzákladnejších zmyslov, túžbu po rozkoši; žiadostivosť po existencii viažucu sa na túžbu po živote vo vyšších a pozitívnejších vrstvách existencie, kde fakt utrpenia nie je prítomný až tak explicitne, túžba po živote, v rámci ktorého by človeku bolo umožnené napĺňať danú túžbu, žiadostivosť; žiadostivosť po nebytí spájaná ani nie tak s nibbánou, ako skôr s materialistickou predstavou, že po smrti ‚ja‘ nie je už toto v žiadnom vzťahu s realitou, hoci človek nemá žiadnu istotu, že by to tak po smrti skutočne bolo. Predovšetkým primárna žiadostivosť pritom vzniká na poli zmyslovosti, tzn. na mieste, kde sa vedno s kammickým potenciálom objavuje pocit príjemného alebo nepríjemného. Tzn. tam, kde sa dáva priechod prejavom piatich skupín existencie, vzniká žiadostivosť a tým pádom utrpenie. Žiadostivosť sama o sebe pritom 77 ARS AETERNA nemusí byť vyslovene jedinou príčinou kammického potenciálu. V súvislosti so závislým vznikaním si ale treba i na tomto mieste uvedomovať, že toto sa viaže aj na žiadostivosť, a tým teda nemožno eliminovať predpoklad, že na jej základe vzniknú také negatívne javy, ako napr. závisť, hnev, zloba a mnohé iné. Tak, ako sme vyššie hovorili o závislom vznikaní vedomia, možno hovoriť aj o závislom vznikaní akýchkoľvek iných javov. Toto je dokonca nevyhnutným k lepšiemu pochopeniu samotného vzniku utrpenia, pretože práve ono je v konečnom dôsledku explanáciou druhej ušľachtilej pravdy. Závislé vznikanie všetkých javov býva ponímané nasledovne – „okom viditeľný tvar priťahuje, pokiaľ je tento tvar príjemný, a odpudzuje, ak sa tento tvar nepáči. Sluchom, čuchom, chuťou, hmatom a mysľou vnímané predmety priťahujú, pokiaľ sú príjemné, a odpudzujú, pokiaľ sa nepáčia. Takto prežíva ten, komu chýba všímavosť a chápajúce oslobodenie mysle, buď prijíma, alebo odmieta, či už prežíva akékoľvek cítenie [...] – príjemné alebo nepríjemné alebo neutrálne – je tým cítením via-zaný a lipne na ňom. Tým v ňom vzniká požívačnosť a žiadostivosť [...] po cítení. Kde je žiadostivosť po cítení, tam je lipnutie [...] a lipnutím je podmienený rast bytia [...]. Na tomto raste bytia závisle vzniká budúce zrodenie [...] A v závislosti na zrodení vzniká starnutie a smrť [...], strasť a nárek, bolesť, zármutok a zúfalstvo. Tak vzniká celá hromada utrpenia“ (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 31). Akcent na pociťovanie nie je 78 pritom náhodný. Práve pociťovanie sa azda najvýraznejšie uchováva v pamäti, vďaka čomu (v prípade pociťovania príjemného) evokuje, či skôr nabáda nielen k zachovávaniu si týchto ‚reminiscencií‘, ale sa tiež usiluje o ich obnovovanie vo forme ďalších analogických zakúšaní identických pocitov. Obdobné je to pri pocitoch nepríjemných a ani príjemných, ani nepríjemných, resp. neutrálnych, pretože v prípade takého pociťovania si ich taktiež minimálne pripomína, príp. uvedomuje, čo je nepopierateľná forma lipnutia a lipnutie je zase jednou z príčin udržiavania sa v samsáre. Túžba po existencii, resp. vôľa po živote nie je ale výsledkom samotného cítenia. Dôležitá je spojitosť cítenia a nevedomosti. Ak by tak tomu nebolo, potom by človek dosiahnuvší nibbánu ešte počas práve prebiehajúceho života nemohol disponovať žiadnymi citmi, čo nie je celkom pravda. Práve preto je potrebné zvážiť ambivalentný postoj, a síce – vďaka dosiahnutiu pravého poznania, ktoré je jedným z predpokladov vôbec, nie je ani mizantropom, ani na živote nelipne, a tak teda zabránil ďalším inkarnáciám. Cieľom by potom malo byť spočiatku azda vedomé dosahovanie a cizelovanie indolencie, ktorá sa prejavuje nielen vo forme nelipnutia na svojich zmysloch a konzekvenciách ich činnosti, ale tiež v eliminácii lipnu-tia na všetkom, čo je predmetom jeho aktuálneho a predchádzajúceho prežívania, resp. na akýkoľvek podnetoch. Negatívne konzekvencie kammy (či už v priebehu tej istej alebo neskoršej inkarnácie) nemožno ale reflektovať cez prizmu akejsi vyššej bytosti, ktorá Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 (ako je tomu napr. v prípade semitských náboženských systémov23) rozhoduje o ďalšom osude tej-ktorej bytosti, ale výsostne ‚životná energia‘, energia konkrétneho bytia (nie vyslovene konkrétneho indivídua, osoby). Človek by si mal byť teda plne vedomý toho, že jeho želania ohľadom uskutočňovania vlastných túžob budú sprevádzané strastnými okolnosťami. Tieto sa pritom prejavia kedykoľvek, keď k tomu dozrejú všetky, aj vonkajšie okolnosti, pretože prúdenie energie24 nie je závislé na fyzickom tele. Energia kammy prestupuje aj mimo telo, čo znamená, že na (ďalšie) smerovanie bytosti vplýva bez ohľadu na fyzickú smrť. Okrem toho (teda s výnimkou inkarnácií) tým máme na mysli tiež jej pôsobenie v rámci duševného sveta, pretože odhliadnuc od narodenia, ochorenia a smrti, azda všetky ostatné formy, prejavy strasti a utrpenia sa rodia nie na poli telesnosti, ale v rovine tzv. duševnej, resp. duchovnej. V intenciách tohto teda poníma svet ako celok, tzn. ako miesto s prestupujúcou sa skutkovou energiou plynúcou zo všetkých činov bez výnimky, čiže zostávajúcej i potom, ako samotný čin pominie. Ak je ale túžba negatívna, pretože vedie k cizelovaniu piatich skupín javov, a tým pádom k udržiavaniu v samsáre a v plynutí kammickej energie, ako je potom možné, že sa v buddhizme hovorí o túžbe po dosiahnutí nibbány? O túžbe po vyslobodení, po pravom poznaní? Buddhizmus sa v tejto súvislosti opiera jednak o pojmovú dezinterpretáciu, resp. o používanie prekladu tohto konkrétneho slova na rôzne ďalšie slová (čo nie je problém iba pri tomto pojme), ale tiež o skutočnosť, že existujú minimálne dva typy túžby – túžba, ktorej dôsledkom je napr. emočná závislosť, ale tiež taká túžba, ktorá nevedie k nesprávnemu názoru a lipnutiu. Znamená to teda, že buddhizmus nazerá za povrchný obal slov a robí diferenciu ako medzi jednotlivými homonymami, tak i v rámci translácie. Čo je vlastne príčinou utrpenia? Má vôbec pre život človeka nejaký hlbší a relevantnejší zmysel poznať odpoveď na túto otázku? Minimálne Upanišády mu prikladali zmysel, resp. príčinu, pričom takémuto prístupu sa v konečnom dôsledku nebránil ani Gautama, práve naopak. Ako sa ale vysporiadať so vzniknutou diskrepanciou, kedy sa na jednej strane o utrpení hovorí ako o ontologicky danom, avšak zároveň ako o fakte, ktorého príčinou je ľudská žiadostivosť a nevedomosť? Pojmu utrpenia sa v skutočnosti nezačal venovať práve Gautama, reálne sa totiž objavuje už v upanišádovom období, avšak až Gautama ho nevysvetľoval výlučne v intenciách univerzálnosti, ale od generalizácie utrpenia prešiel ďalej, a síce – zaoberal sa otázkou jeho pôvodu a odstránenia cez racionálnu analýzu. Nepochybne, jedným z variantov môže byť považovanie utrpenia za bezvýhradne spojené s princípom existencie, v dôsledku čoho by potom cieľom jeho odstránenia malo byť splývanie s hýbateľom, činiteľom, ktorý je mimo jeho dosahu, ktorého sa utrpenie nedotýka. Ak by tomu tak bolo, neexistovala by, zdá sa, možnosť, ako ho zlikvidovať zvnútra, keď je akýmsi všeobecným obalom okolo sveta a života v ňom25. Gautama rozpracoval 79 ARS AETERNA systém dvanásťčlenného reťazca26 vzťahujúci sa svojím zaradením skutkov na činy minulé, prítomné i budúce ku kammickému zákonu, avšak bez ohľadu na to, že by niektorým ďalším členom, príp. kategóriám prisudzoval väčšiu či menšiu mieru relevancie. Buddhizmus, v podstate identicky so súdobým indickým myslením, považuje tieto vlastne za rovnocenné. Treba mať ale na mysli, že to bol práve buddhizmus, kto do myslenia začal implementovať prvok racionality (viď napr. kauzálny zákon), a teda snahu o elimináciu mýtizovania a pod. Navyše, práve na dvanásťčlennom reťazci vidno i úsilie o reflexiu na všadeprítomný a nepretržitý princíp pohybu ako takého. Pohyb v buddhistickom ponímaní je reverzibilný, vďaka čomu vlastne Gautama deklaruje možnosť vymanenia sa zo samsáry a utrpenia. Na prvý pohľad sa síce môže zdať, že je to presne naopak, tzn. že práve reverzibilita pohybu udržiava človeka v kolobehu utrpenia, pretože človek sa prostredníctvom nej sústavne navracia k zdroju utrpenia akoby systémom priviazanosti k pružnému lanu, ktoré ho permanentne, napriek akejkoľvek osobnej sile, snahe a zainteresovanosti, mechanicky vťahuje naspäť k počiatku a bráni mu tým odpútať sa. V skutočnosti ale, ak uvážime buddhistické reflektovanie pohybu v intenciách spomínanej špirály, nie kruhu (kedy by azda reverzibilita skutočne mohla byť ponímaná viac negatívne), je potom reverzibilný pohyb tým dôležitým prvkom, vďaka ktorému sa človek (už s naakumulovanými skúsenosťami a poznatkami, a koniec80 koncov – i kammou) vracia k primárnej príčine svojho vzniku. Tú potom môže cez poznanie postupne eliminovať, rovnako ako nesystémovosť a živelnosť unášania sa v takomto pohybe. Ide teda o akýsi samopohyb neudaný primárnym hýbateľom, ale vznikajúci iba kvôli jeho nositeľovi, jeho nepravému poznaniu, a ktorý je potom (v závislosti od stupňa dosiahnutého poznania) buď v správnej, alebo nesprávnej rovine nositeľom ďalšieho vývoja prostredníctvom seba samého. Existencia (aj ľudská) je ale podľa Gautamu bez akéhokoľvek účelu, preto je teda cieľom jej trvalý zánik, tzn. aj s ohľadom na ďalšie inkarnácie, a to prostredníctvom vedomého, pravého snaženia sa. Môžeme si potom klásť otázku, čo má vlastne v takomto svete27, takto vnímanom živote zmysel, resp. čo v ňom je a čo nie je hodnotou. Pokiaľ vychádzame z hypotézy28, že svet je ‚riadený‘, usmerňovaný vplyvom autohybnej skutočnosti, potom možno naozaj skonštatovať, že sú si všetky veci v ňom rovné, že nič nie je meradlom hodnoty čohosi iného a že všetko má svoju hodnotu samo o sebe. Toto je spôsobené či vysvetliteľné vďaka tomu, že svet nevzniká zo samopohybu, ale že samopohyb vzniká z reality sveta. A keďže všetko si je rovné, potom, prirodzene, nemožno otázku existencie vzťahovať iba na ľudí, ale na všetko vo svete existujúce. Podľa Gautamu sa ale nerodíme do sveta, v ktorom by bolo apriórne dané, čo má hodnotu (a akú), a čo vôbec nie. Z toho teda vyplýva, že vlastne nič nemôže mať hodnotu samo o sebe, ale až na základe nejakého ukazovateľa, indikátora. Čo ním teda je? Ak je možné dať bytostiam Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 a veciam zmysel, potom je nevyhnutné pripustiť fakt, že na základe niečoho sa tak predsa musí diať. Buddhizmus, v podstate celkom logicky, argumentuje tým, že pokiaľ by boli ciele a zmysly vo svete apriórne dané niečím nad svet nadradeným, bytostiam tu žijúcim by sa ich nemohlo podariť dosiahnuť, pretože by disponovali iba tým, čo prináleží životu na zemi. Práve preto je podľa neho dôležité uvedomovať si možnosť stanovenia si svojho vlastného cieľa, pričom definitívnym by malo byť práve dosahovanie nibbány. Na tomto mieste sa ale potom stretávame s nemalým paradoxom, a síce – na jednej strane hlásanie ukončenia existencie ako najvyššieho zmyslu či cieľa života, a na strane druhej – akcentovanie aktívnej lásky. Primárne by sa mohlo zdať, že nejde až o také ambivalentné postoje k životu a otázke jeho zmyslu, avšak ak si tieto stanoviská rozpracujeme, dospejeme k nasledujúcemu: keďže neexistujú žiadne absolútne hodnoty, ktoré by boli hodnotami samy o sebe a každá existencia je orientovaná najmä na seba, potom je evidentná individualizácia. Človek necíti skutočne relevantný zmysel ani vo svojom vzťahu k iným, hoci najbližším ľuďom, môže prepadať apatii a pod., a azda jediným riešením mu pripadá práve vyhasnutie takejto existencie prostredníctvom nibbány. Nemôže ale vari človek nachádzať zmysel i v láske k iným ľuďom a svetu, nech je v ňom akokoľvek veľa utrpenia, a to napr. snahou o jeho elimináciu (neskorší ideál bódhisattu)? Sám Gautama predsa hlása potrebu všeobjímajúcej lásky. Údajne dokonca hovoril o konaní v láske a z lásky, o aktívnom a úprimnom29 konaní dobra ako o tom, čo dáva ľudskému životu zmysel, čo by zase nebol až taký paradox – veď konaním dobra, altruizmom môže vyplniť inak prázdnu a ničotnú existenciu a dať jej zmysel pri ceste za dosiahnutím vyvanutia. Tak či onak, je nepochybné, že Gautama, aspoň pokiaľ je známe, nedokázal racionálne odôvodniť akúsi diskrepanciu objavujúcu sa v jeho učení, a to rozpor medzi ním hlásanou existenciou, ktorej nepripisoval žiadnu hodnotu a význam, a zároveň aktívnou láskou, ktorú reflektoval ako relevantnú, ba priam záväznú hodnotu v živote každého človeka, bytosti. Vrátiac sa k utrpeniu, logicky vzaté, ak je pôvod utrpenia v žiadostivosti, potom je k jeho odstráneniu potrebné eliminovanie práve onej žiadostivosti, dosiahnutie vyhasnutia všetkých javov, na podklade ktorých sa rodí, teda prekonanie telesnosti, vnímania, mentálnych formácií, cítenia a vedomia, v dôsledku čoho napokon nastane ukončenie kammického procesu a zánik vo voľnosti30. Znamená to, že človek primárne prestane pripisovať relevanciu piatim skupinám javov, čiže tiež iluzórnej predstave o dôležitosti svojho ‚ja‘, a tým, že na nich a na dôsledkoch ich činnosti prestane lipnúť, odbúra zase žiadostivosť, ktorá je spolu s nevedomosťou jednoznačným zdrojom energie udržiavajúcim v procese samsáry. Podľa Gautamu tkvie vyslobodenie zo samsáry nie v upínaní sa k Bohu či silám mimo tohto sveta, ale jedine a výlučne vo svojej individuálnej činnosti, ktorej vyvrcholením, avšak do istej miery tiež prvopočiatkom, 81 ARS AETERNA je uvedomenie a následne aktivita vyplývajúca z negácie toho, čo bolo rozpracované v druhej ušľachtilej pravde. Ak spozná strasť a pozná, ako vzniká a ako zaniká, a pozná cestu vedúcu k zániku strasti, dosiahne správny náhľad, jeho náhľad je priamy. Čo je strasť, čo je vznik strasti, čo je zánik strasti a aká je cesta vedúca k zániku strasti? Zrodenie je strasť, staroba, choroba, smrť, zármutok, nárek, bolesť, skľúčenosť a zúfalstvo je strasť, keď človek nezíska, po čom túži […] krátko povedané – päť skupín lipnutia je strasť. A aký je vznik strasti? Je to onen smäd spôsobujúci opätovné bytie spojené s radosťou a vášňou a nachádzajúci potešenie hneď tu, hneď tam, teda túžba po rozkoši, túžba po bytí, túžba po nebytí – tomu sa hovorí vznik strasti. A aký je zánik strasti? Je to zánik tohto smädu bez akejkoľvek vášne, vzdanie sa jej, jej odvrhnutie, oslobodenie sa od nej, jej odstránenie – tomu sa hovorí zánik strasti. A aká je cesta vedúca k zániku strasti? Je to ušľachtilá osemdielna cesta (Zbavitel, 2008, s. 24). Znamená to preto, že ak je príčinou utrpenia nevedomosť, žiadostivosť, zmyslovosť, lipnutie, začať treba práve od ich eliminácie31. Výsledkom tejto aktivity potom bude (ak dôjde k vyprchaniu nahromadenej energie, žiadostivosti, a nevzídeniu novej) nibbána. I vzhľadom na kontext je pochopiteľné nazerať na nibbánu ako na najvyšší stav, ktorý možno dosiahnuť, ako na optimum a konečný cieľ osemdielnej cesty. Definovaná býva cez prizmu akéhosi najvyššieho mieru najčastejšie, a vzhľadom na sanskrt zrejme oprávnene správne32, ako vyvanutie, príp. vyhasnutie, a to piatich 82 javov, ich negatívnych konzekvencií, predovšetkým zármutku, strasti, zaslepenosti, nenávisti a žiadostivosti. Reálne si tento stav, jeho nositeľa možno predstaviť ako bytosť, ktorá sa už viac nezmieta na poli žiadostivosti, želaní, nenechá, aby ním lomcovali zmätočné pocity a vášne. Podľa nám dostupných prameňov sa zdá, že v théraváde sa v súvislosti s nibbánou hovorilo najmä ako o (subjektívnom33) stave dosiahnutom ešte pred zánikom fyzického tela, pričom sa tak údajne deje iba v kontexte mníšskeho života. Na jednej strane sa potom vlastne akcentuje iba tzv. riadny život mníchov, tzn. taký, ktorý prísne sleduje a rešpektuje to, čo je mníchom dané, na strane druhej býva zdôrazňovaný odchod do kvázi bezdomovectva, čiže život v striktnej askéze, aby bol takto mních pod väčšou ochranou pred podľahnutím žiadostivosti34. Vzhľadom na fakt, že rýdzi buddhizmus je možné praktizovať bez ohľadu na ne/príslušnosť k inštitucionalizovanej forme, nemožno potom s istotou negovať potencialitu nemnícha dosiahnuť nibbánu. Koniec-koncov, jedným z príkladov, poukazujúcich na to, že ani mníšsky život ešte nie je zárukou ukončenia samsáry, svedčí nasledujúci dialóg medzi ctihodným a kráľom: „‘Dosiahnu všetci ľudia konečné vyvanutie?‘ ‚Nie, všetci ľudia ho nedosiahnu. Len kto pripustí, čo má pripustiť, kto pochopí, čo treba pochopiť, kto sa vyvaruje toho, čoho sa treba vyvarovať, kto rozpozná, čo treba rozpoznať a kto uvedie v skutok to, čo treba vykonať, ten dosiahne konečné vyvanutie‘“ (ZBAVITEL, 2008, s. 208). Pálijský kánon podáva Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 predovšetkým výklad, resp. vyjadruje sa k nibbáne dosiahnutej ešte počas (aktuálne prežívaného, a zároveň teda posledného) života. K nibbáne ako posmrtnému stavu aspoň najstarší buddhizmus explicitné stanovisko vlastne nezaujal. Z rôznych iných alúzií však možno dedukovať, že posmrtnú nibbánu reflektoval ako stav blaženosti. Blaženosť by mala byť, vzhľadom na všetko to, o čom sme písali vyššie, ponímaná skôr ako negatívny aspekt, na tomto mieste treba ale akceptovať nuansu, ktorá sa pri pojme blaženosti (v súvislosti s nibbánou a najstarším buddhizmom) objavuje, a to – blaženosťou sa nemyslí strasti zbavený stav, stav prežívania výlučnej radosti a potešenia, pseudohedonizmus. Pokiaľ buddhizmus chce reagovať na otázky týkajúce sa posmrtného života, resp. stavu posmrtnej nibbány, potom sa mu to, zdá sa, nemôže podariť inak, ako pomocou ambivalencie k nestálej túžbe po živote35. Dalo by sa síce oponovať, že na túžbe po živote možno predsa bazírovať pevne, bez skepsy a zaváhaní, je to ale možné vtedy, keď sa človek musí potýkať s niečím negatívnym, strastným, kedy si kladie otázky po príčinách, pôvode, fatalite. Takéto uvažovanie je, minimálne podľa konštatácií niektorých autorov36, možné považovať za pendant voči buddhistickému agnosticizmu. Iste, na jednej strane treba priznať, že buddhizmus sa reálne odmietal venovať problematike, ktorá nie je evidentne dokázateľná („Ako nepoznáme cestu iskry zasiahnutej kladivom, ktorá, sotva sa objaví, pravidelne ihneď zmizne, tak nemožno poznať cestu ľudí úplne vyslobodených, ktorí unikajú záplave pút vášní a ktorí sa stali účastníkmi neochvejnej blaženosti“ (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 136), alebo príklad so šípom, o ktorom sme sa zmieňovali na inom mieste), ale na druhej strane, možno hovoriť o agnosticizme? Buddhizmus je síce racionálny, to ale v zásade nemusí znamenať, že akcentoval poznanie v akejkoľvek, i neemipirickej oblasti. Nibbána po smrti je podľa Pálijského kánona popretím života v akejkoľvek sfére, života ako takého, pretože tento je plný utrpenia. Nebude teda viac zrodzovania do žiadnej z ríš, pretože energia kammického zákona je vyčerpaná37. Nibbánu preto možno, ako to naformuloval už Hajko, označiť za potenciálnu možnosť zavŕšenia ľudskej existencie, čím sa stáva jediným dôkazom čohosi stáleho v človeku, akýmsi trvalým základom ľudského ‚ja‘, trvalým a večným cieľom, „ku ktorému sa síce môže principiálne každý jednotlivec dopracovať, ktorý sa však prejaví, nadobudne platnosť až vtedy, keď v súvislosti s ním ľudská bytosť stratí svoj individuálny charakter“ (HAJKO, 2008, s. 171). Pokiaľ by sme k interpretovaniu, resp. definovaniu nibbány mali pristupovať nie v pozitívnom zmysle, potom je namieste pochopiť, že atribút negatíva sa tu objavuje vlastne iba v rovine výpovede, tzn. „je to ustanie strasti, potlačenie chtivosti, nenávisti a klamu, úplné vyhasnutie skupín existencie“ (KÜNG – BECHERT, 1998, s. 35). A teda aj na základe tých konštatácií, ku ktorým sme dospeli na inom mieste práce, nibbána je ako absolútny zánik v nihilistickom zmysle vnímaná iba človekom, ktorý nedospel k skutočnému pravému 83 ARS AETERNA poznaniu. Dôležité je teda pochopiť, že nibbána aj napriek nedostatočnosti relevantne ju opísať naším pojmovým, myšlienkovým aparátom, nie je ani ničotou, ani večným životom v akomsi raji vo význame semitských náboženstiev, ale skôr stavom blaženosti. Pokiaľ ide o to, ako je možná existencia blaženosti tam, kde už nemá byť žiadne vnímanie, Sáriputta, jeden z hlavných Gautamových učeníkov, odpovedá: „Práve to je blaženosťou nirvány (nibbány – pozn. aut.), že v nej nie je žiadne vnímanie“ (KÜNG – BECHERT, 1998, s. 36). Endnotes: Vôľa k životu je teda kvázi oným spojovadlom na poli zachovania energie. Pokiaľ dôjde k jej odstráneniu, výsledkom bude postupné ustatie dovtedy kumulovanej energie, pričom konzekvenciou sa stane definitívne ukončenie znášania svojich predchádzajúcich činov (ako pozitívnych, tak negatívnych). 2 „‘Ctihodný, možno rozlíšiť jednotlivé stavy mysle, keď sú v spoločnej súčinnosti, a povedať: toto je vnem, toto vedomie, toto myslenie, toto chápanie, toto skúmanie a toto hodnotenie?‘ ‚Je to tak, akoby kuchár pripravil polievku alebo omáčku zo smotany, soli, zázvoru, rasce, korenia a ďalších prísad a kráľ by mu potom povedal: oddeľ mi chuť smotany, chuť soli, chuť zázvoru, chuť rasce, chuť korenia a chuť ostatných prísad... Bolo by možné oddeliť z tej polievky alebo omáčky chuť kyslú, slanú, horkú, pálivú, trpkú alebo sladkú? A presne tak je to s jednotlivými stavmi mysle‘“ (ZBAVITEL, 2008, s. 215–216). Navyše pri dosahovaní čistoty mysle je o. i. dôležité to, aby človek zbytočne neprehlboval svoje prebývanie na poli negatívneho uvažovania, čiže v rámci zvyšovania kvality interpersonálnych vzťahov ide predovšetkým o to, aby človek prestal s permanentným premýšľaním o negatívach druhých ľudí, a aby sa miesto toho viac koncentroval buď na to, že aj on sám by mohol byť z niečieho aspektu podrobený kritike, alebo aby zohľadňoval aj dobré vlastnosti ľudí, s ktorými sa stretáva. V dôsledku toho sa potom bude, predpokladáme, minimalizovať ako pocit nadradenosti, tak i rivality, pričom treba myslieť na to, že príklad je viac ako poúčanie a nekonštruktívna kritika. A taktiež, keď človek vidí sám na sebe, že nie vždy je jednoduché vysporiadať sa s osemdielnou cestou, resp. bez zaváhania a chýb po nej smerovať, mal by byť voči ostatným do istej miery ohľaduplnejší. 3 Na mysli máme opakovanie sa jednotlivých aspektov strastiplnej existencie, avšak nie absolútne identických. 4 Na nevedomosti závisia podnety (dôsledky kammy, resp. ňou vytvorené), na zložkách uvedomovanie si ako zárodok ďalšieho bytia na ňom potom závisí meno a podoba, telo a myseľ, tzn. duchovno-telesná podstata, z nich vyvstáva šesť zmyslových oblastí na nich styk so svetom pri narodení, zmyslový kontakt na styku pociťovanie, na pociťovaní túžba, žiadostivosť, na nej lipnutie na živote, životoch, na tomto lipnutí zase vznikanie, na vznikaní narodenie a na samotnom narodení potom zase závisí staroba a smrť (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 83). 5 Na rozdiel od nášmu kultúrnemu kontextu známejších, príp. bližších myšlienkových systémov, náboženstiev, buddhizmus neprijíma moment alebo akceptovaný prvok Stvoriteľa. 1 84 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 V tejto súvislosti je známym jedno z jeho podobenstiev – „...akoby bol niekto zasiahnutý otráveným šípom a jeho priatelia, spoločníci alebo príbuzní by poslali po chirurga, avšak tento človek by prehlásil: ‚Nenechám si ten šíp vytiahnuť, pokiaľ sa nedozviem, kto je ten muž, ktorý ma zranil; či je to šľachtic, kňaz, obchodník alebo sluha, aké je jeho meno a z akej rodiny pochádza, či je vysoký alebo nízky alebo prostrednej postavy.‘ Takýto človek by zomrel prv, než by mohol všetky veci zistiť“ (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 45). Semitské vierovyznania bývajú na tomto mieste, naopak, prijímané ako tie, ktoré sa otázke počiatku nevyhýbajú. Odpoveďou na prípadné polemiky o tom, kto je Boh a prečo by mal byť ponímaný cez prizmu súcitu, ak stvoril svet plný utrpenia, dospievajú k viac-menej identickému konsenzu, resp. stanovisku – pokiaľ na otázku niet jednoznačnej odpovede (ako napr. v prípade, že nie je fakticky overiteľný čas a zrod Boha alebo jeho zámer, motivácia k stvoreniu sveta), konštatuje sa nevyspytateľnosť božích ciest. Na druhej strane, v prípade buddhizmu nebýva širšou, opozitnou či až ofenzívne zameranou verejnosťou akceptovaný, príp. akceptovateľný Gautamov postoj nevyjadrovania sa k metafyzickým problémom a otázkam z dôvodu ich nezmyselnosti pre praktický, mravný život. 7 Hoci nie priamo v buddhizme, pre Indiu je, zdá sa, typická skepsa ohľadom tzv. západného chápania pojmu ‚ja‘, či dokonca ich vnímanie je diametrálne. Min. v hinduizme sú napr. v rámci džňánajógy charakteristické rôzne cvičenia na správne uchopovanie pojmového aparátu, resp. na kritické myslenie ohľadom jednotlivých pojmov a ich interpretácie. Známym je o. i. práve príklad na pojem ‚ja‘, príp. ‚moje‘ – ak totiž človek ukáže na nejaký predmet, ktorého je vlastníkom, a teda ho označí ako ‚môj‘, neznamená to, že on sám je tým predmetom. Ak ale poukazuje na niektorú z častí svojho tela alebo na svoje vlastnosti, pričom o nich hovorí ako o ‚toto je môj, moja, moje‘, spravidla si pod tým predstavíme práve jeho osobu, čiže tieto ‚súčiastky, súčasti‘ považujeme za toho-ktorého človeka. Na tomto príklade vidno nuansy jednotlivých homoným a tiež vysporadúvanie sa východného myslenia s pojmami súvisiacimi s ‚ja‘ a jeho ekvivalentmi. Iste, v bežnom živote je prirodzené používať tieto osobné alebo privlastňovacie pronominá vzťahujúce sa k osobe, avšak podľa buddhizmu nie je správne lipnúť na ich sémantickom význame, resp. na obsahu, ktorý je v nich klamlivo inherentný. Potom by sme teda mohli pripustiť hypotézu, že aj Gautama svojím učením o anattá nepopieral vlastne existenciu ‚ja‘, podstaty, duše ako najvyššej reality, ale skôr mal na mysli, že čokoľvek, čo si človek o ‚ja‘ myslí alebo povie, nemôže byť attá, pretože attá je mimo všetkých slov a predstáv (protiargumentáciu pozri priamo v texte). 8 Pojem brahma je vyjadrením neosobného súcna, najvyššej reality. Je prejavom ako absolútneho bytia a vedomia, tak i absolútnej radosti, je nielen tvorcom všetkého, ale zároveň aj všetko prestupuje. Rovnako je nám ťažko dostupný attá, a to napriek tomu, že je naším najvlastnejším ‚ja‘. Avšak týmto ‚ja‘ nemáme na mysli 5 skupín javov (vedomie, cítenie, vnímanie, telesnosť, mentálne formácie), pretože takéto vysvetľovanie attá by nás opäť voviedlo k prejavom individuality, a tým aj egoizmu, ale dušu, ktorá síce sídli v hmotnom tele, no nie je súčasťou osobného ega, ale brahmu. Preto je hlboké pochopenie ich vzájomnej jednoty konečným cieľom, teda dosiahnutím duchovného oslobodenia, a zároveň v sebe spája pochopenie bytostnej jednoty všetkého vo svete. 9 Identický prístup zaujal aj k cíteniu, vnímaniu, vedomiu a mentálnym formáciám. 10 Sem možno zaradiť napr. samotnú kammu, vipáku a slobodnú vôľu. 11 Neznamená to ale, že prijatie faktu anattá zároveň znamená absenciu humanizmu či prosociálnosti. Uvedomenie si povahy v intenciách anattá naďalej zostáva v rukách 6 85 ARS AETERNA každého‚indivídua‘, čo znamená, že u takej bytosti síce nastane stav duchovného oslobodenia, konkrétne konzekvencie na poli interpersonality a jej vzťahu k svetu sú však nie celkom predvídateľné. Takáto bytosť sa môže potýkať min. s rovinou alebo životom v intenciách arahat alebo bódhisatta, pričom ani na úrovni arahata nemožno apriórne negovať jeho záujem o prosociálne správanie. 12 Autoreflexia, sebaanalýza v intenciách náuky o ‚nie-ja‘ je ťažšie prijateľná o fakt, že ‚ja‘ človek nepovažuje za čosi vágne alebo numinózne, ale práve naopak, za čosi, čo mu je najbližšie a najprirodzenejšie. Okrem toho, človek sa iba ťažko vzdáva predstavy, že je takou osobou, akou si byť želá, resp. že ho za takého (z aspektu tzv. Joháriho okna) považujú aj iní ľudia, rovnako ako ‚ja‘, i napriek evidentným zmenám na poli prežívania, považuje za nemenné, nepodliehajúce zmene a za s ničím neprepojené, tzn. samostatné. 13 Prázdnota nie v zmysle nihilizmu, t. j. ničoty, ale eliminácie nereálnych projekcií, alebo tiež z hľadiska popretia akýchkoľvek charakteristík. 14 Napr. pri výklade pôvodu, inkarnácií a i. 15 Všeobecne sa hovorí až o desiatich putách (samjodžana): klam ‚ja‘ (sakkája-ditthi), pochybovačnosť (vičikiččhá), lipnutie na pravidlách a obradoch (sílabbata-parámása), žiadostivosť zmyslov (káma-rága), zlovôľa (vjápáda), žiadostivosť po jemnohmotnej existencii (rúpa-rága), žiadostivosť po nehmotnej existencii (arúpa-rága), domýšľavosť (mána), nepokoj (uddačča), nevedomosť (avidždžá) (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 49). 16 „Mnísi, toto je vznešená pravda o utrpení: narodenie je utrpenie, staroba je utrpenie, choroba je utrpenie, odlúčenie od toho, čo je milé, je utrpenie, ak človek nedosiahne to, čo si želá, je utrpenie, skrátka, päť skupín javov, ktorými prenikáme k svetu, je utrpením“ (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 71). 17 Gautama samovraždy explicitne údajne ani neschvaľoval, ani nehanil, neskôr však boli vyslovene zakázané. 18 Napr. zaľúbenosť (vedúca sa pospolu so strachom o zdravie milovaného alebo o jeho stratu) či pôrod (ako jeden z prvých predpokladov pre život plný súženia a bolesti). 19 V rámci vysporiadania sa s touto skutočnosťou dochádza k poznaniu, že tak, ako sú pominuteľné stavy šťastia, ktoré v zásade odvracajú našu pozornosť od strastiplnej povahy všetkých javov, tak je pominuteľné aj utrpenie. Z toho následne vyplýva nielen to, že človek by v prípade negatívneho obdobia svojho života nemal upadať (chronickému) zúfalstvu, ale čo je dôležitejšie, je to tiež indikátorom toho, že pominuteľné sú dobré aj zlé prežívania, a stav nibbány (ako stav neprežívania ani blahodarného, ani zhubného) nie je utópiou. 20 Žiadostivosť nielen v spojení s lipnutím, ale tiež závisťou, žiarlivosťou, mamonou a i. 21 Mienime tým prípad človeka konajúceho nedobré skutky alebo utiekajúceho sa k hedonizmu. 22 V tejto súvislosti však máme na mysli predovšetkým vznik utrpenia jednotlivca, nie sveta ako celku. 23 Napriek tomu ale v istom zmysle nemožno théravádový buddhizmus považovať za striktne ateistický, o čom svedčí jedna z elementárnych ríš existencie, v ktorej prebývajú dévovia. Avšak bohovia nie sú večnými a všemocnými bytosťami, tvorcami a udávateľmi mravného poriadku. Jediným relevantným rozdielom medzi nimi a ľuďmi je azda iba v tom, že žijú v relatívne lepších podmienkach, čo ale nič nemení na fakte, že sú taktiež súčasťou samsáry a pod vplyvom odplaty za svoje skutky. 24 V súvislosti s touto energiou nemožno hovoriť o neutralite, ona totiž neutrálnou nie je. 86 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Vždy má v sebe aspekt pozitívna alebo negatívna, tzn. jasnú tendenciu. Preto ak sa dosiahne stav neutrality, ktorý je cieľom, nastane nibbána. 25 Azda jediným možným riešením, ako sa z utrpenia vymaniť, by mohla byť upanišádová jednota attá-brahma, vďaka ktorej ľudia verili, že práve splynutím s brahma, ktoré tomuto utrpeniu nepodlieha, možno docieliť oslobodenie. 26 Výklad dvanásťčlenného reťazca možno pritom zhrnúť do nasledujúcej podoby – pôvod všetkého utrpenia je v nevedomosti, neschopnosti dosiahnuť oslobodzujúce poznanie pominuteľnosti fenomenálneho sveta, ako to bolo vyjadrené v ušľachtilých pravdách. Človek nachádzajúci sa v zajatí tejto nevedomosti sa dostáva do vleku neuvedomelých voľných podnetov, ktoré ho orientujú na javovú stránku skutočnosti. Pod vplyvom týchto popudov jeho vedomie, poznávajúca schopnosť, ktorá po smrti nezaniká, ale vstupuje do ďalšieho ´prevteľovania´, zmocňuje sa novej telesnej schránky, získava ‚meno a podobu‘. Nový jedinec je obdarený zmyslami, ktorých dotykom so zmyslovými predmetmi vznikajú pocity a predovšetkým smäd po zmyslových pôžitkoch, lipnutie na veciach tohto sveta a na telesnosti, ktorá netvorí naše pravé ‚ja‘. Tým vznikajú predpoklady k ďalšiemu zapojeniu sa do strastiplného kolobehu zrodení, ktorý neskončí, pokiaľ nebudú odstránené jeho príčiny, tzn. smäd a nevedomosť (ZBAVITEL, 2008, s. 59). 27 Tzn. vo svete, v ktorom by absentovalo pochopenie jeho iluzórnej povahy. 28 Buddhizmom je považovaná za viac-menej fakt odporujúci upanišádovému učeniu o attá a brahma, príp. semitskej viere v Boha. 29 Neúprimné konanie, resp. konanie dobra s výlučným zámerom na dosiahnutie lepšieho zrodenia v rámci kammy vedie skôr k opačnému výsledku. 30 „Valiace sa hnutie, ktoré nazývame vlna – a ktoré neznalému pozorovateľovi dáva ilúziu jednej a tej istej vody pohybujúcej sa po hladine jazera, – je vytvárané a podporované vetrom a udržiavané nahromadenými energiami. Keď ale vietor ustane a žiaden nový vietor nebude opäť bičovať vody jazera, nahromadené energie sa postupne spotrebujú a akýkoľvek vlnivý pohyb ustane. Podobne i oheň, ak nedostane nové palivo, po spotrebovaní všetkého starého paliva zanikne“ (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 36–37). 31 „Úplné odstránenie a zánik nevedomosti vedie však k zániku podnetov, zánik podnetov k zániku poznávania, zánik poznávania k zániku mena a podoby, zánik mena a podoby k zániku oblasti vnímania, zánik oblasti vnímania k zániku dotyku, zánik dotyku k zániku pociťovania, zánik pociťovania k zániku smädu, zánik smädu k zániku lipnutia, zánik lipnutia k zániku vznikania, zánik vznikania k zániku zrodenia, zánikom zrodenia zanikajú…zármutok, nárek, plač, skľúčenosť mysle a zúfalstvo. Takýto je zánik všetkého, čo je strastné“ (ZBAVITEL, 2008, s. 58). 32 V sanskrte je slovo nirvána odvodené od predpony nir- a koreňa -vá vo význame vanutie (NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA, 1993, s. 37). 33 Stav nibbány možno spoznať predovšetkým prostredníctvom samotného jeho ponímania ako stavu, čo znamená, že človek nie je zmietaný permanentnými zmenami, premenlivosťou, pohybom. Pravé poznanie sa prejavuje ako v rovine múdrosti, tak i meditácie a mravnosti, pričom dôležité miesto zohráva práve fakt zodpovednosti. V neposlednom rade je tiež determinantom aj ďalšie nezrodzovanie sa, tzn. po dosiahnutí parinibbány nenastane už v dôsledku vyprchania kammickej energie žiadna inkarnácia. 34 Nie je to ale akási cesta ľahšieho odporu? Iste, život v osamelosti nie je práve najjednoduchšou voľbou, avšak v konečnom dôsledku treba pripustiť, že v akejsi izolácii od vonkajškovosti je, zdá sa, predsa len akoby ľahšie dodržiavať jednotlivé zásady, nie je tu 87 ARS AETERNA totiž taká vysoká miera konfrontácie. Ak aj človek žije v osamotení, čo si od neho vyžaduje enormnú úprimnosť voči sebe samému, pretože nemá žiadnu spätnú väzbu, žiadne ‚zrkadlo‘, ktoré by ho upozorňovalo na prípadné diskrepancie, rovnako môže upadnúť do presvedčenia, že žije správnym životom. Ak by sa mal však s niekým konfrontovať napr. na poli správnej reči, možno by tento dôležitý aspekt osemdielnej cesty zakrátko zlyhal. 35 Takého človeka opisuje Gautama nasledovne: „Pre toho, v kom nesídli rozkoš, ktorý prekonal pochybovanie a nemá túžby, nie je iného vyslobodenia [...] Takýto človek je úplne zbavený túžby […] podarilo sa mu dosiahnuť oslobodzujúce poznanie a už viac nelipne na túžbe, ani na živote“ (LESNÝ, 1996, s. 130). 36 Ako napr. LESNÝ, 1996, s. 139. 37 Takto tomu ale bolo až v neskorších častiach, spočiatku sa hovorilo iba o pozemskom svete, resp. o ukončení zrodzovania do ríše ľudí, a tým pádom do (od nej) nižších sfér existencie. Works cited: » » » » » » » » DAVID-NEELOVÁ, A. – MINAŘÍK, K. 1993. Pronikavý vhled. Praha : Canopus. HAJKO, D. 2008. Úvod do indickej filozofie. Bratislava : H&H. KÜNG, H. – BECHERT, H. 1998. Křesťanství a buddhismus. Praha : Vyšehrad. LESNÝ, V. 1996. Buddhismus. Olomouc : Votobia. NYNASATTA THERA. 1992. Základy buddhismu. Praha : Alternativa. NYÁNATILOKA MAHÁTHERA. 1993. Slovo Buddhovo. Praha : Stratos. PCHRA KHANTIPÁLO. 1995. Úvod do buddhismu. Bratislava : CAD PRESS. ZBAVITEL, D. 2008. Raný indický buddhismus. Praha : Argo. Miroslava Obuchová Katedra všeobecnej a aplikovanej etiky Filozofická fakulta UKF v Nitre e-mail: ppastelka@gmail.com 88 Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Almost Real… Who is Watching and Who is Being Watched? Peter Mikuláš: Reality TV. (Reality TV), IRIS, 2011. Reviewed by Mária Kiššová Reality TV by Peter Mikuláš is not only about the phenomenon of reality television. The publication covers a much wider spectrum of media studies, and the author presents various genres of reality TV in a broader context and often ventures out of its territory providing interesting information about genre variations and modifications. According to Peter Mikuláš, the main aim of his book is to understand reality TV as a communicative and marketing phenomenon in specific contexts. It is TV programming characterised by genre hybridity and mutations. One of its typical features is convergence between television and so called new media; its influence on current media culture is strong and intense. The book is divided into seven parts; most attention is paid to the genres of reality TV and its marketing aspects. Mikuláš emphasises that genre distinction is crucial for a viewer because when the genre is distinct, or in other words, if the viewer “knows” the genre beforehand, it is a significant factor in “potential communication” (p.14). Speaking of its artistic and educational values, reality shows may be banal, superficial and shallow, but they definitely represent a significant trend and they have become - due to multifaceted reasons - one of the most popular types of TV programme ever. Peter Mikuláš lists several disciplines which need to be consulted if we want to study reality television as a cultural and social phenomenon. He mentions media communication, psychology, sociology, economy and marketing, ethics, linguistic and cultural studies. Looking closely at the reception and popularity of reality TV in Slovakia, the boom of the genre came in 2005-2006 (it was the only dominant genre on TV then), following extremely popular shows with the dominant function of entertainment such as Milionár (starting in 2000 and based on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?). Reality television is not resistant to changes and alterations. Ruled by ratings, the main objective of any commercial TV programme – and reality TV is highly commercial – is to maintain or increase the number of viewers and profit from the advertising that is closely related to the programme. When a genre gets boring, an alteration and a “new” form appears. This can be seen for instance in the replacement of game shows by make-over shows. The reviewed publication thus also serves as an overview of the recent history of reality television, in which Slovak but also foreign programmes are discussed. For the genre analyses, the following reality shows have been selected: 89 ARS AETERNA 112 (wrongly called city soap by TV Markíza), Nora and Braňo (based on the daily life of a controversial couple), VyVolení (an adaptation of Hungarian Reality show Való Világ (Real World)) and Wife Swap. The term reality television is essentially an oxymoron. All TV programmes are based on transmittance, representation and illusion of reality. In this sense, reality TV wants to emphasise spontaneity, unscripted situations and events, and persuade us that it gives a chance to “ordinary people” to become famous (offering Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame). This book also documents that reality television is part of contemporary globalised world (reality shows “travel” and appear within 90 a very short time in geographically and even culturally distant countries); from the social perspective they are made to address a mainstream viewer and very frequently decrease the quality of what one can see in the media, in this case on TV. A very positive aspect of Mikuláš’s book is that he does not moralise nor lament the “garbage-like” content of most of these shows. His book proves that reality TV needs to be studied if we want to understand why it is so meaningful for us to watch and to be watched. Contemporary media outlets give plenty of opportunities for those who dare to join this world, yet the frequent disillusion following such encounters show they can be a far more negative than positive experience. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Historical Compendium of the West Slavs: From Paganism to Christianity Peter Ivanič: Západní Slovania v ranom stredoveku. (The West Slavs in the Early Medieval Ages), Nitra: UKF, 2011. Reviewed by Mária Kiššová The book Západní Slovania v ranom stredoveku (The West Slavs in the Early Middle Ages) covers a wide range of historical, cultural, social and religious information and material on the West Slavs. Peter Ivanič, the author of the monograph, has been working as a scholar at the Institute for the Research of Cultural Heritage of Constantine and Method at the University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra for several years and his research interests and publications cover the period of early Christianisation and the Middle Ages in Central Europe. Chronologically, the book deals with the era starting in the early sixth century and finishes in the 12th to 13th centuries, depending on the significance and social and historical development in particular regions. The first chapter offers a detailed overview of the works which deal with the West Slavs. Peter Ivanič’s research is elaborate and complex, his references include among others - publications of Slovak, Czech, German and Polish scholars; many of them document the results of current or very recent archaeological and historical findings. This chapter is followed by the characterisation of the natural environment of the early Middle Ages, and the next chapter highlights the theories of the origins of the Slavs. Here, the author stresses that autochthonic and migration theories prevail in current scientific debates. Individual chapters on different ethnic groups who lived in the region are arranged in the chronological order. These include the Slavs of the sixth and seventh centuries, the Avars (together with the Slavs and Samo’s tribal union), the Great Moravian Empire, the period of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Czech region in the early Middle Ages, Poland and the Polabian Slavs. Special attention is given to the paganism of the West Slavs and the process of Christianisation. The reviewed publication is suitable for professionals and researchers but also for students of history, ethnology and cultural studies who are interested in this period and geographical territory. With respect to this, the very positive and commendable aspects of the book are its clear and precise structure and refined style. For the lay reader, such a topic, especially if it contains numerous references to other works, could be tiring. This monograph by Peter Ivanič has the opposite effect and many passages actually provoke and stimulate further reading. For example, the chapter on the paganism of the West Slavs discusses the major gods 91 ARS AETERNA of the Slavic pantheon, temples and cult attributes which map significant archaeological sites, including the temple fortress of Arkona, the Gross Raden site, Mikulčice, and Most near Bratislava. Monumental statues and idols made of stone and wood provide fascinating historical sources which prove the rich religious thought of Slavs at the time. Reading about the beliefs of the West Slavs, one is indeed overwhelmed how many parallels with other ethnic groups and mythological systems can be discovered. One of the issues which problematise our interpretation of the era is obviously the lack of written sources. 92 This is also the case of the period of early Christianity in the region which is – as Ivanič emphasises - covered by a limited number of written documents. Due to this, they have to be interpreted extremely carefully. In 2013 we will commemorate the 1150th anniversary of the Byzantine Mission, likely one of the most significant events in our past. It is natural that the sources of our heritage must not be forgotten, and knowledge about them should be part of general cultural awareness. For that reason also, the publication of Peter Ivanič Západní Slovania v ranom stredoveku should be given particular attention and response. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Irish Literature in Focus: John McGahern’s lyrical portrayals Lýdia Čechová: John McGahern – Disclosing Irish Identity (John McGahern – lyrické rozkrývanie írskej identity), Nitra: FF UKF, 2011. Reviewed by Simona Hevešiová While visiting The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October 2011, Edna O’Brien, the doyenne of contemporary Irish literature, shared her not-sooptimistic insights on current literary development with the festival audience. Describing the writing of what she called ‘serious literature’ as a dying flower, O’Brien pointed to the tendency of many writers to disregard the power of the language while focusing merely on the thematic aspects of their narratives. With the heated debate around the controversial term ‘readability’ brought about by the Booker Prize judges last year, the criteria for good writing seem to be coming under increased scrutiny. According to O’Brien, all great prose is poetry and that is why she sees reading as a dedicated and challenging vocation. Her statement, an obvious tribute to the tremendous potential of language, also points to the disappearing artistry of the previous generations of writers. John McGahern (1934-2006), whose work is analysed in the new monograph Disclosing Irish Identity by Lýdia Čechová, published by the Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, belonged to a generation of writers that maintained and cultivated a magic relationship with words while revelling in their multi-layered meanings. Words, seen as physical presence rather than the inevitable tool a writer uses to construct a story, were always selected with care and precision and the author paid close attention to their auditory and rhythmic qualities. In the words of John McGahern, quoted at the beginning of the monograph, “[w]ords had been a physical presence for me for a long time before, each word with its own weight, colour, shape, relationship, extending out into a world without end.” As Čechová aptly demonstrates by quoting numerous examples from his texts, the writer’s careful manipulation of language helped him to achieve an almost impressionistic portrayal of Irish reality. Clearly, McGahern’s short fiction, positioned at the centre of Čechová’s attention, aims to strike the sensory receptors of his readers by creating tangible landscapes of Irish life. The frequent use of recollections and dreaming, which slow down the pace of the narrative, enable him to capture everyday reality through the prism of poetry. He thus forces the reader to slow down the pace of his/ her reading in order to pay attention to the details. 93 ARS AETERNA In terms of its form, the monograph follows a clearly delineated structure. Starting with a basic biographical and bibliographical overview, the author then introduces the main thematic focus of McGahern’s work, which oscillates within the boundaries of the ever-present topics reappearing in works of Irish authors. Obviously, there have always been certain themes that seemed to be inherent in the Irish literary tradition, such as the inevitable link between fiction and political or historical events and religion. The Joycean themes of paralysis, frustration and identity quest are echoed in the 94 writing of many of his followers, McGahern included. His characters long for the old world, the old Ireland, yet at the same time they seek authenticity and freedom. War, dysfunctional relationships between men and women, or problematic father-son bonds also enrich McGahern’s thematic scope. All in all, Lýdia Čechová’s book, comprising extremely skillful analyses of chosen texts, is a valuable contribution to the body of academic discourse on contemporary Irish writing and provides a highly enjoyable and informative read for all those who want to find out more about it. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 The Case of Philip Roth Alena Smiešková: Myth. Reality. Narrative. The Case of Philip Roth, Nitra: FF UKF, 2011. Reviewed by Emília Janecová Philip Roth is one of the most famous living writers of contemporary American literature. Starting his career in the late 1950s, he has written an enormous number of novels and short stories, which after a detailed analysis of their structure and content can be regarded as a reflection of the most significant tendencies of American writing in the last half-century. In order to reveal them all and to their full extent, Roth’s writing should be considered against the backdrop of manifold contextual factors, none of which should be omitted. The monograph Myth. Reality. Narrative. The Case of Philip Roth (2011) by Alena Smiešková presents an overview of Roth’s literary works in a wider context while focusing on the similarities and developmental differences reflecting Roth’s shift from modernism towards postmodernism strategies and which operate within discourse concepts of myth, reality and narrative. Smiešková focuses mainly on the works Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Eli the Fanatic (1959), My life as a Man (1974), The Ghost Writer (1979), Counterlife (1986), Operation Shylock (1993), Sabbath’s Theatre (1995) and American Pastoral (1997). In their interpretative analysis she ponders upon the influence of the petering out of modernism, the characteristics of ethnic writing and the augmenting features of postmodernism present in Roth’s writing in both structure and content. By expanding upon the characteristics of Roth’s writing, the author of the monograph portrays the situation of American literature after the Second World War and its subsequent development in the following decades. This period was characteristic because of the emergence of ethnic writing, which naturally brought new elements and strategies into writing and which soon became a representation of the encounter and subsequent coexistence of various cultures. These elements have always been present in Roth’s literary works and have often been assigned as a principal characteristic. However Smiešková does not treat them as the only significant aspect of his writing, but approaches them as only one facet among many, later becoming an enriching foundation for newer postmodern elements and strategies. The novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is acknowledged as a milestone and she states that the works written before this novel represent more the seriousness of modernist writing focused on searching for one’s identity, while the later works are based on irony, demythologisation and deconstruction of American identity, 95 ARS AETERNA evaporating the borders between fact and fiction and tackling questions on the origins of art and the role of the author. All these particular characteristics of Roth’s writing are presented in a complex way and the attractive collage approach used in encompassing the topic 96 finally results in linear and systematic conclusions. This contemplative but ultimately clear approach and natural and understandable style of writing, as well as the attractiveness of the chosen topic, should guarantee a positive response not only in the academic environment. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 Women Breaking Down the Walls Adriana Kičková: Ženy a britská diplomatická služba. (Women and the British Diplomatic Service), Nitra: UKF, 2011. Reviewed by Mária Kiššová Women’s fight for positions in international diplomacy has been long and difficult. As Adriana Kičková shows in her book Ženy a britská diplomatická služba (Women and the British Diplomatic Service), there have been difficulties, obstacles and – paradoxically - a lot of diplomacy has been needed to get some improvement and progress in the matter. The book focuses on the period between the 1780s and the 1960s. It starts with the description of the first women employed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was in 1782 when “necessary” women started to work at the recently constituted ministry and there is even the specific historical record of a Martha Southcott, the very first woman working there and responsible for the practical issues of household management. The following chapters of Women and the British Diplomatic Service present a chronological overview and analysis of the question of women over three periods. The first one focuses on the issue of women and the diplomatic service during the First World War and includes subchapters on the MacDonell Commission, the anti-discriminatory law (the so-called Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act) of 1919, the Tomlin Commission and the Schuster Commission. Since the social status of women significantly depended on education, Kičková presents the wider context and also mentions the situation in this field, especially from the late 1870s onwards, when the first universities offered places for young women. The second period presents the Eden reforms during the Second World War; the third one concentrates on the post-war situation, when the Gowers Commission and the Plowden Commission actively contributed to the issue. The historical overview based on the primary research materials mostly from the British National Archive in London and the University of Newcastle is followed by interesting bio-sketches of women who influenced the diplomacy and politics of the 20th century. Biosketches are ordered alphabetically, starting with Margery Irene Corbett Ashby (1882-1981) to Lilian Pauline Neville-Jones (1939-). Closer attention is given to Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), likely the most well-known female politician, traveller, and archaeologist of the fin-the-siècle era and to Mary McGeachy (1901-1991), the first woman to be given British diplomatic rank in 1942 and the Director of Welfare for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in 1944. The book also includes a useful list of primary and 97 ARS AETERNA secondary sources and the attachment in English Regulations for her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1872. Kičková’s book shows that women in international diplomacy faced a lot of hostility, discrimination and malice, and their efforts often hit a brick wall built by the British government. Progress was extremely slow due to various reasons, including the deeply rooted conceptions of a suitable status for a man and a woman. In this sense, “men were predestined for leadership and women for care” (p. 90). Current 98 statistics also prove that there are still big discrepancies between the numbers of men and women in the diplomatic service. Thus, the scepticism one feels from the author’s concluding words is neither unexpected nor surprising. It is sad that the media often concentrates more on image, clothes and hairstyle than on the activities and efforts of female diplomats. However, that opens up a much bigger issue and shows other high and thick walls which need to be broken down. Vol.3, No.2 / 2011 99