Bas 2006

2OO6
CONTENTS
REINVENTING THE SELF
SORINA CHIPER THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN VOLUNTARY EXILE / 7 91 REVERE STREET: THE AESTHETICS OF MEMORY / 17 NAME SYMBOLISM IN ALDOUS HUXLEYS BRAVE NEW WORLD / 27 POSTMODERN ARMOURS: TATTOOS IN SARAH HALLS THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO / 39 DANDY SANS FRONTIRES: OSCAR WILDE & MATEIU CARAGIALE / 47 THE SIMULATED BODY IN A GERONTOCRATIC CULTURE: HOMEOSTASIS, GENOME, AND FASHION IN BRUCE STERLINGS HOLY FIRE/ 55 INTOLERABLE BODIES IN GEORGE ORWELLS BURMESE DAYS / 65 SHAKESPEARE AND SLENDER BODIES / 73
REMUS BEJAN RICHARD R. E. KANIA and OLGA MAKSIMENKO PIA BRNZEU CRISTINA CHEVEREAN KLMN MATOLCSY
ABA-CARINA PRLOG DANA PERCEC
JOURNEYS INTO SILENCE

FLORENTINA ANGHEL TED BAILEY REACHING SILENCE IN SEAMUS DEANES READING IN THE DARK / 85 PLAYING AGAINST THE CLOCK: THE METAPHOR OF TIME IN THE FOREVER WAR AND THE DECHRONIZATION OF SAM MAGRUDER / 93 PERDICIT SILENTIUM / 105 TONY HARRISON AND HIS TELEVISION POEMS / 117 UNSAYING ORIGINS IN J. M. COETZEES IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY / 131 I TOLD YOU IT IS ME, IMAGINING / 137 HAYDEN WHITES TROPICS OF DISCOURSE. AN INTERSECTION OF LITERATURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY / 147
DANIELA ROGOBETE ISTVN D. RCZ OTTILIA VERES TIBOR TTH LVIA SZLPL
B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006 NATAA KARANFILOVIC WOMENS WRITING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIMETIC MIRROR: THE PROSE FICTION OF ELIZABETH JOLLEY / 159 AMBIGUOUS NEW WOMEN IN SHAWS GETTING MARRIED / 171
OLIVERA KUSOVAC CRISTINA FLORES MORENO
THE CONTRIBUTION OF RALPH CUDWORTH TO THE NEOPLATONIC BACKGROUND OF S.T. COLERIDGES RELIGIOUS MUSINGS / 179 RACE RELATIONS AND POINT OF VIEW IN JOSEPH CONRADS KARAIN / 187 A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM: IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT IN MARK TWAINS LITERATURE / 197 REAL POWER IS IN COMPASSION: AN UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW WITH JOY HARJO / 205
CHRISTOPHER CAIRNEY GARRET D. ZAYIC
~ JOAO DE MANCELOS
LANGUAGE AND ITS MASKS

LOREDANA FRIL BILJANA MIIC ILIC COLLOCATIONS IN ECOLOGICAL DISCOURSE / 211 THE INTERPLAY OF SYNTAX AND DISCOURSE: CERTAIN INVERSION CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH / 229 MULTIPLE ANALYSIS AND GRADIENCE IN N1 TrV N2 to V N3 CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH / 241 ROMANIA AND THE EU EVALUATION IN THE BBC NEWS / 253 A TYPOLOGY OF PSYCH NOMINALS IN ENGLISH / 265 A NEW TYPOLOGY OF ENGLISH AND SERBIAN NOMINAL COMPOUNDS / 285 NONCE WORDS RESULTING FROM CONVERSION: TRANSLATION PROBLEMS / 289
VLADAN PAVLOVIC
IRINA DIANA MDROANE CAMELIA BEJAN SANJA KRIMER - GABOROVIC RALUCA MIU
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN VOLUNTARY EXILE

SORINA CHIPER
University of Iai
Widely under-read yet widely acclaimed as a towering figure of modernity, a self-proclaimed genius and a controversial personality, cryptic and highly idiosyncratic yet willing to reach the large public, Gertrude Stein is a provocative and defying writer, an intellectual who was at the heart of the artistic and historical modernity, shaping the artistic careers of others and engaging in the major historical event of her time, the First World War. Though her literary reputation derives from her experimental writings, the book that made her well-known and raised popular interest in her other works is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Written at the suggestion of friends as a concession to public taste, The Autobiography stands in an ironic relationship to traditional autobiography, and offers a portrait of the artist on a voluntary exile. This paper examines the interconnections between exile and the major (and more conspicuous) concerns of autobiography. The experience of exile has often been retold as autobiography. In the American autobiographical tradition in general, exile does not seem to be foregrounded, at least not at the time of Modernism. However, in classic modern American autobiographies such as Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1918), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Vladimir Nabokovs Speak, Memory (1966), exile is relevant since the authors are on various types of exile. To put it simply, the first is the autobiography of an exile of the interior, of an author who felt exiled within the American society at the beginning of alienating Modernism; the second is framed by a voluntary exile of two Americans who settled in Europe and who took part in its social and cultural life, which was much richer than what America had to offer then; and the last comes from an immigrant writer, who settled in the States and who gave voice to the events preceding his settlement.
B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006
Exile is the experience of being sent away from ones native country or home, especially for political reasons or as a punishment, or forced absence, as well as long stay away from ones country (Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary 1990: 420). Being away from ones country means living among strangers, in sites of difference that compel an understanding and evaluation of ones self or rather of ones identity. With Gertrude Stein, this understanding, through questioning and evaluation, verbalization and concurrent construction of identity, is paralleled by the questioning and reevaluation of the genre of autobiography itself. Stein produced a large body of autobiographical writings The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Everybodys Autobiography (1973), Wars I Have Seen (1945), Four in America (1947), Stanzas in Meditation (1994), The World is Round (1939) and managed to intrigue critics by a statement made in Everybodys Autobiography, according to which anything is an autobiography. (1973: 5) Against this background of personal fascination with the genre, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appears in an idiosyncratic ironical relationship with traditional autobiography, first of all by violating the principle of personal identity underlying the author = narrator = protagonist trinity. Judging by the title, and by the plain style, much unlike Steins celebrated incantations, the autobiography should have been written by Alice B. Toklas. In the 1933 original edition, there was no authors name on the cover, only a picture taken by Man Ray, called Alice B. Toklas at the Door. The photo showed Gertrude absorbed by her writing, pen in hand, and Alice in the doorframe, opening the door, and letting the light in. On the back cover there was a picture of the manuscript, in Steins writing. These paratextual clues indicate Stein as the author, but indirectly, so that the mystery of authorship is dispelled only at the end, in the closing paragraph: About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it (Stein 1933: 310). Apart from the delayed assumed authorship at the textual level, Stein challenges traditional autobiography by effacing the narrators individuality. Alice, in retelling the memoir of my full life the 25 years spent with Gertrude Stein, has the function of an eye witness, participant and histor, a term coined by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (1966: 242243) to cover
situations when the writer describes events he has not seen with his own eyes, what he has overheard, read about, or accumulated by research through historical records. Indeed, out of the seven time spans in the autobiography (18771906; 1907; 19031907; 18741903; 19071914; 19141918; 19191932) the third and the forth cover events that Alice could not have known, because they happened before she and Alice met. Philip Lejeune, one of the authoritative voices in the field of autobiographical writings, ranks it among the borderline cases of autobiography as fictitious fiction, a form that invents a perspective and a consistent voice for the narrator and that serves narcissistic purposes. This type of game, states Lejeune, is an astute way to achieve a form of self-hagiography that neutralizes or paralyzes criticism (Lejeune 1989: 47). Self-laudatory indeed, The Autobiography is important not so much for what it tells about Gertrude Stein as for its imbedded theory of identity, for the evocation of American expatriate life in Paris and for its occasional philosophical commentary on the 20th century culture. The notion of identity is the hard core of concern in The Autobiography, coupled with the problematics of the creative act. Stein brings into focus the impersonality of the creative gesture, and her conviction that the author is an abstraction, a ghost, a specter, creating a spectacle of the self through the use of what seems to be an external mask but which in fact merges with the wearers own skin. This dialogical process of performance and becoming, of constructing an impersonal mask and of ultimately identifying with it, is captured in the anecdote of Picassos portrait of Stein. There is a blank instead of a motivation for the portrait; it is left unfinished after sessions of posing, because I cant see you any longer when I look (Stein 1933: 65), and finished suddenly, as if unawares, as if by a disembodied arm acting on its own like a tool, in the absence of the model, capturing an essence and foretelling that Gertrude Stein will come to be the mimesis of the portrait. Self-consciousness, Stein intimates, is the enemy of artistic creation, which depends precisely upon an emptying out of selfhood. These ideas echo T. S. Eliots theory from Tradition and the Individual Talent (1969: 5253), specifically his belief that the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, continual extinction of personality, a de-duction from the contingency of daily modern, mechanized life, to reach the abstraction of pure ideas. The modern artist (or the high Modernist) is prone to a voluntary exile from massive commodification
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of experiences, in a rebellious and self-supporting effort to preserve a sense of genuine, different self, and inclined to practice an escape from emotion and an escape from personality, so as to create an art that could transcend time and space, or the contingent human universe. Via Toklas voice, Stein discusses her artistic principles at length and constructs a theoretical apparatus meant to explain what a genius is, as well as to advertise herself as a genius. To write means to use ones imagination, fed as it is by phenomenological observation and mental construction (Stein 1933: 94), This projection is the lesson Stein, the master, taught her disciples. Yet the single act of using ones imagination is not enough to qualify one as a genius. What makes geniuses exiles among commoners is a particular capacity to talk and to listen at the same time: in other words an openness and familiarity, through praxis, with dialogue and inter-dialogue. In the process of genial creation, the new is so difficult to digest that it is first perceived as ugly. The efforts of those who do original work will invariably be ugly, so profound are the problems faced by the creator. Imitators, because they have been relieved of the struggle of conceiving afresh, can concentrate on making the art pretty. (Stein 1933: 65) Though making reference to Picasso and the cubists, this argument was in fact a self-defence and self-justification of why Steins work had failed to reach the general public, and had intrigued publishers. However, Stein distances herself from the high Modernist (and elitist) embodiment of the solitary and superior genius by highlighting the constructedness of the concept, and by bringing out its dialogical dimension, which turns it into a democratic opportunity, open to all. In a jesting tone of parody, Alice confesses her desire to write [t]he lives of geniuses I have sat with, explaining that I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would be geniuses, in short I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses (Stein 1933: 17). The ironic interplay between real and not real wives or geniuses reveals the whole difference as unreal, as a discursive and social construct, institutionalized or sanctioned by norms, rules or definitions. The Autobiography thus makes a point of highlighting the conventional norms of genre and identity, as inscribed and perpetuated by patriarchal discourse. As Barbara Will explains it: In miming and mimicking these norms, the text
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transforms a seemingly conventional relationship of genius/wife into a butch/femme relationship that parodies dominant heterosexual modes as it unsettles the possibilities of point of view. (Will 2000: 144). The text is engaged in a similar demythologising of celebrated figures from the Parisian avant-garde by carrying over salacious gossip about them. These insiders snaps of intimacies or inelegancies were, in fact, the cause of much resentment among Steins friends (Eugene and Maria Jolas, Matisse, Braque, Andre, Salmon, Tristan Tzara) who published a small pamphlet, called Testimony against Gertrude Stein (Sutherland 1996: 35). The purpose of the pamphlet was to correct facts and argue against Steins knowledge of art and of French language, while accusing her of a sordid prostitution of her art. Steins depiction of the artistic life in Paris at the time before and after WWI is intermingled with an inquiry into the notion of national identity, as part of the constructed notion of stranger. I write for myself and strangers, as Stein states in The Making of Americans (qtd. in Perloff 2002: 48) At a micro-level, in a close-context reading of this quotation, a stranger is anyone who is not the speaking authorial I: all actual readers or readers in absentia. In the broader social context of Steins literary production, the strangers, one might be temped to say, are those who are not from Paris, newcomers drawn by the excitement and the promise of opportunities. But does strangeness mean not from this indexical place where I, the locutor, speak or inscribe my text? Are strangers any and all non-Is? Are strangers, for an author on a voluntary exile, the Americans left behind? Are they the French, the hosting nation? Are they all Europeans at the heart of the artistic life in Paris? What marks the difference? The frequent strategy of identifying people by their nationality seems to suggest that a site of difference is nationhood. The conspicuous emphasis on the role of national identity in the dynamics of personal relations, politics and the production of art, could be a natural consequence of the heterogeneity and internationalization of the artistic movement in Paris at the time before and after WWI. Yet because The Autobiography was written precisely with the inter-war American audience in mind, by questioning essentialist notions of nationhood Stein was in fact performing an inter-dialogical act of criticizing the official political agenda of the 1920s in the States, namely the concern to curb illegal migration and to preserve the color line (Davis 1999: 32). The fluctuation of nationalities assigned to the same
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person is meant to show the fallacy of fundamentalist conceptions of identity and the constructiveness, or even hazardous nature, of the process of ascribing a certain identity to a particular person. Rather than grounded in concrete facts, national identity is defined in The Autobiography by a lack. During WWI, in London, foreigners are those who had papers, while native born americans like Stein had none. For Picasso, the Americans are de-sexualized bodies: they are not men, they are not women, they are Americans (Stein 1933: 60). In the case of Marie Laurencin, she is either German at one point by virtue of her marriage, or French, through the ignorance of her father. Ironically, during the war, the lack of a father is interpreted as the possibility of her French extract, and as a valid ground for national categorization. The liquidity of her identity raises interesting questions about the relationship between gender and identity, and about gender roles in lesbian relationships. Feminine identities throughout The Autobiography tend to be associated with fluidity and flexibility, while male identities are fixed, generally within the confines of their nationality. To give just a few examples, Toklas father is nameless, but of polish patriotic stock; the mother has a name, but no nationality. Stein, in her male role, is completely, entirely american (Stein 1933: 19): a statement that might strike one as strange given the time that she spent outside the States. The Autobiography achieves a critique of gendered relations in the artistic market place, in which the circulation of cultural signs is controlled by men. While Picasso or Hemingway were published and celebrated, Stein remained invisible as an artist. With Stein as writer and Alice as editor, the two women re-appropriate the means of representation, use them to particularize their own identities and advertise them as exemplary. Stein uses the genre of autobiography to deconstruct patriarchal, heterosexual marriage, to emphasize the need to escape men in the domestic and public sphere, and to replace them with women. The text also posits lesbian marriage as a legitimate alternative and explores patriarchal representations of women and of womens lives, especially modern representations in art and literature, by promoting autobiography as a better representation of the artistic and domestic union of women. There are two instances of major silence in the text: Steins disaggregation with Leo and the lesbian relation with Alice B. Toklas. The former meant the break of her dependency on the dominating intellectualism
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of her conservative older brother, a rupture which allowed her to explore her own expressive powers away from his scrutinizing critical eye, while the latter provided emotional reinforcement. The rendering of the true nature of the relationship between Gertrude and Alice, with Gertrude embodying male roles (writer, driver, warrior, patron of art) and Alice assuming female ones (cook, typist, dog vet, gardener, housekeeper), is very subtle and understated, and for good reasons. People of alternate sexualities can be said to have been often in metaphorical exile among heterosexuals, because such relationships had to develop in hiding. The interchangeability between Stein and Toklas on their public missions, when dealing with war officials, as well as the merging of Steins autobiographical persona with that of Toklas, as an echo of their actual merging, parodies conventions of domestic romance and raises doubts about the divide between normality and abnormality. Such a divide had been challenged by the destructive experience of WWI. The war offered women the opportunity to engage in both female and male roles, and it gave Alice and Gertrude the chance to profess, once more, their Americanness in exile. During the war, as their example proved, to be an American meant to be a visionary, ahead of ones times, and to be compassionate. Seen from afar, America appeared to Stein as the oldest country in the world because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century, and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be living a twentieth century life, America having begun the creation of the twentieth century in the sixties of the nineteenth century is now the oldest country in the world (Stein 1933: 96). She notices that the American cultural affiliation is not with the British, the Irish, the Dutch or the Germans, but with the Spanish, an affiliation based not necessarily on a historical pedigree but on a psychological one: She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realise abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself by disembodedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual [] Americans, so Gertrude Stein says, are like spaniards, they are abstract and cruel. They are not brutal they are cruel. They have no close contact with the earth such as most europeans have. Their materialism is not the
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materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction (Stein 1933: 111). In the same line of cultural comments, on the basis of her rich international experience, Stein identifies natural links between aesthetic developments and nationality. Cubism, to her mind, was an organic Spanish development because the Spanish realize abstraction and because their materialism is not the materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction. And so cubism is spanish (Stein 1933: 111). The experience of living among strangers and of writing for them makes Stein not only an original cultural anthropologist but also a better stylist, according to her own confession: I feel with my eyes and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I dont hear a language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms, but with my eyes I see words and sentences and there is for me only one language and that is english. One of the things I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no English. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. [..]. I like living with so many people and being all alone with english and myself. (Stein 1933: 86) The experience of voluntary exile in Paris, at the heart of the buzzing European cultural movements, functioned as a background context for the development of the major concerns of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It stimulated questions of identity and nationality, complicated by the forced psychological exile of any person of queer sexuality at the time. The distance and the entailed lack of non-mediated engagement in the American social and cultural life at home, coupled with the familiarity of a multinational artistic environment in Paris, allowed Stein to make sensible comments on the American cultural milieu and on its cultural indexicality in the world. A wise and entertaining piece of cultural history, not unlike Henry Adams Education, save that the theorizing is less pretentious and the tone considerably more humane (Bridgman 1970: 233), The Autobiography makes metafictional references to Steins writing and her sharp sense of language, parodying the genre of autobiography and achieving an undecidability of fact and fiction, voices and perspectives, and sources of the agency of speech and sight.
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References
Adams, H. 1918. The Education of Henry Adams: an Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Bridgman, R. 1970. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Phoebe Stein. 1999. Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Steins The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 45, 1, pp. 1845. Eliot, T. S. 1969. Tradition and Individual Talent, in The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Lejeune, P .1989. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English. 1989. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nabokov, V. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Putnam. Perloff, Marjorie. 2002. 21st Century Modernism. The New Poetics. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell. Scholes, R., R. Kellogg. 1966. The Nature of Narrative. London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1933. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Stein, Gertrude. 1973. Everybodys Autobiography. New York: Vintage Books. Stein, Gertrude. 1947. Four in America. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1945. Wars I Have Seen. New York: Random House. Stein, Gertrude. 1994. Stanzas in Meditation. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1939. The World Is Round. New York: W.R. Scott. Sutherland, J. (ed.) 1996. The Oxford Companion to 20th Century Literature in English. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Will, Barbara. 2000. Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of Genius. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
91 REVERE STREET: THE AESTHETICS OF MEMORY

REMUS BEJAN
University of Constana
Robert Lowells book Life Studies (1959) is, in the poets own words, a conscious attempt at a breakthrough back into life (Lowell 1968a: 19), through the infusion of personal detail, and through the elevation of authenticity and sincerity to aesthetic criteria. The process of self-examination, which is at the centre of his lyrical autobiography, inextricably binds history, memory and poetry:
Theres a good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete flux. Ive invented facts and changed things, and the whole balance of the poem was something invented. So theres a lot of artistry, I hope, in the poems. Yet theres this thing: if a poem is autobiographical and this is true of any kind of autobiographical writing and of historical writing you want the reader to say, this is true. (Lowell 1968a: 21)
Lowells remark seems to reinforce the traditional view of autobiographical writing as based on the verifiable facts of a life history, according to which memory is regarded as a repository from where specific materials can be retrieved in the process of remembering a process described by St. Augustine in his Confessions:
And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where lie the treasure of innumerable images of all kinds of things that have been brought in by the senses. There too are our thoughts stored up and there too is everything else that has been brought in and deposited and has not yet been swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness. When I am in this treasure house, I ask for whatever I like to be brought out to me, and then some things are produced at once, some things take longer and have, as it were, to be fetched from a more remote part of the store. (1961: 10.8)
Augustines concept of memory as a present of things past (1961: 11.20), a repository in which everything can be preserved, altered, and enriched by the process of remembering, serves to clarify the quality of autobiography. The Doctor of Grace saw his narrative as a search for his
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true self and conceived of autobiography as a quest for memory, the form truest to the Providential plan, and therefore a true mirror of the real world. Lowells portrait of Mordecai Myers, which opens the prose memoir 91 Revere Street that makes up the second section of Life Studies, apparently reiterates this Augustinian notion in its emphasis of the rocklike permanence of memory:
Major Mordecai Myers portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of my memories I often come on it in the setting of our Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness. There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each is in its place, each has its function, its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent with life and meaning because finished, they are endurable and perfect. (Lowell 1964: 1213)
Critics have observed, however, that these memories are not merely facts of a childhood now long past; they are present realities, that part of the past that weighs on the present, having lost none of its emotional significance (Axelrod 1978: 106). Contemporary autobiographers no longer accept the concept of autobiographical truth as an unmediated reconstruction of a verifiable past. In Metaphors of the Self, James Olney astutely comments on the function of memory in life-writing: it is through the operation of memory, which draws all the significant past into the focus of the present that the autobiographer and the poet succeed in universalizing their experience and their meaning. Each of them discovers, in fact, by looking through the glass of memory, a meaning in his experience which is not there before and which exists only as a present creation. (1972: 263) Research in human cognition (Fivush 2002: vii) suggests that it is through the construction of a life story that self and memory are intertwined. Although events in the world may be organized in space and time, events take on human shape and human meaning through narrative. Self and memory are constructed through specific forms of social interactions and/or cultural frameworks. Close connections have been established between autobiographical narratives and the development of the self. Katharine Nelson, for instance, distinguishes six levels of self-understanding: the physical self, the social
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understanding of self, the cognitive understanding of self, the representational self level, the narrative self-understanding, and the cultural self-understanding. At the level of narrative self-understanding, the individual integrates action and consciousness into a whole self, and establishes a self-history as unique to the self, differentiated from others experiential histories. [] This is the beginning point of the establishment of a unique life story that has coherence across different life phases, initially starting with the phases from babyhood to childhood, and looking forward to the future as an adult. (Nelson 2003: 7) At the next level, i.e., that of cultural self-understanding, the individual self-history comes to be set into a cultural framework that differentiates it in terms of cultural settings and time frames. Now, the individual can contrast the ideal self portrayed by culture and the actual self as s/he understands it, and then may try to achieve a more ideal self (Nelson 2003: 8). A particular aspect of human memory is its awareness of the past, which Tulving, Wheeler, Stuss and Lepage call autonoesis or experiential awareness (qtd. in Nelson 2003: 11). Autobiographical memory functions uniquely to establish a sense of personal history in a social world in which others have their own unique personal histories, and thus to establish the conservation of self as existing independently through time (Nelson 2003: 18). For McAdams, the self is many things, but identity is a life story (2003: 188). As an integrative configuration of self-in-the-adult-world, both in a synchronic and diachronic sense, identity is a permanently-renewed project, an imaginative construction, whose full articulation requires the understanding and utilization of four types of coherences: temporal, biographical, causal, and thematic coherence (2003: 190). Twentieth-century autobiographers also consider the reconstructive process of memory an essential factor in organizing the truth of their lives. Memory is no longer a repository in which the past is stored intact to be recalled in the future. These writers seldom claim that autobiography offers a faithful reproduction of their verifiable past. Instead, they acknowledge that present attitudes reshape materials of the past. Autobiography should be understood as an art of an imaginative reconstruction; memory and imagination come to be related closely in the making of autobiography. In Memory, Creation and Writing, a brief essay she wrote in 1996, Tony Morrison, emphasizes that personal memory is crucial to her task as a writer because it ignites some process of invention and because I cannot
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trust the literature and the sociology of other people to help me know the truth of my own cultural sources (1996: 212). Discussing her use of memory, she refers to an aspect regarding remembering not sufficiently emphasized by others, the entire galaxy of feeling and impression (1996: 212) that accompanies the memory of a particular person:
[The] interior part of the growth of a writer (the part that is both separate and indistinguishable from craft) is connected not only to some purely local and localized sets of stimuli but also to memory: the painter can copy or reinterpret the stone its lines, planes, or curves but the stone that causes something to happen among children he must remember, because it is done and gone. As he sits before his sketchbook he remembers how the scene looked, but most importantly he remembers the specific milieu that accompanies the scene. Along with the stone and the scattered children is an entire galaxy of feeling and impression the motion and content of which may seem arbitrary, even incoherent, at first. (Morrison 1996: 213)
As a deliberate act of remembering, as a form ...of willed creation, memory is not an attempt to find out the way it really was. . . The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way Memory, then, no matter how small the piece remembered, demands my respect, my attention, and my trust. (Morrison 1996: 213214) Morrison regards fiction as an ineluctable feature of the truth of her life: My compact with the reader is not to reveal an already established reality (literary or historical) that he or she and I agree upon beforehand. (Morrison 1996: 217) As an imaginative reconstruction, memory seems to the Black writer essential to the creation of her authorial self. No complete story can be salvaged from Lowells 91 Revere Street, the prose memoir that makes up the second section of Life Studies. His journey home through memory produces fragments only. The loosely chronological account starts in medias res, evokes various childhood remembrances, spots of time to be revisited and revalued; it soon makes room, however, for personae, places, themes, and images. No break marks the various sections; the story reads continuously, although the impression of fragmentariness, of events simply juxtaposed remains strong. So, while the story progresses along the history of his life, another inquiry, which searches for truth, parallels it. Robert Lowell gives the thematic order the main role and subordinates narration to the work on language that literature presupposes; as far as truth
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is concerned, it is something missing, a gap that the experience of language reveals, that literature tries to surmount, whose attraction guides and organizes writing. The selected memories are carefully framed. They are chosen not for their anteriority, but for their generality: they reflect significant existential problems. Not all material fits easily into the thematic pattern, yet the autobiographer seems capable of creating internal consistency: Lowell frequently forces transitions across the flimsiest associations (Bell 1983:52). Through the shadowy filter of memory, the poet tries to discover patterns, invariants, some fundamental existential meaning in the actual processes of remembering and articulating. In a Letter to Harriet Winslow, of 8 March 1956, Lowell writes:
I have been thinking a lot about people and moments in the past. A lot is lost, and a lot was never seen or understood. Still its fascinating what one can fish up, clear up, and write down its like cleaning my study, like going perhaps to some chiropractor, who leaves me with all my original bone jumbled back in a new and sound structure. (qtd. in Wallingford 1988: 17)
The new and sound structure, in which the image is pinned down in a static form so that it can be studied and perhaps understood if only for a moment, becomes for Lowell the alternative to continuous narrative. The rich, ironic, urbane prose of 91 Revere Street presents Lowell as choking in the intolerable acquiescence of aristocratic Boston: a world of faded gentility and unfulfilled dreams, in which past magnificence turns to present destruction, just as the furniture the Lowells inherit from the Myers has lost its original luster and splendor and looks uncomfortable and disharmonious:
Here, table, highboy, chairs, and screen mahogany, cherry, teak looked nervous and disproportioned. They seemed to wince, touch elbows, shift from foot to foot. High above the highboy, our gold National Eagle stooped forward, plaster and doddering. The Sheffield silver-plate urns, more precious than solid sterling, peeled; the bodies of the heraldic mermaids on the Mason-Myers crest blushed a metallic copper tan. In the harsh New England light, the bronze sphinxes supporting our sideboard looked as though manufactured in Grand Rapids. All too clearly no one had worried about synchronizing the grandfather clocks minutes, days, and months with its mellow old Dutch seascape-painted discs for showing the phases of the moon. (Lowell 1964: 4344)
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Victim of the Oedipal project, Mother tirelessly encourages a premature sense of adult responsibility in her son, whom she forces to share her fantasies of ideally masculine figures. She ran into the bedroom. She hugged me. She said, Oh Bobby, its such a comfort to have a man in the house. I am not a man, I said, I am a boy. (Lowell 1964: 24) When Commander Lowell is away on sea duty, his wife ritualistically destroys him:
She baked in their refreshing stimulation of dreams in which she imagined Father suitably sublimed. She sued to describe such a sublime man to me over tea and English muffins. He was Siegfried carried lifeless thorough the shining air by Brunnhilde to Valhalla Or Mothers hero dove through the grottoes of the Rhine and slaughtered the homicidal and vulgar dragon coiled about the golden hoard. (Lowell 1964: 18)
Father is a sort of absurdist tragic hero, drawn unawares into the abyss of his dream of life. Affecting military authority, manly automobiles, which he has turned into a fetish, Commander Lowell steadily grows ever uncertain of himself, an inarticulate, ineffectual and shadowy figure.
Like a chauffeur, he watched this car, a Hudson, with an informed vigilance, always giving its engine hair-trigger little tinkering of adjustment or friendship, always fearful lest the black body, unbeautiful as his boiled shirts, should lose its outline and gloss. He drove with flawless, almost instrumental, monotony. (Lowell 1964: 23)
With a career marked by repeated failures, Father is a man imprisoned within himself. Lowells description of his fathers den, filled with trivial objects, with its bare and white walls and bookshelves, except for a useless radio-set, illustrates the lethargic personality of Commander Lowell:
The walls of Fathers minute Revere Street den-parlor were bare and white. His bookshelves were bare and white. The dens one adornment was a ten-tube home-assembled battery radio set, whose loudspeaker had the shape and color of a Mexican sombrero. The radios specialty was getting programs from Australia and New Zealand in the early hours of the morning. My fathers favorite piece of den furniture was his oak and rhinoceros hide armchair. It was ostentatiously a masculine, or rather a bachelors, chair. It had a notched, adjustable back; it was black, cracked, hacked, scratched, splintered, gouged, initialed, gunpowder-charred and tumbler-ringed. It looked like pale tobacco leaves laid on dark tobacco leaves. I doubt if Father, a considerate man, was responsible for any of the marring. The chair dated from his plebe days at the Naval Academy, and
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had been bought from a shady, shadowy, roaring character, midshipman Beauty Burford. Father loved each disfigured inch. (Lowell 1964: 17)
Father loves the rhinoceros hide armchair because it is ostentatiously a masculine, or rather a bachelors, chair. It was purchased from a shady, shadowy, roaring character, midshipman Beauty Burford but has nothing to do with any heroic career. Lowell uses memory to probe the past and to recover his lost self; by giving it an aesthetic form, by constructing out of memories a personal narrative that makes sense of the past and its relation to the present, he may hope to free himself from its burden. To the childs point of view, Lowell adds his adult perspective, a method, Ian Hamilton comments, that is particularly hard on Mr. Lowell (1982: 227). The speaker shows neither compassion nor deference for himself. As a child he is moody, needlessly deceitful and cruel towards his friends, egotistically Oedipal towards his father, violent, and self-despising: I was a churlish, disloyal, romantic boy, and quite without hero worship for my father, whose actuality seemed so inferior to the photographs in uniform he once mailed to us from the Golden Gate. (Lowell 1964: 13) The self the memoirist discovers/invents is strictly conditioned, free to the extent he can perceive his own bondage. The image of a nine-year old boy on a coerced afternoon stroll evokes the whole pattern of torment exacted in the name of social routine:
Brimmer School was thrown open on sunny March and April afternoons and our teachers took us for strolls on the polite, landscaped walks of the Public Garden. There Id loiter by the old iron fence 30 and gape longingly across Charles Street at the historic Boston Common, a now largely wrong-side-of-the-tracks park. On the Common there were mossy bronze reliefs of Union soldiers, and a captured German tank filled with smelly wads of newspaper. Everywhere there were grit, litter, gangs of Irish, Negroes, Latins. On Sunday afternoons orators harangued about Sacco and Vanzetti, while others stood about heckling and blocking the sidewalks. Keen young policemen, looking for trouble, lolled on the benches. (Lowell 1964: 3031)
Eventually, in predictable reaction, Bobby on his way to becoming Cal (for Caligula) manages to have himself expelled from this elderly Eden, the Public Garden, by his resident angel, Officer Lever, for bloodying Bulldog Binneys nose against the pedestal of George Washingtons statue
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and for pelting a little enemy ring of third graders with wet fertilizer. Images of ash, blood, sunlight, bodily functions, waste and flesh recur in Lowells remembrances as forbidden symbols of life. The memoir reveals how the young Lowell shares his parents distorted cultural values. Their preoccupation with social standing anticipates his similar anxiety at school: I was in the third grade and for the first time becoming a little more popular at school. I was afraid Fathers leaving the Navy would destroy my standing. (1964: 13) Lowell mentions his restless dreams of being admired (1964: 20) and suggests his desire for popularity: I had attracted some of the most popular Brimmer School boys. For the first time I had gotten favorable attention from several little girls. (1964: 22) Much of Bobbys unaccountable and inconsistent behavior, his pettiness and cruelty toward friends is attributable to his yearning for a direct contact with life. In the memoir, Lowell cherishes his remote connection with his great-great-grandfather, Mordecai Myers, a Mediterranean Jew, and listens enthralled to the coarse tirades of his fathers friend, Commander Billy Battleship Bilgewater Harkness. Major Myers, as Lowell reconstructs his character from the family portrait, is both voluptuous and patrician, a knowledgeable witness, on behalf of acquiescence and happy surrender:
On the joint Mason-Myers bookplate, there are two merry and naked mermaids lovely marshmallowy, boneless, Rubensesque butterballs, all burlesque show bosoms and Flemish smiles. Their motto, malo frangere quam flectere, reads I prefer to bend than to break. (Lowell 1964: 4950)
At the end of the memoir, Major Mordecais image returns as if to rebuke gently the misunderstanding of purpose and the displaced fear of life that has thwarted the emotional growth of Lowells parents: Great-great-Grandfather Myers had never frowned down in judgment on a Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no Mayflower. Instead he looked peacefully at his sideboard, his cut-glass decanters, his cellaret the worldly bosom of the Mason-Myers mermaid engraved on a silver-plated urn. If he could have spoken, Mordecai would have said, My children, my blood, accept graciously the loot of your inheritance. We are all dealers in used furniture. (Lowell 1964: 45) Commander Billy Harknesss vivid presence dominates the last third of the memoir. His weekly visits to the Lowell household disrupt the tense equilibrium that seems to exist in the family. An unruly drinker of Bourbon,
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Commander Billy commonsensically and passionately denounces all forms of despotism, both familial (Mrs. Lowell) and military (Admiral De Stahl), that have denied Commander Lowell a sense of private life:
Then Commander Harkness would throw up his hands in despair and make a long buffoonish speech. Would you believe it? hed say. De Stahl!, the anile slob, would make Bob Lowell sleep seven nights a week and twice on Sundays in that venerable twenty-room pile provided for his third in command at the yard. Bobby me boy, the Man says, henceforth I will that you sleep wifeless. Youre to push your beauteous mug into me boudoir each night at ten-thirty and each morn at six. And dont mind me lying too alongside the Missus De Stahl, the old boy squeaks; were just two oldsters as weak as babies. But Robbie Boy, he says, dont let me hear of you hanging on your telephone wire and bending off the ear of that forsaken frau of yours sojourning on Revere Street. I might have to phone you in a hurry, if I should happen to have me stroke. Taking hold of the table with both hands, the Commander tilted his chair backwards and gaped down at me with sorrowing Gargantuan wonder: I know why Young Bob is an only child. (Lowell 1964: 46)
These are the last words of the autobiographical account: the withheld resolution, the suspension and lack of formal finality paradoxically results in augmenting the unity of his prose memoir, while at the same time demeaning it (Bell 1983:5153). Having established the permanence of memory early in his prose essay, its endurance and perfection, as the memoir progresses, Lowell ironically undermines the idea of a perfect memory, because the adjustments of time seem to radically affect his recollections. 91 Revere Street is not factually true; ultimately, it is a fictional reconstruction of self. The American writer traces the origin of his young self to understand his present self, by situating it in the context of family, society, and culture. Nor does Lowells choice of prose seem to be insignificant in relation to his self-examination. In his essay On Skunk Hour, he recognizes the effect of a prose account in carrying the immediacy of past memories: I felt that the best style for poetry was none of the many poetic styles in English, but something like the prose of Chekhov or Flaubert. (Lowell 1968b: 227). 91 Revere Street seems to direct our attention to the fact that for Lowell, art has a direct bearing on his life. Yet, within the memoir, no clear resolution is reached. It is therefore difficult to clearly separate the strands of self-examination from the strands of art. In Lowells own words: one life, one writing.
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References
Axelrod, S. G. 1978. Robert Lowell. Life and Art. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Bell, V. M.. 1983. Robert Lowell. Nihilist as Hero. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press. Fivush, Robyn. 2003. Introduction: Autobiographical Memory, Narrative and Self, in Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden (eds.). Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. vii xiv. Hamilton, J. 1982. Robert Lowell. A Biography. New York: Random House. Lowell, R. 1964. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy. Lowell, R. 1968a. Robert Lowell, interviewed by Frederick Seidel, in T. Parkinson (ed.) Robert Lowell. A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, pp. 1635. Lowell, R. 1968b. On Skunk Hour, in T. Parkinson (ed.). Robert Lowell. A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, pp. 131- 4. McAdams, D. P 2003. Identity and the Life Story, in Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. . Haden (eds.). Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 187207. Nelson, Katherine. 2003. Narrative and Self, Myth and Memory: Emergence of the Cultural Self, in Robyn Fivush and Catherine A. Haden (eds.). Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 328. Morrison, Tony. 1996. Memory, Creation, and Writing, in J.H. McConkey (ed.). The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology. New York: Oxford, pp. 2128. Olney, J. 1972. Metaphors of the Self. The Meaning of Autobiography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton. Saint Augustine. 1961. Confessions. Translated with an Introduction by R. S Pine Coffin. London: Penguin. Wallingford, Katharine. 1988. Robert Lowells Language of the Self. Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina.
NAME SYMBOLISM IN ALDOUS HUXLEYS BRAVE NEW WORLD

RICHARD R. E. KANIA
Jacksonville State University
and
OLGA MAKSIMENKO
Brasshouse Language Centre, Birmingham
In his last novel, Island Aldous Huxley wrote:

Spiders cant help making flytraps, and men cant help making symbols. Thats what the human brain is there for to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of fairly manageable symbols. (1962: 208)
Huxley was faithful to his observation, freely using symbols in his novels to convey subtle messages to his readers. Huxleys penchant for using names as symbols has been identified in several of his works. As Harold Watts observed about Brave New World, Huxleys malice appears in the invention of names which hark back to the chief cultural heroes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Watts 1969: 80). Peter Firchow (1974: 109) notes the use of name symbolism in Point Counter Point and extensively, but not exhaustively, examines the name symbolism of Brave New World in The End of Utopia (Firchow 1984). John Wain (1974: 26) finds name symbolism in Huxleys After Many a Summer. Sanford Marovitz (1974: 37) identifies it in Huxleys Antic Hay. Previous commentary on Brave New World has focused on the more obvious examples of Huxleys use of names as symbols in Brave New World, but until Peter Firchow in The End of Utopia, no Huxley scholar had called attention to the symbolic value of more than just a few character names, or provided much information on their historic referents. Like Firshow, Michael Sherborne (2002) has identified many of the referents in the novel, but again his identifications are not complete and are scattered about the text. The lack of a comprehensive examination of the proper names in Huxleys scholarship leads us to offer our interpretation of the symbolic use of names in Brave New World. We assume first that most, if not all the names used, had actual preceding referents and through them
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symbolic meanings are embedded in the novel. Here we will attempt to answer four questions. Who are the actual historic referents of the Brave New World characters? What did these names mean to Huxley and his readers in the 1930s? What do these referents have in common with each other? And finally what is Huxleys message to us, then and now? For our research, the facts of interpretation, which, as Culler writes, constitute the point of departure and the data to be explained (1981: 51) are the proper names used in Brave New World. Most characters have highly distinctive names borrowed from historical or contemporary figures known to Huxley and the informed public of the 1930s as part of their general cultural literacy. As Eric D. Hirsch, Jr. (1987: 134) once admonished us, we have an obligation to identify and publish the contents of cultural literacy, and it is reasonable to think that those contents can be identified explicitly, since they are identified implicitly by every writer or speaker who addresses the general public. No writer we know demonstrates Hirschs point better than Huxley. But because contemporary readers of Brave New World are unlikely to be familiar with many of historical figures to whom Huxley alludes, and because the name symbolism reinforces the warning message of Huxleys novel, the identification of all of his referents and their significance to the novels message is long overdue. The terms we operate with include some of the most debated in logic, literary semiotics and linguistics. Their discussion is not our purpose, but we acknowledge them, here, as the starting-points of our speculation. Proper names that aim to refer (or attach) to particular objects or individuals are referring terms par excellence (Reimer 2003). The referent is that item to which the reference is made. In this case it is the namesake, the historical person after whom a Brave New World character is named. The reference is a relation between reality in the broadest sense and the language. In terms of the hybrid theory (Evans 1982), the reference of a proper name is the dominant causal source of the descriptive information the speaker associates with the name. Yet, while still possessing cognitive significance, it refers to something different from its original bearer. It is in terms of the hybrid theory that the reference-change which we observe in Brave New World can be most satisfactorily explained, revealing how a name becomes a broader symbol, a representational token for a concept, idea or object, without describing the features of the character.
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The family is one of the most important sources of a personal identity. Born into our families, we acquire our parents name. The World State is a society without family identity and World Staters surnames will not signify family affiliation. The children are not products of viviparous mothers and impregnating fathers. The children have no lineal kin, and no siblings everyone in the current generation is equally unrelated to everyone in the preceding generation Huxley even gives two characters a common surname to make the point of telling us they are unrelated. In this same key passage he informs us that the number of surnames in use is limited, confirming that their selection is state controlled.
Hullo, Fanny, said Lenina to the young woman who had the pegs and locker next to hers. Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the planet had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising. (Huxley 1946: 28)
Although the surname Crowne most probably does not refer to any particular person, it suggests a symbolic reference to the British royal family and all other royal families everywhere the crownheads. At least one other World State surname most likely also lacks a distinct referent. Jones is far too common to be identified with any specific individual, giving it the symbolic significance of an everyman or common man. Huxley uses Jones in this same generic fashion again in Brave New World Revisited (1958; 1965: 81). Ironically the World State is a society which, while de-individualizing its citizens at one level, also stresses identity. In Brave New World (originally 1932; 1946 edition: Ch. 1, pg. 1 [BNW hereafter]) the World States motto is Community, Identity, Stability. However, unlike our own world, social identity is not established within family relationships, but within social classes and the world-community overall. We hypothesize that Huxley would not have needed to create distinctive, two-part names for his characters if he needed only to identify the principle characters. They could have been given ordinary first names and further identified by some form of batch code reflecting their non-viviparous origins. Thus the names are significant for the larger community. Huxley authorities uniformly agree that at least some of the names in the novel were meant to carry symbolic messages. Perhaps to the literate readers of 1932 these referents were obvious, and part of the cultural
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literacy of Huxleys generation. Names are used, as E. D. Hirsch suggests, to convey metaphoric messages to todays well-informed readers, metaphor, in its wider meaning, being the essence for figurality itself (Culler 1981: 202) where the figurative is the name we give to effects of language that exceed, deform, or deviate from the code (1981: 209). Indeed, several of the names used by Huxley appear in Hirschs 1987 list, along with Aldous Huxley himself (Hirsch 1987: 178): Darwin, Engels, Ford, Freud, Marx, Lenin, and Rousseau. Huxley deliberately chose names the informed public of his time would know and linked them in quaint combinations. Past, present and future emerge intertwined and inseparable in this vision of the world of engineered stability and artificial happiness. The intentional change of reference turns the proper names into symbols which evoke ideas and feelings surpassing a plain interpretation of the words. As hybrid theory suggests about the proper name as the dominant causal source of the cognitive information which the writer associates with it, the informed reader can use the proper names to decipher the authors subtle messages. Table 1 lists all the names used in Brave New World and illustrates the point that the names of the World State were assigned to reflect the cultural heroes of the past, both theirs and ours. This pattern reveals that the World State had its roots in our own culture and heritage, and thus allows us to unravel the significance of the names in the society Huxley envisions. ___________________________________________________________________
BOKANOVSKY, process (1) HENRY FOSTER (1) LENINa CROWNE (1, 3) GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (2) Tommy (2) BERNARD MARX (3) FANNY CROWNE (3) Dr. WELLS (3) PFITZNER, scientist (3) MALTHUSian belt (3) BENITO HOOVER (4) HELMHOLTZ WATSON (4) MALTHUSian drill (5) CLARA DETERDING (5) PODSNAP technique (1) , PILKINGTON, in Mombasa (1) Reuben Rabinovitch (2) Our FORD (2) Polly TROTSKY (3) MUSTAPHA MOND (3) neo-PAVLOVian conditioning (3) Our FREUD (3) KWAGUCHI, scientist (3) GEORGE EDZEL (4) RIEMANN, surface tennis (4) CALVIN STOPES (5) MORGANa ROTHSCHILD (5) Joanna DIESEL (5)
31 Fifi BRADLAUGH (5) SAROJINI ENGELS (5) Jim BOKANOVSKY (5) JEAN-JACQUES HABIBULLAH (6) Tomakin = Thomas, the Director (7) POPE, a Zuni (8) Kothlu, a Zuni (8) Dr. SHAW (11) Miss KEATE (11) EDZEL, journalist (18)
HERBERT BAKUNIN (5) Tom KAWAGUCHI (5) BOKANOVSKY JONES (6) Linda, the Mother (7) John, the Savage (7) Mitsima, a Zuni (8) Kiakime, a Zuni (8) Dr. GAFFNEY (11) PRIMO MELLON (18) DARWIN BONAPARTE (18)
___________________________________________________________________
Table 1: The characters mentioned in Brave New World. Names with unambiguous referents are given in capital letters, followed the chapter number in which the characters name first appears. ____________________________________________________________________
Among the most obvious examples of name symbolism are the dual references to Our Ford (Huxley 1946: 20.) and Our Freud (1946: 31). Readers readily understand Our Ford is Henry Ford, the American industrialist and car-maker. Surprisingly, scholarly opinion on this identification is not unanimous. Warren Paul (1965: 19) feels that the chronology makes it patently impossible that Our Ford is Henry Ford. Nevertheless, the Ford referent is reconfirmed in many ways, as in the mention of Fords actual book, My Life and Work, (Huxley 1946: 1867), Mustapha Monds brief review of World State history for Helmholtz Watson (1946: 195), and the recurring allusions to the Fords Model-T motorcar. Similarly, most readers immediately recognize that Our Freud is Sigmund Freud, the psychological theorist whose ideas about early childhood conditioning and pre-pubescent sexual play are used in the World State. Stephen Greenblatt (1965: 97) comments on the duality of the god-figures name [Our Ford or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters] (Huxley 1946: 25). There is nothing inscrutable in the usage. The World State is the end product of advanced industrialization, advocated by Henry Ford and his peers, and sophisticated psychological manipulations of the populace, employing the theories of such psychologists as Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and John Broadus Watson. The World State god-head is dual, reflecting its dual features, consumer-oriented industrialization and psychological manipulation. These
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two men discovered the keys to satisfying the masses. These are the greatest heroes of the World State, but they are not Huxleys personal heroes. Huxley rejects mindless consumerism, mocking the games and amusements of the World Staters. In Proper Studies Huxley rejects Freudian psychology in his unveiled criticism of Freud and the Freudians (1927: xvi, xix): By comparison with Jung, most other psychologists seem either uninspired, unilluminating, and soundly dull, or else, like Freud and Adler, monomaniacal. Not all the names may carry such definite messages. Reuben Rabinovitch (Huxley 1946: 15) is not a character as such, and the tale told about him may be viewed as nothing more than what it is. Some names (John, Joanna, Jim, Linda, Polly, and Thomas) are so common that they conjure up too many possible referents. The names of the Zuni Indians (Pope, Mitsima, Kothlu and Kiakime) may be precisely what they purport to be, native American Indian names. They are not World Staters, and so it follows that their names would not be like those of the World State. Peter Firchow suggests that Huxley was following actual native usages (1984: 73, 135136, f2426). Kiakime is quite similar to Kyakima, one of the Zuni cities of Cibola (Crampton 1977: 21). Yet Pope was a Zuni leader of the 1680 Pueblo Indian revolt against the Spanish (Firchow 1984: 135, f24). Although many of the more common given names may be nothing more than what they superficially appear to be, several in combination with surnames used by Huxley, are significant. Henry is associated with Our Ford, and his wifes given name was Clara. Herbert and Calvin remind us of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, American presidents of that era. George and Bernard make a highly plausible set when combined with Shaw in a reference to the British playwright and social critic who is named in the text (Huxley 1946: 20). Huxley reveals the pattern to his use of name symbolism with the names he assigns to five fictitious scientists. Bokanovsky, Kawaguchi, Pilkington, Pfitzner and Podsnap are presented in the novel as important scientists who had advanced cloning, ectogenesis, eugenetics and behavioral conditioning after 1931. As distinctive as these names are, no amount of detective work will turn up actual pre-1931 scientists in these fields as the referents. Other name referents, however, do exist. James Sexton (1989: 85) considers that Bokanovsky may refer to Ivan Vasilevich Bokanovsky, a Russian revolutionary; but also could be French politician and technology
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promoter, Maurice Bokanowski, French Minister of Commerce, Industry and Aviation, 19261928. Kawaguchi might be taken from the Japanese novelist, playwright and film writer, Matsutro Kawaguchi (Bergamini 1971: 555). Sherborne (2002: 27) suggests Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese monk whose book Huxley had reviewed in his essay collection, On the Margin (1923). The name Pilkington most likely derived from British industrial family, the Pilkingtons of Pilkington Glass, founded in 1849 and very important in Britain in Huxleys time (GlassLinks.com). Pfitzner may refer to composer Hans Erick Pfitzner (18691949), a German chauvinist and enemy of the Weimar Republic (Kater 2000: 146) and Nazi (Williamson 1992), known for his opposition to modernism in music 20th century (Sherborne 2002: 27). The name of the fifth scientist in the pantheon of the World State represents a special case, a literary joke, name-symbolism within name-symbolism. We are told that the fictional Podsnap was a key scientist of the World State (Huxley 1946: 5), but the name acquires its symbolic meaning from Charles Dickens rather than from history. The character Mr. Podsnap, who appears in Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend, stands for the extremes of English arrogance, outrageous jingoism and materialism (Gutsell 1985). Huxley may be suggesting that podsnappery would have been a key factor in the demise of democracy and the creation of the World State arose. As much as the World State differs from our own society, the custom of naming infants for famous people has been carried over from our world to Huxleys fictive one, even after traditional modes of parental procreating, bearing and naming of children were ended. With the importance of the ectogenists explained in the novel (Huxley 1946: 3, 37), we know why Jim Bokanovsky, Bokanovsky Jones and Tom Kawaguchi came to acquire their unusual names. Thus we infer that other names used in the World State honor the heroes of that society, leaving it to the reader to make the connections. The choice of names does not seem so eclectic any more. Murray speaks about the extraordinary prescience of Huxleys satire, as envisioning ideas of science and human freedom, culture and democracy, the manipulation of the citizen by mass media and consumer capitalism (2002: 256). Very compactly, these names in their improbable combinations illuminate the ideas Huxley uses to warn us against modern trends and tendencies, thus acquiring their symbolic significance. Many of the major figures of the early 1930s no longer are the celebrities they once were. Identifying
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some of less well known referents for these names requires some detective work. We have attempted to identify each distinctive given and surname in the novel, but identifying them more fully here exceeds the space limitations for this article. A useful resource for most of these names is the first edition of Websters Biographical Dictionary (1961). The oldest edition is best, as newer ones omit some obscure referents. We also received great assistance from research librarians Betty Place-Beary of Guilford College and Cynthia Saylor of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Undertaking a classification of the names which we feel confidently can be identified with real persons, we find clear support for the thesis that Huxley chose these names to present a certain image of the World Staters. The clear majority are political figures. Other major groups are scientists, psychologists, figures in industry and finance, and social reformers. Totally absent are other popular celebrity categories, such as the popular sports and entertainment figures of Huxleys time. Political figures represent a variety of systems. Monarchism is implied by the name Crowne. Marxist-socialism is reflected in V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Bakunin, and their pseudo-deities, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Fascist, militaristic nationalist-socialism is well represented by such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini and Primo de Rivera. Fanny reminds us of Fanny Kaplan who tried to assassinate Lenin. Anti-colonial independence movements are represented in the characters named for Pope, Thomas Gaffney, Habubullah Khan, Mustapha Kemal and Sarojini Naidu. George Foster, William Zebulon Foster, Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge were Canadian and American political figures of Huxleys time representing democratic institutions of which Huxley was also wary (1958: 965: 20). The sciences are represented by Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Herman Helmholtz, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Mond, Ivan Pavlov, Georg Riemann, Marie Carmichael Stopes and John Broadus Watson, plus the five fictitious scientists, Bokanovsky, Kawaguchi, Pilkington, Pfitzner and Podsnap. Social engineers and reformers are represented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Bradlaugh, John Keate, George Bernard Shaw, and Herbert George Wells. Ludwig Mond, Rudolf Diesel, Henry, Clara and Edsel Bryant Ford, the Plinkington family, and Henri Deterding represent the importance of engineering and industrialization. The names Andrew
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Mellon, J. P Morgan, and Meyer Rothschild and his descendants bespeak . market capitalism, private wealth, investment and high-finance. Huxley forges a cultural alliance of extreme right and left, nationalists and internationalists, behavioral psychologists, inventors and other scientists, laissez-faire industrialists and financiers, utopian socialists and social engineers. In Huxleys age, as in our own, these cultural representations appear in conflict with each other. Huxley seems to be warning that the social, economic and political forces these people represent could forge an alliance among themselves, with the synergistic result being a Brave New World-like society (Huxley 1958; 1965: 20; Firchow 1984: 83). It is a warning not to be lost on the 21st Century as we observe the former Marxist states adapt consumer-oriented capitalistic incentives to improve productivity and meet popular demand, and how the capitalist states employ well-intended socialistic welfare programs to promote greater equality and social justice. We may not have Ectogenesis, but in vitro fertilization is almost common, and contemporary scientists are exploring human cloning, stem cell research, and DNA manipulation to create designer genes. The assignment of names to World Staters follows our occasional practice of naming new-borns after culture heroes. Yet in the World State there is a deliberate lack of historical awareness among the people. A minor character such as Jean-Jacques Habibullah is not named for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Habubullah Khan out of homage for or even out of knowledge of them. In a world where history is bunk (Huxley 1946: 28) our custom of naming our children after honored predecessors and admired historical figures is being satirized, not continued. Names are assigned at random from the 10,000 allowed in the World State. The real people used as referents for World Staters names would have meaning for us, but not the ahistorical citizens of the World State, revealing the heritage and values of this future society to us. Huxley chose this device to avoid long digressions into the cultural-history and values of the World Staters, as he explains in an earlier work:
Neither common nor scientific language provides us with an idiom in which the nature and workings of the spirit can be adequately described. It is hardly possible to say anything about it except by metaphors and similes borrowed from the material world which we can see and touch. (Huxley 1927: 234235)
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If writers, Hirsch points out, did not make tacit assumptions about the knowledge they could take for granted in their audiences, their writing would be so cumbersome as to defeat the aim of communication (1987: 134). Implicitly Huxley too saw this. The cognitive significance of the proper names in the Brave New World is impossible to overestimate. Huxley carefully selected and masterly manipulated symbols, which allows us now to explore the relationships between ideas, concepts, beliefs, fathers of these ideas and concepts and the world where they have been (or attempted to be) put to practice. Huxleys use of names efficiently and potently provide metaphors for complex social, economic and political ideas which have merged in the World State in a Hegelian synthesis. His selection of character names successfully conveys the image of that society, presenting its cultural heroes with a literary device the readers of the 1930s easily would have grasped. In the seven decades since the books initial success, these subtle metaphors no longer have the currency they once did. We hope that by re-identifying them we have restored some of the original power Huxley intended for them, so that todays readers will more fully grasp his vision of that Brave New World he warns us against. Murray wrote, Huxleys novel was written deliberately to warn against contemporary trends but also against the whole notion of Utopia itself, the idea that one can design a perfect blueprint and then impose it (2002: 257). We couldnt agree more.
References:
Bergamini, D. 1971. Japans Imperial Conspiracy. New York, N.Y.: Morrow. Crampton, C. G. 1977. Zunis of Cibola. Salt Late City: University of Utah Press. Culler, J. 1981. The Pursuit of Signs. Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Evans, G. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Firchow, P 1974. The Music of Humanity: Point Counter Point, in R. E. Kuehn (ed.) . Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Firchow, P .1984. The End of Utopia. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press. Glasslinks.com: A Look at the History and Highlights of Pilkington, available on line at http://www.glasslinks.com/newsinfo/pilk_history.htm [accessed 31 January 2005). Greenblatt, S. 1965. Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press.
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Gutsell, Jane. 1985. Personal communication on Podsnap and Charles Dickens. Guilford College, Greensboro, N.C. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. 1987. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston, Ma.: Houghton-Mifflin Co. Huxley, A. 1927. Proper Studies. London: Chatto & Windus. Huxley, A. 1928 On the Margin. London: Chatto & Windus. Huxley, A. 1932. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus, and New York: Harper. Huxley, A. 1946. Brave New World. New York: Harper. Huxley, A. 1958. Brave New World Revisited. New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers [Harper Perennial Library edition, 1965] Huxley, A. 1962. Island. New York, N.Y.: Harper. Kater, M. H. 2000. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press. Marovitz, S. 1974. Aldous Huxleys Intellectual Zoo, in Robert E. Kuehn (ed.) Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Murray, N. 2002. Aldous Huxley. An English Intellectual. London: Little, Brown. Paul, W. 1965. Cliffs Notes on Huxleys Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. Lincoln, Ne.: Cliffs Notes. Reimer, Marga 2003. Reference, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available on-line at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference [accessed 15 May 2005]. Sexton, J. 1989. Aldous Huxleys Bokanovsky, in Science Fiction Studies, no 16, pp. 8589. Sherborne, M. (ed.) 2002. York Notes Advanced, Brave New World. 2nd impression. Essex: Pearson Education, Ltd. Wain, J. 1974. Tracts Against Materialism: After Many a Summer and Brave New World, in Robert E. Kuehn (ed.) Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Watts, H. H. 1969. Aldous Huxley. New York, N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, Inc. Websters Biographical Dictionary. 1961 (first edition). Springfield, Ma.: G. & C. Merriam Co. Williamson, J. 1992. Music of Hans Pfitzner. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press.
POSTMODERN ARMOURS: TATTOOS IN SARAH HALLS THE ELECTRIC MICHELANGELO

PIA BRNZEU
University of Timioara
When Anglo-Saxon, medieval or Renaissance characters hide behind metal armatures, they recognize physical limits and willingly relinquish their individuality, becoming anonymous soldiers of an army mechanically forged into co-operative strength. However, they also wear the artistic products of skilled craftsmen: artifacts inscribed with more or less explicit social, historical, religious, or artistic messages. Postmodern simulacra of armours, such as cars or tattoos, have similar functions. In The Electric Michelangelo (2004), Sarah Hall illustrates how tattoos, extended like an armour over the entire body, separate and alienate their wearer, while adding a significant artistic touch that encourages onlookers to think ink. The tattoos transform the body into a tremendously powerful hyperimage, one that associates the mirage of anatomy with the symbolism of an emphatically iconic and sensual body art. Sarah Halls novel is basically the story of two tattooers, Eliot Riley and his disciple, Cyril Parks. Their attitude to life, death, and creation is based on the profound ecstasies and incommunicable satisfactions obtained through the ornamental signs they engrave on bodies, signs extremely powerful in extending corporeal limits and offering a new and more provocative reading of the body-as-microcosm. It is true that even without tattoos the skin provides rich information, but it normally wears involuntary signs. Sarah Hall enumerates scars over failed organs, souvenirs from assaults and from pubescent conditions, race, combined race, sustained dependence on alcohol, diet, and the marks of love, old and new, good and bad. (2004: 236) By contrast, tattoos represent a visual text with a multiplicity of functions, mixing the personality of the tattooer with that of the tattooed and overlapping the class, religious, gender, and cultural characteristics of the ornaments with those of their authors and wearers. An internet essay (www. Vanishingtattoo.com /journeys_end/html) highlights the various contemporary functions of tattoos, seen as symbol of
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religious devotion, decoration for bravery, sexual lure, pledge of love, mark of an outcast, amulet, act of rebellion, mark of allegiance, and personal symbol. In all these cases, the semiotic complexity is overwhelming. They combine human anatomy with fashion and art, morality and science, pleasure and violence, imposing a fundamental reconsideration of body significations. Cyril discovers such complexity on Rileys body, a shocking moment decisive for Cyrils future career. He notices how the cobra snake on Rileys back alternates colours from yellow to black in a sophisticated design, starting along the slight depression between muscle and spinal column and finishing coiled round a dagger above the backbone. In general, the beauty and the heaviness of the ornaments give the impression of an armour, of a new, perfect, custom-fitting clothing (2004: 96) which covers the skin and protects the body like a metal carapace. Riley and Cyril keep the tattoos fresh and bright with Nivea lotion, polishing them like a brass fixture. They also believe that the production of tattoos, like that of armours, is a craft, a trade, a technical enterprise, requiring high professional standards and skills. In order to master those skills, the tattoers have to undergo a hard and serious apprenticeship. Like a smith working with metal and fire, they have to learn how to feel the right temperature of the skin so that the colour be received well, how to choose the ink, and how to deal with customers. It seems that the most difficult reactions are not those of the body, predictable in most cases, but those of the customers, who frequently want the colour or the drawing they cannot have. The greatest attraction is represented by blue, a colour of great instability when left in skin. Cyril himself is obsessed with the challenge of the blue ink, and when he can no longer escape the urge of immersing his body in the colour of the sea and the sky, he voluntarily poisons his foot. Manky with sores, like the ulcerous leg of Winston Smith in 1984 (Orwell 1984), Cyrils foot turns into a symbol of unfulfilled and infectious desires of the soul. There are other similarities between metal armours and inky ones: both render the body simultaneously more and less visible. Although physical contours are abolished, the body attracts more attention through the static extension of human shapes. It is a postmodern experience of extreme originality: it develops a new form of semiosis and requires new variants of literacy, marked off from ordinary utterance by a context which, although combining textuality of all kinds with physicality of all kinds, always preserves uniqueness. Combinations are unrepeatable: even if images are
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sometimes stereotypical, the bodys conditions can never be the same. When Cyril visits Rileys tattooing shop, he is impressed by the way in which customers want to have their bodies covered with sophisticated designs. One customer completely disappears under an assemblage of abstract patterns and cartoon images, reptiles, birds, dragons. // The left arm contained some kind of Eden, the right was full of animals, like Noahs ark. // Cyril had never seen a living thing so camouflaged with art (2004: 83). It will happen quite often that Cyril notices how bodies become raceless, classless, genderless, and ageless under tattoos: wrinkled and sagging parts vanish, colours of races fade away, male or female shapes are changed. The ink armour covers the marks of individuality, unifying and uniformizing the body as part of a totalizing expression of collectivity. In the meantime, original ornamentations insularize the body and provide corporeal uniqueness through the play of textual combinations. The more numerous and original the combinations, the more visible the body, transformed into a collection of maps, postcards, ads, books, or paintings. Sarah Halls numerous references to geography and cartography associate tattoos with maps. Both Riley and Cyril refer to the tattoo ink as if it were a river tight in its bed, establishing the colours of the landscape (2004: 150) and the greatness of the body as corporeal scenery. When sailors from Japan, New Zealand, or Fiji come with whole albums on their backs and ask Cyril to continue the tattooed stories, they bring along maps of the places they have visited, maps the artist easily reads. He recognizes their origins and understands that these maps represent spiritual thresholds for people who have lost their native countries and who have allowed their flesh to become a surface upon which other rules, hierarchies, and myths are reinforced. It is not only that the skin of these sailors turns into a new space of enunciation allowing their bodies to escape the banality of blankness in favour of ornamentational grandeur. Tattooing is a process by which the body is turned into a virtual territory that can be neither occupied nor colonized. Cyril enjoys this utopia of invincibility and deferentially reads the tattoos on his customers bodies before adding, as required, new ornamentations to the portions of flesh still left uncovered. Only after correctly deciphering and understanding the meaning of the foreign images will he venture to extend the already existing text with engravings of his own. Geography and the body, territories and the skin are associations also suggested by Grace, the circus woman who asks Cyril to cover her body
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with hundreds of eyes. The unusual tattooing is caused by the dramatic battle Grace fights over her physique: forcing the on-lookers to feel looked at, she celebrates the identity of her body as her own sovereign state (2004: 308) and finds a new way to win her freedom. When tattoos are words, their wearers become vagabond books (2004: 166). The simplest variant consists merely of proper names; the names of Cyrils parents, for instance, are printed on his chest. On Rileys body, however, whole stories are written, including the first stanza of Blakes poem The Tyger, inscribed in tiny curving script on his right sole. Words on bodies may be ambiguous; names may refer to unknown people; texts may require a longer time to be read; a tattoo may accommodate an unnatural position of the limb: such complications turn the body into a much more interesting channel for the transmission of verbal signs than books or magazines. When tattoos are images, signification is projected on an iconic level, and the body becomes a live canvas, wearing items chosen from a tattooers iconolexis. Many such items are mentioned in the novel: military motifs, indecent drawings, naked women, religious symbols, portraits of presidents, hearts, flames of fire, flowers, felines, fish, snakes, swallows, butterflies, dragons, mermaids, angels, and objects of all kinds. Although large, the visual vocabulary is still too narrow to capture all the joys and sorrows of life and death, as the ambitious Cyril desires. For him, body ornaments are not merely marks on skin; they have something primal, buried in the psyche (2004: 163), something provocative, beautiful, mysterious, violent:
His trade was about conveying meaning, about visual abbreviation, an indication of what elements a creature was comprised. It was a nonverbal language. It had inherent meaning. How many war signs and symbols had he tattooed? A thousand, more? How many predatory markings designed to elicit terror, how much hostile camouflage, how many death banners, daggers, skulls, slogans, how much battle pride? (2004: 147).
Even simple things like a name, a figure, or a heart represent for Cyril the symbols of his customers souls. Thus, iconicity implies a lot of symbolic import: this polyvalent semiotic process imposes a new relationship between images and corporeality. When he confesses that Symbols are powerful. They convey a lot without words (2004: 270), Cyril feels that images speak an intimate and colourful language (2004: 78), encoding a peculiar speech of identity by translating experience into colour and shape.
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He catches the customers stories and translates them into paintings; he is allowed into their secrets, into the pleasant or brutal events the customers want to have recorded on their bodies like a photograph album or a picture diary. Cyril is a funnel through which confidences and lives passed (2004: 148), having the difficult position of someone who is required to refashion the essence of a persons most intimate experiences into quick bodily information. Like all other tattooers, he is a kind of pipe, a vessel, through which encoded meanings flow, like water, from one mind to another, illustrating Reddys drainpipe view on language or the idea of an artist as a conduit metaphor (1978: 56). Whether degenerate or honourable, debased or illuminated, messages characterize both authors and readers: accordingly, in Cyrils opinion, a tattoo says more about a fellow looking at it than about the man who has it on his back. It is thus obvious that body ornamentation influences the ways in which all the characters in Sarah Halls novel think and live. The contact with both the exterior world and their own selves is established through images projected on bodies. On the one hand, tattoos activate senses and develop what Hegel termed sense-certainty (1977: 58). On the other hand, image utterance and intimacy allow a profound emergence into self-consciousness. Both tattoers and customers develop a new psychic structure based on the specific forms of communicability and desirability generated by body images. It is true that many ornamental tattoos are stereotypical, laconic, and misleading. Also, they also differ according to the geographical and cultural background of the tattooer and tattoed; such differences become noticeable in the novel chiefly when Cyril moves to America, attracted by the huge possibilities available there to continue his work. In America he discovers that, unlike the British, Americans replace thoughts with emotions and strongly require spectacle, voyeurism, and eccentricity. The tattoos popular in New York Asiatic eyes, hourglass girls, dragons erupting from nowhere seem to Cyril grotesque and bizarre. He also notices a trend for heavy black bordering that gives tatoos a comic cartoon-like shape, the result of a consumerist, macdonaldized approach to the body. Nevertheless, tattooing is in New York the fine art of the place. The tattooer comes to seem a contemporary equivalent of the old portrait painters recording noble faces for posteritys drawing room. He is also respected as an illustrator who can offer a valuable picture gallery even to the poorest
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people. This new attitude heightens Cyrils awareness of being an authentic painter. He refers to Grace as his Sistine chapel (2004: 292) and sees her bare belly stretched across the chair like tight hemp on easel (2004: 270). His painterly hands (2004: 242) move with care, exerting, as he has learned from Riley, greater pressure over muscles and less pressure over loose skin in order to produce an absolutely uniform line. Even the title of the novel, The Electric Michelangelo, suggests that Cyril fights against the opinion that tattooing is a mere peripheral craft, not connected to art. Compared to printing, tattooing appears far richer in symbolic implications. When still a young apprentice to a printer, before starting his life long collaboration with Riley, Cyril had realized that printing and tattooing have in common the distribution of ink, but while the former is dealing with the dead, the latter is dealing with living people. It gains the mysterious energy of life, and therefore it is more attractive to Cyril than reproducing calligraphy, an insipid, uninspired art. (2004: 76) While the printers shop is like Morecambe, the limited, ignorant provincial town in which they live, Rileys tattooing booth is for Cyril a place of magic. Here something is added to the customers body, something timeless and beyond adornment. It is the ultimate, final decoration, offered for the rest of ones life (2004: 82), a decoration yearning for eternity, trying to stop the perishable nature of flesh. It is precisely for this reason that Riley compares himself to Van Gogh and feels obliged to bestow his extraordinary gift upon the world. Afraid that his art might vanish once he dies, he chooses Cyril as an apprentice and forces a long and painful initiation upon the boy. The initiation starts one disappointing summer in the early 1920s, when Cyril is allowed only to mix ink, to fill needles, and to take payment from the customers. Because many of his early tattoos are poorly ground or drawn at the wrong angle, the child has to exercise on a pigs head for days on end. Riley wants his apprentice to learn the tradition from its beginning to its end and to respect it as a rigorous art. He does not let Cyril work until he is sure that the boy has the right hand. Moreover, Cyril is obliged to start with his own body in order to become conscious of the responsibility involved in using a human canvas. Skin is neither paper nor wood; it cannot be thrown away when spotted, muddled, or mistaken. A firm hand is needed, and Cyril has to train it on no other body but his own. As a result, when he performs his first tattoo on a customer, he is very concentrated, careful, and concerned with his job: He coloured in his first black-bordered image, bottom corner up to top
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so as not to smear the transfer, working in a small pool of ink, steadily, interpreting lines beneath it. // And his mind rushed out to all the aspects of chromatic nature, and came back within the image he was making. (2004: 131). In order to make Cyril improve as a tattooer, Riley forces him to visit all the artists in Lancaster and Blackpool to see how not to do it (2004: 98). When he returns, he has to listen to his masters long lectures about favourite artists, including Raphael, Michelangelo, Blake, Courbet and Manet. Rileys lessons are informative, accurate, and attractive, giving Cyril the cultural background necessary to become aware of a long line of predecessors, who, once recognized as masters, will protect his work against kitsch. Cyril is thus included within an impressive canon of great painters, many of whom, like Michelangelo and Blake, were also engravers, sculptors, and poets. Cyril the apprentice both accepts and resists Rileys extraordinary personality. Riley is like a father to Cyril, but also like a force of nature, like an earthquake bending a river, a volcano scarring mountains with lava or lightning striking tree bark, like a tattoo on Cys life. (2004: 150). The relationship master-disciple itself is transformed into a tattoo in this novel, conveying a similar effect of pride and pain. Rileys severity and stubbornness has positive effects on Cyril, who soon understands that in order to be successful he has to imitate the many-sidedness of the Renaissance artists and to transform his job into a complex intertextual art. He also realizes that he will become a central knot in an important chain of decorators and that, consequently, when he is old he will have to transmit his art to the younger generation in order to save it. When he reaches the end of his career, he will also choose a disciple, but unlike Riley, he will prefer a woman, introducing, for the first time, a female artist into the world of tattooers. Most remarkable of all in this novel is the way in which body art establishes the iconic identity of postmodern people. Although tattooing is probably as old an art as humanity itself (it was discovered on the body of Otzi, the prehistoric man of 3,500 years ago and on many Egyptian mummies), iconic identity is a recent concept. Although the body obviously becomes a message carrier, it is not at all clear if the tattoo is the message of the tattooers, who do the ornamentation, of the tattooed persons, who choose it, or of the body, whose contours and shapes are part of the image. Who is the real transmitter and who the addressee? Is the tattooed person a transmit-
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ter, a mere channel, or both? Three more distinction-blurring characteristics should be noticed at the level of the body-image combination: the iconic signs are projected onto a living canvas that has a distinct dynamism of its own; they are enriched or deformed by signs belonging to body language, i.e. a different visual non-iconic code; and they establish a certain relationship between mutable meanings and immutable signs, because the symbolism of the tattoos may change over time, but the shape cannot be modified. The inscribed flesh is forever imprisoned in its own desire to become art. Sarah Halls complex excursion into the art of tattooing makes a body with blank skin seem incomplete, poor, and over-simplified. The readers discover the new aesthetics established by tattooing and understand that if by drawing speech painters give colour and body to thoughts, tattooers and decorators, those who recover and repair skin, give colour and thoughts to bodies. As if in atonement, their signs of ink seem to command the forgiveness of the past and the salvation of the future for all the persons implied in this most strange communicational process: authors of ornaments, tattoo wearers, and readers.
References
www. Vanishingtattoo.com /journeys_end/html Hall, Sarah. 2004. The Electric Michelangelo. London: Faber and Faber. Hegel, F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orwell, G. 1984. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reddy, M. 1978, The Conduit Metaphor, in Orton, A. (ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 4562.
DANDY SANS FRONTIRES OSCAR WILDE & MATEIU CARAGIALE

CRISTINA CHEVEREAN
The Dandy-figure, both as a literary icon and as a cultural given throughout the centuries, has always been subject to ardent critical debate and controversy. Within the British sphere, Brummell, Byron, Beardsley, Beerbohm, Whistler carry the torch held by their French counterparts, Baudelaire, Balzac, Custine, dOrsay, Sue, Vach (cf. Babei 2004: 130160 passim). Although different in background and manifestations, all these individual characters are reunited by their affiliation to the simultaneously vague and enchanting, highly utopian yet strongly personalized worldwide institution of Dandyism. Protean, multiform, complex, this ineffable trend projects a myriad variants, meant to confuse as well as impose standards of living and thinking in the world. Defying all labels, yet creating its own lot, Dandyism falls into what researchers have chosen to place in between the self-assumed devotion to a doctrine and the instinctive subscription to a historically and geographically fluid pattern of behavior. The present paper does not set itself to map out a concept the definitions of which have been excessively speculated upon, but rather to illustrate its applicability within the sphere closest to our knowledge and perception the Romanian literary scene. While Oscar Wilde represents the epitome of Dandyism at the end of the 19th century, brilliantly voicing and embodying the joint creeds of aestheticism and decadence, a less known but none the less remarkable character plays a similar part in what was (and still is) considered to be a less sophisticated side of Europe. Mateiu Caragiale transfers Dandy elegance and affectation into the Bucharest setting of the early 1900s, translating them into a lifestyle and a body of work worthy of more attention and recognition than actually received so far. Thus, my aim is that of popularizing this intriguing profile by attaching it to that of a more than illustrious predecessor, the Oscar (Belford 2000: 5) the Wit, the Sinner, the Confessor.
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The most challenging issues connected to these two bohemian writers and to the Dandy paradigm in general are, probably, those regarding a particular kind of identity structure, a carefully arranged and minutely composed shield against an often aggressive and unsatisfactory outside world. The Dandy aspires to project an aesthetically perfect outer image in order to place himself within the illusory realms of ultimate beauty. Behind the mask, however, the discontinuities of a troubled nature never cease to unfold. In a 1894 letter to Philip Houghton, a young artist, Wilde confesses that his postures are survival strategies: To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely it is not wise to show ones heart to the world and as seriousness of manner is the disguise of the fool, folly in its exquisite modes of triviality and indifference and lack of care is the robe of the wise man. In so vulgar an age as this, we need masks. (in Schmidgall 1994: 21) From the point of view of putting on an act in order to get through life in a safer, lighter and more pleasant manner, Mateiu Caragiale proves a master himself: Ovidiu Cotru unravels the writer as the absolute histrionic character, who pushes theatrical vocation to the uppermost limit of tragic paroxysm, always hiding behind appearances in order to preserve inner freedom (1977: 89). In Dandy-terms, this translates into an exacerbation of the visual side of ones own existence, into the creation of a sartorial faade so flawless that it can both dissimulate and compensate for inner void or mere discomfort. Oscar Wildes striking public appearances, inevitably accompanied by the green carnation, white or purple dress, gloves, walking-stick and other typical items of the dandy-wardrobe, have become notorious over the years and appear in various pictures. As for Mateiu Caragiale, his appurtenance to a less financially fortunate personal and national background made him no less of an exquisite and utterly bizarre presence on the streets of Bucharest, as recollected by Cezar Petrescu: A lonely and strange man was sitting on the next chair; he had shown no sign of impatience. Frozen, absent, his chin propped against a stiff, high, old-fashioned collar, his eyes glazing over, he adopted the hieratic attitude we all knew from the pale photographs taken in between 19001914, before the deluge [] Sitting with his legs crossed, hat placed upside down on one of his knees and gloves thrown inside it, leaning against his high cane, he seemed decided to wait [] His jacket was imperceptibly worn-out, but extremely well cut out of expensive fabric. His
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trousers vaguely reminded me of the color of a ducks egg. On his tie, under the large knot, he was wearing a pin, in the obsolete fashion of Oscar Wildes and Aurelien Scholls dandyism. He had a stone ring on one hand, another stone ring and a voluminous cameo on the other (in George 1981: 71, my translation). There is hardly any need to emphasize the accuracy of the comparison between the two writers tastes in what fashion is regarded. However, while Wilde stood out as the visual symbol of his age, Caragiale was to remain a freak to the public eye, one of the few dandies to walk the mysterious Bucharest nights. (Iovan 2002: 66) The Romanian apostle of aesthetic surfaces stood far fewer chances than the notorious Irishman to fascinate the circles of his time, which were dominated by the gross humor of merchants rather than by the refinement of the beaux. It thus becomes even more touching to notice his devotion to his self-established standards, his genuine sufferance at not being able to replace his suede gloves or boots. Nevertheless, the impression he created was one of mere oddity: Barbu Delavrancea confessed to having been disagreeably impressed by the youths powdered appearance at a horse-race, while an acquaintance noted the way in which his solemn gait and the despising expression on his pale, cold, black-eyed face imposed his lack of naturalness on everybody, as soon as he walked in. (in Iovan 2002: 5253) If to the early 20th century middle-class Bucharest family Mateiu represented nothing but a rarity, his peculiar ensemble of mannerisms is not in the least extraordinary if placed within the context of the Western aesthetic canon. Oscar Wilde found himself at home in the Yellow, fin-de-sicle atmosphere, which consciously relied upon artificiality as a guiding principle to impose the games of illusion upon reality, transforming it. However tragic Wildes fate might have eventually turned out, his downfall was not caused by public opprobrium at a life-style that presupposed rebelliousness, immorality, pretence, narcissism and elegant self-waste. Had it not been for the exposure of his homosexuality, the world would never have objected to a dandified way of living which, in its most uncomfortable and paradoxical statements, was still both entertaining and representative for the highly hypocritical upper class the writer was conveniently criticizing from within. From this perspective, Mateius defence of his own Dandyism was much more of a heroic act than Wildes. Not benefiting from the advantages
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of an aristocratic background, he desperately tried to secure a proper connection to European nobility, mystifying himself into believing in a genealogy of his own making. The main advantage of his self-proclamation as Mathieu Jean Caragiale, comte de Karabey, was that of allowing him access into a world that Wilde himself knew extremely well: that of the double. Both the Romanian and the Irish writer had a skeleton in their closet: Oscar was ashamed of his own instincts, Mateiu of his ancestry. The solution adopted by both was that of living a double, compensatory life, an existence against the grain, one in which their perpetual defiance of all common standard and sense was meant to distract attention from the real, inner and psychological issues they were forced to face by themselves. Such discrepancy between reality and appearance explains the appeal of the Dandy pattern to the two highly sensitive aesthetes. By means of a theoretical and behavioral framework they had the opportunity to enrich, it gave them the chance to justify their constant toying with personal determinations. Snobbery, fetishism, narcissism, personal adornment and disguise, bookishness, anachronism, defiant immorality and corrupt enjoyment of lifes futilities form a series of masks by means of which both body and spirit are wrought out into a seemingly perfect human masterpiece. Self-creation and self-molding into a living work of art is the purpose of both the Irish and the Romanian Dandy: while Mateiu Caragiale is regarded by his critics as a chef-doeuvre of his own spirit (Iovan 2002: 8), Wilde owns up to his convictions himself: No artist recognizes any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament. The artist seeks to realize in a certain material his immaterial idea of beauty, and thus to transform an idea into an ideal. That is why an artist makes things. The artist has no other object in making things. The real point here, however, as in so many of the tales themselves, is that one must play in both the ludic and the thespian sense oneself. (in Schmidgall 1994: 168) Becoming an observer of his own life, standing out as the passive demiurge of his own fate is the chief preoccupation of the Dandy. With Wilde and Caragiale, the cause of the last gleam of heroism in times of decadence (Baudelaire qtd. in Sturgis 1995: 116) is fiercely defended, in all its elaborately frivolous details. As a singular attempt to establish new elites at a time of uniformity, Dandyism becomes an indelible attribute of the lives of two writers who embrace its spectacular side. If one were to randomly open Giuseppe Scaraffias Petit dictionnaire du Dandy, one would
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undoubtedly be astonished at the frequency of issues our two protagonists share: superiority, solitude, precociousness, passivity, mystery, mirror, irony, impassibility, image are only a few of the objects and attitudes that both attract and define the Dandy and, implicitly, our writers and their heroes. Courtship of the public in various, usually subversive manners, is the means by which the Dandy gets recognition for his originality and exceptionality. The assertive Wilde is a master of self-advertisement, transforming Dandyism into a brand name and himself into the main product to be marketed. Meanwhile, the shier but not less ambitious Caragiale proves to be quite a skilful player on the social scene as well, convincingly lobbying for himself in order to acquire certain distinctions or positions, and even going to the length of forging his birth certificate in order to be able to take advantage of the name of a late father whom he had discarded for a lifetime. (Oprea 1979: xxxii) Nevertheless, while both writers are perfectly aware of the advantages of establishing a recognizable public persona by means of astonishing their audiences, Caragiale stops at the dark, cold, demonic representations of the Dandy, rejecting spontaneity (Oprea 1979: xxxviii), practicing literature as an exorcism of personal demons (Cotru 1977: 115). Wildes personality is more complex in what self-fashioning and metamorphosis are concerned. Matthew Sturgis Cult of Celebrity captures his image before the notorious issuance of Dorian Gray as follows: By 1889, the only arts of which he could claim complete mastery were self-promotion and conversation [] Yet already there was a rift within the body of his achievement. For although Wilde always wore the mask of the dandy-artist, it had two distinct aspects the poetic and the ironic. Just as there was a bifurcation between Wildes personality and his character, so within his self-created persona there was a further division. His work already showed the distinctive marks of this divide: his poems and plays strained after seriousness and intensity, his lectures and short stories (being closer to his conversation) sparkled with paradoxical wit. In the former mode Wilde was self-conscious in his quest for effect and his desire to be taken seriously; in the latter he was self-aware and self-deprecating. The ideas and practice of the decadent tradition would make appeal to both these sides of Wildes artistic personality. (Sturgis 1995: 117) However multiform a creature Oscar Wilde himself proved to be, encompassing a larger scope of interest fields and manifestations than any other of his Dandy fellows, the basic coordinates of the universe that
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Caragiale melancholically revives in early 1900s Bucharest remain unchanged, as enumerated by Murray G. H. Pittock: The manifesto-makers of the fin-de-sicle milieu liked to establish central metaphors for aspects of thought which shared common premises: the superiority of the artist and his art to the taste and the surroundings of society; the rejection of progressive, mechanistic culture; the subjectivity and isolation of the self; and the hunt for beauty. It was the hunt for beauty, especially beauty in the strange or exotic form, which most centrally animated Aesthete, Symbolist, and Decadent alike. The visible pursuit of beauty, the outward sign of an inward ideology, was well suited to Aesthetic or Decadent notions of display as a central value. (1993: 5556) Once more, Mateiu Caragiale falls into the patterns already defined by a generation that was already flourishing at the date of his birth (March 25th, 1885), intimating their fascination and projecting it with a kind of severe nostalgia upon his own life and work. Once more, he steps on the path opened by the man whose openly elitist stands from the Picture of Dorian Gray must have resonated with the inner nature of the rejected, abandoned child of a famous father. Forced to give up any hope of being the legitimate inheritor of fame and fortune, he channeled his undisputed creative energies into a compensatory, independent universe. The dandiacal theories indirectly expressed by Wilde in his novel seem to both inspire and resonate his state of mind: Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. Ones own life that is the important thing. As for the lives of ones neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt ones moral views about them, but they are not ones concern. Besides, Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of ones age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of grossest immorality [] I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich. (1994: 92) Beautiful sins and beautiful things are commonly held by Mateiu and Oscar, to the same extent to which their inclinations are shared by their characters. Their writings display a highly autobiographical dimension, their cases becoming the more interesting as they witness the intermingling of life and art, the two sides of the Dandy mirror. Both with Wilde and with Caragiale, the reader is put in the position to observe exhibit-characters,
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aesthetes whose refinement, love for jewelry, ornament, clothes, interior decoration, expensive books and escapist sceneries places them in the window of the times old curiosity shop. Aubrey de Vre, the fleeting evening star from Remember prefigures Pantazi, Pirgu and Paadia, a triangle of male wanderers through nocturnal Bucharest which instantly brings to mind Oscar Wildes self-acknowledged alter-egos: Dorian, Henry and Basil. The use of literary masks for various facets of the creative persona is a common dandy technique: the writers use their characters as skilful disguises for their own less comfortable or hardly avowable attitudes, beliefs, and preferences. Wildes identification with his heroes has not only been speculated upon, but also admitted by the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray himself, in the famous letter passage stating Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps. (qtd. in Schmidgall 1994: 22) Gary Schmidgalls comment in this respect is extremely pertinent: Oscar thought he was and was indeed like Hallward. He, too, was an artist hopelessly and ruinously infatuated with beautiful young men. The world thought him the witty, cynical, risqu dandy Lord Henry. And like all gay men he longed to be in another age! an irresistibly gorgeous object of desire like Dorian. (1994: 23) As for Mateius crai, their conjugated profiles cover both the nobility claims and the degenerate corruption of the bohemian life in Curtea Veche, both the dark fantasies and the lofty dreams of their demiurgical father. Since the young Caragiale regards creation as a perpetual forgery, as the minute correction and adornment of written material, it is easy to decipher his game of alter-egos; the characters are connected by a self-professed commonality of features which unites them in a twin-like, recognizable dimension. What is even more interesting and Wilde-like, is the authors own mirroring in his ink and paper counterparts, the dissolution of the real man into self-made veils of images and words. Alexandru Opreas analysis is telling in this respect: The writer does not only present the decline of aristocracy, but, simultaneously, the fading out of this world from his own dreams. His own trial is brought to court. The characters may share features with people the author once knew, but their inner structure has changed, assimilating and symbolizing Mateius complex emotions [] If there is indeed one character whose face can be recomposed in its full complexity out of a careful read-
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ing of the novel, then this character is no other than Mateiu himself. (1979: xl, my translation) Mateiu and Oscar, two dandies who gave birth to dandies in their own turn, have managed to fascinate generations of readers by means of the intricate texture of their life-meets-art existential and fictional cloth. Each of their characters accounts for a different side of the Dandy posture: living rooms, and taverns, dinner tables and late night confessions, fancy costume and made up visage will constitute the generous topic of a further investigation as to the ways in which the two writers live out their inner beliefs.
References
Babei, Adriana. 2004. Dandysmul. O istorie. Iai: Polirom. Belford, Barbara. 2000. Oscar Wilde. A Certain Genius. New York: Random House. Cioculescu, B. 1994. Studiu introductiv, in Mateiu I. Caragiale. Opere. B. Cioculescu (ed.). Bucureti: Editura Fundaiei Culturale Romne, pp. vlvi. Cotru, O. 1977. Opera lui Mateiu I. Caragiale. Bucureti: Minerva. George, A. 1981. Mateiu I. Caragiale. Bucureti: Minerva. Iovan, I. 2002. Mateiu Caragiale. Portretul unui dandy romn. Bucureti: Compania. Oprea, A. 1979. Mateiu I. Caragiale. Dosar al existenei. Un personaj. Bucureti: Muzeul Literaturii Romne, Biblioteca Manuscriptum. Pittock, M. G. H. 1993. Spectrum of Decadence. The Literature of the 1890s. London and New York: Routledge. Scaraffia, G. 1995. Mic dicionar al Dandyului in B. dAurevilly. Dandysmul. Iai: Polirom, pp. 198204. Schmidgall, G. 1994. The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc. Sturgis, M. 1995. Passionate Attitudes. The English Decadence of the 1890s. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan General Books Ltd. Wilde, O. 1997. Collected Works. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Wilde, O. 1994. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin.
THE SIMULATED BODY IN A GERONTOCRATIC CULTURE: HOMEOSTASIS, GENOME, AND FASHION IN BRUCE STERLINGS HOLY FIRE
KLMN MATOLCSY
University of Debrecen
As Merritt Abash contends, there [is] an extremely small number of pre-twentieth-century works dealing with bodily immortality, but during the last fifty years there has been considerably more literary attention paid to the subject, due both to the vastly expanded popular expectations from science and the overall growth in science fiction output (1985: 20). It is therefore the burden of science fiction, a relatively novel way of speculation and introspection, to invent both allegorical and quasi-scientific modes of life extension. In Bruce Sterlings Holy Fire, methods to extend human life are legion, and most of them concentrate on the body as their object of practice. In Sterlings 1996 novel the confrontation with the technological takes place mainly upon and within the human body. Nevertheless, the cyborgization of the body, outlined in Donna J. Haraways once revolutionary Manifesto for Cyborgs (2001), is presented in an unusual way in the novel: not as cybernetic transcendence of the flesh, but as a radical virtualization of it. The novel features ninety-four-year-old Mia Zeeman, a medical economist, undertaking a radically novel life-extension treatment, NTDCD (Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification). In a society frantically haunted by the memory of several twenty-first-century plagues, NTDCD, far from being utopian-science-fictionally safe and widely available, is very little tried and very expensive; the narrator explains, qualifying for such a lavish upgrade required an intimidating level of personal sacrifice (Sterling 1996: 50). Indeed, through the medical procedure Mia loses something more than her elderly appearance. In the passages on Mias NTDCD treatment, we see essentially the reverse of the initial imagery from Mamoru Oshiis seminal anime Ghost in the Shell. In the anime we observe, or rather, are invited to scrutinize, the cyborg Kusanagis metallic body constructed, hauled and pumped through various pools of vital (or mechanical)
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fluid, her organic muscles, skin, and hair grown on and added at later stages. Kusanagi is elevated to an organic-human level of existence by the mass-productive birth canal. In Holy Fire, Mias body is immersed in similar fluids; however, the process purports not the construction, but the deconstruction, the liquidization of her being through a symbolical return to the uterus:
The next trick, quite an advanced one, was to stop being quite so rigorously multicellular. Mia would be foetally submerged in a gelatinous tank of support fluids. Her internal metabolic needs would be supplied through a newly attached umbilical. Her hair and the skin had to go. [. . .] The skinless body would partially melt into the permeating substance of the support gel. [. . .] The skinless, bloated, and neotenically foetalized patient, riddled with piercings, would resemble an ivory Chinese doll depicting acupuncture sites. (Sterling 1996: 5152)
During this rejuvenation process, Maya loses her human form; she becomes an entirely antiseptic organism, a floating amniotic gel-culture (1996: 52). Apart from that metamorphosis, because she is constructed in the technological womb of a medically-conscious society, her second birth as a young woman is her birth as machine and, more importantly, as the simulacrum of a human. The most radical element of the NTDCD process is a method by which Mias genes are taken one by one and are reinstated, made healthy and young again. In this way, Mias body is technologically reconstructed gene by gene:
On a genetic level, Mias cells would be studied for cumulative replication errors. Precancerous and/or junk-burdened cells would be tagged with artificial antibodies and made the targets for programmed apoptosis. [. . .] The surviving cells would then be treated to a neo-telomeric extension. The telomeric ends of chromosomes were a genetic clock, wearing thin as the human cell approached its Hayflick limit of allowable replications. New telomeric material would be spliced on to the chromosomes, tricking the ageing cells into believing in the fiction of their own youth. (Sterling 1996: 52)
During this treatment Mias body is, essentially, reduced from more than a sum of its parts and becomes equaled, cleanly and hygienically, with her genome. The genome is the totality of genetic information in an organism, contends Haraway in Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture
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(1994: 350). Through NTDCD Mia becomes a totality of information. Haraway in her essay epitomizes the convergence of genomics and informatics:
Much of the history of genetics since the 1950s is the history of the consolidation and elaboration of the equation of gene=information in the context of master-molecule metaphors. I consider this representational practice for thinking about genetics to constitute a kind of artificial-life research itself, where the paradigmatic habitat for life the program bears no necessary relationship to messy, thick organisms. (1994: 350)
Holy Fire goes a step further. It acknowledges the body/genes division as a premise and then gradually re-introduces the fleshy body (Catalano 2000: 1) into the genetic-informational body, the simulacrum of a human being. Exactly this devouring of the fleshy by the computational is what is revealed by the suggestive term of medical upgrade (Sterling 1996: 48). Although not as harsh in its arguments as Jeremy Rifkins Algeny (1983), Holy Fire likewise contends that the secret philosophers stone of extreme longevity or even immortality is the reducing of biological systems to information. Jean Baudrillard argues that the genetic code, where the whole of a being is supposedly condensed because all the information of this being would be imprisoned there [. . .] is an artifact, an operational prosthesis, an abstract matrix (1996: 99). Maya as Mia prefers to call herself after the treatment arises out of Mias informational matrix and thus it is not Mia who equals Maya, but only Mias genome. Holy Fire delivers a fatal blow to self-contended human thinking not dissimilar to Richard Dawkinss selfish gene idea. In The Selfish Gene (1990), Dawkins deconstructs the idea of human will or that of animals, for that matter; it is not the person who acts in any particular way, but his or her genes that act upon an evolutionary intent. Maya in Holy Fire is no longer a person either. Mias genes have gotten hold of Mias personality and have produced the Maya persona. Mayas body is no more than a large database of information-archiving packages, a stockpile of information and of messages, as fodder for data processing (Baudrillard 1996: 99). In Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers, N. Katherine Hayles examines the postmodern and posthuman exchanges between information narratives and bodies of information (2005: par 18), concentrating upon various major writings of cyberpunk fiction, such as William Gibsons
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Neuromancer trilogy, published between 19841988. The special state of the body, she contends, derives from its existence in the virtual worlds, the cyberspace, of computers and VR machines (Hayles 2005). Nevertheless, with the acute expansion and marriage of twentieth-century science and technology, the body has become virtualized not from the outside, by virtual cybernetic dimensions, but from its inner building blocks, the genes. As Evelyn Fox Keller argues,
At the other extreme of realist scientific discourse, human subjects are equally invisible, their material, embodied presence equally ephemeral and inconsequential [. . .] the search of biologists for the building blocks of life leads them into the realm of pure information [. . .] The substantive component of the gene is said to lie in its nucleotide sequence, and that can be stored in data banks and transmitted by electronic mail. (1992: 179)
If Maya is only a virtual Mia a different organism from a human it is reasonable to ask what exactly her taxon is. Maya is a different organism but also a different instance of organism from Mia. As Dr. Rosenfeld informs her, Once you enter your convalescence, youre not going to be the same woman whos sitting here in front of me right now (Sterling 1996: 55). Holy Fire carries on the Doppelgnger idea and extends it in an unusual way. Mias Doppelgnger, Maya, is derived from Mias genome. The NTDCD treatment having finished, we see Maya in the hospital with different medical control-surveillance systems and devices inserted in and upon her body, at the endpoint of a quasi-Biblical creation story:
On the seventh day, she realized that she had once truly been someone called Mia Ziemann, and that there was probably something pretty seriously wrong with her. She didnt feel at all sick, though. She felt terrific, wonderful. [. . .] When she thought seriously about really being Mia Ziemann, however, there was a taste in her mouth like she had bitten her tongue. She felt a peculiar kind of dread, as if Mia Ziemann was hiding in the closet and waiting for dark. So that Mia Ziemann could come out and caper ghostfully around the hospital room. (Sterling 1996: 62)
The rejuvenated girl who thinks of herself as Maya has created herself out of Mias ghostly genes. Because she is genetically modified, or rather, genetically derived from Mia, Maya is a clone. Soon after recovering from NTDCD, furnished with the new personality, the clone escapes from medical surveillance and flies to Frankfurt. Baudrillard in Clone Story discusses the impossible modus vivendi of a
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clone as a cancerous metastasis (1996: 100). In light of this characterization, it is all the more telling that Maya spends her Wanderjahr, her vagabond journey through Europe, under the auspice of wanting to be vivid. Being vivid, being alive, is the desperate and ultimate will of the dead, the unreal, the cancerous cell that should not exist at all. Maya, the tumor cell, is fleeing through Europes biggest postindustrial cities, searching for a life of its own. Exactly due to this transgressive mode of existence of the clone, Maya reads as a special kind of character in the story, a ghastly half-figure from the literary fantastic. Vividness is the program of Europes youth, those oppressed by the gerontocratic system. Vivid people, or artifice people, are young revolutionaries who oppose the establishments decorporizing tendencies or corpocentrism, for that matter the robbing of humankind from a youthful future through the endless rejuvenation of old bodies, through the perpetuation of the techno-medical system. Paul, the Praha groups ideologist, wages war on an ageing human civilization which pretends to a utopian tranquility but is secretly traumatized beyond all possibility of healing (Sterling 1996: 155). Tom Shippey argues that Sterlings fiction contains an obsession with the termination and survival of systems, with the perpetuation of cultural legacies and the construction of such legacies through bricolage, the assembling of novelties out of parts of broken systems (1992: 218). In Holy Fire, the perpetuation of gerontocracy is possible through the technological corroboration of the genomes interminable genealogy, the incarcerating history of the genome as information database. In the carceral of the genome the status quo is maintained by the homeostasis of gerontocracy. The theory of cybernetics defines homeostasis as the self-perpetuation of systems (not merely computational ones). In Holy Fire, the homeostasis of gerontocracy sets eternal time. Maya, in spite of her involvement in the gerontocratic system, is after a different version of fulfillment. Through her rejuvenation treatment she doesnt wish to support the status quo but, on the contrary, to exit it. She is in search of something similar to Henry David Thoreaus idea of the eternal moment in Walden: Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains (1981: 178). In flight from the homeostatic system, Maya enters the world of vividness and artifice through photography. Trying to be vivid, Maya attempts to
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cast away the ill history, the annulling power, of the genome and to liberate her fleshy body and her fleshy mind. In a futile attempt, she means to anchor herself in the moment through photography, to escape from the shackles of the history of the body as a clone, a fleshless copy out of a medical database. Although she becomes the disciple of Josef Novak, a master photographer, she never manages to take any really artistically valuable pictures (Sterling 1996: 20911). As Helene Vauxcelles-Serusier, the police spy says, Art doesnt come out of a metabolic support tank. If art came out of support tanks, it would make a complete mockery of genuine talent and inspiration. Those photographs are banal (1996: 280). Mayas wish to dive deep into an eternal moment is not born on her Wanderjahr, though, but in an instinctual moment after the NTDCD treatment, when she acts upon the inexplicable urge to escape from the medical surveillance machines and the watching eyes of Mias ghost. Even more formative, however, is the decision she makes just before undertaking the treatment. One night she experiences the holy fire when putting up a young vagabond, Brett, in her apartment:
And now she was looking at a drugged and naked stranger on her carpet, and that sacred moment had come back to her, still exactly what it was, what it had been, what it would always be. This stranger was not her daughter, and this moment of the century was not that other ticking moment, but none of that mattered. The holy fire was more real than time, more real than any such circumstance. She wasnt merely having a happy memory. She was having happiness. She had become happiness. (Sterling 1996: 46)
As the joy full of mysterious numinous meaning overflows within her, she takes the decisive step toward her NTDCD treatment (1996: 46). In this sense, the treatment is an escape route out of the gerontocratic system, because Mia thinks this one would bring her youth and the holy fire not for an eternity, but only for a couple of years that is, for a truly vivid moment:
No matter how carefully she guarded herself, life was too short. Life would always be too short. Mia heard her own voice in the silent air. When the sentence struck her ears, she felt the power of the terrible resolve. An instant decision, sudden unconscious, unsought, but irrevocable: I cant go on like this. (1996: 46)
Despite Mias instinctual wish to be vivid, to cast the framework of the simulated gerontocratic body, NTDCD turns out to be more harmful than
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benevolent. Mayas most important role in Josef Novaks life ultimately is not photography but simple modeling. Her real self remains an image, observed through Novaks lenses:
When Maya saw the raw shots on Novaks notebook screen, she was elated and appalled. Elated because he had made her so lovely. Appalled because Novaks fantasy was so revelatory. Hed made her a bewitching atavism, a subterranean queen of illicit chic for a mob of half-monstrous children. Novaks glamour was a lie that told the truth. (1996: 211)
In Holy Fire photography, modeling, and the virtual body all collate in the images of fashion: the novel is flooded with descriptions of fashion items and styles. Modeling for Maya, however, becomes a natural job. When she starts to work illegally for a boutique in Stuttgart, her employer, Therese, takes her to a studio where, out of admiration of her near-perfect body, the artificers make a foam model of it. Mayas body becomes a model in reality: her body turns into a physically possessed, manipulated and consumed object, a functional object, a forum of signs (Baudrillard 1998: 131, 133). Novaks photos and the foam model, of course, as if in an endless fractal, further perpetuate the image of Mayas simulacrum of a body. As Baudrillard argues, The fashion model is [. . .] an abstraction (1998: 133). Fashion in Holy Fire purports to be an art form, but one that only further replicates the gerontocratic ideology. Even though Maya wishes to vivify herself, to enliven and inhabit her simulated body, through becoming a member of the Praha group, their ideology also turns out too much to hinge upon the idea of the deconstructed, simulated body. As Paul says, The destruction of the human condition offers us an avalanche of novel creative approaches (Sterling 1996: 154). Accordingly, Paul and his fellow-revolutionaries keep on playing with novel technologies in virtuality, like the furoshiki a woven display screen [. . . a] flexible all-fabric computer (1996: 124) or the virtuality pool. Benedetta, another group member points to the irreversible rupture with brutal precision: See, Maya? Youre not human. Were not human. But we can understand. Were artifice people. (1996: 271) One of the most powerful images in the novel is the virtuality pool itself. It is, in fact, a fluidic VR machine that people can dive and swim around in, meanwhile inhaling liquid that contains micro-circuits transmitting virtual images. As Paul explains, Its a buoyant, breatheable, immersive virtuality (1996: 272). The virtuality pool is indeed immersive. It obscures
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the body, and transforms it into a pool of information. In Mayas case, the information flow of her genetic being is matched up with the information flow in the milliards of tiny data-transmitting particles in the fluid. Maya becomes a flux of information in the utter virtualization of the body and the self. It is no wonder then that Maya, so desperately in search of her vivid self, nearly drowns in the pool in a black-out a total loss of self in the whirlpool totality of data. Gerontocrats strive to forever deter the final point of a human life, death; they wish to extend life into infinitude. Benedetta and the Praha group, too, have similar theories. They support with statistics the idea that theirs is the first generation that is going to live forever. In gerontocratic life-extension, Benedettas theories and Mayas vividness concept are motivated by an analogous urge. All are exit paths out of time, the rigid history of the genome, but they do not share the same methods. Mayas Thoreauian moment is the only method that attests to the presence of eternity within the present time. At the end of the novel we see Maya wandering contentedly along the American highways. On one of her journeys she meets with her ex-husband David whom she has not seen for a very long time. When she finally takes a picture of David, she appears to acknowledge her dark counterpart, the raving unconscious called Mia, and fuses the simulated Maya body with the Mia mind. In his essay Why Was I Born If It Wasnt Forever?, Carl B. Yoke contends: Only recently have we come to realize that if we are to live our lives in psychological health we must find sincere means of dealing with our own extinction. He goes on to epitomize Carl Jungs idea that it is hygienic to discover in death a goal toward which we can strive and that shrinking away from it is unhealthy and abnormal (1985: 7). In Jungs terminology, life-extension practices are deviations from an ethical norm. Gerontocratic society is secretly traumatized beyond all possibility of healing (Sterling 1996: 155), it becomes obsessed with [life] as an end rather than a means (Collings 1985: 29). It is exactly the sorrowful burden of our deaths that enhances the apprehension of beauty and art, of the necessity of relationships and love for each other the holy fire in us, human beings. Maya understands that as she manages to take her first really vivid shot of her ex-husband: She lifted the camera. She framed him. She knew suddenly that this was it. This was going to be her first really good picture. [. . . ] So real and so beautiful. / The camera clicked (Sterling 1996: 296). Mayas
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Thoreauian photographic moment reveals the method that acknowledges death as an ever-present factor in life. That is to say, Thoreaus eternal moment is a death-moment, a stepping out of endless time, an unusual manifestation of the human death-wish. Mia-Maya, the living dead, after her long struggle, a quest through the Limbo of codes and flickering signifiers, finally acquires life. She succeeds to anchor herself in the eternal moment, to joyously unite with her fleshy body ultimately and forever in the shadow of a fleshy death. Mia/Mayas journey through states of being as clone, model, artist and the countries of a posthuman Europe may be read as a twenty-first-century rendition of Apuleiuss Golden Ass. Following a path similar to the picaresque structure of the ancient Roman novel, Sterlings work re-thematizes the most traumatic point of all cyberpunk fiction: the fusion of human and machine. Whether exercising transformations among simulated bodies or journeying to various landscapes of gerontocracy and posthuman existence, Mia has to battle the virtuality of the machine time and again. Summarizing that, the narrator muses upon Daniel:
Hed done his best with allowable technology, but the allowable technology was just barely enough. Machines were so evanescent. Machines just flitted through the fabric of the universe like a fit through the brain of God, and in their wake people stopped being people. But people didnt stop going on. (Sterling 1996: 296)
The expression going on brandishes a double edge here: on the one hand, it suggests the continuation of the Faustian bargain between human and machine, but, on the other, it also means the self-perpetuation of the human race. Preservational sentiment or not, posthuman life is inextricably woven into the fabric of technology and vice versa. Bojana Kunst likewise contends:
The ways of shaping the bodys visibility, transparency, organization, functionality, borders [. . .] reveal themselves through the aesthetic mediation present in the organic/technological relationship in which science and art participate in the production of the bodily image, and forming its geography and place. (2005: par 2)
Holy Fire re-theorizes this geography, projects it upon the map of a posthuman Europe, and collates it with the biological, religious, and artistic renditions of life and of death, ultimately diagnosing the human condition for the new millennium.
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References
Abrash, M. 1985. Is There Life After Immortality?, in Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler (eds.) Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport, Ct: Greenwood, pp. 1928. Baudrillard, J. 1996. Clone Story, in Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 95104. Baudrillard, J. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: Sage. Catalano, J. 2000. Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre. New York: Routledge. Collings, M. R. 1985. The Mechanics of Immortality, in Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler (eds.). Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, pp. 2938. Dawkins, R. 1990. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, W. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace. Gibson, W. 1986. Count Zero. London: Gollancz. Gibson, W. 1988. Mona Lisa Overdrive. London: Gollancz. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2005. Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers, [Online] Available: http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Flick.html Haraway, Donna J. 1994. Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture, or Its All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States, in William Cronon (ed.). Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: Norton, pp. 32166. Haraway, Donna J. 2001. A Manifesto for Cyborgs, in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 226999. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1992. Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science. New York: Routledge. Kunst, Bojana. 2005. The Presence of the Body between the Organic and the Artificial, in Orlando: Associazione delle donne. [Online] Available: http://orlando.women.it/cyberarchive/files/kunst.htm Rifkin, J. 1983. Algeny. New York: Viking. Shippey, T. 1992. Semiotic Ghosts and Ghostliness in the Work of Bruce Sterling, in George Slusser and Tom Shippey (eds.). Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 208222. Sterling, B. 1996. Holy Fire. London: Millenium. Thoreau, H. D. 1981. Walden. 1854. In Joseph Wood Krutch (ed.). Walden and Other Writings. New York: Bantam. Yoke, C. B. 1985. Why Was I Born If It Wasnt Forever?, in Carl B. Yoke and Donald M. Hassler (eds.). Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, pp718. Yoke, C.B., and D. M Hassler. 1985. Death and the Serpent: Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
INTOLERABLE BODIES IN GEORGE ORWELLS BURMESE DAYS

ABA-CARINA PRLOG
This paper deals with the relations between the colonisers and the colonised in Burma, as presented in George Orwells novel Burmese Days (1984). Set in the 1930s, before India gained its independence, the book focuses on the difference between the Burmese and the English in their bodily/mental perception of one another. The main character of the novel, Flory, could be located somewhere in between the two groups, due to his darker skin, marked face (he has a birthmark on one cheek) and open mindedness. Untolerated or rejected bodies appear in the book as a result of the British policy in Burma. This relation to the body develops as a consequence of the inappropriate relations existing either between races (Oriental vs. European) or within ones own race (Flory, the poor, the beggars). The atmosphere is a period of unrest in Burma, caused by the establishment of a diarchy in India, which excluded the Burmese, as G. Bowker explains in his biography of Orwell (Bowker 2003: 80). Eventually this system was extended to Burma, but unfortunately too late; a nationalist rebellion broke out in the Burmese territory. The book itself treats the rebellion only in part; it centers more on Anglo-Indians trying to cope with the changing times. Bowker (2003: 80) As a police officer in Burma, Orwell had often been mistreated by the local people, who would spit betel-juice on him while walking in the street; also, he was jostled by youngsters, fouled at soccer, etc. (Bowker 2003:84). He confessed to having been hated by large numbers of people (Hitchens 2002: 11) and to feeling guilty about his presence there:
I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically and secretly, of course I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly
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than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. (Orwell qtd. in Hitchens 2002: 12).
In the novel, Flory experiences the same feelings and dissatisfaction as Orwell had in his days. He is the imperial agent in Burma, and he becomes utterly depressed by the lack of civilised living conditions and of young European women. He feels lost and hopeless, and tries to suspend his conscience and memory in liquor. His chaotic and useless life is also determinedly marked by the birthmark on his face:
The first thing one noticed in Flory was a hideous birthmark stretching in a ragged crescent down his left cheek, from the eye to the corner of the mouth. Seen from the left side his face had a battered, woebegone look, as though the birthmark had been a bruise for it was a dark blue in colour. He was quite aware of its hideousness. And at all times, when he was not alone, there was a sidelongness about his movements, as he manoeuvred constantly to keep the birthmark out of sight. (Orwell 1984: 16)
For Orwell, ones moral imperfections are engraved upon ones face, as Bowker points it out in his biography: He [Orwell] seemed to believe, as did certain Victorian criminologists, that character is manifest in human physiognomy. [] And when he gave the wretched John Flory a hideous birthmark, his mark of Cain, it signifies not just a flawed complexion but a flawed character, too (Bowker 2003: 140). Because of it and of his slightly darker complexion, Flory feels inferior to his British colleagues. The place that his post-Cartesian body secures for him is consequently somewhere in between his European civilising colleagues and his Indian friends, who are in the process of becoming civilised. Flory seems to hover between the two groups, never fully belonging to either. He always chooses the easier option, the one which poses no threat to him, as when he is supposed to support his friend Veraswami, but decides to sign a paper forbidding the access of the latter to the English Club established in Kyauktada. He does all this because he wants to avoid any direct conflict with Ellis, the most wicked and aggressive of his colleagues. Even though he does not protest against his colleagues evil remarks about the natives looks and mentality, he feels that they are being unfair
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and mean. He is rather hypocritical in what his relation with them is concerned because, after the time spent in their company, he goes to see Dr. Veraswami and complains of all the things they said, with which he did not dare disagree openly. Though cowardly by nature, he tries to mediate the tense relations existing between his English and his Burmese colleagues and friends, and in the end he is caught in the middle, between one partys narrow-mindedness and the others slyness. Flory is too sensitive to accept the manner in which the English treat the locals, which is why he supports the Burmese rather than the English in his long discussions with Dr. Veraswami. He is accused by his British colleagues of being a Bolshevik in his opinions, because he hates it that his co-nationals do not treat the natives as their equals and make no effort whatsoever to change for the better. One can speak of three points of view from which the human relations in Burma can be grasped: the point of view of the white colonisers, the point of view of Flory, and the point of view of the Burmese. Each is determined by the political situation of the country, by the difficult living conditions and the unexpected, unpleasant events that occur because of the sometimes rough treatment applied to the natives or because of the natives poverty and, alternately, greed. The novel is not the first time that Orwell has touched upon the subject of modern mans cruelty, especially the man living during the world wars. In a review of Malcolm Muggeridges book on theThirties, he wrote:
I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period twenty years, perhaps during which he did not notice it. (qtd. in Bowker 2003: 24)
Critics seldom discuss Orwell in terms of corporeal analysis; criticism is more likely to link his literary world to unfair political matters or to an uncreative reportorial style. Nevertheless, he himself may be a suitable subject for post-Cartesian bodily examination, as, according to his former friends and colleagues, he was a secretive, uninteresting, yet problematic boy a paradox. Thus he wrote intricate materials for his contemporaries to decrypt, materials mostly based on personal experience.
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The post-Cartesian body is the body endowed with the power of living outside the realms of the rational beings mind, combining rationality and feelings in an equilibrated whole. The post-Cartesian body represents the body in which soul and mind co-exist in a natural relationship. It is the body in which the brain can rely on sensorial perceptions and in which there is a constant influence and interdependence between mind and body: the body is guided by the need of ones mind to explore, while the mind has to gain knowledge through the medium offered by the body, thus through sensorial perceptions. The post-Cartesian body is opposed to Descartes theory, according to which body and mind are made of two distinct substances, the former deceiving in terms of the information provided and the latter unique in its reliability. (cf. Grosz 1994: 6) The theory of the post-Cartesian body offers a new perspective upon the three points of view mentioned above (the white colonisers, Florys and the Burmeses): a corporeal-mental perspective. Two types of untolerated post-Cartesian bodies take part in the action: Florys post-Cartesian body, which is that of a darker European who tries to patch things up between the two races and gets blamed for it, and the post-Cartesian bodies of the Burmese, which are different from the European ones in both looks and mentality and are discriminated against because of that. The Burmese cannot do much to change things, because their thinking is too rudimentary and those who are in power and grasp the situation as it really is are too preoccupied with their own well-being to do anything about it. This is a case of untolerated post-Cartesian bodies that appear as a result of the differences between races. The intolerable post-Cartesian body can be consequently described as the body one refuses to look into, to understand, to accept; a body characterised by difference in external appearance, skin colour, mental grasp and customs. The untolerated post-Cartesian bodies that appear within ones own race are Florys (because of the way his colleagues treat him) and those of the poor villagers of Kyauktada (because of the way the rich Burmese behave towards them). It is not only the financial situation that accounts for the rejection of the second group, but also their looks, and their high degree of sensitivity and vulnerability. Nevertheless, some of them become coarse altogether and indulge in their simple lives without aspiring to superior conditions.
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Flory, the Burmese and the white civilisers are consequently viewed from the three perspectives mentioned above: I. a) The white civilisers accept Flory or rather show intermittent tolerance in his case, because he is one of their own or so he is supposed to be. He is however mocked at for his appearance. Ellis characterises him as having got a lick of tar-brush himself, which might explain that black mark on his face, as being piebald and looking like a yellow-belly, with () black hair, and skin the colour of a lemon (Orwell 1984: 32). Florys colleagues also mock at his lack of stamina, of strength and vigour. Still, once he overcomes his cowardice and shows physical and mental energy in supporting his friendship with the native Veraswami and in attempting to introduce him into the English local club, he is again despised, scolded and rejected. One can draw another parallel between Florys life and Orwells experience in the East. He himself tried to avoid acting too overtly in favour of the Indians, although he demanded, in one of his essays, that India become a full independent ally. While working for the BBC World Service, despite the orders he got from the management, he prepared unbiased reports on the literary events of the time, the books that appeared, etc., showing his respect for the audience, formed of Indian students mostly (Bowker 2003: 287). b) The Burmese are considered inferior because of their scanty knowledge of hygiene, lack of morality and education, on top of their poverty. They are called a set of damn black swine (Orwell 1984: 24), black hides (1984: 29) and dirt (1984: 30). II. a) From Florys perspective, the civilisers, with his exception, are narrow-minded in their imperial superiority, aggressive rather than understanding (which points to a lack of balance in their post-Cartesian bodies), and ignorant of everything beyond their personal concerns:
In British India, the Europeans lived separately from the native Indians and existed largely in ignorance of the local culture, cultivating among themselves a sense of exclusion and superiority. (Bowker 2003: 8)
Flory, just like Orwell himself, represents an exception: he is friendly towards the natives, as opposed to the great bulk of the colonisers of the time. He even takes Elizabeth, whom he hopes to marry, to show her what the natives are really like.
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b) Flory also views the Burmese as narrow-minded, because of their lack of education. He perceives them as exotic, interesting, slightly inferior in their simplicity and poverty. He thus cannot completely escape his position as European civiliser, but he does make friends among them. He judges them as he would his fellow compatriots, as we still do today: in terms of class, status and power. Like him, Doctor Veraswami cannot completely escape his status either. He considers himself inferior, because he is part of the mass being civilised. He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race. (Orwell 1984: 38) Still, if compared, they are both capable of momentarily forgetting the political situation of the country during their conversations and of talking to and treating each other as equals. Doctor Veraswami can be considered an exception among the Burmese, because he is an intellectual who studied medicine and read literature. He is also unique among the Asians as they are presented in Burmese Days, because he rejects bribes, he tries to remain honest, although he is surrounded by corruption of all types, and he shows mercy towards his weaker co-nationals. He also supports wholeheartedly the idea of the English as civilisers and agrees that they sometimes have to be rough in order to improve things. As for the Burmese, he considers them apathetic and superstitious (Orwell 1984: 39). III. a) The Burmese have different perceptions of Flory from those of Doctor Veraswami, depending mainly on the nature of their interactions with him. For them Flory is, in turn, a richer co-national (in his position of lover), a weak adversary (for U Po Kin), a lenient master (for his faithful servant), etc. The typical example of a rich Burmese is U Po Kyin, the Subdivisional Magistrate, who is everything Dr. Veraswami is not: a liar, a cheater, a criminal, a manipulator, a schemer, etc. All the evil aspects of human nature have somehow found way into his character. The narrator tells the readers that to fight on the side of the British, to become a parasite upon them, had been his ruling ambition even as a child and that he had actually bought his way into a Government clerkship, just as many other Burmese had. (Orwell 1984: 6). He is fat, as if swollen with the bodies of his enemies (1984: 14), and considers his fatness a symbol of his greatness. His brain, though cunning,
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was quite barbaric, and it never worked except for some definite end; mere meditation was beyond him (1984: 8). He also proves to have great insight into complex matters when he makes the remark that no European has any faith in a man with a black face. (1984: 12). b) The European civilisers are seen as fashionable rich white foreigners, who have to be treated with very much care, but who do not really care about their Burmese neighbours or servants. They are perceived as having superior post-Cartesian bodies. However, there is mutual contempt, more or less hidden, between the Burmese and the Europeans for quite distinct reasons. And it is again U Po Kyin who mentions that these people [the English] have no feeling of loyalty towards a native (Orwell 1984: 12) In conclusion, it may be stated that the post-Cartesian bodily problems of the former Imperial Britain are still an issue, despite present attempts at and impulses towards racial tolerance. One is thus haunted by matters which seemingly belonged to the past. The post-Cartesian bodily perspective offers a clear image of the difficulties encountered in the acceptance of the Other, difficulties which spring from various causes, to do with ones place in the society or in the world. It proves also that the end does not always justify the means, especially in problems of moral order.
References
Bowker, G. 2003. George Orwell. London: Little, Brown. Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press. Hitchens, Ch. 2002. Orwells Victory. Allen Lane, London: Penguin Press. Orwell, G. 1984. Burmese Days. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in assoc. with M. Secker & Warburg.
SHAKESPEARE AND SLENDER BODIES

DANA PERCEC
If in the 19th century fat rhymed with social success and economic wealth, and slim bodies especially feminine were associated with depression or disease, in our century slenderness is a sign of success at all possible levels. Starting with the 20th century, too much weight has come to be regarded as a sign of lack of will, inadequacy, self-indulgence, failure. Fat is now the declared enemy as were in the past appetite and desire, two major obstacles dealt with by fasting prescriptions and practices that had mainly a religious content. As Susan Bordo notices (1990:85), such preoccupation [with slimming] may function as one of the most powerful normalizing strategies of our century, ensuring the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplining docile bodies, sensitive to any departure from social norms, and habituated to self-improvement and transformation in the service of those norms. Unlike the past, when the fasting groups like those of saints or monastic communities were an exception to the norm, nowadays, within certain age and gender groups (especially young women), these practices seem to be adopted by an overwhelming majority: some researches push the figures up to 80%. (Krugovoy Silver 2000) Also, if in the past refraining from eating was an indicator of ethic behaviour and modesty, nowadays it is an indicator of an excessive preoccupation with ones own image in comparison with the representational body. More than a simple diet that stems from aesthetic considerations, the extreme limitation of food intake may take, in women, political forms. Not allowed to express her protest verbally, the woman seems to plead for her rights in an extreme manner, anorexia nervosa having become, thus, one of the variants that a hunger strike can take. Victoria Pitts (1998: 70) argues that bodily modifications that include self-harm practices common in contemporary women (scarification or cutting, bulimia, anorexia, etc.) are strategies of reclaiming the female body, personal expression, resistance. They are subversive identity effects, like the reclaimative gestures of other marginal communities. In pop culture, the body modifications that used to
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belong to sub-cultural groups (lesbian, fetish, neo-tribal, transgender, etc.) are adopted by the majority, are absorbed into the mainstream, commodified, transformed into technologies of consumption. What Victoria Pitts calls the delicate self-harm syndrome (1998: 72) anorexia, bulimia, tattooing, etc. are nowadays widely-recognized and adopted for a shorter or longer period of time, accidentally or deliberately. From group ritual, performed only in specialized, safe spaces, they have reached the level of an epidemic. Nowadays, the slim body is primarily a symbol of regulated appetite, of a life and a personality kept under control, whereas a fat body is a sign of no will power, lack of discipline or even selfishness, and personal failure. Appetite is stigmatized or even ridiculed in the media as well as in fiction (fat boys or girls are always an annoying presence for the other children, being unreliable play mates or the parents and the teachers spies) or may even connote danger or persecution (as it happens in the fictional representation of vampires). The present paper looks at ways of rejecting or minimizing food intake in some Shakespearean plays, grouping them into three categories: religious fasting, hypocaloric diets, and anorexic reactions. One of the purposes of this paper is to identify which of the connotations of fatness and slenderness consecrated by 19th and 20th century customs already appear in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts. In Shakespeares Measure for Measure, fasting has a regulating role. Angelos moral as well as political integrity is granted by his saint-like behaviour, well-known to all citizens in Vienna. Controlling the appetite and refraining from eating was a common medieval practice, signalling the hatred of the flesh, extreme self-discipline, the power of the mind, and singling out saints from lay people since the earliest centuries of Christianity (Brown 2000). In the dark comedy, the Dukes departure for such a long time is not a problem since Upon his place/And with full line of his authority,/Governs Lord Angelo; a man whose blood/ Is very snow-broth; one who never feels/The wanton stings and motions of the sense,/But doth rebate and blunt his natural edge/With profits of the mind, study and fast (I, iv). Meditation and fasting keep Angelo away from bodily temptations, which are necessarily painful (the stings [] of the sense). Refraining from food makes Angelo adamant in applying the law, as his senses, in the denial of the flesh, become numb, and with them, feelings
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such as mercy or sympathy. A saints practice trains Angelo to be like the law he wants to enforce: harsh and impersonal. Lucio tells the Duke half seriously, half ironically about Angelos non-human (or, rather, humanitarian) character: Some report a sea-maid spawnd him; some, that he was begot between two stock-fishes. But it is certain that, when he makes water, his urine is congeald ice (III, ii). An alleged monster by birth, Angelo is also a monster in terms of his lack of understanding and his lack of scruples. But what Angelo seems to lack most is moral consistency, as from a fasting saint he turns into a fornicator at the mere sight of pure and innocent Isabella. It is the maidens fasting that tempts Angelo in the first place: ISABELLA: Hark how Ill bribe you: good my lord, turn back.[]- prayers from preserved souls,/ From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate/ To nothing temporal. (II, ii) Unlike other characters, who oppose fasting to vice, disorder, even death, Isabella opposes it to financial satisfaction. If for men like Angelo and Lucio, fasting equals giving up sex, for Isabella, fasting, as the supreme monastic manifestation, means having and desiring no money. What is transitory, for her, is not youth with its sex appeal, but richness a mere illusion. However, it is due to Isabella that the fasting-sexuality dichotomy is activated in the play. Paradoxically, it is Isabellas chastity and nuns apparel that stirs Angelos sexual interest. As Eagleton puts it: Isabella, who represents a general principle to Angelo in her own person, finds that she has seduced him by her person rather than by the principle (1988: 56). In other words, her intentions were those of a lawyer in front of a jury. Despite her initial plan, she manipulates Angelo with her body rather than with her discourse. It is not the promised fasting of a nun that bribes Angelo, but the bodily promise of the woman behind the nun. In terms of the connection between sexuality and fasting, Isabellas feminine counterpart in the play is not Mariana (her substitute in the bed trick), but Mistress Overdone. Her hypersexualized nature is given, like in the case of the Wife of Bath, by the numerous husbands she has had. Also similarly to the Wife of Bath, Mistress Overdone is a symbol of excess because of the quantity of discourse she produces: she is garrulous, nagging, gossiping, knowing everything that happens in Vienna before anybody else. Secondly, she is the nuns opposite in terms of eating. If Isabella believes she can win Angelo through an excess of praying and fasting, Mistress Overdones name suggests a cooking excess. In culinary terms, the
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meat was excessively used. In socio-human terms, the flesh escaped the minds control. An overdone steak is hardly any good; an overdone body is doomed. Claudio must die and Juliet, his mistress, must live in shame for the rest of her life. Another common woman who is supposed to form a sheer contrast with Isabella is Mistress Elbow. On the one hand, her appetite makes her different from the future nun: As I say, this Mistress Elbow, being, as I say, with child, and being great-bellied, and longing, as I said for prunes (II, i). On the other hand, her being pregnant and therefore, according to religious prescriptions, impure (although legally married), opposes her to Isabella, the pure maiden. The huge belly means fatness and pregnancy at the same time, two bodily conditions that the nun is exempted from. Pompeys ironic comment on the two main temptations of the body eating and copulating is ambiguous: such a one were past cure of the thing you wot of, unless they kept very good diet, as I told you (II, i). The thing you wot of, the thing you know of can refer back to the prunes therefore to food or can be a euphemistic replacement of sex. Being past cure may mean not being able to refrain from eating until getting sick or not being able to avoid the consequence of sexual intercourse, which is pregnancy. A very good diet (where good connotes both strict and salutary), then, may refer to eating less or eating food with fewer calories, or to keeping oneself chaste. We remember here that common interdictions during fasting periods were formulated both against meat and against sexual intercourse. The bodily temptations Angelo refrains himself from at the beginning of the play can become lethal (as Claudio, repenting his sin, feels): Our natures do pursue,/ Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, /A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die. (I, ii). For Claudio, sexuality is an evil that belongs both to the act (in this case, the individual would normally be able to make a moral choice if he wanted to) and to nature itself (where the individual is regarded as a helpless toy in the hands of both destiny and his own tyrannical body). L.C. Knights analyses Claudios gloomy lines in these terms:
The illustrative comparison has, we notice, three stages: (i) rats ravin downpoison, (ii) which makes them thirsty, (iii) so they drink and the poison taking effect die. But the human parallel has, it seems, only two stages: prompted by desire, men quench their thirsty evil in the sexual act and by the terms of the new proclamation pay the penalty of death.
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The act of ravening down the bane or poison is thus left on our hands, and the only way we can dispose of it is by assuming that our natures have no need to pursue their thirsty evils for it is implanted in them by the mere fact of being human. (qtd. in Rose 2002:109)
The connection between love (as a sexual function) and digestion is given by the fact that they both belong to the body, that they are, actually, the two paroxysmal manifestations of the body. Surfeit appears in Claudios lines as it appears in Orsinos discourse about love in the opening of Twelfth Night: If music be the food of love, play on;/ Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,/ The appetite may sicken, and so die. (I, i). If the former lines suggest repentance, the latter express the lovers unhappiness and dissatisfaction with the fact that his feelings are not to be found in the ladys heart. Both texts are, however, based on the same mechanism: desire and eating/drinking habits function in the same way too much of any of them can have dangerous consequences for ones health, can cause serious disorders, and such complications may lead to the patients death. Claudios lamentations establish a contrast between the sinners irregular, chaotic life, which poisons his body (we can argue that some contemporary vices such as smoking or drug consumption are literally poisonous), and the different embodiments of the father (the saint, the monk, the priest), who are not only the earthly instances who regulate and condemn sin, but stick to a regular life that, with numerous strict rules, disciplines the body, thus keeping it healthy and, ultimately, alive. Contemporary theories also try to persuade people of the importance of diet and physical exercise which can prolong their lives with a couple of years. Fasting will also be regulating for a character like Lucio, indifferent to moral matters, an ethical naturalist, as Eagleton (1988: 53) calls him. Like Claudio, he left a woman with child. Unlike Claudio, he is neither punished, nor repenting or willing to make up for his mistake. In the end, he will be forced to marry the woman he has ignored for so long. But Lucio, despite his selfishness, cowardice, and immorality is not Barnadine, a psychopathic murderer who refuses to expiate his sin and is so inert that he objects to being executed only because the hangman is interrupting his morning sleep. The Duke does not send him to execution when he was due to die because, for justice to be done, it is not enough to send a man to death; he should be fully aware of deaths dimension. Lucio, although a sinner without remorse and a libeller, is saved by the speech of renunciation he gives
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when he learns about his friends alleged death. His incapacity to eat, the fasting, is imposed on his body not by his mind or will, but by the body itself: O pretty Isabella, I am pale at my heart to see thine eyes so red: thou must be patient. I am fain to dine and sup with water and bran; I dare not for my head fill my belly; one fruitful meal would set me tot (IV, iii). If Angelos insensitive heart is signalled by his urine which is congealed as his body does not get enough warm food to eliminate, Timons misanthropy in Timon of Athens will be signalled by the roots he eats when he isolates himself from the world. At the beginning, Timon manifested his generosity by offering banquets and giving all his friends the most refined meat, bread and wine. Later, when he finds out that the men he esteemed are only selfish flatterers, he offers them a last banquet where their dishes are filled with lukewarm water that the host throws into their faces. The feast is an essential locus of friendship and symbolic brotherhood, traditionally associated with sharing: the convive is the person sitting next to you at the table but also, etymologically, the person who lives with you, your companion, your family. At Timons table, the guests are symbolically invited to share the hosts generosity: the fellow that sits next him now, parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught (I, ii). Invited to one of the banquets, Apemantus, the skeptic philosopher who lives as a hermit in the woods next to Athens, insists on the cannibalistic nature of the guests feasting in Timons house: O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one mans blood; and all the madness is, he cheers them up too (I, ii). Just like in the case of Falstaff, almost literally eating his Hostess, Timons friends are parasites abusing the generosity of the nave Athenian nobleman. When Timon realizes the true nature of the men he trusted, he gives them a last meal consisting only of plain, lukewarm water. To distinguish himself from these mouth friends, Apemantus refuses Timons meat repeatedly: I scorn thy meat; twould choke me, for I should neer flatter thee; Rich men sin, and I eat root (I, ii). He suggests that the knife the convives use at the table to carve the meat will also be used to stab the host behind his back. His refraining from eating is, thus, a sign of honesty, good intentions, and transparence. It is, at the same time, a nonconformist gesture as he insists to do otherwise than the guests and the host altogether. Timons complete metamorphosis is suggested by the drastic transformation of his diet, from daily, elegant feasts with friends into solitary root
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eating. And, since an old saying suggests that you are what you eat, Timon becomes a skeptic philosopher just like Apemantus when he starts sharing the latters eating habits. Root eating will be, for Timon, both a medical diet and a form of self-punishment. On the one hand, after a vegetarian period, the man understands that meat and alcohol had, in the long run, negative effects on his health, altering the way in which his vital organs functioned: Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn leas;/ Whereof ingrateful man, with liquorish draughts/ And morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind (IV, iii). Too much fat (what modern medicine discovered to be the cholesterol level) slowed down both his moves and his reasoning. On the other hand, the Athenian nobleman repents for the sin of having been too gullible: drastic fasting and complete isolation are the mortifying measures he adopts. He realizes that not only were his false friends parasites when they fed themselves on his expense, but he himself was a parasite in front of generous Nature. The banditti he encounters in the woods are, suggests Timon, thieves not because they rob people, but because they abuse the natural world, by eating more than it would be necessary to stay alive. Timon gives the banditti his own example of anti-parasitism: vegetarianism. If his initial generosity was directed towards fellow humans and consisted of offering them the sacrifice of nature (slaughtered animals especially game , the bleeding vineyards, etc.), his final generosity is targeted at nature itself Common mother, thou, whose womb unmeasurable, and infinite breast, teems, and feeds all (IV, iii), and consists of protecting it by not having any living creature killed for his own basic needs or luxury. Three centuries later, the Victorians will be extremely preoccupied with women who eat very little or refuse food out of rebellion, unhappiness, poverty or illness. David Copperfields mother is so thin that her son has the impression Claras body is made of stained glass and her hands are transparent. She is opposed to Miss Murdstone, whose massiveness is a sign of negative femininity, and by Mr. Murdstone, who turns out to be far from the lover and husband nave Clara had expected. She diminishes, disappearing little by little, out of her sufferance caused by the separation from her son but also by her romantic expectations grossly dismissed by the man she loves. In Charlotte Bronts novels, the Victorian connotations of anorexia are even more evident (Krugovoy Silver 2000). Her female heroines are slim, spiritualized creatures whose silent starvation is a sign of purity and renunciation. In Shirley, Caroline Helstones food rejection is opposed to
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mens huge appetite. Suffering from love, not joining the family meals, spending more time in her room than elsewhere, Caroline turns from a rose into a snow drop. Even before becoming anorexic, she has a very small appetite, just like her friend, Shirley Keeldar: at supper, just a little bread and milk is enough for the two young ladies. Carolines anorexia and prolonged illness undermine, little by little, the authority of the man in the house. At the same time, her vanishing is a symbol of victimization both on a social level (represented by her uncle) and on a personal, emotional level (represented by Robert Moore, the man she loves and who does not seem to share her feelings). Not accidentally then, Victorian artists were fascinated with Ophelias character, the ideal predecessor of these victimized female heroines of 19th century literature. The dimension of anorexia nervosa as a form of romantic suffering was immediately identified and exploited in visual representations of Shakespeares feminine character. Ophelia is a woman who suffers with maximum intensity the loss of her love and the death of her father. Growing mad, she becomes a sort of symbolical vegetarian just like agonizing Falstaff who can only smell flowers in his last days. Ophelia carries flowers around, offering them to the Queen or her brother, and associating them with abstract notions: rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, roses for love. Her withdrawal from the world, professed with so much emphasis by Hamlet (Get thee to a nunnery, go; and quickly too. Farewell, III, i), takes the form of suicide in the end. Hamlet, an Angelo-like character in his misogynist discourse to and about women, delivers sermons on morality to both his fiance and his mother: the former should retire to a convent lest she should lead more men into temptation, the latter should refrain from joining his uncle in his bedroom until desire fades away. Ophelias getting to a nunnery involves her transformation into a fasting and asexualized Isabella. The mad Ophelia in the fourth act may have become such a woman. Fasting, in Hamlet, is not directly associated with Ophelia, but with the dead king and young Hamlet. The former describes his eternal tortures in hell in terms of food that is denied to him: And for the day confined to fast in fires (I, v). Polonius considers that young Hamlets madness derives from Ophelias rejection and presents Claudius a clinical description of Hamlets disease: his organism, weakened by the lack of food which he refuses or is unable to consume because of his severe depression, cannot fight against the mental disease. The princes anorexic
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reaction is caused by his sexual frustrations and disappointment: And he, repulsed/Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,/Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,/Thence to a lightness, and by this declension,/Into the madness wherein now he raves (II, ii). We can, therefore, imagine a similar diagnosis for Ophelia, rejected and humiliated by her lover. When she drowns, she is so light that she does not go to the bottom of the river until her clothes, imbibed with water, become heavier than her body. In the girls cryptic discourse, even her madness weighs more than her body: By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight,/Till our scale turn the beam (IV, v). According to Alexandru Olaru (1976: 227), Ophelia is suffering from a severe depression, having a psychotic reaction to Hamlets rejection. This is manifested by her sickly appearance described by the courtiers, her confusion and delirium in her meaningless speech, her nervous gestures and her apparent desire to commit suicide, proved by the euphoria with which she meets her death. Another Shakespearean character who suffers from a depressive and anxious reaction manifested as temporary madness, with muteness and complete refusal of food is Pericles, in the play with the same title. His anxiety begins when Helicanus, his loyal servant, lets him know about Antiochus dangerous plotting, and reaches a maximum of intensity, in combination with grief and despair, when he loses his wife during a storm at sea and, later, his daughter, whom he assumes dead according to her foster mothers lies. He does not speak or eat until he is reunited with his lost daughter, Marina, and we may assume he would have committed suicide just like Ophelia, had he not been under the permanent supervision of loyal Helicanus. As mentioned previously, Victorian artists manifested a special interest in forms of female mental or spiritual suffering metabolized in more or less severe forms of anorexia nervosa, finding Ophelia an ideal subject of analysis. What these portraits share is the slenderness that all Pre-Raphaelite painters consider a key element suggesting intense moral or even physical pain. The artists manifest an inclination towards a very youthful Ophelia, insisting thus on her vulnerability and delicacy, her paleness being also enhanced by her white, light bluish or cream-yellowish garments (Arthur Hughes portrait). In other paintings (by George Frederic Watts, for example), her slenderness is signalled by details of very thin or delicate parts of the body: a sharp nose, very slender arms, long and fragile hands and fin-
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gers, her mental derangement being suggested by the half open mouth and staring eyes. Black and white pictures of Ophelia augment the impression of exhaustion and illness, her veils covering a skinny, almost transparent body, and her eyes being sunken in dark, grayish sockets. Ernest Hbert offers a portrait of an Ophelia with a sharp chin and sunken cheeks in contrast with very beautiful blond hair carefully adorned with white flowers, leaving the impression of an unfortunate bride, unable to fulfil her destiny through the union with the partner for whom she has dressed up with so much care. Georg Falkenberg pushes the realism of the portrait even further, giving a clinical description of a maniac, with dishevelled hair, flowers placed on the head in disorder, revealing no preoccupation of the subject for her appearance. From tragedy and disease in the 17th and 19th century to fame and popularity nowadays, the slender body has travelled a long way and has become omnipotent due to the development of the media. It is to them that the skinny feminine body owes its tremendous and counterfeit success story.
References
Bordo, S. 1990. Reading the Slender Body, in M. Jacobus, E. Keller, S. Shuttleworth (Eds.). Body Politics. Women and the Discourses of Science. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 84100. Bront, C. 1985. Shirley. London: Penguin Books. Brown, P 2000. Trupul i societatea. Bucureti: Rao. . Dickens, Charlotte 1970. The Personal History of David Copperfield. London: Hazell, Watson and Viney. Eagleton, T. 1988. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell. Krugovoy Silver, A. 2000. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olaru, A. 1976. Shakespeare i psihiatria dramatic. Craiova: Scrisul romnesc. Pitts, S. V. 1998. Reclaiming the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance and the Grotesque, in Body and Society 3/1998, pp. 6784. Rose, J. 2002. Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare. Hamlet and Measure for Measure, in J. Drakakis (Ed.). Alternative Shakespeares. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 97120. Shakespeare, W. 1996. The Complete Work. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.
REACHING SILENCE IN SEAMUS DEANES READING IN THE DARK

FLORENTINA ANGHEL
University of Craiova
But silence was in the heart of the dark, the silence of dust and the things that would never stir, if left alone. And the ticking of the invisible alarm-clock was as the voice of that silence which, like the dark, would on day triumph too. And then all would be still and dark and all things at rest for ever at last. (Beckett 1997:227)
Reading in the Dark seems to have been written to show how silence can encompass everything. It becomes a means of life for a family, a necessity in the logic of narrative economy, the goal of life in a Freudian sense, and the openness of the novel-form itself. Although silence has been considered another form or attribute of death, Seamus Deane makes it an inexhaustible source of communication and imagination, the darkness wherein the process of dying turns into a birth into death: only there, free of constraint, the narrators imagination can give birth to his story, live through his storytelling, and die as an everyday ego. Shaping his quests and uncertainties as a text also means putting an end to them. Within the theoretical frame of his work Narrative as Communication (1989), Didier Coste distinguishes two drives that make silence an inherent presence in narrative. Coste states that every narrative [] has at least one textual beginning and one textual end (on the narrational plane); most narratives also have beginnings and endings on the plane of the narrated and on the plane of story (Coste 1989:246). According to Raymond Russel the author should provide a link between a beginning and an ending that cannot be identical but should have an air of family resemblance (qtd. in Coste 1989:246). There is a common logic that Coste thinks about implying a causal etiological and teleological orientation of all narratives (1989:247); thus silence becomes a logical end of the story.
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Another drive refers to the narratives that employ characters whose evolution has to reach a point where their problems are solved, has to reach silence, or the story may fail and grow tedious. Knowing when to stop is part of the artistry. The authors choices are restricted by the narrative itself; rhetorical, moral and aesthetic constraints, therefore, can determine the way in which the characters can reach silence. The story in Seamus Deanes novel is born out of silence, shadow, magic, mystery, darkness and silence. The first section carries a symbolic positive title: Stairs (On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence). Because it implies the idea of ascendance, mother and son are separated by a shadow that only the mother can see:
Dont move, my mother said from the landing. Dont cross that window. I was on the tenth step, she was on the landing. I could have touched her. Theres something there between us. A shadow. Dont move. I had no intention. I was enthralled. But I could see no shadow. Theres somebody there. Somebody unhappy. Go back down the stairs, son. [] Im sure I could walk up there to you, in two skips. No, no. God knows. Its bad enough me feeling it; I dont want you as well. (Deane 1998:34)
Seamus Deane creates suspense and magic as a background, against which he portrays a childs personality and identity. Both silence and shadow are good incentives for a child who wants to discover his identity. They may also mean freedom: because his story seems to be forged out of nothing, in the dark, it seems to be the fruit of a resourceful imagination that shapes its own way and erects its own obstacles (like the obsessive disappearances that the character has to address). Despite his mothers warning that the investigation of the shadow would bring something bad to him, the boy chooses the darkness: he chooses to stay by his mother and try to understand and help her as a proof of his love for her and for his father.
I was up at the window before she could say anything more, but there was nothing there. I stared into the darkness. I heard the clock in the bedroom clicking and the wind breaking through the chimney, and saw the neutral glimmer on the banister vanish into my hand as I slid my fingers down. Four steps before the kitchen door, I felt someone behind me and turned to see a darkness leaving the window. (Deane 1998:4)
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The reader is introduced to the cause, the birth of the reason for which the novel should happen, that is the existence of a shadow in the life of the boys mother. The existence of the shadow encapsulated in silence was revealed by the first words related to its existence and betraying his mothers fears. Had she not said anything about the shadow, it wouldnt have appeared in the boys life and, of course, the novel wouldnt have been written. He was challenged to look for something unknown where there shouldnt have been anything. Absurdity and frustration hardened the boys childhood by making him see darkness by the window. When he passed by the window he identified with the shadow and annihilated the fragile glimmer on the banister. The light coming through and the window might have projected the shadow, which could have been his mothers within a surface literal meaning. Otherwise the shadow that only his mother could see may be symbolically perceived as her secret and her feeling guilty because of it. His mothers sense of guilt hindered her from sharing the secret and became an almost palpable presence, haunting and nearly overwhelming her. The existence of her secret could be heard in the silence. Her mentioning the shadow broke the silence that she would have actually liked to engulf her secret. What the reader is made to experience is exactly the opposite: the protagonist reads the story of the family in the dark and insists on speaking about the silence that he and his family were supposed to keep until they wisely embraced it. In the external economy of the novel, dealing with the etiological orientation would reveal the text as the outcome of hard labour, transformations, and planning energy. On the way from silence to words (sentences, texts, novel), from shadow to person, and from magic (apparently innocent stories for children) to reality, the author needs another ambiguous term, disappearances, that might be seen as a symptomatic solution to support the evolution of the novel towards silence. Disappearances imply sudden events which turn people or peoples souls into shadows haunting the other peoples memories and imagination. The disappearances the narrator has to deal with give birth to contradictory stories, and those characters who try to find meaning are in fact inventing stories. The protagonist is again caught between magic and reality: children whose souls disappear because they are stolen by Irish fairies (pooka); the disappearance of a clown, which makes the boy worry Was Mr. Bamboozelem all right? I looked up into the darkness, half fearing I would see his boots and candystriped belly sailing
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up into the dark beyond the trapeze lights (Deane 1998:6); the disappearance of uncle Eddie and of McIlhenny; the field of the disappeared where the souls of the disappeared gathered. The hypotheses launched around all these disappearances range from magic, hiding, and leaving for cruel death. The narrator is lost in the thicket of mysteries, which gradually transform into secrets to be solved. Thus, the reader finds himself trapped between reality and fiction; uncertainty is metatextually sustained in the section Reading in the Dark, in which the narrator confesses that he used to imagine stories when he couldnt read them and also that the stories people appreciated were the simplest and closest to reality. Therefore, the title of the novel may refer to the fact that the narrator had to investigate the secrets of his family to find out who the shadow was and why his mother was afraid of it. The title is in fact part of the plan of the narrative in the internal economy of the text. Seamus Deane succeeds in veiling everything in silence, both outer and inner life: silence is cause, setting, and goal. The author avoids the description of the setting because events and characters seem to rise out of silence: when the police come because they have found out about the pistol, the boy was still in the silence. Objects seemed to be floating, free of gravity, all over the room. (Deane, 1998:30) Describing his fathers family the protagonist states: So broken was my fathers family that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire A long, silent feud (At other times it seemed to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the end of it.) (Deane 1998: 42) The son wants to punish his father for not telling him about the problems his family had with the police by destroying his roses, the only colour in his life. He reduces them to silence: Walking on that concreted patch where the bushes had been was like walking on hot ground below which voices and roses were burning, burning. (Deane 1998: 111) Love for his mother and father means silence: I hated having to love her then for it meant I couldnt say or ask anything (Deane 1998:134) Everybody who knew the secret of Eddies death was dead or in exile or silenced one way or the other. (Deane 1998: 217) The son who feels the need to communicate is reduced to silence by a kind of community law, which makes voices and words burn everybody, as his mother felt when she had a breakdown and couldnt speak to unbur-
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den her soul. The son chooses to communicate by using other means: he destroys his fathers roses and tells him that he knows why, his father not telling him the truth about their family has destroyed the boys childhood and innocence. He reads his father the story of their familys secrets in Irish pretending he is reading an essay for school, and in the process he finds out that his father does not know all the secrets while his mother has known and reacted to them. Disclosing these secrets to his father makes him feel relieved, but his last attempt to communicate with his mother is a failure:
Dont worry any more. Ill never say a word. Dont worry about it. Its all past. She took the flower with its three heads and three petals on each. Look, she said, tearing the petals off, one at a time, and letting them drop on the floor: If you want to, you can tell, One petal dropped off. If you dont, thats just as well. Another swirled on the linoleum. Get it over, get it done, Father, lover, husband, son. She laughed coldly and threw the remains on the floor, folded her arms across her breast and rocked back and forth, humming tunelessly. [] She was nearly gone from me. (Deane 1998:227)
For the sake of his love for both his parents, the boy, now an adolescent, chooses silence, but it seems to be too late for his mother, who feels haunted by her sons presence and paralyzed by shame. When he makes his choice, the narrator becomes the shadow: Now the haunting meant something new to me ? now I had become the shadow (Deane 1998: 228), which is the logical end of the story. What comes after this moment plunges both events and people into silence: sergeant Burke, who is the representative of the police and who has brought them suffering, dies; father dies (innocently lay) before his retirement without knowing the secret, mother retires into her bedroom in silence. Thus, the third stage in the evolution of the events is reaching silence, which turns out to be either physical or spiritual death (mother, son, Crazy Joe). Besides the fact that by reaching silence in the end of the novel the author succeeds in finding and establishing the link with the beginning, the structure of the text also reveals a teleological orientation, the fact that the novel is designed so as to move towards certain goals of self realization in this case silence or death.
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The other perspective upon the internal economy of the text is closely connected to the first since, at least in Reading in the Dark, all the characters find a solution to their problems and/or die. Thus, the reader may assume that some characters deaths (those of Una, Eddie, Fathers sisters) contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of suspense and suffering, and have a traumatic effect upon the other characters. The cyclic structure of the novel, mentioned earlier, may be translated into a successful achievement of the goal of life, according to Freuds theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The major instinctual drive which he called the death-instinct stands for those conservative instincts which give the deceptive appearance of being forces towards change and progress while they are seeking to reach the goal of life, that is the initial state from which the living entity has already departed. Thus, the conservative instincts impel towards repetition, the restoration of an earlier state of things (Freud 1990: 52). Both adult subjects affected by the First World War and children whose games concentrated on unhappy experiences made Freud conclude that such a compulsion seeks to determine the person to face the situation and to make an effort to control it. The young protagonist of the novel consumes his energy trying to discover the adults secrets. His action is born out of silence and shadow, and he returns to them in the end, as his grandfather had anticipated:
We live, boys, in a world that will pass away. The shadows that candle throws upon the walls of this room are as insubstantial as we are. [] But there is an inner peace nothing can reach; no insult can violate, no corruption can deprave. Hold to that; it is what your childish innocence once was and what your adult maturity must become. (Deane 1998:26)
Grandfather wisely brings together life and death, light and darkness, candle and shadow with their inexorable coexistence and dependence. Both people and shadows are insubstantial, which seems a good incentive for the writer to have the story told by a narrator without identity, insubstantial, unreal. Such a narrative device confers openness upon the narrator. There are at least two drives the work offers: on the one hand, the ambiguity of the text (like a shadow) implies repeated attempts to find a meaning which is only a version in the dark; on the other hand, the unknown narrator is a shadow himself if we consider him the writers artistic personality, which exists only in relation with the work of art, the one that created the novel and was shaped by it (Mavrodin 1982).
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From a poststructuralist perspective, the text may be seen as the concatenation of the phases of ones existence. The novel may be seen as birth which here means becoming aware of the shadow; deconstruction investigation of the dark leading to the identification of separate elements which seem meaningless until the narrator succeeds in establishing a connection between them; a reconstruction that is a harmonious combination of the previous elements so that they reveal a meaningful story; and the annihilation of a personality since the end of any story means the death of the author (Barthes 1988), of the authors artistic personality, the Unnamable, the Other who created the work. A release of creative inner energy, Reading in the Dark is the story of the storytelling as well, revealing the appearance of the authors shadow, the consumption of the energy generated by the conflict, and the moment when inner peace is reached because everything has been told or understood Adult maturity, compared here with childish innocence, has been reached, and everything would be laid to rest at last.
References
Barthes, R. 1988. The Death of the Author, in Newton, K.M. (ed.). Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. London: Macmillan Education Ltd. Beckett, S. 1997. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. London: Everymans Library. Coste, D. 1989. Narrative as Communication. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deane S. 1998. Reading in the Dark. New York: Vintage Books. Freud, S. 1990. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Mavrodin, Irina. 1982. Poietic i poetic. Bucureti: Univers.
PLAYING AGAINST THE CLOCK: THE METAPHOR OF TIME IN THE FOREVER WAR AND THE DECHRONIZATION OF SAM MAGRUDER
TED BAILEY
University of Miskolc
If sports reveal the values of a society, then America must be a nation with a terribly schizophrenic attitude towards time. Most countries have a single national sport, soccer, which is played over two forty-five minute periods that are only rarely interrupted and then only in the case of a major injury. Moreover, only one person in the entire stadium knows exactly when a period will end. In North America, by contrast, two of the three major national sports football and basketball are played with an almost fanatical obsession with time. A multitude of clocks strategically located throughout the stadium or arena make the time left to play visible from almost every perspective, and the sports themselves abound in rules involving two-minute warnings, twenty-four second clocks, and time-outs. Metaphors such as fighting against the clock and conserving time proliferate in the language of coaches, managers, and journalists covering these sports, where an athlete who can work the clock inevitably becomes a key player. Baseball, on the other hand, takes a different approach, with nothing allowed to interfere with the duration of the game except the rule dictating that each side gets an equal number of opportunities. Attempts to establish a time limit or to speed up the game are invariably decried as abominations that would ruin the purity of the game witness the recent suggestion to enlarge the strike zone in order to speed up the game. If basketball and football are obsessed with controlling time and moving forward, baseball, by comparison, with its appeals to tradition and the denial of the power of time, offers a nostalgic retreat into the past. Similar cultural attitudes towards time find expression in literature as well. The obsession with either conquering time or ignoring the boundaries it imposes appears, respectively, in two late twentieth-century works, Joe Haldemans The Forever War (1975) and George Gaylord Simpsons The Dechronization of Sam Magruder (1996). The genre of science fiction,
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which these two novels represent, is about as distant from the world of sports as one can get; yet, although neither of these works relies on the images or language of sports, both employ metaphorical uses of time that are embodied in football, basketball, and baseball. Through these metaphors the novels gain a distinctively American flavor and reflect on American values. At the end of The Great Gatsby, one of the few works in literature to capture succinctly Americas contradictory relationship to time, F. Scott Fitzgerald embeds his final comments on the obsession with the lost American dream in the language of sports journalism.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but thats no matter tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . . And one fine morning So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (1992:189)
Anyone familiar with the perennial cries of Just wait till next year! would find it difficult to overhear what Fitzgerald is saying: the desire to move forward towards a goal in the golden past is not just Gatsbys obsession, but an integral part of the national psyche. Much of the power in this passage arises from the tension Fitzgerald creates in mixing two time metaphors which Lakoff and Johnson call Moving Observer and Moving Time metaphors (1999:14146). On the one hand, the future recedes and eludes us, giving the impression that a game is being played and time is moving away while the speaker stands still. On the other hand, one needs only to move, to run faster, to try harder, and time as is implied in sports language as well can be overcome. Fitzgeralds final sentence juxtaposes the two metaphors, the observer paddling while time bears him in the opposite direction, thus dramatizing the illusion of power over time that the Moving Observer metaphor can subtly imply. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, taking metaphorical concept of time as literal will lead to contradictory and silly results (1999:167), and this conflation is precisely what brings about Gatsbys downfall. Just as football acts out its own Time Is A Resource metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:161) in stadiums across the country every autumn weekend, Gatsby becomes a victim of the belief that man is an active agent who can control and manipulate time: Cant repeat the past? he cried incredulously, why
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of course you can! (Fitzgerald 1992:116) What Gatsby pays no attention to is that [t]ime is directional and irreversible because events [. . .] cannot unhappen (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:138). Naturally, the Moving Observer metaphor does not automatically mean that one is deluded as to ones own control over time. Humans are, by nature, egocentric, and so placing oneself as the active agent in the center of a metaphor is not necessarily irrational or excessively narcissistic. In fact, the Moving Observer metaphor can be equally used to demonstrate and explore ones powerlessness in the face of time. Both Joe Haldemans and George Gaylord Simpsons novels do exactly this point by making the Moving Observer metaphor a literal fact, employing time travel to move their protagonists through time. These novels translate time into a metaphor for distance between people, thus providing a device to dramatize isolation and loneliness. Additionally, just as Fitzgerald used the tension between two attitudes towards time to critique the American dream, these novels use time to comment on various aspects of the American psyche and present a sharp contrast to traditional American beliefs about time that are embedded in sports metaphors. In order to realize time travel as a metaphor for loneliness and distance between individuals, two important restrictions are placed on the methods of travel in these novels. Whereas H. G. Wellss The Time Machine (1895; 1992) allows time travel both forwards and backwards in a machine the Time Traveller himself constructs, both Haldeman and Simpson send their protagonists on one-way trips over which they have no control. This thematic represents a marked change from traditional American attitudes to time as embodied in major sports. Footballs obsession with dominating time has already been noted, and baseballs traditions encourage a dialogue between past and present that dissolves the barriers of time and provides the illusion of time travel. As David Halberstam has noted, [i]n baseball more than anything I know, today is not merely today; it is yesterday as well (qtd. in Skolnik 1994: 9). Loneliness, however, implies a loss of control over ones situation, and so the observer moving through time cannot be allowed to call a time-out or to enter or to leave the ballpark at will. Central to both Haldemans and Simpsons use of the metaphor of time travel is the modern understanding of time that has developed since Einstein formulated the theory of relativity. Wells also used time travel as an extension of the Moving Observer metaphor, but his concept of time, in the
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novel written ten years before Einstein published his theory, is based on the idea of an absolute time. This idea allows him to move his protagonist back and forth along a scale of linear time that does not move in relation to the protagonist. With the theory of relativity, however, time became a more personal concept, relative to the observer who measured it (Hawking 1998:143), and so especially in The Forever War the observer moves in relation to other peoples clocks, not to a grand, united sense of time. That we all perceive time in different ways is, of course, not a new or difficult concept. One of the factors that determine our relationship to time is our chronological age. The observation that time moves faster when one gets older is a common experience, attributable to the amount of time one has lived through. A day seems like forever to a small child, and since he has probably experienced only two-thousand other days it is literally a larger proportion of his life than a day is to a mother in her forties, who has already seen some fourteen-thousand days and to whom a day may appear to rush by in the wink of an eye. Similarly, the realization that the finite amount of time one has to live is rapidly drawing to a close will change ones perception of this time, as it does for Peyton Farquhar, whose mind expands the few seconds left to him into a long hallucinatory sequence in Ambrose Bierces An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1998). The historical era one lives in and its technological accoutrements also influence ones perceptions of time. As Don Gifford points out, the distance covered in three and a half hours by car in the late twentieth century would have meant a ten-day trip on foot or a four-day journey on horseback two hundred years earlier (1990:104). Our perception of what constitutes a long distance or a long time is dependent on the technology available to us. Looking forward, Joe Haldeman theorizes about future developments in technology in The Forever War and pushes his characters by varying degrees forward in time in order to dramatize differences between them. This technique allows Haldeman to exploit the theme of alienation and explore contemporary American attitudes about technology and time. How time travel in The Forever War is achieved is important, for it reinforces the points Haldeman is making with the Moving Observer metaphor. Time dilation occurs when the soldiers are rapidly projected long distances, be it to boot camp on an outer planet, to a staging area, or directly to the battlefront. Each jump in physical distance costs to use a time as money or resource metaphor a certain amount of time in relation to those back
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home on earth. Physical distance, therefore, translates into a distance in time, which then appears as a cultural or psychological distance compared to others when the soldiers return home or are transferred to a different unit. The step-by-step alienation of soldiers during the Vietnam War as they were sent overseas to a land remote from their homes and native culture is thus dramatized as a few years for the boot camp experience, several more for the trip to a staging area, and even more years for the experience of actual combat. The distortion in age between the returning soldiers and their friends and family at home makes visual the sense of alienation many veterans felt in a way that other novels such as Coming Home or Rambo cannot. In addition, the constant G-force pressure the soldiers are subjected to while underway creates a continual and palpable reminder of their separation from their loved ones and from their home culture. Another example of how the moving observer functions to show distance between individuals comes in the troubles that creep up amongst the soldiers themselves as they are shuffled between units. As the war drags on, the more recent recruits come from a culture several centuries apart from that of their commanders, although in chronological age they may be only one or two years apart. This cultural gap creates a tension aboard the spacecraft similar to the problems encountered in Vietnam, where university educated officers came from practically a different world than average, lower-middle class soldiers. The mutiny plotted against Mandella during the final mission of the Forever War is reminiscent of the stories of American soldiers in Vietnam cutting down their own lieutenants during combat. To rapidly move the soldiers forward in both time and space, the military develops pressure tanks that will ensure the soldiers survival, but which further distorts ones sense of time and also serves to change the soldiers relationship to their environment and own bodies. If being bound to the rhythm of walking in 1798 left one free [. . .] to inhabit the rhythms of [ones] own thoughts and conversation (Gifford 1990:1067), then travel in 2458 unbinds one from any sense of mental or physical rhythms. In the pressure tanks, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name (Haldeman 1996:197). Speeding up the observers movement in relation to time/distance intensifies the difference in perception that Gifford identified between centuries at the close of the second millen-
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nium. In The Forever War, faster speeds do not just alter ones mental rhythms; they obliterate them. Another aspect of American ideas about technology that Haldeman critiques with the Moving Observer metaphor is the belief in the inevitable benefits of technological progress. Emerging victorious in the mid-twentieth-century as the most technologically advanced country in the world, the United States seemed to its citizens capable of almost anything, including transforming the world into a better place. Threats by Khrushchev to bury America in the race to produce consumer goods and the quick leap ahead of the Soviets in the space race soon after Sputnik only served to reinforce the ideas that it was all a matter of technology and that America only needed to move forward in this area. Polio vaccines, the eradication of small pox, organ transplants, anything and everything seemed possible. This entire idea suffered a severe blow in Vietnam, when the worlds most advance military machine could not defeat an enemy lurking in jungles with rifles or melding into the local population, and it is precisely this feeling of impotence despite advanced training and weapons that Haldeman recreates in The Forever War. Time dilation distances the soldiers not only from the home front but also from the enemy, and so the warriors are never sure from what time their enemy will arrive in any particular battle. Will they be technologically more advanced than the soldiers themselves, will they be comparatively easy prey, or combatants of equal skill? In this way, Haldeman simultaneously reproduces the tension of fighting an unknown enemy and the logic which propelled the arms race in the Cold War. Not knowing what the enemy had, the United States was inevitably forced to develop new forms of military technology in order to keep ahead or just even with the other side. That this constant development of technology brings no sense of security is demonstrated through the effects of time dilation. No matter how much one progresses, one still cannot predict from which future the enemy will come, and so all efforts to control the clock through technological progress are doomed. Eisenhowers warning about the dangers of linking the military and industry too closely echoes as well in the technological race that the war encourages. As Mandella careens forward in time, he discovers that science has made it possible to regenerate body parts, and thus severe injuries suffered during the attack on the transport ship are cured within a matter of months. What he concurrently discovers is that the medical advancements
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serve more the interests of the war machine than those of the individual. In earlier times, an injury had meant a one-way ticket home and out of the war hence the occasional self-inflicted wound in Vietnam but there is no more of that consequence here. This fascinating piece of technology allows a soldier to get back up on his feet quickly and return to the fray to serve his time. In extending the war over hundreds of years, Haldeman shows not only the way the military perverts technological advances for its own purposes but also the distorting effect of technology itself. Ostensibly, technological progress has always been carried out to benefit mankind, but here, pushed to its limits, it again serves to alienate humans from their own bodies. If it was not clear to people how cars and air-conditioned buildings cut us off from nature, then the first heart transplant, performed less than ten years before publication of The Forever War, made it obvious that extending ones life also involved treating the body as a machine, separating the physical from the spiritual will to live, the body from the mind. The desire to stay alive forever, to overcome time, means detaching the physical aspect of man from his soul and creating a hybrid human. The American fascination with staying young forever also involves a cost in terms of human relationships. Returning home after aging only a few months, Mandella has the opportunity to experience his mother both in her 50s and her 80s. The net effect is to alienate him from her; by staying young he has lost contact with the rhythm of other peoples lives and therefore cannot understand the changes she has gone through. Time dilation can thus express the psychological distance that ensues when one does not mentally keep pace with ones companions; the individual becomes isolated because there is no moving backward in time to restore the past. After all, [t]ime is directional and irreversible (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:138). Technological developments, such as the time shuttle, may allow a couple to be re-united in time, but it also isolates individuals from humans of their own time. By the time the novel closes on the further shores of the thirty-second century, the couple lives together but are forever separated from their original culture. The use of movement through time to express distance between people also appears in The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, albeit in the opposite direction. As Stephen Jay Gould points out, Simpson placed Magruder in a remote past as the only human in the age of dinosaurs partly to rumi-
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nate on his own professional interests in paleontology and take jabs at his colleagues, and partly to examine the themes of loneliness and fears of intellectual impotence (1996:120). Though Simpson may well have intended the metaphor of distance in time to express his own personal sense of loneliness, the novella also resonates with echoes of Walden to offer a wider vision that is similar to Thoreaus, yet tinged with a sense of sadness and frustration. Ultimately, the difference can be traced back to how the two authors understand time and employ it as a theme. Though they end up at their respective retreats for different reasons, the similarities between Thoreaus and Magruders sojourns are unmistakable. The former goes to Walden Pond to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived (Thoreau 1960:66). Magruder, of course, winds up at Pentaceratops valley purely by accident, but once there considers his stay there a search for comprehension (Simpson 1996:83). What is important to him is the same thing that is important to Thoreau: What I have done and what I have seen are essential parts of the story, but the only really important thing is what I have felt and thought (1996:84). Thoreaus book was meant, as he states at the very start, as a wake-up call to his contemporaries, to show them that most of what they desire so highly in life material goods, travel, technology, news, and so forth are distractions that prevent them from understanding themselves. By his example, Thoreau tried to demonstrate that one can live with less and live better. In the same vein, the adaptability of man to new conditions is also what the evolutionary scientist Simpson sets out to show in the story of Magruder, though under more extreme conditions than those prevailing in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts. Magruder comes to the same conclusions about travel that Thoreau does, that travel is not interesting for its own sake. What I liked was going places with someone, meeting new kinds of people, coming back and talking about it all (Simpson 1996:44). Similarly, Thoreaus observation that news is gossip If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care about the myriad instances and applications? (1960:68) is paralleled by Magruders realization that many of his attempts to distract himself by, for example, picking fights with dinosaurs was, in fact, pure escapism from the emotional realities of my life (Simpson 1996:84).
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In the end, although Magruders final words a man is responsible only for himself (1996:104) sum up the beliefs of both authors, Simpsons views come across as decidedly less optimistic and exultant than Thoreaus. Neither of them meant for others to try to repeat their experiences, but Thoreaus ideas are exhorted as a lesson to be learned and his story is inevitably one closer to most people, if only for the reason that he himself was physically never very far away. He could, and did, walk into Concord to talk with others when he wanted, and guests often paid him a call at his cabin in the woods. Magruders isolation from his fellow humans, on the other hand, is complete. Inevitably, the extremeness of his one-way trip must account for the melancholy that pervades his remarks, but in placing Magruder in this situation Simpson is not just giving expression to his own personal anxieties, as Gould suggests. Melancholy is unavoidable because throwing a single individual back eighty million years is necessary to demonstrate an important and un-Thoreauian reality about evolution. From the first day of his life in the Cretaceous era to the last, Magruder continually asks himself why he should try to go on. The situation is hopeless, since he cannot go back, procreate, or guarantee that anything he thinks or produces will ever live on after he dies. He is a unique individual in the truest sense of the word, but it is a comfortless thought when confronted with the realization that [i]t is mankind that has survived, not any one man (1996:45). The answer to his unarticulated impulse to survive one that never goes away comes with the small mammals that steal his food. His instinct to survive is meaningless in the context of the Cretaceous era, but he has inherited it from these small animals which will evolve thanks largely to this blind impulse into humans. Although he himself will not pass anything on, he can and does honor life and the future mankind by at least trying to survive. Moving an individual millions of years back in time thus becomes a metaphor for the insignificance of the individual compared to the entire species. Paradoxically, Magruder both recognizes the meaninglessness of his own person and at the same time appreciates the necessity of the urge to simply survive. Simpson thus places mans longing for immortality in an even larger and more intricate context than does Thoreau, who died a few years after Darwin published the Origin of Species, and he casts a sobering light on the American fascination with individualism that Thoreau expounded.
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The incident with the small mammals also allows Simpson to work his way neatly around the grandfather paradox (Deutsch and Lockwood 1994:68). Cast back millions of years, the protagonist becomes an unseen blip on the radar screen of evolution, and once aware of the importance of these tiny creatures he can easily back off and avoid interfering with the course of events. The Ethnologist may criticize him as a small man for refusing to play God, but one can equally well ask why any man should attempt to play that role. Science, Simpson suggests, is not just a toy for manipulating the environment but also a useful tool for simply understanding our role in the world. Of course, one could ask whether Magruders reaction would have been the same if he had slipped back only a hundred years and actually met his own human great-grandfather. It may take the evolutionary scale of millions of years for one to gain a humbler perspective on ones own existence. The immense scale of time Simpson employs and the unbridgeable gap between people that it suggests demonstrate the difference between Thoreau and himself. The formers statement that [t]ime is but the river I go a-fishing in (1960:71) and its implied opposition to the popular American proverb time is money illustrate his belief that it is not time itself but attitudes towards time that separate people. A similar idea appears in Alan Lightmans Einsteins Dreams, when, for example, a world is imagined in which people build their houses at as high an altitude as possible in order to slow down time and hence live longer (1993: 2832). Thoreaus philosophy, however, takes a more optimistic tact, for he argues that rather than rushing about trying to find or make time, one can overcome the barriers of time through the imagination. Sitting in front of his cabin, he can travel almost anywhere and to anytime: Both time and place were changed, and I dwelt nearer to these parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me (1960:64). Playing on the Moving Time metaphor of a flowing river (Lakoff and Johnson 1999:144), Thoreau claims one can transcend time. For Magruder, on the other hand, time is, at first, an object of study which one can manipulate with machines and, later, a dimension which separates him from others. For the one, time is a mental state which can be overcome; for the other, it is a physical reality which, since it allows only one-way travel, cannot be overcome. Radical as Thoreau might be in challenging mainstream American beliefs, his general idea that time can be overcome is as American as apple
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pie. Baseball, with its traditions, romantic associations with the past, and statistics, embodies this national obsession with lifting barriers between past and present. Although the sports original fascination with statistics stems from nineteenth century social reform movements and the belief in documenting needs and improvements (Tygiel 2000:20), by the twentieth century statistics became a way of comparing the past with the present and hence dissolving the boundaries between the two. Statistics allow two-way communication, and so it comes as no surprise that the 1919 Black Sox can step into 1980s America in W. P Kinsellas Shoeless Joe (1982). . What the novels by Haldeman and Simpson have in common is the literal use of the moving observer metaphor that highlights, among other things, problems with the American sense of time embedded in sports metaphors. The attempt to dominate and to control time, efforts exemplified by football and basketball metaphors or by the worship of technological progress, are unrealistic undertakings, doomed on the one hand by the distance technology puts between people, and on the other hand by the insignificance of the individual on the evolutionary scale. Baseballs attempt to overcome time by going in the opposite direction, relinquishing control over time and transcending time-barriers, is equally illusionary. Baseball a sport in which disorder always threatens and the object is to re-establish order (Skolnik 1994:38) flies directly counter to the three arrows of time that Steven Hawking demonstrates travel in one direction only, namely towards disorder (1998:152). Its lack of time-limits provides an allure that suggests an older, task-oriented rural society where the time of day was clearly secondary to the completion of the job at hand (Skolnik 1994:10), a harkening back to the farther shore of America in the mid-nineteenth century with a profoundly different attitude towards the rhythms of life [. . .] (Gifford 1990:106). But actually reaching the farther shore, as Fitzgeralds Gatsby has shown, is really just an American dream. Both Sam Magruder and The Forever War defy these American myths about controlling and overcoming time by allowing time travel in only one direction. The two novels send their protagonists in opposite directions in time, but both, in limiting the direction, are able to use time as a metaphor to illustrate isolation and to challenge American notions about technology and individualism.
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References
Bierce, A. 1998. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in N. Baym, et al. (eds.). The Norton Anthology of American Literature, (vol. 2). New York: Norton, pp. 26974. Deutsch, D. and M. Lockwood. 1994. The Quantum Physics of Time Travel, in Scientific American. March, pp. 6874. Fitzgerald, F. S. 1992. The Great Gatsby. New York: Macmillan. Gifford, D. 1990. The Farther Shor: A Natural History of Perception, 17981984. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. Gould, S. J. 1996. The Truth of Fiction: An Exegesis of G. G. Simpsons Dinosaur Fantasy. Afterword to G.G. Simpson. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder. New York: St. Martins Press, pp. 10526. Haldeman, J. 1996. The Forever War. New York: Avon. Hawking, S.1998. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam. Kinsella, W.P 1982. Shoeless Joe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. . Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Lightman, A. 1993. Einsteins Dreams. New York: Warner. Skolnik, R. 1994. Baseball and the Pursuit of Innocence: A Fresh Look at the Old Ball Game. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press. Simpson, G. G. 1996. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder. New York: St. Martins Press. Thoreau, H. D. Walden. 1960. New York: Signet. Tygiel, J. 2000. Past Time: Baseball as History. New York: Oxford University Press. Wells, H. G. 1992. The Time Machine. New York: Tor Classics.
PERDICIT SILENTIUM
DANIELA ROGOBETE
University of Craiova
We live inside the act of discourse. But we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which the articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies such as the icon of the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is difficult to speak of these, for how should speech justly convey the vitality of silence? (Steiner 1969: 31)
Silence, wrongly treated as an unambiguous concept, has nevertheless received so much attention in different cultures and at different times that it has become a form of discourse outside language (Le Breton 2001: 80), likely to be interpreted not necessarily in opposition to the Word but rather in prolongation of it. Theorised from various angles, metaphorised and charged with religious, political or cultural symbolism, silence has come to be associated to a multiplicity of cultural practices. It is seen in a variety of ways: as the threat of a possible erasure of language, a benign alternative to speech, or as a form of discourse outside regular language. Theorized as the guardian of tradition, silence permanently reveals its duality through different aesthetic figures and is continuously undermined, echoed or deepened by language. For the mystics of any religious tradition, the gap between word and thought is prolonged toward an indefinite space in which silence acquires particular significances, becoming a new type of discourse endowed with magical forces. Silent language, when achieved, activates intuition and deeper communication, marking the passage from common language to its next phase, the poetic language, and then to a kind of silence that allows a much better understanding of the surrounding world.
The ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word. It is only by breaking through the walls of language that visionary observance can enter the world of total and immediate understanding. Where such understanding is attained, the truth need no longer suffer the impurities and fragmenta-
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tion that speech necessary entails. It need not conform to the naive logic and linear conception of time implicit in syntax. In ultimate truth, past, present and future are simultaneously comprised. It is the temporal structure of language that keeps them artificially distinct. (Steiner 1969: 31)
In contrast to Eastern traditions, Western tradition imposed the pre-eminence of the Word over silence, even if the values of silence were frequently emphasised, especially by religion. By placing the power of creation on language, the Greek and Judaic cultures perpetuated the fear of silence. Nevertheless, the philosophic perspective upon silence as a means of transcending language or even as a different type of language goes back to Greek Antiquity. Although giving supremacy to the Word, early Greek philosophy admits the ambivalence of both silence and logos. The voice is also viewed as the great mystery transcending the reality of the visible (Steiner 1969: 31), as a means of knowing reality by knowing the names of its objects as well as the first step toward spiritual illumination and liberation. From this perspective, any linguistic act is conceived as the expression of a mental and linguistic process that revives or constitutes reality by naming its components. The burden of a tradition which sees the written word as a dogmatic paralysis of the creative, spoken word, has engendered in many cultures the idea of writing as an evil tool whose use corrupts thought and, implicitly, speech. In some ancient cultures the priority of the uttered word over the written one is equated with the predominance of knowledge over rite, of revelation over tradition. The common conception starting to take shape at the end of antiquity is that writing (the expression of the dead letter) is infallible and self-sufficient in comparison to the spoken word, once living and creative, but after a while looked down upon as ephemeral and unreliable. The unbreakable domination of the written word is shattered at times by the introduction of poetry, myths and implicitly metaphoric language which produce ruptures in the stream of common language creating spaces of silence. The passage from orality to literacy is sometimes considered to be another source of silence; in the transition from the spoken to the written word, something is forever lost, something that cannot be rendered in writing, however much one might try. Analysing this passage, Walter Ong stresses the importance of the impact it had upon human existence whose main narratives came to be shaped by the internalisation of the word. He distinguishes between the spoken word, which belongs to hearing and to
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reaching beyond itself, which is not confined to isolation but enjoys a sense of communion, and the written word, which belongs to sight and to the solitude imposed on the reader: Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer... I am at the centre of my auditory world which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core sensation and existence. (Ong 1982: 72) Finding its reverberations, though attenuated and diminished, in oral narrative elements, the spoken word is still perceived as preserving some of the magical powers and sacred attributes which seem to have been lost when typography was introduced. This magic vein slips into silence which is once again subtly re-inscribed within discourse. Different voices illustrating different views in the history of Western thinking give primacy, in turns, either to orality as the starting point of literacy or to the latter as the superior form of human expression. To the basic shift orality-literacy so much theorised and debated, contemporary literary theory added further distinctions when dealing with the passage from writing to print and to computer processing. Silence comes in this case from everything which is missed when shifting from orality to literacy, when sacredness and magic are turned into frozen science, human communion into isolation, savage mind into what Lvi-Strauss saw as domesticated thought. (1968: 23) Where orality empowered spoken words with magical power, sacredness and freedom, and uttering names meant acquiring power over what was named, literacy degraded words and names to mere labels attached to their referents. Ong believes that [t]hought is nested in speech not in texts, all of which have their meanings through reference of the visible symbol to the world of sound (1982: 75). Silence is once more emphasised by the passage from written to printed words and even more by the introduction of the computer. Word technology implies silencing and fixing it within the typographic page.
Writing initiated what print and computers only continue the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist. By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write naturally. Oral speech is fully natural to human beings in the sense that every human being in every culture who is not physiologically and psychologically impaired learns to talk. Talk implements conscious life but it wells up into consciousness out of unconscious depths, though of course
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with the conscious as well as unconscious co-operation of society. (Ong 1982: 82)
Silence is stressed now by the peculiar use of typographic means which fill space with meaning by arranging the lines in different suggestive ways, by playing with fonts, characters, blanks and signs, and by using visual tricks that sometimes, as in the case of postmodern poetry, make reading aloud almost impossible. Suggestively arranged on the page, words become meaningful because of their silent visual symbolism; significance here is related to seeing words not uttering them. Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Writing moves words from the sound world to a world of visual space, but print locks words into position in this space. Control of position is everything in print. (Ong 1982: 121) Silence and its ambiguous dimensions have found other means of expression through a new shift from processed words to a new form of post-typographic orality called secondary orality. Television, radio, telephone reinvent the spoken word and revive some of its former attributes: a sense of communion, a concentration upon the present moment, and a focus on spontaneity. The use of formulaic expressions is once again revived along with rhythmic recitations and mnemonic techniques meant this time to capture attention and imprint commercial messages upon the viewers memory. George Steiners study on Language and Silence (1969) makes a pertinent analysis of silence viewed from different cultural perspectives which far from offering a definite answer to the question of silence, only increase the multiplicity of approaches. Steiner discusses the primacy of the word in those parts of the Western cultures that tend to represent the human being as a zoon phonanta. Each period brings its myths and consecrates emblematic figure. Silence and speech are defined and redefined according to ideologies and philosophic trends, to historic circumstances and subjective views. Mala taciturnitas is permanently shown in contrast with bona taciturnitas in an equilibrated balance in turn experiencing decline and ascent, acquiring primacy or being relinquished to the background and bringing forth problems of translation, anti-languages or non-languages. It is considered that translation can never achieve complete equivalence, because there always remains a gap between the word to be translated and its translation, a gap that is itself translated by silence. Silence is introduced when the attempt to find perfect correspondences between cul-
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tures or languages proves to be impossible; J. Robert Oppenheimer (qtd. in Steiner 1969) warns against the breakdown of communication in all sciences and human activities, and considers that bridges between languages can only be found through approximate metaphors which only create the illusion of understanding and knowledge. The problem of the imperfect translation is not something new, it was discussed by different authors in different periods, discussions culminating during the seventeenth century in the theory of the emergent silent speech and coinciding with the development of mathematical and scientific languages seen as alternatives to vain attempts at translations. From this perspective, translation is extended from linguistics to different other fields of study. To the gap between one text and its approximate translation in a different language, no matter how accurate and close to the initial significance it might appear, theorists oppose metaphor and the gap created between the metaphorical content and its literal translation. The crisis of language became visible in all arts particularly during the twentieth century, which promoted silence under different guises and rose against the predominance of the word and verbal equivalence. Anti-languages or non-languages, chiefly characteristic to science, started to replace traditional verbal statements in many artistic fields. In literature, silence has frequently been associated with authorial voice, with narrative texture, and with the treatment and hidden implications of characters; it has stood for a diversity of values which made it a complex sign prone to multiple interpretations. Blank pages, gaps, pauses, breaks are just a few means generally used in order to graphically represent silence. The ambiguity of silence was repeatedly stressed by texts that seemed to be woven out of sounds and silences, deepening meaning and making it transcend the literal level and reverberate on different other levels of significance. Hermetic encodings and narrative techniques destroy the traditional plot and chronological sequence and introduce particular means of creating silence; this creation-effect results in the readers hesitation when faced with disturbing points of view and ambiguous narrative treatments, from gaps created within the text and metaphorical reinterpretations. Experiments and innovations in point of technique increase the ambivalence of the discourse which oscillates between readings and horizons of expectations, and introduce silences that wait to be decoded and filled with significance. Intertextual cross-references, requiring familiarity with different cultural spaces, puns
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and invented words make up a new language denying the traditional one and demanding new schemes of reading. Science has long imposed its anti-languages, versions of which are now rendered even more abstract and simplified so as to fit the ever more sophisticated and abstract mathematical realities. New systems of signs and codes have been designed to translate these realities into graphic inscriptions and the silence they imply into significance. Art is even more inventive in discovering alternative means of expressing silence; painting, music, sculpture and even dance use various aesthetic figures to render the silent white writing into colours, sounds, shapes or movements. Starting from Jakobsons functions of language, Gian Paolo Caprettini (2000) established six types of silence built upon the relations between addresser and addressee, context and message, contact and code in verbal communication. First distinguishing between speaking silence and mute silence, Caprettini makes an analogy between oblivion as extreme condition of memory and identity, and silence as extreme condition of language. Jakobsons disposition of relations and functions becomes with Caprettini a revaluation of silence from six perspectives.
CONTEXT (referential silence) MESSAGE (self-reflexive silence) ADDRESSER ADDRESSEE (expressive silence) CONTACT CODE (metalinguistic silence) (conative silence) (phatic silence)
When taking into account the addressers silence, the ensuing function is the emotive/expressive one; this type of silence is charged with implications and significances as silence can never start from zero degree but is always projected upon a conversational background which transforms it into a possible answer, reaction, unexpressed intention and allusion. The addressees silence fulfils a conative function demanding the direct implication of the addressee in the communicative act. When the one supposed to answer and continue the exchange of messages is silent, his/her silence
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can be taken as an answer or as a break introduced at the core of communication; it can be the silence of comprehension (of translation of codes), either hermeneutic or cognitive silence meant to give information about the addressee. The context itself may be silent in which case we deal with the absolute silence of the word taken out of its referential sphere and projected beyond immediate significance. This is the referential function of silence, illustrated by the special cases of prayer and meditation in which the word acquires either mystical or magical powers; with no specific addressee, not a physical one anyway, and with no expectation of an audible answer that might prolong and motivate the exchange of messages, the silence of prayer is placed outside usual language and communication. When the message is silent, the ensuing function is the poetic (self-reflexive) one responsible for the analysis of contemplative silence. It is interpreted as the introductory moment of a revelation, of a discovery which is not necessarily translated into words. Silence of contemplation is totally opposed to muteness or indifferent silence representing a silent quest for truth and answers; it is also the silence of the work of art which requires the viewers decoding of its concealed significances. The phatic (expressive) function of silence involves the contact when silence itself is the one that sustains and prolongs communication; it signals tacit agreement, mutual understanding, and breaks in the linear process of communication meant to emphasise significances and to stress alluded implications. It may designate complicity, discretion or indifference, and it may also be charged with emotional coordinates. This type of silence is taken as a frame of the word, a blank or a border of the word. (Caprettini 2000: 205) When dealing with the last element, the code, the metalinguistic function regards the double aspect of the issue: silence of the code and silence as code. Silence as a code waiting to be deciphered has received innumerable readings going from acceptance, refusal, surprise, ignorance, doubt, control of emotions or lack of control, dis/approval, tacit protest, hesitation, suspense, secrecy, and contemplation up to ideological and political implications (censorship, restrictions, imprisonment and finally death). The silence of the code is translated as a communication breakdown, a mistake in formulation or address, as incapacity of expression. Caprettini sees silence as code as a mark of creativity and eloquence whereas silence of the code comes from automatism, stereotype and clich. It generally refers to the dangerous silence of censorship seen as the ultimate form of repres-
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sion whose beginnings are placed around 443 BC, when it designated the office of censor charged with the commandment of the census and the observance of citizens morals in ancient Rome. Different periods stressed different aspects of censorship whether in its political, religious or moral dimensions. Censorship was initially conceived as a necessary element in the establishment of the proper relationship between state and individuals. Religion had its significant say in the matter as many principles referring to the individuals morals were dictated and influenced by the Christian doctrine adjusted by the Church officials to the requirements of a good social and political organisation. Forms of censoring literary writings deemed dangerous became more and more severe, reaching during the following periods the most repressive dimensions culminating with imprisonment and executions. The necessity of getting a publication-licence, imposed in the seventeenth century, gradually transformed publishing houses into their own censors with their specific censorship systems criticised by Milton in his Aeropagitica (2004), a famous pamphlet overtly directed against the decision of the Parliament to censor the Press. Even if considered less dangerous than blasphemous literature particularly censored at different times with different degrees of intensity , obscene writings, at first ignored or lightly sanctioned, came to be more and more severely treated by publishing houses which finally decreed a mass destruction of all these books, no matter if they included Christopher Marlows translation of Ovids Elegies or other classic texts deemed indecent. Pre-censorship is abolished in 1695, and the event is described by Macaulay (qtd. in Thomas 1969) as having done more for freedom than Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights. Political censorship had severe consequences on writers and their public; for fear of trials, persecutions and punishments which might have completely silenced their voices, authors preferred either to keep their manuscripts hidden awaiting better times or to disguise the controversial topics of their works under the mask of allegory. The Parliament controlled the writers and all the publications issued on the market. Donald Thomas (1969: 5) speaks about a sub form of political censorship, which he calls ministerial censorship, in charge with evaluating the political writings and the satires attempting to undermine the Governmental authority. By intelligently breaking the deadening silence of the word and combining allegory and irony, many authors and publications escaped censor-
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ship and punishment. In 1741 David Hume published On the Liberty of the Press (1987), in which he discusses the necessary conditions required in the process of modernizing the press in England. He considered that England enjoyed a good liberty of the press because of its status somewhere between an absolute monarchy and a complete democracy. The Victorian moral censorship replaced the political censorship of the eighteenth century. The mid-nineteenth-century marked the beginning of intellectual freedom and the end of the censorship system. Even if dangerous topics and controversial issues were still present in the publishers minds, even if certain areas of interest, especially those related to sexuality, were still full of taboos and forbidden places, the period enjoys more freedom of speech hailed as a sign of progress and intellectual enlightenment.
By the cessation of those laws which restricted the liberty of printing, there was laid the foundation of the great Public Press, which more than any other single cause, has diffused among the people a knowledge of their power and has thus, to an almost incredible extent, aided the progress of English civilisation. (Buckle in Thomas 1969: 6)
The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of a new type of puritanical and political censorship directed against too blunt a denunciation of the truth. The proclamation of the freedom of thought and speech, free sex starting with the hippie generation and the sexual revolution of the 60s devoid of inhibitions and taboos, the introduction of various means of birth control, the emancipation of women and relinquishment of guilt to religious spheres created the illusion of a banishment of censorship to the history of literature. The example of so many writers persecuted, accused and sometimes sentenced to death (Salman Rushdie, Amir Nikaiin, Monouchehr Behzadi, Djavid Misani, Abutorab Bagherzadeh, Said Soltanpour and Rahman Hatefi) proved that we will always live under one form of censorship or another, the important thing being not to surrender to compromises and the silence of taboos when the revelation of the truth is concerned. Mills words in On Liberty have been invoked many times: The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. (1974: 47) Donald Thomas speaks about silent censorship and about new, devious means of silencing audacious spirits by ignoring them. The mistakes of
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the past are now corrected and instead of vividly censoring indecorous writings and publicly pillorying their authors, the present simply erases what contradicts its morality by reducing everything to the silence of ignorance.
The relevant question at any stage of human history is not Does censorship exist? but rather, Under what sort of censorship do we now live? The technology of the later twentieth century offers the means of silencing men without the danger of making them martyrs by the most effective method of all, by ignoring them. It is bloodless and almost silent censorship but, nonetheless, it might have been the envy of the Tudors and the Stuarts. (Thomas 1969: 318)
Silence of the repressed, of the migrant, silence of death and of the end of the Word/World, silence of the work of art, of secrecy, of complicity, of censorship, of ignorance, of too much knowledge and contemplation, of creation and of final destruction, of absence of meaning, are just a few of the avatars of silence finding their place in contemporary fiction. Either celebrating it as a subversive weapon undermining noisy discourses of power or rejecting it as a submissive politics of the defeated, treating it as a device of deepening meanings and increasing ambiguities or as a standing symbol of interdiction and censorship, texts inscribe silence within their attempt to deconstruct the major narratives of postmodernity. Placed at the intersection of conflicting discourses and readings, silence is most of the time shown in its dual characteristics and ambiguous heterogeneity. Steiner begins his study on silence by reminding us that the Apostle tells us that in the beginning was the Word. He gives us no assurance as to the end (Steiner 1969: 31), but in the end he warns against the dangers of malign silence which might engulf humanity. He quotes Blackmurs words announcing the advent of an era which will not express itself in wordsat all for the next age may not be literate in any sense we understand or the last three thousand years understood. (Steiner 1969: 56) If we are not able to come back to the sacred force of healing silence, then the prophecy of the anonymous poet quoted by Steiner (1969: 56) in Pervigilium Veneris that the Muses silence will also bring the silence of the entire civilisation will come true, and we will be all doomed to perish by silence.
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References
Caprettini, G. P 2000. Memorie i tcere. Povestirea ca Forma mentis. Translated . by George Popescu. Constana: Editura Pontica. Hume, D. 1987 (1742). Of the Liberty of the Press, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, edited by Eugene F. Miller. Georgia: Liberty Fund Inc. Le Breton, D. 2001. Despre tcere. Translated by Constantin Zaharia. Bucuresti: Editura All Lvi-Strauss, C. 1968. Structural Anthropology. London: Penguin Press. Mills, J. S. 1974 (1859). On Liberty. London: Penguin Books. Ong, W. 1982. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge. Sabine, G.H. 2004. Aeropagitica: And, of Education, With Autobiographical Passages from Other Prose Works. Massachusetts: Crofts Classics. Steiner, G. 1969. Language and Silence. Essays 19581966. London: Penguin Books. Thomas, D. 1969. A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
TONY HARRISON AND HIS TELEVISION POEMS

ISTVN D. RCZ
University of Debrecen
Tony Harrison, one of the most often discussed British poets of the past two decades, was born in a Leeds working-class family. His obvious ambition is to speak for the working-class, but Harrison also sees the paradoxes of his class affiliation. The ideal of the working-class poet is only an illusion to him: the poet belongs to a different class by definition. As he himself has said in an interview: obviously by being a poet Ive moved into another class (qtd. in Woodcock 1990: 55). In Sean OBriens phrasing, Harrison is a poet continually troubled by the knowledge that the gift which enables him to speak for his class is what separates him from it (1998: 51). In addition, Harrison did his studies in a field which could just as well be an emblem of aristocratic education: he got a degree in Classics at Leeds University. A thorough knowledge of Greek and Roman culture largely determines his poetry. His translations of Greek and French plays form an integral part of his life work. Some of these works are translations proper; some others can be seen as original texts inspired by classic plays. Therefore, Harrison is also a dramatist: his connections with the theatre are clearly shown by the dramatic features of his lyric poetry, particularly his long poems. On the other hand, the general problem of translation is also at the centre of his life work. The critic and poet Sean OBrien has remarked that the central subject matter of Harrisons verse is his examination and dramatisation of the relationships between language, class and power (1998: 51). This characterization suggests also that Harrison re-introduced political poetry into the mainstream of British literature. Among his topics one can find class-consciousness and class prejudice, the problem of political freedom, and the social function of the poet and poetry. More concretely, he has written about the First World War (and its aftermath), the Salman Rushdie affair, the effects of bombing Hiroshima, the changing face of Europe in the 1990s, and other such issues.
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Harrison speaks from a position frequently identified as postcolonial. This claim means, to put it simply, that he positions himself as a poet coming from a working-class family in the North of England, and from this position he speaks against the hegemony of the middle-class culture of the South. This extension of the term postcolonial is, of course, debatable, since it blurs the difference between the misery of African colonies and the economic hardship of Yorkshire, in this way distorting the perspective from which the English themselves view the history of colonialism. Harrsion, however, constructs his own solidarity on the basis of this colonial or postcolonial situation within his own country. He was helped in his self-definition by a pioneering work of cultural studies which he first read in the fifties as a student at Leeds University: Richard Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (1957). The title of Harrisons often quoted poems, Them and [uz], is a modified version of the title of a chapter in Hoggarts book: Them and us. (1957: 62) This poem is dedicated to Professors Richard Hoggart and Leon Cortez. The latter was not a real professor: Cortez was a popular comedian, who became famous for his Cockney adaptations of Shakespeare. Bruce Woodcock has pointed out that this double dedication is a sign of Harrisons orthodox and unorthodox education, illuminating the paradox of the implied poet:
Harrison is debunking the hegemonic power which puts high culture in the hands of an elite, but arguably the bite of the poem can only be decoded by a reader with access to that very culture. On the one hand, Harrison is asserting the democratic availability of such culture; on the other, his poem is speaking from within it, and as such unavailable to most people. (1990: 56)
Thus, although Harrison fights against the cultural hegemony of the middle-class and for the rights of an English language different from the language of the middle-class, his poetry also shows an opposite tendency. His preference for some classic forms of middle-class poetry, particularly for traditional stanza forms, is remarkable. According to Douglas Dunn, this shows that Harrison is one of those post-war poets whose life works can well be understood through the tension between poetic and political loyalties (1994: 327). As Harrison himself has said, this formal feature is a sign of his aggressive occupation: I was going to usurp classical forms but fit them to what I wanted to say and the kind of language I wanted to use
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(qtd. in Woodcock 1990: 53). This metaphor reveals his postcolonial position: although he speaks about class difference, the image he uses represents the occupation and re-occupation of land in the history of colonization. Harrisons aggression is not the revolt of the working-class person, although strike and other forms of rebellion are frequent metonymies in his poetry. His struggle is of a composite nature: he energetically attacks political and cultural barriers, but he is also aware that any destructive gesture and any occupation will inevitably result in the construction of new barriers. Therefore, his postcolonial position is the position of the constantly moving intellectual, the position of liminality. The greatest value of his verse is a rich representation of the paradoxes following from this dynamic position, but as I mentioned before this is also what makes interpretation difficult. The strange title of Them and [uz] suggests a provocative attitude. The title of Hoggarts chapter, Them and us, is an idiom indicating the difference between those who have power (them) and those who do not (us) in working-class discourse. Harrison adds a dialectical element to the sociolect quoted by Hoggart: he uses phonetic signs to indicate substandard pronunciation. The use of phonetic transcription reinforces the linguistic sign of solidarity, but its shape (the form it eventually takes on the page) also alienates it from the community in which the poet is rooted. The text itself is a self-reflexive poem representing its own intertextuality and semiotic uncertainty. In other words, the poet is in search of signs to represent his own revolt, and he cannot always find them among the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. The layout of the text is strikingly unconventional. The first impression of the scanning reader1 is that the poem is rich in unusual minimal signs: Greek letters, a digit (used instead of letters), italics indicating dialect forms, phonetic signs, hyphenated spelling, and so on. We see them right in the first few lines:
, ay, ay! stutterer Demosthenes gob full of pebbles outshouting seas 4 words only of mi art aches? and Mines broken, you barbarian, T.W.! He was nicely spoken. Cant have our glorious heritage done to death! I played the Drunken porter in Macbeth. (Harrison 1987: 122)
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The four Greek letters in the beginning signify the characteristic moans of ancient Greek tragedies. Its phonetic transcription is the ay, ay! following them, but this expression is also the popular (and sarcastic) shout of the comedian Leon Cortez. In a recording of his own reading Harrison pronounces the two kinds of wailing differently: first he imitates a conventional tragedy actor, then the voice of Cortez. The elliptical sentences that follow reconstruct a story from his school years: the young Harrison was allowed to play only the drunken porter in Shakespeares Macbeth, and because he recited Keatss Ode to a Nightingale with a broad accent, his teacher mocked him after the first four words. He takes revenge now (in the present of narration) by himself becoming a teacher, a father-figure. As in his manifesto quoted above, here again, he speaks about poetry as a form of occupation. This claim constructs two equally important meanings, poetry as a form of discovery and the emblematic image of colonization:
So right, yer buggers, then! Well occupy your lousy leasehold Poetry. You can tell the Receivers where to go (and not aspirate it) once you know Wordsworths matter/water are full rhymes, [uz] can be loving as well as funny. (Harrison 1987: 123)
Apart from contrasting different sign systems, Harrison also reinterprets the tradition of English poetry. All possession starts with the possession of language. Vernacular cultures, however, are heterogeneous, and this generalization applies also to language itself. In British culture the gaps between versions of the language often create a plurality within the individual, since the same person often speaks two different versions of English: both standard English and a dialect or sociolect. In the tradition of British poetry, as reinterpreted by Harrison, Wordsworth and Keats find their places because both of them spoke a dialect but wrote in a classic and elevated style. As a consequence, their poems represent those paradoxes, uncertainties and questions that determine Harrisons own attitude as a poet. On the other hand, he is also close to the neo-modernism of the second half of the 20th century: his remorse resembles the remorse caused by a transition of
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social class, as expressed in poems by Matt Simpson and Seamus Heaney (Barry 2000: 152). Images of childhood are of central importance in a number of post-1945 poets, and this feature is a clear sign of their roots in Romantic poetry. To use the idiom of post-structuralism: when Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, and Harrison write about their own childhood, they do so by re-reading Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Larkin reconstructs the image of childhood as an absence (therefore, his nostalgia can only be for Nothingness). Hughes constructs a new childhood in his closeness to nature (and represents the impossibility of this venture). Harrison asks the question again and again: what meaning can the culture of his childhood acquire in the present? Although his poems are very far from the nostalgia of light verse, they are still popular. Harrison owes this popularity mainly to the television versions of some of his long poems, which are outstanding and provocative works of television art. To achieve visual effects directly has always been a challenge to poetry. Concrete poetry becomes visual by the construction of still pictures; Harrisons television poems use motion picture for the same purpose. There were experiments with film poems before (the best known example being W.H. Audens Night Mail), but Harrison made this form popular for a significant number of TV viewers. These texts betray the eternal intention of poets to transgress the limits of conventional poetics, but his experiment with this form also aims at leading poetry back to those who originally created it. Consequently, we can interpret his ambition as a sign of remorse, the feeling of guilt that I mentioned before. Harrison is popular, but not in the sense as John Betjeman or Roger McGough are: instead of writing poetry for entertainment, he opens the poem towards the visual culture, the predominating culture of our age. His popularity, therefore, means popularity with a rather limited circle: his television poems (like the similar experiments of Simon Armitage, Douglas Dunn and others) belong to high culture, even though their subject matter often tends to be mass culture itself. More precisely: these works are about the plurality and conflicts of various cultures, using both verbal and visual devices. Verbality and visuality themselves create a tension which becomes a synecdoche of the effects and counter-effects caused by cultural mechanisms. Harrisons television poems are always based on written texts, moreover, on poems written in conventional stanza forms and meter. However, the interaction of the
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verbal text with visual and audio effects results in new aesthetic qualities not unlike text and design interact in Blakes books. The first and most successful of these is the film version of the poem entitled v. It has been characterized as a state of the nation poem: a text representing Britain during and after the miners strike in 1984. The title can be interpreted in a number of ways. V is Churchills famous sign (which is still often used in international communication as a sign of victory and, even more, as a sign of wanting victory). The reverse of the same gesture in body language is an obscene sign, originally meaning the female genitals. As an abbreviation, v can stand for the Latin word versus (and it can refer to social antagonism), but it is also a near homophone of the word verses. V is also a Roman numeral, and this is also relevant: although Harrison did not break the poem into parts, it still consists of five main units, as Helmut Haberkamm has pointed out in a critical essay (1994: 85). The most obvious antecedent of v. is Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The form is the same: both poems consist of four-line stanzas of iambic pentameters. Harrison also follows Gray with the structure of the poem: he also starts with the description of a churchyard and its environment, and finishes the poem with his own epitaph. Consequently, he follows in the wake of 18th-century churchyard poetry while he also undermines this tradition. Gray contemplates the talents of those simple peasants who rest in the graves:
Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast, The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his countrys blood. (ll. 5760)
Gray constructs idyllic tranquillity by contrasting it with fame, anxiety and the violence of political power. This last term, power, can be gained only with the help of language, but the man called Milton (a modern man having a talent like Miltons) is not only anonymous and inglorious, but also mute, unable to use language. This muteness, however, both inhibits and protects: it avoids Cromwells guilt, and it preserves the peace of the soul. Gray, the neo-classicist poet, used metaphorical naming as a central device in his poem: Hampden, Milton and Cromwell are used as metaphors. Naming is also important in Harrison, but in v. it has a
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metonymic (rather than metaphorical) function. The poet figure in the poem refers to the tombstones of two men who had the names Wordsworth and Byron only as a curious coincidence:
Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned luggage cowhide in the age of steam, and knew their place of rest before the land caves in on the lowest worked-out seam. (1987: 236)
Because the implied poet only knows the names and professions of the dead, the names themselves become parts of reality: as a result of the coincidence, they will make perfect company for the 20th-century poet. In this way Harrison re-writes the image of Grays latent folk heroes. Since the name is the only certainty (as in Philip Larkins poem Maiden Name), the signified is always what the speaker of the poem finds significant in his own context. By this pattern he also re-interprets the word aerosolled by a football hooligan on the tombstone of Harrisons parents: UNITED. The meaning of the word, as the author of the graffiti understood it, is the short form for the football team Leeds United. However, the poet (who definitely plays the role of the poet in the text) immediately discovers that the signifier can refer to a different signified on the tombstone, between the name of his father and his mother: united, that is re-united in death. After the original meaning slips, the poet finds a new meaning, a new significance and, moreover, new aesthetics in the signifier, in the pure word UNITED. In Bruce Woodcocks words, v. is as much a personal elegy for Harrisons father and mother as it is for his society (1990: 59). Furthermore, it is also a dramatic lyric organized around the motif of the Doppelgnger, the double. The speaker in the cemetery has a vision: he sees a skinhead who has sprayed obscene and offensive words on the slabs. The conversation between the two of them is the central part of the poem. (I quote here the first two and the last two stanzas of this passage; the italics in Harrisons text signify the foreign words used by the persona and the words of the skinhead.)
What is it that these crude words are revealing? What is it that his aggro act implies? Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies?
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So whats a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Cant you speak the language that yer mum spoke. Think of er! Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek? Go and fuck yerself with cri-de-coeur! . OK! (thinking I had trapped) OK! If you are so proud of it then sign your name when next youre full of HARP and armed with spray, next time you take this short cut from the game. He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried. He aerosolled his name. And it was mine. (1987: 241, 244)
The skinhead is the double and the alter ego of the poet. To mention the most obvious meaning: the skinhead is what the poet could have become had he not been educated. But he is also a real (not simply virtual) part of the poet figure: the skinhead is an allegory of the poets anger caused by his own passivity. It is worth noticing how didactic the hooligan is in the first stanza of the above-quoted passage. He asks in an accusing tone: Cant you speak / the language that yer mum spoke? The poet asks back: why arent you brave enough to tell me your name? Then the skinhead gives the ultimate answer: I am brave enough to tell you, I am you. If we summarize the main points of the above-quoted dialogue like this, we can see that two kinds of soul get into a fight in this debate. I am speaking of souls because both characters exist only in a vision. They do not seem to have bodies: the bodies in the poem rest in their graves. They cannot have bodies, because each is identical with what he represents. No self can exist, the poem suggests, without the activity of a deviant anti-self. This dichotomy would be distorted if we simply explained it by identifying the poet with the superego and the skinhead with the id, or the poet with high culture and the skinhead with subculture. What we can possibly say without largely distorting the meaning is that both selves want to exercise power over the other by possessing language and by trying to position themselves as father-figures. Positioning oneself, of course, also means positioning and
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containing the other at the same time. However, this attempt to possess language and to become a father figure is doomed to failure on both sides. The poem makes points about language through the metonymy of graffiti. Graffiti can always be read as a palimpsest: a text that is written on top of another text. This is also true when the aerosolled word or figure appears on a clean surface, since a building itself is a sign and is modified by everything that is added to it. The opposite is also true: graffiti acquires meaning only in the context of what it is written on. However, graffiti are even more obviously a palimpsest when written on top of another word, figure, or text. We have seen such superposition in the case of UNITED (which becomes a palimpsest as it interacts with a tombstone), but the television poem offers another example: somebody writes NF (meaning National Front) on top of a swastika, then both are covered by the word CUNT. This pattern suggests how the emblem of right-wing totalitarianism is first overwritten by the abbreviation of an extremist right-wing group founded in 1966 (signifying the obvious link between the two and the reincarnation of fascist xenophobia), and then by an obscene word in English. Universalizing hatred first leads to its own continuation, then it results in anarchy. The film shows how the red colour of CUNT gradually erases everything else, filling the whole screen. This visual representation of bleeding means bloodshed caused by hatred, but it also leads the obscene word back to its original meaning: the female genitals and menstruation. The two meanings, of course, contradict each other, because there is no signified that we could know with certainty: the old word shows under the new layer of the palimpsest. What we can know with certainty when reading this poem is that antagonisms do exist and are effective. The dual persona outlined above, the binary opposition of the skinhead and the poet, corresponds to the emblematic dichotomy of the poem: the sign v on the one hand, and the word UNITED on the other. The former is a symbol of destruction, disintegration, and even entropy: it is a short form of versus (against), but it can also be an obscene sign of violence, as well as a sign of victory (meaning destroying or oppressing others). Being united, however, suggests solidarity, keeping together and building a community. Harrisons position is strikingly secular: instead of finding transcendental power in religion (which promises transcendental union after death) he finds it in language. He is fully aware of the unreliability of language, which awareness creates a post-
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modern position for him. However, it is no accident that in his texts he makes references to the Romantics: he also uses the order based on tradition as a weapon against the chaotic present. In this way, his poetry is much closer to the mainstream of British poetry than to the verse of John Ashbery and other American postmodernist poets. v. is a poem whose television version is a later adaptation of the original text; Harrisons other film poems, however, were written for the screen in their original forms. Therefore, they are combinations of conventional stanzas and film scripts. If we read them as they appear on the page, we see not only two kinds of text, but also two kinds of role: that of the poet and that of a film-script writer adapting the poem of the former. This duality resembles that of Coleridge playing the role of a medieval ballad singer in the stanzas of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the role of a 17th-century textbook editor in the marginal glosses. The marginal glosses both in Coleridge and in Harrison distance the reader from the main text, and they also construct two implied poets with two remarkably different attitudes. One of these poems is The Gaze of the Gorgon (1995). A gorgon is a mythological figure who kills (more precisely, petrifies) with its gaze. The very word gaze is one of the most frequently used terms in psychoanalytic film studies; it means the kind of look that also contains desire. This gaze in the mythology of Harrisons film means both the desire to kill (that is, to exercise power over another human beings life) and the desire to petrify, to turn into stone (that is, to transform another human being into a work of art). A formal correlative of this latter meaning is the stanza form, the smooth rhythm of the iambic tetrameters:
Gulf: Tank Gorgon/Golden Sea From long ago the Gorgons gaze stares through time into our days. Under seas, as slow as oil the Gorgons snaky tresses coil. The Gorgon under the golden tide brings ghettos, gulags, genocide. (1995: 33)
Harrison reverses the perspective suggested by the title: the speaker is the fictitious figure of Heinrich Heine, whose body exists only symbolically, in the form of statues representing him. Harrison, again, plays the role of a poet: the voice in the poem belongs to a petrified poet (petrified because he exists in stone), who is in search of his identity the same way sounds are
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in search of a meaning. When he says, see heroin addicts then go in / to hear heroes sing in Lohengrin (1995: 37), the word heroes in the second line sounds as a grotesque echo of heroin addict in the first line. Thus, heroes leave the meaning attributed to them in Wagners opera. The Heine figure of the poem and the film becomes a mask for the implied poet, emphasizing marginality and poetic qualities. (Heines statue is also shown in contrast with the much more heroic statues of Goethe and Schiller.) The function of the fictitious Heine in this poem is basically the same as that of the biographical Harrison in his short lyrics, such as in Them and [uz] and On Not Being Milton. In the latter, the role of Milton is the same as that of Goethe and Schiller in The Gaze of the Gorgon they represent institutionalized poetry as opposed to the marginality of Harrison/Heine. After the two television poems mentioned above and three further films (The Shadow of Hiroshima, A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan and The Blasphemers Banquet, 1995) the film entitled Prometheus (1998) can be seen as a summary. As the introductory essay entitled Fire and Poetry suggests, this text, again, represents Harrisons dual cultural background: his working-class origin and his profound knowledge of Greek and Roman culture. In the essay he makes frequent references to Shelleys Prometheus Unbound. In his view the main difference between Shelley and himself is in the imagery they use. In Shelley, Prometheus is tortured by images of the industrial revolution; in his own poem, deserted factories and mines fulfil the same function (1998: xix). The instincts and the rebellious energy of the Luddites have survived, although their direction has changed: instead of destroying machines, todays Luddites want to keep the machines and mines at any cost. The figure of Prometheus is important for Harrison because he represents creative fight rather than blind revolt. There are two aspects of Prometheus, the Titan, in Greek mythology: the demi-deity who created humankind from clay (Prometheus plasticator) and the patron of human beings, revolting against the gods by giving the Olympian fire to the mortals (Prometheus pyrphorus). Harrison leads this allegorical figure across Europe typically, in the form of a statue. However, the body represented by the rigid form of a golden work of art is in search of a meaning and, as a result, Prometheus is eventually reincarnated in the body of an old English workman.
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Although Prometheus falls short of the aesthetic standard set up by the previous television poems (the panoramic image of Eastern-Europe is somewhat didactic, and the golden statue is too pathetic), it still finds a place in the logic of Harrisons life work. Moreover, I suggest that it can be read as a reply to the questions asked in the previous texts. If the dead resting in a cemetery live in us (and are united by ourselves), and if the fatal gaze of the Gorgon is impossible to avoid in any age, then it is also true that human history creates its Prometheus from time to time. The fire that he brings is not only an ambivalent symbol of destruction and creation, but also a symbol of thinking. This symbolism obtains both at the level of anthropology (since it was the cave man staring at the fire who first started thinking) and at the level of Harrisons biography. He writes in the introductory essay that his first poems were inspired by fire, and he adds: I later learned that the Latin for hearth is focus. And fire is what I focus on in Prometheus (1998: vii). It follows that fire kept under human control is a metonymy of thinking. To enlarge on the ambivalence of the image, Harrison mentions various examples of fire used as a sign in history, and these also become allusions to his former texts. He refers to the bonfires on V-Day (v.), to Hiroshima (The Shadow of Hiroshima), the Rushdie affair (The Blasphemers Banquet), and so on. Thus, the fire of a working-class Prometheus also becomes a symbol of Harrisons life work. * In the above-mentioned introductory essay, Harrison writes also that the size of the screen in a cinema can give the illusion of heroism to the simplest face; moreover, Men projected onto large screens could become Titans or gods (1998: xxii). With this remark he not only defines what he means by a hero (a hero is somebody shown as a hero by a medium), but he also demonstrates why he needs the film as a medium. As I mentioned above, neither the extension of poetry towards the visual, nor the combination of lyric texts with television could be called entirely new in Harrison. There are plenty of instances of intersection between poetry as a mode and television as a medium. (On the BBC, for example, John Betjeman used to be a popular personality, and the two films about Philip Larkin form an important part of the cult of Larkin.) Harrison,
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however, is a pioneer for two reasons. On the one hand, he treats poetry as a collective experience (this way, making public reading available to everybody); on the other hand, he has elaborated on a language in which written text and motion picture interact as two independent and equal arts. Pictures are not mere illustrations in his television poems. As in texts by William Blake, visual elements form a tension with the written text in Harrison. The most typical case in point is the way he constructs the poet-figure as his alter ego and mask. I will mention two examples. The centre of v., as mentioned before, is the antagonism between the poet and the skinhead. The unity, or even identity, of the two is more obvious to the viewer of the film version than to the reader of the written text, since s/he sees that the words of both personae are read out by Harrison. Moreover, we can see the attentive face of the audience. (It was a very good decision that the skinhead is only present through the voice of the poet. Visualizing the skinhead would have completely changed the meaning.) Thus the function of dramatization becomes the poets vivisection and his confession in front of a cultural congregation. The poet and the director (Richard Eyre) construct this confession by using close-ups on Harrisons contemplative face, by showing his body language, and by significant cuts. In the film version of The Gaze of the Gorgon the gaze mentioned in the title creates monstrous figures. Harrison and the director (Peter Symes) used the shocking effects of documentary films and photos about the First World War, which show amputations, mass graves and distorted faces. Thus, the faces themselves become gorgons. The misery of the conquered is so astonishing because the victims are similar to the aggressor. The face of the petrified man is a mirror image of the gorgon. As an analogy, the speaker of the poem, Heinrich Heine, is also a petrified figure, a stone statue. In the same way, the other poet figure of the poem, Sissy, the Austro-Hungarian queen, also exists in the form of her own statue. The two statues, of course, are colourless, but they are always shown in a coloured environment.2 They are works of art and gorgons themselves: the gaze of Heine subverts the value system constructed by Goethe and Schiller, while Sissys obsession with Heine debunks the cultural hierarchy represented by her husband, Francis Joseph, and the German Emperor William. This dual face of the poet, both victim and gorgon, is much more richly shown in the film than in the written text.
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Harrisons poetry is not only poetry for television, but his film poems (particularly v. and The Gaze of the Gorgon) are the peaks of his art. They are innovative texts in which experiment is not for its own sake: it follows from the innate logic of his whole life work.
Notes
1. One should make a difference between the linear and the scanning ways of reading lyric poetry. The latter means that prior to line-to-line reading most readers start by observing the poem as a homogeneous whole, as a visual work of art. This mostly happens in case of short lyric poems and it largely determines the further phases of reading. 2. I am grateful to Krisztina Timr for calling my attention to this.
References
Barry, P 2000. Contemporary British Poetry and the City. Manchester: Manchester . University Press. Dunn, D. 1994. Back and Forth: Auden and Political Poetry. Critical Survey 6. 3, pp. 325335. Gray, T. nd. The Poems of Thomas Gray with a Selection of Letters and Essays. London: J.M. Den and Sons. Haberkamm, H. 1994. These Vs Are All the Versuses of Life: A reading of Tony Harrisons Social Elegy v., in C.C. Barfoot. In Black and Gold. Contiguous Traditions in Post-War British and Irish Poetry. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Harrison, T. 1987. Selected Poems. London: Penguin. Harrison, T. 1995. The Shadow of Hiroshima and other film/poems. London: Faber. Harrison, T. 1998. Prometheus. London: Faber. OBrien, S. 1998. The Deregulated Muse. Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Woodcock, B. 1990. Classical Vandalism: Tony Harrisons invective, in Critical Quarterly 32. 2, pp. 5056.
UNSAYING ORIGINS IN J. M. COETZEES IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY

OTTILIA VERES
Christian University Partium, Oradea
In her introduction to Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak defines Derridas concept of origin as an unoriginal origin, an absent origin (Spivak 1974: xi). In my reading of J. M. Coetzees In the Heart of the Country, I want to make use of Derridas and Foucaults understanding of origin, with the assumption that their notions of origin shed light on the working and dynamics of Coetzees text. Accordingly, I do not understand origin(s) as a metaphysical category denoting and being associated with presence, essence, substance, nor as one particular point in time (history) and space; instead, in this paper, I will use the term origin(s) in the poststructuralist (Derridian and Foucauldian) sense of the word, origins featuring as stratified, and being associated with absence and/or supplementarity. In his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Michel Foucault denies the existence/possibility of a linear genesis (1977: 139). This disclaimer could be the starting point of a discussion on the question of origins in Coetzees In the Heart of the Country, a text that starts out by disrupting its narrative/narrated origin. The first sentences are stated only to be questioned and denied by the subsequent ones: 1. Today my father brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in a dog-cart drawn by a horse with an ostrich-plume waving on its forehead, dusty after the long haul. Or perhaps they were drawn by two plumed donkeys, that is also possible. [] More detail I cannot give unless I begin to embroider (Coetzee 1999: 1; italics mine). Designating embroidering/imagination as its guiding principle, this narrative begins by moving along the lines of uncertainty, lie and contradiction. After telling the story/scene of the arrival of her father with his new bride a scene which she seems to witness , the narrator Magda says: I was not watching (1999: 2), and thus claims for herself the position of the unreliable narrator par excellence.
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With its second start (origin), this narrative denies the existence of an (original) origin of/to itself, and, instead, posits its origin as unoriginal: Six months ago Hendrik brought home his new bride. They came clip-clop across the flats in the donkey-cart [] (1999: 18). Ironically, the agentive position is now occupied by the servant Hendrik, rather than by the master. This scene can be read, thus, as a symptom and a foreshadowing of the future, in which the master/servant roles of the narrative are disrupted or subverted. This second origin cancels out the texts origin, or, in another reading, renders it as repetitive, stratified, therefore no longer originary; the repetition of origins cancels itself out as origin. Derrida talks about the stratification/stranding of the origin(s), by means of which the origin is lost, impossible (1974: 36). He speaks of a dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point of origins becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin [. . .] (1974: 36, italics mine). While marking the sexual metaphors in the discourse (promiscuity, seduction), the narcissistic attribute of the seduction has to be marked as well. Does the repetitive structure/dynamics of Coetzees text point towards its own narcissism? Does it display its pleasure in returning again and again to parts of its body and admire them narcissistically? According to Spivak, Derridas dissemination occurs within a sexual fable: Exploiting a false etymological kinship between semantics and semen, Derrida offers this version of textuality: A sowing that does not produce plants, but is simply infinitely repeated. A semination that is not insemination but dissemination, seed spilled in vain, an emission that cannot return to its origin in the father. Not an exact and controlled polysemy, but a proliferation of always different, always postponed meanings (Spivak 1974: lxv). Admitting the existence of a true double life (Coetzee 1999: 4) in her imagination, Magda asks: Is it merely a vision of a second existence passionate enough to carry me from the mundane of being into the doubleness of signification? (1999: 4, italics mine). In the passionate weaving of her story, Magda proves unable and unwilling to write/tell a one-dimensional linear, temporal story leading from A to B. While feeling anxious about this incapability of hers, she seems, at the same time, to be flattered by the degeneracy of [her] line (1999: 25). Besides the opening passage
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of which we get several versions Magdas stories mostly contradict themselves when she gives accounts of her murder of her father. According to the first narrative, she axed down her father and his mistress in their connubial bed; in a later version we learn that she shot them with a rifle. The minute details of the corpses writhing also differ considerably. All the different versions of the murder are there only for the reader to find out later that he [the father] does not die so easily after all (1999: 18) and to find Magda nursing her ill father in the very last passages. Similarly, when Hendrik rapes her, Magda weaves the story of their fight on and on, offering several versions of their scuffle:
He springs at me and grabs my arm. Let go! I shout. He grips me tightly and pulls me back into the kitchen. No, wait a bit! he hisses in my ear. I pick up the first thing I see, a fork, and lunge at him. The tines scrape his shoulder, probably not even piercing the skin; but he exclaims in surprise and hurls me to the floor. I stumble up into a deluge of blows. (1999: 113114, passage 205.)
The subsequent descriptions (passages 206, 207 and 208), significantly, are variations of this previous passage (and variations of one another, of course, at the same time). It is the logic of supplementarity that is at work here. Significantly enough, what Magda holds in her hand all through her fight with Hendrik and all through these narrative variations is a fork, symbolically marking the forking and stratification of her story and also symbolizing the narrative authority that lies in her hands. Thus, the physical tour de force with her oppressor Hendrik at the same time becomes/transforms into a storytelling game, a narrative tour de force as well. Derrida defines decentering as the essential trace/characteristic of dissemination. On the one hand, I read the numbering of the diary entries as an act that aggressively tries to impose order upon a narrative that has no center and no origin. The numbering functions to impose some order on a chaotic narrative, on Magdas torment of And next? And next? (1999: 22). The and next of her narration is, to some extent, assured and guaranteed by the implementation of the sequel of subsequent numbers upon the bits of narrative from 1 to 266. However, aware of the violent implementation of this sequencing and ordering of her tale, Magda admits the impotence/incapability of her tale to be(come) a narrative driven by and working according to the and next password of story-telling. Unlike Hendriks ancestors, who in the old days crisscrossed the desert with their flocks and their chat-
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tels, heading from A to B or from X to Y (1999: 20), Magdas narrative cannot head in this preferable direction; therefore, at the same time, she cannot build up a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end (1999: 46). The linear and epic line is disrupted in Magdas tale, bringing about centerlessness and a delinear temporality of her narrative. Instead of a one-dimensional linear model, Coetzees text offers a diffuse, dissolving, decomposing, dissociating narrative line, which spreads in several directions, undoing its relatability and narrativity. It is precisely the free motion and play of dissemination that is at work here. In the medium of a multi-dimensional dismantling narrative Derrida argues the myth of the simplicity of the origin gets lost; the origin and the center are veiled (1974: 109). Accordingly, I read Klein-Annas skirt as a symbolic space within Coetzees text, as a veil the uncovering movement of which disrupts and blows up the core and center of Magdas story that of the clear-cut boundary between master and servant and of the taboo of sexual intercourse between them. The disclosing, the opening up of Klein-Annas skirt causes/brings about the chaos of both the plot and of the tales narrativity: She lifts her knees to push him [Hendrik] off; her dress falls over her hips. No, she pleads with him, and I hear it all, stopping suddenly in the schoolhouse doorway, catching first the high-lights on her thigh and his cheekbones, then, as my eyes adjust to the gloom inside, everything else No, not here, shell catch us! (Coetzee 1999: 83). Though this sexual scene takes place between Klein-Anna and Hendrik, I read the disclosing of her skirt as a symbolic exposure, pertaining to her adulterous relationship with Magdas father, her master. So far, as this symbolic veil functions according to its role that is, it veils, it covers , order is retained: the clear-cut and desirable boundary and distance between master and slave are respected. Independently of who is responsible for this transgression whether it be Master Johannus forcing the girl into adultery or the girl willing to enter this sexual play offered by the other the removing of this symbolic cover violates a central taboo of Magdas fable, and by doing this it breaks down a significant pillar of the narrative and leaves it centerless. The lack of center in this narrative could also be linked to (the presence of) desire in Magdas tale. Is it the abundance of desire that deprives this narrative of a center? Is it desire that disrupts the order(liness) of the narrative? Significantly, this (symbolic) veil hides/covers Klein-Annas geni-
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tals, the primal object of desire both for Magdas father and for Hendrik (and, perhaps, for Magda herself?). Equally importantly, in the same scene the male genital organs are laid bare: Hendrik comes upright on his knees. He grins straight at me. From his middle juts out unhidden what must be his organ, but grotesquely larger than it should be, unless I am mistaken (Coetzee 1999: 83). Signifying excessive desire, the presence of the genital organs sets off (blows up) this narrative. Significantly, this scene is watched over by Magda, and thus she comes to represent the gaze determining and creating desire. In the dissemination of meaning, Derrida says, the subject itself is absent, not present, or if it is present it is split, dispersed, diffuse disseminated (1974: 111). He speaks of the loss of self-presence, when the subject is always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to itself except in its own disappearance (1974: 111). In Coetzees text, Magda complains about her presence as absence: I have been a zero, a null, a vacuum towards which all collapses inward, a turbulence, muffled, gray [. . .] (Coetzee 1999: 2). Describing the arrival of her father with the new bride and adding that she, in fact, was not watching, Magda asserts: I was absent (1999: 2). Besides its obvious meaning that she was not there when they arrived, or was not watching their arrival considering the whole text, I read this statement of hers as referring to her absence as a subject or active agent of her story. She continuously complains that she is merely words, a torrent of sound streaming, an emblem signifying something (1999: 10). I create myself in the words that create me (1999: 8), she asserts. What there is of her is merely her voice; this is what assures the certainty (and possibility) of her being, and of her presence. One might read her as merely a metonymy a trope, as the prolongation of her voice. She narrates/talks/weaves to prolong herself: prolong yourself, prolong yourself, that is the whisper I hear in my inmost. [. . .] (weave, weave!) (1999: 6). Accordingly, I offer two possible readings to the following passage: [. . .] the truth is that I am equal to anything (1999: 17). Beside meaning to meet, to match, to cope with something, I understand Magdas statement as denoting and referring to her existence as trope, e.g. as a metonymy, as explained above. However, in her attempts to define herself, Magda seems to find herself at a loss. Unable to find metaphors for herself and, thus, to build a story for herself she seems to be stuck in barren, unproductive repetitive structures: I am I, My story is my story (1999: 5,
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59, 78); or as Klein-Anna also asserts: Miss is the miss (1999: 32). In her incapability to define and tell a story of herself, the subject as subject is deleted, absent, scrubbed out: I (scrub-scrub-scrub) (1999: 17). Foucault argues against an original identity of/at the origin (1977: 142). The idea of the subject in Coetzees text is not linear either; there is no sense of a beginning, middle and end to it. As Magda herself asserts: I am inexplicable (Coetzee 1999: 6). Though Magda uses the metaphor maze of words to refer to herself (1999: 17), by which she builds up the image of a centreless labyrinth of herself, I read this trope, at the same time, as a central metaphor to the whole text, itself a centreless labyrinth. I read In the Heart of the Country as a deconstructive/deconstructing text that consciously disrupts its narrative origin and the truth-value of its narratives, positing its origins as stratified, multi-dimensional, and therefore unoriginal. Coetzees text denies linearity and a temporal causality, rendering the text unstable and the truth-value of its narratives undecidable. Accordingly, the text comes to seem a centreless narrative in which Klein-Annas skirt functions as a symbolic veil, the uncovering of which sets desire free and, at the same time, initiates the narrative. As my preceding discussion has argued, Coetzees text posits its subject, its origins and its narratives as disseminating.
References
Coetzee, J.M. 1999. In The Heart of the Country. London: Vintage. Derrida, J. 1974. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1974. Translators Preface to Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. ix-xc.
I TOLD YOU IT IS ME, IMAGINING

TIBOR TTH
Eszterhzy Kroly University College, Eger
Philip Roths Deception (1990) is a book which is essentially about the process of writing; the novel presents the dialogue between artist figures and their muses in the form of a number of variations on several theoretical issues. Furthermore, the protagonists, who are variations of the artist and muse figures, construct the world in which they exist and discuss the theoretical and existential aspects involved. Thus, the novel refuses objectivity and does so in the interest of becoming an open-ended discovery, a manifestation of the mechanisms of creativity in process. (Bradbury 1984: 450) This interpretation matches Bradburys definition of one of the main goals of modern literature. Even the title of this paper is taken from Philip Roths Deception; it is an example of the authors definition of the concept of identity as fiction. Philip Roths Deception reformulates its authors interpretations of freedom, the rhetoric of fiction, and the accompanying narrative and technical solutions. It would be difficult to distinguish between narrative and rhetoric aspects involved in the novel, because the narration itself addresses and includes many elements of the rhetoric of fiction, including the relationships between art and reality, between author and character, between showing and telling, between the authors different identities. This metafictionality means that both the fictionally presented narrative and the rhetoric are doublevoiced. Here is Julia Kristevas interpretation of the subject in poetic writing as opposed to Ferdinand de Saussures ambivalent, unassimilable scientific writing. This concept serves as a definition, for my purposes here, of the concept of the doublevoiced effect in fiction.
The minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, not in the sense of the signifier/signified dyad, but rather, in terms one and other The double would be the minimal sequence of paragrammatic semiotics to be worked out starting from the work of Saussure. (Kristeva 1980: 69)
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Julia Kristeva writes about a language conceived as beyond logic. Aristotles assertion that something is either A or not-A is declared 0 and the double of this relationship 02 produces an element which questions the traditional division between signified and signifier; she argues that poetic language foregrounds the inability of any logical system based on zero-one sequence (true-false, nothingness-notation. (1980: 80) Wayne C. Booth also writes about the necessity of this second remove from reality: It became more and more clear that if the gap between art and reality were ever fully closed, art would be destroyed. (Booth 1983: 35) This theoretical approach documents the fictional characters and fictions identities and the way in which the protagonists and fiction construct and deploy the conflicts in this novel, as part of double(multi)voice narrative and rhetoric. In nearly all the novels of Philip Roth, the fictional characters identity is problematic. In Portnoys Complaint (1982) the hilarious therapy deconstructs the conventional sense of identity of both Alex and Dr. Spielvogel, and the opposition between different characters contributes to the conflict between fashionable modes of expression and fictionally-real ones. Or more famously, David Kepeshs identity is problematic and his existence as a breast determines the conflict between art and reality and thus empowers his failure, in a fictional mode anticipated by Kafka (1992). A similar claim could be made about poor Peter Tarnopol, who tries to define his identity on the basis of other peoples interpretation of him. In Roths later fiction, the fictional characters search for identity contributes to some sort of private mythology of the author; Nathan Zuckerman, for instance, seems to gain uncensored authority over the books in which he exists. Zuckerman imagines a number of alternative identities for other characters as well, but it is also important to note that the alternatives he invents result in open structures, which could be interpreted on the basis of a loose analogy with what Gerard Genette calls the architext.
The architext, is then, everywhere above, beneath, around the text, which spins its web only by hooking it here and there onto that network of architexture. (Genette 1992: 834)
This principle produces numerous possibilities, for example in The Ghost Writer. Anne Frank is the martyr, Lonoffs mistress, Nathans possible wife and ally, the ignorant Jew, the ungrateful daughter ready to give up meeting her father; in the context of the fictionally existential dimension,
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she is Amy Bellette. These fictional identities could undermine the credibility of the story, but, because Nathan Zuckerman admits that they are the product of his imagination, the story can be interpreted in traditional terms as well. The situation is similar to that in The Counterlife, in which Nathan and Henry are two characters who can be interpreted as representations of conflicting aesthetic and moral identities, for Zuckerman and for the process of art. In The Facts, a fictional Philip Roth is a character, and at the same time he is theoretically identical with the artist who wrote When She Was Good, Portnoys Complaint, The Breast, The Professor of Desire, My Life as a Man, The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy; he can be identified with Alex Portnoy, David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, Nathan and Henry Zuckerman as well. Deception is even more equivocal in this respect, because the novel is a monologue (a pseudo single voice) written in the form of dialogue (actual doublevoice). Thus the dominance of the subjective element does not allow for a conflict between the subjective and the objective dimensions. I am speaking of monologue because the novel is a brainscript in which the fictional artist figures and their muses can be multiplied, and their career is re-imagined continuously. This solution contributes to the greater mobility of the already flexible concepts of space and sequentiality, and reminds us that storytelling is intentional and illusory, producing a number of representations of the characters. Referring to the way in which representation works, Wolfgang Iser generalizes that no rendering can be that which it renders (Iser 1989: 251); thus, countless representations of a characters and fictions identities are possible. Philip Roths muses are slightly reinterpreted women characters of his earlier fiction with the possible implication that they represent some sort of reaction to misinterpretations of those books. Writing, being written and acting or rather playing are interchangeable, and talking, making love and contributing to the writing of the novel are a kind of game; as play, they simultaneously and ultimately construct and are identifiable with the fiction we are reading. No wonder deception and desire are interchangeable, and it is virtually impossible to define the two terms. This situation is meticulously formulated by the text itself: it is the quality of the play that is to be observed and not its goals as the fictional artist employs this strategy on several occasions and the muse always insists on totally different experiences.
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It never gets better. Its like a play. They never get better, either. If you want to leave at the interval of a play, leave, because its not going to get any better. (1990: 77)
The situation and the discourse are reminiscent of Kristevas doublevoiced text; character and conflict assume a double identity which functions on the 0:2 principle, that is they are both A and not-A. This polyvalence contributes to the flexibility provided by paradox in situations when the artist figures and the representations of the Muse deploy a vast array of literary forms.. Womans subservient role is granted in the novel by the introduction of the wife figure who is too easily identifiable an agent of the exterior world and thus has to be outfoxed and isolated. The revolted wife rages against the artists interpretation of freedom and calls it a kind of perverse betrayal, but announces that she knows the desire for her to exist exists. (1990: 188) Fictionally real and fictionally possible might be conditions, compete and support the dynamic flow of Deception. This polyvalence is true of the whole fictional material, characters included, as individual characteristics are relevant or meaningful only through their opposition, even if we interpret the plot in a conventional way. The women queuing up at the writer-protagonists studio tell their stories because they want to exist through their texts and want to contribute to the fictional authors interpretation of their status as human beings, sexually frustrated women, women abused by secret police, victims of male dominance, Jews, and artists. This suggests an alternative form of democracy; it can mean that fiction is a form of existence not only for the fictional artist figures but also for the muses. The English mistress even announces that she can easily identify the fictional women from the manuscript with real persons and suggests that she has the right to correct or at least to suggest changes to the material. In Deception the muse even wants to turn the desire for her to exist against the artist figure, but she is humiliated for her ignorance of the rules of the play. In fact when the English mistress declares that she is in possession of inspiration and fictional facts and threatens to write a book about the artist she is corrected instantly.
Because you had a baby doesnt mean I didnt make up a baby; because youre you doesnt mean I didnt make you up. I also exist.
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Also. You also exist and I also made you up. Also is a good word to remember. You also dont exist as only you. I certainly dont any more. You never did. As I made you up, you never existed. (1990:188)
The wormholes principle is emphatically stated as the artists faith in the creative process defined as life also is acted out in the form of an imaginary interview, following the fictional death of Nathan Zuckerman, one of the multiple impersonations of the artist. At the level of the plot, Zuckermans death does not result in the death of the author, because the fictional Phil is another impersonation of the fictional novelist. The other characters seem to ignore this possibility, and the young biographer talks about his difficulties, which stem from a tremendous lack of objectivity in peoples responses to Zuckerman. The biographers complaints about Nathan Zuckermans multiple impersonations, his intense interest in the ambiguity of the I, and the way a writer makes a myth of himself by the numerous strategies meant to manipulate the larger audience, actually support the logic that Nathan Zuckerman and Phil are fictional incarnations of the archetypal author whose strings might be pulled by yet another author(ity). For the moment Mr Hyde might have died, but Dr. Jekyll is alive, and thus the Zuckerman heritage is impossible to grasp and interpret that is, to maintain its freedom. In Deception the muse has to understand that she is mere inspiration rendered fictionally real. The artist separates the fictionally real level from the level of the second remove when he tells her that he did love her terribly, and that he had had one life with her in that obscure room and another one when he was writing the book. Paul Cobley notes the problematic nature of side-trips characteristic of fictional narrative and argues that these modifications, which traditionally are termed diversions or delays, cannot be explained in themselves because they actually construct the space in which traditionally defined conflict, time and setting merge.
(They) might be said to possess space in the movement from beginning to end, and that narratives enact in this movement a relation to time. (Cobley 2000: 12)
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In Deception the narrator or rather the dominant narrative voice grows into existence through the contribution of the other narrative voices who clearly have an inferior status. Nathan Zuckerman is murdered by Ivan, but the possibility that Nathan Zuckerman has created the fictional Phil so that he can return later, also seems valid. The two identities of the artist character do not compete, but complement one another. This complementarity is possible because, although on the basis of Philip Roths solutions offered in his earlier fiction the two novelist figures are or might be interchangeable, the muses have a relatively equivocal function: their deficiencies strengthen the power of the artistic representation of the reality of fiction and do not observe the difference between the two. The only exception in this respect is the wife. In Philip Roths novels the mobility of the narrative point of view imposes the flexibility of the narrative structure and vice versa. Paul Cobley recognizes the difficulty of coping with the different definitions of narrative and argues that the greatest problem is that the conventional interpretations tend to erase the difference between narrative and story. His suggestion in this respect can be of some help.
Put very simply, story consists of all the events which are to be depicted. Plot is the chain of causation which dictates that these events are somehow linked and that they are therefore to be depicted in relation to each other. Narrative is the showing or the telling of these events and the mode selected for that to take place. (Cobley 2000:56)
Deception is also an excellent example of Roths experimentation with story, plot and narrative and the conventional requirements of fiction, such as the alternation of descriptive and conversational passages; telling and showing also collapse into one dynamic flow of dramatised performance designed to dislocate the limits of the spiritual world and to deny its borders. The characters are creating The-Middle-Aged-Lovers-DreamingAbout-Running-Away-Together Questionnaire, and the fiction we are offered really develops by way of questions and answers, which generate new questions. The power of the questions stems from the fact that they do not require equivocal answers and the answers that are formulated are constantly undermined. There is no interpretable or stable definition of love in the novel and it is also difficult to state who the lovers are. Most of the time the male partner can be identified as Nathan Zuckerman, the notorious artist character of earlier novels, but following his violent death, Phil takes
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over his role. The dominant female partner can be identified as the English mistress, a possible variant of Maria (from The Counterlife) and occasionally interpreted as Philip Roths wife, and her status is complemented by a number of other ghosts. The setting is the artist characters studio, but because it is a studio that exists on the pages of a notebook of a fictional character, its exact location is impossible. The solution is relatively simple: the artists relationship with his muse is illustrated through a series of speculative substitutions. The dialogue suggests that at a spiritual level the relationship is constant because, to put it in pedestrian terms, the muse cannot exist without the artist and no artist can exist without imagination or inspiration, much in the spirit of Zuckermans exasperated argument formulated in The Facts. Philip Roths might have been is transformed into it can happen and ultimately into I am what I say I am in Deception. It is difficult to describe most of the basic elements of the book because there is an infinite variety of points of view. There are at least two centres of consciousness, which occasionally are identical, but very often contradict each other; accordingly, I have to accept the explanations or the guidelines otherwise formulated by the novel. They produce what I term the mirror in the mask effect and result in a partial revelation of the distortions produced by the pretended intimacy of the whole process that constructs and deploys the space in which author, characters, and aesthetic correlatives coexist. I am trying to explain the term by bringing together Nancy Millers interpretation of the subordinate protagonist and Barthess theory regarding the death of the author. Miller writes:
Only the subject who is both self-possessed and possesses access to the library of the already read has the luxury of flirting with the escape from identity () promised by an aesthetics of the decentered (decapitated, really) body. (Miller 1988: 83)
In The Death of the Author, Barthes draws our attention to the conventionally hierarchical, filial relationship between author and reader:
A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them
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being lost, a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet, this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology, he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. (Barthes 1977: 148)
In Deception the death of the author (Nathan Zuckerman) occasions the birth of the author (Phil) who employed the former as a mask. The mirror function of the mask is debated at length in The Facts. Actually, besides the masks and the mosaic-like poetic persona, the book contains its own theoretical interpretation on other accounts as well, and in fact, the insistence on the importance of the twists of the fictional material, on the principle that the mobility of the narrative I, is announced by the very first act of the characters. The solution creates authors whose metamorphosis into readers, characters and back into authors, is largely a question of extra-fictional authority. The lovers try to find adequate words to make up the questionnaire, and later the artists put down the texts inspired by the disappointed muses. Those muses have prior fictional existence in earlier Philip Roth novels and thus urge further reworking of the material in which they get the chance to be resurrected, and which they might inhabit in the form of life also. Thus, identity is defined as a function of the spiritual world: life also is the expression of psychic unity that transcends the totality of individual fictional experiences of the muses and artists, which create the fictional world. This multitude of conflicts would normally fragment and deconstruct the material, but Philip Roth makes visible the creative process. He assembles these experiences as life also and demonstrates that consciousness is both manipulated and, at the same time, permanent. Consequently, at the end of the novel the fictional artist defines this complex mode of expression and existence as life also. As in his earlier books, Philip Roths protagonists in this text are not searching for an authentic identity, or an author; rather they are searching for a world dominated by the sense of freedom that might have been. They are actually elements of the process of reforgetting into a might have been condition or life also which can theoretically be equated with an eternal novel of freedom, which undermines its own generic conventions and
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seems to have one reliable point of reference which is the I who is imagining everything as stated by the title of this paper: I told you its me imagining.
References
Barthes, R. 1977 (1968). The Death of the Author, in Barthes, R. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana. Bradbury, M. 1984. The Modern British Novel. London: Penguin. Cobley, P 2000. Narrative. London and New York: Routledge. . Iser, W. 1989. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kafka, F. 1992. The Transformation (Metamorphosis) and Other Stories. Translated by Malcolm Pasley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardin and Leon S. Roudiez. Edited by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, Nancy K. 1988. Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Roth, P 1968. Portnoys Complaint. New York: Modern Library. . Roth, P 1977. The Professor of Desire. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin . Books Ltd. Roth, P 1986. The Counterlife. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books . Ltd. Roth, Philip. 1988. The Facts, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd Roth P 1962. When She Was Good. New York: Random House. . Roth, P 1980. The Breast. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd . Roth, P 1985. Zuckerman Bound, A Trilogy and Prologue. New York: Fawcett Crest. .
HAYDEN WHITES TROPICS OF DISCOURSE. AN INTERSECTION OF LITERATURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

LVIA SZLPL
Central European University
One way of interpreting history is through the analysis of the deep structure of historical imagination. According to Hayden White, the metahistorical element of a historical work proposes a deep structural content in the representation of history which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively historical explanation should be (White 1990: ix). In this sense, the historical work is essentially a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse (1990: ix). As Hayden White argues, the discourse formation in the Foucauldian sense gives historical studies the opportunity to reinvent their objects of studies and to renew themselves by transgressing disciplinary borderlines. The etymology of the word discourse comes from the Latin discurrere, which makes possible a movement back and forth or a running to and fro (White 1978: 2). In this sense, language is not a transparent, homogenous entity and we cannot grasp reality completely through it. Although we read through the language, we see first the surface and then the content. The aim of this paper is to reveal the complicated relationship between literature and historiography in Hayden Whites theoretical works, starting from the assumption that Whites tropology can be traced back to Giambattista Vicos poetic logic of history. I would argue that this in-betweeness, shifting from the conventions of historiography to interdisciplinary approaches, provides an alternative conceptual framework for the field of cultural studies. As Hayden White argues, the field of history became much more aware of its linguistic nature; conversely, a work of art whether a novel, a play, or a movie could be analyzed and comprehended only in its historical context. These developments raise the question of disciplinary boundaries of history and literature and ask for a critical rethinking of their relationship.
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The key argumentation of this essay is connected to the representation of tropology in Whites theory originating in Vicos poetic logic of history. The organizing principles for analyzing this question can be logically connected to two main points that this paper aims to highlight. Firstly, I intend to investigate the intersection of literature and history by focusing on the historical text as a literary artifact. Secondly, I focus on the poetic logic and aim of tropology as a mode of transition between history and literature that connects the theories of White and Vico. The goal of my investigation is a new understanding of historical imagination within the limits of unconventional history.
Whites Impact on Humanities

According to White, conventionalism is a doctrine that determines the interpretation of a historical text (1981: 160). The ambition to acquire a proper meaning or interpretation of a historical text is in itself a fallacy. Historical explanation, with its ideological implications, can be described by the familiar relativist parable retold by E.D. Hirsch (1989:259) among others about the blind men and the elephant: the blind man at the tail thinks the elephant is a snake, but the blind man at a leg thinks the elephant is a tree. Thus, Whites historical explanation offers an alternative point of view that does not intend to be the history proper but one among others. I would argue that the attempt to deconstruct an historical text needs a hermeneutic signifier-interpretative moment, which is the blindspot of the fictional and factual discourses. This blindspot can be seen only by a further anamorphotic phase, and this process could go on cyclically as a self-reflective repetition of the interpretative process. According to White, historiography offers a verbal image of reality; thus, the historical text as a narrative is nothing but an allegorical representation of facts (White 1987: 45). Allegory as a displaced metaphor, in this sense, covers or hides the lack or the hermeneutic code of history. Moreover, this enigma connects seemingly incomprehensible things with the help of metaphorization (Aristotle 1992: 41). Thus, the factual and figurative characterizations are combined to create an image of an object, which functions as the real referent of the discourse different from the manifest referent (White 1975: 56). Whites tropology as a continuation of Vicos poetic logic of history can provide a new meaning for humanities by both rejecting authority and respecting tradition.
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In this sense, on the basis of Erwin Panofskys notion, humanitas both means value and limitation (Fernie 1995: 184185). Whites impact on the theory of history is clear from the different labels that have come to be attached to him. He is considered an historian, a philosopher of history, a cultural relativist, or a subversive figure of human sciences. His name was connected to Structuralism, New Historicism and even to New Criticism (Marn 2003: 23). White relates different registers to a new conceptual framework of reasoning by transgressing and violating the fixed borders of disciplines. His theory connects the fictional and factual discourses with the rhetoric of history, historiography and literary studies. Whites in-betweennes can be traced back to Vicos poetic and cyclic logic of history, which provided White with the poetic theory of consciousness, namely tropology understood as a science of transition that is the heart of Metahistory (Domanska 1998: 177). This tropology, however, is more than a model or a register; it aims, through the poetics of knowledge, to disclose the unconscious of historical discourse (White 1994: xix).
The Intersection of Literature and History as Art

White argues that the literary form of a historical text reveals a unique content that can provide an alternative interpretation for the historical evidence. The truth value of a historical artifact is defined by power relations and by creating a context in which historical evidence gets the meaning of being true. Moreover, because of the limited capacity of language and because of the problematics of referentiality, historians are not able to reconstruct what actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen; notion originating from Ranke 1972:57), even if they try to endow their sources with absolute meaning. Thus, the discourse of history is approaching the allegorical representation of facts. Therefore discourse theory reveals the logocentric relations between words and things, the visible and the invisible, (Foucault 1991: xii) and the gap between the factual and fictional discourses. Unconventional histories can fill this gap by abandoning the truth claims of history, that is the Rankian doctrine of what actually happened, and by focusing on the principles of authenticity. Thus, the main focus from the time-spaced language of the historical texts as narratives can be shifted to a new understanding of historical imagination, the content of the form that can represent the incomprehensible enigma of past/ness.
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The difference between content and form, in other words, between the literary image of history and the historical text can be cancelled by putting them in the same category as functional symbols. Thus, this paragone can be suspended by making a dialogue between words and constructed images. The historical explicandum of the text with its ideological implications provides an alternative, distorted perspective constructed by the historian. I would argue that this metaphor of interpreting the past could be best explained by Maurice Merleau-Pontys statement that visibility itself involves non-visibility (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 247):
When I say that everything visible is invisible, that perception is imperception that consciousness has a blindspot, that to the sense of a contradiction it must be imagined that I add to the visible perfectly defined as in Itself a non-visible (which would be only objective absence)... One has to understand that is visibility itself that involves non-visibility. (emphasis mine)
Thus, the gap or blindspot between fictional and factual representation can be explained with the process of anamorphosis, when the constructed verbal image of the past turns inside out and reveals the otherwise invisible content matter: this verbal image cannot be seen as such without a paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as there and not there at the same time (Mitchell 1986: 17). This shift in vision may provide an alternative point of view that does not claim to be the history proper but one among others. Readers of the text can create their own histories since they do not manufacture mental images on the basis of what they are immediately given to see, but on the basis of their memories, filling the blanks and their minds with images created retrospectively (Virilio 1988: 110). The impact of this kind of encodation is to familiarize the otherwise unfamiliar. Accordingly, the reader in this encodation process gradually realizes that the story or chain of events he is reading is a different one. In other words, through perceiving the form of the plot, the reader draws inferences, attaches connotation. Then at a certain point, the reader feels that he understands the meaning by successfully following the story. The reader has become familiarized with the text because he has been shown the icon of emploted data, a plot structure with which he is familiar as a part of his cultural endowment (White 1978: 110). In what follows, I would like to explain Whites theory of the interpretation of the historical text by connecting it with one concept borrowed
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from the field of fine arts: the process of anamorphosis. The process of anamorphosis can reveal the blindspots of the texts by opening up a new perspective. The element that disturbs the traditional way of studying a pictorial image is the punctum, which stings, cuts, specks and is a little hole which pricks the viewer (Barthes 1984: 2627). Barthes describes the punctum also as the right moment or the kairos of desire (1984: 59) The literary blindspot (Cristian 2001: 240) has the same function as the Barthesian punctum and it is a device to reach the point of anamorphosis, where the picture in this case the verbal image turns inside out. Moreover, this blindspot corresponds to Ecos catastrophic point in the interpretation process. Accordingly, at first we perceive the substance as the form of the image in Alpha modality then we translate it into the figurative language of words on the basis of our encyclopedia in Beta modality, that is, we realize the content of the form. In the interpretation process, as Eco argues, we are constantly switching from Alfa modality to Beta modality and vice versa (Eco 1999: 480). This process corresponds to Whites statement that the latent meaning of the discourse serves as a code by which the reader is invited to assume a certain attitude toward the facts and the interpretation of them offered on the manifest level of the discourse (White 1975: 55). The place of this catastrophic point, where the reader switches to interpretation, is not an a priori but a culturally dependent category (Szo nyi 2004: 241). Thus, every representation is both revealing and hiding; and the role of art and literature, as Paul de Man argues, is to reveal both the hidden and the visible reality (de Man 2002: 71). With the help of anamorphic processes, however, there can be a shift in vision. Painters like Hans Holbein, practiced a kind of iconography in which apart from the displacement of the observers point of view, complete perception of the painted work could only happen with the aid of instruments like glass cylinders and tubes, mirrors, magnifying glasses and other kind of lenses (Virilio 1988: 110). This anamorphotic process can be illustrated by Holbeins painting The Ambassadors. There is a strange or obscured form in the foreground of the painting that is an elongated or distorted image of a skull. This skull can be seen in a certain way if it is looked at from a particular point of view (bottom left hand side). This process of distortion is called anamorphosis. Holbeins painting demonstrates the realization of seeing things from a dif-
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ferent or unexpected perspective. The Ambassadors makes visible something that is annihilated and was invisible for the viewer. Virilio calls the point of view distortion the productive unconscious of the sight (Virilio 1988:111113), a collapse of the forms of the established order. Therefore, the act of seeing is to be replaced by a regressive perceptual state: the viewer projects his/her ideas on the sight. This phenomenon corresponds to the optical unconscious, which gives way to the point of anamorphosis; from a changed position the viewer realizes that there is something strange in the picture, and thus s/he realizes another nature of the object. Lacan gives an example to explain the non-cylindrical anamorphosis. He supposes that there is a portrait on a piece of paper that he is showing the audience of his lecture. He argues that the viewer sees the blackboard in an oblique position in relation to that sheet of paper. He describes the process of anamorphosis by the distortion of the geometrical perspective:
Suppose that, by means of a series of ideal threads or lines, I reproduce on the oblique surface each point of the image drawn on my sheet of paper. You can easily imagine what the result would be you would obtain a figure enlarged and distorted according to the lines of what may be called a perspective. One supposes that if I take away that which has helped the construction, namely, the image placed in my own visual field the impression I will retain, while remaining in that place, will be more or less the same. At least, I will recognize the general outline of the image at best, I will have an identical impression. (Lacan 1988: 85)
Accordingly, the process of historical explanation does not correspond to the conventions of the visible, empirical documentary view of historical studies. Whites interpretation of historical facts is presented in a narrative form constructed from metaphorical structure, plot and arguments that carry ideological implications. In this sense, the historical text is arbitrary and figuratively produced. Whites investigation of the historical text is more than the aesthetic text analysis provided by New Criticism. Whites interpretation of the historical text goes beyond the assumptions of New Criticism. The central aim of that reading strategy had been to focus on the autonomy of the literary text. Thus, the approach restricts the spectrum of investigation to the formalist aspects of the text and its interpretative techniques, leaving many questions unanswered about the content of the form. White, by con-
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trast, supposes that the meaning is not something out there but in the unconscious of the text. Whites critique of the historical text, as Dominick LaCapra argues, works against the positivism of historical studies and the unself-conscious employment of traditional narrative in the writing of history (LaCapra 1983: 74). Essentially, history had been part of literature as a form of epic, but the separation of the two modes became institutionalized toward the end of the eighteenth century (Gossman 1990: 227). Before that separation, history writing had been considered to be an art of presentation rather than a scientific inquiry, as in the Renaissance. Then, due to the ideas of the Enlightenment, literature started to be associated with poetic and figurative writing. Thus, as Lional Gossman claims, the literary work of art became different from the other products of labour corresponding to the Age of Industrial Revolution and Capitalism. Moreover, the literary text acquired a magical or fetishized characteristic, and the real was separated from the ideal, poetry from prose, corresponding to the doctrine of positivism (1990: 228229). Most recently, literature has shifted away from its rhetorical function, leaving it to historiography. The comprehension of history as art exists in the shadow of the scientific ideal (LaCapra 1983: 74) of conventional historiography. Thus, the disciplinization of historical studies entailed regulation by subordinating the historical text to the categories of the beautiful and suppressing the sublime elements (White 1987: 6263). Thus, the question arises what do we mean by poetic logic of history?
Poetic Logic of History

The analysis of the figurative language-use in a given historical discourse provides a way for characterizing the instrumental, pragmative, or conative dimensions of it (White 1975: 53). Consequently, as White argues, figures of speech are the very marrow of the historians individual style and their lack can destroy much of its impact as an explanation in the form of idiographic description (1975: 53). Historical imagination operates on a different level than the sheer judicious employment of the rules of evidence. It is present in the conscious effort, which is close to the New Historicist approach of Stephen Greenblatt and others, to enter into the minds or consciousness of human agents long dead and reaching objectivity by seeing things from their point of views (White 1987: 667). Thus, as White claims,
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there is an essentially poetic element in every historical text, which element appears in prose discourse as rhetoric (White 1975: 65). In this sense, the historians craft has an artistic component with the power of constructive imagination (1975: 65). The figurative elements of historical imagination are the foundation of Whites poetic logic of history, which goes back to Vicos The New Science (1961). Vicos three language types correspond to the three sequences of world history that he differentiated. According to Vico, the first and original language of humanity was poetic, and this finally shifted to the scientific one. Thus, primitive men by their nature were poets who spoke in poetic characters (Vico 1961:5). The controlling methodological assumption of Vicos science of humanity is the cyclic rhythmic repetitions of history. Vicos theory somehow stabilizes time by asserting that there are no real novelties in it. He illustrates a meaningful pattern by marking the phases in which everything recurs. A cycle is a sequence of three ages: religious, heroic, and human, which are the age of gods, the age of heroes and the age of men, respectively. Though details may vary from one cycle to another, the essential character of each age is repeated in every cycle, and every cycle ends only to begin (1961: 454). The connecting point among the three ages of a cycle is language. Language defines conscienza, corresponding to historical consciousness, while the pursuit of scienza is philosophy (Fisch 1961: xxxv). According to Vico, this science was not an a priori category but a result of disciplinalization. Thus, poetic metaphysics (that is, poetry) was divided into its subordinate sciences, each sharing the poetic nature just like the history of ideas (Vico 1961: 82). Consequently, the history of ideas was part of poetry and was governed by poetic logic. Verbal images assumed a crucial role in his philosophic reflections by developing a new method for the study of human culture. For Vico, the truth (verum) and its imitation or image (factum) are interchangeable terms. He provides a simile by describing divine truth as a solid representation of things and human truth as a picture (Pompa 1982: 51). Consequently, the history of ideas was part of poetry and was governed by poetic logic. In this sense, Vicos approach was close to interdisciplinary thinking insofar as it revealed in what ways discourse can constitute culture (Stone 1997: xxii). Vicos poetic logic of universal history served as a stimulus for Whites system of tropology. The metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony as
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trope patterns are the tools the historian can use to emplot his sources; moreover, they carry ideological implications by having a prefigurative and projecting function in constructing the discourse of history (White 1978: 12). This tropical element in discourse is the shadow from which all realistic discourse tries to flee (1978: 2). According to White, the word tropic comes from tropikos, tropos, which had the meaning of turn or way in Greek. It was transmitted into modern Indo-European languages by way of tropus, which corresponded to metaphor or figure of speech in Classical Latin but became a notion of mood or measure of music theory in Late Latin. The word trope in Modern English started to be used together with style (1978: 2). The four master tropes, originating in Vicos work, are the basis of signification that constitutes discourses and give rise to other discursive levels which are the emplotment, explanation and ideological implication. The repeated patterns of history are constructed by metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, which can be connected to one another cyclically as beginning, middle, end and as identity, difference, higher identity with irony as a trope-killer at the end of an era (LaCapra 1983: 77). Accordingly, Whites Tropics of Discourse tells the story or history of the tropes by providing a metalanguage for the Metahistory. Tropology became the foundation of his discourse theory originating in Vicos definition of tropes as those figures of speech that turn a word from its proper and narrative meaning to an improper and strange one which Terence in Latin calls the inversion of words (verba inversa) (Vico,1996: 137). This paper has tried to highlight the connecting points of literature and history by investigating Hayden Whites metahistorical theory and tropology, which originate in Vicos poetic logic of history. Metahistorical thinking seems to convert the Aristotelian doctrine that poetry is more philosophical than historiography. Discourse theory is the foundation of Whites theory on historical explanation with ideological implications. Essentially, there is a poetic element in historical texts that appears in the prose discourse as rhetoric. Consequently, if the poetic logic of history gives the form for the historical text then it also has a crucial impact on its content; thus, the historians craft belongs to the field of art.
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References:
Aristotle [Arisztotelsz]. 1992. Potika. (trans. Jnos Sarkady). Budapest: Kossuth Knyvkiad. Barthes, R. 1984. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. (trans. Richard Howard). London: Flamingo. Cristian, Rka Mnika. 1991. Interface Semiotics in the Dramaturgy of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Szeged. DeMan, P 2002. Olvass s trtnelem. Budapest: Osiris Kiad. . Domanska, Ewa. 1998. Hayden White: Beyond Irony in History and Theory. Vol. 37. 2, pp. 17381. Eco, U. 1999. Kant s a Kacsacso emlo (trans. Gl Judit). Budapest: Eurpa ru s. Knyvkiad. Fernie, E. 1995. Art History and Its Methods. London: Phaidon. Fisch, M. H. 1961. Introduction to Giambattista Vico. The New Science. (trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch). New York: Anchor Books, pp. xxiliii. Foucault, M. 1991. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archeology of Medical Perception. (trans. A.M. Sheridan). London: Routledge. Gossman, L. 1990. Between History and Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, E.D. Jr. 1989. Faulty Perspectives, in Lodge, D. (ed.) Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. A Reader. London: Longman, pp. 254263. Lacan, J. 1988. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (trans. Alan Sheridan). London: Vintage. LaCapra, D. 1983. Rethinking Intellectual History. Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Marn, D. 2003. A reprezentci politikja: Hayden White utpikus realizmusa, in Caf Bbel 13, pp. 2336. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1968. The Visible and Invisible. Followed by the Working Notes. (trans. Alphonso Lingis). Evaston: Northwestern University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1986. Iconolgy. Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pompa, L. (ed. and trans.) 1982. Vico. Selected Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Ranke, L. 1972. The Ideal of Universal History, in Stern, F. (ed.) The Varieties of History. From Voltaire to Present. New York: Vintage, pp. 5462. Stone, H. S. 1997. Vicos Cultural History. The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples 16851750. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Szo nyi, G. E. 2004. Pictura and Scriptura. Hagyomnyalap kulturlis reprezentcik huszadik szzadi elmletei. Szeged: JATEPress. Vico, G. 1961. The New Science. (trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch). New York: Anchor Books.
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Vico, G. 1996. The Art of Rhetoric (Institutiones Oratoriae, 17111741). (trans. & eds.) Giorgio A. Pinton & Arthur W. Shippee). Amsterdam: Atlanta. Virilio, P 1988. A Topographical Amnesia, in N. Mirzoeff (ed.). The Visual Culture . Reader. London: Routledge, pp. 108122. White, H. 1975. Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination, in History and Theory. Vol. 14., No. 4, pp. 4867. White, H. 1978. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. 1981. Conventional Conflicts, in New Literary History 13/1, pp. 145160. White, H. 1987. Content of the Form. Narrartive Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. 1990. Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. 1994. Foreword: Rancires Revisionism, in Jaques Rancire. The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. viiixix.
WOMENS WRITING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIMETIC MIRROR: THE PROSE FICTION OF ELIZABETH JOLLEY
NATAA KARANFILOVIC
University of Novi Sad
Elizabeth Jolley (1923 ) belongs to the period of late modernism or, with respect to thematic and stylistic features of her fiction, we can say to the postmodern streams of Australian literature. (Those directions, as in the case of modernism, appeared somewhat later in Australia than in Europe or America.) The trajectory of Elizabeth Jolleys discovery and consolidation as a major Australian writers coincides with the advent of postmodernism in Australia, which introduced controversial issues and unconventional ways of representing them; with the affirmation of womens writing in Australia, which defied the invisible orthodoxy of the early 1970s that Australian fiction was a masculine territory; and last, but not the least, with the development of regional publishing. For many years, Jolleys work was regularly rejected by publishers. Eventually Jolleys first book, Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories, was published when Fremantle Arts Centre Press was established in 1975 to publish and promote Western Australian writing. Another story collection, The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories (1979) and a short novel, The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981), appeared with the same publisher. Her first novel, Palomino (1984), had to wait for several years before it found a publisher. And even when Outback press, one of the new, alternative small publishers, agreed to do it, it was another four years before it came out in 1980, in part perhaps because its story of a lesbian relationship between an older and a younger woman was unusual for the time. In addition, Jolleys writing refers to a European cultural tradition (in which for instance not only intertextual allusions are employed but also references to German and Austrian classical composers), not accessible to a wide Australian readership in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1983, several months prior to the Penguin publication of Mr Scobies Riddle, University of Queensland Pres, a regional publisher, brought out Jolleys third novel, Mrs Peabodys Inheritance, which was followed by Milk and Honey in 1984. Keeping in mind the crucial contribution of regional publishing to the career of one of
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Australiaa most significant contemporary writers, both authors and critics raise the question of the importance of regional publishers in general, especially nowadays when their survival is threatened by the purchasing and marketing power of the larger multinationals. When Jolleys writing is viewed from a feminist standpoint, it is important to mark the year her first novel was published. It is no coincidence that the book finally appeared in print at the time when growing feminine consciousness and female narrative voices of the late 1970s forced the critics of the early 1980s to radically reconsider the ways gender functions in writing, publishing and reading. By the late 1980s the landscape of Australian fiction was thoroughly gendered, and by the end of the century women writers had become a significant, well-established presence in Australian literature. What Jolleys prose has in common with feminist writings is the radical shift from themes and narrative techniques of earlier female writers. Her deviation from the historical, biographical and mimetic style of her female predecessors, as well as her confident presentation of women and the world they inhabit, compelled the reader to confront and comprehend the intrinsic misogyny of a patriarchal society. Stylistically, Jolleys incorporation of traditional realism within experimental texts gave impetus to contemporary writers stylistic variations. Thematically, Jolleys fiction incorporates the main preoccupations of womens writing: expression of woman-to-woman sexuality present in the lesbian fiction of Elizabeth Riley, Helen Garner or Mary Fallon; the ways gender difference structures power inequities portrayed in the fiction of Beverly Farmer; the domestic realism of Helen Garner; and the Gothic-influenced realism of Barbara Hanrahan and Kate Grenville. From a feminist point of view, it is of utmost importance that Jolley has brought the female protagonist to the forefront of the novel in a manner rarely attempted, in a country where, as Dorothy Jones in Olivia and Chloe comments, the importance of mateship has assumed [the status of] a cult, a clich and literary convention in both its artistic and cultural norms. (Schmidt at home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/edit9823.htm) On the one hand, Jolley rewrites and redefines the traditional domestic myth and the idea of womans place; on the other hand, she explores the role of woman as creator, in which literature often figures as a metaphor of creativity. As John OBrien points out (1991: 131), Miss Peabodys Inheritance, The Well and Palomino are rich in images of rustic domesticity. The idyllic surface, how-
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ever, betrays a complex relationship between gender and myth. The clash between modern woman and the idea of womens place, as prescribed by the Australian cultural tradition, both demystifies the traditional myth of domesticity and holds up the possibility of resistance. At a first glimpse the Australian legend contradicts the stereotype of the defenceless woman. In the bush, where resourcefulness was vital and husbands lacked a reputation for domestic co-operation, the women could hardly afford to be feminine in the Victorian sense. Traditional descriptions of what it means to be Australian are decidedly masculine. As Lawsons stories show (1980), the bush is incompatible with traditional femininity, and the appreciation for womens accomplishments and strength under hardship is simultaneously and repeatedly overshadowed by expectations based on domestic associations. Toughness, independence and freedom of the bush woman in traditional Australian literature are of an ambiguous nature. These values are not the result of gender enlightenment or of justice, but are a matter of necessity and do not challenge cultural perceptions of womans place. That place is still the home, and the women in the bush simply have the additional task of extra work outside the house. Further, the myth supports the idea that the value of the bush woman is not in her assertive, aggressive femininity, but in the way she manages an impressive litany of masculine accomplishments. If she demands respect, she does so because she can behave much like a man. A contemporary writer like Jolley, employing both the traditional domestic myths and their variations, can shape a more forceful resistance to patriarchal ideology. Identifying and exposing patriarchal mythic structures not only challenges existing patriarchal myths, but also makes it possible to reimagine them female. Open texts, like Jolleys, can move beyond the stereotypical and make it impossible to accept at face value myths like the domestic ideal. Jolleys fiction unsettles the readers historical, cultural and psychological assumptions. OBrien (1991:134) claims that in this light, each novel reveals a unique relationship with the ideology reflected in the domestic idyll. Accordingly, Miss Peabodys Inheritance is seen as an attack on domesticity, The Well as a study of the violence of repression, and Palomino as the novel which, in its portrayal of female friendship, offers the clearest oppositional possibility to mateship. A negative example of the power of dominant ideology is given in the character of Gwendaline Manners, a girl who is not attracted to trav-
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elling or knowledge, but, as the Headmistress of the school for girl notices, the gel wants simply the kitchen, the ironing board and the baby bath. (Jolley 1988:76) The novels stance attacks the dominant mythic structure. The repressive nature of the home is epitomised by Miss Peabodys tyrannical disabled mother. Miss Peabody represents and lives the grim side of the myth. She is an old maid and a slave to her home. Trapped in her house, she finds relief in her close relationship with the novelist, who invites her into an alternative mythic world where the wildly exciting adventures of the novels and their exotic Australian author are staged. Miss Peabody experiences transgression that her dull domestic life has excluded. At the end of the novel, she leaves her home for Australia and in that way she breaks both the confines of home and myth. The Well (1987) shows that under the atmosphere of a seemingly domestic idyll one can be desperately longing for freedom. Jolley convincingly portrays the romantic harmony of domestic life of Miss Harper and Kathy. Living in their isolated cottage, they enjoy every variety of domestic ritual. However, the smooth surface of the idyll proves to be a creation of the authoritative Miss Harper, the result of her selfish love for Kathy. Miss Harper does not allow Kathy to lead her own life outside the gilded cage she has provided for her. As becomes clear to the people in the town, Kathy is overprotected by Miss Harper; even Kathys best friend is perceived as a rival. However, Miss Harpers most intense fears relate to the man Kathy inadvertently runs down. Introducing the elements of a ghost story, in the eerie voice from the well, Jolley concretises the fears of Miss Harper that the man will steal Kathy form their domestic tranquillity. Indeed, the voice awakens in Kathy her sexual energy and vague fantasies of marriage. Miss Harper is afraid of such a future, since it would mark the end of their domestic bliss, and finally she decides that Kathy must simply never leave. Miss Harper decides that the well must be permanently sealed if the idyll is to be restored. After a violent struggle with the floating corpse, she returns to the shelter of the cottage to wake Kathy with the offer of some freshly baked scones. The reality of oppression is again concealed under the pretence of a smooth surface of domestic paradise. In Palomino (1984) Jolley reimagines the masculine codes of violence, abandonment and alcohol implied by mateship in feminine terms even down to the walkabout equivalent of the repeated European trip motif in her novels. Palomino most powerfully forges an oppositional ideology in the
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enormous opportunities it finds in female friendship. In Palomino the female friendship is imagined within the contemporary tradition of the feminist utopia, existing without men at all. OBrien (1991:140) concludes that in Palomino the myth of domesticity is not just attacked but confronted with a truly oppositional ideology that suggests traditional signs may undergo a kind of dialectic transformation in which traditional myth is reclaimed to become a healthy idyll of feminine friendship. Audacious and provocative, womens stories that Jolley presents break the mimetic mirror of realism and venture into metafiction. Like other non-realists, she exposes the frames around the pictures drawn in words, she flaunts the invention, the artificiality of language, its difference from the world of experience. In addition to the self-reflexive prose of open fictionality, Jolley offers new ways of generating meaning or expressing relationship between writing and life. A new conception of the way in which fiction can create rather that replicate meaning derives specifically from female anatomy. Sue Gillett (1991:105120) points out and analyses the importance of body as metaphor of creativity in Jolleys writing. The metaphor which associates writing with childbearing is ancient: indeed, a clich. Writers have used the metaphor to assert the potency of their own or their characters creative powers. However, Gillett argues, it has always been possible to somehow detach the notion of successful and desirable birth form the role of woman, which means that admirable written products are divine babes. Their creators are men, which is in fact a variation of the myth of the original procreator, God, who independently and womblessly made the Word flesh. Eve, the original mother figure, is associated with sin, while Virgin Mary is associated with immaculate conception, where the emphasis is placed on creative powers rather than on the very act of childbirth or womans desire, power or creativity. It can be concluded, therefore, that Jolleys distinctiveness with regard to a conception of the relationship between art and life does not reside in her discovery of the metaphor of the child of the brain. Its clichd nature is comically underscored in the remarks of those of her characters who employ it. Jolley gives the metaphor new meaning by reworking the clich, by fleshing out the logic of the metaphor, which leads to a focus upon the positively female aspects of creativity. The sexual organs, functions and desires are not degraded nor debarred from the positive side of creativity in Jolleys fictions: her characters menstruate, lactate, have orgasms, become pregnant, give birth, experience
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menopause. Jolley presents female sexuality not as mysterious or perverted, but as normal. In literalising the metaphor through her stories of womens lives written by women, Jolley redresses the selectivity, bias, and stereotypes that denied their creativity. The result of Jolleys inquiry into the role of women creators is legitimisation and celebration of the natural creative potential in women. In the framework of the childbearing metaphor Jolley draws attention to the fact that in the process of creative reproduction, where both the mother and the writer create, they produce, from within themselves, something which is different from themselves. The work of art, as well as the child, separate form their author or mother and are delivered into the world where they encounter other relationships. In this way Jolley makes the metaphor of creativity embrace the theory of reception. The meaning of the text-child is not complete and does not exclusively derive form its mother-author but continues to be created in its interaction with the others. The group discussions of the play Foxybaby, which are integrated into the novel Foxybaby (1985), enact this point: the play is open to change. One of the reader-actors of the play, Mrs Viggars, is so moved by the story and the plight of its main character, the foxybaby girl, that she decides to shelter and support a similar girl who had played the role of this young incest victim. The story has meaning and influence beyond the boundaries of its own existence. Mrs Viggars does not take meaning from the play but uses the play to create meaning in her own life. Other characters are similarly moved by the reading into contemplating explorations of their own lives. Miss Porch, the professional writer in Foxybaby, tells her students about the readers contribution to and interaction with the production of meaning. The recognition and acceptance of the readers role signifies an important shift from the dominant notion of meaning as the product of a representational correspondence between word and world to a dialogic and relational notion of meaning. That is why it is important not only that the work be written but be published as well: someone has to read it if the work is to come to life. From a feminist point of view, Elizabeth Jolleys fiction re-shapes and extends the prevailing Australian social, psychic and sexual narratives. The subversion of the conventional fulfilments of romantic fiction, made possible through the change of viewpoint, makes Jolleys work significant for the feminist reader because it bears the visible mark of womans experience
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and the possibilities that arise from it. Therefore, with respect to the creative metaphor, the female body becomes the place of conception, and the birth is imagined as a biological transition form the womb into the world, emphasising that the creative process is a laborious transformation of one material into two, and not the deed of an invisible maker created effortlessly and without the traces of the process itself. The female body is used as a means of demythologising creativity, that is, of shattering realist illusions. The daring approach to the traditional metaphor is accompanied by a daring thematic choice which testifies to Jolleys interest in exploring emotionally charged and morally perplexing situations such as adultery, possessiveness and jealousy, incest, sexual obsession, eccentricity, murder, madness, lesbianism and the tension between motherhood and homoeroticism, the questions of psychological and physical exile which create the sense of being a displaced half-belonging person. Her fiction illustrates her unremitting curiosity for the human behaviour that somehow deviates from the norm. a wide range of themes has established her as a prolific writer whose fiction has won considerable acclaim. Her achievements have been compared to those of Patrick White. The two writers share the disconcerting choice of subject and its treatment. In the interplay of reality and illusion in the novels of Patrick White, the weak-minded become the bearers of divine wisdom, and physical deformity a mark of spiritual beauty; while Jolley with understanding and with a lack of bias shows the lives of people who are pushed to the margins of society and stigmatised as moral, emotional and sexual outcasts, or on the other hand, of those who are outside public notice, the ones that society neither appreciates nor rejects but simply fails to notice: elderly spinsters, the inhabitants of geriatric wards, sad migrants, cleaners, musicians, orphans, etc. It should be pointed our, however, that humour sits in her works alongside sadness, misery or pain. Its role is not only to ease the tension or relieve the pain but to erode various kinds of authority and obstructive norms as well. In addition, humour often facilitates a serious approach to important social issues. Jolleys fiction probes controversial and painful social issues such as abortion, the failure of family life, single parenthood, childlessness, loneliness, illness, age, and death. Her writings, furthermore, deal with murder or manslaughter, theft, vandalism, arson, ambiguous cases of deception and exploitation, which means that her fiction has a strong ethical dimension, that is, it has to do with human values and responsibilities. Such a
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scope gives rise to the critical dilemma whether ethics and morality should be connected with evaluating fiction or whether literary characters should be treated as real people. As an author, Elizabeth Jolley does not impose her own attitudes, nor does she give answers to proposed questions. Rather, she presents her audience with several opposing ethical frameworks through which the reader is pressed into considering a number of possible reactions to the moral status of events. There is no superior system of values in the text that the reader is supposed to share with the author. The reader does not know what kind of response the author expects from them, neither are there any authorial signposts. In Jolleys texts literary theory begins to be part of the network of allusions and she uses intertextuality to draw attention to traditional positions in Western culture. The intertextual allusion is one of Jolleys two major ways of authorial intervention. The other is the manipulation of the expectations set up in the reader by various genres and conventions. Metafictional play leads the reader to make ethical assumptions only to be forced to revise them. By manipulating genres, Jolley manipulates ethical attitudes and constantly reminds the reader that her work is a work of fiction, not reality. In Jolleys main characters, thought and imagination are often an unruly and irresponsible excursion into worlds innocent of morals, taboos, conventions or orthodoxy, and yet there is no apparent authorial comment. That narrative reticence means that Jolley as an author chiefly asks questions without answering them, so that she cannot be seen as judgmental. Instead of an explanation, Elizabeth Jolley offers a multiple perspective achieved through several narrative possibilities, sometimes used in just one sentence. She lurches and darts from one discourse, one mode of perceiving to another, but the reader is never allowed to rest secure in any single, indivisible way of viewing events. Despite the aforementioned thematic variety, her fiction consistently offers a complex account of the process of desire. Her fiction is about human longing to gratify the repressed desire, about a powerful impulse which disrupts the lives of the characters and which also involves a continual narrative fragmentation. It means that her narrative techniques are crucial to the representation of the process of deferred desire and displaced repression, in which the very language of the text participates. Hidden desires indicate the presence of one side of ones personality which remains unknown and undisclosed to the world. Always between the other and the familiar, Jolleys fiction is fluid, suggestive and unresolved; the
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intriguing and uncanny quality of her fiction is maintained and a shadowy otherness is intimated but not quite established. Calculated uncertainty and the open quality of Jolleys work indicate that it does not attempt to be definitive and monumental but to create a fictional profusion and complexity which embodies and draws attention to significant psychic processes. Jolley offers an alternative to various kinds of complacencies. She suggests the otherness of foreigners, of repression and its displacements, of sexual difference. However, she does not explicate this otherness, nor does she offer solutions. Her fiction is subtle and suggestive, leaving room for the readers imagination. The silences and ambiguities of Elizabeth Jolleys fiction require imaginative work from readers and the suggested otherness is more resonant for its lack of detail and resolution. Jolleys elliptical prose, with its elliptical sentences, unfinished thoughts and unresolved plots invites the reader to take part in the final act of creation of the work of fiction. Jolleys worlds evade attempts at final explanation. Even the sum of knowledge of all the characters does not give us a complete picture of an event. There is an ironic gap between what we are offered in the novel and our desire for an ideal organic whole, explicable, understandable. This corresponds with the ironic gap between what each character knows and what he or she desires to know and understand, and is reflected in the discontinuous and incomplete structure of the novels. The openendedness of Jolleys works becomes a metaphor for the way individuals experience their lives and construct their identities. Among her characters there are female writers whose writerly preoccupations express both frustration at the lack of finality or resolution inherent in living, and excitement at the possibilities entailed by continual creation. The pleasure in rewriting derives form the practice of choice which means that Jolley uses the metaphor of writing to present change as a positive force, an active, energetic life activity in which the individual plays a responsible, generative part. Rewriting and change, in Jolleys novels, give the individual the powers of self-determination. Jolley rarely departs from a realistic mode of narration, whether invisibly omniscient or first-person. She often chooses writers of various kinds as her central characters and, indeed, a debate about the writing of fiction, both theoretical and practical, is one of the strands of discourse that surfaces in several novels and is problematised via several different mouth-
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pieces of varying reliability. In this metafictional frame, Jolley plays with her readers curiosity about the distance and relationship between herself and her characters, but the narrative is never wholly absorbed in self-reflection. The realistic mode of narration intertwined with the conscious fictionality of her work allow the reader to read Jolleys work as an awareness of the linguistic bases of experience in general and as the place of fabrication, creativity or delusion within that experience. A self-conscious emphasis on the nature of fiction disrupts the credibility of character and event. Narration proceeds through anticipation and flashback and the ending does not resolve the plot. There is a sense of an absent force exerting pressure, whether it be the characters own repressions which threaten the stability of their egos or withheld information which, when revealed, will fracture the unity of the text. As such Elizabeth Jolleys fiction belongs to a literary tradition which has been concerned with representation of identity, with the constraints and possibilities of fiction and the attempt to depict the psyche in more than an external and superficial manner. Jolleys texts incorporate European cultural heritage, quotations form European literature, most often from Schiller, Rilke, Goethe, Hardy, Shakespeare and Dickens, as well as Biblical and musical allusions. References to European and classical literature and to biblical texts are often used to generate uneasiness in Jolleys own fiction. They are disturbing and not always hopeful. Jolleys fiction provides abundant evidence of her musical sensibility. Her characters have much of interest to say about music-making, and about sharing the experience of music as listeners. Music in her novels can define character and also define such social issues as immigration and class division.
References
Gillet, Sue. 1991. Breaking the Realist Mirror: With a (Female) Difference, in D. Bird and B. Walker (eds.). Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1979. The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1981. The Newspaper of Claremont Street. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
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Jolley, Elizabeth. 1983. Miss Peabodys Inheritance. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1983. Mr Scobies Riddle. Ringwood: Penguin. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1984. Palomino. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1985. Milk and Honey. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1985. Foxybaby. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Jolley, Elizabeth. 1987. The Well. Ringwood: Penguin. Kiernan, B. (ed.). 1980. The Portable Australian Authors: Henry Lawson. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. OBrien. J. 1991. Myths of Domesticity in the Novels of Elizabeth Jolley, in D. Bird and B. Walker (eds.). Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Schmidt, M. Elizabeth Jolley: Living Treasure [Online]. Available: home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/edit9823.htm
AMBIGUOUS NEW WOMEN IN SHAWS GETTING MARRIED

OLIVERA KUSOVAC
University of Montenegro
In the light of Shaws continual struggle for the creation of a more just society, his endeavours to bring new values into the British theatre, as well as in the context of the time he lived in, his interest in the womens question comes across as plausible and consistent. Within his dramatic oeuvre this interest appears on two different planes. First, his work, almost unfailingly containing discussions of various social issues, abounds in explicit feminist arguments that the author gives to a large number of both female and male characters and that are, for the most part, in harmony with the views expressed in Shaws non-dramatic writings. Second, his heroines often have rather uncommon roles which, superficially at least, distinguish them from stereotypical Victorian women; this technique produces an array of unorthodox and surprising female characters. In his play Getting Married (1965), Shaws propensity for elaborate arguments (that frequently tend to dominate other aspects of his plays) is conspicuous. It feels at times as if the writer primarily argued with himself, reducing the dramatic action to a never-ending story of marriage and marital relations. Hence, the discussion about marriage in this case serves as a plot, but not only that; through the various discussions and views on marriage that he puts on stage, the author depicts and defines an array of female characters, ranging from Mrs Collins (a prototype of the womanly woman or martyr-woman addressed by Shaw in a number of his theoretical writings) to Mrs George (one of the mysterious and omniscient Shavian Sphinxes). The focus of this paper is neither the womanly woman nor the Sphinx, but the so-called new woman embodied in Lesbia Grantham and Edith Bridgenorth. One could argue that these two characters are also largely defined through their attitude towards marriage, but also through their comparison to the image of new women, very popular at the time. Before looking more closely into their dramatic representations, however, we shall cast a glance at the term itself and its non-dramatic representation in the Victorian era.
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The emergence of the term new woman is linked to the last decade of the 19th century, when it was introduced to cover the new trend in womens behaviour and attitudes. Gardners description of the concept of the new woman was as follows:
[S]he was seen typically as young, middle-class and single on principle. She eschewed the fripperies of fashion in favour of more masculine dress and severe coiffure. She had probably been educated to a standard unknown to previous generations of women... She was financially independent of father or husband... She affected emancipated habits, like smoking, riding a bicycle, using bold language and taking the omnibus or train unescorted. She belonged to all-female clubs... She sought freedom from, and equality with, men. In the process she was prepared to overturn all convention and all accepted notions of femininity. (in Tinkler 1995:160)
Another, this time graphical, depiction and at the same time rather malicious distortion of the prototype of the new woman of the late 19th century is found in a cartoon published in 1880 in the well-known British magazine Punch. As Elsie Adams (1974:21) describes it, the cartoon shows a woman with very short, or severely pulled back hair, wearing a white shirt, a tie and a simply cut suit (resembling a mans), while the editorial comment, given as the title, says Man or Woman? A Toss Up. Viewed in the light of the time when it appeared, the cartoon does not strike us as a surprise. Men, as well as women loyal to the deeply rooted values, were struggling to maintain centuries-old gender imbalance and thus caricatures served only as a vehicle for making a mockery of career women. That Lesbia Grantham does not go along with the stereotypical mocking representation expressed in the cartoon is clearly shown in her very first appearance in Shaws play. The author takes his audience by surprise by putting on stage a woman who does not fulfil their expectations. A sophisticated lady appears instead of the expected mannish woman, displaying prominently nice manners, warmth and gracefulness, Good morning, dear big sister... (they kiss)... Good morning, Collins. How well you are looking! And how young! (Shaw 1965:549). Equally surprisingly, instead of a woman who flatly refuses both men and any symbols of femininity, Lesbia is revealed as a woman not refusing either, but merely rejecting the traditional female role of marriage and motherhood. Because of this departure from the stereotypical image of the new woman, Lesbia may appear, at first glance at least, as Shaws ideal new woman (Davis 1992:30), a refreshing
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representation serving according to some critics as yet another proof of the claim that the author was well ahead of his time. By rejecting the accepted rules of marital play, Lesbia just like almost all the other characters in the play becomes a proponent of part of Shaws criticisms against the modern form of marriage. Through Lesbia Shaw tries to separate motherhood from marriage, presuming correctly that these are two different categories and that society should grant women freedom to choose by themselves whether and how they want to achieve motherhood. Accordingly, he depicted Lesbia as a woman who does not want a husband (that is, a marriage partner), but who is characterised by a fully defined desire for motherhood and a feeling that she would make a perfect mother. When her pathetic and tireless suitor Boxer, whose repetitive marriage proposals she adamantly refuses, asks her, Dont you want children? (Shaw 1965: 550) Lesbia replies:
I ought to have children. I should be a good mother to children. I believe it should pay the country well to pay ME to have children. But the country tells me that I cant have a child in my house without a man in it, too; so I tell the country that it will have to do without my children. If I am to be a mother, I really cannot have a man bothering me to be a wife at the same time. (1965: 5501)
As already mentioned above, Lesbia does not reject men as such, but her resistance is a matter of her attitude or principle. Shaw apparently requires her to demonstrate her heterosexuality; her sexual inclinations might otherwise seem a mystery, further reinforced by her name (that makes her suitor cry). The suggestiveness of her name is a nuance that could hardly have passed unnoticed at the time; the Fabian audience was most probably familiar with Havelock Elliss serological theories and his description of lesbians within them (Davis 1992: 30), for instance. The answer she gives to Boxers confused questions as to whether it is really possible for her not to want a husband and his allusions to her natural instincts is the following disclaimer: No, I want children; and I want to devote myself entirely to my children, and not to their father... As I said before, an English lady is not the slave of her appetites. That is what an English gentleman seems incapable of understanding (Shaw 1965: 551). In another instances, too, only in a different manner and in a different context, she demonstrates that her outright refusal of a husband by no means implies that she objects to male company in general, There is no reason
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why a mother should not have male society. What she clearly should not have is a husband (1965: 571). And Boxers direct reference to love is met with her exclamation:
Oh, love! Have you no imagination? Do you think I have never been in love with wonderful men? heroes! archangels! princes! sages! even fascinating rascals! and had the strangest adventures with them? Do you know what it is to look at a mere real man after that? A man with his boots in every corner, and the smell of his tobacco in every curtain? (1965: 550)
Therefore, Lesbia is a woman who deeply loves and desires children, having at the same time natural instincts attracting her to men, but who gives both up. Being a real English lady ...trained to do without what I cant have on honourable terms... (1995: 551), she opts for celibate life, without a child or man. It appears that through this act Shaw tried to put her in the category of emancipated, liberated women, which, at first glance at least, he manages to do. For, even today, the concept of compulsory motherhood is unfailingly woven into the process of womens socialization: from the earliest childhood, in various, more or less subtle ways, girls are steered towards this role, first through their play with dolls and later on with younger children. Messages about the significance and appropriateness of motherhood as a prerequisite of the wholeness of female identity are so obvious and prevailing that they are almost impossible to evade. Hence, in the light of such a state of affairs, which, undoubtedly, must have been even more prominent in Victorian times, her emancipation at first glance appears to have even greater value. Present-day feminists emphasize that women should be granted the freedom of choice not to become a mother as a socially acceptable alternative, and that the process through which women spontaneously and unquestionably integrate their vision of mother into their own feeling of identity must be deconstructed (Baber & Allen 1992: 106107). Therefore, women need to be helped to start to perceive motherhood as one of a number of options and possibilities. Lesbia, admittedly, succeeds in going beyond the socially imposed role of wife and mother, and in making her own choice. However, if we delve deeper into the character of her emancipation, we come across several problem areas. Let us have a better look at the issue of her liberation. Presumably no one can deny that by her unyielding refusal to comply with the generally accepted norms, Lesbia has indeed made a certain step forward compared
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to the women of her time. She has made her own choice. Still, her reasons why she loathes the mere thought of marriage seem to trivialise all her elaborate argumentation regarding the role of woman, marriage and motherhood (Crane 1974: 25). Here is the explanation she offers Boxer when she declines his marriage proposal for the umpteenth time:
Im a regular old maid. Im very particular about my belongings. I like to have my own house, and to have it to myself. I have a very keen sense of beauty and fitness and cleanliness and order. I am proud of my independence and jealous for it. I have a sufficiently well-stocked mind to be very good company for myself if I have plenty of books and music. The one thing I never could stand is a great lout of a man smoking all over my house and going to sleep in his chair after dinner, and untidying everything. Ugh! (Shaw 1965: 550)
Despite mentioning the independence and wealth of her inner life, what dominates her statement is her almost pathological obsession with pedantry, order and details in her home, a quality stereotypically ascribed to women who have no other fish to fry but run after other members of their household putting things back in their place. Her repetitive and persistent mention of the cigarette smoke which she finds irritating also labels her as a fussy spinster, who is miles away from our vision of the so-called new woman. At the same time, however, all this may be regarded as revealing a deeply rooted contempt for the male gender, their unjust, masterly attitude, and, accordingly, be interpreted as an expression of Lesbias (that is, Shaws) feminism. Still, it appears that in this manner feminism is reduced to trivial, banal and unhealthy grounds. The author expresses a far more radical and healthy attitude towards the issue of getting married through the acrobat Lina Szczepanowska, a character from Shaws famous piece Misalliance (1995), who we dare say falls among the most emancipated heroines in the dramatists extensive oeuvre. Relating amiably and understandingly to an array of suitors who would like her to be their mistress, she is terribly offended and angered by young Johny Tarletons appropriate offer to provide her with a home, status and financial security. To her, a life of wifely duty and subservience to an unadventurous husband and fossilized social codex would be the utmost humiliation. She would lose her individuality and freedom and abandon her prime duty, the duty to herself. Listing all the things she would be willing to accept in order to avoid marriage, she ends her inspiring tirade with the fol-
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lowing words: All this I would do sooner than take my bread from the hand of a man and make him the master of my body and soul. And so you tell your Johny to buy an Englishwoman: he shall not buy Lina Szczepanowska (Shaw 1995: 113). Linas vision of marriage as a form of legalized prostitution, that is, a form of selling ones soul for the sake of financial security, has a modern parallel in the present-day view of marital arrangements (Crane 1974: 29). When speaking of Lesbias liberation, one additional question inevitably arises. Namely, it is clear that she freed herself of the need to get married at any price; still, what does not come across as so obvious is the question what she freed herself for. She has no occupation whatsoever, or any other directed preoccupation to devote her energy to and creatively employ her capabilities: the only two things she mentions in that sense, except for order in the home, are books and music. She sees them as her pastime, a way to fill her time and be, in her own words, a pleasant company to herself. On the other hand, what she would love to devote her life to and what she considers herself to be gifted for, and that is motherhood, she sacrifices, as children are inevitably accompanied by a husband, which she does not want. Not only does she believe that children would give her fulfilment, but she is also convinced that her giving birth to a child would be a great contribution to the state. By giving that up, she is left with no personal fulfilment whatsoever. She is freed, but solely from getting married as a must; unfortunately, not to the benefit of fulfilling her own personality. (Crane 1074:26) At this point we could re-examine more closely Lesbias attitude towards motherhood. As we have just stated, she views motherhood not merely as a personal, but also as a public category, which is evident in her numerous lines. Just because I have the qualities my country wants most I shall go barren to my grave; whilst the women who have neither the strength to resist marriage nor the intelligence to understand its infinite dishonour will make the England of the future (Shaw 1965: 579), she will say in one of the scenes, lamenting the situation. She will be even more explicit when, in the course of considering the agreement of partnership that should replace the traditional form of marriage, she declares: A woman has no right to refuse motherhood. That is clear, after the statistics given in The Times by Mr Sidney Webb (1965: 566). It is more than obvious that Lesbia thinks in terms of eugenics, the dominant ideology of her time. The
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expressed attitudes are the following: 1) the state must create propitious conditions for women to enable them to freely perform their basic function the function of procreation, i.e., the continuance of the human species and 2) women who have children should be intelligent, advanced and emancipated women who will, consequently, produce better offspring and thus create a better race. So, to judge from his depiction of Lesbia, Shaw did neither lag behind nor go ahead of his time, but remained thoroughly consistent with the time he lived in. Another representative of the new woman is Edith, the young woman whose wedding is the occasion that brings together the other characters of the play and, at the same time, provides a (loose) skeleton of dramatic action. Being an emancipated young lady, she refuses to proceed with the scheduled wedding after she has read a pamphlet of marital legal provisions. Therefore, she views marriage from a highly rational perspective, being opposed to getting married under any circumstances. Unconventionally, marriage illusions are destroyed in the pre-marital phase both for Edith and her husband-to-be Cecil. However, after a thorough and exhaustive discussion about marital relations lasting the whole play, and after making a fruitless marriage agreement, Edith and Cecil manage to find a compromise solution and disappear from the stage. As we learn through her future husbands words, Edith is an emancipated and self-assured young woman passionately engaged in social work of all sorts: organizing shop assistants and sweated work girls and all that and her blood boils about it (and it boils at least once a week) she doesnt care what she says (1965: 561). She is a committed member of the womens club, with self-respect and independence high on her list of priorities (1965: 571). All this was very typical of the process of the Fabian Womens Group formation. Still, when we meet her for the first time, she, quite sarcastically, appears with pamphlet in hand, principles up in arms:
She is the typical spoilt child of a clerical household: almost as terrible a product as the typical spoilt child of a Bohemian household: that is, all her childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious impulse have been applauded and deferred to until she has become an ethical snob of the first water. (1965: 562)
This characterization can by no means be seen as a favourable picture of a woman, particularly when it is offered as a vision of the new woman. Here, instead of a woman, we see a spoilt brat; instead of a feminist, we see
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a mere ethical snob driven not by principles but affectation (Davis 1992: 29). Once again, the reader is met with an anti-feminist representation of the new woman that the author offers to society in order to expose her to criticism and mockery for her immaturity and frivolity. Even though one could regard this as yet another proof of Shaws unwillingness to depict the world in black and white, such a dramatic representation of the new woman, at a time of overwhelmingly mocking social representation, is, to say the least, a disappointment. In conclusion, we could say that Shaws representations of the new woman reveal profound ambivalences toward women. Shaw appears to have been continuously torn between his conscious commitment to feminism as an advanced ideology of the time, which earned him the reputation of the patron saint of the womens movement, and his subconscious urge to maintain the centuries-old gender imbalance and separateness of male and female spheres.
References
Adams, Elsie. 1974. Feminism and Female Stereotypes in Shaw, in The Shaw Review. XVII, No.1, pp. 1722. Baber, K. M. and K. R. Allen. 1992. Women and Families: Feminist Reconstructions. New York, London: The Guilford Press. Crane, G. M. 1974. Shaw and Womens Lib, in The Shaw Review. XVII, No.1, pp. 2331. Davis, J. 1992. The New Woman and the New Life, in V. Gardner and S. Rutherford (eds.). The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 18501914. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Shaw, G. B. 1965. The Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw. London: Paul Hamlin. Shaw, G. B. 1995. Heartbreak House and Misalliance. New York: Bantam Books. Tinkler, P 1995. Women and popular literature, in J. Purvis et al (eds.). Womens . History: Britain, 18501945. London: UCL Press.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF RALPH CUDWORTH TO THE NEOPLATONIC BACKGROUND OF S.T. COLERIDGES RELIGIOUS MUSINGS
CRISTINA FLORES MORENO
Universidad de La Rioja
Religious Musings is a poem that has not received much scholarly attention, although its importance to Coleridge, especially as an expression of his Neo-Platonic ideas, deserves to be acknowledged. The poem depicts Coleridges initial steps toward his mature literary theory, particularly involving the concepts of symbol and imagination. Religious Musings signals the Romantic poets turn toward idealist positions, leaving the Hartleys associationism behind. Against the widely-accepted proposition that the source of Coleridges concept of symbol is to be found in German Idealism, it is our contention here that he was initially influenced by a group of British Neoplatonic philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, who provided Coleridge with the bases upon which he would build his symbolic poetics. This paper examines Coleridges readings in the years 17956 of Ralph Cudworths The True Intellectual System (pub. 1678; 1995) and how the ideas in this work contributed to the ideological background of Religious Musings (17941796). In order to find the Neoplatonic sources of Coleridges concept of symbol and the related concept of imagination, we must then turn to an early period in his life and career, the 1790s. This is a period previous to his study of German thinkers, (18012, in the case of Kant, and around 1805, in the case of Schelling). About Schellings works the romantic poet claimed that in them he first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do (1983: I.92). Coleridges entries in his notebooks, and his literary production of the period 17941798: First Lecture on Revealed Religion, The Destiny of Nations, and the Conversation Poems, show the initial impact of Cudworths philosophy in Coleridges thought. In the period 17901800 Coleridge did not produce many explicit commentaries on the nature of poetry, but his poetry is crowded and sweats
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beneath a heavy burthen of Ideas (Coleridge 1971: 137). Coleridges poems in that decade present his attempt to get an insight into the unity of Nature and further identification of man and Nature, and they also depict his interest in the mental processes involved in the poetic creative act. A letter he wrote to Thelwall in October 1797 sheds light on Coleridges concept of nature:
I can at times feel strongly the beauties, you describe, in themselves, and for themselves but more frequently all things appear little all the knowledge, that can be acquired, childs play the universe itself what but an immense heap of little things? I can contemplate nothing but parts, and parts are all little ! My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great something one and indivisible and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity! (1971: 349)
Nature seems to Coleridge a great unity. Because all things counterfeit infinity, phenomena are different parts of this complex whole that allows humans to reach, through contemplation, this unity of Nature. In this sense, then, elements in nature are symbolic: For all that meets the bodily sense I deem / Symbolical, one mighty alphabet (1994: 132). Symbol and referent participate in a common nature by virtue of the Plastick Life of nature. This is the foundation of Coleridges symbolic knowledge (Appleyard 1965:50). His mature philosophy of literature is based on this symbolic knowledge:
In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking [] I seem rather to be seeking [] a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists. (Coleridge 1973: 2546)
In these speculations we can see the source of his mature idea of symbol as he defines it in his latest works, especially The Statemans Manual (1816; 1993a) and Aids to Reflection (1825; 1993b):
[B]y symbol I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents. (1993a: 79) A Symbol is a sign included in the Idea, which it represents: ex.gr. an actual part chosen to represent the whole (1993b: 3634)
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Coleridges most-discussed concept of Imagination appears as the intellectual faculty in charge of recognising symbols, and through them conducting the poet to the knowledge of the Whole, the Greatest Being of Nature. In March 1798, in a letter to his brother George, Coleridge already presents himself as inspired by fields & woods & mountains with almost a visionary fondness and seeking to elevate the imagination & set the affections in right tune by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living soul, by the presence of Life (1971: 397). This living soul, the presence of Life, which the poet should recognize in the symbolic phenomenon through imagination, seems to be the result of his attraction to Ralph Cudworths The True Intellectual System and his concept of plastic life. Coleridges attraction to the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, which started to fascinate him during his attendance at Christs Hospital, was further strengthened in Cambridge and continued to hold his interest during his stay in Bristol where he undertook a study of the Cambridge Platonists. These were a group of Anglican philosophers led by Ralph Cudworth (16171688) and Henry More (16141687) who, in the seventeenth century, emerged against the materialist philosophy of the time with the aid of Platos and, chiefly, Plotinuss concepts. The main purpose of the group was to defend the concept of the existence of God, and in order to do so they proposed the spiritual constitution of nature and defended a universal synthesis. Nature is, to them, plastic rather than mechanical. They work [to] show how the one original vital force governing nature is infinitely exemplified, yet not lost, in these exemplifications (Cassirer 1953: 51). The link between the original vital force and nature phenomena is plastic nature. In his masterwork, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678; 1995), Cudworth challenges the empiricism of the age by claiming that the natural world was symbolic of a transcendent reality beyond appearances, thanks to the spermatic reason or plastic nature that allowed the interrelation between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Though Cudworth distinguishes between two principles of being: a corporeal (quantity) and an incorporeal substance (energy), intrinsically different and incommensurable, he admits a reciprocal influence of one substance upon the other in the intermediary sphere of the lower energies of the soul. This intermediary sphere is the imagination, corresponding to Plastic Nature as the link
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between both substances, the forming principle from within, the medium employed by God to shape the universe:
[....] there is a Plastick Nature under him [God], which as an Inferior and Subordinate Instrument doth drudgingly execute that Part of his Providence which consists in the Regular and Orderly Motion of Matter. (Cudworth 1995: 147)
Coleridge became acquainted with Cudworths Intellectual System during 1795 and 1796. According to the Registers of the Bristol Library Society (Whalley 1949), Coleridge borrowed Cudworths book twice, in the periods going from 15 May to 1 June 1795 and again from 9 November to 13 December 1796. Nevertheless some evidence suggests that he had already become acquainted with the Cambridge Platonists thought some time earlier. In his Sonnets on Eminent Characters: To The Rev. W.L. Bowles (the first version of which was printed in the Morning Chronicle in December 26 1794), we find Coleridges first reference to the concept of plastic spirit:
While shadowy Pleasure with mysterious wings Brooded the wavy and tumultuous Mind, Like that great Spirit, who with plastic Sweep Movd on the darkness of the formless Deep! (Coleridge 1994: 84)
Coleridges first reference to Religious Musings is found in a letter to Robert Southey dated 29 December 1794: I am writing a poem which when finished you shall see and wished him to describe the Characters & Doctrines of Jesus Christ for me but his low Spirits prevented him The Poem is in blank Verse on the Nativity. (1971: 147) He was still working on it a few weeks before it appeared in Poems in Various Subjects, on 16 April 1796 (1971: 187). He took the poem very seriously, writing to Cottle in October 1795 it has cost me much labour in polishing, more than any poem I ever wrote and I believe, deserves it more (1971: 162). In this letter he states that the poem was not quite three hundred lines, but the 1796 version contains four hundred and nineteen lines; he had some remaining work to do to reach the (definitive) 1796 version. Thus, at the time the poet began the long process of writing Religious Musings he had already had some knowledge of Cudworths philosophy. Moreover, the composition of the poem coincides in time with Coleridges serious study of The True Intellectual System of the Universe.
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Ashton describes Religious Musings as a kind of poetical miscellany, mirroring Coleridges preoccupations in religion and politics over the fifteen months of its fragmented composition (1996: 84). The targets of the poets criticism are Pitts Government, the slave trade, the war and the defences of it in the Parliament which turn God into Accomplice Deity; property; a starting verbal picture of thimbrothelled Atheist; and the Church of England, boldly described as mitred Atheism. Coleridge included an Argument that followed the poem on a separate page:
Introduction. Person of Christ. His prayer on the Cross. The process of his Doctrines on the mind of the Individual. Character of the Elect. Superstition. Digression to the present War. Origin and Uses of Government and Property. The present State of Society. The French Revolution. Millenium. Universal Redemption. Conclusion. (1994: 108)
To Appleyard (1965:39) the main subject of the poem is the religious interpretation of contemporary political events and the essential element of the interpretation is the optimistic reliance upon the eventual triumph of social and religious justice. However, pervading all these topics, the poem shows a powerful strain of idealism and transcendentalism. Coleridges political criticism was always strongly charged with a religious and idealist element that sharply differentiated him from the leading figures among the politically rebels: Godwin, Holcroft, and Thelwall. In Religious Musings we observe the appearance of three ideas that Coleridge had probably found in Cudworths The True Intellectual System. One is the wholistic idea of the universe, which is composed of infinite parts that, at the same time, are exemplifications of the Universe. Second, the idea of a mediator between the greatest Spirit and nature plastic life of nature. And finally, the concept of symbol as one of these parts that constitute the universe and give us epistemological access to the greatest Being. The poem opens with the vision of the heavenly multitude that composes the world:
This is the time, when most divine to hear, The voice of adoration rouses me, As with a Cherubs trump: and high upborne, Yea, mingling with the choir, I seem to view The vision of the heavenly multitude. (Coleridge 1994: 1089)
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Through this multitude the visionary narrator gains access to the Great Invisible. In the following lines, Coleridge depicts the ontological relationship between the Great Invisible and the natural world by virtue of the workings of a surpassing light that flows from the great invisible into the elements of nature, shining from inside the faces of humans. Though here he does not introduce the term plastic life of nature, this surpassing light described in the terms shown in these lines clearly corresponds to this Neoplatonic concept. In the epistemological field, the symbol appears as the only possible entry to the knowledge of the great Invisible. Christ is the perfect example of a symbol in Coleridgean terms, as he is the perfect image of the supreme beauty.
() For the great Invisible (by symbols only seen) With a peculiar and surpassing light Shines from the visage of the oppressed good man, When heedless of himself the scourged Saint Mourns for the oppressor. Fair the vernal mead, Fair the high grove, or many-coloured mead, Nor the green Ocean with his thousand isles, Nor the starred azure, nor the Sovran sun, Eer with such majesty of portraiture Imaged the supreme beauty uncreate, As thou, meek Saviour! () (1994: 109)
Sublimity in humankind is related to his recognition of being a part and proportion of one wondrous whole. God diffuses through the universe and because of his distribution, we all are made one whole.
Tis the sublime of man, Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole! This fraternises man, this constitutes Our charities and bearings. But tis God Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole; This the worst superstition, him except Aught to desire, Supreme Reality! (1994: 1134)
Coleridges optimism rests in this diffusion. Gods victory is to wrap in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell (1994: 1145). By sacred sympathy we are joined in a whole one Self:
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When he by sacred sympathy might make The whole one Self! Self, that no alien knows! Self, far diffused as Fancys wings can travel! Self, spreading still! Oblivious of its own, Yet all of all, possessing! This is Faith! This the Messiahs destined victory! (1994: 1145)
This whole one Self does not recognize itself. It is oblivious of its own but all possessing. And this is one of the defining characteristics of the plastic Life according to Cudworth. The Neoplatonic philosopher describes it as an artificial, regular, and plastic nature, devoid of express knowledge and understanding, and subordinate to the Deity (Cudworth 1995: xli). This subordination of the shaping Plastic Life to God saves first the Cambridge Platonists, and later Coleridge from falling into determinism or pantheism. At the end of Religious Musings, the nature and role of the plastic power are clarified.
Contemplant Spirits! Ye that hover oer With untired gaze the immeasurable fount Ebullient with creative Deity! And ye of plastic power, that interfused Roll through the grosser and material mass In organizing surge! Holies of God! (And what if Monads of the infinite mind?) (Coleridge 1994: 124)
The plastic power emanates from, but does not equal, the creative deity; it interfuses, roll(s) through the grosser and material mass/ in organizing surge. In Cudworths words, plastic nature doth drudgingly execute that Part of his Providence which consists in the Regular and Orderly Motion of Matter (Cudworth 1995: 147). Appleyard (1965: 45) notes that the unity of being in Coleridges poem is objective in nature, as well as in the divine mind, and is realized in man by means of a personal vision contingent upon his own contemplation of the loveliness of God and its reflection of things. This unity is possible because, according to Coleridge in Religious Musings, we are not only material parts of the wondrous whole, we are also Monads of the infinite mind.
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Religious Musings is suffused with evidence that in this early period in his career, Coleridge absorbed the philosophy of the Cambridge Platonists and introduced it into his own view of nature and of human epistemology. Those views will later combine with the influence of German idealism to shape his mature literary thought, his symbolic poetics.
References
Appleyard, J.A. 1965. Coleridges Philosophy of Literature. The Development of a Concept of Poetry 17911819. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Ashton, R. 1996. The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Blackwell. Cassirer, E. 1953. The Platonic Renaissance in England. London: Nelson. Coleridge, S. T. 1973. Collected Notebooks. Coburn, K. & Christensen, N. Ed. Princeton: Princeton. Coleridge, S. T. 1983 (1817). Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coleridge, S. T. 1993a.The Statemans Manual in Lay Sermons. White, R.J. (ed.) In Coburn, K. The Collected Works of S.T.Coleridge. Princeton: Princeton (v .6). Coleridge, S. T. 1993b. Aids to Reflection. Beer, J. (ed.) In Coburn, (v.9). Coleridge, S. T. 1994 (1834). The Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. London: Wordsworth. Cudworth, R. 1995 (1678). The True Intellectual System of the Universe. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Jackson, H.J. (ed.) 1978. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Whalley, G. (ed.) 1949. The Bristol Library Borrowings of Southey and Coleridge, 17931798. London: The Biographical Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
RACE RELATIONS AND POINT OF VIEW IN JOSEPH CONRADS KARAIN

CHRISTOPHER CAIRNEY
Dog University, Istanbul ` u
Despite the aesthetics of a good story set in a country far away, many scholars seem drawn, implicitly or explicitly, into arguments about Conrads relation to Imperialism, or colonialism, because of the time and setting of many of his stories. The simplistic view is that he is either innocent of the charge of racism or that he is guilty of failure, even sin, in some moral dimension. Achebe and Said, for instance, famously see him as a racist, more or less, while Nadjer and others feel that he is not, or that he is not in fact writing about the Orient at all, but about Europe. MacKenzie and Donovan have put forward other views. Such arguments usually involve some reading of Conrads novel Heart of Darkness; for our purposes here, Conrads story Karain seems a good place to problematize the issues, because Marlows sympathetic but decidedly etic perspective in the novella is replaced in the short story by Karains constructed faux-emic one. Postcolonial writers at the end of the twentieth century have focused attention on Joseph Conrad, a writer of the previous fin de sicle, and have thrown down a gauntlet of sorts on the issue of Conrads legacy. Typically, postcolonial fiction and criticism deals with the tension between the European and the indigenous in a colonial or once-colonial area, or talks about differences in perspective. Postcolonial criticism also examines linguistic choices made by local writers to find evidence of psychological tension or identity crises, or examines how the imposition of European culture, whether active or passive, has had a negative effect. Given the postcolonial reading of early twentieth-century literature in English, it might now be difficult to believe that a European man of that time would be able to identify with the common humanity of Africa or Asia to any real degree. Yet some such identification does occur in Heart of Darkness and other works by Joseph Conrad. As Steven Donovan states, no one, not even Conrads sternest critic, disputes the claim that his writing offers a critique of imperialism itself (1999: 32). Even Chinua Achebe and Edward Said, two of
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Conrads most polemical critics, admit some sympathetic connection between the writer and his subject: Achebe states that Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation (1972: 262), while Said offers that most readings of Heart of Darkness (the usual target of the postcolonial critique) rightly call attention to Conrads scepticism about the colonial enterprise (1994: 198). The postcolonial critique has a bearing on a discussion of Conrad the European because some feel that the discordant note stuck by the colonized masses of Conrads time somehow influenced Conrads modernism (Al-Dabbagh 2002: 71). Indeed, it is the modern European who is made the target of an angry retrospective against the spirit of the colonialist of one hundred years ago: and it is evident that Europe is still greatly distrusted. Tom Henthorne points out that it has been increasingly popular to regard Conrad as a racist and imperialist, at least among postcolonial critics, a number of whom characterize him as a Western demon (2000: 203). Conrad is often closely identified unfairly with a negative stereotype of the European, and is even seen as an agent of the Colonialist project and process. Hildegard Hoeller speaks of refraining from the horror of the racism of Conrads Heart of Darkness (2004: 1), while Bruce Hendricksen suggests Conrads sin is to take ones own experiences as normal and to present oneself as an authority on the discourse of the other (1993: 296). The political formulation has a basic, if simplistic, dualism: innocent, blameless local people and culture are robbed of their own way, and hence of happiness. As Donovan states:
modern scholars have been divided over the precise relation of Conrads ideas to a racist and imperialist past that is now almost wholly reviled. Conrads ideas stand trial, so to speak, in a court of imperial crimes against humanity. (1999: 32)
It might be said here that Conrad is being attacked as a European, not as Conrad. The angst of postcolonial critics is understandable, and the European is invited to sympathize (but not necessarily to empathize) with the opinions expressed. It must be somewhat taken on faith. Achebe accuses Conrad of being a purveyor of comforting myths and a legitimizer of imperialism, imperialism with a European stamp (1987: 255), and even calls Conrad a thoroughgoing racist (1987: 251) who had a problem with niggers (1987: 257), language clearly intended in a political context to incite, and therefore having it would seem, little to do with Conrad the man or
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Conrad the writer, and everything to do with Achebes more contemporary angst. It is indeed such a strident comment that it loses its impact, for anyone who had read Conrad in any depth would see the unfairness of such an ad hoc dismissal of the man who is known to have made a rich and ambiguous commentary on much of the world he had seen, including Africa. Achebe even asserts that Heart of Darkness cannot be called a great work of art because it, in his view, depersonalizes a portion of the human race (1987: 257). The assessment seems unfair, not only because Achebe privileges politics over aesthetics rather across the board, which is itself a questionable ontology, but Heart of Darkness strikes one as being very much about Europe, notwithstanding the setting of a large part of the story in Africa. Though indeed part of the story is in a sense in Africa, the story is also very much on a river and the process of the confluence of the river-and Marlows mind-seldom touches shore. It is a watery Africa, and is for the most part viewed, or conceived, rather than physically touched, in the same way that Kurtz is a voice rather than a physical body (1997: 125). Is there an unwritten rule that one must always touch the shore? Or may we instead watch and dream, often from a distance, physical or psychological? Touching is often a political act, but dreaming seems inherently literary. Therefore, though the story is set in this watery sense in the Belgian Congo, it is always still originating and currently within the aspirations and assumptions of Belgian corporation, European. It is not only a different time and a different politics, it is a different aesthetic altogether. So, to the extent that he does look at Africans, from a boat as it were, it seems he does a rather good job of personalizing characters he can hardly be expected to completely understand. Also, it could be said that often the outsider sees what we do not see, such as the African looking at the European. So the outsider looking at the insider could be a good thing: such as Conrad looking at both the Belgians and the Africans as an outsider. In Meditations on Conrads Territoriality: An Essay in Four Tacks, Zdzislaw Najder discusses Conrads use of non-European characters:
His Malay, Arab, and black (in The Nigger of the Narcissus) protagonists are clearly shown as moral equals to his European characters. Chinua Achebe, I think, is wrong in his well-known essay on alleged racism in Heart of Darkness. He is so not only because he misinterprets the storys general structure, meaning, and technique, but also because he misses (or denies) the fact that African characters are fully humanized by the
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powerful presentation of their suffering, both collective as in the Grove of Death and individual as in the person of Kurts African mistress. (2003: 3).
Elsewhere, Najder discusses Conrads critical gaze:

Conrad was a stern Eurocritic. He stressed the hypocrisy and rapaciousness of colonialists, and the failure, moral and psychological, of the white civilization when faced with completely different cultures. Still, his angle of vision remained European in the sense that he evaluated Europeans by their own standards, in terms of their own ideals and crimes, myths, blunders and inadequacies. (<http://conrad-centre.w.interia.pl/conference2004/conrads_europe.htm>)
Conrad created unique stories, and although he was by no means typical, he was himself a European of a certain type: a questing, wandering, romantic figure. For his uncle and guardian, he was a wandering and worrisome, yet beloved, charge, and a political exile from Poland (Fletcher 1999: 2024). Joseph Conrads place in European culture is that of a voice. In Youth and Heart of Darkness we hear in Marlow the voice of an endangered nation and an endangered class: that of a Polish aristocrat. But Conrads is a living voice, not an anachronism, and a powerfully critical voice. Much of Heart of Darkness, for instance, can be read as a satire on Europeans ambitions, both intellectual and material. The question perhaps is, why would Achebe think that aesthetic value only lies within a political category, why would he think that at all, let alone think it lies only within a particular or exclusive political category such as his own? It seems naive and quaintly ethnocentric, the very stereotype with which he would probably wish no association. While European activities in Congo did enforce the European on the Native, and Conrad was part of that, the novel itself certainly does not. Achebes fear is that the reading of Conrad perpetuates colonialist attitudes toward, say, the African. This association is perceived as a danger and a threat and labelled racist; Conrad is labelled a racist, monolithically, because of fear. This response is, of course, an over-reaction. Xenophobia and intolerance, as well as jingoism, demagoguery and outright racism, are not exclusively European categories. As Conrad wrote in The Mirror of the Sea:
the nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory turns easily into rage, hate, and violence. (1950: 149)
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Edward Said pointed out that European works that discuss the East have long tended to lump their subject into an Oriental category (1978: 45) and criticizes European writers for creating superficial characters to represent the East: characters not personalized or fully realized by the Western writer. Said adds that Achebes criticism of Conrad does not go far enough (1994: 165) and claims that Conrad writes as a man in whom a Western view of the non-Western world is so ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations. All Conrad can see is a world dominated by the Atlantic West He could not understand that India, Africa and South America also had lives and cultures with integrities not totally controlled by the gringo imperialists and reformers of the world. (1994: xviii) Postcolonial critical ideology seems to reflect an opinion that only the African can/should write about Africa, or by extension, only the Malays about Malaysia. Such a gaze reflects xenophobic, or at least simplistic, reasoning, a case of the once reviled seeking revenge by reviling the European in turn. It would seem implicit in such arguments that Conrad should stick to writing about Europe (as though he were alive today), and yet, according to many mainstream critics of Conrad that is exactly what he did, and what he was at throughout his career, writing about Europe. Often the intent of Conrads stories is primarily to engage issues for and about Europeans, and even when his stories are set in locales far from the Danubian plain, the focus tends to turn back to his own experience and concerns as a European. Najder points out that half of Conrads work is set in Europe, often in several countries in the same story, and when it is set ostensibly outside Europe, it is always about Europe, not Africa or South America or Asia:
Events in the other half of his novels and stories are placed outside Europe, but only in the strictly geographical sense. All the time Europe is eyed from afar and remains the locus of reference by no means idealized. (<http://conrad-centre.w.interia.pl/conference2004/conrads_europe.htm>)
When Hoeller (2004: 1) speaks in favour of a postcolonial revision of Heart of Darkness, his proposal is therefore an idea fundamentally flawed because it assumes that Heart of Darkness is about Africa, although (as Najder rightly indicates) it is much more about Europe and the Europeans. Najder elsewhere points out that the specificity of the locations in Conrads fiction need not even be about a real-life place at all, witness Nostromo, yet as with Heart of Darkness, it is always still first about Europe. In Nostromo,
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actually, Conrad creates (although not ex nihilo) a whole country, with its geography, past, economy, culture, and politics. (2003: 1) Yet it is still Europe-and a cosmopolitan one at that. Watt also states that, in Nostromo, South America is not the target of his inquiry, Nostromo being, in the words of Irving Howe, wider in social scope than Conrads other political works (Howe qtd. in Watt 1988: 72), so it is again not specifically or really about South America except as South America fits the general pattern of Europe. To paraphrase Watt: isolated in the Petri dish of South America, the political cultures of the English, the French, the Italians, all examined by the Pole, are mixed together in microcosm and observed, to see what can be learned in this laboratory and applied to the real Europe (Watt 1988: 73). In his book Public and Private Value: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Peter Smith calls his chapter on Conrad Nostromo: a Tale of Europe (as if to debunk the misdirection implicit in Conrads far flung sub-title, a tale of the seaboard) and explicitly calls the created country, Costaguana a little Europe (Smith quoted in Watt 1988: 73). What unites Africa and South America in this view is the process of the European economies: again, the narrative is not about Africa or South America, it is about Europe. The postcolonial issue is of course complex, and in the best postcolonial critique, Europe is engaged fully, while in the weakest postcolonial writing Europe is repudiated out of hand with a reactionary intolerance that risks appearing reductive and monolithic. Yet the postcolonial debate is often peripheral to Conrad, though at times it seems central. I agree with Daniel Schwartz (2005) when he calls for a plurality of approaches to Conrad. One cannot convincingly highjack Conrad from what he is, Conrad remains Conrad, and the focus and the significant contribution remains European. One cannot construct a monolithic Conrad or a monolithic Europe: such entities exist only in polemical dreams. Conrad and Conrads writings are anything but monolithic. Conrad made choices regarding what to write about and how: we cant actually know what Conrad was not capable of (what he couldnt see or couldnt do), we can only know what he was capable of, which was quite a lot, and most of that had to do with Europe. Perhaps this is what so angers writers of the postcolonial critique about Conrad, that in their view he chose not to write about Africa or Asia or South America in a real sense, but wrote about Europe instead. As Alan Simmons points out, Conrad espouses a particular vision of English and Englishness a vision born of his indeter-
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minate status as both an outsider and an insider, and confirming his self-professed duplex nature (2004: 3). Postcolonial studies see such duplex issues in terms of mimicry:
the cultures of postcolonial lands are characterized by tensions between the desire for autonomy and a history of dependence, between the desire for autochthony and the fact of hybrid, part-colonial origin, between resistance and complicity, and between imitation (or mimicry) and originality And the danger of retrenchment, or of a neocolonial relation, is ever present. (Moore 2001: 112)
Notwithstanding the postcolonial insistence upon an imperial/colonial dichotomy, the issue for and in Conrad is political power and its social manifestations, and it involves a different binary, for Conrads own Englishness is duplex, and [b]etween being one of us and that bloody amazing foreigner lies the tension that yields prose typically self-conscious and sometimes schizophrenic (Simmons 2004: 3). As Homi Bhabha writes, in the context of a discussion of the colonial mimic:
to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.The Anglicized colonial is forever caught between two cultures, not allowed to be part of the one that he/she has embraced, but having already repudiated the other. (1994: 87)
By this formulation, Joseph Conrad, the Anglicized writer, would be just such a mimic, a Polish mimic of the English: and yet he never repudiated the other to use Bhabhas formulation: he remained Polish and, at the same time, something greater than the sum of the parts: European. Simmons discusses Conrads play with his insider/outsider status in English letters (2004: 9), while Najder notes identifiable Polish, French, and English themes in Conrads fiction:
I do not know any other writer of Conrads time who would dispose of an analogously firm and broad command of the European cultural space in the triple sense of personal experience, historical knowledge, and intellectual insight. (<http://conrad-centre.w.interia.pl/conference2004/conrads_europe.htm>)
And so in the end, Conrads writing, far from being about Africa or Asia or whatever, is about Englishness, and the nature of the European, and what an Englishman can be, and is ultimately about Conrad, because it involves his personal working out of important trans-European political issues.
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Having said this, we can problematize the relation of Heart of Darkness to colonialism, which is to some extent Conrads. I say to some extent because there are other works by Conrad with other settings: for instance, not the Congo River, but the East, not Heart of Darkness but the Malay tales, not Marlow the European, but Karain the Malay pirate prince. I have claimed that Heart of Darkness is about Europe and is only set in Africa only as a kind of ironic literary ruse, fairly transparent. What about Karain? If the etic is the knowledge of a culture gained by say, an anthropologist, even on close study, and the emic is the true and unattainable insiders knowledge of his own culture then what Conrad attempts in Karain, in writing from Karains perspective, is at best a kind of faux-emic: and one we are asked to accept as uncomplicated by the author through the suspension of disbelief. Is the faux-emic possible? Or is it just another colonialist blunder, this time by a Polish author? There is no shortage of the ironic distance to the usual European program Conrad is famous for: and though the story is related in straightforward English, it is in Malay that we are told Karain communicates with his nautical English friends and resuppliers in the story. There is great pain taken to relate as marvellous the manhood of the Malays, though there is a palpable sense of the Edwardian anthropologist competing with a very real sense that Karain and his three English friends are very much fellow travellers. Kurz, surprisingly, may have his root in Karain: for we learn that Karain is an exile, and a victim of fate, while Hollis has the wisdom of Youth and probably foreshadows Marlow, who is introduced soon after in the short-story Youth. Karain: A Memory leads the way to the Marlow tales, Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Chance. It sets the tone by being pro-contact and by believing in communication: not uncomplicated communication, but communication none the less. The Malay does ask for a talisman to ward off a ghost, but in providing it the Europeans prove not only their friendship but their common humanity as fellow victims of fate with a need for talismans of their own to ward off the ghosts of memory which come from the inhospitable regions of the earth and so we are back to Heart of Darkness, and the Congo river, and the memories that haunt the mind and darken the heart.
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References
Al-Dabbagh, A. 2002. Going Native: Conrad and Postcolonial Discourse, In English Language Notes 39.4, June, pp. 7188. Achebe, C. 1987. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads s Heart of Darkness, in Robert Kimbrough (ed.). Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism. New York: Norton. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Conrad, J. 1950. The Mirror of the Sea. London: Dent. Conrad, J. 1988. Nostromo. Cologne: Knemann. Conrad, J. 1997. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. New York: Signet. Conrad, J. 1997. Youth, in Keith Carabine (ed.). Selected Short Stories. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. Conrad, J. 2000. Lord Jim. London: Penguin. Donovan, S. 1999. Figures, Facts, Theories: Conrad and Chartered Company Imperialism, in The Conradian 24.2, Autumn, pp. 3160. Fletcher, C. 1999. Joseph Conrad. London: British Library. Henthorne, T. 2000. An End to Imperialism: Lord Jim and the Postcolonial Conrad, in Conradiana 32.3, Fall, pp. 20328 Hoeller, Hildegard. 2004. Ama Ata Aidoos Heart of Darkness, Research in African Literatures 35.1, Spring, pp. 13047. MacKenzie, J. 1995. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moore, D. C. 2001. Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique, in PMLA 116.1, January, pp. 11128. Najder, Z. 1997. Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Najder, Z. 2003. Meditations on Conrads Territoriality: An Essay in Four Tacks, in The Conradian 28.1, Spring, pp. 116. Najder, Z. 2004. Joseph Conrads Europe. Joseph Conrad Study Centre in Opole. 31 December 2004 <http://conrad-centre.w.interia.pl/conference2004/conrads_europe.htm>. Porter, B. 1968. Critics of Empire: British Radical Attitudes to Colonialism in Africa, 18951914. London: Macmillan. Said, E. 1991 (1978). Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London:Vintage. Schwarz, D. R. 2005. Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel. Oxford: Blackwell. Simmons, A. 2004. The Art of Englishness: Identity and Representation in Conrads Early Career, in The Conradian 29.1, Spring, pp. 126. Smith, P 1994. Public and Private Value: Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, I. 1988. Joseph Conrad: Nostromo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM: IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT IN MARK TWAINS LITERATURE

GARRET D. ZAYIC
University of Sibiu
Like Whitman, his (Mark Twain) lasting gift to American writing was a native voice. As T. S. Elliot said, he was one of those seminal writers who, by escaping false structures and bringing language up to date, change the tradition for all their successors. (Ruland & Bradbury 1991: 203)
As Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury state, Mark Twains greatest contribution to American literature was his influence in opening the field to native voices. As the decades have passed, two images of this giant of American Letters have endured. As Gregg Camfield says in his work Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy, these two images are the popular Mark Twain, the grandfatherly and comedic icon of the white suits and equally white hair, and the more complex and troubling Mark Twain, represented both in works published in his lifetime and in the even more disturbing works released after his death. It is this second Mark Twain who has long puzzled scholars young and old (Camfield 1994: 3). Originally, the idea for this paper was an attempt to explain the steady trend towards pessimism and misanthropy that is evident in Mark Twains work, especially from the middle to late period. Twains writing becomes consistently darker and darker as his work progresses. Indeed the jump from the more ambiguous and hidden pessimism found in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not so great to the final blackness of The Mysterious Stranger. In looking for a theory which could account for this steady descent, enlightenment struck from what was, for me, an unexpected source, i.e., William James. In the series of lectures William James collected under the title Pragmatism, he found a theory for new opinion acquisition, a process that offers a possible answer to the conflicts which surface throughout Mark Twains literature. Considering the question of how much an individual will change their old opinions to accommodate a new one, James argues: He saves as
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much of [his old stock of opinions] as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservativesThe most violent revolutions in an individuals beliefs leave most of his old order standing (2000: 35). In the interest of clarity, I give the following model for Jamess theory: 1. The individual, quite naturally possessing an inherited and learned stock of old opinions, is presented, in one manner or another, with a contradiction. 2. This contradiction comes into conflict with the old stock of opinions causing the individuals mind to be cast into a turmoil from which s/he seeks to escape. 3. Eventually a new idea arises which a) both accounts for the contradiction while b) disturbing only a minimum of the previously held stock of old opinions. 4. The individual carries on in relative peace and contentment until s/he stumbles onto a new contradiction. The significance of this idea of new opinion acquisition to the theory I am putting forward for studying Mark Twain involves positing a situation in which the chain of new opinion acquisition is not completed. The model as it stands, though functional, is perhaps over-simplified given that although the turmoil of contradiction is mentioned, the seriousness of this state of mind and the duration for which it can last are no discussed. To find any mention of this one must look to another American Pragmatist, John Dewey and his How We Think. The philosopher says, [a]t one extreme, almost any conclusion that insures prompt and unified action may be better than any long delayed conclusion; while at the other, decision may have to be postponed for a long period perhaps for a lifetime (Dewey 1910: 78). Whereas James fails to elaborate on just how long and serious the inward trouble can be, Dewey indicates that one must be prepared to accept that easy solutions to lifes problems do not always present themselves. It might be a lifetime before a proper resolution can be found for a mental conflict that has arisen from a contradiction. Taking the earlier offered model into consideration, think again about an individual who, for one reason or another, is presented with a new conflicting belief or opinion and is incapable of reaching steps three and four. What happens to an individual who is cast into conflict and doubt, an individual who, irrespective of how hard he or she might try, cannot escape? It is this sort of problem that is a cognitive pragmatic crisis. Such a crisis
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comes about because of a breakdown in the process of new opinion/idea acquisition. For reasons of great desire or necessity an individual will attempt to assimilate a new idea or opinion to the old stock. Unfortunately this new opinion, unlike most, is of such a contradictory nature that there is no solution, no way for the individual to escape the turmoil created. Such an individual is trapped in contradiction, unable to move backwards or forwards. Such, I believe, was the case of Mark Twain. Twains body of work divides into three broad categories: an early period (pre-1869-c.1880), a middle one (1880-c.1895), and a late one (18961910). With this in mind we can now ask (a) what the old base of opinions consists of and (b) why the new opinion comes to contradict this old base? (a) The Real: The Mark Twain of the early period, the Bohemian newspaperman of the Frontier West and groundbreaking realist author, is distinctly of a practical disposition. The world is a world of humans, of facts that are revealed through solid evidence. A non-sentimentalist and humorous writer by profession, he found in the airy principles of the more sentimental society of the East a rich source of material to be exploited. Mark Twains first major work, The Innocents Abroad, provides an excellent example of this first model. In his preface to the book, Mark Twain writes: This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of the kind, and withal so attractive (Twain 1980: 15). Thus, Twain sets the tone for the rest of the work. He is not claiming to provide a solemn scientific treatise; rather, he is recounting a pleasure trip, suggesting that everything within can be treated lightly. This assertion seems innocent enough. Of course Mark Twain, pleasure trip notwithstanding, was also on his way to the spiritual home of the Genteel Tradition: to Europe and the Holy Land, the birthplaces of Western culture and philosophy and, of course, of Christianity. From this perspective such a trip should be taken enormously seriously, and yet the reader is warned from the start that this will not be the case. Both places are treated with equal irreverence. From the great masters of Western art to the sacred places of the Middle East, Mark Twain unrelentingly satirizes the very core of sentimental genteel society. This was Early Mark Twain at his best.
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(b) The Ideal: Not long after Mark Twain had immigrated East in 1866, he began taking the tenets of genteel society with a greater degree of seriousness than he had before. Though he did not immediately try to assimilate the idea of an absolute ideal, he did, for practical purposes, try to pretend that he could be converted to their line of thinking, as is evidenced by Mark Twains friendship with Mary Fairbanks (Kaplan 1983: 4546). To return to Jamess Pragmatism and what he calls tender-minded (in our terms, ideal) consciousness, the philosopher makes a list of general characteristics for this intellectual construct. The idealist individual tends towards the rationalistic (going by principles), intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, dogmatical: all characteristics of the genteel tradition that, at that time, dominated American arts and letters. Writers of this persuasion were the intellectual elite of the day, defenders of the refined European tradition of arts and culture. An excellent example is one of their most celebrated poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Born in 1807, Longfellow was an exemplary student of modern languages, so much so that he was awarded a professorship at Bowdoin and later at Harvard. As a writer, he domesticated European subject matter and poetic meter (Baym 1998: 144950); his belief in the superiority of European art and literary styles to anything America could produce natively sustained an overly sentimental and idealistic worldview that Mark Twain consistently and accurately lampooned during his early career. Despite his early opposition to the sentimental ideal of the genteel tradition over the course of the next several years something would cause Mark Twain to attempt to cease satirizing this belief and attempt to adapt this tender minded, genteel, aesthetic position for himself. Returning now to the idea of a cognitive pragmatic crisis we summarize: 1. The old base of opinions: Mark Twains literature originates in the Western frontier of the United States. The world of this frontier is a purely human one, the goods and bads are wholly human. As a practical outlook for the world, this early period creates a consistent whole. 2. Contradiction and conflict: By 1882 Mark Twain has begun the process of developing a theory of absolute good in his literature. Evidence for this is the publication of the novel The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twains genteel childrens novel. A tale about identical strangers in desperately different social positions Mark Twain weaves a charming tale of moral-
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ity that directs the reader to realize that concepts of morality and human rights belong to a higher order, which should be applied equally to all people regardless of their social standing. In this genteel tale, the pauper Tom Canty is thrust into the position of king while his look alike, Edward VI, is cast out as a pauper. As testament to the neatness of the morality of this genteel childrens novel the final chapter is entitled Justice and Retribution. In three pages (Twain 2003: 20911) all loose ends are tied up. Evil is punished and virtue rewarded. Scoundrels flee, young lovers are united, slaves are freed and paupers live long privileged lives as their reward for unshaken and unshakeable piety. As for Edward VI, whose death Twain could not ignore, Twain has the following words: The reign of Edward VI was a singularly merciful one for those harsh times. Now that we are taking leave of him, let us try to keep this in our minds, to his credit. (2003: 211). The merciful prince dies young, perhaps not a surprise considering the harshness of the age. Though it cannot be said that morality is absent in the earlier Twain, this short novel marks a shift from a human morality to a grander and less forgiving absolute morality. Studying the works of the middle period which come after The Prince and the Pauper, there is greater pessimism and conflict. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn there is a strong symbolic distinction between the ideal world of the river (Huck and Jim floating on their raft down the Mississippi) and the real and frequently cruel world on the shore. The examples of this cycle are numerous (the dead man in the house, the thieves on the wrecked steamboat, etc.). In Chapter XVI, Huck and Jim are again forced to leave the freedom of the river for the shore. Over the course of the next few chapters Huck is subjected to the fury and stupidity of the feuding Shepherdsons and Grangerfords. Using the simplistic language of a child Twain accurately sums up a feud through young Buck Grangerford:
Well, says Buck, a feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other mans brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in and by and by everybodys killed off, and there aint no more feud. But its kind of slow, and takes a long time.(Twain 1991: 355)
Almost immediately after coming to shore Huck is exposed to the senseless horror of this feud. Just a few days later the majority of both the
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Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords have been slain, and Huck and Jim are silently floating away in their raft (1991: 3625). Only away from civilization, when Huck and Jim are on the run, is the ideal world achievable. Following The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twains literature continues in a downward pessimistic cycle. The next novel, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthurs Court, starts out lightly and ends darkly. Again we are given a double vision of the ideal and the real. In this fantastic realistic novel, the ideal and real square off in a final horrific battle. Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us (Twain 1971: 4045). Despite this seeming victory for the hero, Merlin reveals the true victors and vanquished: Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered! These others are perishing you also. Ye shall all die in this place every one (1971: 407). Despite the heroic struggle of the ideal, it cannot triumph over the crushing force of reality. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee is more violent, darker, and ends horrifically, whereas the earlier novel allows, albeit unconvincingly, the ideal to triumph in the end. 3. Conflict unto oblivion: The conflict that arises so powerfully during the middle period is one which never finds a solution. Try as Mark Twain did with various theories, a resolution was never discovered which allowed him to escape from the contradiction and confusion that came about from trying to wed the ideal with the real. Time and again the resolutions for this recurring problem of bringing the ideal into harmony with the real failed, leaving one side or the other as the victor. The two examples of this I would again point to are the conclusions to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthurs Court. In the first of the two conclusions the realist vision is discarded in favor of an idealistic ending in order to allow for a superficially happy ending (see chapters XXXII-XLIII). Though backgrounded, the problems of reality are still there. The second conclusion of these two is the violent destruction of the ideal in the face of reality. The Yankee scores a horrific victory in the face of the realities of medieval England; however, there is no doubt that it is idealism that has been handed the final defeat, it has been blasted out of existence and the world will continue on its original course from before the advent of the ideal.
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As Mark Twains writing carries on after this middle period, the authors inability to turn the hope of an ideal destiny for humankind into reality persists and manifests itself in greater and greater pessimism. The final result of this ever growing conflict between the real and the ideal is denial and dissolution of both. The ideal is inadequate because humanity appears to be incapable of ever attaining it. Reality is horrific because humankind is constantly pushing towards atrocity and dominance even as they deny this reality. The only solution from this great conundrum, then, is absurdity and finally denial. Only in the absence of everything can there be resolution, with nothingness problems simply disappear. This despair leads to The Mysterious Stranger, which was published seven years after Mark Twains death (1917; 1992). This story, one of Mark Twains last, is set in the sleepy village of Eseldorf in Austria, a locale that is suggestive of the equally sleepy St. Petersburg of Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns fame. An angel appears in the village and the grossness and hypocrisy of human nature as well as the apparent cruelty and callousness of the infinite, the ideal, are revealed. The Mysterious Stranger reveals a world where the most one can usually hope for is a swift death, and even this is no guarantee of escape into the next world. The wicked easily dominate the good and do so in the name of virtue. At the end of this bleak vision Mark Twain reveals his final solution to the cognitive pragmatic crisis that consumed him for almost his entire career. The answer is oblivion:
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true. (Twain 1992: 121)
This is the conclusion that Mark Twain leaves us with after his failed struggle. The earlier Twain, with his highly aggressive humor and satire against the prevalent beliefs of the day, does not have the problem of conflict and contradiction that has arisen by the 1880s. Following the publication of The Prince and the Pauper we see the rise of this conflict between the ideal and the real. This conflict continues unabated into the twentieth century until
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the author finally washes his hands of the world and thereby rids himself of having to confront the problem any further.
References
Baym, N. 1998. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Norton Anthology of American Literature. Fifth Edition, Volume 1. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Camfield, G. 1994. Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Dewey, J. 1910. How We Think. Boston, New York, Chicago: D. C. Heath & Co., Publishers. James, W. 2000. Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press. Kaplan, J. 1983. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore: Simon & Schuster. Ruland, R. and M. Bradbury. 1991. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Ontario, Auckland: Penguin Group. Twain, M. 1971. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthurs Court. New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Ontario, Auckland: Penguin Group. Twain, M. 1980. The Innocents Abroad. New York, Ontario: Signet Classic. Twain, M. 1991. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. New York, Toronto: Everymans Library. Twain, M. 1992. The Mysterious Stranger, in The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. Toronto: Dover Thrift Editions. Twain, M. 2003. The Prince and The Pauper. New York: The Modern Library.
REAL POWER IS IN COMPASSION: AN UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW WITH JOY HARJO

~ JOAO DE MANCELOS Universidade Catlica Portuguesa
Joy Harjo (born Joy Foster, in 1951, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is one of the most innovative and influential Native American poets and musicians of her generation. Her literary production includes Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), In Mad Love and War (1990), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994), A Map to the Next World (2000), How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 19752001 (2002). Several of her collections of poems were awarded important prizes, such as the Oklahoma Book Arts Award, the American Book Award or the Delmare Schwartz Memorial Award. An enrolled member of the Muskogee tribe, Harjo constructs a discourse of reconciliation and approach between European American colonizers and Native Americans, in order to open a new chapter in the multicultural history of the USA.
~ JOAO DE MANCELOS: Transfix me with love. Many of your poems deal with the past and present oppression suffered by Native Americans, and some of them express very strong points of view. At the same time, theres a call for love and reconciliation. If the real revolution is love, to what extent can poetry, in general, encourage a better understanding between Native Americans and European Americans, and help to end what you call the huge monster of violence? JOY HARJO: First of all, I dont use the term Native Americans. The term is so academic. It is a term born in the university. We dont call ourselves Native Americans when we are at home. There is no such thing as a Native American. We all belong to tribal nations and call ourselves by those names. Most of us still prefer Indians for a generic term. That term has its limitations. I prefer the First Nations used by Canadian natives, or indigenous nations... A poet, whether the poet resides in Europe, India, North America, wherever, is a poet. We write or sing about what is utterly human, and travel into the dense areas of consciousness to see what quivers there, to see where weve been and where we are going. A poet works from the
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mythic stuff that gives structure to the surface of life, and then history, and then the highways of movement made by singing and thinking, and so on. If I open my eyes at the beginning of this century I see destruction and violence. I see that native peoples were one hundred percent of the population of this country and now we are one-half of one percent of the population. Those figures reveal a terrible story. Consider all of the current population of Portugal being killed and replaced by invaders so that one-half of one percent of the original population remains. The monster of violence would be fat, greedy for more and would not be content to stop. (That is happening here, still in the western hemisphere oil companies and other multinational corporations are stealing, finding any means to take what they want and what they want is usually on and under indigenous lands). The survivors would still be trying to figure out a way to keep moving through this world with dignity. Thats where poetry comes in to enter into the stream of poetry is to enter into love. Love is a force thats been downplayed, relegated to romance. By love I mean compassion, a compassion that makes a story that is able to continue with dignity, despite shame, despite all attempts to thwart it. Compassion enables a people to see beyond the senses, beyond the mind, to the level of god in which all life is connected. We acknowledge our enemies, those who have tested us, those who hate us, but retain a dignity and keep singing. It is easier to pick up a gun or a bomb and kill those who have killed you. That is called power in this postcolonial world. Real power is in compassion. Poetry has taught me this. J.M.: The land [...] is a beautiful force, in the way the Navajo mean the word beautiful, an all encompassing word, like those for the land and sky, that has to do with living well, dreaming well, in a way that is complementary to all life. I have noticed the strong importance of magical and mythical spaces in your poems, places where one can communicate with the nature, the ancestors, the spirits, and even feel connected to all human beings. Also, I noticed that in many of your poems, the winter is associated with hate while spring or summer times are associated with forgiveness. How, do you think, can nature inspire or teach us forgiveness? J.H.: We are nature, all of us, whether we are of the Mvskoke nation and live in Dustin, Oklahoma, or are Italian living in Pisa. We are nourished by the sun, influenced by the moon; [we] are creatures of this earth. We have learned how to dream and move about with a particularly complex volition over other animals, but all is an equal part of creation. There is
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no supernatural world. It is all natural. I am not sure how to answer your question. Humans are obviously forgiven much by the natural world as we still have a presence here and we have not given much back in return. J.M.: As a woman and as an American Native, what difficulties did you face in order to publish your poetry and made it acceptable for a non-Native American audience? J.H.: My identity is a complex identity. I am a full member of my tribal nation, a member of the Mvskoke Nation of Oklahoma. I was born a tribal member, a member of the state of Oklahoma and a U.S. citizen. We did not request U.S. citizenship. It was conferred on all indigenous nations in the U.S. We are also individuals with individual identities. My sister is very different than me. In our tribe we have various experiences, backgrounds, etc. But to most of the world Indians are Indians; we are stereotypes that come mostly from literature and movies. There are no subtleties of character, no complexity to our stories. This all figures in to how native writers are perceived, accepted or not accepted by non-native audiences. If we behave in a stereotypical manner, that is, we write about or dress and behave in a manner that has the flavor and trappings derivative of a Hollywood version of a Plains tribe, we are then recognizably Indian, or if we write about cowboys and Indians then we are embraced. Most of those who write out of real Indian communities, out of our own lives do not find commercial success. Leslie Silko is one of the finest of our writers, the author of several critically acclaimed novels. Her latest novel was brilliant but disregarded. Ray Young Bear is an amazing Meskwakie poet the same problem here. My work has managed to cross over. Part of that comes from my own engagement with the world at large. I perform and my performances have moved my work into larger circles. Yet, my work and the other work of native writers is often relegated to ethnic lists, and not given the support of publishers because Indians are relatively small populations and arent readers. Its different for African American writers, Latino writers and Asian American writers in this country. They have huge populations who read. Yet, I continue to believe that fine literature will find its place. But it is discouraging to many of us I was just talking with Greg Sarris about it this morning hes a wonderful Pomo Miwok novelist and filmmaker. Its strange that non-native people who write about natives often sell more books about Indians than we do ourselves but they are often given more publisher support. Ultimately we native writers must keep to the integrity of our work, which is
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derived from our communities, our tribal communities and the larger circle of community, which now includes Portugal! J.M.: Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to some sacred wordless form. Many times you have mentioned in poems and interviews how difficult it is for you to use the English language in order to convey thoughts that could more easily
COLLOCATIONS IN ECOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

LOREDANA FRIL
1. On collocations
The study of meaning has been a permanent interest of scholars. Logicians, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians or lexicographers have approached the issue, each in accordance with the resources of their discipline and using their characteristic research techniques. A very complex and diverse background for matters of meaning has thus come into being. Of the multitude of statements of meaning in terms of linguistics, some bring to the fore the issue of meaning by collocation the tendency of words to co-occur in a way that sounds natural to an (English) native speaker. Thus, Firth (1957) was the first to mention meaning by collocation, one of the possible modes of meaning he discussed. According to him, this type of meaning may prove a useful starting point in describing literary idiosyncrasies as well as in following the evolution of a language along the years. Rosamund Moon (1994, 1998) spoke about anomalous collocations which she divided in three categories: defective, phraseological and cranberry. The last ones were analyzed in more detail, according to the lexical anomalies they are based on. Thus, she mentioned expressions that contain rare fossil words or words borrowed from other languages or varieties which never occur outside a fixed collocation, lexemes that are unique to the fixed expression, but homographic with other independent items, or cranberry items which have compositional or familiar morphemic structures, but nevertheless occur only in fixed strings in modern English. The grammatical equivalents of cranberry collocations are, according to Moon (1998), the ill-formed ones, those that cannot be parsed according to normal syntactic rules. Chitra Fernando (1996) has a different theoretical view of collocations. In dealing mainly with idioms and idiomaticity, she suggests that, although closely related, idioms and collocations are not perfectly identical. They
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would rather represent points on a scale of different degrees of habitual cooccurrence of lexical items, idioms lying at the top of this scale and collocations somewhat lower. The applied part concerning collocations in Fernandos book focuses on the analysis of topic-related word combinations in various written texts or oral fragments about conflict. The conclusion she arrives at is that, although the exact repetition of the same collocations is very rare in her corpora, combinations of words belonging to the semantic field of conflict and conflict resolution are closely associated, and therefore highly predictable. Thus, in her related contexts, Fernando finds at least three types of pairs of topic-bound collocations: those in which a word is repeated identically, in an identical phrasal structure; those in which a word is repeated similarly, in a different phrasal structure; and those that involve the similar repetition of a word, in different phrasal structures that have, however, similar meanings. There might be sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy between these collocations, although they enter these relations in a looser way than single words do. A double-sided approach to collocations both theoretical and applied is offered by Sinclair (1991), too. His starting point in discussing these word-combinations is his conviction that in order to explain the way in which meaning arises from language text, we have to advance two different principles of interpretation (Sinclair 1991: 109). These two principles are the open-choice principle and the idiom principle. The former lies at the basis of seeing texts as the result of a large number of complex choices. At each point where a unit is completed (a word, phrase or clause), a large range of choices opens up and the only restraint is grammaticality. Often called a slot-and-filler model, it considers texts a series of slots which have to be filled with items chosen from a vocabulary that satisfies local restraints. In each slot, virtually any word can occur. The latter principle, which completes the former, reads that a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi pre-constructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments (Sinclair 1991: 110). One of the possible illustrations of the idiom principle are collocations, cases in which words appear to be chosen in pairs or groups, although they are not necessarily adjacent.
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The applied part in Sinclairs chapter on collocations starts from the distinction he draws between node the word that is being studied, and collocate any word that occurs in the specified environment of a node. Each successive word in a text is both node and collocate, though never at the same time, he says. (Sinclair 1991: 115). When a is a node and b is a collocate, he further explains, we talk about downward collocation the collocation of a with a less frequent word, b. When b is a node and a is a collocate, we talk about upward collocation. He illustrates this distinction with the collocations of the word back in the Collins English Dictionary (1986). For other linguists, collocations are a matter of concern when foreign language learning is brought into discussion. Richard Alexander (1989), for example, insists on the fact that lexical collocations bear both a temporal dimension and a strong relation to cultural aspects and real historical contexts. This has an important implication for teaching EFL in that linguistic and real-world knowledge is not sufficient for an appropriate learning of a foreign language if it is not supported by the learners being familiar with the socio-cultural background of this language. Thus, collocations, a specific part of the phraseology of a language, should be taught from at least two perspectives: a purely linguistic one and a socio-cultural one. The former approach should be centered round paying attention to the language-specific, internal probabilities of words co-occurring, to the most prominent characteristic structural patterns. The latter perspective should take the learners mother tongue as a starting point and address questions such as Which social institutions, cultural practices, technological processes/practices, artefacts, everyday behaviour patterns, commercial arrangements, industrial structures, work habits, consumer bahaviour / expectations are different from the vantage point of the native language / socio-cultural system, and hence likely to be differentially coded in the target language? Differentially coded is an umbrella term which covers a wide range of phenomena: lexical gaps, additions, refinements, syntacticization vs. lexicalization (Alexander 1989: 19), as well as what Alexander (1989: 20) terms cultural collocations. He postulates different degrees of such word-combinations, ranging from the universal, i.e. readily translatable into a related or neighbouring culture, to the specific, i.e. having no equivalent or being unlikely to be used in communication in the English learners mother
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tongue. A middle category is that which includes near lexical equivalents of certain languages and cultures. Didactic purposes are also followed in compiling mono- and bilingual collocations dictionaries. The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations (1997), The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English (1991) and Oxford Collocations Dictionary (2002) list a number of strong collocations in English only either grammatical, i.e. phrases consisting of a dominant word (noun, adjective, verb) and a preposition or grammatical structure such as an infinitive or a clause, or lexical, i.e. typical combinations that consist of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. In 1999, such a learning tool was published in Romania as well, the bilingual collocations dictionary Dicionar de colocaii nominale englezromn (English-Romanian Dictionary of Nominal Collocations). As the authors, Hortensia Prlog and Maria Teleag, point out in the Foreword to this dictionary, collocability is an endless source of mistakes for the learners of a foreign language, since it is the specific use of that language that makes certain word combinations acceptable and not some universal semantic rules. To help those whose target is proficiency in English overcome the difficulties collocability implies, the two linguists offer Romanian equivalents for the 1300 English noun + preposition + noun collocations, highlighting the sometimes difficult to anticipate asymmetries between the two languages Approximatley 5000 verbal collocations noun + verb, verb + noun, verb + adverb are listed together with their Romanian equivalents in Dicionar englez-romn de colocaii verbale (English-Romanian Dictionary of Verbal Collocations), coordinated by Prlog and Teleag (2000). This dictionary, like the one published one year earlier, is meant to raise the learners awareness of the differences between the verbal collocations in English and Romanian.
2. Collocations in ecological discourse

The research outlined here adds up to the already-existing applied studies of meaning by collocation. It focuses on the lexical combinations containing the noun environment, the adjective environmental, and the adverb environmentally, as they appear in a corpora made up of three variants of ecological discourse: ecology textbooks, scientific articles and
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greenspeeches. These collocations are paralleled to the first fifty most frequent combinations of these words recorded in the online Cobuild Bank of English, a continuously updated collection of about fifty-six million spoken and written words of current English (among the fifty most frequent collocations in the Bank of English that contain the words indicated, there are some which are built on patterns different from those identified in my corpora. These are disregarded hence, less than fifty collocations will be actually considered for comparison). The purpose in mapping the collocations in ecological discourse on those offered by the Bank is to observe the diversity and degree of technicality of these combinations in the three variants of environmental discourse studied (taken as a whole and individually), as compared to the combinations that occur in what is known to be a collection of unspecialized language. Since collocations containing the above mentioned words may be part of the vocabulary of ecological discourse worldwide, I also find it useful to point at how they are translatable into Romanian (reference is made both to the collocations in my corpora and to those selected from the Bank). Brief considerations about the presence of these collocations in specialized English and Romanian dictionaries will round off the study undertaken. 2.1. Collocations with the noun environment The most frequent pattern in which the noun environment occurs as a node is adjective + noun. (Article) + noun + noun collocations are also represented, alongside (article) + noun + preposition + (article) + noun combinations; in the last one, the term environment functions as a collocate. 2.1.1. adjective + environment Greenspeeches: coastal environment, human environment, marine environment, natural environment, personal environment, shared environment, specialized environment Scientific articles: biophysical environment, changing environment, global environment, open environment, physical environment, semi-arid environment, unpredictable environment
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Ecology textbooks: biotic environment, enclosed environment, global environment, immediate environment, inhospitable environment, marine environment, rural environment, terrestrial environment The Bank of English: friendly environment, global environment, hostile environment, marine environment, natural environment, physical environment, safe environment, social environment, supportive environment, urban environment 2.1.2. noun + environment, environment + noun Greenspeeches: reef environment Scientific articles: community environment, gap environment, (high) light environment Ecology textbooks: energy environment, input environment, output environment The Bank of English: wildlife environment There are only two noun + noun collocations in my corpora, in which the word environment occurs as collocate: environment degradation and environment agency. 2.1.3. (article) + noun + preposition + (article) + environment Greenspeeches: the conservation of the environment, the control of the environment, the deterioration of the environment, the state of the environment Scientific articles: 0 Ecology textbooks: the protection of the environment, resources of the environment, the use of the environment The Bank of English: care / concern for the environment, destruction of the environment, threat to the environment 2.1.4. The total number of environment collocations shared between the fragments of discourse representing my corpora and those belonging to the Bank of English remains very low for all the three variants of the environet: there are only two combinations shared between the former and each of the three types of ecological discourse considered. This prompts the conclusion that environment collocations in ecological discourse, as represented in my corpora, although quite close in number to those in the Bank (fourteen collocations counted in the Cobuild collection
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of texts and in the textbooks, twelve in the greenspeeches, ten in the scientific articles), are different from and more specialized than those in everyday language (compare in this respect the professional terminology in biotic / coastal / gap / immediate / input / output, etc environment, as they occur in the three variants of ecological discourse, to the more readily understandable friendly / global / hostile / safe, etc. environment, recorded as specific to non-specialized English). Translating environment collocations into Romanian might reveal interesting situations. The Romanian for the English noun environment is, basically, the phrase mediu nconjurtor. However, there are other equivalent nouns possible mediu, spaiu, zon, mprejurimi, regiune, meleaguri are among them. The translation of environment into Romanian is actually conditioned by the collocate or by the node this noun is used with. Thus, environment may be translated either by mediu or by mediu nconjurtor for the greatest number of the collocations listed in the tables above. For example, the word-by-word translations into Romanian that I suggest for biotic / changing / global / hostile / human / inhospitable / input / marine / natural / output / rural / social / specialized / terrestrial / unpredictable / urban environment are mediu biotic / instabil or schimbtor / nconjurtor / ostil / uman / ostil / int / marin / natural / surs / rural / social / specializat / terestru / instabil or schimbtor / urban. The collocations in 2.1.3., on the other hand, care for / concern for / conservation of / the control of / destruction of / the deterioration of / the protection of / resources of / threat to / the use of the environment are most readily translatable word-by-word into Romanian by grij pentru / preocupare pentru / conservare a / controlul asupra / distrugere a / deteriorarea / protecia / resurse ale / ameninare asupra / utilizarea or utilitatea mediu(lui) (nconjurtor). Although it is possible to translate resources of the environment wordby-word as resursele mediului nconjurtor, the Romanians choice would rather be a collocation that has become almost a clich resurse naturale, obtained by transposition. Spaiu is the preferred Romanian version for environment in the word-by-word translations of biophysical / community / immediate / open / personal / physical / shared environment as spaiu biofizic / al comunitii
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/ proxim or apropiat / deschis / personal / fizic / comun, while zon is the most probable word for coastal / reef / safe environment zon litoral / de coast / a recifului / sigur. Coastal environment becomes, by transposition, the Romanian zon litoral / de coast. Reef environment and safe environment are translated word-by-word. However, in the case of some collocations, there might be more than one Romanian word to choose from for the English environment. Thus, enclosed environment may be rendered word-by-word either as zon delimitat or spaiu delimitat; (high) light enviornment, by transposition, becomes in Romanian zon (foarte) luminoas or spaiu (foarte) luminos; semi-arid environment, is translated word-by-word as mediu semiarid or as zon semi-arid; wildlife environment, by transposition as zon slbatic or mediu slbatic. With the exception of gap environment, for which I could not find a Romanian equivalent (neither the context seedlings of some species can be found only in gap environments (Kenny 2000: 14), nor my limited ecology knowledge was of help in my undertaking this task), in most of the cases, the collocations discussed in this section were not very difficult to translate. The Romanian equivalents of the English word environment, mediu nconjurtor, simply mediu, spaiu and zon all have a [+ spatial] constituent in their meaning, like the English word. However, I encountered at least two examples in which environment loses this semantic component. For these two special cases, I suggested the Romanian component as a possible modulated translation of the English lexical item: (1) Later in this chapter, the total energy flow that constitutes the energy environment of the biosphere will be considered (Odum 1983: 93) (2) solar radiation and long-wave thermal radiation flux from nearby surfaces. Both contribute to the climatic environment (temperature, evaporation of water, movement of air and water) (Odum 1983: 93) Suggested translations: (1a) Pe parcursul acestui capitol, ne vom ocupa de fluxul de energie ce constituie componenta energetic a biosferei (2a) radiaiile solare i fluxul radiaiilor termale pe unde lungi de la suprafeele aflate n apropiere. Ambele fac parte din componenta climatic (temperatur, evaporarea apei, micrile aerului i ale apei).
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2.2. Collocations with the adjective environmental 2.2.1. environmental + noun Greenspeeches: environmental abuse, environmental architecture, environmental benefits, environmental choice, environmental crisis, environmental damage, environmental decency, environmental degradation, environmental embarrassment, environmental footprint, environmental future, environmental groups, environmental guardians, environmental impact, environmental improvements, environmental indicators, environmental labeling, environmental legacy, environmental legislation, environmental management, environmental practices, environmental problems, environmental quality, environmental stewardship Scientific articles: environmental assessment, environmental change, environmental engineering, environmental groups, environmental heterogeneity, environmental impact, environmental inventory, environmental manager, environmental organizations, environmental sources, environmental stochasticity, environmental studies, environmental uncertainty, environmental variability Ecology textbooks: environmental benefits, environmental burden, environmental challenge, environmental consequences, environmental costs, environmental damage, environmental degradation, environmental dis-benefits, environmental entrepreneur, environmental hazards, environmental implications, environmental laws, environmental movements, environmental pollution, environmental protection, environmental radiation, environmental reforms, environmental refugees, environmental residence, environmental standards, environmental timetable The Bank of English: environmental agency, environmental assessment, environmental damage, environmental education, environmental effects, environmental factors, environmental groups, environmental health, environmental impact, environmental influences, environmental issues, environmental management, environmental movement, environmental policy, environmental pollution, environmental problems, environmental protection, environmental research, environmental standards The three types of texts in my corpora share approximately the same number of environmental collocations with the Bank of English the ecology textbooks and the greenspeeches five each, the scientific articles three. The collocations in the textbooks are closest in number to those in the online corpus in the former, there are twenty-one word com-
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binations built on the pattern discussed, in the latter, there are nineteen. They are outnumbered by the twenty-four collocations selected from the greenspeeches and followed numerically by the fourteen collocations quoted from the scientific articles. The number of shared collocations not being considerable, it is obvious that the word-combinations in my corpora are different from those in the Cobuild database. They also seem to be, at least partly, more specialized than those in the Bank of English (to support this opinion, compare, for example, environmental architecture / footprint / hazards / heterogeneity / labeling / radiation / residence, etc, selected from the three variants of environmental discourse considered, to environmental agency / effects / factors / groups / influences / movement, etc in the electronic corpus). 2.2.2. Translating the collocations containing the adjective environmental depends, like in the case of those containing the noun environment, on the node this adjective accompanies. Word-by-word translations are not always possible the Romanian equivalents of the English word-combinations are obtained indirectly, by simple transposition, by transposition by extension or by paraphrase. A great number of these equivalents contain the noun phrase mediu (nconjurtor), which is the most frequent translation of the noun environment, as I illustrated in section 2.1. Others, also quite numerous, have the adjectives ecologic or ecologist in their structure, but Romanian phrases that contain neither of these adjectives are also possible. Due to the lack of symmetry between the ways in which the English collocations discussed in the present section may be translated, I shall group their suggested Romanian equivalents in three categories, as follows: a) suggested Romanian equivalents that contain the noun phrase mediu (nconjurtor): environmental agency = agenie de mediu environmental assessment = evaluarea strii mediului nconjurtor environmental challenge = problem legat de mediul nconjurtor environmental change = modificare a mediului nconjurtor / schimbare intervenit n mediul nconjurtor environmental consequences = consecine asupra mediului nconjurtor environmental costs = costuri de protecia mediului (nconjurtor)
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environmental damage = deteriorarea mediului nconjurtor / pagub ecologic pagub produs mediului nconjurtor, cum ar fi: dispariia terenurilor mltinoase, poluarea rurilor, etc. (Collin translated by Anton et al. 2001: 165) environmental decency = atitudine decent fa de mediul nconjurtor environmental degradation = degradarea mediului nconjurtor / degradare ambiental environmental effects = efecte asupra mediului nconjurtor environmental engineering = ingineria mediului environmental factors = factori de mediu / factori ecologici environmental footprint = amprent asupra mediului nconjurtor environmental guardians = comisari ai Grzii de Mediu; protectori ai mediului (nconjurtor) environmental health = sntatea / calitatea mediului nconjurtor environmental heterogeneity = varietatea / diversitatea mediului nconjurtor environmental impact = impact / efect asupra mediului nconjurtor / evaluarea efectului pe care l au asupra mediului nconjurtor activiti precum: punerea n practic a unui proiect de construcie de anvergur, asanarea mlatinilor, etc. (Collin translated by Anton et al. 2001: 166) environmental improvements = mbuntirea calitii mediului nconjurtor environmental indicators = indicatori de mediu environmental legislation = legislaie de mediu environmental pollution = poluarea mediului nconjurtor environmental protection = protecia mediului (nconjurtor) environmental quality = calitatea mediului (nconjurtor) environmental radiation = radiaii n / din mediul nconjurtor environmental residence = durata de via / persistena n mediul nconjurtor / cas natural (a daring translation prompted by the title of a book about how to design a healthy, harmonious and ecology-oriented home, in Romanian, Cartea casei naturale, Pearson 1993) / cas ecologic environmental stewardship = protejarea mediului nconjurtor / slujirea naturii (lit.) environmental stochasticity = instabilitatea mediului nconjurtor environmental studies = studii de mediu environmental uncertainty = evoluia imprevizibil a mediului nconjurtor environmental variability = instabilitatea mediului nconjurtor
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b) suggested Romanian equivalents that contain the adjective ecologic or ecologist: environmental benefits = beneficii n plan ecologic / beneficii ecologice environmental burden = stres (ecologic) environmental choice = opiune ecologic (n favoarea mediului nconjurtor) environmental crisis = criz ecologic environmental dis-benefits = consecine negative n plan ecologic environmental embarrassment = dificultate / povar ecologic / impediment ecologic environmental future = viitor ecologic environmental groups = grupri ecologiste environmental hazards = factori de risc ecologic environmental implications = consecine n plan ecologic / consecine ecologice environmental influences = influene n plan ecologic / influene ecologice environmental inventory = list de probleme ecologice environmental issues = probleme de ecologie / teme ecologice environmental labeling = aplicare de etichete coninnd informaii ecologice (e.g. produs netratat chimic / nepoluant / natural / bio-degradabil / care nu afecteaz stratul de ozon) environmental legacy = motenire ecologic environmental manager = manager ecologist environmental management = conducere / management ecologic() environmental organizations = organizaii ecologiste environmental policy = politic ecologic / plan de abordare a problemelor de mediu existente la nivel naional sau local (Collin translated by Anton et al 2001: 166) environmental practices = practici ecologice environmental problems = probleme de ecologie (ale mediului nconjurtor) environmental reforms = reforme ecologice environmental research = cercetare n domeniul ecologiei environmental standards = standarde ecologice environmental timetable = program ecologic c) other suggested Romanian equivalents environmental abuse = ntrebuinarea excesiv a resurselor naturale / agresarea mediului (nconjurtor)
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environmental architecture = arhitectur peisagistic environmental refugees = sinistrai / refugiai datorit agresiunilor ecologice environmental sources = surse naturale 2.3. Collocations with the adverb environmentally 2.3.1. environmentally + adjective Greenspeeches: environmentally friendly, environmentally sound Scientific articles: environmentally homogenous Ecology textbooks: environmentally desirable, environmentally friendly, environmentally sound The Bank of English: environmentally acceptable, environmentally aware, environmentally benign, environmentally concerned, environmentally conscious, environmentally correct, environmentally damaging, environmentally economical, environmentally efficient, environmentally free, environmentally friendly, environmentally healthy, environmentally responsible, environmentally safe, environmentally sensitive, environmentally sound, environmentally sustainable, environmentally unfriendly, environmentally unsound The number of collocations containing the adverb environmentally is very low in all the three variants of ecological discourse analyzed. The textbooks rank the first with three such word-combinations (two of which occur in the online corpus, too). The greenspeeches follow with two collocations, both of them present in the Cobuild collection of words, while the scientific articles fall on the last place with only one environmentally + adjective combination, not found anywhere else. This leaves the texts making up my corpora a considerable way behind the Bank of English both in numerical terms and, consequently, in terms of diversity the Cobuild online corpus numbers nineteen collocations of the type discussed in this section. As far as their level of technicality is concerned, keeping the proportions, the collocations in my corpora and those in the Bank of English are almost alike. Of the four different word-combinations representing the former, only one may be considered more technical than the others (environmentally homogenous), while of the nineteen collocations in the latter, about four seem to address a professional audience (environmentally benign / contiguous / efficient / sustainable). 2.3.2. Like in the case of the collocations containing the adjective environmental, translating environmentally + adjective combinations proves
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not to be successful on a word-by-word basis. The suggested Romanian equivalents of the English phrases not uniform, as the translations demonstrate are the result of transposition mainly. Thus, environmentally acceptable / correct / desirable / economical / efficient / free / homogenous / sustainable may be translated as acceptabil / corect / preferabil / economicos / efficient / liber / omogen / sustenabil din punct de vedere ecologic / din punctul de vedere al mediului nconjurtor. For the synonymous expressions environmentally aware, environmentally conscious, and environmentally responsible, I suggest the Romanian attributive construction cu contiin ecologic. The set of the synonymous collocations environmentally damaging, environmentally unfriendly, and environmentally unsound may be translated either unboundly, by the attributive clause care duneaz mediului nconjurtor, or by duntor pentru mediul nconjurtor. Its antonymic series environmentally benign / friendly / healthy / safe / sound may, in its turn, become in Romanian, either an attributive clause, care nu duneaz mediului nconjurtor, or an attribute followed by a prepositional object, neduntor pentru mediul nconjurtor. Finally, environmentally sensitive may be translated as sensibil la mediu or as care este influenat de factorii de mediu / ecologici (in Collin 2001b, an English Romanian ecology dictionary, environmentally sensitive area is translated by Anton et al. as zon care este declarat protejat de ctre Ministerul Agriculturii; it follows from here that a possible Romanian equivalent for environmentally sensitive is protejat). 3. Conclusions
Collocations containing environment environmental environmentally
Greenspeeches 12/2* 24/5 2/2
Scientific articles 10/2 14/3 1/0
Ecology textbooks 14/2 21/5 3/2
The Bank of English 14 19 19
TOTAL
38/9
25/5
49/9
52
* the number of collocations shared with the Bank of English, in figures
As seen from the table above, the frequency of the specialized collocations analyzed differs in the variants of ecological discourse considered. The
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textbooks and the greenspeeches are denser in such combinations than the scientific articles. This rapport may be the consequence of the fact that textbooks, as didactic instruments, address quite a large number of issues in rather few pages (even within the boundaries of the same chapter, more than one aspect is usually approached), obeying the principle that things that are meant to be learnt should be presented clearly and concisely. On the other hand, scientific articles deal with much narrower areas of knowledge and research, and, consequently, the specialized vocabulary is also restricted. The comparison between the variants of ecological discourse considered and the online collection of everyday English words prompts two final remarks. On the one hand, there are no differences between at least two types of environmental discourse the greenspeeches and the ecology textbooks as far as the number of collocations shared between each of them and the Cobuild corpus is concerned (nine in each case). The scientific articles share even fewer collocations with the electronic database only five. This rather reduced number of common collocations legitimates the opinion that specialized vocabulary of the type focused on in this chapter is only to a small extent the vocabulary used in everyday contexts. On the other hand, the level of technicality of the collocations in my corpora is, generally (the exceptions being the combinations containing the adverb environmentally, which are pretty much everyday terms), higher than that of the collocations in the Bank of English. As an obvious adaptation of the three types of ecological discourse to the specific audience they target, the scientific articles are, as expected, at the top of the technicality scale. They are followed by the fragments of textbooks, while the greenspeeches lie at the bottom of the scale. My attempts at translating the English collocations into Romanian have proved that it is not always possible to find a word-for-word equivalent for them. Most of the times, a change of grammatical class or transposition by expansion are needed to obtain a Romanian equivalent. Paraphrasing and modulation are resorted to less often, but they are also among the translation techniques used to render the English collocations into Romanian. This diversity of translation procedures (and my admitted hesitation in some cases) demonstrates that, at least for the specialized collocations discussed, Romanian does not as yet have well-established equivalents.
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A further proof of this is the absence of a great number of the terms I suggest as possible Romanian equivalents for the collocations selected from my corpora from the most recent specialized Romanian dictionary of ecology Mic dicionar de ecologie, printed in 2004 (to my knowledge, this is the second ecology dictionary printed in Romania, the first, Dicionar de ecologie, having been published in 1982). In an alphabetical order, only the following Romanian words and phrases mentioned in this paper are among the entries in Mic dicionar de ecologie: degradare ambiental, diversitate, mediu biotic, mediu natural, protecie a mediului, resurse naturale, stres, zon litoral. If, for Romanian, the absence from a specialized dictionary of numerous phrases present in my corpora may reflect the rather incipient stage at which environmental terminology of this language still is, for English, criticism may be directed to at least one dictionary Peter Collins Dictionary of Ecology and Environment, printed in 2001. This lexicographic work, in its turn, includes few of the collocations used in the three variants of ecological discourse analyzed. One may say this is not relevant enough to allow any criticism on my part, since my corpora may not be the most representative to serve as reference. However, the dictionary quotes surprisingly few of the fifty most frequent collocations listed in the Bank of English, too a corpus many linguists consider as one of the most significant collections of everyday English. Collins dictionary leaves stones unturned for future lexicographers. It will be their task to decide which of the most frequent everyday collocations of the type mentioned in this chapter should be included in English ecology dictionaries to come. However, the following collocations selected from my corpora were among the entries in the Dictionary of Ecology and Environment (2001a): rural environment, environmental damage, environmental impact, environmental policy, environmental protection, environmental (quality) standards, environmentally sensitive (area) The collocations ecological engineering / footprint / indicator, present in Collins dictionary, may be considered synonyms of environmental engineering / footprint / indicator, present in the three variants of ecological discourse analyzed.
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References
Alexander, R. 1989. Fixed Expressions, Idioms and Collocations Revisited. In P . Meara (ed.). 1989. Beyond Words. Papers from the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics, Exeter, 1988. CILT: London, pp. 1524. Benson, M., Evelyn Benson and R., Ilson (eds.). 1991. The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English. A Guide to Word Combinations. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Collin, P 2001a. Dictionary of Ecology and the Environment. London: Peter Collin .H. Publishing Ltd. Collin, P .H. 2001b. Dicionar de ecologie i mediu nconjurtor englez- romn. Tranlsation by Anton, Liliana, Carmen Caraiman and Irina Nistor. Bucureti: Universal Dalsi. Fernando, Chitra. 1996. Idioms and Idiomaticity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Firth, R.J. 1957. Modes of Meaning. In Papers in Linguistics 19341951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 191215. Hanks, P (ed.). 1986. Collins English Dictionary. London: Collins. Quoted in Sinclair, . J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hill, J. and M. Lewis (eds.). 1997. The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations. Hove: Language Teaching Publications. Moon, Rosamund. 1994. The Analysis of Fixed Expressions in Text. In M. Coulthard (ed.). 1994. Advances in Written Text Analysis. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 117135. Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prlog, Hortensia and Maria Teleag. 1999. Dicionar de colocaii nominale englezromn. Timioara: Mirton. Prlog, Hortensia and Maria Teleag (coord.). 2000. Dicionar englez-romn de colocaii verbale. Iai: Polirom. Pearson, D. 1993. Cartea casei naturale. Oradea: Aquila. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cited from the corpora

Kenny, Belinda. 2000. Influence on Multiple Fire-Related Germination Cues on Three Sydney Grevillea (Proteaceae) Species. In Austral Ecology 25 (6) [Online]. Available: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com. Odum, E. 1983. Basic Ecology. New York: Holt, Rinehart.
THE INTERPLAY OF SYNTAX AND DISCOURSE: CERTAIN INVERSION CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH

BILJANA MIIC ILIC
University of Ni
1. Introduction
The growing interest in discourse and extensive research in the past twenty years has enriched various linguistic disciplines, syntax included. The study of various syntactic constructions seems to have particularly profited from being examined in the light of discourse functions they serve, related to specific aspects of the context they appear in. In this paper I hope to demonstrate this relationship between syntax and discourse by examining the role of various syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and textual characteristics of certain inversion constructions in English and their discourse functions. The particular inversion type that I will be dealing here with is syntactically defined as a sentence in which the logical subject appears in postverbal position while some other, canonically postverbal constituent appears in clause-initial position (Birner 1994:235), and is sometimes labelled subject-dependent inversion (Huddleston and Pullum 2002:1385). It should be noted that in this construction various formal and functional elements may be inverted with the subject, as illustrated in the examples below.
2. Theoretical Overview
There has been extensive research of various types of inversion in English. To mention just the few most significant previous studies: Hartvigson and Jakobson (1974), Green (1980), Coopmans (1989), Rochemont and Culicover (1990), and the most recent one, (Birner 1994), from the pragmatic point of view. Inversion constructions were often surveyed within the study of noncanonical word order, which, in turn, is a significant issue for examining the
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relationship between syntax, pragmatics and discourse. Research in this area, focusing on particular constructions (Prince 1981b, Prince 1986, Penelope 1982, Geluykens 1988, Fox and Thomson 1990, Huck and Na 1990, Virtanen 1992, Ward 1988, Ward and Birner 1994, Birner and Ward 1996, inter al.) culminated in the past few years in several books and articles (Birner and Ward 1998, Ward and Birner 2004) providing a unified account of the so-called information-packaging constructions, as they are referred to in the whole chapter devoted to them in the latest comprehensive grammar of English (Huddleston and Pullum 2002:13651447). Although my approach to inversion follows their line of thought in combining syntactic analysis with the analysis of extended language segments, in this paper, however, I will point to some fine-tuning details, emphasizing the relationship of some syntactic specificities and the identified discourse functions of inversion.
3. Syntactic and Pragmatic Characteristics of Inversion

3.1. Syntactically, it is possible to distinguish the following inversion subtypes, according to the form and function of the initial constituent: (Note: in the given examples the initial, inverted constituents are capitalized, the final subjects are bold and underlined, whereas the discourse references to the initial constituent are bold.) 1/ Initial place adverbials
(1) , even great sorrows can be survived; troubles which seem as if they must put an end to happiness for life fade with the lapse of time until it becomes almost impossible to remember their poignancy. But OVER AND ABOVE THESE SELF-CENTRED CONSIDERATIONS is the fact that ones ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace ... (Russell/57) (2a) The mist lifted in quick, lithe ribbons, and BEFORE US lay the island, the mountains as though sleeping beneath a crumpled blanket of brown, the folds stained with the green of olive groves. (2b) ALONG THE SHORE curved beaches as white as tusks among tottering cities of brilliant gold, red, and white rocks. We rounded the northern cape, ... (Durrell/18) (3) ... I sauntered out on to the veranda to have a look at the lunch table, which had been put out in the shade of the vine. IN THE CENTRE OF
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WHAT HAD BEEN A VERY ATTRACTIVE FLORAL CENTRE-PIECE perched the Magenpies, reeling gently from side to side. Cold with dismay I surveyed the table. The cutlery was flung about in a haphazard manner ... (Durrell/283)
Formally, they are most frequently prepositional phrases (PP), although they can be also adverbs. In literature this is reported to be the most frequent inversion type, usually referred to as Locative Inversion. 2/ Initial subject complements 2a/ Noun Phrases (NPs)
(4) After this we often meet the porpoises when we went moonlight bathing, and one evening they put on an illuminated show for our benefit, aided by one of the most attractive insects that inhabited the island. We had discovered that in the hot months of the year the sea became full of phosphorescence. ... We found the best time for the phosphorescence was when there was no moon at all. ANOTHER ILLUMINATED INHABITANT OF THE SUMMER was the firefly. These slender brown beetles would fly as soon as it got dark ... (Durrell/151)
2b/ Adjective Phrases (AdjPs)

(5) He himself proposed the name. He is her Godfather. She murmured, I know it is strange. STRANGE CERTAINLY were Charless feelings; and the ultimate strangeness was only increased by this curious soliciting of his opinion on such, in such circumstances, a trivial matter... (Fowles/392) (6) ...but when they are found out, or in grave danger of detection, they wish they had been more virtuous, and this wish may give them a lively sense of the enormity of their sin. CLOSELY ALLIED WITH THIS FEELING is the fear of becoming an outcast from the herd. A man who cheats at cards or fails to pay his debts of honour has nothing within himself by which to stand up against the disapproval of the herd when he is found out. (Russell/75)
There are a few syntactic considerations to be made here. Regarding the initial NPs, it could be questioned whether they are really subject complements (SC), or perhaps, just subjects. Without going into details, it should be stressed that what distinguishes these inversions from regular S V=be SC sentences and seemingly similar special types of pseudo-clefts,
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inverted pseudo-clefts (Quirk et al. 1985:13881389, Geluykens 1988:831832), are not formal, syntactic criteria, but rather the semantic role of the SC which is that which identifies the subject (Stageberg 1981:201), or applies some attribute or definition to the subject (Quirk et al. 1985:55). Moreover, the pragmatic parameter of information status distinguishes the initial SC (i.e. the identifier) as more familiar in the discourse, i.e. it represents older information than the identified, the final subject. The referent of such an NP/SC is a member of a salient set, evoked in prior discourse. There are often formal, lexical indicators of this relationship, words and expressions such as also, another, one of. With initial AdjP subject complements there is no dilemma as regarding their syntactic function. However, with ed participle adjectives (Quirk et al. 1985:413415), the question is whether they are adjectives or participle predicatives (subtype 3b below). How the ed form will be interpreted depends primarily on the degree of verb transitivity and the explicit or implicit presence of the (semantic) Agent in the sentence. 3/ Initial participle predicatives 3a/ -ing participle phrases
(7) The back of the display was a simple draped cloth of dark purple. FLOATING IN FRONT was a striking array, suspended on thin wires, of gentlemans collars of every conceivable shape, size and style. But the cunning in the thing was that they were arranged to form words (Fowles/361) (8) Charles looked through the leaves and down the slope of the ashgrove and his blood froze. COMING UP TOWARDS THEM, as if seeking their same cover, were Sam and Mary. Sam had his arm around the girls shoulders. He carried his hat ... (Fowles/161)
3b/ -ed participle phrases

(9) LODGED AMONG THE POST THAT LANDED ON MY DESK A FEW MONTHS AGO was a dog-eared missive which the postmark showed had been underway for eight weeks from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. What the Russian post lacked in speed, however, it had made up for in efficiency in tracking down the correct recipient for the address: The Lady Chief, The Times, Moscow. (The Times, March 28th, 1994/16)
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This particular construction has been usually referred to as Participle Preposing. The potential problem of formal labeling of the ed participle as either an adjective or a verb has already been discussed. The ed participles, in the sentences where the predicator is be, receive a passive interpretation. As for initial ing phrases they are free to receive either a perfective OR imperfective interpretation, depending on context (Birner and Ward 1992:3). 4/ Initial time adverbials
(10) Englands cricketers may have had a better time than usual in Trinidad, during the Third test to date, but the familiar clamour about what is wrong with the English game continues to grow. TODAY comes news of an initiative that could finally find England some top-class fast bowlers to match the skill and speed of Ambrose, Walsh and company. Over six weeks this summer budding English speed merchants will be invited to join a series of fast-bowling master-classes across the country. (The Times, March 28th, 1994/3)
Formally, they are most often adverbs or adverbial phrases, although they can be PPs and NPs as well. This is a rather infrequent inversion subtype. Unlike the previous three types of initial constituents, these initial time adverbials usually are not obligatory sentence elements. What do all these inversions have in common? The inverted, final subjects are usually relatively long, modified or coordinated NPs (but not exclusively, as can be seen in examples 3, 4 and 8!). The predicates are short, often containing just the predicator. Mostly it is the verb be, but it can also be another copula, or an intransitive verb, semantically denoting existence, state or motion. However, the verb type, rather than being subject to some syntactic or semantic restrictions, is actually only pragmatically constrained in that it must be informationally light, i.e. must not represent new information in the discourse (Birner 1995). 3.2. The need to broaden the scope of the analysis beyond syntax meant observing the sentences in context, and examining some textual and pragmatic aspects. This was important in order to a/ detect the relations between the entities denoted by initial and final constituents and other dis-
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course entities, i.e. determine their discourse familiarity, and b/ examine the textual links with the preceding and the following context. The most significant discourse parameter is the pragmatic parameter of information status. This should be determined for both the initial constituent and the final subject, and even for the predicator. In this paper, as in several recent studies of information-packaging constructions, we have adopted the taxonomy of discourse familiarity from the seminal paper by E. Prince (1981a) according to which information in the discourse can be either new or evoked (i.e. given) or inferrable from the previous context, with a couple of subtypes of each. Later, in Prince 1992, this taxonomy was transformed into a matrix of cross-cutting dichotomies of discourse-old and discourse-new, and hearer-old and hearer-new information. The information status is determined according to a/ formal criteria (e.g. the presence of definite articles, determiners, deictics, coreferential pro-expressions, etc. indicates a higher level of discourse familiarity), and b/ the relationships with the previous discourse (e.g. information can be inferrable according to some logical relationship (part/whole, set member, etc.) or some semantic relationship (synonymy, antonymy, hyperonymy). It should be noted that, in inversion, it is usually not the whole constituent that is familiar, but only some part of it, usually the nominal in large word groups, such as PPs, ADjPs or non-finite predicatives. Thus, for example, in (1), it is only the NP these self-centered considerations that is familiar, its headnoun considerations being a hyperonym to great sorrows and troubles mentioned before, and specified with the definite determiner these. On the basis of large empirical research, Betty Birner (1994) concluded that what is significant for inversion is not any particular information status of either the initial or the final constituent, since she found them to belong to various information categories. Rather, what is important for felicitous inversion is the relative information status of these two constituents, since the information in the initial constituent must be more familiar in the discourse than that in the final subject, where both the evoked and the inferrable information behave as discourse-old. In particular, what makes the information more familiar is prior evocation, inferrability and recency of mention (Ward and Birner 2004:172). For instance, in (2a) both the initial adverbial and the final subject represent relatively familiar information. The referent of the NP the island is definite, known to the reader, the scene of the whole novel, and the topic of several paragraphs surrounding the token
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segment. However, from the narrators point of view it is still less familiar information compared to the first person plural deictic pronoun in the initial constituent, us. In (3), similarly, both the referents of the initial and final NPs are hearer-old and discourse-old. Yet, the initial NP floral centre-piece can be inferred as part of the lunch-table mentioned in the previous sentence, whereas the latest discourse mention of the Magenpies, the two domesticated magpies, the narrators pets, was not so recent. Typically, the initial constituent is discourse-old and the final discoursenew, but they can both be discourse-old or discourse-new, in which case it is their relative status that matters. Our empirical analysis, though on a rather small corpus, points to the conclusion that initial subject complements almost exclusively represent discourse-old, evoked or inferrable information, initial place adverbials show the similar preference, whereas initial predicatives, and especially initial time adverbials tend to be somewhat lower on the familiarity scale, representing either inferrable or unused (i.e. hearer-old but discourse-new) information. Therefore, having in mind the relative status of the initial and the final constituent, it is no wonder that final subjects in these last two inversion subtypes, on the whole, tend to be less familiar (i.e. unused, as in 8, or brand-new, as in 7 and 9) than the final subjects in inversions with initial SCs and place adverbials.
4. Discourse Functions
4.1. One of the main theoretical assumptions of functionally-oriented studies is that similarities in syntactic form may correspond to discoursefunctional similarities in the use of those forms. Previous research on English inversion mentions various discourse functions. However, in her very influential study, Birner (1994:234) goes a step further and, trying to provide a unified account of all inversion types, defines the discourse function of inversion as an information-packaging mechanism, allowing the presentation of relatively familiar information before a relatively unfamiliar logical subject. Accepting this as a valid, all-encompassing statement, now we are going to take a closer look at the different manifestations of this discourse function.
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4.2. Information-packaging constructions, inversion included, despite being syntactically more complex and more marked than their canonical counterparts, are claimed to facilitate discourse processing. By presenting relatively more familiar information first, inversion thus contributes to text coherence. 4.2.1. The linking function of inversion to the preceding text has been widely recognized in literature. However, it should be noted that it is realized in various ways, depending on the discourse familiarity of the initial constituent. The link is strongest when the initial constituent or part of it has a direct, coreferential antecedent. This is a relatively rare case, compared, for instance, to various preposings of subcategorized nominals (Miic Ilic 1998:310311). More often, the link is less direct, based on inference, since the initial constituent represents information that is inferrable from the prior discourse. In case of inference via set relations, the link is still strong, as can be seen in 4, where the set consists of natural illuminations of the summer, or in 11 below, the set of aviaries on the balcony. But, since, as already stated, with the majority of inverted initial constituents it is not the whole constituent, but only some part of it that is familiar and it represents inferrable information, this direct linking function is not very prominent. 4.2.2. The linking function should be viewed not only in terms of the links of the initial constituent to the preceding discourse, but also as the linking to the following text. Sometimes it is a direct rheme-theme link, the next sentence taking up as its theme what was expressed in the rhematic, inverted subject. This can be noted in 4 and 8, where the final subjects of the token sentences (the firefly and Sam and Mary) are repeated as the initial subjects of the following sentences (these beetles and Sam, respectively). More often, however, the link is less direct, in the form of illustration, elaboration of or contrast to what was expressed in the final subject, as in 1, 5 and 6. Therefore, inversion, presenting a relatively familiar information before a relatively unfamiliar logical subject (Birner 1994:234), can be considered as serving a dual linking function. A non-inversion, canonical counterpart sometimes would even not be acceptable in the same context, and certainly would not contribute in this way to text coherence. 4.3. Turning now to specific syntactic subtypes of inversion, regarding initial place adverbials in particular, it seems reasonable to view them
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alongside other initial place adverbials, in non-inversion sentences. Their most universally recognized function is the so-called scene-setting (Quirk et al. 1985:521), which, to various degrees can be combined with linking to the previous text, rearranging sentence elements, etc., (Miic Ilic 2005), as well as with signaling segment boundaries at the text-organizational level (Virtanen 1992). Initial place adverbials in inversion share this primary scene-setting function, which depending on their form and information status, can be combined with linking to the preceding text. Moreover, in other two subtypes, initial SCs and especially initial participle predicatives could be also taken as setting the scene, though not a direct, spatial one, but rather as setting the thematic framework of the sentence. (Theme is here used in Hallidays sense (1985: 4446. 5356), as the point of departure of the message, in which case these initial constituents would be marked topical Themes. Certain information-packaging constructions were claimed in literature to have a very special pragmatic, prominence-giving discourse function marking the open proposition (defined in Ward 1988:5, and similar to Jackendoffs (1972:230,245) notion of presupposition) of the sentence as salient in the discourse, and, simultaneously, marking the referent of the preposed, initial constituent as a member of a salient set. This is especially true of topicalized, subcategorized nominals (Prince 1981b, Prince 1986, Ward 1988, Ward and Birner 1994). With regard to inversion, opinions vary, and locative inversion in particular has been usually denied this function (Huddleston and Pullum 2002:1386,1388; Birner 1994:237; but, quite the contrary is the claim in Prince 1986). Our findings lead to the conclusion that what makes a presupposition salient is not any particular syntactic subtype of inversion, but primarily informational links with the preceding discourse, by which the initial constituent is identified as the set member, or the whole presupposition is inferrable via some logical or semantic relationship. This is usually the case with initial subject complements. Moreover, and here particularly illuminating, is that what also gives rise to a salient presupposition are some textual factors the contrast between the referents of the initial constituents and final subjects and other discourse referents, expressed in syntactically parallel structures. Thus, even for locative inversion, if in the relevant language segment there is contrast, stated in parallel structures the presupposition of the token inversion sentence is felt as salient. This can be noted in 11:
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(11a)In one corner of the room I found small French windows that led me out on to a balcony. At each end a large aviary had been built, and IN ONE lived a cock blackbird, black and velvety with a flaunting, banana-yellow beak; (11b) while IN THE OTHER AVIARY OPPOSITE was a thrush-like bird which was clad in the most gorgeous blue feathering ... (Durrell/217)
The salient presupposition, with two variables X and Y, is instantiated by the elements of two sets, X and Y, with contrasted members, for the locative and for the subject, respectively. The set Y, aviaries, is here explicitly mentioned. The salient presupposition could be stated as: (Bird X) lived (in aviary Y) X = {a cock blackbird, a thrush-like bird} Y = {one aviary, opposite aviary}
5. Conclusion
My paper starts with an overview of certain inversion constructions in order to demonstrate how a deeper insight into a particular syntactic construction can be gained when our horizon goes beyond syntax. The important questions should include not only what takes place, for instance, in word order changes, but also why there are such changes, what their contribution to the discourse is, and how they functionally differ from their canonical counterparts. My analysis of inversion includes not only syntactic, but also semantic, pragmatic and textual aspects. Together with the major, general discourse function of packaging more familiar before less familiar information in a sentence, inversion was shown to have some particular discourse functions as well. Though exact rules regarding the direct correlation between the examined parameters and identified discourse functions could not be stated, it is possible to demonstrate that there indeed are some generalizations and non-arbitrary preferences. The particular discourse functions of inversion tend to be interrelated, as well as the various parameters influencing them. Therefore, the investigation of their interrelatedness in discourse makes an interesting and promising field, significant not only for functionally-oriented studies of particular syntactic constructions, but, more impor-
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tantly, for a more general research into the fascinating interplay of syntactic and pragmatic factors in discourse production and comprehension.
References
Birner, B. 1994. Information status and word order: An analysis of English inversion, Language 70, pp. 233259. Birner, B. 1995. Pragmatic Constraints on the Verb in English Inversion, Lingua 97:4, 233256. Birner, B and G. Ward. 1992. On the Interpretation of VP Inverstion in American English, Journal of Linguistics 28:112. Birner, B. and G. Ward. 1996. A Crosslinguistic Study of Postposing in Discourse, Language and Speech: 39(23):113142. Birner, B. and G. Ward. 1998. Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Coopmans, P. 1989. Where Stylistic and Syntactic Processes Meet: Locative Inversion in English, Language 65:728752. Durrell, G. 1956. My Family and Other Animals. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fowles, J. 1977. The French Lieutenants Woman. London: Triad/Panther. Fox, B. and S.Thomson. 1990. A Discourse Explanation of the Grammar of Relative Clauses in English Conversation, Language 66:292317. Geluykens, R. 1988. Five Types of Clefting in English Discourse Linguistics 26:823841. Green, G. 1980.Some Wherefores of English Inversion Language 56:582601. Halliday, M.A.K. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Hartvigson, H. and K.L. Jakobson 1974. Inversion in Present-Day English. Odense: University Press. Huck, G. and Y. Na 1990. Extraposition and Focus. Language 66:5178. Huddleston, R. and G. Pullum 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP . Jackendoff, R. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Miic Ilic B. 1998. Discourse Functions of Word Order Changes in English , Declarative Sentences, Facta Universitatis 1/5:301313. Miic Ilic B. 2005. (in print) Initial Adverbials of Place and Time in English , Declarative Sentences. Space and Time in Language and Literature Conference Proceedings, Rijeka: University of Rijeka. Penelope, J. 1982. Topicalization: the Rhetorical Strategies it Serves and the Interpretative Strategies it Imposes, Linguistics 20:683695. Prince, E. 1981a. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information, in Cole (ed.), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 223255.
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Prince, E. 1981b. Topicalization, Focus-Movement, and Yiddish-Movement: A Pragmatic Differentiation, Berkley Linguistic Society, 7. 249264. Prince, E. 1986. On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions, Chicago Linguistic Society 22, Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory, 208222. Prince, E. 1992. The ZPG letter: subjects, definiteness, and information-status, in Thompson, S. and W. Mann, eds., Discourse description: diverse analyses of a fund-raising text. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 295325. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, & J. Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Rochemont, M. and P Culicover. 1990. English Focus Constructions and the Theory . of Grammar. Cambridge: CUP . Russell, B. 1961. The Conquest of Happiness. London: Unwin. Stageberg, N. 1981. An Introductory English Grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Virtanen, T. 1992. Given and new information in adverbials: Clause initial adverbials of time and place, Journal of Pragmatics 17: 99115. Ward, G. 1988. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Preposing. New York: Garland. Ward, G. & Birner, B. (1994): A Unified Account of English Fronting Constructions, in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 1, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, 159165. Ward, G. and B. Birner. 2004. Information Structure, in Handbook of Pragmatics. Horn, L. and G. Ward, eds. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Pp. 153174.
MULTIPLE ANALYSIS AND GRADIENCE IN N1 TrV N2 to V N3 CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH

VLADAN PAVLOVIC
University Of Ni
1. Introduction
My papers starting point is the well-established fact now (Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987; Taylor 1989, and others) that linguistic categories, including the grammatical ones, have a prototype structure, with central members sharing a range of syntactic and semantic attributes. Therefore, it is claimed that they should be explored through the study of gradience, the gradient being defined as a scale which relates two categories of description in terms of degrees of similarity and contrast. (Quirk et al. 1985:90). At either end of such a scale there are items that (relatively) clearly belong to one category or to the other, whereas the intermediate positions are occupied by the in-between cases which tend to satisfy the criteria for one or the other category in varying degrees. Closely related to the notion of gradience is that of multiple analysis. It reveals yet another kind of indeterminacy which out of two or more analyses to apply to the same gramatical unit, i.e how to specify its possible constituent structures. In that sense, clauses, for example, have been analysed in at least two ways in terms of elements such as S, V, C, A, as well as in terms of just the subject and the predicate. In many such cases (the) two analyses may be considered the end-points of a gradient, and the particular instances of a linguistic category in question may then vary in the place they occupy on the scale between one interpretation and the other.
2. Methodological prerequisites
Starting from the outlined principles, the purpose of this paper is to show how the notions of multiple analysis and gradience can be applied to N1 TrV N2 to V N3 construction in English (eg. I want her to write a book, She told me to call her again later, etc.). During the analysis, references will be made especially to Quirk et al., 1985, where an outline is given as to how
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such an analysis may proceed. The corpus used in the analysis consists of the sentences containing the above-mentioned construction that could be found in the grammar books and the dictionaries listed at the end of the paper. The intuition of a native speaker of English has also been taken into account and relied on. Drawing on the insights provided by both the structuralist approach to grammar and the generative Government and Binding Theory, the paper will first present the different ways in which the N1 TrV N2 to V N3 construction can can be analysed functionally. Then, in order for the paper to present the gradient nature of the structure in question, two preliminary steps had to be made. Firstly, all the main verbs appearing in this construction have been classified according to the criteria outlined in Quirk et al., (1985:1180 et passim). The following verb groups have been established: 1. volitional verbs: (cant) bear, desire, hate, like, love, prefer, want, wish; 2. prepositional verbs: ask for, call for, ache for, aim for, burn for, burst for, care for, clamour for, crave for, hope for, itch for, long for, plan for, prepare for, wait for, yearn for; 3. public factual verbs: acknowledge, announce, certify, confess, confirm, declare, deny, guarantee, proclaim, pronounce, report, repute (esp. Pass.), rumour (Pass. only), say (Pass. only), state, testify, tip, warn; 4. private factual verbs: assume, believe, conceive, consider, estimate, expect, deem, discover, fancy, feel, find, imagine, judge, know, mean, note, notice, observe, perceive, presume, presuppose, prove, reckon, recognize, reveal, see (P only), show, suppose, suspect, take, think (esp. Pass.) understand; 5. verbs of intention: intend, mean; 6. performative verbs: appoint, elect, name, vote; 7. general causative/resulting verbs: cause, drive, force, get (no Pass.), lead, prompt; 8. verbs with a modal character, expressing such concepts as enablement, permission and compulsion: allow, authorize, compel, constrain, enable, entitle, equip, fit, oblige, permit, require; 9. verbs of influencing between which a common factor appears to be that the non-finite clause has a purposive meaning: assist, bother, bribe, condemn, dare, defy (no Pass.), encourage, help, induce, inspire, press, summon; 10. verbs which introduce indirect directives: advise, ask, beg, beseech, challenge, command, counsel, detail, direct, enjoin, entreat, exhort, forbid, implore, incite, instruct, invite, order, persuade, pray, remind, request, recommend, teach, tell, urge. It should be noted here that the grammar-book by Quirk et al. (1985) considers the first two verb groups monotransitive, the last one ditransitive
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and the verbs in the all the other groups complex-transitive. The second preliminary step deals with the criteria that had to be established in order to help locate a particular group of verbs in the gradient. These are the following (mostly taken over and sometimes partially adapted from: Quirk et al. 1985:1218, 1219, and Huddleston and Pullum 2002:1203): a) N2 is a raised object (and therefore actually an argument of the verb of the subordinate clause: I want her to write a book can be analysed as I want (for(she to write a book)), to which subject-toobject raising is then applied; b) N2 (the NP preceding the infinitive) cannot be made the subject of a passive main clause: *She is wanted to write a book. c) The N2 to V N3 sequence can be passivized without change of meaning: I want a book to be written by her. d) The to V N3 part cannot normally be omitted without radically altering the meaning (another way to put this: the infinitive marker to need remain so as for the reduced construction to preserve the original meaning): I want her to write a book is not reducible to I want her (the meaning changes), but can be reduced to I want her to. These criteria have been chosen as instruments of analysis as they can help determine the number of constituents following the main lexical verb, and show how closely, syntactically and semantically, the main verb and the N2, on the one hand, and the main verb and N2 to V N3, on the other, are related. It should also be stressed here that the second verb (the one marked with a V only in the construction) need not always be a transitive one it can also be the verb to be: They reported him to be a thief, as well as some other linking verb: They forced him to become a president). The three Ns (N1, N2 and N3) are taken to be nominals words and word groups that occupy positions typically occupied by nouns and that perform functions typically performed by nouns.
3. The results of the analysis

This part of the paper will present the results of the analysis of the N1 TrV N2 to V N3 construction in English in view of the notions of multiple analysis and gradience.
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3.1. Let us first consider the following sentences: 1) I want her to write a book. 2) They expected John to win the competition. 3) She told me to call her again tomorrow. They all conform to the N1 TrV N2 to V N3 pattern, yet all of them can be analysed in different ways functionally. Sentence 1 can be analysed as S V DO, sentence 2 as S V DO OC, and the third sentence can be analysed as S V IO DO. In other words, the first sentence can be taken as an example of monotransitive, the second one of complex-transitive and the third one of ditransitive complementation. In addition to this, the N2 can be analysed as: ) the subject of the infinitive clause, in sentence 1: I want (for(her to write a book)), to which, as explained above, subject-to-object raising is applied, so that it can also be called a raised object; ) the indirect object of the main verb, in sentence 3 (i.e. N2 is here treated as a constituent at sentence level and not at the level of the subordinate clause); ) something that draws on both these analyses, in sentence 2; namely, it would be reasonable to argue, from the semantic point of view, that N2 in this sentence requires the treatment of N2 in the first sentence: They expected (for (John to win the competition)). From the formal point of view, however, the analysis of sentence 2 (considering N2 simply an object of the main verb, and therefore a constituent at sentence level and not at the level of the subordinate clause) seems no less appropriate as it reflects the ability of N2 to become the subject of the passive (John was expected to win the competition), which is not true of the N2 of the first sentence. In other words, N2 behaves as an object in relation to the main verb of the sentence, but like a subject in relation to the second infinitive verb (and can also be called a raised object). 3.2 It is one of the most important purposes of this paper to show that even such, relatively fine, (multiple) analysis of this particular construction proves not sufficiently adequate to reveal some of the other subtleties that can be found here. Therefore, a table will now be presented that explores the ways the above-mentioned groups of verbs respond to the outlined criteria, showing thereby how actually more than three categories can be distinguished here. It is the response to those criteria that has made us posit the verb groups 1 and 10 presented in the previous part of the paper as end-
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points of a gradient, with all the other verb groups at some point(s) on the scale between them.
Type of compl. Criteria a) N2 is a raised object b) N2 cannot be S of a passive MCl c) no change of meaning in passive N2 to V N3 + + +* +* + * /+ /+ d) change of meaning when to V N3 is omitted + + /+ + + +/
Verb classes MonoTr 1. Volitional verbs: (can't) bear, desire, hate, like, love... 2. Prep. verbs: ask for, call for, ache for, aim for, burn for... CxTr 3. Public factual verbs: acknowledge, announce, certify... 4. Private factual verbs: assume, believe, conceive... 5. Verbs of intention: intend, mean 6.Performative verbs: appoint, elect, name, vote 7.General causative/resulting verbs: cause, drive... 8. Verbs with a modal character: allow, authorize... 9. Verbs of 'influencing': assist, bother, bribe... DiTr 10. Verbs which introduce indirect directives: advise, ask, beg, beseech...
+ + + + /+
+ +/
3.3. Comments will now be made related to the data presented in the table, with the listed criteria as the starting point. 3.3.1 The first criterion takes into account whether N2 is a raised object or not. Raising (subject to object raising in particular) has been chosen as one of the criteria because it can help make a difference between a typically monotransitive and a typically ditransitive interpretation of the construction in question. Namely, it makes sense to say that where subject-to-object raising is involved, we actually have a case of monotransitive complementation, with the raised N2 constituent actually belonging to the lower, non-finite clause, which then, as a whole, functions as a direct object. That is typical of the first, emotion, group of verbs. On the other hand, no raising is involved in the deep-structure interpretation of a sentence like Mary persuaded John to wash the dishes. This sentence is actually interpreted as
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Mary past persuade John (for([e] to wash the dishes)), i.e. the verb persuade (as well as all the other verbs in group 10 above) is not seen as a raising, but as a control verb, the one whose second argument the object controls the interpretation of the non-lexical subject of the lower clause, wherefore it is also called an object-control verb. It is well known that apart from object-control, we can also talk about subject-control verbs (notably the verb promise), but no matter what kind of control relationship a verb shows (let us for the time being concentrate on the verbs belonging to group 10 above only), the point is that sentences with such verbs can be considered examples of ditransitive, and no longer monotransitive, complementation, with N2 functioning as an IO, and the rest of the construction the non-finite verb phrase/clause (to V N3) functioning as a DO. Having thus discussed the two end-point verb groups in the gradient with regard to the criterion of raising, we will now focus on the in-between ones. Verb group 2 (the one with prepositional verbs) is rather specific, as the verbs belonging to it, requiring (in most cases) the obligatory preposition for when appearing in the given construction, cannot be analysed as either raising or control ones. In that sense, however, this verb group is important, as it shows that, even though it is labelled monotransitive, it actually does not share one of the characteristics we have just said is typical of monotransitive complementation with this construction. The way the complex-transitive verb groups respond to the given criterion is indicative in the sense that it points to the fact that complex-transitive complementation in particular, no matter how homogenous it may seem at the first sight, can only benefit from the gradience approach. It shows that the verbs from three complextransitive verb groups above 3, 4 and 5, are used with a raised object and therefore are more like the monotransitive ones, while three other verb groups -6, 8 and 9, are closer to the ditransitive verbs, in that they are not raising, but control ones. In addition, there is another verb group the one subsuming general causative/resulting verbs in which some verbs, force and compel for example, are control verbs (such verbs constitute a majority in this group, hence a minus in the first position in the table where this verb group crosses the criterion in question), whereas others, such as cause are raising verbs. 3.3.2 We now turn to the second criterion, the one dealing with whether the NP preceding the infinitive (the N2) can or cannot be made the subject of a passivized sentence and to how the given verb groups respond
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to it. Generally speaking, the situation here is more straightforward than in the previous case. The typical characteristic of the verbs at the beginning of the scale the ones involved in monotransitive complementation is that they do not allow for N2 to become the subject of the corresponding passive sentence. In that sense, one cannot say *You are wanted to write a book. This again proves that N2 in sentences containing verbs from this verb group is not a separate constituent at sentence level, but rather a part of the non-finite subordinate clause functioning as DO. At the other end of the scale, the location of the ditransitive verbs, we deal with the reverse situation N2 can easily be made the subject of the corresponding passive sentence (eg. He was persuaded to leave), which proves this time that it indeed is a separate constituent at sentence level and one of the two arguments in the postverbal position, the second being the to V N3 part, functioning as DO. We will now focus again on the in-between cases. The first thing to notice is that the (prepositional) verbs from the second group, labelled monotransitive, unlike the other monotransitive group, often do allow N2 to become the subject of a passive sentence (eg. The government was not called for to resign so quickly). The second point of interest here is that the verbs from all the complex-transitive verb groups behave in a uniform manner all of them also do allow passivization, whereby N2 becomes the subject (eg. He was presumed to have committed the crime). In that sense, one can say that complex-transitive verbs, as far as their response to this particular criterion is concerned, generally incline towards the ditransitive end of the scale. Finally, it should also be pointed out, in connection with these verbs, that a very small number, due to their inherent properties, actually have no passive at all notably the verb get and defy. On the other hand, there are also verbs that are primarily used in the passive (verbs such as repute and think, and some other public and private factual verbs), as well as those that, when appearing in this construction (N1 TrV N2 to V N3), are used in the passive only (e.g. rumour, say or see). 3.3.3 We will now discuss the response of the given verb groups to the third criterion whether or not the N2 to V N3 sequence can be passivized without change of meaning. It has been noticed that with the verbs belonging to the first (monotransitive) verb group there is no change of meaning when part of the construction in question is passivized (I want a book to be written by her means the same as I want her to write a book). On the other hand, in the case of verb group 10 just the opposite happens. Namely, if one
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compares Peter persuaded John to help Sue and Peter persuaded Sue to be helped by John, one will clearly see that these two sentences actually do not have the same meaning. This is yet another proof that N2 to V N3 in the first case is a single unit a non-finite clause with a lexical subject, i.e. a relatively autonomous structure, in which any grammatical changes which occur tend to have only a very limited effect on the rest of the sentence, whereas the opposite is the case in the latter example. We now move on to the in-between cases. Before I proceed, however, it should first be noted that, as long as my analysis focuses on this criterion, I will always assume that the second V (the one between the infinitive particle to and N3) is a transitive (and not a linking) verb capable of being passivized (i.e. middle verbs, for example, are excluded). As the verbs in groups 3, 4, and 6 are affected by such a constraint to a significant degree, being most often used with the verb to be when appearing in this construction, the points in the table where these verb groups intersect with the given criterion are starred (*), so as to show that this criterion is applicable to them in not too many cases. Having this constraint in mind, we first turn to verb group 2. It is the first time that this verb group responds to a criterion in the same way as the verb group 1 (They arranged for the charges to be investigated by the committee means the same as its active counterpart: They arranged for the committee to investigate the charges). The response of the remaining seven, complex-transitive, verb groups is not uniform again. Namely, the verbs from verb groups 3, 4 and 5 seem to be more related to the monotransitive end. To give an example, a sentence such as They expected the professor to be seen by the students, does not seem to differ in meaning when compared to its counterpart in which the N2 to V N3 sequence is active. On the other hand, the verb groups 6, 7, 8 and 9 are closer to the other, ditransitive end of the scale in that a change of meaning does occur when the part of the construction in question is passivized. For example, They elected/forced/allowed/encouraged the present Dean to be succeeded by Mr. Brown does not mean the same as the original active counterpart They elected/forced/allowed/encouraged Mr. Brown to succeed the present Dean. 3.3.4 The fourth and the last criterion has to do with whether or not the to V N3 part can (normally) be omitted without radically altering the general meaning of the whole sentence. Alternatively, it refers to whether the infinitive marker to need or need not remain so that the reduced construc-
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tion preserves the original meaning. This criterion is important as it shows how closely related syntactically the main verb and N2 are, which is sometimes easier to see precisely when the to V N3 part is cut out. In that sense, with the monotransitive verbs of verb group 1, it is not possible, as already explained, to reduce a sentence such as I want her to write a book to I want her without (significant) change of meaning, and the infinitive particle need remain for the original meaning to be preserved I want her to. On the other hand, the converse is true of the verbs belonging to verb group 10 (the ditransitive ones). For example, I persuaded him to take part in the competition is reducible to I persuaded him without any radical change of meaning and no infinitive particle need be retained. Moving on to the in-between verb groups, it can be noticed that the other monotransitive verb group verb group 2, behaves the same as the first monotransitive verb group does. For example: They were all burning for the famous director to finally make public his new project does not mean the same when reduced to They were all burning for the famous director only. The verbs in verb group 3 behave in a very specific way. Namely, first of all, they can be divided into two groups those where the resulting reduced construction is not grammatical at all and those where such an observation does not hold. The verbs that belong to the former group are pronounce and proclaim, (for example it is ungrammatical to say *The citizens proclaimed him or *I now pronounce you). Secondly, the latter subpart of this verb group can be further divided into two groups: verbs (such as warn) where the meaning does not change when the relevant part of the construction is dropped out (They warned him is closely related in meaning to They warned him not to do that); and verbs such as confirm, where a change of meaning can occur when the N1 TrV N2 to V N3 construction is reduced. For example: The executive board confirmed the rumours of job losses to have been intentional misinterpretation on the part of the workers cannot be reduced to only The executive board confirmed the rumours of job losses without singificant loss of meaning. The verbs in verb group 4 behave in the same way a verb such as confirm from the previous group does they require an overt OC to retain the original meaning. Compare, for example, the following pair of sentences: I believe this psychiatrist and I believe this psychiatrist to be a fraudster. Generally speaking, verb group 5 (verbs of intention) behaves in the same way. The behaviour of verb groups 6, 8 and 9 shows that they are, as far as this criterion is concerned, closer to the ditransitive end of the gradient. The
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to V N3 part can be omitted here without any significant change of meaning. For example, a sentence such as They elected her to succeed the present Prime Minister, can be reduced in the above-mentioned way without any significant loss of meaning. The verbs in verb group 7, as the +/- sign in the appropriate place in the table suggests, behave in an ambivalent way, just as they did in response to the first criterion. Namely, the construction N1 TrV to V N3 with some of these verbs (drive, for example) cannot be reduced as described without loss of meaning (Hunger drove her to commit several petty thefts is not the same as Hunger drove her) whereas the same is possible, in principle at least, with a verb such as force (She forced me to help him entails She forced me).
4. Conclusion
The analysis has, hopefully, provided substantial evidence to prove that the three functional interpretations (monotransitive, ditransitive and complex-transitive) of the construction in question can be further refined to no insignificant degree by the application of the concept of gradience. Namely, using (only) four criteria, quite a lot of other categories between which differences are very small have been distinguished; this is especially true of the complex-transitive verbs. In other words, some of the complex-transitive verb groups are closer to the monotransitive and some are closer to the ditransitive end of the scale. The verbs belonging to the former category are public and private factual verbs and verbs of intention (verb groups 3, 4 and 5 in the list above). Moreover, the private factual verbs and the verbs of intention react to as many as three out of four criteria in the same way as the monotransitive verbs of verb group 1 do; similarly the public factual verbs respond to two criteria in the same way as the verbs from verb group 1 and ambivalently in relation to yet another criterion. In that sense, it turns out that the first two of these complex-transitive verb groups have more in common with the monotransitive verb group 1 than the other monotransitive verb group (verb group 2). On the other hand, verb groups 6 to 9 (performative and general causative verbs, verbs with a modal character and verbs of influencing) are closer to the ditransitive end of the scale. The closest to it are the performative verbs they actually respond to the given criteria in the same way as verb group 10 (we will return to this soon). Verbs of influencing and verbs with a modal character differ in only one
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response when compared to the ditransitive verbs, and not entirely at that, as the response to this criterion is ambivalent (meaning there are some verbs in those two verb groups that behave in the same way as the verbs in verb group 10). The next closest verb groups to the ditransitive one is verb group 7 (general causative verbs) with two points of difference in comparison with verb group 10 (the differences are rather small as the reaction of those two verb groups to the appropriate criteria are again ambivalent). The present analysis, far from being extensive and comprehensive, has certainly left a great deal of the complexities of the issues explored unaccounted for. To mention but one problem the criteria used here have remained silent on the fact that, although the verb groups 10 and 6 responded to the given criteria in the same way, the verbs in group 10 require that N2 denote a sentient being capable of making decisions (I persuaded her/*(the book) to intimidate John), whereas the verbs in group 6 often do not (Insulin enables the body to use and share sugar), suggesting that the present analysis requires further calibration. Despite such problems, however, one may claim that the use of the concept of multiple analysis and especially of gradience can still reveal numerous facets of a problem, make it clearer and indicate more accurate ways of dealing with it.
Corpus
Collins COBUILD Resource Pack. 2003. London: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (on CD-ROM). Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary. Sixth edition. 2000. S. Wehmeier (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quirk, R. et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman.
Abbreviations
A adjunct C complement DO direct object Pass. passive N1, N2, N3 nominals NP noun phrase OC objective complement PP prepositional phrase TrV transitive verb IO indirect object
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References
Huddleston, R. and G.K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: CUP . Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Quirk, R. et al. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language London and New York: Longman. Taylor, J.R. 1989. Linguistic Categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
ROMANIA AND THE EU EVALUATION IN THE BBC NEWS

IRINA DIANA MDROANE University of Timioara
The enlargement of the European Union is at present perceived with doubt by many western European citizens, who fear an influx of cheap labour force from eastern European countries, as well as a wave of potential criminals who might disturb the peace and quiet of their historic, prosperous cities. Furthermore, the population of the affluent European countries frowns upon the extended work hours and the diminished social protection caused by the big economic differences between the rich and the poor countries of the Union, an acute problem after the 1 May 2004 extension by ten members. In this context, the welcoming of two new members, Romania and Bulgaria, in January 2007 has become a debatable issue, not necessarily for politicians (in spite of some protests coming from the European Popular Party, Romania and Bulgaria did sign the entry treaty in April 2005), but, as already mentioned, for many western European citizens, who feel threatened by the rapid pace of EU expansion. For example, German and French citizens see the two candidate countries, according to the English version of Der Spiegel, as nothing but exporters of pimps, prostitutes and underage criminal gangs (9 May 2005). And, considering that France and Germany belong (or used to belong?) to the group of EU enthusiasts, the question is what the general public in more EU sceptical countries, such as the UK, might think of the expansion planned for the year 2007. The media are crucial in influencing the public opinion and, even if no extreme viewpoint has been expressed in the British media about Romanias and Bulgarias future EU membership, an analysis of their coverage of the problem would reveal how they assess it and how they project their ideal target audience. My paper focuses on the coverage in the BBC news online of aspects related to Romanias integration. There are two reasons for this choice: the BBC has an impact in Romania (what is broadcast by the BBC is quoted in
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the Romanian press and commented on very frequently); the BBC is a credible opinion leader in the UK, with a well-defined audience. My corpus consists of two news stories from December 2004 (EU backing for Romania elections 02.12.2004 and Romania welcomes historic EU deal 09.12.2004), two news features from the same period (Tough rebirth for Romania 06.12.2004 and Analysis: New Era for Romania? 13.12.2004) and of three news stories from April 2005 (EU to approve two new countries 13.04.2005, EU backs Bulgaria and Romania bid 13.04.2005 and EU candidates sign entry treaty 25.04.2005). The month of December 2004 has been chosen because it was the moment when Romania closed the negotiations chapters in view of EU membership. It was also an electoral month in Romania, which triggered many discussions and reviews of the countrys situation. Only the news stories and features which deal with the EU integration topic have been selected, many others focusing primarily on the elections. The month of April 2005 is also relevant because then Romania signed the treaty by which it was admitted to the EU, the integration itself being set for 2007. My interest is with the evaluation in the BBC news discourse of Romanias state of affairs and with potential changes in the attitude towards Romania between the two moments. I have not taken into consideration, at this level of my analysis, the fact that the author of three of the articles analysed is a Romanian expatriate, who is a correspondent for the BBC, since her discourse has not struck me as being any different from the BBC discourse in the other news stories. The linguistic concept used in this study is that of evaluation, which, in a separating approach, refers to the authors (speaker/writer) perception of something as good or bad/desirable or undesirable (see Fairclough 1989 and 2003, Halliday 1994). However, the present paper will use what Thompson and Hunston call a combing approach to evaluation (2000:5), which encompasses, apart from the expression of the speakers or writers attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions he or she is talking about, aspects related to mood and modality (how certain are authors of or how committed are they to the content of their statements?). Evaluation will cover therefore both the relative and the expressive values of formal features (Fairclough 1989:112) or, in other words, Hallidays interpersonal function of language (1994). Evaluation has, in the combing approach, three functions, which Thompson and Hunston define as follows:
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(1) to express the speakers or writers opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of that person and their community; (2) to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader; (3) to organize the discourse. (2000:6) The first function quoted here reflects the authors position towards the ideas conveyed in the text and it represents the main function of the concept. In order to facilitate communication, this function relies on a system of values shared by the author and his or her intended audience: Every act of evaluation expresses a communal value-system, and every act of evaluation goes towards building up that value-system. (Thompson and Hunston 2000:6). It is what Fairclough calls common sense/ground or classification schemes (1989) or what Fowler characterises as consensus (1991). In this context, assumptions (the implicit meanings of words) are taken into consideration by discourse analysts, especially value assumptions (what is desirable or undesirable on the background of the common value-system see Fairclough 2003:5558; 172173). While evaluation can be made explicit with the help of negatively or positively charged words (e.g. This is extraordinary!), it is often embedded in texts through assumptions, which may be triggered by text markers or may be left totally implicit (the term covers here what is meant in pragmatics by presupposition, entailment, and implicature). The second function of evaluation refers to the relation the authors establish between themselves and the interpreters of their texts and it is important, among other things, when manipulation is analysed. The use of the declarative mood and of categorical truths, for example, indicates a position of authority on the text producers part. In media genres such as news stories, journalists often adopt this role of information providers extremely sure of their point of view, which is very difficult for the readers to argue against (Fairclough 1989:129; Thompson and Hunston 2000:2425). However, choices are always possible: between the declarative, interrogative and imperative moods and between instances of low, median and even high modality (Fairclough 2003:170; see also Halliday 1994). Categorical truths (facts), if used extensively, support a view of the world as transparent as if it signalled its own meaning to any observer, without the need for interpretation and representation (Fairclough 1989:129), which can be very manipulative. Making claims (introducing something as a problem) or
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presenting information as given (instead of new) turns the authors evaluation of the events into something difficult not to accept as such (Hoey 2000:2935). The function of organizing the discourse plays an important role because authors do construct their texts with the help of evaluation, which tends to occur at boundary points in a discourse (Thompson and Hunston 2000:11). The use of what Fairclough calls logical connectors (1989:131), the positioning of subordinate and main clauses, as well as a certain disposition of larger text units induce readers to readily adopt a perspective which they might have otherwise contested. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative (assessment is based on comparison against some benchmark), subjective (involving personal opinion and attitude) and value-laden (Thompson and Hunston 2000:21). Linguistically, the analysis may be made on three levels: lexis (positive or negative adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs), grammar (generally the presence or absence of modality markers) and text structure (Fairclough 1989, Fowler 1989, Halliday 1994, Thompson and Hunston 2000:1422). The last element employed in the present analysis refers to what Thompson and Hunston have classified as parameters of evaluation, a consequence of the different functions of this concept: (1) the goodbad/positive-negative parameter (the most significant); (2) the certainty parameter; (3) the expectedness parameter; (4) the importance or relevance parameter (2000:2226). The first two concern the text producer, while the last two the text interpreter and they all co-exist in discourse and may be used for various purposes. The analysis of evaluation in the BBC news stories carried out in this paper will discuss the three functions of the notion, first in the news stories from December 2004 and then in those from April 2005, with the objective of comparing the main features discovered in each case. The first function of evaluation, in this context that of expressing the journalists opinion about their topic, brings about the issue of the common value system, which should enable the readers to make the same assumptions as the authors of the news stories. In the present case study, the journalists and their readers are members of the European Union, while Romanias status is that of a candidate country. Therefore, everything which meets the European standard is evaluated as good/desirable and everything which falls short of it is bad/undesirable.
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The first news story in the December series, EU backing for Romania elections, opens with the assumption that Romania is not trustworthy. Therefore, it needs close supervision from the EU, which must confirm the correctness of the elections; otherwise, they are not credible:
The European Commission has said the weekends elections in Romania were conducted in an orderly manner and will not affect EU membership talks.
Another assumption here is that EU membership talks might have been affected in case of electoral fraud and that Romania needs to be careful about what it does. In the same news story, the idea of doubt about Romanias real chances to close the negotiation chapters is emphasised:
Romania is hoping to wrap up entry negotiations in the next two weeks, in order to join the EU in 2007 along with its neighbour Bulgaria. But it still faces serious hurdles in the race to catch up with Bulgaria, which has already finished entry talks. (my emphasis) Romania missed out on the EUs big wave of eastwards expansion last May. The countrys entry to EU membership is by no means a done deal.
The use of the verb hope presupposes that Romania has not achieved enough and, as a result, it can only hope that negotiations will be closed. A different choice of verb, for instance expect, would have given more credit to the candidate country. The idea of doubt is conveyed even more firmly with the help of the contrastive connector but at the beginning of the next paragraph, coupled with still (the third function of evaluation organising the text), and with the negative collocation serious hurdles. The phrase Romania missed out on the EUs big wave of eastwards expansion has s double role: to provide the historical background necessary in this type of news story and to make readers assume that what has happened once may happen again, especially that Romania is behind. Comparative evaluation is very important in this news story. The yardstick is Bulgaria, but it may also be, occasionally, other former communist countries that have gained access to the EU. The section finishes with a high modality statement, which aims to convince the readers that there is no guarantee that Romania will become an EU member.
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In the last part of the news story there are other instances of negative evaluation, some based on assumption: the European Comission has decided not to recommend the closure of this sensitive chapter (assumption: Romania has partly failed to fulfil the conditions imposed by the EU) and some on explicit evaluation: concerns over corruption and inadequate border controls, Every state decision taken by the Romanian competition council has been wrong, [], so it has no credible record at all (my emphasis). In terms of the second function of evaluation, to communicate with the readers (or rather to communicate a certain message to the readers), apart from the use of high modality illustrated above, there are numerous sentences expressing categorical truths, which indicates that the journalist is certain of her perspective. Only in the end is there an instance of low modality, strengthened however by the if clause in marked position in the sentence:
If Romania and Bulgaria fail to make the grade by 2007, the EU could decide to delay their entry by one year.
This last sentence, even if in a key position in the text, does not cancel the effect of all the previous categorical statements where the odds are high that Romania will fail. As far as text organisation is concerned, the author constantly uses the conjunction but after those paragraphs in which the Romanians optimism is rendered:
Romanian officials remain confident that EU leaders will endorse concluding talks by the end of the year. But doubts about the country readiness to become an effective member of the club are likely to linger.
The idea of doubt is also repeated at important discourse boundaries (beginning, middle, end). The same attitude prevails in the two news stories written to announce Romanias completion of negotiations (Romania welcomes historic EU deal) and to comment on it more extensively (Analysis: New era for Romania?). In the former news story, there are several assumptions about Romania not being ready to become a full member of the EU, assumptions resulting mostly from comparative evaluation:
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The European Commissions conditions for Romania are more stringent than those set for the 10 countries which joined the EU last May. They are also tougher than those in the deal agreed earlier this year with Bulgaria, which is seen as better prepared for accession in January 2007. (my emphasis)
The conclusion which readers are expected to draw from the paragraphs quoted above is that Romania is indeed the worst candidate the EU has ever had. There are also assumptions about Romanias problems (the country is not yet ready to join the EU, it has not done enough), which are not based on comparative evaluation, but on value-laden evaluation:
The EU wants Romania to overhaul its judicial system, promote industrial competition and root out corruption. (my emphasis)
The same assumptions exist in the Romanian officials statements, which are, however, more positive in approach:
He [Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana] accepted tough entry terms, arguing it would encourage its government to modernise its administration and economy before the 2007 target date. [] He said the government in Bucharest would accelerate reforms to ensure it met the EUs criteria on home affairs, justice, competition and border controls. (my emphasis)
The discourse of the Romanian representatives is also marked by the acceptance of the fact that Romania still has a lot to do on its way to the EU, an attitude which is evaluated positively in the BBC news story. The phrase tough entry terms associated with accepted denotes the right attitude on Romanias part. The news story raises doubt again due to its last sentence which alludes to the possible change of government after the elections: The agreement comes ahead of Romanias run-off presidential election on Sunday. The statement might be just a general remark or, on the contrary, it might lead to various scenarios in the minds of those readers who are aware of the background. For instance, one scenario could be that the members of the European Commission have pushed the signing of the deal, even if Romania did not fully comply with the conditions, in order to help the Romanian Social Democrats in the elections. Another scenario might be that a change of government would also affect the acceleration of reforms.
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Analysis: New era for Romania? begins and ends in a sceptical tone. The headline itself, being a question, implies a possible negative answer (the alternative here would have been a categorical truth in the form of a statement: Analysis: New era for Romania). The feature is fraught with negative assumptions, clustered especially in its first and last part. Text organisation plays a significant role here, as well: any positive evaluation is constantly undermined by the introduction, in the following paragraph(s), of some negative assessment:
Last week, Romania concluded membership negotiations with the European Union. [assumption: Romania has achieved something important] A number of EU officials and MEPs have openly expressed their misgivings. [assumption: Romania may not actually deserve its new status]
There are also cases of explicit comparative evaluation, which cast a bad light on Romania:
Not only is Romania considerably poorer than the ex-communist countries of Central Europe the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, which joined the EU in May. It also has the unenviable reputation of being one of Europes most corrupt countries. (my emphasis)
Corruption is the key word in this news feature, and it is explicitly evaluated as endemic, as an integral element of the way Romanians conduct their business and politics. The assumption behind this statement is that the problem is very unlikely to be solved. But the BBC shows confidence in Traian Bsescus announced fight against corruption. While the middle part of the feature is positive, the doubtful attitude reappears in the end, when Bsescus attempts to reopen a chapter of negotiation with the EU is seen as controversial and so is, by means of text organisation and the use of connectors (also) his strategic partnership with Washington and London. The new parliamentary elections, which might be necessary, after all, and which are mentioned in the very last sentence, constitute a negative element, as well, because of the assumption of political instability. The other news feature selected for analysis, Tough rebirth for Romania, which was written before the completion of negotiations, focuses on a rather different aspect, namely how Romania has been coping with the change imposed from the outside (basically by the European Union) in the years after the 1989 Revolution. Timioara, a city located in the west of Romania, is evaluated positively. Evaluation is mostly value-laden. Thus, the
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citys multi-cultural and outward-looking nature, the boom of telephone companies, the presence of foreign investors and talented students from the local university, and the business initiative shown by local people are considered desirable. There is also comparative evaluation: the feature compares Timioara with a very poor region of the country, the Jiu Valley (a mining area), whose high unemployment rates, social unrest, and people who wish to emigrate are all considered undesirable. In fact, the optimism in the former half of the feature is almost totally submerged in the negative attitude which characterises the latter half. The number of paragraphs is unequal and it favours the Jiu Valley (21 paragraphs, by contrast with the 17 paragraphs on Timioara). Moreover, the last section raises a big question mark on Romanias future generations the miners children in whom the spirit of democracy is not instilled. This is the main assumption in the features ending:
Paul David openly admits he misses Nicolae Ceauescu and the certainties of communist rule. He has taught his grand-daughter Ana Maria a poem he wrote himself, called Democracy, sarcastically declaring he is overjoyed at having democracy when he is so hungry that it hurts. Ana Maria will be part of a generation of Romanians growing up as EU citizens. Their definition of democracy will determine Romanias future.
The assumption one is likely to make after reading this feature is that Romania has no future in the EU, since its younger generation espouses ideas that are so remote from true democracy. Nevertheless, in April 2005, Romania signed the entry treaty, together with Bulgaria, so one would expect the BBC evaluation of the country (and of its neighbour, as well) to have switched to a positive, optimistic tone. The analysis of the three news stories which appeared in April on the BBC site on the topic shows that, surprisingly enough, evaluation is predominantly negative. The only change is that Romania is no longer presented as inferior to Bulgaria; instead, they are both looked upon with concern and cautiousness. The two news stories which were written before the signing of the treaty (EU to approve two new countries and EU backs Bulgaria and Romania bid) constantly emphasise the lack of guarantee that the two countries will actually become members of the EU, even if the treaty is
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signed. This is achieved by value-laden evaluation: cautious optimism (on the part of Olli Rehn, the European Enlargement Commissioner); their eventual membership still depends on both countries reforming areas such as; But their memberships could be delayed for one year if they fail to make key reforms ; However, he warned he would not hesitate to recommend delaying both countries entries by one year if they proved unprepared; The accession treaty does not absolutely guarantee the countries EU membership in 2007. If either country fails to meet the criteria, their accession could be postponed until 2008. The assumption in all these excerpts is that Romania (and Bulgaria, for that matter) may very well not gain access to the EU. This assumption, even if sometimes marked by low modality (could), almost has the function of reassuring readers: Dont worry, the EU will take all the necessary steps so that the two candidates may be ready to join our community. They are not members of the Union, even if they sign the treaty and its very likely that they wont become members of the Union in 2007. The last assumption is emphasised by the journalists repeatedly reminding the readers of Romanias and Bulgarias failure to become members in 2004. Moreover, the second sentence in the news story announcing the signing of the treaty runs as follows: The treaties contain a safeguard clause delaying entry for a year if either country fails to meet EU standards, which assumes, again, that Romania and Bulgaria may not become members of the Union after all. In the same news story, the BBCs scepticism is reinforced through the voice of one of its representatives: The BBCs Nick Thorpe says many governments in western Europe fear an influx of Romanians and Bulgarians and may yet find reasons for delaying full membership. If a positive approach had been chosen, Nick Thorpe would have mentioned that the two countries must also have had supporters among European politicians (otherwise the treaty would not have been signed). Negative evaluation prevails on other levels: Romania and Bulgaria are described as poorer than all 25 existing EU member states or as potentially the poorest member states; Romania is also seen as still lagging behind, and the few instances of positive evaluation are downplayed by means of text organisation (they are always followed by conjunctions and adverbs like but, however, which introduce negative evaluation and pessimistic assumptions).
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Assumption and high modality are used extensively to express the feeling of distrust in the two countries potential to succeed: For the next year and a half, both countries will be kept under close watch (if close watch is necessary, the countries are not trustworthy); Romania is required to reform its justice and law enforcement, club industrial state subsidies and improve environmental records. It must also secure rights for its Roma community. (assumption: Romania has not registered progress in many important areas and it is no longer given a choice; it must fulfil the conditions or it is out of the game); The reforms that Bulgaria and Romania have already passed must now be put into practice. Courts will have to prove that people receive a fair trial and anti-corruption authorities will have to show that no one is beyond their reach. (assumptions: the reforms have not been put into practice; people do not receive a fair trial; anti-corruption authorities still fail to do their job). Such evaluation predominantly negative of the two countries (the focus has been on Romania, but Bulgaria is in the same situation) which have signed the EU entry treaties may only encourage readers to believe that the new members should not be welcomed in the Union. It is not only surprising, but also paradoxical, that the BBC discourse has not changed for the better in terms of evaluation since December 2004, considering that the countries have been allowed to sign the treaty, which means that they have registered some progress. The main conclusion at the end of the analysis is that the BBC could have used the same discourse, with very few alterations, if the two countries had been denied access to the EU. This perspective on the events can only make BBC readers more reluctant to accept Romania and Bulgaria than they might already be for various other reasons.
References
Fairclough, N. 1989. Language and Power. London and New York: Longman. Fairclough, N. 2003. Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge. Fowler, R. 1991. Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London and New York: Routledge. Halliday, M. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edition). London: Edward Arnold. Hoey, M. 2000. Persuasive Rhetoric in Linguistics: A Stylistic Study of Some Features of the Language of Noam Chomsky in Evaluation in Text: authorial stance and
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the construction of discourse. S. Hunston and G. Thompson (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 2838. Thompson, G. and S. Hunston. 2000. Evaluation: An Introduction in Evaluation in Text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse. S. Hunston and G. Thompson (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 16.
Texts
EU backs Bulgaria and Romania bid in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4440755.stm [2005, April 13]. EU candidates sign entry treaty in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4480677.stm [2005, April 25]. Lungescu, O. EU backing for Romania elections in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4063045.stm [2004, December 2]. Lungescu, O. Tough rebirth for Romania in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4072271.stm [2004, December 6] Lungescu, O. EU to approve two new countries in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4439221.stm [2005, April 13]. Repa, J. Analysis: New Era for Romania? in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4093155.stm [2004, December 13]. Romania welcomes historic EU deal in BBC News [Online]. Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4081703.stm [2004, December 9] Who wants the EU? in Der Spiegel [Online. English Site]. Available: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,355485,00.html [2005, May 9].
A TYPOLOGY OF PSYCH NOMINALS IN ENGLISH

CAMELIA BEJAN
Ovidius University of Constana
The examination of the properties of psych nominals has raised many questions. Thus, for instance, it has been noticed that Object Experiencer verbs do not nominalize according to the expected pattern: the subject in the genitive phrase and the object in an of-phrase: (1)
Mary enjoys the game. Marys enjoyment of the game. Teenagers annoy their parents. *Teenagers annoyance of their parents (Subject Experiencer verb) SN(of)O (Object Experiencer verb) *SN(of)O
To account for such an anomaly, we will explore the argument structure of psych nominals. We will compare word order in psych nominalizations with the Subject Object order in non-psych nominalizations with a transitive base. Our hypothesis is that differences between the two types of nominalizations can be put down to the properties of the subclasses of psych verbs. We will sketch a tentative typology of psych nominals in English based on two criteria: word order and verbal sources. We rely on three important contributions to the study of nominalizations: Valois (1991), who accounts for the projection of arguments in the syntactic derivation of deverbal nominals, Grimshaw (1990), who analyses the argument structure of derived nominals from a lexicalist viewpoint, and Pesetsky (1995), who formulates a morphologic hypothesis for the derivation of psych nominals. The paper is organized in four sections. First we will outline the theoretical framework adopted, then we will examine word order in nominalizations related to the two classes of psychological verbs: Subject Experiencer and Object Experiencer verbs. We will conclude by suggesting a tentative typology of psych nominals.
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1. Theoretical background
The inheritance of argument structure has been studied extensively with respect to derived nominals. The general issue is whether derived nominals show in their ability to take arguments any systematic relation with their related verb or whether their behaviour is chaotic. Relatively recent literature on the topic has provided a better understanding of the structure of nominalizations. Word order facts in nominalizations of transitive verbs have been accounted for by Valois (1991) in terms of the theory of Government and Binding. He has shown that the projection of arguments in the DP is similar to that in the VP Subjects in nominals are associated with the external argu. ments of the base verbs, while Objects in nominal configurations correspond to the internal arguments of the base verbs. The similarity between the clausal and the nominal structure has been further supported by Giorgi & Longobardi (1991) who have argued that just as the verbal arguments are projected hierarchically onto syntactic structures (for instance, the Agent is structurally more prominent than the Theme or the Patient), so are the DPinternal arguments structurally organized along a hierarchy: possessor > agent > theme. Thus, a simple transitive verb such as examine would yield the following patterns of nominalizations: (2)
The doctor examined the patient. a. b. c. d. e. f. the doctors examination of the patient the examination of the patient by the doctor the examination of the patient the patients examination *the examination of the doctor *the doctors examination SN(of)O NObyS N(of)O ON *N(of) S *SN
The Subject of the initial sentence appears in a prenominal genitive position in (2a) or in an adjunct by-phrase in (2b). The prenominal genitive position can be occupied either by an Agent or by a Theme (2a,d). However, the Agent cannot normally occur in an of-phrase as in (2e). The presence of the Object of-phrase is obligatory for an Agent to appear in prenominal position (2f).
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A supporter of the lexicalist approach to deverbal nouns, Grimshaw (1990) claims that there are two types of nominals: event and result nominals. Event nouns obligatorily have an argument structure as part of their lexical representation: they assign specific thematic roles, just like verbs. Result nouns do not take real arguments, which bear specific thematic roles, but rather a kind of semantic participants that are more loosely associated with them. Taking as a point of departure word order in nominalizations of nonpsych transitive verbs, we will examine the various possible linear orderings of the nominal, the subject and the object in psych nominalizations
2. Nominals related to Object Experiencer verbs

Most nominals which appear to be related to ObjExp verbs (amaze, amuse, astonish, bore, etc.) take an Object-phrase preceded by an idiosyncratic preposition: amazement (at/by), amusement (at), appalment (at), astonishment (by/at), astoundment (at/of), bafflement (by), boredom (at/with), depression (at), disappointment (at/with/about), discomfiture (with), disconcertion (at), (dis)satisfaction (with), embarrassment (about), enchantment (with), enragement (at), excitement (at/with), exhilaration (at), fascination (with/for), frustration (with/at), irritation (at), (dis)pleasure (at/ with), puzzlement (at/about), satisfaction (with), stupefaction (at), etc.: (3)
I dont know how to describe my astoundment at the lack of comprehension of history. The report indicates US travelers satisfaction with hotels. The photo shows students exhilaration at graduation.
The presence of the preposition indicates that these examples are actually derived from the adjectival predicates as in (4a) and not from the causative psych verbs as illustrated below in (4b): (4)
a.I am astounded at the lack of comprehension of history. US travellers are satisfied with the hotels. Students are exhilarated at graduation.
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b. The lack of comprehension of history astounds me. The hotels satisfy the US travelers. Graduation exhilarates students.
Other experiencer derived nominals such as amusement, boredom, puzzlement behave similarly, i.e. the syntactic realization of their arguments resembles that of the adjectival counterparts be amused at, be bored with, be puzzled at, be vexed at rather than that of the verbs amuse, bore, puzzle, vex: (5)
The listeners amusement at/ boredom with the reminiscences of their school days. SN PO The listeners are amused at/ bored with the reminiscences. The reminiscences of their school days amused/ bored the listeners. The journalists vexation/ puzzlement at the news The journalists were vexed/ puzzled at the news. The news vexed the journalist. SN PO
Furthermore, Zubizaretta (1987) shows that not only derived nominals but even basic nominals, such as terror and horror, pattern more like their adjectival predicates to be terrified, to be horrified and not like the denominal verbs horrify and terrify: (6)
The viewers horror at/ *of the war pictures. The defendants terror at / *of incarceration. The viewers were horrified at the war pictures. The defendant was terrified at incarceration. The war pictures horrified the viewers. Incarceration for life terrified the defendant. SN PO
In the case of psych nouns with no corresponding verb, this relationship between the nominal, for instance aversion to, indignation at/ over/ about and the adjectival predicate be averse to, be indignant at/ over/ about, is undeniable:
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(7)
Criticism of the campaignalso included a very strong aversion by many students to the idea of one-party rule. N byS PO Many students are averse to the idea of one-party rule.
The evidence given so far clearly points to the fact that such nominals correspond to adjectival predicates and not to verbal ones. Pesetsky (1995) formulates a morphological hypothesis for the derivation of nominals related to ObjExp verbs. He explains that nouns like agitation, annoyance, amusement or surprise are not nominalizations of the causative predicates agitate, annoy, amuse, and surprise. Rather, they are nominalizations of corresponding non-causative predicates. Thus, annoyance does not mean the process of making annoyed, but the state of being annoyed. Amusement cannot refer to something amusing someone, but it refers to the state of being amused. He suggests that both causative verbs and nominals are derived from SubjExp bound roots. Thus, the zero-causative morpheme is attached to SubjExp verbal roots to derive ObjExp verbs and the nominalizing affixes are attached to SubjExp verbal roots to derive nominals. Pesetsky (1995: 208) further argues that there are no causative nominalizations related to any of these verbs: (8)
a. *The exams continual agitation of Bill was silly. b. *Our constant annoyance of Mary got on our nerves. d. *His looks constant embarrassment of John was unnecessary.
In order to explain why nominals related to ObjExp verbs have such non-causative semantics, Pesetsky starts from Meyers (1984) who made a strong claim, known as Meyers generalization, about zero-derived forms: Zero-derived words do not permit the affixation of further derivational morphemes. Applied to psych verbs, his generalization indicates that when a phonological string such as distress is assigned two syntactic categories (verb and noun), only one member of the pair allows the affixation of derivational morphemes. Thus, the noun distress yields the adjective distressful, but the verb distress does not yield *distressment or *distression. Meyers accounted for the data by assuming that one member of the pair is always zero-derived from the root represented by the other member. The
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derived member does not allow further derivation by affixes. Pesetsky argues for the existence of a zero causative morpheme CAUS, which, when added to a root, blocks further derivation. Thus for the suffixes forming abstract nouns: -ment (amazement, amusement, astonishment, etc.) and ance (abhorrence, annoyance, disturbance, etc.), the structure of occurring non-causative and non-occurring causative uses is given in Pesetsky (1995: (245), (246)) repeated below: (9)
a. [[ annoy V] ance N] b. *[[[ annoy V] CAUS V] ance N] a. [[ amuse V] ment N] b. *[[[ amuse V] CAUS V] ment N]
If these structures are correct, then the impossibility of causative (b) examples is explained as an instance of the attachment of the suffixes ment and -ance to an already suffixed form. Unlike ment and ance, nominalizations in -tion/-sion (depression, intimidation, irritation, etc.) may attach to previously suffixed bases, but the base must be Latinite (depress, irritate, intimidate, etc.). The derivation for non-causative and causative uses of agitation and depression would be: (10)
a. [[ agitate V] ion N] b.*[[[ agitate V] CAUS V] ion N] a. [[ depress V] ion N] b.*[[[ depress V] CAUS V] ion N]
If CAUS is [-Latinite], then the impossibility of the causative examples (b) is obvious. The nominalizers ure (displeasure, pleasure) and -doom (boredom) behave like ment and ance. Finally, a number of ObjExp psychological predicates are related to nominals via zero derivation (bother, cheer, fright, puzzle, shame, surprise, worry, etc.). As expected, these nominals allow the affixation of derivational morphemes to form adjectives: cheerful, frightful, shameful, worrisome, etc. but the zero-derived verbs do not allow derivation by suffixes: *botherment, *cheerment,*frightment, etc.
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Pesetskys morphological hypothesis has been formulated to allow for a uniform derivation of all psych nominals from Subj Exp verbal roots. We believe that Pesetskys proposal is not tenable for a set of psych nominals related to ObjExp verbs. We will show that there are a few psych nominals related to agentive uses of ObjExp verbs such as entertainment, intimidation, humiliation, discomfiture, etc. which can occur in causative nominalizations, i.e. they are allowed to appear in nominalizations with the former clausal subject in the genitive phrase, and the Object-phrase headed by the preposition of typical of nominalizations with a transitive base: (11)
a. The jester entertained the children AGENT EXPERIENCER The jesters entertainment of the children b. The lawyer intimidated the witness. The lawyers intimidation of the witness
SN(of)O
SN(of)O
These psych nominals can appear in nominal configurations with a passive structure, in which the Experiencer Object occurs in a genitive phrase and the Agent in a by-phrase: (12)
The elders of the churches discomfited them. Their discomfiture by the elders of these churches ON byS
The Beatles baffled my parents. I can remember my parents bafflement by the Beatles ON byS
Occasionally the Object phrase is extraposed due to its length thus allowing the Agent by-phrase to occur in adjacent postnominal position: (13)
The intimidation by the authorities of a number of human rights defenders N byS (of)O The discomfiture by the people of Austin of the military company N byS (of)O
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3. Nominals related to Subject Experiencer verbs

Few nominals are related to transitive SubjExp verbs (abhor, adore, detest, etc.) or prepositional intransitive SubjExp verbs (care about, fear for, etc.) a. Nominals related to transitive SubjExp verbs (abhorrence, adoration, detestation, enjoyment, relishment, resentment, etc.) appear in nominalizations with the expected word order: the former clausal subject in the genitive phrase in pre- or postnominal position and the Object-phrase headed by the preposition of: (14) a. He abhors flattery. His abhorrence of flattery.
SN (of )O
The Prince detested modernist architecture The Princes detestation of modernist architecture SN (of)O He relished natural beauty. His relishment of natural beauty SN (of)O b. The force of the Amendment lies in the abhorrence of the founding fathers of standing armies NS (of)O The psych nominal adoration frequently occurs in a passive structure with the Object in prenominal genitive position and the Experiencer in a byphrase: (15)
The Magi adored Christ Christs adoration by the Magi The media suddenly adored Gore. Gores sudden adoration by the media ON byS
ON byS
Even basic, non-derived nominals such as: desire, dislike, dread, fear, love, etc. can occur in a similar pattern: (16)
The refugees constantly fear attacks.
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Ann loves literature. Her mother dislikes housework. The refugees constant fear of attacks. Anns love of literature (music, arts, books, etc.) Her mothers dislike of housework SN (of)O SN (of)O
The subject of such nominals has been alternatively argued to be either an adjunct (Zubizaretta, 1987), or an argument-adjunct (Grimshaw, 1990). Zubizaretta claims that stative verbs (like desire, fear, love) do not have a derived nominal counterpart with a predicate-argument structure. The genitive phrase in the specifier is an adjunct that bears the relation of Possessor with respect to N (as in the example: Johns book). Grimshaw partly agrees with Zubizarettas interpretation of the status of poss subject of the nominal. She admits that the genitive phrase behaves like an adjunct but, at the same time, it resembles an argument because it conveys information about positions in the argument-structure of the predicate. This leads her to the assumption that the poss phrase has an intermediate status, that of an argument-adjunct, which is licensed by the argument-structure. Both proposals correlate the status of the genitive phrase with its optional occurrence. On the other hand, the prepositional phrase of literature in postnominal position in (17) has been interpreted by Zubizaretta as an adjunct, which specifies or restricts the denotation of the noun love. Moreover, when the stative experiencer nouns take a benefactive complement, as in (18), the for-phrase cannot be analysed as an argument inherited from the verbs love, desire, hate as indicated by the non-existence of the verbal counterparts (19): (18)
Anns love for her children (her husband, her family) SN PO Johns desire for comfort and protection (justice, freedom, power) Trumans dislike for communism
(19)
*Ann loves for her children *John desired for comfort and protection *Hamlet hates for his uncle *Truman disliked for communism.
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The prepositional phrase must therefore be analysed as an adjunct complement. In contrast to Zubizarettas proposal, Grimshaw argues that stative psych verbs as in (16) actually have argument-taking nominals as in (17). She starts from the assumption that argument structure is actually structured by relations of prominence along two dimensions, namely, the thematic hierarchy, and the causal hierarchy. The argument which is most prominent on both dimensions is the external argument. According to her theory, nominalization means the suppression of the external argument. As a consequence, all verbs that have an external argument available for suppression will nominalize. By examining the interaction between these two hierarchies for a stative psych verb such as fear, she suggests that the Experiencer is maximally prominent both thematically and aspectually. As a result, the verb has an external argument to be suppressed in nominalizations. Therefore, verbs like fear are expected to have argument-taking nominals: (20)
The refugees fear of attacks/ reprisals Johns fear of failure The peoples fear of a possible war
The basic difference as far as the argument structure of nouns and verbs is concerned is that subjects of clauses are obligatory, while subjects of NPs are optional. b. Since prepositional SubjExp verbs are related to nominals via zeroderivation, they do not allow further derivation (*fearment). The nonderived nominals take an idiosyncratic preposition: care about, fear for, gloat over, hanker after, lust after/ for sth., worry about, etc.. The lack of derived nominals is compensated for by ing forms: yearning for, craving for, longing for, hankering after, etc.) as in (21b) below: (21)
a. Her fear for her safety was overwhelming. She fears for her safety. SN PO
b. The story gives a sensitive account of Pauls innocent yearning for love and affection. Above all Paul yearned for love and affection.
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The orphans craving for love and acceptance impressed the visitors. Theyve always craved for love and acceptance. She felt a great longing for the sights, sounds of home. She longed for the sights of home.
4. A typology of psych nominals

The examination of the argument structure of psych nominals has shown that: psych nominals related to agentive ObjExp verbs and transitive SubjExp verbs appear in the nominal configuration SN(of)O, typical of nominalizations with a transitive base. In contrast, non-agentive ObjExp verbs and prepositional SubjExp verbs do not yield nominalizations. psych nominals corresponding to adjectival psych predicates take an idiosyncratic preposition to introduce the Object in the structure SN PO. These observations concerning word order in psych nominalizations enable us to propose a typology of psych derived nominals in English in correlation with their sources of derivation:
structure nominalization The clowns entertainment of the SN(of)O children Marys enjoyment of the game Marys annoyance with the report SN PO ----------prepositional SubjExp verbs source agentive ObjExp verbs+acc transitive SubjExp verbs adjectival predicates
What is common for all acceptable structures with psych nominals is the fact that only the Experiencer is allowed in the genitive position.
Conclusion
In this paper I have discussed word order in psych nominal configurations with a view to outlining a typology of psych nominals in English. Word
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order in psych nominalizations has been compared with the Subject-Object order in non-psych nominalizations with a transitive base. The irregularities encountered in the structure of psych nominalizations have been put down to the lack of homogeneity of their sources: verbal or adjectival.
References
Giorgi, Alessandra, G. Longobardi 1991. The Syntax of Noun Phrases: Configuration, Parameters and Empty Categories. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Meyers, S. 1984. Zero derivation and inflection, in MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 7: MIT Workshop in Morphology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.. Pesetsky, D. 1995. Zero Syntax, Experiencers and Cascades. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,. Valois, D. 1991. The Internal Syntax of DPs, dissertation. Los Angeles: University of California. Zubizaretta, Maria Luisa. 1987. Levels of Representation in the Lexicon and in the Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
A NEW TYPOLOGY OF ENGLISH AND SERBIAN NOMINAL COMPOUNDS

SANJA KRIMER - GABOROVIC
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Subotica, University of Novi Sad
The aim of this paper is twofold: to elucidate the phenomena of linguistic productivity and creativity in English and Serbian compounds, and, mirroring the title, to offer a new, syntacticosemantic, typology of English and Serbian nominal compounds. In order to achieve this, the paper is organized in the following way: some general considerations are dealt with in Part 1; productivity and creativity are the focus of Part 2; Part 3 explores criteria serving to distinguish an endocentric binominal compound from a parallel syntactic group; Part 4 offers a tabular classification of English and Serbian nominal compounds; and in Part 5 the main points of the paper are summarized.
1. Introduction
One important thing to bear in mind when dealing with compounds is that they are derived words: (1) in accordance with the wordformation rules of a particular language, and (2) analogously to the already existing compounds; e.g. seascape, being a relatively new compound, has been derived analogously to cloudscape, skyscrape, waterscape, dreamscape, winterscape. Admittedly, the majority of newly coined English and Serbian lexemes evolve from the application of some creative and innovative combination patterns to the already existing lexical material, i.e. through the process of lexical additions, hereafter compounding, with a prototypical compound being the result of putting together two bases which are morphologically analysable and semantically transparent or non-idiomatized (cf. Taylor 1989 for a definition of prototype). High productivity represents a distinctive property of the compounding process, seen as a major lexical device, alongside affixation and conversion, for a more economical expression of the communicative needs of the speakers of a language. As Bauer (1983: 18; 1988: 57), Prc ic (1997b: 10) and
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Klajn (2002: 10) state, a wordformational rule is known as productive if it is synchronically usable in the creation of new lexemes. Put differently, and following Bauer (1988: 5960, 645), the rule add a derivational suffix -th to form a noun out of an adjective used to be highly productive, e.g. warm: warmth, long: length, deep: depth, etc., but now it is no longer such, e.g. brown: ?brownth or grey: ?greyth. Another example of an unproductive linguistic rule is change a to e to make a plural noun, nowadays valid only for man/men and woman/women. Furthermore, according to a widely held view, we must distinguish productivity, most obvious in the production of new forms, from creativity referring to the meaning extensions of the existing forms. In other words, when creativity is at work, the resources of a language are extended in a motivated, but unpredictable (non-rule governed), way. It is very important to differentiate compounds from parallel syntactic groups, since compounds are commonly perceived as syntactico-semantic compressions or reduced underlying syntagmas, which correlate with full (explicit) syntagmas, sentences (cf. Lees 1960; Marchand 1965/66a,b; Kirova 1993; Vukic evic 1995). An apt illustration of the phenomenon is the highly pro ductive English endocentric compounds of the binominal type, such as tear gas, root vegetable and bubble bath, where endocentric compounds as a whole denote hyponyms (subordinate elements) of their grammatical and semantic heads. As a result, the above mentioned N + N compounds can be expanded into respective underlying sentences relying on the Recoverably Deletable Predicates, first introduced by Levi (1978), and embracing the following: cause, have, make, use, be, in, for, from and about. In short, these covert predicates allow us to interpret the compounded strings of the specified nature in terms of the following explicit syntagmas or full sentences: (1) cause: tear gas a gas causes tears; (2) have: root vegetable a vegetable has a root; (3) make: bubble bath a bath makes bubbles; (4) use: police dog the police use dogs (to catch criminals); (5) be: fig tree a fig is a tree; (6) in: country doctor a doctor (works) in the country; (7) for: army camp a camp for an army; (8) from: mint tea a tea (made) from mint; (9) about: dream diary a diary about ones dreams;
2. Productivity and Creativity of the Compounding Process

As stated above, compounding is a productive word-formation process because it is regularly and systematically used in the production of new lexical
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units, which explains the existence of a large number of compounds in presentday English and, to a lesser extent, Serbian. In the words of Lyons (1977: 76), productivity is also commonly interpreted as the ability of language users to produce (encode) and understand (decode) an indefinitely large number of higher linguistic units. Nevertheless, it has likewise been pointed out that productivity must be distinguished from creativity, seen as the native speakers ability to extend the language in a motivated, but unpredictable (nonrule governed) way. When productivity is at work, new forms are produced, while creativity denotes the meaning extensions of the existing forms. Creativity is possibly most efficiently illustrated by metaphorical and metonymical extensions, for example gold mine, referring to a business or activity that produces large profits, or crocodile tears, false tears. As Kastovsky (1986: 5856, 5934) observes, it is essential that we also differentiate morphological (lexical) productivity, which produces new lexemes (compounds) from syntactic (grammatical) productivity, which produces new sentences and/or new grammatical forms of a lexeme. Consequently, we must be aware of nonce formations as well as hypothetically possible yet non-existent compounds, such as (1) ?windowbell and (2) ?mouseleaf, which could be interpreted as (1) a bell near the window of a house that you ring to let people inside know you are there, and (2) a leaf that mice jump on, or a leaf devouring mice, respectively. In Bauers words (1988: 5960, 645), nonce formations illustrate individual productivity as opposed to societal productivity, with newly coined lexemes being adopted and shared by the entire language community and eventually gaining the status of dictionary entries. A few relatively recent examples of societal productivity are as follows: liposuction, mouse mat, shopaholic, e-mail, mountain biking, etc. Both Leech (1981: 212) and Prc ic (1997b: 11) point out that morphological (lexical) productivity is always restricted to some degree, which is due to the fact that a particular word-formation process (in this case compounding), does not apply whenever and wherever possible. What is more, numerous well-formed compounds are instantly discarded (e.g. nonce formations), even though they have been produced in line with the currently active compounding rules. Another important issue to bear in mind here is that a common principle behind morphological (lexical) and syntactic (grammatical) productivity is the ranking order, namely higher units consist of lower ones, which means that sentences are derived by combining word-forms, whereas lexemes (compounds) by putting together two bases. An important difference between the two, however, stems from the principle of recursive-
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ness, i.e. while a single sentence very rarely gets repeated (except in case of quotations and proverbs), a newly coined compound slowly gains entry to the lexicon and is relatively often used again. Finally, it must be stressed that at the level of the lexicon, perceived as a continuum embracing different lexemes, here compounds, illustrating high, restricted and low productivity, idiomatized compounds such as ladybird and pineapple are of low productivity, in contrast to some indicative examples of high productivity, as is the case with binominal compounds such as fruit cake, fruit sugar and fruit market, on the one hand, and music box, tool box and metal box, on the other. Admittedly, here fruit and box represent highly productive compound elements, the former occupying the modifier position, and the latter that of the head. In between the two poles of the continuum, there are numerous examples with various degrees of restricted productivity.
3. Nominal Compounds and Parallel Syntactic Groups

We have already mentioned that compounds are built as syntagmas and can therefore be explained with their underlying sentences, deep structures. In consequence, pedal boat and church tower, can be interpreted as a boat needs pedals (to push on) and a church has a tower, respectively. Bearing this transformational approach in mind, Marchand (1969: 21) states that a clear morphological distinction between compounds and parallel syntactic groups can be drawn from a different word order: we need only consider the compounds iron-grey and sky-blue in contrast to the parallel syntagmas grey iron and blue sky, respectively. The same holds for the Serbian compounds limunzut (yellow like lemon) and zumancezut (yellow like yolk), morphologically differentiated from the parallel syntactic groups zuti limun (yellow lemon) and zuto zumance (yellow yolk), respec tively. Another criterion pertains to the presence or absence of an inflectional morpheme in inflecting languages such as Serbian. Here, the compound Crvenkapa (Little Red Riding Hood) can be clearly morphologically isolated from the syntactic group crvena kapa (red cap), due to the absence of an inflectional morpheme. Similarly, the distinction between the compound novovernik, a person who has recently accepted a particular religion or belief (also, a convert), and the parallel syntactic group novi vernik, a new member of a religious group, stems from the presence in the former of the
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inflectional (linking) morpheme [ o ]. Finally, compounds and parallel syntactic groups can be distinguished on the basis of a different stress pattern, as is the case with woman doctor, a doctor treating ill women, and glass case, a china case, a showcase, in contrast to woman doctor, a female doctor, and glass case, a case made of glass. Nevertheless, according to Warren (1978: 312), Bauer (1983: 1045; 1998: 70) and Matthews (1991: 98), this last criterion is seen as rather unreliable. Matthews, although a native English speaker, openly admits that he is often uncertain about how to stress compounds like milk shake or milk shake, office party or office party, teddy bear or teddy bear. An additional confusion, in his words, is created by varieties concerning British and American English stress patterns. It is necessary to point out here, however, that the relevance of stress pattern is unquestionable in Serbian. Thus, stress pattern serves as the criterion for morphological isolation of the compounds ` c uvrkuc bot. a, houseleek, Begrad, the capital of Serbia, and zldelo, a crime, from the parallel syntagmas ` r kuc someone guarding somebody elses house, c va a, b` grd, a white city, and zlo d` eo ` ` elo, a misdeed, respectively. ` ` The discussion so far brings us to a tabular classification of English and Serbian nominal compounds, which will be the focus of attention in the following section.
4. Tabular Classification of English and Serbian Nominal Compounds

We have provided a description of the distinction between language productivity and language creativity, on the one hand, and, on the other, have listed criteria relevant for establishing a distinction between compounds and parallel syntactic groups, a necessary introduction into the forthcoming discussion on the tabular classification of English and Serbian nominal compounds. It must be stressed that the classification of English nominal compounds provided in Table 1, has been inspired by Bauer (1983: 2027), while Table 2, reviewing Serbian nominal compounds, with some minor modifications has been taken over from Vukic (1995: 13373). evic Both classifications stem from basic semantic relationships and morphosyntactic criteria. It is also true that when dealing with the semantic nature of nominal compounds in the two languages and their resulting categorization into exocentric, endocentric, appositional and copulative com-
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pounds, English seems to prefer endocentric and exocentric compounds, while Serbian favours only those that are exocentric.
Table 1
ENGLISH NOMINAL COMPOUNDS

classification
(1) noun + noun
semantic relationship
endocentric
Syntactic relationship
gerund + noun o the pattern can be interpreted as a combination of: (a) noun + noun (a more probable solution) (b) verb + noun proper noun + common noun (a) semantic relationship is identical to the one between two common nouns (b) a process or entity is named after a person
examples
fishing rod shooting star
productivity
high (the most numerous subgrouping of nominal compounds)
two common nouns exocentric appositional (the first element marks the sex of a person) copulative two common nouns two common nouns
(a) Wellington airport o demonstrates a locative relationship parallel to, e.g. city museum (b) David Hume Tower Chomsky adjunction bullet train pigtail skinhead
restricted restricted
(2) verb + noun
endocentric
exocentric
woman doctor boy-friend pronoun + noun she-goat he-cheetah two common nouns jazz-rock owner-occupier (a) two common nouns panty-hose (b) two proper nouns Cadbury-Schweppes RowntreeMackintosh Bosnia-Herzegovina hovercraft the nominal element is not the OD (direct object) play pit of the verb cut-throat the nominal element is pickpocket the OD (direct object) of the verb; this type is commonly used for denoting people; an example of non human denotata is the trade name Xpel-air
low
high
marginally productive
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(3) noun + verb endocentric common noun + verb; it is arguable whether the second element is a noun or a verb it is arguable whether a given adjective + noun collocation is a compound or simply a noun phrase; adjectives that can occur here are mostly monosyllabic and of Germanic origin most commonly are hyphenated there is possibly an overlap between these and those in (5), since here the adverb now may also be interpreted as an adjective showing time represent nominalizations of phrasal verbs, and it is arguable that these are not strictly compounds at all; a number of the formations are not derived from phrasal verbs (marked with a star) the head element is initial and the modifier is a phrase or sentence the head element is final and the modifier is a phrase or sentence nosebleed sunshine
very low
(4) verb + verb endocentric (5) adjective + exocentric noun
make-believe highroad hothouse quicksand fast-food hard-stuff software
non productive rather high
(6) particle + noun (7) adverb + noun
endocentric
endocentric
after-hours in-crowd off-season now generation
rather high
very restricted
(8) verb + particle
exocentric
(9) particle + verb
drop-out drawback fallout* teach-in* output
rather high
low
(10) phrase compounds
endocentric
son-in-law lady-in-waiting jack-in-the-box
non productive
exocentric
copulative
what-do-you-thinkmovement a-pain-in-stomachgesture syntactically a very forget-me-not heterogeneous group has-been I.O.U (< I owe you) these seem the least like whisky-and-soda compounds and the pepper-and-salt most like syntactic phrases; the conjunction and creates the difference between these and true dvandva compounds
high
low
restricted
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Table 2
SERBIAN NOMINAL COMPOUNDS

classification
(1) nominal formative + linking morpheme [-o-]/[-e-]/[-a-]/ [-u-] + noun
semantic relationship
mostly exocentric, just a few endocentric examples
syntactic relationship
(a) nominal formative, either the leftmost or the rightmost element, equals the noun (nom.sg) by which it is motivated
examples
nos[-o-]rog, rhinoceros kit[-o-]lov, whaling zmij[-o-]lovac, snake hunter min[-o-]baca , mortar grlobolja, sore throat vinograd, vineyard udotvorac, miracle/wonder wo rker
productivity
high
(1.1) noun + + noun
(2) adjectival formative + linking morpheme [-o-] + noun
(2.1) adjectival formative + + noun
(b) nominal formative (nom. sg. n.) ending in [o] + a linking morpheme [o-], the two are then reduced to just one [o], which is consequently considered a linking morpheme the leftmost constituent should be regarded as a noun (nom. sg.), instead of a nominal formative + a linking morpheme [-a-], due to the existence of the compounds such as: brzinometar, speedometer (cf. brzina, speed) vatrogasac, fireman (cf. vatra, fire), knjigopisac, novelist (cf. knjiga, book) adjectival formative may equal the adjective (nom. m. sg.) by which it is motivated; it resembles the adjective (nom. sg. n.), because of the linking morpheme [-o], the head element always being a noun (nom. sg.) compounds of this kind are of the syntagmatic nature (a descriptive adjective + a noun (nom. sg.))
babadevojka, spinster bubamara, ladybird bubavaba, cockroach
low, yet on the increase due to the English influence
belokost (cf. beo), ivory (cf. white) zlovolja (cf. zao), sullenness, moodiness zlodelo, crime
rather high
vodenkonj, hippopotamus zelenkada, (bot.) narcissus ur evdan, St. George's Day
very low
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(3) verb + noun exocentric these are also known as the imperative compounds, since the verbal modifier in the 2nd p. sg. may be regarded as the imperative verb: compounds of the kind most often preserve the accent of the imperative through which they have been motivated, e.g. laipaukovi, (zool.) Phalangidae sko ibube, (zool.) Elateridae striibube, (zool.) Cerambycidae modifier is a cardinal, ordinal or collective numeral; head noun is in nom. sg., with the exception of four nouns in nom. pl.
visibaba, restricted (bot.) snowdrop ispi aa, drunkard gulikoa, oppressor, tyrant
(4) numeral + linking morpheme [-o-] + noun
mostly exocentric, just a few endocentric examples
(4.1) numeral + noun (no linking morpheme)
jedn[-o-]rog, (zool.) rhinoceros deset[-o-]boj, decathlon dv[-o-]papkari, (zool.) cloven hoofed ruminants, Artiodactyla prv[-o-]svetenik, archpriest (a) modifier is always a sedmero-kut, collective numeral ending heptagon in [o] dvoje-noge, Diplopode (b) modifier is always the numeral sto (a hundred) stogodinjica, centennial, centenary stoglav, a hundred headed nita ovjek, good for nothing samokrv, murder svojevolja, wilfulness, stubborness
restricted
(5) pronoun + noun
exocentric
head noun is always in nom. sg.
very low
We will conclude this section with a few additional comments on the Serbian nominal compounds. First of all, a number of compounds can be labelled both endocentric and exocentric. Thus, e.g. brodogradnja has two meanings: (1) shipbuilding (the endocentric meaning), and (2) naval
286
architecture (the exocentric meaning: the compound as a whole does not represent hyponyms of their grammatical but rather of some unexpressed semantic heads). Similarly, kitolovac, whaler, can refer either to a (1) person hunting whales (the endocentric meaning), or (2) ship hunting whales (the exocentric meaning). Another important point that must be addressed here concerns binominal Serbian compounds and the mechanism of a nondeclined noun being used as a modifier in a N + N structure. The mechanism has been latent in the language for long, mainly as a result of Turkish, German, and Hungarian influence, examples being the following: (1) krstabarjak, a flag with a cross, sahat-kula, a clock tower, (2) vekorpa, a laundry basket, generaltab, general headquarters, (3) remek delo, a masterpiece. Other examples of this kind are commonly found in the Serbian folklore tales and poems, such as lepota-devojka, a beauty (girl), biser-grana, a pearly branch. It must be emphasized, however, that a more extensive use of the mechanism has recently been triggered off by
` a growing English influence on Serbian, e.g. covekmoljac, a mothman,
flertveza, a flirting relationship, which is logical enough if we bear in mind that the N + N pattern is highly productive in English.
5. Summing up
This paper has attempted to put forward one, basically syntacticosemantic, way of analysing English and Serbian nominal compounds. Also discussed has been productivity (spanning from high, restricted, to low) for each relevant subgroup of the kind. For better clarity and precision, creativity of compounding as a major word-formation process has been treated as well. Finally, bearing in mind that compounds can be considered as syntactico-semantic compressions, i.e. reduced underlying syntagmas, which correlate with full (explicit) syntagmas, and/or sentences, the paper represents a critical evaluation of the criteria serving to isolate a compound from a parallel syntactic group. The evaluation, offered primarily with respect to highly productive English endocentric compositions of the N + N type, build around the following criteria: (1) a different word order, (2) the presence or absence of an inflectional morpheme in inflecting languages such as Serbian, and (3) a different stress pattern.
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Notes
1. The paper is based largely on Sections 2.3 2.6 of my MA dissertation entitled Endocentri?ne imenic ke slozenice u engleskom jeziku i njihovi prevodni ekvivalenti u srpskom ` [Endocentric Nominal Compounds in English and their Serbian Translation Equivalents] (Krimer Gaborovic 2004).
References
Bauer, L. 1983. English WordFormation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bauer, L. 1988. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bauer, L. 1998. When is a Sequence of Two Nouns a Compound in English? in English Language Linguistics 2 (1). 6586. Kastovsky, D. 1986. The Problem of Productivity in Word Formation in Linguistics 24/3. 586600. ` Kirova, M. 1993. O nekim vrstama srpskohrvatskih imenickih slozenica [On Some Types of Serbo-Croatian Nominal Compounds] in Na jezik [Our Language] XXIX/34. 182196. ` Klajn, I. 2002. Tvorba rec i u savremenom srpskom jeziku. Prvi deo. Slaganje i prefiksacija. [WordFormation in Contemporary Serbian. First Part. Compounding and Prefixation]. Beograd: Zavod za udzbenike i nastavna sredstva. Leech, G. 1981. Semantics. Second Edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Levi, J. 1978. The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York, etc.: Academic Press. Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics 12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marchand, H. 1965/66a. The Analysis of Verbal Nexus Substantives in Indogermanische Forschungen LXX/1. 5771. Marchand, H. 1965/66b. On the Analysis of Substantive Compounds and Suffixal Derivatives not Containing a Verbal Element in Indogermanische Forschungen LXX/2. 11745. Marchand, H. 1969. The Categories and Types of PresentDay English WordFormation. Second Edition. Mnchen: C. H. Becksche. Verlagsbuchhandlung. Matthews, P. H. 1991. Morphology. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ` Prc ic , T. 1997b. Produktivnost u tvorbi rec i. [Productivity in WordFormation]. (man uscript). Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet. Taylor, J. R. 1989. Linguistic Categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ` Vukc evic , D. 1995. Imenicke slozenice u srpskom knjizevnom jeziku [Nominal Compounds in Standard Serbian] in Zbornik Matice srpske za filologiju i
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lingvistiku [Matica srpska Journal of Philology and Linguistics] XXXVIII/1. 127 174. Warren, B. 1978. Semantic Patterns of NounNoun Compounds. Gteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
NONCE WORDS RESULTING FROM CONVERSION: TRANSLATION PROBLEMS

RALUCA MIU
1. Introduction
It is a generally acknowledged fact that the vocabulary of a language is in a state of flux, that some words may fall out of use while others may emerge. This happens as a consequence of the need to adapt the language to the changing world around us, to the changes in our society, to our attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, etc. Therefore, words may be coined in a language for various reasons, such as to fill a lexical gap, to save space, and even to be funny and eye-catching. As opposed to the external means of enriching the vocabulary of a language (borrowing), the internal word-building processes such as affixation, composition, conversion, back-formation, abbreviation, contraction, etc., put to use elements and processes already existing in the language in order to coin new words on the basis of patterns productive at that point in the evolution of the language (Ttaru 2002: 33). Moreover, there are authors who argue that the force of a language is given by its capacity to form new words and meanings on the basis of internal resources and patterns. Among the major internal word-formation devices, widely used in English, conversion is most frequently defined as a derivational process whereby an item is adapted to a new word class without the addition of an affix (CGEL 1994: 1558, and Crystal 1997: 92). Other labels used for this very common process are functional conversion, functional shift, and zero derivation. The main reason for the wide-spread development of conversion in present-day English is above all the absence of inflections, those morphological, formal signs marking the part of speech to which a word belongs (Salapina 1972: 70). A means of enriching the vocabulary which allows the formation of new words by simply changing the distribution of already exist-
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ing ones is very fit for a language of the analytical type, like English (marking grammatical categories by means of prepositions and word order). If Old English was characterised by full endings and Middle English by the levelling of endings, the loss of inflections massively occurred in Modern English. It was in the period of Early Modern English (after 1500) that conversion began asserting itself, the phenomenon taking on more varied forms than it does today. In contemporary English, the most active domains of conversion belong to nouns and verbs, and also adjectives and adverbs. Theoretically, the word-formation procedure of conversion can apply to any part of speech, which thus shifts to another class of words without any change in its morphological form. However, lexicologists make the distinction between two groups of converted items, namely words which have been incorporated into the general word stock of the English language, and words which are converted occasionally, the latter being termed as nonce words, nonce meaning the present use, occasion, or time (Levichi 1963: 51). Though such coinages are perfectly acceptable and understandable to a native speaker, they are not yet accepted as the norm or listed as separate entries in the lexicon of the language. The procedure of occasional conversion is used on an increasingly large scale in Modern English, where many such examples can be identified. The ease with which the English language coins nonce words is seen especially in the frequent formation of verbs from other notional parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, adverbs). Leech (1990: 215) draws the attention on the partial productivity of the lexical rule of conversion, illustrating his statement with four examples of locative denominal verbs used transitively, and having different degrees of acceptability in the English language. Thus, the verb to pocket in He pocketed the change, as well as the verb to net in the sentence He netted the ball are well-established conversions which any good dictionary will record. On the other hand, a sentence like She basketed the shopping (with the meaning She put the shopping into her basket) is only dubiously acceptable, while the example They carred all their belongings (meaning They put all their belongings into the car) is definitely outside the range of normal usage, although the author admits that it is not inconceivable. In order to enter the vocabulary of the language, newly coined items such as the ones quoted above ought to be received and accepted by the
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speech community first. Adams (1973: 198) rightly describes this phenomenon, by stating that the more used to it [the newly coined word] we become, the more disposed we are to accept it. One can thus very quickly understand a new word in ones language and cope with the use of different forms of that new word. In many cases, as Jespersen (1965: 105) indicates, the urge to use such a word is so great that the term is coined independently by several speakers at different times, and then the word will have to be reckoned among the common stock of words in the language. But there are also cases when the term is bold, being produced by the requirements of an individual speaker on the spur of the moment. This will never be counted more than a momentary outgrowth of the state of language in which this word-formation pattern has developed. The translation of items formed by conversion may represent a real challenge for those who have to render such words into Romanian since it may often happen that the Romanian vocabulary does not include one word encompassing all the semantic features of the English nonce word. Consequently, translators may often be unable to find an equivalent in the target language, being obliged to resort to certain quantitative and qualitative modifications in the target text, in order to clarify the meaning of the message. These consist of indirect translation procedures, such as transpositions, modulations, insertions of explanatory words or phrases, definitions. By undergoing this research, my intention is to make translators constantly aware of the translation difficulties entailed by the transfer into Romanian of English nonce items resulting from conversion, and to offer a rather detailed presentation of the various translation methods at their disposal. The theories and observations formulated throughout this study are based on the analysis of a corpus of examples collected from modern and contemporary British literary works in prose. I decided to restrict the sphere of the example sources mainly to contemporary writings, given the fact that conversion is an increasingly productive device in Modern English, especially in the informal register, for the purpose of creating visual or comic effects, as well as reducing the length of the sentences. I also concentrated on selecting the most unusual uses of the words, which were likely to pose translation problems. Most of the translations of the English examples are
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mine, but I also used some official (i.e., published) translations of English writings into Romanian.
2. Romanian equivalents of English nonce items resulting from conversion

Examples of individual conversion are, according to Ginzburg (1979: 138), verbs such as to girl (a boat), or to Billy (someone), while Levichi (1963: 52) quotes from J.K. Jeromes Three Men in a Boat, where denominal verbs are used in constructions with meaningless it:
(1) Engl. We therefore decided that we would sleep out on fine nights and hotel it, and inn it, and pub it, like respectable folks, when it was wet (Jerome, in Levichi 1963: 52)
The addition of the empty object it after intransitive denominal verbs designating persons and animals, with the meaning to play the (the entity denoted by the noun) is illustrated by Jespersen (1965: 108): to cat it, to fool it, to hare it, to heroine it, to man it, to man-and-woman it. Moreover, the author finds similar examples to Jeromes, such as to cab it, to bus it, to foot it. The translation suggested by Levichi for the three denominal verbs in the previous excerpt from Jerome consists of an intransitive verb, a trage, with the meaning to halt / put up at a place for a short time, followed by three adverbials of place (la hanuri, la hoteluri, la restaurante): Ro. Am hotrt, aadar, s dormim afar n nopile frumoase; i ca oamenii care se respect, s tragem la hanuri i la hoteluri i la restaurante pe vreme ploioas(Jerome 1994: 25, transl. by Levichi) The use of the second-person personal pronoun as a verb is perfectly understandable, although no dictionary of modern English will list it as a legitimate member of the vocabulary. An example is provided by Ttaru (2002: 80):
(2) Dont thou the teacher! (in Ttaru 2002: 80)
Examples of nonce words formed from pronouns and adverbs are offered by Jespersen (1965: 107) as well:
(3) to be theed and thoud by this lady
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(4) Dont really me! (5) The boys invariably hurrayed him.
The same author identifies a special class of nonce words often used in retorts. He explains that in anger, one simply seizes one word or phrase in what was said by the other party, and repeats it as a verb in an imperative sentence, and a scornful tone of voice (Jespersen 1965: 105):
(6) The man is thinking of Nihilists and what not Id Nihilist him! (7) Huh! Call it luck! Ill luck them later on. (8) God forgive youYou Gawd forgive me again and Ill Gawd forgive you one on the jaw thatll stop you praying for a week.
Another type of retort, which is mentioned also in Adams (1973: 51), consists in using the same word twice, first as a verb and then as the object: Thank me no thankings!, But me no buts!, Cause me no cause!. The process of creating nonce words by conversion is easily extended, not only by adults, but also by children. A few funny examples are provided by Aitchison (1997: 161), who registered some utterances of three to five-year-old children in specific contexts. New verbs, such as to key, to shirt, to nut have thus come about:
(9) Hes keying the door. (where the verb denotes the action of unlocking a door) (10) Im shirting my man. (the sentence belongs to a little girl dressing a doll) (11) Will you nut these? (this is the request of a five-year-old who wanted some walnuts cracked)
Such coinages are very frequent in childrens language, but not common in adult language. Adults do not normally say Im caking for Im eating a cake, or Im souping for Im eating the soup. The author mentions however a few examples of unusual coinages likely to be used by adults: to chocolate a cake (= to cover the cake with chocolate) or to Moulinex the vegetables (an instrumental verb formed from a noun referring to a brand of food processor). The translators only choice when rendering these constructions into Romanian is to use a general verb whose meaning is completed by an
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object or an adverbial. One fact that should be stressed is the importance of the context in understanding the meaning of the English word and in deciding upon its translation into the target language. In adult language, occasional coinages are generally created in order to bring out the meaning more vividly in a given context only (Ginzburg 1979: 138), and represent stylistic devices employed by literature or newspaper writers. The sentences presented in what follows include examples of nonce words which are likely to pose translation problems caused by lexical gaps in Romanian. As it can be noticed in these examples, the most productive type of occasional conversion is the one transforming nouns into verbs. Although there is no clearly cut out method of tackling the translation into Romanian of these items, some recurring structures can, however, be identified. Consequently, the most frequent Romanian equivalents for English nonce words are the following: 2.1. an approximate equivalent, when the explanation of the English word in more words in Romanian is not essential in the context, and would also sound awkward. A denominal verb like to steeple, which occurs in the following example in a collocation with the noun hands with the meaning to put ones hands together so that they resemble the object denoted by the noun (here, steeple), could be translated with approximation by a single word, a mpreuna. However, this solution fails to suggest the semantic relation of similarity between the position of the hands and the shape of a steeple, a relation included in English by the denominal verb, while an extended translation operated with the help of explanatory words would overburden the Romanian sentence (in order to render all the semantic elements of the English verb, the translation in Romanian should be cu minile unite sub brbie astfel nct acestea s formeze un triunghi cu aspectul unei turle:
(12) Engl. Jennings sat across from me, his hands steepled together, the fingertips resting in the small roll of fat that now hung beneath his chin. (Connolly 2000: 403) Ro. Jennings sttea n faa mea, cu minile mpreunate, degetele odihnindu-se n colanul de grsime ce-i atrna acum de sub brbie. (my translation)
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The same base noun can serve for the formation of the antonymic pair of the previous denominal verb, the latter undergoing also a derivation process with the negative prefix un (to unsteeple). In this case too the translation by an approximate equivalent seems the most appropriate, since the semantic features incorporated by the English verb require a too lengthy explanation in Romanian:
(13) Engl. Jennings unsteepled his hands and jabbed an index finger at me. (Connolly 2000: 404) Ro. Jennings i desprinse minile i m mpunse cu arttorul. (my translation)
Another occasional coinage is the denominal verb to ghost over, which appears in combination with the subject lips and the object words. Its use is highly poetical and consequently the Romanian translation of the word cannot include any reference to the base noun ghost:
(14) Engl. She could tell when he was thinking hard on something because his lips sometimes ghosted over words without realizing what they were doing. (Hall 2004: 103) Ro. i ddea seama cnd era adncit n gnduri, deoarece buzele sale schiau cuvinte fr s-i dea seama. (my translation)
2.2. a verb + a direct object The translation of certain English converted items requires the insertion of a general verb introducing the Romanian equivalent of the English base noun, which cannot undergo conversion in the target language, and functions instead as an object or an adverbial. The translational pattern of a verb followed by a direct object is sometimes obligatory in Romanian, as in the case of the English verb to happy birthday derived from a noun phrase functioning as a wish:
(15) Engl. And we had an audience too. All the other diners, happy birthdaying one who wished she had never been born. (Rubens 2002: 72) Ro. Am avut i asisten pe deasupra. Toi ceilali clieni, care srbtoreau/serbau ziua de natere a unei femei care i dorea s nu se fi nscut. (my translation)
Although the English converted verb, as well as the Romanian equivalent a srbtori, appears in a collocation with an animate noun (to happy birthday someone = a srbtori pe cineva), a faithful translation should specify that it is a persons birthday (ziua de natere) that is celebrated
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and not some other occasion, since a srbtori is a rather neutral verb that collocates with nouns denoting various events, festivities, etc. A verb like to breakfast, which is not yet accepted as a dictionary entry, will receive a similar translation (i.e. general verb + direct object), since our language can convey this idea only by means of the collocation a lua micul dejun:
(16) Engl. he was happy to be breakfasting alone on Belgian chocolate. (McEwan 1990: 45) Ro. Dar era fericit c-i ia singur micul dejun, constnd din ciocolat belgian. (McEwan 2004: 78, transl. by Stanciu)
Some of the English denominal verbs translated into Romanian according to the pattern mentioned above may be formed by conversion from a noun indicating the instrument of the action. In the next example, the verb to pebble is derived from a noun denoting the object used by the subject of the clause to strike against his friends window in order to get the latters attention:
(17) Engl. He spoke of it to no one, though he passed by Jontys house as he walked the streets and could have pebbled his window (Hall 2004: 79) Ro. Nu vorbi cu nimeni despre asta, dei trecuse prin dreptul casei lui Jonty pe cnd bntuia pe strzi i ar fi putut s-i arunce o pietricic n geam. (my translation)
2.3. a verb + an adverbial of manner An adverbial of manner is frequently used in Romanian for the translation of occasionally converted English items. The verb to butterfly is obtained through conversion from a compound noun denoting someone who moves on quickly from one activity or person to the next (Longman 2003: 203). The semantic component [+quickly] is rendered in Romanian by an adverbial of manner, expressed by a prepositional noun phrase, n zbor, modifying a general verb denoting movement, a trece. This solution for its translation has been chosen here due to its power of suggesting the movement typical of butterflies or bees, and thus the image created in English by the conversion of the noun butterfly into a verb is preserved as closely as possible:
(18) Engl. Such people tended to butterfly from one alternative solution to another. (Brett 2001: 80)
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Ro. Astfel de oameni obinuiau s treac n zbor de la o soluie la alta. (my translation)
A verb derived both by composition and conversion is to freehand, referring to the operation of tattooing someone by hand, a semantic component which ought to be present in Romanian as well:
(19) Engl. They hadnt trusted him to freehand them. (Hall 2004: 237) Ro. Nu au avut ncredere n el s-i tatueze manual. (my translation)
A denominal verb referring to ones way of walking is the compound to soft-shoe, whose elements (an adjective and a noun) are hyphenated. The translation of this verb is performed by a verb indicating movement, followed by an adverbial of manner. The latter happens to be an adverb converted from an adjective:
(20) Engl. He soft-shoed out the door like the end of a vaudeville act. (Atwood 1995: 94) Ro. Iei ncet pe u, ca n finalul unui act de operet. (my translation)
When the denominal verb has the meaning to behave or act in the manner of an animal denoted by the noun, the translation into Romanian is performed with the help of a subcategory of the adverbial of manner, namely the adverbial of comparison. In the following example, the verb to tom-cat occurs in its participial form, while in the Romanian corresponding sentence the verb is omitted:
(21) Engl. Aires, out tom-catting all night (Rushdie 1995: 28) Ro. Pe afar toat noaptea ca motanii n clduri(Rushdie 2002: 41, transl. by Crciun)
Notice that the Romanian adverbial of comparison contains the noun motanii, corresponding to the English base for conversion, modified by a prepositional noun phrase explicating the latters behaviour (n clduri). 2.4. a verb + an adverbial of means The denominal verbs in the following two examples appear in non finite forms (the infinitive in example 22, and the participle in example 23). They both denote an activity performed by means of a machine or vehicle, designated by the noun base for conversion.
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The verb to merry-go-round is formed by conversion from a compound noun whose elements are linked by hyphen, and is translated with the verb a se nvrti, which best renders the turning movement specific to a merry-go-round, completed by an adverbial of means introduced by the preposition n: n carusel.
(22) Engl. Better just to merry-go-round at Coney, up and down, to the creepy tinkling music of the mechanical hammer-driven pianos (Hall 2004: 244) Ro. Mai bine se nvrte iar i iar n caruselul din Coney, acompaniat de zdrngneala nfiortoare a pianelor mecanice cu ciocnele (my translation)
Since the base noun merry-go-round has also a figurative meaning of a continuous cycle of activities or events (the Oxford Dictionary, 1999: 892), a translation by means of an expression could be suggested for the previous example: Mai bine bate pasul pe loc aici la Coney. In the next example, the verb to chariot appears in a structure with a direct object (charioting the surf), while in Romanian the addition of the adverbial of means mentioning the vehicle helping to perform the action is necessary. Moreover, the Romanian variant also includes a modifier of the noun denoting the above mentioned vehicle (car triumfal), in order to indicate the exact type of vehicle involved in the action (used in ancient times in battles and races):
(23) Engl. an ocean creature looked back at her she seemed, even while making the fugitive motions of Yvonness vanity, somewhere beyond human grief charioting the surf. (Lowry 1993: 54) Ro. o creatur a oceanului, prea s-i ntoarc privirea, imitndu-i chiar i gesturile rapide de cochetrie, plutind ntr-un car triumfal pe valuri undeva dincolo de suferina uman. (Lowry 1999: 71, transl. by lapac)
Notice that the direct object following the denominal verb in English (the surf) turns into an adverbial of place in the Romanian translation (pe valuri), which highlights in fact the derived character of the English object, resulted from the deletion of the preposition over (charioting over the surf). 2.5. a verb + an adverbial of place The translation by means of a verb and an adverbial indicating place is needed in the following case, where the English nonce word is derived
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from a compound noun, namely front-page (it should be mentioned that the verb formed by conversion from the noun front-page is not incorporated in the English lexicon, while only the Macmillan Dictionary (2003) includes the adjective frontpage with the meaning important enough to be printed on the first page of a newspaper):
(24) Engl. I retreated to the mundane, front-paged a story on bug repellent and citronella candles. (Collins 2000: 55) Ro. M-am retras n cotidian, publicnd pe prima pagin un articol despre insecticide i lumnri de citronella. (my translation)
2.6. an expression An interesting and very frequent example of occasional conversion is the verbalisation of English proper nouns, especially in informal language, in structures such as the following:
(25) Engl. Dont you Ferdinand me! (Fowles 1989: 86) Ro. Nu m lua cu Ferdinand, zic. (Fowles 1993: 82, transl. by Chioran)
The expressiveness and the comical effect characteristic of these structures is mentioned in a Romanian translation study by Camelia Petrescu (2000: 76), where the author suggests as variants of translation for Dont Mary me! the following: Nu-mi spune Mary! / Nu mi te adresa cu Mary! The frequency of nonce words thus created is acknowledged by Jespersen (1965: 107) as well, who offers such examples with verbs derived from common nouns also:
(26) He dears me too, you see. (27) I told you not to darling me. (28) She neither sird nor my-lorded him.
If translated into Romanian, these denominal verbs would also have whole phrases as equivalents (a se adresa / a lua pe cineva cu /a-i spune). 2.7. a paraphrase By attempting to render faithfully and clearly all the shades of meaning incorporated in the English word, and also to create in Romanian the image
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it conveys in English, the use of paraphrases in order to translate converted items may sometimes be very helpful. For the translation of the following example including a verbal combination with the noun way, a paraphrase is definitely needed in order to make the meaning clear for the Romanian readers:
(29) Engl. the Earl of Rochester, an English dandy who had boozed and whored his way to an early grave in the time of Charles II. (Connolly 2000: 309) Ro. Contele de Rochester, un dandy englez pe care butura i femeile l-au dus de timpuriu n mormnt pe vremea lui Charles al II-lea. (my translation)
With respect to the denominal verbs in this example, I find it necessary to acknowledge their presence in English dictionaries with the following meanings: to booze = to drink large quantities of alcohol (the Oxford Dictionary, 1999: 160), to whore = to use the services of prostitutes (idem: 1634). However, I included them in this chapter, dedicated to nonce words, since the combination with way seemed extremely occasional to me. An occasional coinage like the verb to pebble was previously translated with the help of a verb and a direct object (a arunca o pietricic, in example 17), but in the following case its use is figurative, and the translation even more extended:
(30) Engl. I kept my eyes on the raindrops pebbling the canal. (Chevalier 2003: 106) Ro. mi fixasem privirile pe picturile de ploaie care ciupeau suprafaa apei i o fceau zgrumuroas. (Chevalier 2003: 139, transl. by Popescu)
However, the combination of words suggested by the translator of this example may not be entirely fortunate and clear in Romanian (suprafa zgrumuroas a apei), on the one hand because of the alliteration and on the other because a pebble is a small, round, smooth stone. Therefore another variant, awkward as well from a quantitative point of view, but more specific, could be proposed:
Ro. m uitam la picturile de ploaie care cdeau ca nite pietricele n canal formnd cercuri concentrice pe suprafaa apei. (my translation)
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In the following example, the author formed a verb from the noun trapeze, and associated it with the activity of birds flying from tree to tree. In order to capture the same image in Romanian, the translator should be able to suggest that the movement of the birds is similar to that of acrobats who balance on a trapeze:
(31) Engl. In the skeletal branches above, tree sparrows huddle together; cedar waxwings trapeze from tree to tree. (Connolly 2000: 61) Ro. Pe crengile dezgolite de deasupra se adunaser trei vrbiue; mtsarii fac acrobaii dintr-un copac n altul. (my translation)
A final remark remains to be made at the end of this section, namely that the translation of nonce words or combinations of words should take the context into consideration. The same word may mean something different on different occasions, according to the speakers or writers current intentions. Consider the following pair of examples provided by Aitchison (1997: 161):
(32) Engl. Sammy pizza-ed the floor. Ro. Sammy a scpat pizza pe podea. / a umplut podeaua de pizza. (33) Engl. Felicity pizza-ed the dough. Ro. Felicity a pregtit aluatul pentru pizza.
Notice that in the first example, the base noun for conversion pizza becomes in Romanian a direct object of a general verb inserted by the translator, while the direct object in the English sentence, the floor, turns into an adverbial of place in Romanian: pe podea. In the second example, the translator needs to add a neutral verb (a pregtit / a fcut), and also an adverbial of purpose expressed by a preposition (pentru) and the noun pizza.
3. Conclusions
The theory which includes conversion among the principal ways of forming nonce words in English is confirmed by the variety of examples under consideration in this article. The analysis of the data for my research also reveals the prominence of noun-to-verb coinages, which constitute the largest category of examples illustrating conversion. The translation of these items into Romanian implies
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mainly indirect procedures, such as the insertion of explanatory terms, paraphrases, expressions (all these operations are often referred to as translations by expansion). The most frequent structures encountered in the Romanian translation are those including adverbials of instrument, of manner and of place, as well as paraphrases necessary for rendering the meaning clearer in the target language. Another aspect that should be stressed here is the importance of the context where words appear. Thus, many of them have figurative meanings, and consequently different translations according to their linguistic environment. Far from claiming to have treated the issue exhaustively, I have thought of proposing this study mainly as a working tool for translators, teachers and students of English, who may be confronted with such transcoding problems. They can continue to make their own discoveries about the translation of English nonce items resulting from conversion, and only when more data have been analysed, and only when the data have been taken from a wider range of fields and periods, can certain assertions and findings be considered universally true.
References
Adams, Valerie. 1973. An Introduction to Modern English Word-formation. London: Longman. Aitchison, Jean. 1997. Words in the Mind. Oxford: Blackwell. Crystal, D. 1997. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Ginzburg, R.S. 1979. A Course in Modern English Lexicology. Moscow. Jespersen, O. 1965. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part VI: Morphology. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Leech, G. 1990. Semantics. The Study of Meaning. London: Penguin Books. Levichi, L. 1963. A Course in English Lexicology. Bucureti: Editura Didactic i Pedagogic. Petrescu, Camelia. 2000. Traducerea ntre teorie i realizare poetic. Timioara: Excelsior. Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik. 1994. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (CGEL). London: Longman. Salapina, Galina. 1972. Limba englez contemporan. Lexicologie. Timioara: Tipografia Universitii din Timioara. Ttaru, Cristina. 2002. An Outline of English Lexicology. Part I: Word Formation. ClujNapoca: Editura Limes.
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References for examples

Atwood, Margaret. 1995. Surfacing. London: Virgo Press. Brett, S. 2001. Death on the Downs. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Chevalier, Tracy. 2003. Fata cu cercel de perl. Iai: Polirom, trad. Horia Florian Popescu. Chevalier, Tracy. 2003. Girl with a Pearl Earring. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Collins, M. 2000. The Keepers of Truth. London: Phoenix House. Connolly, J. 2000. Dark Hollow. London: Coronet Books. Fowles, J. 1989. The Collector. London: Picador. Fowles, J. 1993. Colecionarul. Bucureti: Evenimentul, trad. Maria Chioran. Hall, Sarah. 2004. The Electric Michelangelo. London: Faber and Faber Jerome, J.K. 1994. Trei ntr-o barc. Bucureti: Vizual, trad. L. Levichi. Jerome, J.K. 1998. Three Men in a Boat. Bucureti: Prietenii Crii. Lowry M. 1993. Under the Volcano. London: Picador. Lowry M. 1999. Sub vulcan. Bucureti: Editura Univers, trad. Florin lapac. McEwan, J. 1990. The Innocent. London: Jonathan Cape. Rubens, B. 2002. Nine Lives. London: Little, Brown Books. Rushdie, S. 1995. The Moors Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape. Rushdie, S. 2002. Ultimul suspin al Maurului. Iai: Polirom, trad. Dana Crciun.
Dictionaries
Levichi, L; Banta, A. 1999. Dicionar englez-romn. Bucureti: Teora. *** The Oxford Dictionary, Tenth Edition. 1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *** The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. 2003. Pearson Education Limited.

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B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006

REINVENTING THE SELF

B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006

B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006

REINVENTING THE SELF

B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006

REINVENTING THE SELF

B.A.S. vol. XII, 2006