journal of literature and art studies vol.4 issue 10 2014

Journal of Literature

and Art Studies

Volume 4, Number 10, October 2014 (Serial Number 35)

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Journal of Literature and Art Studies

Volume 4, Number 10, October 2014 (Serial Number 35)

Contents Literature Studies

Li-Young Lee’s “I” Poetry: In Quest for His Self as a Diaspora 755 LI Gui-cang

Oral Narrative an Underutilized Tool of Transformation: The Case of Ateso Folk Tales in Iteso Communities of Uganda and Kenya 767

Simon Peter Ongodia

George Orwell’s Experiment With the Ironic Narrative Structure in Nineteen Eighty-Four 784 Louai T. ABU Lebdeh, Amaal Al Masri

Debt in the Quebecois Novels of the 1960-1980 792 Marie-Dominique Boyce

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul 802 Mirjana Marinković

The “Mother Complex” of Martha Quest 810 Rukhsana Rahim Chowdhury

Writing as Shamanic Consciousness in DainaChaviano’s Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother 817

Robin McAllister

Contesting Veterans’ Identities: Reflections Upon Gender Roles and History in Pat Barker’s Regeneration 822

Denise Borille de Abreu

Verbal Images Paradigm in Different Lingual Cultures 831 Yermekova Zhannat

Tagore’s Poetry—Universal Psychospirituality 837 Tinni Dutta

Art Studies

A Great Citizen Is Still “Under-Construction”: The Conflicting Self-Identity in Sayonara 1945 840

LEE Shin-yi, CHEN Jui-sung

Special Research

The Concept of Peace in the Pentateuch 848 Uri Zur

Popular Catholicism Based on Sensory Engagement and Corporeal Perception 857 Euna Lee

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 October 2014, Vol. 4, No. 10, 755-766

Li-Young Lee’s “I” Poetry: In Quest for His Self as a Diaspora

LI Gui-cang Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China

As one of the representative contemporary Asian American poets, Li-Young Lee in his two poetry collections

entitled Rose and The City in Which I Love You, recuperates his fragmented family history of immigration, and

reconstructs a dynamic relationship with remembrance of the past that writes about him and defines his sense of

self. This paper from the multicultural perspective argues that understanding the past through understanding his

godlike father, Lee not only negotiates the formation of his subjectivity and identity, but also establishes a spiritual

origin and belonging not merely with his ethnic communities but with all the immigrants as well. The paper finds

that the strategy he employs in his articulation of his self is marked by his excellent execution of poetic epiphany,

and metonymic cannibalism.

Keywords: Li-Young Li, sense of self, Asian diaspora, poetic epiphany, metonymic cannibalism

Introduction

Juliana Chang (1999) in her award winning essay Reading Asian American Poetry identifies two dominant critical perceptions of reading this body of works. The first is to practice what she considers a “privatization of poetry, which would imply taking [the ethnic poetry] more lightly than prose narrative”, whereas the second “conceive[s] of poetry as heavily social” (p. 85). The privatization reading is further enunciated as a critical assessment of poetry as “a private and subjective luxury in the context of current multiculturalism” (p. 86). In contrast, the socialized reading is said to “extol poetry as a direct and powerful embodiment of the social or historical” (p. 86). Chang critiques these two dominant approaches to this body of works and asserts that “whether poetry is perceived as erasing or creating racial and cultural differences, the [two] readings are in fact inflected with and serve to maintain dominant ideologies of language and writing, race and nation” (p. 89). In other words, whether critics privatize or politicize poetry, their critical preference reflects the mainstream cultural ideology. As regards the critical perspectives, the two approaches as she identifies may loosely apply to Asian American poetry as a whole, but critical readings of individual poets have to alter in alignment to the unique qualities of their poems, because poetry criticism cannot be generally subsumed under the logic of either privatization or politicization. Specifically, not all criticisms are adequate and productive in reading Asian American poetry, for particular poems are intended to be interpreted particularly. For instance, contemporary Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee presents his persona in Rose (1986) and The City in Which I Love You (1990) as an Asian diaspora, who maneuvers across the interstices of diverse cultures, histories, discourses, and poetic traditions in search of his identity as a diaspora; hence an obvious choice here to discuss his poetry that, to

Li Gui-cang, professor, Dean, College of International Culture and Education, Zhejiang Normal University.

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LI-YOUNG LEE’S “I” POETRY: IN QUEST FOR HIS SELF AS A DIASPORA 756

borrow Homi Bhabha’s words in Location of Culture (1997), addresses “a cultural politics of diaspora and paranoia, of migration and discrimination, of anxiety and appropriation” (p. 59). To be noted that Lee’s poems are overtly “personal”, they do not demand a privatization reading, simply because the core of his “cultural politics of diaspora” constitutes a relentless quest for whom he is in relation to his self consciousness, histories, memory, and the depth of his character as a diaspora. The author will focus on his rhetorical delineation of his subjectivity in the context of cultural politics that articulates historical, familial, racial, and geopolitical issues in the hope to understand his multivalent sense of self as results from his lived experience of a diaspora.

After briefly discussing the identity question addressed in Li-Young Lee’s poetry, Yu (2000) in his Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry claims that Lee’s work is rooted “in a coherent, physical self”, and “grapples with the self all the time” (p. 447). Yu indicates that the thematic content and formal choice of Lee’s poetry are mainly constituted of representations of that “coherent self”. This paper argues that the quest, delineation, examination, and interrogation of his complex and dynamic self as a Chinese diaspora are what render Lee’s poetry the most self-exploratory, and in a sense, special in contemporary Asian American poetry.

Hardly can one find a Descartes’ sense of a “coherent self” in Lee’s poetry. Rather, a casual glimpse of Li-Young Lee’s poetry would even impress readers that questions of “I” and the construction of subjectivity are particularly complex and central to his work. De facto, the imminence in Lee’s poetry is his undertaking of a herculean effort in articulating and constructing his subjectivity and cultural identity by making sense of his and his family’s particularity in transnational geopolitics.

Of all the Chinese American poets, Lee is likely the only one who fuses subjectivity and family history in such a manner that the self, as manifest in most of his poems, is maintained and revised by the past and other factors in his life. Apparent in his poetry is a surging desire always at play to reconstitute through “constant remembrance” his fragmented life into an emotional quest for subjectivity and cultural identity (Lee, 1990, p. 14). He defines and redefines his subjectivity by writing and rewriting about his and his family’s past, which represents loss, meaninglessness, political persecution, personal tragedy, disconnection, and dislocation. The nature of what he constructs and negotiates is as Bhabha (1997) states in Location of Culture that “[i]t is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated” (p. 2). Bhabha points out here that subjectivity and cultural identity cannot be ascribed to pre-given, irreducible, prescriptive, coherent, scripted, and ahistorical individual and cultural traits that define the conventions of ethnicity. On the reverse, “subjectivity” is an entity that is fluid, rather than “coherent”, and constantly changing along with other social, political, and cultural factors: It is historical, and as well as cultural, as is apparent in Lee’s poetry.

To Lee, “historical” here refers to familial and personal history, hence memory and past remain seminal in his construction of subjectivity as manifested by his inexhaustible effort in constructing a dynamic relationship with his father and the other members of his family through “constant remembrance”, because, as he understands it, “Memory revises” him (1990, p. 14). He never writes about the past as a way to escape the present and future. Rather, he firmly believes that the meaning of “what I am” depends solely on the incorporation of the past into his everyday life. It is the past, or the past related with his father, that defines his true self. In a sense, the past is not what he writes about. Rather, it is the past that writes about him. Since his father represents all the meaning of the past to Lee, understanding the god-like man foregrounds his reconstruction of self: his attempt to understand his


father takes three forms: philosophical meditation, poetic epiphany, and cannibalism. Through remembrance he reconstitutes his family’s past, which serves as a force to strengthen his subjectivity and identity, and a source of his personal integrity, values, emotional and intellectual power as a Chinese diaspora in the United States.

Philosophical Meditation: Spirituality and Subjectivity

Chinese American poetry, like any other ethnic literature in the United States, is mainly concerned with the search and reconstitution of subjectivity and identity. In his foreword to Li-Young Lee’s Rose, Gerald Stern (1986) characterizes Lee’s poetry as “a pursuit of certain Chinese ideas, or Chinese memories… and a moving personal search for redemption” (p. 9). Stern does not outline what those “ideas” entail, and nor does he underpin what that “personal search for redemption” designates. A more convincing argument would be that Lee searches for the meaning of self in the context of the loss of self, disconnection, fragmentation, and the ever present anxiety over the loss of spirituality as the result of his life as a Chinese diaspora, and, of man’s obsession with materialism in general.

Like most modern masters of poetry, Lee is concerned with spirituality in relation to his subjectivity. In this sense, he is in philosophy more leaning to the Hegelian in this regard. Lee acknowledges Eliot’s influence on him in his interview with Tod Marshall. Lee believes Eliot’s lifelong concern with modern man’s inadequacy, ineffectualness, and spiritual futility through his overt contrast of the grandeur of the past with the sordidness of the present as evident in The Waste Land, influences Lee so much that he is totally committed to his poetic preoccupation with his own spirituality as an immigrant, and spirituality of life in general. He despises poetry represented by William Carlos Williams, accusing it of being “so concerned with apparent materiality” (Marshall, 2000, p. 133). Like Eliot, Neruda, and Tu Fu, Lee delineates the condition of man’s spirituality. Look at his version of The Waste Land, where materiality is shrouded in death:

Dead daisies, shriveled lilies, withered bodies of dry chrysanthemums. Among these, and waste leaves of yellow and brown fronds of palm and fern, I came, and found a rose left for dead, heaped with the hopeless dead, its petals still supple. (Lee, 1986, p. 37)

Yet, unlike Eliot, Lee seldom displays Eliot’s cynicism about human spiritual retrogression: The rose survives among the “hopeless dead”. In this respect, Lee resembles Tu Fu, whose unsurpassed representation of the miserable fate of the ordinary people serves almost as an unlimited source of inspiration for all the poets of the Chinese language or heritage. Like Tu Fu, Lee believes that human spiritual degradation partially results from man’s placing too much significance on materialism and the selfish pursuit of power and status. Lee approaches spirituality by the denial of any significance of materiality at all, as is footnoted in his assertion that “[T]he true self is the one that speaks, and it does not give a damn about the one that walks in clothes. The rest is Chaff” (Marshall, p. 135). In other words, spiritual gain and perfection can only be accomplished through denial of the physical. Such a position may sound a little extreme but understandable if we know all the ordeals his family has undergone: Spiritual tenacity is what invigorated them to live on; material possessions would have been necessary but not essential in their struggle for a more meaningful survival and life.


The seemingly overt emphasis on spirituality reflects Lee’s concept of the relation between spirituality and subjectivity. To him true subjectivity can only be negotiated through the understanding and pursuit of man’s spirituality: “It is the exercise of the mind to think constantly that this false identity (all the things in the room) is fading away” (Marshall, p. 134). Lee believes in the possibility that through logos or Tao or God, man can articulate his true self. Most of Lee’s poetry attests to his unyielding belief in the shaping power of spirituality in his search for meaning. Even in his many references to the body of his father, the material/physical substance gradually disappears. In its place emerges the inexhaustible search for spirit and soul. An interesting illustration of how the material aspect evaporates and the spiritual sustains is found in the title poem The City in Which I Love You (Lee, 1990):

A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I’m vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I’d eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don’t see me. (Lee, 1990, pp. 51-52)

Only the spiritual sustains. And the material merely functions as an avenue toward the spiritual. Again, the negation of the material seeks to reveal a possible fullness and fulfillment of human spirituality.

An interplay of spirituality and remembrance is captured in the following lines about his acute sense of disconnection and dislocations:

Will I rise and go out into an American city? Or walk down to the wilderness sea? … That means I was born in Bandung, 1958; on my father’s back, in borrowed clothes, I came to America. (Lee, 1990, p. 13)

A similar significance of remembrance in the construction of his subjectivity and identity is unmasked in Bhabha’s Remembering Fanon. Bhabha (1994) contends that

Remembering […] is a process of intense discovery and disorientation. Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. (Bhabha, 1994, p. 121)

Given that, but how can the remembrance of the past revise Lee in particular? The philosophical emphasis on the shaping abilities of the past and reminiscence is well elucidated in Lee’s own explanation of the Chinese notions of what the past, present, and future are:

The Chinese word for the day after tomorrow is hou, meaning behind, and the word denoting the day before yesterday is actually chien, meaning in front of. So, you see, Tod, that to a Chinese mind, tomorrow, the future, is behind


me, while the past lies in front of me. Therefore, we go backing up into the future, into the unknown… and everything that lies before our eyes is past, over already. (Marshall, 2000, p. 133)

He then uses the stars as an analogy to illustrate his point that what we see is done, over with, gone, or even dead long ago. In other words, the present, as well as the future is illuminated and enunciated by the understanding of the past. Such an epistemology of the relationship between the past and future demands a constant return to the past in order to understand the present and the future, or “the unknown”, as Lee calls it elsewhere in the interview.

Poetic Epiphany in Understanding His Father

The remembrance of past experience facilitates an access to knowing his father in order for Lee to define his subjectivity through an epiphany. In the sixth section of Rose, Lee recollects one of his visits to his father’s house, which is almost buried in rotten fruit and wild grass. He stands in the desolate yard “not for the scent/of their dying…/Not for the wild grass/grown wild as his beard in his last months/not for the hard, little apples that littered the yard” (Lee, 1986, p. 42). And then, “The rain came. And where there is rain/there is time, and memory, and sometimes sweetness” (p. 42). As the rain enlivens everything, and brings back a sweet memory of his father, he realizes that “Where there is a son there is a father” (p. 42). The sudden remembrance of his father reduces to triviality his purpose of presenting himself physically in front of his sick father. The visit loses its significance of seeing the dying man and re-orients in the revelation of the man’s spirituality. If the initial purpose is to see his father, the remembrance provides access to the understanding of his father and the spiritual connection between them as father and son. Furthermore, the evocation of his father transforms the speaker into a new persona, who is now able to overlook the devastating scene and sees something inspirational, which is ablaze yonder:

Past the choked rhododendrons behind the perishing gladiolas, there in the far corner of the yard, you, my rose lovely for nothing, lonely for no one, stunning the afternoon with your single flower ablaze. (Lee, 1986, p. 42)

Because of the remembrance of his father, the simple, routine visit is completed with his letting “the rain/meditate on the brilliance of one blossom/quivering in the beginning downpour” (p. 42). The “brilliance of one blossom” symbolizes the spiritual power he associates with his father. The epiphany brings him closer to his father spiritually, if not physically. Happy, reflective, and content, he leaves without seeing his father. At this point, seeing is replaced with understanding. What a thorough transmutation of the one who first stands in the desolate yard, disconcerted, uncertain, troubled, and preoccupied! The awareness of the sustaining power of spirituality as embodied in the glowing flower enables him to identify completely with his father. Spiritual communion overrides the necessity of seeing his father. His visit to his then blind father turns out to be a rediscovery of himself and his father.

Lee’s poetic recuperation of the diasporic history of his family and his desire to know his father in order to be able to identify with his father indicates that his concept of self is largely influenced by Chinese culture and philosophy. He seems to have accepted the Confucian philosophy of the relationship between the self and society.


Generally speaking, Chinese people tend to see themselves first as family, kindred, and social members, and second as discrete individual beings. There is no ambiguity that they so reserve themselves as not to be fantastic individuals, but their sense of self is more defined in relation to others. Their pursuit of self seldom purports to set themselves essentially apart from the society as remarkable individuals only. Rather, it is a continuous effort in becoming more fully accepted into a group, a clan, and, ultimately, into the society that defines how and why they strive.

Lee told Marshall, “Somehow, an artist has to discover a dialogue that is so essential to his being, to his self, that it is no longer cultural or canonical, but a dialogue with the truest self. His most naked spirit” (Marshall, 2000, p. 132). Memory serves as the medium of creating and maintaining such a constructive dialogue, through which he builds a relationship with the past, hence his reconstruction of his subjectivity. Such a concept of the self requires that the individual essentially situate his self in a filiative order—a concept that demands incorporation of family history or national history to negotiate individual subjectivity. Although accepting such an order as necessary to define his self, Lee’s life in exile disallows him to situate completely the self in relation with any of the histories of China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, or America, or with any particular place where Lee has spent some time in his life. The only history available to him is history on a personal level. It is personal history only that matters and speaks to him. Since he has lived a raveled skein of life first as a refugee in many countries and later as an immigrant in the United States, the only significant filiations he can incorporate into the redefinition of his subjectivity to define the meaning of his true self is the turbulent history of his family, the center or the hero of which is his father.

In all his poetry, Lee tries to understand himself by understanding his father, a figure who appears as a generator of meaning of his life. In Rain Diary, Lee beautifully writes about his “search” for his father:

I looked for you in your shoes. I found nothing and the rain I tried your shirts, your pants, called your sweaters mine, ... I searched the hours, perforated by rain. I looked in the milk, the salt, cold water, and found the rain. I looked in the billowing curtains, they were haunted with the rain... Rain knocks at my door I open. No one is there, and the rain marching in place... Perhaps it is my father, arriving on legs of rain, arriving, this dream, the rain, my father. (Lee, 1986, p. 42)

His childish but vigorous search ends in the soothing illusion that his father may come to him on the “legs of the rain”. Although he seems to be the source of Lee’s being, the father is never presented as a fully developed character in Lee’s poetry. He represents a victim of his times and international politics, a victim who has noble spirit and lets his hair grow “past his shoulder” (p. 60). Maybe that is the reason Stern sees the father as “an


extraordinary and heroic” and a “mythic figure”, who “is more godlike” (p. 9). In Lee’s eyes, his father is godlike in terms of tribulations and of the magnitude of his spirit.

Metonymic Cannibalism

Indeed, Lee eulogizes his father as a godlike figure: “My father the Godly, he was the chosen/My father almighty, full of good fear” (Lee, 1986, p. 42). As we try to understand and embrace God in proper and manageable names, out of something that, as Confucius warns, improper nomenclatures obstruct communication, Lee thus asks his dead father:

Could you rise and stand and bear the weight of all the names I would give you? Cup of Blood, Old Wrath, Heart O’ Mine, Ancient of Days, Whorl, World, Word. O day, come! (Lee, 1986, p. 44)

Giving different names designates his wish and desires to approach his father, who is like “The Old book I finished reading/I’ve since read again and again”, as well as his inability to completely understand the godlike man (Lee, 1986, p. 69). The surging desire of knowing the man like waves in the high Atlantic Ocean keeps charging at him. However, all his means—philosophic meditation, poetic epiphany, and sensibility—to comprehend the godlike man fail him; he turns to his last recourse—the cannibal:

I eat you to put my faith in grief. Singed at the edges, dying from the flame you live by, I eat you to sink into my own body. Secret body of deep liquor, I eat you Down to you secret. (Lee, 1986, p. 40)

As the Holy Communion service satisfies people’s wish to have God in themselves and as part of their life, so is the significance of Lee’s cannibalism revealed here. Although the wish for a total physical possession of his father entails Lee’s position of subjectivity as a single stable source of his feelings and intellectual power, indicating that the source is accessible, the source remains mythic and enigmatic anyway. As suggested earlier that Lee’s disbelief in the value of materialism runs awry with his search for spirituality and subjectivity in the physical embracing of his father, Lee can only evoke the memory of his father’s dead body. The “secret” is yet to be solved. He has to continue interrogating: “What are you to me/I’d tear you with my teeth” (Lee, 1986, p. 43).

The fact that his father no longer remains available exacerbates his frustration. What is left of his father is an “Excellent body of layers tightly/wound around nothing” (Lee, 1986, p. 40). The word “layers” not only denotes the layers of clothes on his father’s corpse, but also delimits his full understanding of the man, who “exiled from one republic and daily defeated in another/who was shunned by brothers and stunned by God” (Lee, 1986, p. 41). As represented in all of his poetry, his father is never a heroic figure but a helpless and passive victim of geopolitics, who, like a boat adrift in the high seas, has no control of his fate at all, except for his firm belief in spirituality and final justice. But, how can Lee identify with such a pathetic victim? Why does Stern see the father


as a “heroic figure?” What is there in this political victim that validates Stern’s claim of “heroic” qualities? The strategy Lee employs is to differentiate his father as a noble human being from his kinsmen without the

need to present his father’s tangible and recognizable heroic qualities. As a poet, Lee reveals them, out of a deep love and respect for his father, by contrasting his father to his kinsmen and fellow countrymen, who are presented as a contemptible race, cruel, bloodthirsty, and crazy:

Remember it was I who bled for you, I, born, hungry among the hungry, third in the last generation of the old country, of the family Plum, a brood distinguished by madness, tales of chains and wailing. (Lee, 1986, p. 45)

For Lee, not only are family history and the past the impetus to write about, they become what needs to be incorporated into his poetry, the very element needed to experience the self. Memory as a poetic form and structure provides access to the experience of his subjectivity and identity. It is through memory, though it fails him sometimes, that Lee bewares of the relationship between his self and his family, particularly his father, because memory, in Timothy Yu’s words, has become “a necessary foundation for future action” (p. 447). In The Room and Everything in It, Lee claims that “of the one thing I learned/of all things my father tried to teach me/the art of memory” (Lee, 1990, p. 49). Through this form of art, he attempts to understand who he is by constantly articulating the particular relationship he has with his father until he realizes that he cannot separate his life from his father’s: “Is this the first half of the century or the last/Is this my father’s life or mine” (Lee, 1986, p. 52). And “among/the dying things/are you and I” (Lee, 1986, p. 45).

Through the art of memory Lee has constructed an image of his father: a godlike victim of political atrocity and his times, whose forbearance keeps him through the ungodly parlous times. In The Location of Culture Bhabha asserts that “the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy—it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image” (p. 45). If Lee succeeds in his deification of his father in his poetry, he totally assumes that image:

[M]y true self or identity is universe or God. There are certain assumptions that I secretly carry around, and I do not know if other poets share these. I assume that my true nature is God. I assume I am God, in my true nature. (Marshall, 2000, p. 134)

Some postmodern cultural critics would argue that the past is inaccessible and history only exists in texts, both of which are subject to interpretations. Yet, with Lee, history and the past are not only real on personal and emotional levels, but also, penetrable through the agenda of memory. As shown in his “Always a Rose”, “history resembles flowers”, “where/a world of forms convulses” (Lee, 1986, p. 20). Lee proclaims:

I see these flowers, and they seize my mind, and I can no more unsee them than I can undream this, no more than the mind can stop


its wandering over the things of the world, snagged on the world as it is. The mind is a flowering cut in time, a rose, The wandering rose. (Lee, 1986, p. 20)

To Lee, history seems to be something wherein the self can ground itself. History takes different forms, and therefore, generates different meanings the way we make associations with flowers in the mind. Lee believes that history, especially the personal and family, provides the foundation for the construction of subjectivity, which never retains its wholeness, but remains in constant revisable permutation. In this sense, Lee’s poetic articulation of self is in tune to what Nietzsche and Foucault examined the concept of subjectivity, because they believe that “there is no final evidence for the existence of the ‘I’ as a stable substance or essence” (Cavallaro, 2001, p. 89). To Lee and to them, subjectivity can only be approached and addressed through discourses for which remembrance serves as a structural means, hence Lee asserts that his self is under “ceaseless invention, incessant/constructions and deconstructions” (Lee, 1990, p. 25).

Father-Son Relationship and Beyond

Chin, Chan, Inada, and Wong editors (1974) of Aiiieeeee! claim that

A constant theme in Asian-American literature […] is the failure of Asian-American manhood to express itself in its simplistic form: fathers and sons […] The perpetuation of self contempt between father and son is an underlying current in virtually every Asian-American work. (Chin et al., 1974, pp. xlvi-xlvii)

Chin’s assertion of the awry relationship between Asian American fathers and sons reflects representations of such a relation in the early Asian American works, but Lee articulates this relationship in a flip-over manner. In both his collections, Lee’s relation with his father is enviously conducive and constructive. In Rose, memories of his father and the past have an ability to shape and form his subjectivity. This evolves into an exploration of the relationship between his subjectivity and his own life as an immigrant in the United States. His second collection The City in Which I Love You (Lee, 1990) retains almost all the aesthetic features shown in the first; most poems are lucid, judicious, complex, sometimes obscure, and elastically figurative. They represent a wide range of associative and symbolic narratives, memory, meditations, descriptions, questionings, and exclamations, wherein Lee negotiates his subjectivity more as a Chinese American in a wider social context within the framework of a father-son relationship.

As a refuge, Lee came to America, on his “father’s back/in borrowed clothes”, initiating the process of “incessant/constructions and deconstructions” of “telling my human/tale, tell it against/the current of that vaster, that/inhuman telling” (Lee, 1990, p. 27). Through the telling he affirms his subjectivity as a Chinese American. This affirmation is well captured in the opening and the concluding poems of his second book, Furious Versions and The Cleaving, respectively. He locates his subjectivity in the diasporic experience of the Chinese immigrants:

America, where in Chicago, Little Chinatown, who should I see


on the corner of Argyle and Broadway but Li Bai and Du Fu, those two poets of the wanderer’s heart. (Lee, 1990, p. 23)

Of all the Chinese American writers, nobody has better recaptured, with as much heart-breaking honesty and sensibility, the tantalizing tension of the historical and cultural discontinuity Chinese American have experienced. Nor has anyone ever uttered with such immediacy the “preemptory of self of the present” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 122). His father and himself are among the wandering hearts: “My father wandered/me beside him, human/erect, unlike roses” (Lee, 1990, p. 23). The phrase “human erect” is reminiscent of the Homo Sapiens, who embarked on a new level of life. For Lee, the new life is not rosy at all because:

I grow more fatherless each day For years now I have come to conclusions without my father’s help, discovering on my own what I know, what I don’t know. (Lee, 1990, p. 37)

He lost his father, and needs to rearticulate his subjectivity as a Chinese immigrant. The loss of the father as an image to identify with is virtually compensated by his poetic envisioning of the two ancient Chinese poets Li Po and Tu Fu, two wandering poets, through whom Lee captures the shadow of his own self. It is through the effort to face the reality of the existence of Chinese Americans that prompts Lee to evoke Li Po and Tu Fu to “meditate on the experience of dispossession and dislocation—psychic and social—which speaks to the condition of the marginalized, the alienated, those who have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity and fantasy that denies their difference” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 122).

One thing Lee knows now is that in America he finds himself having lost a father but found a community with “my face” (Lee, 1990, p. 77). In The Cleaving, he explores the ethnic physical features as a means to negotiate his subjectivity. The poem begins with Lee’s identification with a Chinatown butcher, who “gossips like my grandmother, this man/with my face, and I could stand/amused all afternoon” (1990, p. 77). In the familiar face not only does Lee envisions himself, but all the diasporas, “Such a sorrowful Chinese face/nomad, Gobi, Northern/in its boniness” (Lee, 1990, p. 77). All his emotions and sympathy are registered in the simple exclamation “Such a sorrowful face”, on which is write all the imaginable hardships immigrants have endured. The butcher serves for Lee as a grand image of most Chinese Americans, who:

could be my brother, but finer and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged sinewy from his daily grip and wield of a two pound tool. (Lee, 1990, p. 78)

As the poem develops, the motif of cultural displacement is rehashed in beautiful verse. To win the battle of survival, most immigrants have to abandon their own interest and are forced to take low paying jobs and get stuck with them their entire lives. Most of them aim high and think big but end up low in spite of themselves. The old butcher, serving as an epitome of Chinese American cultural displacement, demonstrates this space wart like a floundering whale on the beach:

In his light-handed calligraphy on receipt and in his


moodiness, he is a Southerner from a river province suited for scholarship... He could be my grandfather. (Lee, 1990, p. 78)

Moreover, Lee’s sympathy and love for the immigrant scholar/butcher are extended to all the minority people in the United States in the next section of the poem. Here he challenges the Orientalist notion of racial hierarchy by celebrating the beauty of diversity in physiognomy:

Puffed or sunken according to the life dark or light according to the birth, straight or humped, whole, manqué, quasi, each pleases, verging on utter grotesquery All are beautiful by variety. (Lee, 1990, p. 81)

This Chinese immigrant butcher-scholar transcending the limitations of racial politics bears:

the sorrow of his Shang dynasty face, African face with slit eyes. He is my sister, this beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite, keeper of sabbaths, diviner of holy texts, this dark dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese I daily face, this immigrant, this man with my own face. (Lee, 1990, pp. 86-87)

These people are his “[b]rothers and sisters by blood and design[…][who] constitute a many-membered/body of love” (Lee, 1990, p. 81). Noticeably, Lee’s celebration and deference for the physiognomic heterogeneity is accompanied by his wish to understand all the immigrants by devouring them, just as he wishes to “eat” his father for the purpose of achieving totality and finality in the understanding of his father:

those bodies prepared for eating, I would eat, and the standing deaths at the counters, in the aisles, the walking death in the streets, the death far from home, the death in a strange land, these Chinatown deaths, these American deaths. (Lee, 1990, p. 83)

Lee’s “eating [is] a kind of reading” and to “devour the world [is] to utter it” (Lee, 1990, p. 82). Devouring functions as his way of meeting, reading, comprehending, and mastering the world and the unknown by letting the world enter him and reemerge in his poetry in a more comprehensible and manageable manner. Spirituality and subjectivity, as it is, always remain the central concern in Lee’s construction of identity, the core of his


subjectivity. The loss of spirituality due to cultural discontinuity and dislocation constitutes the death of selfhood; hence he only sees “standing deaths”, “walking deaths”, and “these American deaths”. There is nothing surprising if we recall his remarks with Marshall about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual: “The true self is the one that speaks, and it does not give a damn about the one that walks in clothes” (Marshall, 2000, p. 135). Lee’s cannibalism designates his wish to restore life to the clothe hangers. Instead of an ogre, “eating” is an act of saving. In this sense, it not only transforms his self but also the world of immigrants, with which he can negotiate his subjectivity in a more comfortably manner and grandeur, because eating serves as a sign of cultural communion that enacts ethnic and diasporic communities.

Conclusion

As we can see, Lee’s attempts (in his first book) to reconstruct his subjectivity by revision as the result of the constant remembrance of what has happened to his family in its incessant, forced relocations, are extended to the celebration of all the ethnic people in the United States in his second book. In the first book, he tries to understand who he is through interpreting, interacting, and memorizing the past, and even tries to “devour” his father in the hope of understanding the godlike man. In the second book, as he enlarges the circle of relationships to include all ethnic people, he tells his “human tale” by writing about the reality of immigration and the consequences of socioeconomics, which impose marginality for not only Chinese Americans but for all the ethnic communities. It is through the medium of remembrance, philosophic meditation, poetic epiphany, and cannibalism that Lee reconstructs his subjectivity. It is through his constant remembering of his father that he enters the world of (Chinese) American immigrants, and understands himself. By utilizing the art of memory of the personal and family histories of cultural reconstruction and re-invention in his interrogations of the question of subjectivity that Lee articulates in his “I” poetry the profundity of the matrix of memory that “revises” him in the arduous process of “putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the present” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 121). In Rose, Lee’s voice is that of an ethnic orphan, who longs to get in, while in The City in Which I Love You, he is much surer as an ethnic hero who transcends borders and boundaries and voices his wishes to hold dialogues with universalism as a fuller, if not “coherent” self. He thenceforth is able to identify with humanity.

References Bhabha, H. (1994). Remembering Fanon, self, psyche and the colonial condition. In W. Patrick, & C. Laura (Eds.), Colonial

discourses and post-colonial theory. New York: Columbia UP. Bhabha, H. (1997). Location of culture. New York: Routledge. Cavallaro, D. (2001). Critical and cultural theory: Thematic variations. London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press. Chang, J. (1996). Reading Asian American poetry. MELUS: The Journal of the Society of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the

United States, 21, 81-98. Chin, F., Chan, J. P., Inada, L. F., & Wong, S. (1974). Aiiieeeee!: An anthology of Asian American writers. Washington, D.C.:

Howard UP. Lee, L. Y. (1986). Rose. Brockport: BOA Editions, Ltd. Lee, L. Y. (1990). The city in which I love you. Brockport: BOA Editions, Ltd. Marshall, T. (2000). To witness the invisible. Kenyon Review, 22, 129-147. Yu, T. (2000). Form and identity in language poetry and Asian American poetry. Contemporary Literature, 41, 422-461.


Oral Narrative an Underutilized Tool of Transformation: The

Case of Ateso Folk Tales in Iteso Communities of Uganda and

Kenya*

Simon Peter Ongodia Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

The study explored the various performances of oral narratives in the Teso communities. In-depth interviews

carried out with 68 respondents from 2009 to 2013, in six selected Teso districts in Uganda and Teso and Busia

districts in Kenya, before and after performances, provided the data. In placing value and assessing the

unquantifiable feelings of narrators and audiences, the study chose the methods of qualitative research and

ethno-methodological philosophical analyses. Various levels of perceptions emerged from both the audiences and

performers as they journeyed into both self and society. The study showed that the communities yearned for the

communicative avenues of harnessing resources for solving various issues as they look into the future. Oral

narratives motivated audiences through experiences of self discovery which spurred them to analogies of societal

issues that haunted them. Both value and virtue were experienced at individual and group levels with a cultural

identity and exposure to ethnic ties that bound them together in the struggle for a brighter tomorrow. The study

recommends that a new society can be realized with movement from analogue to digital strategies for

communication.

Keywords: Ateso, Iteso, folklore, narrative, self-discovery, analogue to digital strategies

Introduction Meaning and structure of oral narratives are imbedded in the lives of people. A parent’s life with a baby is

characterized by narrative of a parent-child communication. A teacher who cannot use narrative in pedagogy and andragogy would not be employed effectively. Oral narrative implies the use of the mouth to tell a story to an audience. A politician can only move the hearts of the voters through effective use of narrative. Manifestos, promises, and vows are invariably told to listening and/or listening audiences. As a university lecturer the author has experienced the power of oral narrative in the lecture theatre and in tutorial discussions the effectiveness of which is determined by sender-receiver mutuality and establishment of decoding of meanings.

Oral narrative is the use of word of mouth to convey a torrent of events and issues to a listening audience. In the study, the oral narratives were folktales of the Iteso. In Uganda, the Iteso numbering about 3.2 million (9.6% of Uganda’s population according to the 2002 population analysis) live mainly in the Teso sub-region in

* This study was funded in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Makerere University.

Simon Peter Ongodia, Ph.D. candidate, lecturer, Department of Literature, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Makerere University.

DAVID PUBLISHING

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ORAL NARRATIVE AN UNDERUTILIZED TOOL OF TRANSFORMATION

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the Districts of Amuria, Bukedea, Kaberamaido, Katakwi, Kumi, Ngora, Pallisa, Serere, Soroti, and Tororo. In Kenya the Iteso live in the Busia and Teso Districts of Western Kenya numbering about 279,000. The Iteso in Diaspora are unaccounted for in these estimates.

As most of the narratives reflected the experiences of the Iteso communities where the study was carried on, it was important to replicate the past of these people. What kind of future is worthy for a people in the contemporary world? For the study, oral narratives were the major means persons at the small communities could use to express their thoughts better. The performers used various methods of narratives; to some the historical narrative was more appealing than the mythological narration. A blend of the two forms worked well for many performers since audiences showed preference for them. Anecdotes brought in by the audience and auxiliary performers in Ateso oral narratives helped to illustrate the concerns and simplified issues for the common person to grasp.

The experiences of the researcher, as a teacher in secondary schools and then as lecturer in universities, were historical. They helped in the reflection that the life of a knowledge disseminator is characterized by both oral and written narrative. Teaching and delivering lectures involved lots of oral narration. Preparation for the teaching and lecturing sessions relied on the written accounts. Whether one used the word or other communication devices like figures and diagrams, inevitably these tools did the narrative for the learner to receive any knowledge, new or old. Much as the initial interest was to examine the pneumonic and gestural strategies used by performers of Ateso oral narratives, the consideration of the power of oral narrative as a genre took the attention of the research. The investigation led to the empathetic discovery of many forces that lay and were at interplay between the performers and their audiences. The stories being told were also affected, they metamorphosised taking in more modern language and expression.

Many philosophers and educationists (Gaarder, 1996; Bruner, 1988, 1990; Egan 1985) and literary analysts (Ong, 1982) expressed the view that the most powerful device used by human to disseminate knowledge is narrative. It builds emotive and affective images in the person (Jung, 1968) and opens doors to meaning and the extensions therein.

Narrative is the expression of ideas that are structured purposively. The account of incidents and occurrences could be linear in a chronological fashion, circular or cyclic where there is a lot of reliance on precursor incidents for proper understanding of the present ones, or meditative in a romanticized manner of fantasy and projection. Narrative is mother to other disciplines because it entails dramatic involvement, in a time space, where issues affecting humans and their environs are being expressed and analyzed with the intention of arriving at some solutions, so as to identify the roles stakeholders or players have in the business of making this world a happy place to live in.

Research Questions The study was provoked by many questions including the following:

What is the position of narratives of folktales in the lives of the modern Africans? How do philosophical and sociopolitical issues impact on the nature of oral narratives? How is oral narrative employed to communicate the plight of the communities? How do the performers evaluate the responses they receive from their audiences? What appraisal do audiences give the performers of oral narratives in the region? What kind of future do the communities aspire for? How do they envisage getting there?


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How are the forms of narratives adjusting to the modern methods of problem-solving? In trying investigating the place narratives of stories of a people holds in the contemporary Africa, the

study appraised the remnant cultural practice of storytelling around a community evening gathering in moonlit nights. People’s continual search for the truth in conflicts and crises that inflict their living in their societies was considered paramount in the quest. Human beings essentially social beings devise a way they feel effective in articulating their troubles. The power of the spoken word and acted non-verbal expression is made use of. The study was concerned with the effectiveness of this strategy in Africa of today. The key players in the dissemination of the information are the storytellers and orators. As a communication process, the performers are conscious of the feedback they generate from their audiences. In the study, their empathetic and professional points of view were evaluated in relation to successful delivery of the themes. In a reciprocal manner, the evaluation of performances by audiences had to be looked at to assess the level of impact created for positive change to be created. A further search into the tomorrow the African people look forwards to became inevitable. It was not enough to grumble about the lost glorious past in a vibrant today that could pave way for a better tomorrow.

Narratives are purposively structured and connect to a philosophy of communication. New thought patterns are provoked in the events that are being performed by characters created or cited if not masked to do so (Abrams, 1993, p. 123). What characters say and do in the stories give a narrative thought pattern about the actions and events which lead the audience to discussion, reasoning, describing, and alluding to recent events in their milieu, in order to attempt to understand their present predicament better (Knapp & Watkins, 1994, p. 22). [Oral] [n]arrative involves coding and decoding of images which perform a cognitive process of placing the narrative plot into the introduction or beginning, the middle or the complication of issues, and the denouement or the finish (K. J. Gergen & M. M. Gergen, 1986, p. 25). The performer will present the events in the order of importance according to the agenda of narrative. In the words of Bruner (1988), “What gives the story its unity is the manner in which plight, characters and consciousness interact to yield a structure that has a start, a development and a sense of ending” (p. 106).

Methodology Data Collection and Analysis

This study explored the various performances of Ateso oral narratives in the Teso sub region of Uganda and Kenya. Using ethnographic methods, the study carried out in-depth interviews with 68 respondents interfaced with before and after 49 performances at the various performance sites and times from 2009 to 2013. The major stories studied included the following:

(1) Folktales 7 Okirokuan (Troubled Life) Nyagilo na Eisinye (The Greedy Nyagilo) Apesur Akany ka Obibi (Ten Girls and the Ogre) Obibi ka Apese (Ogre and the Girl) Apesur Akany edengete Aimuria (Five Girls picking wild Grapes) Otoori ka Oliogom (Kite and Stock) Etunganan je ka Aberuke (A Man and His Wife)

(2) Trickster stories 2


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Abaliga lo Ngora (Abaliga from Ngora) Opoo ka Obuin (Hare and Hyena)

(3) Fables 5 Turukuku (A Woman and her Adolescent Girl) Apesur akany nu araraete Akito (The Five Girls who were collecting Firewood) Opowoi, Omenia, Otomei, Orisai ka Okolodong (Hare, Bat, Elephant, Leopard and Tortoise) Angurian na Ibaren (The Grumbling of Domestic Animals) Amojong kede Epege (The Old Woman and The Piglet)

(4) Mysteries 3 Epolon ka Aberuke (The old Man and his Wife), the plight of the pumpkins-cum-sisters Eipone lo Abunio Atwanare Akwap (How Death came into the World) Aicum Akiru (Piercing Rain clouds)

(5) Legends 2 Malinga lo Ejie (Malinga the Warrior) Abaliga lo Epali (The Stubborn Abaliga)

These provided studies of empathetic involvement of the stake holders in comprehending the narratives and relating their experiences to the problem-solving strategies in the socio-economic and cultural setting. There were polarized responses to the communication scenarios which were elicited in the process as were understood by the Keen’s (2006) theory of narrative empathy among other theories of narratology.

Polkinghorne (1988) argues that studies should be free from positivistic research:

I find that our traditional research model, adopted from the natural sciences, is limited when applied to the study of human beings. I do not believe that the solutions of human problems will come from developing even more sophisticated and creative applications of the natural science model, but rather by developing additional, complementary approaches that are especially sensitive to the unique characteristics of human existence. (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. x)

In agreement with Bruner (1990) and Polkinghorne (1988), Minichiello, Aroni, Timewell, and Alexander (1995) emphasized that in order to understand people, “…we must discover the contents of their minds—their beliefs, wishes, feelings, desires, fears, intentions” (Minichiello et al., p. 22). According to Bruner (1990) “the symbolic systems that individuals use in constructing meaning… is deeply entrenched in culture and language. [So], we must look to people’s stories to infer their intentional states and their interpretations of cultural experiences” (Bruner, 1990, p. 11). The study believed that the discovery of the richness of Ateso oral narratives as tools of mediation between culture and the world of vast insatiable needs of the humans would enhance the efforts to make a better Africa.

In the analysis, the ethnographic approach of listening to individual stories told and retold with varying modifications helped the research share meanings and concepts with the respondents. It is true to what Bruner (1990) says, “By listening to these individual stories, one can find shared meanings and shared concepts” (Bruner, 1990, p. 13). These common grounds established help us to understand the worldviews of African culture as a force to reckon with.

In analyzing the expressive language of people’s narratives one opts for a qualitative rather than the quantitative examination. In quantitative approaches, a hypothesis is put forth and variables isolated. They are then acted upon to determine by measured occurrences and events if the hypothesis is true or not. In qualitative


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strategy, the model is majorly inductive because it starts with a context and ends with a greater story told. This is what Reissman (1993, p. 13) refers to as “meta-story” when describing the construction by a researcher as one built on patterns and themes of the component stories. Lancy (1999) notes that in quantitative research there “is a clear separation between the issue studied and the methodology used to conduct the study… By contrast, topic, theory and methodology are usually closely interrelated in qualitative research” (p. 3). The author chose to take the qualitative approach basing on the arguments above so as to get empathetically involved in the analyses of the new grand story being told in the Ateso oral narratives. The strategy would help the study analyze narrative thinking of both audience and performers, eliciting of thoughts, feeling and deeply held perceptions, assess the linguistic prowess of Ateso oral narratives and draw conclusions for creating a better Africa.

Data were collected using in-depth interviewing which, according to Minichiello et al. (1995), are a “conversation with a specific purpose—a conversation between a researcher and informant focusing on the informant’s perception of self, life and experience, and expressed in his or her own words” (p. 60). This method helps the study delve into the treasure stores of personal experiences and concepts and the interpretations of what is going on around the people. The reserved persons can open up in the in-depth interviews and yet this may not be attained in the quantitative stratified questions and straight jacket inquiries. The author shared some of his experiences with the informants and that helped in opening them up. Sometimes, it was a reflex action of doing well to one turn. Most sessions became shared explorations of views and concepts about Ateso oral narratives. This, as Reissman (1993) says of the purpose of dialogue is to “make meaning together” (p. 55). The questionnaires distributed to some respondents provided some measurements of tendency and helped in construction of some conclusions.

The sampling of respondents was based on “information-rich case”, according to Patton (1990) and Neuman (1997) from varied social setting, ethnic backgrounds and based in the rural settings and Ateso speaking communities. The author’s selection was theoretically based (Patton, 1990) in that he wanted a balanced representation of respondents on social, cultural, economic, educational, religious, and gender bases. On ethical considerations, the author sought permission of local leaders and of parents for juvenile informants. Although the author had preferred that all information remain anonymous some informants expressed desire to have their names at least alluded to. Some pseudonyms were maintained especially with of those expressing “sensitive” demands. Informants were interviewed in quiet locations which they chose and away from prying eyes and ears. They had the freedom to answer or not to answer any questions. The interviews were taped and later transcribed. At times, notes were made about the interviews which helped in the interpretation of results by clarifying the perspectives and reservations of the interviewees.

As far as reliability and validity of results were concerned, the results revealed through data analysis reliability. In quantitative analysis, reliability refers to accuracy in measurement and the ability of the research to be replicated. In qualitative methods, instead of repeating measures, the researcher wants to identify a repetition of concepts, ideas, and thought patterns that can lead to new discoveries (Minichiello et al., 1995). “When we are measuring people’s views, this is translated as internal and external consistency. Internal consistency refers to whether the data are plausible given all that is known about a person and an event” (Neuman, 1997, p. 368). The author interviewed retired teachers and oral performers to help him get internal consistency. These persons had repeatedly used oral narratives in their lives as teachers or as storytellers. The author had made some assumptions and they maximized the interpretative powers of each interview process,


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and according to Minichiello et al. (1995), there was rationality because the author assumed that the interviewees were familiar with oral narratives, intentionality because the study assumed that oral narratives were their trades, self-directedness as the researcher assumed that the interviewees presented authentic views from their personal experiences, truth-telling as the study treated the responses from the informants as truthful portrayal of their backgrounds and experiences.

Qualitative reliability was guaranteed by striving for external consistency. Opinion leaders in areas of the research were consulted and interviewed to ascertain the popular views about the oral narratives and performers. The researcher varied the persons interviewed, in age, sex, location, and occupation. Educational levels of individuals did not deter the interviews. The study also considered contextual factors in order to achieve reliability. Observations of several performances created triangulation to ensure that the interview fit into the overall context (Neuman, 1997, p. 368). The study tried to ascertain that the narratives were in context of the people and socio-political and economic climatic settings. There was then, “pattern matching”. Minichiello et al. (1995) suggest that qualitative researchers make a number of cultural assumptions in a pattern matching. In trying to ascertain reliability, the researcher assumes that there is an overlap among a person’s beliefs, words, and ideals and his or her culture and that the subject’s particular culture gives meaning to the behavior exhibited and the actions performed. In the texts and performances of this study, key concepts and catch words identified the interviewees with their cultural allegiances. The personality and office of the cultural leader of Iteso Emorimor Papa Iteso was referred to by both performers and members of the audience with ease. The respondents affirmed that it was the desire of the Iteso to have a unifying personality to help them achieve development.

In qualitative research, validity is “confidence placed in a researcher’s analysis and data as accurately representing the social world in the field” (Neuman, 1997, p. 369). The researcher determined validity of the study by employing, on part time basis, some teachers, one of primary and the other of a secondary school as research assistants. They were based in the communities that speak Ateso language. They were graduates, one of them doing a master in translation studies from one Ugandan university and she was quite in touch with Ateso narratives. These research aids were adequately motivated to participate in the research, an attribute of qualitative research. Validity was also determined by involvement of other persons who were not teachers or storytellers to assess and give their input in the performances. All stakeholders, civil leaders, religious adherents, cultural heads, and politicians were interviewed to see if the research was representative of their views as well. The study was probing whether the narratives represented what was valid to the communities in their quest for answers to a number of problems. External validity could be determined when the templates of the story could be seen to apply to other situations as well. One method of conflict resolution in one narrative could be applied in another scenario. The research had to take care of all interests represented in the performances, social, economic, and cultural.

Conclusion The study came up with a number of findings and made some conclusions with regard to Ateso oral

narratives. The first property of Ateso oral narrative is the commitment which must be impressive to capture the attention of the audience. K. J. Gergen and M. M. Gergen (1986) describe a dramatic engagement as “[T]he capacity to create feelings of drama or emotion” (p. 28). For a member of an audience to listen to and watch then later on participate in an oral narrative, the empathic attachment should have been created by the


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performer and the performance. The mutual interest is established early enough between performer and audience, and has to be sustained so that the oral narrative takes grip of the audience and the varied facets of meaning are disseminated. The Teso performer was aware that appealing to some human emotion and conditions of the area helps in establishing the dramatic attachment. In some communities, the storytelling took place after cattle had been rustled by some armed persons posing as raiders. When the storyteller alluded to the incident there was unanimous support for the message being passed on condemning such robbery and arson. Iteso are agricultural and pastoral people, growing crops and keeping livestock. The Iteso in Uganda have suffered several setbacks from cattle rustling of their stock by their neighbours, particularly the Karamojong. That has made the average Etesot (an adult male native of Teso and speaker of Ateso) to divert attention to other income earning ventures like growing of crops in coping with the crises created by cattle rustling and torching of homesteads.

It was with one accord that the oral narrative and the audience-performer dramatic engagement brought the community of Iteso to terms with their situation. Similarly, in the appreciation of the fable about animals guarding a pool of living water, the performer referred the audience to the drought in the area and the members of the audience did not need a second reminder that water was precious and should not be adulterated.

In line with Keen’s (2006) theory of narrative empathy, an affective link is created by the Ateso storyteller to engage the audience up to the end of the plot. Egan (1986) observes:

Stories are largely about affective matters—they are about how people feel. These feelings can either provide the motives for actions or they can provide the point and result of actions…we can see the importance of human emotions and intentions in making things meaningful. To present knowledge cut off human emotions and intentions is to reduce its affective meaning. This affective meaning, also, seems especially important in providing access to knowledge and engaging us in knowledge. (pp. 29-30)

It was portrayed in Ateso oral narratives studied that performers were aware of the power of engagement. Many strategies were employed by the storytellers to involve emotionally their audiences even though it was not plain sailing at the start. The members of the audience were effectively engaged in the narratives whenever they identified with characters and incidents in the tales. Sense could be established with the movements of the narratives and establishing links between cause and effect in the plots. With fervent commitment to understanding the story and its relevance in paving way for a better community, persons could use their imaginations to propel them to previous events and forecast the probable futures to choose from.

The second property of oral narratives is temporality, a state of existing and having some relationship with time is another property of oral narratives. Persons should identify with a specific period in time, live in it, not just exist in it and aim to make a difference to leave it better than they found it. In the dramatic engagement that the oral narratives transport their audiences, the temporality aspect is important in providing meaning to incidents and issues. In some Iteso communities where the study was conducted, members took time to relate the issues to their own circumstances. They shared their views in brainstorming sessions and came up with plausible solutions. Iteso seemed to look to the research as a possible means through which they and their views could reach the powers that be to make changes for the better. Issues of corruption cropped up in trickster stories and some fables and various communities were able to variedly assign roles to some personalities and pass judgments on them. When members of the audience knew their situation better it was possible to place meaning in the narratives they received and listened to. Storytelling in the Ateso speaking communities selected was an involving experience. Atwood (1996) says:


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When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness… like a boat [being] crushed… all aboard powerless to stop it. It is only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else… (pp. 345-346)

True to Atwood’s statement in the Ateso oral narratives, involvement in the story is an intricate process and experience. The artists call it the “into and out of the illusionary world” engagement. We must strive to get to grips with what the characters in the story portend, the level of comprehension of their predicaments. Using the empathetic stance, the audience can place themselves in the positions of the characters and in their time and visualize the way forward. The strong motivation to have a good conclusion in the story, a better future in the real life of the members of the audience, links the oral narrative to the communities with relevance. When moral judgments were passed on immoral characters or actions in the oral narratives, there was the relieving effect: The members, at least for a time, felt some psychological relief and kept their hopes high for the actualization of their aspirations. In telling the story as Atwood points out the engagement is like a maze, a puzzle from which the audiences emerge as informed advocates of the future. The story becomes a catalyst in the transformative process in communities. Sandlos (1998) says:

The closure of a story or “how the story ends” (e.g., as a tragedy, a comedy of errors, a victory, or a defeat) is a passage of moral judgment on agents of “eventhood” within the narrative and thus provides a framework for meaning production that would not otherwise be possible given a series of disconnected events. (p. 2)

The aspirations and fears of the audience as they accepted to be part of the narratives are justified or erased as the storyteller concludes the narrative. Oral narratives work towards unity and integration of thought patterns. The narrative strives to establish a common front for the people to use for tackling their problems. Viewpoints are harmonized and extremists accommodated. Temporality makes oral narratives an excellent device for memory enhancement and easier identification of the common goal for the common good. Bruner (1990) argues that stories in a context of meaning are far more memorable than a list of dates.

Conflict resolution is the third property in oral narratives. True to most genres of literature, conflict and conflict resolution is the menu of the narratives. In folktales, there is a central conflict or complication of life and a resolution or denouement. This provides the audience with avenues of solving problems in their areas especially when similar or related issues were well articulated in the oral narratives. The Ateso tales reflected a variety of conflicts that humanity could be faced with: political, social, cultural, economic, technological, aesthetic, and psychological to name a few. The performers had to engage the audience into the problem highlights provide a development of the crises and explore strategies used for grappling with the issue. According to Egan (1988), explorations to resolve the conflict would require a variety of cognitive skills in potentially all disciplines. All faculties are required, affective, cognitive, and psychomotor. Narrative plots in Ateso oral narratives gave models which paralleled human conflicts and dilemmas and gave indicators of possible solutions.

The fourth property of oral narrative is character where roles in life situations are dressed in personalities depicting them. MacIntyre (1984) compares human life to narratives where persons have certain roles to play on stage at given times and learn the complex dynamics of our cultures.

We enter human society… with one or more imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted and have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 216)


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He further cautions, “Deprive children of stories and you leave them anxious stutterers in their actions as well as their words” (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 216). Just as teachers should not deny their learners stories, communities should not be deprived of oral narratives by socio-cultural endowments. The people will degenerate into stutterers and desolate beings. As stories are connected to words and actions the drama should be engaging people from the start on life situation of here and now. Life is presented as fragmented actions and notions of meanings with the resultant chaos ensuing. Oral narratives in characterization in Ateso helped model and define characters to be emulated by members of Iteso communities and those to be abhorred. Oral narratives displayed intolerance in varying degrees and the models portrayed a nurturing of tolerance to be accommodated in the meaning creation process. Virtues were imparted through tolerance, establishment of trust and mutual concern for others were dressed in the characters that the oral narratives showed. Skills of survival and co-existence were interwoven in the oral narratives. The trickster tales from the Ateso stories gave fertile ground for discussion on the role of trust and tolerance in society.

Another property of oral narratives Ateso stories portrayed was voice, the right to be heard. The communities the research was carried in did not mince words in expressing their right to be heard. Many informants were saddened by the apparent denial of the right to be heard. Skepticism was shown because of disappointments realized from various empty promises of political, cultural, and religious leaderships. Audiences had to be persuaded to adopt viewpoints of the narrators. It was made possible when the audiences were made to see the stories as real to them. That is why Connor (1999) argues:

…Understanding that the storyteller—wittingly or unwittingly—selects, highlight, obscures, evades and manipulates ‘the facts’, is also one of the tenets underpinning critical literacy and informed social action. (p. 4)

Historical novelists and playwrights intentionally weave fiction with nonfiction in order to engage the affective and cognitive imaginations of the audience so as to activate the psychomotor domain of their faculties. Details are evoked of events of feelings that could have been lost over time. When Ngugi wa Thiong’o refers to the African struggles in his novels and plays, (for example in A Grain of Wheat (1967) or Petals of Blood (1977)) the historical fact of the political revolts against foreign rule are freely interwoven with fiction resulting in the rekindling of the fires of strong desire for a better Africa. More often than not, more truth comes out of a blend of fiction and nonfiction than a pure factual report of history. After listening to the story told, the audience members often carried on the discussion by telling related stories of their own to further illustrate the meaning they got. According to Robinson and Hawpe (1986):

Throughout the construction process, judgments and references are required at two levels: about discreet items of information and about the adequacy of the unfolding story. Selecting, comparing, inferring, arranging, and revising are activities, which we regard as cognitive strategies. (p. 116)

When the facts on the ground are blended with feeling of sympathy and empathy, the affective domain supports the cognitive one. Feelings are internalized and appreciated giving rise to positive thinking for affirmative action. The communities are able to think rationally and not emotionally as was the prevalent case in the past, for instance, after the loss of a kin to armed insurgents.

That leads to the sixth property of oral narratives, the perspective of the audience, the various ways in which each member of the listening and acting party perceive issues with a renewed outlook. Just as storytellers use various approaches to tell the same story, individual members of the audience, bearing in mind their background experiences, do understand the story in their own angle of conceptualization. In Ateso oral


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narratives, the truth in the narrative was judged subjectively and severally. The researcher recalled a simple experiment of message transmission using the rudimentary teaching aid of a line of 10 individuals spaced at five meters apart and told to convey a short message in a conveyor-belt system from source A to the neighbor. By the time the message is said out aloud by the 10th person, the amount of distortion was significant to the horror of the sender. The audience perspective is a property that oral narrators have to reckon with.

Integrative force is the seventh property of oral narratives. As we mentioned above oral narratives freely merge fiction with non-fiction sometimes in the same breath of telling. It also integrates other disciplines in the storytelling. The performance experience vied from social issues like family conflicts to cultural issues like the cultural institution of Iteso; the Iteso Cultural Union headed by His Highness the Emorimor, Papa Iteso. The same audience and performers would discuss economic and gender related issues in their communities. Science and technology often found their way into the oral narratives. In one of the folktales about mysterious girls who were got from creeping plants, Epolon ka Akeberu (The Old Man and His Wife), it was told that when their union with humans became sour, one aggrieved sister networked with her other sisters using a mobile phone and they reassembled and returned to the swamp to their family of creeping plants, abandoning their efforts to please humans. In the tale an old childless couple had been blessed by nature when they picked some creeping plants that turned out to be beautiful girls when taken home. The couple married off four of the five “daughters” to political and cultural leaders. One daughter, who was lame, refused to get married and stayed home, however, the “mother”, was as ungrateful for their fortune as she was cruel. The lame girl was tortured days on end until she saw that it was enough. She called her other four sisters using a cell phone and they mournfully returned to the plant life from which they were got. Through the story told about aspects of humanity, the performer prepares the audience to comprehend the conflicts around them and seek to possible solutions to rectify the dismal conditions. Personal responsibility for actions and lack of correct actions became the topic of discussion. Ideas and facts were integrated in the narratives. In a similar way, in Angurian na Ibaren (The Grumbling of Cattle) the characters wrote a memorandum to the civic leaders demanding respect for animal rights and urging humans to desist from artificial insemination.

It is this viewpoint that Polkinghorne (1988), a narrative psychologist explains that, “the narrative scheme serves as a lens through which the apparently independent and disconnected elements of existence are seen as parts of a whole” (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 36). It follows that any oral narrative provides the opportunity for members to integrate their experiences and existences of other beings in the bid of subduing the world for the good of humanity.

The eighth property of oral narrative is cultural mediation. In many narratives that the study examined, the performers ended the plot with reference to the cultural institution of Iteso. A storyteller extricated the fictional narrative by saying that the cultural leader of Iteso (who was not mentioned anywhere in the narrative, but assumed to have eyes and ears everywhere) was concerned about the crises displayed in the narrative. This appeal for cultural unity was seen by many performers as a tool for harnessing constructive energies for a better Africa. Bruner (1990) indicates that one of the properties of narrative is its ability to “forge links between the exceptional and the ordinary” (Bruner, 1990, p. 47). He continues to state that the stories of a culture perpetuate its morals and traditions, but the conflict and resolution structure of a narrative allow for negotiated meaning when there is a conflict, when intent must be considered.

The Ateso oral narratives invariably alluded to facets of culture. The story of the creeping plants turned beautiful girls alludes to the cultural cord of Iteso who identify themselves with the creeping plant, emuria,


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tough, and resilient to all weather. Narrative “mediates between the canonical world of culture and the more idiosyncratic world of beliefs, desires and hopes” (Bruner, 1990, p. 52). Oral narratives essentially provide avenues for moral decision-making and conflict resolution. The performers gear their oral tales to suitable endings that support the people’s cultural values, ethos, attitudes, feelings, and norms. These values play significant roles in helping the people make up their minds about certain crises. They prioritize the values highlighted and base their rationalized conclusions on them. The oral narratives make audiences foresee an outcome of some set of actions while the stories they share related to the narrative enables them engage integrated support from one another. The power to identify the nature of the problem, issue, or conflict is given, cultural values are explained, and the process of value prioritization is set in motion. The Iteso audience was able to predict possible outcomes of a given series of occurrences and then support a feasible resolution to the crises in given circumstances.

A renewed perspective is the ninth property of narrative. The process that the beginning of a storytelling session ignites continues the flame of inquiry into the meaning of life and the crux of conflicts pervading human communities. People want the truth about their story however gloomy it might be. Social scientists call this identity a placement of a person to a milieu. In the study, it was not uncommon for Iteso audiences getting up in arms against adulteration of their folktales. Performers and their auxiliaries were often challenged when communities thought that their narrative was blatant distortion of facts. Violence was viewed in varying angles of the characters portrayed in the tales. The experience of oral narrative gave some people opportunities to journey into the self, own what they can, and identify with some aspects of the past that they know worked well. Reconciliation is seen as a tool for reconstruction of African societies. In the oral narratives, the irreconcilable characters are ejected from society and their state of being outcasts is judged as punitive.

The tenth property of oral narrative is reflection when the meaning obtained and the renewed perspective arrived at empowers the individuals to give better informed meanings to their predicaments. MacIntyre (1984) suggests that narrative is the pathway to meaning, because our lives are a narrative. The power of narrative is that it reflects our own life space. This effect is heightened by the overlap of life narratives; the interplay of generations that gives us clues to interpreting our own events (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 212). In the reflection stage, the Iteso audiences and performers could see new possibilities of solving what had looked insurmountable tasks. But this, they concurred, required action and not apathy. Bruner (1990) says:

When we enter human life, it is as if we walk on stage into a play whose enactment is already in process—a play whose somewhat open plot determines what parts we may play and toward what denouements we may be heading. (p. 34)

In the reflection phase, the oral narrative gives the audience and performers certain viewpoints open to them. They feel privileged to have enough sense to redesign their destiny using the knowledge obtained from the storytelling experience. As they each view their lives as personal narratives, they get a better view of self which helps in undertaking the journey of life further on. The brainstorming sessions that followed some narratives showed that the participants had come to terms with their realities and were not projecting blame to other persons or bodies but were determined to harness resources in their reach for a better Africa. This is what K. J. Gergen and M. M. Gergen (1982) refer to as the healing power of narratives when they argue that narrative becomes a powerful psychotherapy tool when patients feel empowered to identify their conflict and look towards possible positive resolutions (K. J. Gergen & M. M. Gergen, 1982, p. 27).


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Recommendations The study recommends that a new Africa can be realized with interactions and connections being revived

through oral narratives of the people of Africa. Oral narrative as a genre gives the personal, individual, and communal concerns a voice, a projection that reflects the perception of the actors in a given scenario. It points out that there is the concern of all who must play their roles in the circumstances to pave way for the better future. Oral narratives become the cultural mediator and umpire for the norms of the community. Through oral narratives communities adopt new attitudes and outlooks to issues that could have been insurmountable for an individual. The Iteso find that they can forgive one another and reconcile with their hostile neighbors as they look to the future. The elders and the youth can live in harmony in spite of the previous animosity that might have existed in the socio-cultural revolutions.

Narrative Language for Development The study examines the relationship between narrative language and development. Following what the

structuralist, Chomsky (1965, 1968) believed that there was an innate ability of individual to learn and develop language in his language acquisition device, Bruner (1990) claims that “innate syntactic language” is modified with social interactions and that “rules can only be learned instrumentally” (p. 70). When an oral narrative is performed there may be cases of innate readiness for the meanings to be inferred by the ability to form prelinguistic appreciation of context. Bruner’s (1990) views agree with Polkinghorne who says that “the more accepted position is that narrative structure although dependent on basic human capacities, are acquired by abstractions from experiences” (Polkinghorne, 1988, pp. 112-113). The generalizations conceived begin as the narrative unfolds and is helped by precursor events in the interpreters’ minds. Word meanings get generalized as members of the audience play with the verbal dexterity and the acquired meaning is shared by the speech community. Bruner (1990) claims that humans have the will to communicate and “the push to construct narrative determines the order of priority in which grammatical forms are mastered” (Bruner, 1990, p. 71).

The study about constructing knowledge using narrative was done way back at the times of the educationist Montessori (1912) who notes that children at a remarkably young age are making sense of their worlds through language. According to her, “dictorium” is the use of language for intellectual growth. Spoken language (oral narrative so to say) “develops through the exercise of its mechanisms and is enriched by perceptions and dictorium that develops with the mind and is enriched by intellectual culture” (Montessori, 1912, 1988, pp. 247-248). This view is true of oral narratives in African folklore. In the arguments about the power of oral narratives in fostering development, the study notes that communities need to develop communicative strategies that are in resonance with narratives. Westby (1991) says:

Developmentally, narrative is the first language form that requires the speaker to produce an extended monologue rather than an interactive dialogue. In relating or listening to a narrative, the speaker and listener act as spectators rather than participants. As spectators, the speaker and listener reflect on experiences, whereas as participants, they use language to get things done and make changes in the current situation. (p. 340)

What Westby says is in line with the thesis of the study. Ateso oral narratives can be used effectively by Iteso to foster development. Africa can solve her problems using actively narrative. Polkinghorne (1988) contends that:

For human existence, linguistic forms are paramount, for they filter and organize information from the physical and cultural realms and transform it into the meanings that make up human knowledge and experience. On the basis of this


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constructed experience, we understand ourselves and the world, and we make decisions and plans regarding how we will act. (Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 158)

Oracy as a Sharpening of Literacy Prospects In one of the Ateso folktales, Angurian na Ibaren (The Grumbling of Cattle), the storyteller dramatizes

how the characters wrote a letter to the government to express their grievances. That is utilizing literacy as a tool of expression. Oracy gives rise to literacy, the orate characters prove themselves to be literate. The more orate our people become the more chances of their becoming well-read and knowledgeable. Goodman (1986) says:

Language is language only when it is whole. Whole texts, connected discourse in the context of some speech or literacy event, are really the minimal functional unit, barest whole that makes sense. When [we] look at words, phrases, sentences, [we] do so always in the context of the whole, real language texts that are part of real language experiences of people. (pp. 27-28).

Audiences get immersed into narratives that the power of literacy is sharpened. Fox (1997) illustrates the immersion process in narrative saying that, “when we develop literacy we should be reading aloud daily” (p. 123). She was emphasizing two points: selecting good literature and daily reading. What was being recommended for a classroom teacher applies in oral narratives where the performer is teacher and the audience is the students. Oral narratives assist developing the literacy skills. Cambourne (1988) uses the parallel of oral language to emphasize that making errors is not only normal, it is “absolutely essential to the whole process” of learning to read and write (Cambourne, 1988, p. 67). In learning to speak we go through a series of successive approximations. In learning to read and write, we should be allowed to do this as well in a judgment free, safe and secure environment. The study explored the power of oral narrative in enhancing an understanding of a given language. This involved getting to grips with the journeys of personalities in the stories, linking them to individual journeys of members of the audience and their communities in line with their culture. Oral narratives help enrich the understanding of a culture and way of life of a people.

The researcher interviewed performers and members of the audiences to determine strategies; they felt plausible in their given environment to have things change for the better. The researcher noted that their understanding of their predicaments ran deeper than the language they were using could express. Nonetheless, they opted for the oral narrative medium of expression as relieving for both the participants and the stakeholders. Storytelling reflects life’s journey by affording members of the audience opportunities to explore their personal narratives in their social setting. The ability to understand life experiences meaningfully is enhanced. All human life is a cyclic mirror: we are born, we grow, we learn, we work, we play, we face conflicts, and have to make choices, we relate with other human beings, and we propagate and die, to let others continue the cycle. In spite of these repetitive phenomena, each individual has a role to play in the cosmos. Oral narratives provide imagery for self exploration using metaphors of life. The ability to process the images using the cognitive and the affective domains help the understanding of the patterns and rhythm of the person, emotionally, cognitively, and socially.

Oral narratives help in noting the importance of narrative as well as paradigmatic thought patterns through the provision of allegory, image, and metaphor. Bruner (1988) says, “Narrative thinking, a good story, convinces us of the likeliness of the events occurring or the character existing. This is in contrast to “the ‘well-informed argument’ of paradigmatic thinking which aims to convince us of truth” (p. 99). This leads to


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the cause and effect thought patterning, which Robinson and Hawpe (1986) say “are attempts to organize and give meaning to human experience, to explain and guide problem solving” (p. 114). Listening to the free conversations of the audience members and performers after performances, the researcher observed that both the paradigmatic and narrative thought patterns were being used concurrently. Some people used logico-scientific reasoning to design a structure of plot the narrative should have taken, and immersed themselves into the action of the story, took on some role(s) and explained what he or she could have done in the circumstances. The word which is the productive creation of human for expression is related to many aspects. Ong (1982) comments on oral recitation, “The oral word… never exists in a simply verbal context, as a written word does. Spoken words are always modifications of a total, existential situation which always engages the body” (p. 67). When literacy is developed the person has to provide more to make the word lucid and clear to the reader.

Reading the Signs of Time, Traditions, and Festivals We experience the signs of time through daily and weekly patterns, seasonal patterns and by a realization

of the past, present, and the future we want in Africa. The linear and circular stories in Ateso oral narratives celebrate traditions, customs, and festivals. Celebrations mark passage of time in which connect to the people’s past, birthdays, marriage anniversaries, funeral rites and other rites of passage. Traditions and cultural festivals bring families together to celebrate aspects of their existence. Mock (1999) says, “The sense of belonging engendered by their participation in family cultural traditions make our active support important… Traditions and stories can make the present more meaningful, the past more believable, and the future more possible” (p. 34). Hence, the celebration of narratives in Ateso oral folktales help the communities to understand the present of their existence, believing in the past treasures and norms and to forge ahead for a bright future for people of Africa. In traditional oral cultures, thought and memory are related to sound. If a story was forgotten by a tribe, it was lost forever. “For this reason, oral cultures have exploited language to aid memory” (Egan, 1997, p. 58). Mnemonic patterns include the phrases and sayings that are echoed from one occasion to another. The repetition of words and ideas, alliterations, and assonances (Ong, 1982; Egan, 2000) help in memory retention. Ong (1982) points out that in oral cultures, it is important for there to be a lapse of time before a story is retold since this gives the listener time to formulate personal patterns that would enable him or her to remember the tale in an internalized version. “Part of this memory process involved identifying ‘standard thematic settings’ (the assembly, the meal, the duel, the hero’s helper, and so on), in proverbs which are constantly heard by everyone so that they come to mind readily and which themselves are patterned for retention and ready recall” (Ong, 1982, p. 34). The power of story can be used for communities of oral societies to aid memory as “lore coded within a story structure… much easier to preserve. They could orient hearers’ emotions to their contents” (Egan, 1997, p. 62).

When stories are told, the listeners share in the storied experiences of others with whom they feel a connection which Keen (2006) refers to as “speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences” (p. 207). The speculation and connection influence the choices that contribute to the uniqueness of individuals. Personal journey choices can also be affected by an awareness of endowments and interests that constitute individual uniqueness and personal traits. The Focused Group Discussions held in the study revealed that people were encouraged to explore their personal narratives and discover their own voices and viewpoints to guide them in the life’s journey. The speculation can be used as integrating force when narrative helps person


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find the inner authentic voice to experience transformation through effecting psychological and spiritual development. Once one has recognized a journey, he or she engages respect for other people’s journeys are enhanced to assist in getting deeper meaning. This inquiry involves envisaging a goal related to personal change and coping with obstacles on the pathways to achieving greater ideals. People develop creativity as an outward expression of inner balance which involves discovering universal truths and values and relating these to one’s life through interweaving archetypes and transcend cultural limitations.

Dialogue and Self Discovery In the tale of Okirokuan (Troubled Life) fate and fatalism pave way for the down trodden. The protagonist

is an adopted into a family with a benevolent foster father but an evil step mother. As fate would have it, this male Cinderella turns out to be the most intelligent and brave man who is liked by all human beings and wild animals alike. He establishes his home in the middle of a virgin forest and lives happily with his wife. The story is agro-forested in setting and opens avenues of untrodden paths for problem-solving strategies. Humans are made to see virgin forests that are surviving as fertile ground for agriculture, the backbone of their community’s economy. The forests house the fauna and floras that are friendly to humanity are harnessed well.

Change Beginning With Self In the story Amojong ka Epege (The Old Woman and the Pig) threats and fear are used to solicit support

and adherence from parties that are selfish and conceited. The wayward leader is made to do the common good. Sanctions imposed today reflect the coercive nature of humanity where the wayward brother or sister is brought back in line with humanity by the threat of pain inflicting steps is posted on the menu. Change is pivoted as a personal journey into the self, a re-examination of one’s role in the development process. It abhors the apathy and laziness, the sins of omission and commission.

Conflict Resolution Strategies Identified In the Ateso oral narratives, each story had a crisis it portrayed. The members of the audiences exploited

the opportunities to examine the strategies the fictitious characters took in attempting to resolve standing issues. Community awareness campaigns were being exercised at will. Government organs and other well wishers take heed from the stories and the avenues that were provided in the narratives and when there were programs like eradication of poverty and alleviation of the standards of living of the communities, the stakeholders were better informed on strategies that were friendly to the particular society. In bringing economic, social and health issues to the attention of the societies the players would be better informed on the plausible strategies to use.

Storytelling also helped communities identify problems that afflicted them. Slavery to an unidentified issue is worse that knowledge of the existence of the crises. Problem identification strategies were given by the oral narratives in varied proportions. This helped the communities to own up some issues and look for solutions to them in their efforts to seek a better tomorrow.

As one story showed, it was time communities realized that they lived in a global setting where the physical and political frontiers did not play a big role. Networking was a solution that had come with the digital era and had to be made use of at all costs. That would ensure that linkages and affiliations were rooted in the Africa of today and tomorrow. Just like most oral narratives alluded to associations and connectivity, Epolon ka Aberuke (The Old Man and His Wife) where characters used mobile phones to network, the digital facilities ought to be used in getting solutions to the kaleidoscope of social issues.


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Implications for Further Research In the seven years the researcher spent living with various communities of Ateso speakers, he saw that

there were many unwritten tales being passed on by word of mouth. The stories had a number of modifications as far as the elderly members of audiences could recall. This meant that the authentic orthodox stories were being lost slowly. This source should be tapped and made usefully available for the present Africa.

In a similar way, a number of conflict resolution avenues were being suggested if not alluded to. As communities develop, a number of divergences emerge and new methods of declarations need to be exploited to enable humans live meaningfully in harmony.

Most of the concerns of the communities were about survival. Now that there was relative political stability established in the region, the major threat to their livelihood was the food basket. Food security in the region should be studied and plausible means devised to ensure that there is food for all, starting with a sensitization through accessible oral narratives.

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George Orwell’s Experiment With the Ironic Narrative Structure

in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Louai T. ABU Lebdeh Irbid National University, Irbid, Jordan

Amaal Al Masri Al Balqa Applied University, Amman, Jordan

This study seeks to establish the major relevance of the ironic vision embodied in the narrative structure in George

Orwell’s early novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. After providing a comprehensive satisfying examination of the cultural

phenomenon that goes by the name of “Modernism”, the world in which the young George Orwell began his

literary career; the study will present a critical analyses exploring Orwell’s novel concerning the past-war ironic

dystopian vision, with special reference to his experiment with the ironic narrative techniques and structure.

Keywords: modernism, ironic narrative, Winston Smith, romantic quest, politics, doublethink, Big Brother

Introduction Before the detailed analyses of Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, it makes sense to turn our attention

not only to “modernism”, but also to one of its manifestations that lead to the satirical ironic vision of Orwell’s novels of the 1940s.

Europe witnessed an abrupt break with all tradition. The greatest of all divisions in the entire history of western man, in every sphere, in politics, religion, social values, art, and literature, a chasm lies between the two ages. The First World War, the war that was to end all wars, set the stage for the rise of the Nazis and the fascist who would drag the world to another global cataclysm. Women were empowered with the vote; male chauvinism was finally under threat. In the world of art and literature, no previous age produced work which was as shatteringly and bewilderingly new as that of the cubists, Dadaists, the surrealists, and Picasso. Along with these developments, there came the ideas of Freud and Jung, and Adlor. Traditional notions about the continuity of the self, the stability of the individual identity, were shattered by the psychologists’ probing of the human psyche. The human world that the young George Orwell had to reek on with was very different. The radical quality of the age is expressed by these words of Virginia Woolf:

On or about 1910 human nature changed ... All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, Parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. (Woolf, 1953, p. 85)

There were pervasive aesthetic revolutions that shoot up Europe directing artistic expression along new ways. The humanistic tradition of the west faced a crisis. Human existence appeared to have taken a new form of thinking and feeling. This engendered radical consequence in the realms of politics and in those of art, and literature. Everywhere, and in every strata of society to be self-aware meant to be filled with anxiety. This

Louai T. ABU Lebdeh, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of English Language & literature, Irbid National University. Amaal Al Masri, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of English language & literature, Al Balqa Applied University.

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general feeling of angst may be explained as the result of movement of the western world from the Romantic Movement into a new age.

George Orwell’s readers would be familiar with his antipathy towards the growing mass culture of the 20th century, particularly Orwell’s aversion to the forms of mass entertainment. His dismay is explicitly and implicitly aired in the conversation of the characters of most of his novels. At the same time, the novels manifest Orwell’s familiarity with and appreciation of the Avant-Garde artists. The ethos of fracture was aggravated by the passage from one age to another, the surging flow of new inventions and experiments in science and technology, the new means of communication, and most disconcerting of all, the political breaches that were opening up between the modern states. Orwell and his fellow artists would also have realized that change in the literary milieu were not merely an aesthetic phenomenon. It grows from ideological change, changes in beliefs and ways of life. From the first decade of the 20th century, Europe witnessed changes of frontiers, classes, values, and ideas. Every aspect of human existence was being transformed. The changes were most visible in the great cities of Western Europe; and the artists gravitated to these urban centers. Changes in the external ambience were paralleled by startling changes in the inner lines of human beings. All the great works of literature began to be thought of under the rubric of “modernism”, and to be distinguished from the “contemporary”.

Another issue that has to be faced in which Orwell began his career is the relationship of modern art and literature to truth and value in life. The writers and artists of the past had their characters struggling to answer questions, and the answers arrived at were crucially moral answers. The modern artists limit themselves to questions. The above observation boils down that the human condition is problematic, and the modern artist’s contribution to the problematic gave it a special orientation.

One of the most striking features of the literary ambience that George Orwell had to reckon with was the way literary modernism found its natural habitat the metropolitan cities, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Paris, and London. These polyglot cities which had attained preeminence as centers of intellectual and cultural exchange were the real incubators of the literature of experimental modernism. These cities were always associated with new ideas and new arts and allured young writers. It has to be realized that modernism was a uniquely urban art because the modern artist was thoroughly embroiled in the spirit of the modern city. Indeed, the city itself was the dominant spirit of a modern technological society. The big city became the visible, throbbing, multifaceted embodiment of culture.

By the time George Orwell began to get published, the modernist movement had sealed its special bond with the modern city, which was playing a dual role as cultural museum and hectically novel environment. At the same time, the major cities of Europe had been culture-capitals of the continent, and modernism planted its roots in these fertile centers. It was a time when the intelligentsia was expanding and becoming conscious of itself as a distinct caste, and experiencing separation from the other social orders. Orwell’s involvement in his age was thorough, yet as a satirist the involvement was necessarily abstracted. He developed a flair for getting at the heart of the fashionable life-styles and recreating them in telling images and episodes. Orwell’s satiric narrative stance caused a swing, between involvement and detachment. In keeping with the satiric mode, Orwell steers clear of psychological immersion.

Orwell’s practice as a novelist worked towards a particular aesthetic philosophy for fiction in modern and times. Such a poetics is dictated by the current view of man or the way man is represented as a figure in fiction. Orwell’s novels get under way with the glossy surface presented by the intellectual and social trend setters.


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Soon, the action plunges below to the boredoms, discomforts, and animal passions that stir there. His characters are creatures of a sophisticated urban ethos. From their behavior it would become clear that the aristocracy is on the verge of collapse and the middle-class intellectuals, flitting around in an ambiguous landscape, and conducting sexual liaisons of varying degrees of ridiculousness. There is in English fiction a tradition which mixes comedy, a concern for social justice and a more than amateur interest in what philosophers mull over.

The social, political, and cultural scene along with the future of London, after the anxieties of the post-war in modern Britain was unexposed as the nation was attempting to illustrate the miserable transference towards its modern future provides a certain number of tragic critical visions for the city modern future. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), among many other literary artists who contributed to the crises that rented London and the whole nation, reflects and shows a very clear waypoints in its development. In fact, his writings in a diverse manner were always considered as labels for the frequent feelings of a forfeiture of the terrible concern regarding the future of the modern British society and the national status and power. Remarkably, given the famous liberal credentials of Orwell’s, such terrible concerns have provoked in his novel a preservative fear of change, regardless the fact, if this change displayed by a technological growth, a flourishing youth culture, or socialist government.

Thematic Concern There is no doubt in our minds that the real identity of the leading or the major character in the normal

fashion and mode, is not supposed to possess any exceptional or supernatural forces, but usually the protagonist locates his identity in the extra-social circumstance. The major character mostly embodies man as a person who attempts to live in harmony with nature, without intending to dominate it. In fact, the leading character or the hero in the ironic fashion or mode is usually dehumanized physically or psychologically by his own society; the society in which he exists, and this society is usually totalitarian and the character’s behavior and deeds, are usually sterile. In other words, the ironic hero’s always response to a certain call to withdrawal from their society, and this withdrawal usually comes in the form of ironic journey. Orwell depicted this essential quest in his famous novel 1984.

From a critical point of view, in ironic fable the hero is not single—dimensional, neither is the world in which he lives. In fact, narrative irony might be examined as a “parody” of narrative romance, through the protagonist in ironic and romantic fable examines a journey of a symbolic nature. During this symbolic journey and inception the ironic hero, usually begins to realize and grasp the perplexity that exists in his world, as well as his heroic abilities in a more considerable way. Yet, it is possible to state that the ironic narrative also can be considered a parody, due to the nature of the journey that is usually tumultuous by coincidence, or by arbitrary to the beginners.

Orwell felt that, the ironic protagonist’s quest. Would be the best influential way to reflect and demonstrates the criticism of the doctrinaire and despotism of tyrannical government that hides behind the mask of socialist equality in the miserable civilian slum.

Orwell’s hero, Winston smith, is conscious of the oppression and doctrinaire practiced by the society on the lives of the individuals including his own one and the scarcity of consciousness. Orwell was quite aware to realize that his character Winston would be in need for a certain psychological characteristics to reinforce his growth and to develop his intellectual capacity to be logically able to differentiate between right and wrong, as well as to appraise what he wants to be. Thus, and in order to make it possible for Winston to achieve his desire,


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the distance from society was an essential demand, for this reason Winston Smith journey and his withdraw to the country was due to an attempt to work on his human instincts.

Orwell’s hero struggles with sin that has been implanted. In fact, Orwell’s hero struggles more with the appearing restless and remorse, than with his ethical conscience for the unfavorable decision he has made when he decides to respond to his call. But it seems that the hero’s sense of this sin is reduced the more distance he attains from civilizations as well as society. The ripeness procedure and rite of passage permit Winston the independence to be a person. It is really a perfect romantic model that enables the hero to obtain bravery and honor as he finishes his initiation. In fact, the romantic fable is pure and predictable, yet it recognizes the desirable. But, the perplexity in our life and in the human spirit do not constantly permits for such nostalgia, and that the social foe is able to perplex the result. The irony is embodied throughout the narrative because the romantic model doesn’t expose as one might think when the real life and human nature are interwoven. In fact, the ironic narrative is a spoof of the romantic narrative; irony is the structure that emerges when the unconscious and the reality of the world are applied to the hero’s journey. Orwell’s 1984 contains all the elements of an ideal romantic quest; with the fact that in his text, Orwell portrayed a totalitarian central government as evil or the foe and this evil would be defeated and beaten by the romantic hero Winston Smith.

Additionally, Orwell’s novel includes many elements of the Monmouth; which sets the reader to think that Orwell’s protagonists Winston was detached sufficiently from society to recover his individualism, or he could truly be reborn again as a free man.

At the very opening of the novel, in a gloomy April day, Winston is going back to his bleak apartment, while the people of Oceania are suppressed by the permanent war against the other powers and the perpetual observations. Winston is one of the effective members of the Outer Party, yet, he suffers seriously from his reality, and this anxious feeling is popular for a protagonist in responding to his call to adventure. Winston contemplates why the people do not revolt. Winston in his individual revolution against the despotism, he purchases a diary and starts to commit disloyalty by writing “Down with Big Brother” (Orwell, 2007, p. 20) frequently. But when a women namely Julia whom Winston had once worried was employed for the thought police, astonished him when she gave him a piece of paper stating “I LOVE YOU” (Orwell, 2007, p. 113). We are quite sure that Julia is the second copy of Winston’s or Winston’s other. In the novel Julia presents the characteristics such as rebelliousness and sexuality, which had been repressed in Winston. The other or the darker image plays a significant role in the hero’s journey of growth and development, if it is observed by him. Yet, it is also his integral side, and they are interconnected to each other, even if they appear to be diagonally ambivalences. The image usually incarnates everything that the protagonist was unable to recognize or suppress in his personality. In other words, the character will be psychologically weak and infirm, if he is unable to acknowledge the integral interrelated bands that he shares with the other. It was possible for Winston to recognize that he shares Julia many commonalities, with the exception of that she is only “a rebel from the waist downwards” (Orwell, 2007, p. 129)

The way in which Winston transacts with the conflict that forced him to recognize the fact that he needs to change, beat something, or capitulate to a downfall, in Winston’s condition, it seems that he is on the edge of a psychological downfall. In such cases, the hero is usually conscious that he is on the edge of his journey and the call to his journey adventure, always results from within. The events of the story go on, with the secret meetings for Julia and Winston affairs; and with Mr. Charrington, a shop owner Winston sets the dispositions. In the novel Mr. Charrington is presented as Winston’s instructor in his trip. After that, Winston’s dream to


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meet O’Brien “In the place where there is no darkness” (Orwell, 2007, p. 178), he is one of the active internal factious members in the Brotherhood confidential revolt party and outwardly. His dream comes true after he was called officially by O’Brien. In the course of their secret meeting, O’Brien hands Winston a script of the original text that explains the strategy the group utilizes to hold the citizens stratified and keep authority. Yet, O’Brien ends his meeting with Winston after he warns him against the consequences that he will encounters in this path. After Winston’s consent to O’Brien’s call he starts reading the script text deliberately, thinking what could he do.

The narrative quest always revolves around a central factor; this factor might be attributed to the fact that the hero in this quest usually searches for a worthy thing, as it is the case with every quest. In fact, it is not a simple task to achieve this worthy thing, and it demands a real protagonist to achieve the prize and to correct the world behind. Winston is searching of individuality; he is in need for more enlighten about freedom from the suppression and manipulation. In this stage, the writer forces and stimulates the audience to think that the tripe of the hero has started; Winston has given his consent to O’Brien call that he is fit for the mission, and he seems initially, to create the impression that he begun to achieve initial success in his journey. With this development, the trip of the protagonist will be rented by difficulties due to the tragic events, or simply the writer might be in need for a timely suitable rite passage. Thus, Orwell’s decision to involve his protagonist Winston in a journey of adventure was very important, to make it possible for Winston to achieve the essential required awareness and vision, concerning himself or the surroundings, despite the sort of this awareness, if it is right or wrong.

The real trials of Winston starts when he was subjected to be tormented into abiding and approving the philosophy of the party; after being ensnared in Mr. Carrington’s room with Julia. Noticeably, Winston, and Julia now are quiet sure that it is impossible for them to renegade and deceive each other; but, with enough adequate physical and psychological torment, they were converted into typical party members. But in a true romantic quest, Winston would have succeeded in declining his distress and trials; yet, he also would have been capable to hold out the torment. Winston, instead, was able to recognize that “the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself” (Orwell, 2007, p. 297).

In fact, Orwell’s decision to utilize and employs the elements of the romantic quest for two purposes. The first one, was to pave the way for the reader to foresee a definite termination and then to let him down. As for the second purpose, it was to demonstrate the damage and the harm of the central government as an evil antagonist, as well as the human capability to impairment. Unlike the romantic protagonist, the hero in narrative irony does not appear converted as a knowledgeable person, and he is not also destructed by a tragic shortcoming. The ironic protagonist is presented as a more dominated and influenced than before he starts his trip. Yet, his experiences are arbitrary, but the tragic shortcoming presented in the ironic quest is depicted with more factual dimension; due to the fact that the story in the ironic quest might be more deeper than the tale in romantic quest. In fact, the hero in narrative irony discovers that he strives with heroism.

It seems that the journey Orwell originated in his book 1984 can be described as both sterile and inverted form other novels belongs to the same period. It is an imitated journey that affects our moral subliminal and terrifies us with the most archetypal vicious status. The ambience and the mode Orwell depicted in 1984 is the negation of the ideal utopian society to criticize the governmental or the political ambience by employing allegorical satire. However, Orwell was very accurate and alert in creating a protagonist that seems to be familiar, but qualified, to make it possible for the middle class readers to believe in and could easily recognized


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by replacing the prevalent archetypal persecution, injustice, urban blight, and terror. Through his story Orwell exaggerates in enlarging the societal vices existing in his days, however, he established an extreme text of the sterile romantic quest. In fact, Orwell’s readers were able to observe his themes of the corruption of power and manipulation. Orwell’s dystopian setting serves to reinforce the readers trust and hopes that their protagonist is capable to beat and defeat the tyrannical mind doctrinaire. Regrettably, Winston Smith shows and demonstrates two facts, the first one, that he is a sufferer of the government adversary, as well as an anti-hero. Orwell’s intention was not only to motivate the reader to recognize his ambivalence doctrines regarding the result of the text, but he also expects the reader to recognize the ambivalence doctrines that revolve about his own personality. In fact, if a person doesn’t fight back the corrupt powers, certainly, he will be a victim too.

As it is the case with most of the dystopian narratives that employ the ironic method, the cosmos in which the major characters live in, is a cosmos that is full of despotism and persecution. It is a world in which the major characters endeavor to flee away from the tyrannies of their societies, though it is a tentative effort in order to come back to their natural primitive spirits. In the dystopian genre, the protagonist should possess the least of human instinct left; and he should be capable, on a certain stage, to realize the doctrinaire with a forced or defeated sense to take an action towards it. In addition, it is quite familiar due to the nature of the dystopian genre, that it permits the protagonist to be member of the outside world. Regardless the supporters, the protagonist is eventually and basically beaten due to the archetypal vicious powers override common orders of control.

The supporter or the helper plays a very important role in the dystopian genre. In fact, the actual role and function of the supporter is to provide both the protagonist, as well as the reader with the essentials of political doctrinaire. Yet, feeding the mind of the reader with these essentials is more significant than the protagonist. In the case of Orwell’s character O’Brien, he enlightens the protagonist Winston with a script of a text concerning the political doctrinaire. Even so the case of enlighten seems to be arid and somehow unimportant to the plot, but this act servers and permits the reader to realize and apprehend the nature, the regime, and the post story or the history of the dominant ruling class, a political regime that is similar to the totalitarian antagonist government presented in Orwell’s time; and the process of going through the script text by the protagonist, gives the reader a chance to observe that the evil setting descried in the text encounters the archetypal agenda, yet, it also might encounters the same conditions of his life. Thus, it is possible to regard O’Brien in 1984 as a supporter for the reader, whose duty is to prepare the reader to be more conscious.

However, the notion of doublethink is also proved and suggested in the same chapter, which shows and demonstrates the capacity to handle two paradoxical concepts together. Orwell illustrates that “in spite of education and the vigilance of the Guardians, many of the ancient human instincts are still there” (Zamyatin, 1994, p. 22). Orwell depicted his protagonist in a way to keep these antique old human instincts with the hope that the reader would recognize the humanity of his hero. Regardless the circumstances, this human instinct though it exists, are suppressed by the dominance and psychological doctrinaire foe. It is quite obvious to observe Orwell’s decision to select the archetypal dystopian elements, and the way he depicted his protagonist decorated with human qualities, was to serve the duality doctrines grasped due to a potential romantic or tragic ending, which both are attributed as an outcome of doublethink. Although the reader is quite familiar with the romantic end of the hero’s quest, even so the narrative text doesn’t permit such ending the reader desire for a romantic end is still present. In fact, Orwell wanted the reader to observe this duality in thinking in order to be more sentient and conscious.


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Through the ironic techniques embodied in the structure of his novel, 1984, Orwell was quite aware to implicate the elements of the doctrines that take place during the Second-World-War and the decades after it. Also, Orwell was a quite conscious to involve the motifs and the elements of the dystopian archetypal, but at the same time, Orwell creates his characters with sufficient humanity to motivate his readers to look forward for a romantic ending. In regard to Oceania, the mind dominance of its dystopian society plays a significant role in reinforcing the impact of a total dehumanization. Even so, Orwell’s hero Winston is fatalistic, there were certain moments when he and Julia realizes the doctrines and instinctively for individuality. Winston illustrates that “You were the dead; there was the future. But, you could share in that body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two makes four” (Orwell, 2007, p. 182).

With reference to the above statement, it must be noted that, if history, which is the foundation of political consciousness can be deformed, consequently, the foundation of human identity, the individual memory also can be overcast to the point of defacement. Orwell believed in the existence of objective reality where “two plus two makes four” (Orwell, 2007, p. 164). In fact, this objective reality has been effaced in Orwell’s portrayal of the archetypal “hell”.

Conclusion In his novel 1984, Orwell was mainly concerned to intensify and asserts individualism and liberty and

their significance. Orwell’s protagonist Winston explains, “[If] you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it cannot have any result, whatever, you’ve beaten them” (Orwell, 2007, p. 138). Eventually, towards the end of the story, Winston recognizes that he “loves” Big Brother due to the personalized torment he undergoes. Though the end of the story was a melancholic one, Orwell did not intends to portray or even to draw a predictable imagined future that might really occur, as has often been supposed and understands, but in fact, it is another different exemplary warning story about recognized distinguishable orientations in the neoteric contemporary world. Orwell utilized stylistic model and narrative displacement to make it possible for the reader to realize the totalitarian doctrinaires, corruption of power, and the mind control. It seems that, a portion of Orwell’s Catalonian experience , is evidently generated and motivated increasingly by new modern ways of mass communication, of deformed and even falsifying actual facts to suit the purposes of those in power.

Winston Smith restless neural state is a result of his continuous anxiety concerning the Big brother and the thought police; that he tentatively beats and controls his lack and deficiencies; his human spirit appears to be ineffaceable. The love affair between Winston and Julia reinforces feelings to realize that he is a live again, and it was considered as a good indication of Winston new rebirth as the readers expected, but finally Winston ratifies that he loves Big Brother. Thus, Orwell protagonist journey come to a certain end and failure, when Orwell decides to blend the political and the psychological doctrinaire with the weakness of the human beings.

At the very opening of the novel in early stages, Orwell’s intention was obviously stated for the reader about the kind of the world presented in the story, that it is not a normal common world; with the fact that romantic quest has no place in. The story starts in a shining, cold day in April and the urban dirtiness is evident, this prototype vicious setting might be modified by the hero or the hero might be modified irreversibly by this setting. Smith, the protagonist last name, is a popular, common name; that does not suggests any sign of greatness, however, it is not also a catastrophic shortcoming or blemish that drives and procures to Winston’s demolition.


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If one reading narrative irony procures to boost the predictable romantic result or conclusion, one must also be able to recognize and to expect the ironic letdown. One recognizes that they grasped duplicitous credence concerning the text all along. Orwell utilizes his ironic narrative structure, along with his ironic techniques and his notion of “doublethink” that he collected from varied dystopian sources. In fact, Orwell’s ironic narrative techniques oblige the reader to expect the duplicity in the story. Yet, this expectation obliges also the reader to contemplate about the certainty of the romantic quest and the genuine factual powers that influences the quest. The satirical allegory incarnated in Orwell’s novel permits the reader to realize the relevance to his own life. Thus, it is possible to state that Orwell’s essential purpose is obtained in converting political writing into art through the ironic narrative technique.

References Alan, S. (1997). Literature, politics and culture in postwar Britain. London: Athlone Press. Crick, B., & Orwell, G (1980). A life. Boston: Little Brown. Cushman, T., & Rodden, J. (2005). George Orwell: Into the twenty-first century. Boulder, Co: Paradigm Publishers. George, W. (1984). Orwell’s message: 1984 and the present. Madeira Park, Canada: Harbour. Hitchens, C. (2003). Why Orwell matters. New York: Basic Books. Jefferson, A., & Robey, D. (1986). Modern literary theory. London: B.T. Batsford. Kubal, D. L. (1972). Outside the whale: George Orwell’s art and politics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Meyers, J. O. (2000). Wintry conscience of a generation. New York: W.W. Norton Company. Newsinger, J. (2002). Orwell’s politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Orwell, G. (2007). Nineteen eighty-four. Lebanon: York Press. Woolf, V. (1953). A writer’s diary. In L. Woolf (Ed.). London: Hogarth Press. Zamyatin, Y. (1994). We. In G. Zilboorg (Trans.). New York: Dutton. Zehr, D. (1982). George Orwell: The novelist displaced. Bucknell Review, 21, 17-31.


Debt in the Quebecois Novels of the 1960-1980

Marie-Dominique Boyce Fairfield University, Fairfield CT, USA

This article will study the Quebecois novels of the 1960-1980’s and especially the feeling of debt that women had

because of the Christian Bible that condemned women as being the sinful Eve responsable for the Fall of

Humanity. These novelists from Quebec, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hebert, and Gabrielle Roy, show that their

female characters are unable to let go of this myth of the incarnation in their bodies of the temptations leading to

Sin. Consequently, these heroines show a violent disgust for their bodies, and for all sexual manifestations

(puberty, pregnancey, child-birth) that they describe very crudely. They reject their bodies and live in shame of

their bodies. For this reason, they dress with modesty and have a neurotic fear of the Sin of the Flesh. This Sin

makes them want to withdraw from the image of the temptress Eve and to identify themselves to Mary, the

sublimated woman. For Quebec novelist Gabrielle Roy, the female debt cannot be repaid by a sublimation of

women to Mary, but by a sublimation of women’s own talents. Gabrielle Roy sees her late birth as a debt

contracted towards her very impoverished and old parents. Fortunately, in her adolescence, she rebels against this

unfair contract that her family and especially her mother imposes on her and that wrongs her because it forces her

to follow the career path of a school teacher to repay the debts of her family. She withdraws from this debt by

leaving for France and following the career path of a writer. She will redeem the debt of her family by writing her

autobiography which is a monument in sublimation of her mother.

Keywords: maternal nurturance and compassion, woman’s deliverance by writing themselves, reinvention of

writing “le corps feminin” by women, sensual writing

Introduction

The idea of Woman’s Eternal Indebment towards Humanity because of the mythical guilt of Eve’s Original Sin is a concept that the women authors of the 1960-1080’s (Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hébert, and Gabrielle Roy) want to have abolished.

These women authors have lived their youths under the Duplessis regime, regime de “la Grande Noirceur”, that maintained traditional views dominated by the Clergy in the face of young generations and a new intellectual elite that aspired to personal fulfillment. While Marie-Claire Blais and Anne Hébert fight for a re-valorisation of the female body and sexuality, Gabrielle Roy fights for a social and economic sublimation of women.

The study showed demonstrates that the feeling of debt in the Quebecois novels written by women from 1960-1980 comes from the historical and religious contexts in which they are inscribed. The historical context

Marie-Dominique Boyce, Ph.D. in French Studies/Adjunct Faculty, Modern Languages and Literatures Department, Fairfield

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demanded that after the defeat of the French, women become mother hens bringing forth as many children as possible to the world to counteract the invasion of the English and to show the representation of the Francophone people who remained in Canada. Women are therefore considered only for their sexuality and in relation to men’s needs. The Christian morality approved of the reduction and domination of women by men as indebted woman through the original sin of creation. Around the beginning of the 1980’s, we see that women are opposed to the original debt, and reclaim justice and equality in love in the novels by Anne Hebert.

The second part of the article will deal with the evolution of the debt of women which is seen in the autobiography of Roy (1988) Enchantment and Sorrow, no longer on a physical and moral level but on a social level. It is Roy’s inability to pull herself away from the path of defeat of her Francophone family in Manitoba and from their request that she maintain the oral French language alive, which prevents Roy from progressing and which binds her to the poverty debt of her family. When she realizes the falsity of this family contract and when she goes away to France and England, she redeems herself from that debt and will assert herself not so much as a French teacher but as a writer of the French language.

Here is the historical context of women’s debt. In 1756, French soldiers loose the battle against the English. This is the invasion of the English in French Canada. The French Canadians who remain on the continent decide not to assimilate with the English and to regroup in a distinctive society directed by the Catholic priests that also remained in Canada to evangelize the Amerindians.

In order to counteract the expansion of the British, the French leaders as well as the Church enjoin women to produce as many children as possible. Such moral principles as the submission to the husband, the giving of self, altruism, Christian charity and sacrifice for the family are required from women. They are commanded to insure the preservation of the language and the faith of the French family. The woman will be wedded and a mother or a nun, there is no other future for the woman. Nuns are entrusted with caring for the sick, the orphans, the poor, and the education of girls. Wives and mothers are ordered to become mother-laying hens, like the mother in the novel A Season in the Life of Emmanuel by Blais (1970). In this novel, the mother has a family of 16 living children (and many others are not counted in this number as they died in infancy). The mother must give all of herself to the family. We see the total abnegation of this woman who gave birth to her 16 children this very morning and goes immediately after to the fields to help out her husband. The mother’s total abnegation is transcribed stylistically by the point of view of the newborn (a son) who judges her mother when she gets back home. The mother is the prisoner of the gaze of her son who awaits impatiently to be fed while the husband and the rest of the family await for their bath and their dinner. This mother is seen as an object by the gaze of the newborn son and she is completely emptied of any interior thoughts, of personal feelings.

Here is his mother. He recognizes her. She does not come towards him yet. He could believe that she has abandoned him. He recognizes her sad face, her bent shoulders. She does not seem to remember that she gave birth to him this very morning. She is cold. He sees her hands clutching the pail of milk. “He is here, says grandmother Antoinette, he is hungry, he cried the whole day”. His mother is silent… His mother takes him in her arms. She protects him now with her frail body, she supports his head so that he can eat and drink in peace… (He is exhausting his mother, he is taking everything in her! His mother, she does not say anything, does not answer any longer, profound calmness, deserted maybe. He is there but she forgets about him. He does not echo in her any joy or any desire. He slips in her, he rests hopelessly. (Blais, 1970, p. 14)

The mother is seen in relation to the son. In her gestures, as seen from an outsider’s point of view, it is the


mother’s duty to breastfeed and provide for the well-being of her son, already described. We do not know anything of the needs and joys of the mother.

While the mother is an automaton controlled by the husband and her family, the grandmother would seem to be liberated from the constraint of the family on her. In fact, she is the one who controls with kicks of her cane all this flood of children that the mother delivers on to the world, throughout the entire day that the parents are in the fields. But, this flood of children always presses around her, stifles her with their incessant demands, waiting “with a gaping mouth, panting with impatience and hunger for the crumbs of chocolate, and all those gluey treasures that she had accumulated and that were now springing forth from underneath her skirts and her haughty corset” (Blais, 1970, p. 12). She defends herself from the siege of all these children around her by saying “Go away, go away!” but she is constantly harassed by her family with the needs which she has to provide for them.

It is also a real struggle that the grandmother has with her son-in-law once he is back from work. The grandmother had the control of the whole household during all of the day. Now, obedience and the power over decisions on all matters concerning the whole family return to the husband. The grandmother suggests that Skinny Johnny is right to educate himself by hiding under the table, and she dreams of saving him from poverty and tuberculosis by pushing him towards priesthood. She says to him: “in the convent… there are infirmaries, heated dormitories… You will be well there…” (Blais, 1970, p. 19). But the son-in-law does not let the grandmother control him. He answers back “Grandmother, I know life better than you, I know what my children will be doing later!” (Blais, 1970, p. 14).

The grandmother defies him by refusing to bring his bowl of hot water, so then the son-in-law pulls off one of the buttons of her shirt collar to remind her of her submission and of the needs of the man, and to order her to sew the button back on. “You know that this will be you (who will sew it back on)”, says the man, “It is always you, grandmother!” (Blais, 1970, p. 19).

While history indebted the woman and imposed upon her this obligation to provide for her numerous families, it is the religious context of this time period, along with politics of birth, that ruined woman. For those religious, woman must not only be a slave to the orders of her husband and of her family, showing her perfect self-sacrifice, but she was Eve who had introduced sin to the world. Her body was bluntly seen as nothing other than flesh, than material, and thus satanic. In the novel Les fous de Bassan by Hébert (1982), it is the desires of the delicate forms of the little Atkins, Nora, of 15 years old, and Olivia, of 17 years old that the entire community has in mind. Even the reverend of the community, Nicolas Jones, confesses this:

Am I going to once again put my nose in my sin (Confessing all, against the asleep body of Irene (my wife), my ecclesiastical clothes barely arranged on a chair at the foot of the bed, I weigh in secret the light weight, the delicate forms of the little Atkins? (Hébert, 1982, p. 24)

Indeed, this novel is a confession of this desire of repressed love according to religious principles, that ends in the murder of two young girls. The novel is a compilation of intimate journals of main character that tell us their unease of living, under the religious principles to see the evil in woman, the corrupting woman Eve, the temptress of the bewitching body which has no other intentions but to drag man into her downfall. According to these religious principles, man must battle against his desires and live solely for the spirit. We see the difficulty that the reverend has in attaching himself to the spirit, to the Holy Scriptures. He as well cannot resist the two


beautiful faces of Nora and Olivia, tense towards before him during Sunday prayer at the church, and he confesses that he is perhaps the first to have corrupted this community by mixing his own desire in the words of God.

Master of Holy Scriptures, I speak to them of the name of God. For some time, I have been selecting even more carefully the Sunday psalms and hymns, thinking of the little Atkins. Their violet and ultramarine eyes raised towards me for my damnation… I am preparing them as young fiancés, attentive to the talks of love that surround them, in the light of summer. I modulate/adjust. I articulate every sound, every syllable. I make the breath of the earth pass in the Word of God. (p. 28)

Yet, the most alienated of all characters towards this idea of evil carnal desire is Stevens, a young man of 20 years old who returns to the village of his childhood Griffin Creek, after having left it five years before due to a violent brawl with this father regarding the subject of the kiss that he had given to his cousin Olivia. The father and the son throw themselves into a fury one against the other, the father wanting to eradicate his son’s desire for the body, the son defending himself against the father. This ill treatment of his father and of the Puritan religion in which Stevens was raised, makes him consider women as the other.

As De Beauvoir (1949) tells it in The Second Sex:

Woman does not cease being the other, we do not consider that reciprocally male and female are both flesh; The flesh that is, to the Christian, the other enemy does not distinguish itself from the woman. (De Beauvoir, 1949, pp. 231-233)

For Stevens, woman is the enemy that he must combat and exterminate. Still humiliated by the chastisement of his father, he returns to his country to reject the responsibility of this desire for women. He intends to lay bare their desire and punish them in turn. His first victim is his cousin Maureen, a widow aged 50 years old, who falls because of her flesh when she sees her cousin naked in her bath. Stevens remarks the change in his cousin’s body seduced by him, “She did not have any more strength in her arms and her legs. She began to tremble… ” (Hébert, 1982, p. 19). As woman is nothing but flesh for Stevens, a sexual object, a good to be consumed for his profit, he takes her without consideration, “Everything nude is dripping wet, I take her in her room on her defeated bed. She protests and says that she could not… that she is too old... I immediately made myself at home” (Hébert, 1982, pp. 68-69).

He boasts crudely of this sexual act to his friend Mic, to whom he writes and announces:

I want her less and less, to the extent that she awakens under me, like a cat in heat. At night, despite her protests, I sleep in the barn. I repeat to her that there is my assigned place. And that I do not care for her long hair tickling my face and for her arms around my neck. I am aching all over. (Hébert, 1982, p. 69)

For Stevens and according to the teachings from the Bible that says that woman was created from one of the numerous bones of Adam, woman is an object fashioned in the function of man and for the profit of man. As says De Beauvoir (1949) in her essay The Second Sex:

Humanity is male and man defines woman not in her own self but in relation to him. Man thinks of himself without woman. She does not think of herself without man. And she is nothing other than what man decides, so one calls her “the sex”, meaning to say by this that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being: for him, she is sex, so she is it in the absolute. She determines and differentiates herself based on the man, and not here based on herself. She is the inessential against the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute: she is the other. (De Beauvoir, 1949, p. 15)


Stevens does not recognize the desire of Nora, who follows him like a fox in the forest in the chase for erotic feelings. Suddenly, he makes an about face, lets her advance towards him, she desiring, repeating his name pleading with love, and he insults her by reproaching her carnal desires:

“You should not do what you may regret” (De Beauvoir, 1949, p. 91). At the burning desire of Nora, Stevens puts forward a cold ban, and he likes seeing his cousin melt from

humiliation under his scathing refusal:

She freezes up. For an instant, one could believe her to be absent, sheltered by her impassive face, profoundly preoccupied inwardly at receiving the insult to swallow like a bitter potion. Little by little, her eyes become shinny, tears come slowly, drowning her look, slipping on the cheeks. This pleases me well enough. But there, where I wait all my enjoyment, I see her blaze in anger. In equal fury, I fancy you, my little cousin, and how I would like to take you in these deep woods. She treats me with “accursed Christ” and “bastard”, she searches for another word that she does not yet know and calls me “tomboy”. I do not yet try to restrain her on the trail path where she retreats liming on the stumps and dead branches. (De Beauvoir, 1949, pp. 91-92)

This vulnerability of the woman to be carnal and enchanting, this debt that she must repay to the men for having led them to the sin is death. It is he who commits the murder of Nora and Olivia, who defend their right to sexual desire, but that he does not listen and he strangles his cousins, rapes them, and throw them in the sea.

Only the mothers who know the power of seduction of their body survive in these puritanical communities, but do not draw vanity from it so much as guilt. They show modesty and hide the nudity of their bodies from the eyes of men. Felicity Brown refuses to cede to the wishes of her young son Nicolas to bathe with her and her cousins in the ocean at dawn, despite the tantrums of her young Nicolas who thinks that his mother prefers his cousins to her own son. A distinguished mother, felicity buries her flesh and her passions in her corset and presents herself to her son only as the refined mother, Marie of a stiffened, and compressed body, like that of a statue. The only time when she shows some passion to her son is the day where he tells her of his calling for God.

She embraces me for the first time. Her face salted like sea spray. A tear on her cheek. The long neck of my mother. Her collar bone. Her black corset stuck with pins where I did not dare lean my head on as a child. The warmth of her life under there which beats, beats like a captive bird. If I reach to open the cage? With which magical prayer which invention of crazy love could I deliver the heart of my mother? I dream about it as an impossible mission. (De Beauvoir, 1949, p. 25)

In this misogynous society where woman is declared inferior, imperfect only because of body and not spirit, and is viewed solely based on the function and needs of the husband, the woman is the prisoner of the man and his marital law, her jailer. This ill treatment of women by men breeds in the minds of children feelings that women are tortured in their rooms at night. Olivia who sees trances of blood in her mother’s bed thinks to some ways that her father must have made her mother suffer. Her mother does not explain to her that these are her menstruations, too ashamed to speak about this infamy of the woman, divine punishment of having to spill blood every month to atone for her original fault.

In this manner, the rendering of women as inferior, as well as the disgust of the female body are transmitted from mother to daughters. But as we can see in the novel Les fous de Bassan, written in 1982, the woman rebels against this inferiority of her body. The young girls Nora and Olivia demand their rights to love, and they are supported by the other drowned dead mothers who make heard their growls from the sea and who reject the corpses of the young girls on the shore, accusing the community of its crimes.


In Kamouraska by Hébert (1970), the woman puts an end to this misogynous society through the murder of Seigneur in a bath of blood. In Children of the Sabbath, Sister Julie ousts important persons, the doctors and priests, from their powers of authority, and throws upon them into a fate where it is them who have the mark of blood inferiority, in the form of burns and wounds.

In the autobiography of Roy (1988), Enchantment and Sorrow, the siege of consciousness of the debt that women have to repay to the community is not with respect to a physical or moral inferiority of women like in the novels of Marie-Claire Blais and Anne Hébert, but this debt caused by women towards the community is with respect to a social inferiority of the woman who delights in living under French traditions in poverty, at the margin of the Anglophone society of Manitoba and who refuse to take a job in this Anglophone society and to make herself valuable.

Gabrielle Roy does not talk about a physical inferiority of the female being, since this is not her internal weakness, but she analyzes that these internal pains have more to do with the financial troubles of her family. Indeed the mother, like a child, does not have a sense of reality and spends more than she can make at her small work as a seamstress. It is very often that she goes with her last daughter to take advantage of small earnings in the Anglophone neighboring city of Winnipeg and, like the “Milkwoman” with her pot of milk in La Fontaine’s fable, thinks of everything that her meager money could buy.

She thought about a rug for the living room, a new dishwasher. Not yet having opened the small sum that she had at her disposal for today, this appearing to have to suffice to fill the desires that had been waiting for a long time. Others were growing at the very same moment. Mom was one of these poor people who dream, so as to have possession of the beautiful good more than people who have it at their residence and hardly see it. So it was in riches, all the possibilities of intact purchases still in our heads, that we were crossing the bridge. (Roy, 1988, p. 12)

She has to go to the evidence, once at the store, that she cannot buy anything or even buy incorrectly through impulse and leaves the store full of remorse from these purchases, warning Gabrielle to hide them to her father who is making himself a world of small debts. Gabrielle remarks that these outings in the neighboring city of Winnipeg are mostly an occasion for the mother to attack, to make worth it her rights to be of use to a compatriot French woman and to dream that she could remake history and prevent Manitoba from becoming totally English. Gabrielle, her daughter, calls her back to reality and remembers her remarks:

A good moment later, I became angry towards mom, and told her that she would see us ill to the end, and that, if we both laughed, we would also be laughed at. (Roy, 1988, p. 15)

The mother wants to continue to blame their poverty on the English and on their ancestral traditions of daily life to the French of Québec, their traditions of cultivating the soil and of being slaves to God by cultivating the garden of Eden that God had given to Canada, and to denigrate any other form of culture, particularly the culture of the mind through reading and writing.

The mother rejects this poverty debt on her daughter who studies. It is Gabrielle who will pay back the family debt:

To what mom, a bit stung, retorted that it was not up to me, who had all the chances to be instructed, to give a lecture to her who had just been able to finish the sixth grade in the small grade school of Saint Adolphe de Rodriguez… That would be up to me, the agile mind, the head not yet broken by constant calculations, to put me to learn English, so that we avenge all. (Roy, 1988, p. 15)


Gabrielle who wrote this autobiography towards the end of her life, remembers these remarks from her mother and observes with bitterness the disturbance of this debt from generation to generation and the incapacity of Francophone people to liquidate this debt, so to finish living in the past in defeat and take life by the hand, even at the present hour of her autobiography (Roy, 1988):

Later, when I would come to Montreal and observe that things were hardly different in the stores to the west of the city, I would be knocked over and would feel that the bad luck of being French Canadian was irreparable (Roy, 1988, p.15).

This legacy of the debt, Gabrielle takes seriously and believes that she is also a cause of it, the appendicitis operation that she incurred having cost expensively, the mother always showering her small last daughter with all the pleasures. She disavows liquidating the debts of her family. She vows to her mother, who she sees is exhausted once she returns to consciousness from her operation, that she would “always be the first in her class at school”.

Hypnotized by the gaze of her mother who for Gabrielle still holds the gift to erase all troubles, Gabrielle becomes chained to the debt. Her mother, such a large spider weaves, around her more and more threads of dependence, cocooning and paralyzing all sprit of independence in her. To hold Gabrielle beside her, the mother paints for her a frightening picture of all her other children who left to work far away and who only found disappointments in their work, ending up even farther and farther to teach in these villages of misery like Adèle or Anna, who married too young and smothered their talents. And Gabrielle, remarking her best chances beside her mother:

Now me, the last, I was apparently happy with my task, accomplishing my best and finding satisfaction there. I would relax with group activities, play tennis, take part in the parish meetings, later, I would join in the “Cercle Molière…, I would appear for Mom the only who was gifted with happiness”. (Roy, 1988, p. 136)

Still indebted even more gravely by her mother but laughing at all the fables that her mother invented, like Scheherazade, dreaming of arriving at unforeseen fortunes coming from such a great uncle or another who arrives just in time to seal off the arrears in the budget, Gabrielle begins to think of breaking her chains. She realizes that her gifts would be suffocated if she stayed in Manitoba.

The call of the old country becomes more and more pressing, torturing here almost and making her discover that her real path is not in Manitoba teaching spoken French language according to family traditions, but becoming a writer and writing French for the posterity.

How this project of leaving for Europe had grown and pushed, and why it overcame me until it took me without pity, I could hardly say… I was running after something but what! My writings until then mattered so little! Had I dared to reclaim them to announce that I intended to give myself wholly to the task of writing? No, it did not suit me, even with my own eyes. At the bottom of my conscience, however, I believed that I could distinguish a vision of myself in the future where I saw myself, not only becoming a writer, but trying hard, trying hard to reach it. (Roy, 1988, p. 182)

The same incident that had made her take charge of her family debt, will break her chains. Ready to depart for France, her mother trains one last effort to retain her daughter beside her and to hide the hip. Still adoring her mother, despite all her talk, Gabrielle realizes her imprisonment:

Day after day, I felt the bonds of the routine, of security, also of the affection tighten to better contain me (Roy, 1988, p. 198)


She breaks her chains when she unmasks the game of her mother who refuses to have her hip plastered after her fall to maintain dependence of her daughter:

Never, never!

At her age, it would be madness to shut oneself up like this, she said defensively. She could not come out alive. It would be better to accept the disability…

And to shut myself up as well, to keep me forever by your side, I told her with brutality for all of a sudden, I understood that it was the only weapon that I possessed against her recalcitrant will.

She became totally pale. At the quivering of her look, I understood how the blow had struck. She lowered her eyes. (Roy, 1988, p. 199)

This departure for France is seen as a desertion of hers, of her sisters, of her brothers, and of the entire community:

No one around me supported me. Our little French, Catholic village did not raise us through the price of so much sacrifices, of abnegation and of rigor to let us leave… My sister Adèle, inclined to excessive gestures, accused me of betraying my own kind. Anna, more moderate, judged me crazy… It seemed that they had a grudge against my young self for undertaking what they, during their youth, did not dare accomplish, and were reproaching them now without any doubt. (Roy, 1988, p. 211)

She endorses this debt towards her own loved ones and makes the bet to pay it with interest all at once upon returning from France. She remembers at the moment of her departure abroad being consoled by this dream:

The great comforting dream of my youth… that I would have the time to do everything. First, save yourself. To whom is anyone of use, if one is drowning. Then, come and save the others. It seemed to me that time would be granted to me. (Roy, 1988, p. 243)

The second part of the autobiography of Roy, A bird falls on the doorstep, holds forth the debut of Roy in Paris. In Paris, Roy is very much a bird fallen from the familial nest, who must emancipate herself and face all the troubles of searching for a lodging, feeding herself, and finding her path… Everywhere she loses herself, commits blunders. While searching for a family who would welcome her like a lavish child, she only finds an old landlady in Paris, Mrs. Jouve, who snubs her for arriving so late without informing her. At her Parisian theatre auditions, where Gabrielle expects to also be acclaimed as she had been in her theatre evenings in Manitoba, she receives only reproaches on her manners and her Manitoban accent. The finishing shot occurs when her gold medals are stolen, treasures from her competitions in French, that she had won to avenge her loved ones from their poverty and from their loss of the beloved country, Acadia. All of a sudden, she understands that it is not the memory of succeeding in the competitions that makes her cry for her medals, but more the money that she could have withdrawn from them as they were in gold. It is not about her stolen clothes that she is crying about, but about the sad memories of extravagant spending that her mother reproached her for. Suddenly, all becomes clear in her mind, and she sees the pretense of the familial attachment. She understands that all the tirades of her mother were only a dramatic effect for maintaining her close to her and for enchaining her to the family’s debt. She obtains the confirmation of the falseness of this ancestral way of wanting to maintain, at the price of poverty, the oral French language at Manitoba when she goes to listen to Cyrano of Bergerac at the French Comedy. All at once, she realizes that the oral tradition of French is no longer the homeland, the family that she desires. Here is what she says:


But the sight of Cyrano, wounded to death and hours later still standing and discussing… left me at a great unease. If this were theatre, I would never believe it. It was too false. Too big! Or rather I was not meant for it. The evidence imposed itself on me little by little. It was admitting it that was difficult. For if I were in Paris, it was, as I had tried to make myself believe, to study theatre arts. (Roy, 1988, p. 274)

Rejecting the oral tradition of French of her homeland and of her family, Roy, bilingual, leaves for England. In London, she still participates in courses of theatre arts. It is in her recitation of Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice that she realizes that she can exhale her pain through the words of the English playwright, and while interpreting the role of Portia disguised as a lawyer demanding the clemency of her friend’s debt to the Venetian doge, she begins to see that there is a redeeming equivalence as Cecili Francis says that circulates “between fault, esthetic gesture, and forgiveness”. This is what Roy feels while reciting this speech of Portia:

Then everything started to blend and became blurred. I was no longer someone who was reading, another who was watching. I had escaped the others and myself. The shyness and the distress had blown me back far in my life. I had returned to my childhood. I was still in class at the Academy Saint Joseph. The inspector was watching our every move. Sister Agatha had pleaded me, “Stand up and save the class”. And I was doing my best in the middle of the class, “Was it at the Guidhall? Was it in Saint Boniface? What was still to save, God only knew!... Had I not rejoined my old misery from the Rue Deschambault, which astonishingly seemed to exhale itself through the words of Shakespeare”. (Roy, 1988, pp. 322-323)

It is at Century Cottage, that she finds the perfect fairy tale family that welcomes her like one welcomes a prodigal child. She is exhausted, and falls like a bird on the doorstep of this little English cottage occupied by the perfects. There, she finds a family completely disinterested in the money that coddles her, and encourages her in her intellectual pursuits. Soon she comes to pass the obstacle of the white page stemming from ancestral education of the falseness and devilish forces attached to the book.

Suddenly, Roy comes to pay no heed to the ancestral veto against reading and writing books. She starts writing and pouring out her sensitivity in her writings. Little by little, her identity is reborn

through writing. She becomes more confident in herself and forgives her family for all the wrongs that they did to her. She especially forgives her mother and erects this monument, her autobiography, to immortalize her.

Conclusion

Since the history of Creation, woman was seen in comparison to man. The historical conditions of Québec menacing the French community into assimilation with the Anglophone majority reinforced this indebtedness of woman. Woman then becomes the only means to perpetuate the French race through her multiple childbirths. But in particular, it is the religious context that ruined the woman. Woman is seen as the object of man’s sin, the enemy against which he must fight to save his soul. Hébert (1982) insists on this injustice in her novel Les fous de Bassan which shows woman as degraded into flesh and her sexual drives, which are all that man sees in her, a bewitching Eve, indebted from the fall of humanity. Even more gravely, Hébert shows the misogyny that is transmitted by the woman herself who is ashamed of her body and her menstruation. Hébert (1970) predicts in her novel Kamouraska the end of this absurd misogyny through the death of Lord of Kamouraska in his blood bath. For Roy, the inferiority of woman does not come from her body but from her social inferiority that, like in her mother’s case, takes pleasure in living like a carefree and dreaming child begging her subsistence from the majority Anglophone society of Manitoba.


Roy sees the difficult of Quebecers to liquidate the debt of their past, their dream destroyed by their defeat in the annexation of Canada from France. She sees the absurdity that this debt operates on her mother, always leading her to spend more. She breaks with this charge and emigrates to France and to England where she remakes her identity by becoming a writer.

References Blais, M. C. (1970). A season in the life of Emmanuel. Montréal: Editions du Jour. De Beauvoir, S. (1949). The second sex. Paris: Gallimard. Hébert, A. (1970). Kamouraska. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Hébert, A. (1975). The children of the Sabbath. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Hébert, A. (1982). Les fous de Bassan (The shadow of the wind). Paris: Editions du Seuil. Irigaray, L. (1974). Speculum de l’autre femme (Speculum of the other woman). Paris: Editions de Minuit. Lacelle, E. (1979). La femme et la religion au Canada-français (Woman and religion in French Canada). Montréal: Editions

Bellarmin,. Millett, K. (1971). La politique du Mâle (Male politics). Paris: Stock. Roy, G. (1988). Enchantment and sorrow. Montréal: Editions Boréal. Shakespeare, W. (1964). The merchant of Venice. Paris: Garnier.


Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul*

Mirjana Marinković

Belgrade University, Belgrade, Serbia

The paper is based on the autobiographic-essayistic book Istanbul: Memories of a City written by Orhan Pamuk.

Istanbul as a typical old capital shapes the lives of its citizens by its spirit, culture, and imperial past. On the other

hand, it is a city that lives with specific sentiments—the sense of defeat and loss, melancholy and pain because of

the lost power and glory. The author analyzes Pamuk’s vision of his native city created on the basis of the real

scenes and imaginary, the truly lived experiences and fiction. The paper is also concentrated on the deeds of the

Turkish and European writers that had made a great contribution in Pamuk’s synthesis of the East and the West, the

past and the present and authentic permeation of cultures he has achieved writing about Istanbul.

Keywords: Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk, the Ottoman Empire, the old capital

Introduction Istanbul is a shadow that follows Orhan Pamuk both in life and literature. Its streets, architecture, and

marvelous past create a specific background of his novels. It can be said that Istanbul is in a way the main

character of Pamuk’s prose. Istanbul is a city where he was born, where he has discovered the world, where he

has found out the meaning of living in an old capital keeping secrets of the past and facing challenges in the

present. Istanbul was a source of inspiration of many distinguished Turkish authors such as Abdülhak Şinasi

Hisar, Ahmet Rasim, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. But Orhan Pamuk is the author of the

unique book Istanbul: Memories of a City that reveals the unknown Istanbul. Istanbul that synthesizes his

memories from his early childhood and his impressions got from various sources—family conversations, public

transportation, football matches, street inscriptions, books written both by Turkish and European writers. Since

Pamuk has the eye for colors, he has written his book about Istanbul as a painter too. Thus his book devoted to

Istanbul is an original way of looking at this everlasting city that shapes the lives of its citizens.

The Source of Pride of the Empire Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a great Turkish novelist and one of the most prominent Turkish authors of the

20th century, has written in his anthological essay about Istanbul published within the book of essays Five

Cities (Beş Şehir) that this old Ottoman capital was “the source of pride of the Empire and the whole Muslim

world” for the generations after its conquest in 1453. Besides that, he has emphasized that “the eyes of the

whole East were directed on Istanbul which was a brilliant mirror of the national life and which had completely

national character in taste” (Tanpınar, 1995, p. 117, 139). In the middle of the 19th century, a little bit more

than a hundred years before Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel Prize Winner was born, one French * The paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association at the New York University in New York 20-23 March 2014.

Mirjana Marinković, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Oriental Studies, Belgrade University.

DAVID PUBLISHING

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ORHAN PAMUK’S ISTANBUL

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author named Gustave Flaubert expressed his conviction in one of his letters that Istanbul would be a capital of

the world in a hundred years from then. But, the truth was completely different. Istanbul of that time was in a

true sense of the word and old, dilapidated, worn out and melancholic capital of once the most powerfull

empire in the world. Pamuk (2005) writes:

The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own. (Pamuk, 2005, p. 6)

Almost all Pamuk’s novels plots are settled in Istanbul. But, Pamuk’s autobiographical book Istanbul:

Memories of a City, which is a subject of my analysis, gives us much more about Pamuk’s feeling towards his

native city. It is devoted both to his memories from his childhood and early young age and to Istanbul as a city

and the meaning it has in this writer’s life as well. The book is composed of such memories and emotions that

have shaped his life forever.

Istanbul Fate is My Fate Istanbul is not only a city of Pamuk’s birth, childhood, and youth, the city in which he has started being

“himself”, the city of his first love and adulthood. Istanbul with its past, spirit and atmosphere is his

unseparable life companion that created his character and world. Istanbul is a destiny, both personal and

collective, it is a fate of its inhabitants. In the very beginning of the book Pamuk claims: “Istanbul fate is my

fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am” (Pamuk, 2006, p. 6).

Istanbul: Memories of a City brings the atmosphere of the ex Ottoman capital from the beginning of fifties

until the beginning of seventies of the 20th century. The book consists of several thematic circles:

Pamuk’s memories from his childhood and early young age;

Pamuk’s visual impressions of the city landscapes;

Turkish writers and their books that have shaped Pamuk’s relationship with Istanbul;

European writers and their experiences which in some extent have determined Pamuk’s visions of the city.

Even at the first glance we notice that Pamuk’s Istanbul can be read in different ways regarding the fact

that Pamuk has been building his relationship with his own city using various material—personal visual

impressions, family experiences and memories, both Turkish and European writers’ books which helped him in

making his own idea of Istanbul. The deed can be read as memories of his childhood and youth and life of his

high esteemed and well situated family losing slowly its reputation and wealth but still personificating the new

elite of the modern Republic of Turkey. We can read it as a short history of the city especially of the transition

from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey in search of its new identity. The book titled Istanbul is

perhaps the most important as a source for the research of the emotional map of the society living with feelings

of defeat, loss of power and significance that has been accepted or condemned to live with melancholy as a

sentiment that follows its members as a destiny. That is the book arguing that the city that “does not have a

center outside ourselves” is not only in the eyes. On the contrary, the idea of the city consists also of read books,

newspaper articles, street inscriptions and advertisments, and its sounds as well.

The Pamuk family settled in the elite Istanbul area of Nişantaşı in the thirties of the last century, at the

time when “the Republic had done away with the pashas, princes and high officials and so the empty mansions

they had left behind were only decrepit anomalies” (Pamuk, 2006, p. 27). Simbollicaly, the Pamuk family rised


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in Istanbul as the old capital between two eras and represents the generation of the builders of the new state that

had accepted the European education and culture. The state that was truly eager to modernize and westernize

itself made a radical break up with the Ottoman past and the former culture which had been treated as decadent.

A number of cultural reforms such as clothing reform, alphabetical revolution, and language purification aimed

to reject the old institutions and traditions, to enter a brand new civilization, to create a new Turkish identity

and to turkicize the society in general.

In his book Other colors Pamuk testifies that the state making efforts to Westernise itself was forbidding

originally European critical thought at the same time. While it was emphasizing the Turkish identity it was

pushing the traditional culture underground. That was the reason, as Pamuk (1999) says, that:

panic, fear and isolation from the tradition, from the future, from the East and the West, from cultural conflicts and complexities that one culture should bear with itself were the worst practicies of the new elite created by the Republic. (p. 258)

Pamuk notices that despite the new arhicteture and taste

the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to Westernise and modernise may have been, the more desperate wish, it seemed, was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire [...] But as nothing, Western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to Westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of the past. (Pamuk, 2005, p. 27)

On the other hand, Orhan Pamuk, in contrast to the most of his co-citizens, is in a constant and

uninterrupted dialogue with the past he admires and longs for in some way.

Despite a keen desire to forget the imperial and, for the most of the people, decadent past, its monuments

and traces were a part of the Istanbul landscape, its architecture and colors. They have been reminding the

citizens of Istanbul about the lost empire in spite of the fact that they were not able to reach and accept its

subtle culture. People, unconscious of the beauty and value of a great number of monuments from the Ottoman

times, simply have been living next to them. This shows that the Istanbullus of Pamuk’s youth were not able to

show respect to their antiques. In contrast to other nations who take a good care of their heritage with envy, the

historical monuments in Istanbul are something unnoticeable, something to live next to it normally without

paying too much attention. In Pamuk’s opinion, modern Istanbullus were under their historical heritage, limited

in their capacity for understanding the values of the civilization they were not worthy of, educated on the basis

of literature that has been significantly decreased by the alphabetical and langugage revolution. That was the

reason why all of the riches of the old culture have stayed unavailable to them. That is why an average Turkish

citizen generally has no much experience with the traditional literature and art. He is deprived of understanding

his own history that he rejects deeply. But at the same time he is not prepared enough to accept the European

thought and tradition. In Pamuk’s (2005) words:

The fastest flight from the hüzün of the ruins is to ignore all historical monuments and pay no attention to the names of buildings or their architectural particularities […] by neglecting the past and severing their connection with it, the hüzün they feel in their mean and hollow efforts is all the greater. Hüzün rises out of the pain they feel for all that which has been lost, but it is also what compels them to invent new defeats and new ways to express their impoverishment. (p. 92)

Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk is a complex of the real and the imaginary, the visible and the fantasy. I have an

impression that Pamuk’s Istanbul is above all in his head, in his emotions and visions in which there is no

strong border between what exists and what is imagined. The authors that Pamuk sees close to him have played


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a significant part in that. Their words and ideas have shaped his idea of Istanbul. Sometimes this idea is much

stronger than the real city. “And just as we learn about our lives from others, so, too, do we let others shape our

understanding of the city in which we live” (Pamuk, 2005, p. 8).

The good example for this complicated game in which the reality is equally strong both in seen and

imagined is Pamuk’s text about the paintings of Antoine-Ignace Melling. Pamuk is excited because he

recognizes some scenes of everyday life that have not changed a lot and the same places of Istanbul that he

knows in a different way. Looking at Bosphorus hills and cypresses on Melling’s paintings, Pamuks says that

the paintings have come from heaven and re-entered his present life (Pamuk, 2005, p. 61). Mellling’s beautiful

tableaus conjure up Istanbul at the beginning of the 19th century. They are the result of Melling’s close ties

with the spirit of the city, its geography and architecture.

At this point Pamuk is close to Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, a writer who has made “the Bosphorus civilization”

everlasting. He has been depicting the Bosphorus villas and moonlights with love and some kind of poetic

nostalgia. Hisar writes that “deeply lived life and time have such a power for the spirit that has experienced

them so that they never stop existing” (Hisar, 1968, p. 44).

The City of Melancholy The grief or hüzün that Pamuk feels in himself is the emotion accepted by the city. Almost there is no

Turkish writer that does not share this sentiment specific to Istanbul. Hisar is sad spectating the Bosphorus

landscapes. Ahmet Rasim claims that “the beuaty of a landscape is in its grief”. Grief is immanent in the

Eastern way of looking at the world that has spread the ethics of modesty and content with little. The mystical

poetry has always been praising worthlessness and weakness of the human being to come close to God, the

only true object of love. But “Istanbul does not carry its hüzün as ‘an illness for which there is a cure’ or ‘an

unbidden pain from which we need to be delivered’: it carries its hüzün by choice” (Pamuk, 2005, p. 93).

This sentiment was shared by “four lonely melancholic writers”. Their deeds have made a frame through

which Pamuk has been looking at his city and its life. These four writers are Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Reşat

Ekrem Koçu, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. These writers, wounded by hüzün, in

Pamuk’s words, were aware of the fact that the Ottoman civilization has been irretrievably gone, but in contrast

to the general oblivion and neglecting the past, they have been opening their eyes towards its remnants, beauty

and harmony of its buildings, melancholy of Istanbul landscapes and dilapidated and isolated neighbourhoods.

They have been searching for a shelter of banality and misfortune and at the same time for a source of an

authentic literary voice. Hüzün of ruins had something poetic for these writers, and Pamuk has adopted it with

style.

Numerous similarities and even coincidences between Pamuk’s Istanbul and the texts and verses of Yahya

Kemal and Tanpınar can be found. In my opinion they are writers that had exerted the greatest influence on

Pamuk while he has been creating his own vision of Istanbul. In intertextual analysis of Pamuk’s Istanbul we

figure out in what extent the voices and views of these authors, with whom he has been discussing in the book,

were woven in his city view. It is obvious that Pamuk’s Istanbul is in a certain extent Istanbul in the heart of

Yahja Kemal and Istanbul in the eyes of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. In other words, Pamuk’s Istanbul is Istanbul

preserved in the poetic tableaus and writings of these authors.

Yahya Kemal Beyatlı was a poet in love with Istanbul. The book of his essays and lectures has a symbolic

title Dear Istanbul (Aziz Istanbul). In the first years of the Republic of Turkey, Yahya Kemal was a neoclassical


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poet, fond of the old metric system in poetry and a great admirer of the Ottoman past and civilization. From the

other side, he was a real patriot praising the “Turkish” character of that civilization, especially the “Turkish”

character of Istanbul. He was among the first Turkish authors eager to synthesize the two worlds—the old

Ottoman and the new Republican Turkish, accomplished by Orhan Pamuk after a couple of decades.

In an intertextual analysis of Pamuk’s book Istanbul and Yahya Kemal’s poetry, I would like to call your

attention to the poem Koca Mustapaşa. Indeed, what Yahya Kemal has expressed in verses, Pamuk has

conjured up in prose and photography.

Koca Mustâpaşa! Ücrâ ve fakîr İstanbul! Tâ fetihden beri müm’in, mütevekkil, yoksul, Hüznü bir zevk edinenler yaşıyorlar burada. Kaldım onlarla bütün gün bu güzel rü’yada. (Kemal, 1969, p. 42)

Koca Mustâpaşa! Remote and poor Istanbul! From the conquest believer, resigned and poor, Here live those who turned hüzün to pleasure. I have stayed with them all day long in this beautiful dream.

Doesn’t Pamuk say the same? I remind you that he has written that hüzün is a conscious choice of the

Istanbullus. Melancholy or hüzün is mentioned 35 times in Istanbul: Memories of a City (Seçkin, 2008, p. 276).

These verses from the same poem of Yahya Kemal has almost the same echo and even a visualisation in

Pamuk’s text:

Gece, şi’riyle sararken Koca Mustâpaşa’yı Seyredenler görür Allâha yakın dünyâyı. Yolda tek tük görünenler çekilir evlerine; Gece sessizliği semtin yayılır her yerine. (Kemal, 1969, p. 44)

While the night’s embracing Koca Mustapaşa Spectators see the world next to God. Rare people are seen on the street going home The silence of the night`s spreading on everything.

This scene we can see on the Ara Güler’s photo that Pamuk has put into his book (Pamuk, 2005). He

writes:

What draws me to this photograph is not just the cobblestone streets of my childhood, or the cobblestone pavements, the iron grilles on the windows or the empty, ramshackle wooden houses—rather it is the suggestion that with evening having just fallen, these two people who are dragging long shadows behind them on their way home are actually pulling the blanket of night over the entire city. (p. 32)

Some remarks of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar in the essay Istanbul are also very close and even equal to

Pamuk’s words. For example, Tanpınar claims that the art and the architecture do not mix with everyday life in

many places as it is the case in Istanbul and that those sights make a real core of Istanbul mahalles (Tanpınar,

1995, p. 147). The cypresses on Melling’s paintings admired by Pamuk, together with plane-trees are trees that


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have left their traces in the Turkish imagination according to Tanpınar. He writes that “we owe the noble

melancholy in Istanbul landscape to cypress, plane-trees and conifers”. Both Tanpınar and Pamuk were sad to

see old buildings ruined and modern Istanbullus’ indifference. Tanpınar has been writing that they will be

happy when they realize that the real rebuilding starts with the preserving the heritage (Tanpınar, 1995, p. 156).

Writing about famous Istanbul fires, both Tanpınar and Pamuk emphasize that the citizen of Istanbul used to

feel a certain pleasure in spectating old wooden mansions in flame. Just like Tanpınar has been writing that

sometimes he had a vision of Nerval or Gautier sitting with the poet Seyrani in some of Istanbul cafés, Pamuk

says that he might has met “four lonely melancholic writers”—Hisar, Koçu, Beyatlı, and Tanpınar while they

were walking in his neighbourhood (Pamuk, 2005, pp. 97-98; Tanpınar, 1995, p. 166). Tanpınar has also payed

attention to Melling’s pantings saying, just like Pamuk, that the beauty of his tableaus comes from the fact that

he has been living in Istanbul and that he had “an insider’s point of view” (Tanpınar, 1995, p. 193; Pamuk,

2005, p. 67).

Colors take a significant place in Pamuk’s life and literature. Parla has noticed that “Orhan Pamuk’s colors

are the colors of twilight—from grey to black” (Parla, 2008, p. 67). These are the prevailing colors of Pamuk’s

Istanbul too. He thinks that Istanbul is black and white because beautiful things could not be seen, because

Istanbul was neglected and rejected. Pamuk (2005) writes:

I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions: only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading. When I watch the black-and-white crowds rushing through the darkening street on a winter’s evening, I feel a deep sense of fellowship, almost as if the night has cloaked our lives, our streets, our every belonging in a blanket of darkness, as if once we’re safe in our houses, our bedrooms, our beds, we can return to dreams of our long-gone riches, our legendary past. And likewise, as I watch dusk descend like a poem in the pale light of the street-lamps to engulf the city’s poor neighbourhoods, it comforts me to know that for the night at least we are safe from Western eyes, that the shameful poverty of our city is cloaked from foreign view. (pp. 31-32)

Orhan Pamuk is not very far from “four lonely melancholic writers” who did not succeed to find

themselves the appropriate place and who were condemned to the creative loneliness in the atmosphere of the

early Republic of Turkey. Pamuk is also skeptical about the Westernization of the society since in practice it

was a naive and simply imitating West. His specific and unique Istanbul view comes from the fact that he used

to look at his own city sometimes with the eyes of a native Istanbullus but sometimes with the eyes of a

Westerner. Turkish writers and poets have been writing a very little about Istanbul, its past, culture and life

style. Classical Turkish poetry has seen the city as an abstraction, while the chronicles and histories were

occupied mostly by political history. That is why Pamuk has been passionately reading Nerval’s and Gautier’s

observations and live and convincing testimonies in order to find out something new about the past and

everyday life of his city. He was happy because in their words he could find his own emotions and views. He

admits that “there is something foreign in his way of looking at the city” (Pamuk, 2005, p. 218). In addition to

that, he claims that Western writers have told him much more than the writers from Istanbul who has paid no

attention to the city. There is no doubt that impressions of those Western passengers and authors about Istanbul,

their notes and comments have contributed in shaping Pamuk’s vision of Istanbul.

“Something foreign in his way of looking at the city” has created some distance between Pamuk and the

other natives of the city. He simply has not shared the psychology of masses, nationalism or Republican

patriotism that imposed feelings of community, belonging to the same collective spirit. Paradoxically, he does


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not feel at home in the city he is not able to live without, that is his fate.

Pamuk complains about the fact that Istanbul has lost its victorious, multilingual and glorious days and

“became a monotonous, monolingual town in black and white” (Pamuk, 2005, p. 215). In the middle of the

19th century, Flobert was slightly ashamed of hearing various languages, just like in “tower of Babel”—you

could hear Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Italian, French, and English—and he could speak only French! But, a

century after that, there were tables with the inscription “Citizens, please speak Turkish” (Pamuk, 2005, p.

216)!

Istanbul has been evoking its old days with a specific feeling of collective melancholy that Pamuk defines

with the word hüzün. But it was not a feeling of nostalgia—the word that cannot be found in Pamuk’s Istanbul.

Citizens of Istanbul cannot feel nostalgia because they have not been longing for the Ottoman times. That is

why they enjoyed watching old mansions and villas in fire during fifties and sixties, because they were symbols

of the past they wanted to get rid of. “This is the guilt, loss and jealousy we feel”, says Pamuk, “at the sudden

destruction of the last traces of a great culture and a great civilization that we were unfit or unprepared to

inherit in our frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city” (Pamuk, 2005,

p. 191). Pamuk has been asking himself if the mystery of Istanbul is hidden in its poverty besides the glorious

history, or in its limited everyday life besides natural beauties. Keeping eyes closed in front of the tradition has

turned Istanbul, once cosmopolitan city, and its citizens to a provincial town. This is what Pamuk has made

unhappy and forced him to a certain voluntary exile.

Pamuk’s success in depicting Istanbul as the old capital lays in a poetic permeation of cultures in his spirit.

He looks at the city with the eyes of its natives, its visitors from the West, its writers, poets and painters.

According to him, the poetic texture of Istanbul consists of every kind of bizarreness, empyreal glory and a bit

of history. But Pamuk is right when he says that this poetry of the city opens itself only to him.

Pamuk’s Istanbul is in fact the old capital. Almost on every page of his book he seeks for a link with the

past. I think that he has given the answer to the question of his favorite Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

who had written that the main question was “when and in what way will we connect to the past” (Tanpınar,

1995, p. 207).

Conclusion Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul consists of the author’s intimate life story and his various impressions, visual

sensations, and personal experiences got from different sources—from paintings and old books to European

travelogues. His vision of his native city is hard to define. It is based both on the real and the imaginary. He is

capable to look at the city both as its citizen and a Westerner. Pamuk is especially successful researching the

city’s spirit, its unique melancholy that is a key emotion produced by old, ruined and neglected buildings,

poverty and marginality, feelings of defeat and loss of the imperial glory. Pamuk feels this spirit that

determines his life in almost everything he does. Although he owes a lot to the famous Turkish writer Ahmet

Hamdi Tanpınar, the most significant part of his book Istanbul: Memories of a City lays in his ability to

connect past and present and to see the city’s forgotten history, its landscapes and colors that no one has ever seen.

References Hisar, A. Ş. (1968). Boğaziçi Yalıları: Geçmiş Zaman Köşkleri (The Bosphorus villas: The Pavillons of the past). İstanbul: Varlık

Yayınları. Hisar, A. Ş. (2006). Boğaziçi Mehtapları (The Bosphorus moonlights). İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları.


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Kemal, Y. (1964). Azîz İstanbul (Dear Istanbul). İstanbul: Yahya Kemal Enstitüsü. Kemal, Y. (1969). Kendi Gök Kubbemiz (Our sky). İstanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi. Pamuk, O. (2005). Istanbul: Memories of a City (F. Maureen trans.). London: Faber and Faber Limited. Pamuk, O. (2006). Istanbul: Uspomene i grad (Istanbul: Memories of a city) (M. Marinković trans.). Beograd: Geopoetika. Pamuk, O. (2011). Druge boje: Eseji i jedna priča (Other colors: Essays and a story) (M. Marinković trans.). Beograd:

Geopoetika. Parla, J. (2008). Orhan Pamuk`un Romanlarında Renklerin Dili (The language of colors in Orhan Pamuk’s novels). In N. Esen &

E. Kılıç (Eds.), Orhan Pamuk’un Edebi Dünyası (The literary world of Orhan Pamuk) (pp. 55-76). İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.

Seçkin, M. (2008). İstanbul: Hayallerde Şehrin ve Hal Tercümesinin Yeniden İnşası (Istanbul: Reconstructing of the city and the biography in imagination). In N. Esen & E. Kılıç (Eds.), Orhan Pamuk’un Edebi Dünyası (The literary world of Orhan Pamuk) (pp. 273-280). İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları.

Tanpınar, A. H. (1995). Beş Şehir. Retrieved from http://m.friendfeed-media.com/0c45a43bf0624089282744f749451c4203fa2e5a


The “Mother Complex” of Martha Quest

Rukhsana Rahim Chowdhury BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Human experience can best be understood in the framework of collective social relations. Like any other tie, the

mother-daughter relationship is forged not in isolation but informed by cultural, historical, and social values,

circumstances, and practices. The twentieth century has witnessed the greatest changes in world history. As an

outcome of the noticeable shift in gender ideologies in the last half of that century, modern mothers and daughters

struggled to experience a union, a bond, an understanding of themselves and the world around them. Clash of

tradition and modernity in ideals and mores can be held accountable for the consequential neurotic development of

the psyche in twentieth century mothers and daughters. Doris Lessing’s writings reflect the way in which these

complex changes in society affect family relationships. Her first novel of the Children of Violence series, Martha

Quest, is an apt study of a mother and her daughter’s struggle with their newly defined roles in society. This paper

will seek to examine the conflicts that are encountered in the wake of such adjustments by contemporary mothers

and daughters. In order to do so, the study will focus on an exploration of the kind of issues that Martha Quest and

May Quest experience in Lessing’s Martha Quest through approaches available in works by Carl Jung on his

theory of the “mother complex”.

Keywords: gender roles, “mother complex”, resistance, psychic dilemmas, Matrophobia, motherhood

Introduction The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr.

—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986)

Any mother-daughter relationship is forged not in isolation but is informed by cultural, historical, and social values, circumstances, and practices. The twentieth century has witnessed the greatest changes in world history. Among other shifts and changes, gender ideologies also underwent a degree of revision which found modern mothers and daughters struggling to experience a union with, and a bond or an understanding of, themselves and the world around them. Clash of tradition and modernity in ideals and mores can be held accountable for the consequential neurotic development of the psyche in twentieth century mothers and daughters. Doris Lessing’s writings reflect the way in which these complex changes in society affect family relationships. Her first novel of the Children of Violence series, Martha Quest, is an apt study of a mother and her daughter’s struggle with their newly defined roles in society. This paper will seek to examine the conflicts that are encountered by modern mothers and daughters. In order to do so, the study will focus on an exploration of the kind of issues that Martha Quest and May Quest experience and deal with, in Lessing’s Martha Quest through approaches available in works by Carl Jung on his theory of the “mother complex”.

Rukhsana Rahim Chowdhury, M.A., Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Humanities, BRAC University.

DAVID PUBLISHING

D

THE “MOTHER COMPLEX” OF MARTHA QUEST

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The twentieth century has seen two world wars, great delusions and even greater disappointments consequentially giving birth to new ideologies. In the backdrop of a gradual loss of faith in tradition and religion, Socialism offered a new hope to many. Doris Lessing believed in the socialist philosophy that human experience can be understood in the context of social relations which in turn open up the possibility of personal transformation. She believed that the psychic dilemmas of modern womanhood are rooted in the social relations of the modern family. This is perceptible in the delineations of most of the mother-daughter relationships in her writing. Equations in the relationships of Mary Turner and her feminist mother in The Grass is Singing, Janna Somers and her surrogate mother Maudie in The Diaries of Jane Somers and Alice Melling and her mother Dorothy in The Good Terrorist, clearly reflect Lessing’s concern and preoccupation with her vision of the contemporary mother-daughter relationship.

For Martha Quest—living in Africa in the early 20th century—there is no role model, no living woman to guide her. She lives with a father constantly fussing over his “illness” and a mother determinedly trying to hold on to the trends and values of “home”—that for her was and always would be, a Victorian England—which are completely out of sync in this world. She is a soul struggling against the traditions and mores of the past and is in a state of transition into a modern girl of a modern era. Her dilemma is that being raised by a “traditional” mother, she finds it immensely difficult to hold on to a sound sense of her own identity, her individuality which would be free of a maternal persuasion. According to Rosen (1978), Martha longs to escape from the inevitable destiny of “marriage and motherhood” (p. 54). Eventually, she does succeed in escaping from home not into a marriage like her mother’s tradition would have desired, but to create a life for herself, far removed from her mother’s heavy and oppressively confining maternal influence.

Resistance to the “Mother Complex” But when she fights against the mother she may, at the risk of injury to her instincts, attain to greater consciousness,

because in repudiating the mother she repudiates all that is obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature. (Jung, 1969, p. 99)

Historically, the concept of motherhood and maternity has been worshipped through the ages. Child psychologists unanimously agree that mothers greatly influence their children’s emotional and social condition through their own expressive and affective behavior. For Lessing’s protagonist, her mother’s dogmatic attitude regarding a woman’s sexual growth, role in society, merit, ambitions etc., served as the springboard for conflict between the two women.

Martha Quest is a young teenager who lives on a farm owned by her father in the fictional African town of Zambesia in the 1940s. Initially it was her mother’s colonial outlook which prevented her from mixing freely with her neighbours or living a free life as she desired. May Quest’s failure to understand the needs, wishes, and desires of Martha, creates a sense of emotional alienation and exile in her daughter and thus this mother-daughter relationship seems to embody only angst and anger.

Martha has a fiercely independent nature and temperament and has a clearly defined set of her own values. She does not shy away from voicing her opinions, and expressing her point of view in front of her parents and neighbours. Her personality reflects a pendulum oscillating between sheer indolence and sharp insight. Sadly the mother does not sympathise with or understand this attitude. Thus Martha grows into an intellectual introvert who seeks self-fulfillment and intellectual freedom in books supplied by her Jewish friends Solly and Joss Cohen. Her readings raise in her the awareness that neurotic, fragmented mother-daughter relation is a


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20th century dilemma confronting the modern women. Lessing shows that this heightened self-consciousness was developed especially as a result of Martha’s antagonistic feelings for and relationship with her mother. Martha’s need for what Rosen (1978) calls a “symbiotic attachment” (p. 56) clashes with her strong desire to attain her own individuality as Mrs. Quest’s influence and presence in her life is oppressive and domineering.

The narrative offers no clarification for Martha’s resentment towards her mother as Lessing invites her readers to draw their own conclusions. The mother-daughter duo fights over various issues. Concerns like having friendship with the Cohens, going for dance parties, even walking alone in the veld become matters of huge disputes. Martha’s desire to dress according to her own taste and inclination and read books on politics, psychology, and sex are all a result of her reluctance to conform to her mother’s ideal of a daughter. She tells herself every time, that “1 won’t give in. I won’t” (Lessing, 1995, p. 26). Her mother on the other hand, feels that “she did not know what to do with Martha, who seemed bent on behaving so as to make her mother as unhappy as possible” (Lessing, 1995, p. 16). Martha knows well that her mother’s sorrow about her is too personal, because her failure to conform will reflect upon Mrs. Quest’s maternal inability to control and guide her daughter. And for a lady of Mrs. Quest’s social stature it was quite shameful, to let a daughter rebel and resist the mother’s control. A mother is traditionally regarded by society as being the primary source of encouragement, understanding, and nurture for her children. The fundamental conflict arises when Martha’s mother, a product of the patriarchal mindset, attempts to impose patriarchal principles and values on the daughter. She feels that it would be a matter of great disappointment for a mother to find that the child whom she has so lovingly raised with hopes of seeing her own self reflected, has other “modern” ideas.

These threads of conflict and tension in the mother-daughter relationship find place in Carl Gustav Jung’s discourse on human psyche. He discussed an individual’s “archetypes”, i.e., universal thought-forms or mental images that influence an individual’s feelings and actions. Discussing archetypes such as the anima, the mother, the child, the shadow, etc., Jung considered the mother as the most important archetype because it seemed to contain all else. According to Jung, when there is an imbalance of the archetype in a person, he suffers from the mother “complex”. The mother complex is a potentially active component of one’s psyche, informed first of all by experience of the personal mother, then by significant contact with other women and by collective assumptions. The constellation of a mother complex has differing effects according to whether it appears in a son or in a daughter. This mother complex can make a woman go to any lengths to not be like her biological mother. She may carve out a sphere of her own, for example, becoming an intellectual to show up her mother’s lack of education. A choice of marriage partner may be to antagonize and move away from the mother.

In his essay, Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetypes, Jung (1969) shows two opposing aspects of the archetypal “mother”. These twin aspects are generally referred to in Jungian psychology as the “good or loving mother” and the “terrible mother”. The qualities associated with the great mother are “maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility” (Jung, 1969, p. 82). Good mothers are those who evoke devotion and awe in their off springs. An ambivalent aspect of the mother is in the mother symbols having an evil connotation, for example, deep waters, the grave, and nightmares. Jung cites the example of Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ as a personification of this ambivalence. She is “not only the Lord’s mother, but also, according to the medieval allegories, his cross”. In Indian mythology, this loving and terrible mother factor is characterized by the goddess Kali.

Fighting her own demons, Martha seeks the Jungian “good” and “loving mother” but is confronted instead


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with the “terrible mother” who reserves her maternal love for her son and subjects Martha to attempts to turn her into a conventional or rather, an Edwardian lady. She feels that her mother never loved her and fiercely resents her mother’s conventional mind-set. Her mother represents values and ideas, which she is unable to identify with. This impossibility of identification with the mother creates a huge void in her life as she confronts the absence of a model to follow. The daughter, therefore, seeks some kind of solace in the bosom of the Jungian “earth mother”, which for her is, the African veld. After a nasty spat with her mother on the issue of boys and marriage, Martha “marched off down the garden, and ran into the bush” (Lessing, 1995, p. 9). Here she lies down in the long grass under a tree and keeps repeating to herself that “her mother was hateful” (Lessing, 1995, p. 10). We see that for a long time,

…she remained under the tree, whose roots were hard under her back, like a second spine, and looked up through the leaves to the sky, which shone in a bronze clamour of light. She ripped the fleshy leaves between her fingers, and thought again of her mother. (Lessing, 1995, p. 14)

It is apparent then that unfortunately this also turns out to be a futile attempt. Her beloved farm and the adjoining open land fail to arouse any feeling of devotion or awe, or provide the promise of the protection which she subconsciously sought. She was “so resentful of her… parents that the resentment overflowed into everything near her” (Lessing, 1995, p. 5). She liked taking long and solitary walks in the veld. During one such walk an experience described by Lessing was when “the bush lay quiet about her, a bare slope of… grass moving… and she stood quite still, waiting for the moment…” (Lessing, 1995, p. 66). “Suddenly the feeling in Martha deepened and… she knew… what she had been waiting for… was a pain, not a happiness… ” (Lessing, 1995, p. 67). She accepted the experience as “incidental to the experience of adolescence” (Lessing, 1995, p. 67) and was left feeling irritable, “flat and stale”. In the absence of a mother-daughter bond, she cannot recapture the memory of an experience which she never had in the first place. In her estimation, Mrs.Quest epitomizes the Jungian definition of the “terrible mother” and so Martha is left feeling confused, empty, angry and caged more than ever. Her fervent desire for freedom and independence from the mother is encapsulated in her intellectual superiority. She struggles to free herself and in extension, her creative energies, the “libido” from an emotional entanglement with the mother. One night she dreams of a land bordered by sea. Interpreting Jung’s ideas regarding the mother archetype, it can be said that deep waters symbolise an evil aspect of the mother where the deep dark water becomes the cold embrace of the mother’s bosom which instead of providing solace seeks to smother the child. The dream of the vast sea represents Martha’s unfulfilled wish for fusion with the “good mother”.1

As mentioned earlier the mother complex results in a desire to attain a superior intellect in order to highlight the mother’s (supposed) lack of education and thereby create a space where the mother has no place. This clear form of resistance against the mother is evident in Martha’s habit of reading. She successfully excludes and evades her mother in a world of books. Mrs. Quest often imprisoned Martha emotionally through her tears. Just before her matric exams, Martha contracts the “pink eye” and was brought home by her mother to give rest to her eyes. Martha goes on reading books, prompting her mother to remark, “You do it on purpose to upset me!” (Lessing, 1995, p. 30). The only way for Martha to get out of this emotional imprisonment was to wish for a different social order, where everything her mother rejected and condemned will be the norm of life. Hence at night she dreams of a city with a new and different society where equality and integrity are the norm. 1 “Metamorphoses of the Libido” from The Second Sex (1956), Beauvoir, p. 167.


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This dream reflects her growing frustration with the condition of her life. She is often reprimanded for breaking the boundaries set by society for white women. The very English Mrs. Quest with all her colonial ideas was dead set against allowing Martha to walk back home from the market. She was of the opinion that “A young White girl walking alone” (Lessing, 1995, p. 50) invited getting raped by the Black natives. Martha vehemently disagreed and held on to her claim that rape is not colour or creed based and that a White man is just as likely to rape a Black girl. The mother ends the argument with the ominous comment that “girls get raped” (Lessing, 1995, p. 51). Her relationship with the Cohen brothers was not free and easy as this too was frowned upon by Mrs. Quest who had strong anti-Semitic feelings. Martha agrees with Joss that she “dislikes racial prejudice… including anti-Semitism” (Lessing, 1995, p. 56). In the city of her dreams, everyone, the Cohens, the black, the white, and the brown will be welcome, except people like her parents who had “pettiness of vision and small understanding” (Lessing, 1995, p. 17).

Martha suffers a rude shock while in the car with Mr. McFarline. Later, her indignation at his seductive behaviour was met by her mother with the response that, “Nonsense, you’re imagining it, he couldn’t have done” (Lessing, 1995, p. 63). This expresses the difference in attitude between the two generations. The older generation believed that sex was something that should not be discussed openly and honestly. The mother refuses to admit her daughter’s physical maturity and related problems. Her reaction suggests that at 17, Martha was too young for such attentions. She is desperately trying to shield the daughter from the seedy side of society and the daughter with ideas of equality and justice is fighting to expose the pretensions of this very society.

For Martha, emancipation is in independence from the controlling grip of her mother who was seen as an enemy. Their relationship was so strained that fighting and arguing became a daily routine. She would approach everything her mother said with a lot of misgiving: “…at the slightest remark from her mother she was impelled to take it up, examine it, and hand it back, like a challenge… ” (Lessing, 1995, p. 8). When invited to a dance at the Van Rensbergs, Mrs. Quest insists on dressing her in a childish frock believing this would make her appear sexually unattractive to the boys. Martha resists this by stitching a new dress herself and defiantly wearing the provocative dress to the party.

Martha’s growing alienation from her mother propels her towards a quest for her own identity. For Martha the farm meant being near her mother and mother meant domination. She feared at every turn, her mother’s influence upon her personality and she resisted it always.

…she was having terrible nightmares of being tied hand and foot under the wheels of a locomotive, or struggling waist-deep in quicksands, or eternally climbing a staircase that moved backwards under her. She felt that some kind of spell had been put on her. (Lessing, 1995, p. 37)

Escape from this spell and independence from her mother’s domination is seen in the resolution to leave the farm for the city. Martha’s decision echoes Beauvoir’s thought that a woman can achieve independence only in work. A woman who can financially support herself can also achieve a form of liberation. So she leaves the farm for the city but unfortunately, even here the mother continues to interfere, leaving Martha with the feeling that “something unpleasant would happen, because it always did” (Lessing, 1995, p. 158). In Mrs. Gunn’s house after her mother’s visit: She flung all the clothes out on to the floor, and then rearranged them to her own taste, though no outsider could have seen any difference; she pushed the bed back to what she imagined had been its old position (Lessing, 1995, p.104).


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Martha’s Matrophobia Matrophobia… is the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother.

—Adrienne Rich, italicized in original, 1986, p. 235

Lynn Luria Sukenick, an American poet coined the term “matrophobia” in her work, “Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessings’ Fiction”. Lessing believes that modernity has destroyed the role of motherhood and marriage as a fulfilling “choice”. Adrienne Rich echoes this thought in her book, Of Woman Born, where she explores the contemporary mother-daughter relationship. Rich states that “Matrophobia can be seen as a womanly splitting of the self, in the desire to become purged once and for all of our mother’s bondage, to become individuated and free” (Rich, 1986, p. 236). Martha’s matrophobia leads to her struggle to break free of her mother’s influence and subsequently flee “home” and land in the very mess she wanted to avoid, namely, “marriage”.

Martha finds herself in confrontation with the modern world’s dilemma in her relationship with her mother and exhibits the symptoms of matrophobia, which is the fear of becoming one’s mother and leads to a search for individual desire and freedom. This is apparent in her fervent desire not to be “bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother” (Lessing, 1995, p. 20). This desire completely echoes Jung’s thoughts when he says that such a person is the “supreme example of the negative mother-complex. The motto of this type is: Anything, so long as it is not like Mother!” (Jung, 1969, p. 90).

Her self-respect is fashioned out of her sense of difference from the woman who hovers uselessly in the margins of her life. Although it is Martha’s nature to behave sensibly, her common sense is reinforced by her desire to avoid the manipulative histrionics, the mindless tabulations of inconsequential matters, the cruel helplessness, which seem to inform repeatedly the older woman’s behavior. (Sukenick, 1973, p. 518)

She finds herself to be in constant confrontation with the mother figure so much so that “at the slightest remark from her mother she was impelled to take it up, examine it, and hand it back, like a challenge” (Lessing, 1995, p. 8). This cathexis between mother and daughter makes her feel oppressed by the idea of having to lead the same “dull staple” of their lives (Lessing, 1995, p. 6) and later decides that “she must not sink into being a mere housewife” (Lessing, 1966, p. 112). Mrs. Quest’s vain attempts to instill ideas of conventional femininity only serve to make Martha even more rebellious and resistant. Martha basically resents her mother as reflecting the conventional mind-set she embodied the patriarchal myth that good mothers know everything necessary for raising perfect children. This knowledge burdened her relationship with her daughter who thinks of using her body as a weapon against her mother’s prudish, Victorian attitude. May Quest is a product of the modern, post world war world and is plagued by her own neuroses. Her own strictly Victorian upbringing is the biggest hurdle in the way of a sound mother-daughter bond. On the one hand, she finds herself lauding the values of the Victorian-Edwardian era and on the other hand she cannot help but appreciate and simultaneously be concerned about the freedoms inherent in the modern age. She fails to reconcile modern thinking with established traditions. After her marriage she expected to lord over a perfect and well kept household following the English traditions. The family’s move to Africa carried dreams of a better life. But then reality struck. The Whites who went to Africa with big dreams of making money and eventually returning to their home land, became frustrated with the realisation that they do not make enough to return. They live on and on in the temporary thatched houses without ever altering it, year after year, counting on a good crop that would liberate them finally from the claustrophobic, yet physically, vast veld. Thus Mrs. Quest appears as a victim of the imperial


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system that landed her in Africa. She is not a thoroughly monstrous and authoritarian figure, but is rather caught in the same chain of being that jeopardizes her daughter’s individualism. Subsequently Mrs. Quest appears as a “tired and disappointed but decided matron” who has transfered all her dashed hopes and ambitions to her daughter. Setting up a successful daughter in the world becomes her reason for existence. She wants Martha to have a good education and a career and hopes eventually to see her well settled in marriage.

The mother completely fails to understand her daughter even on her wedding day. She arrives to find guests already there and does not comprehend that this was no conventional, traditional wedding ceremony but a rather modern exchange of vows where gestures like the father “giving away” his daughter’s hand in marriage to another man become redundant. She could only experience a feeling of immense relief that she had finally been able to succeed in carrying out her motherly duty of getting her daughter “properly married” (Lessing, 1995, p. 319). Ironically the daughter knew even when she was entering into this marriage that “she would not stay married to him” (Lessing, 1995, p. 315). Lessing here reflects the cultural code of the society where a girl marries at a very young age. This is due to Martha’s impression of marriage as an escape route from the mother.

Conclusion Doris Lessing always distanced herself from the idea of feminism and despised being referred to as a

feminist. In Martha Quest, she has created a heroine who is not a victim of the patriarchal order, but is a woman haunted by matrophobia. Her neuroses are reflected in her mother complex. Lessing’s protagonist is driven to assert her own individuality and will, independent of any emotional shackle. Martha’s fervent desire for freedom and independence from the mother is encapsulated in her intellectual superiority. She struggles to free herself and in extension, her creative energies from an emotional entanglement with the mother. She eventually succeeds in resisting the mother complex and freeing herself from the effects of matrophobia even if only temporarily. Towards the end of the novel we find a heroine who has thrown off the fetters and is independent enough to take such major decisions as marriage although her mother complex ensures that this would only be a temporary form of escape or refuge.

References Berets, R. (1980). A Jungian interpretation of the dream sequence in Doris Lessing’s “The Summer Before the Dark”. Special

Issue of Modern Fiction Studies, 261(1), 117-31 Friday, N. (1977). My mother/My self: The daughter’s search for identity. New York: Delacorte Press. Holmquist, I. (1980). From society to nature: A study of Doris Lessing’s children of violence. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis

Gothoburgensis. Jean, K. (1991). Jung’s “Dual Mother” in Joyce’s Ulysses: An illustrated psychoanalytic intertext. Journal of Modern Literature,

XVII(4), 477-489. Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychological aspects of the mother archetypes. New York: Princeton University Press. Lessing, D. (1966). A proper marriage. London: Granada Publishing Ltd.. Lessing, D. (1995). Martha Quest. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Reventos, M. D. M. (1996). The obscure maternal double: The mother/daughter relationship represented in and out of

Matrophobia. Atlantis, 18(1/2), 286-294. Rich, A. (1986). Of woman born: Motherhood as experience and institution. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Rosen, E. I. (1978). Martha’s “Quest” in Lessing’s “Children of violence”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 3(2), 54-59. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.1956. Trans. & ed. H. M. Parshley, London: Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd. Sukenick, L. (1973). Feeling and reason in Doris Lessing’s fiction. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207470


Writing as Shamanic Consciousness in DainaChaviano’s Fables

of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother

Robin McAllister Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Ct., USA

Chaviano’s Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother is a pioneering Cuban science fiction novel with four

interconnected plots that manifest their separate worlds—the Havana of Ana, the protagonist writer, the Neolithic

Celtic world of Merlin and Stonehenge, Faidir, the planet of Ijje and the winged psyches with three eyes, and Rybel,

the world of Ana’s character Arlena, the “jumen” on the run in an alien planet after being wrecked in a space

ship—through Ana’s writing. Ana uses mental exercises and automatic writing to temporarily regress to a

pre-rational state of consciousness where these parallel universes interpenetrate and cross in the locus of her

subconscious. Writing for her is a form of possession that withdraws her from her immediate reality into a

visionary state resembling that of a shaman. She is a writer being invented and written by her own characters. Her

stories are not fictions, but already existing realities, and she is a channel by which they are able to manifest their

existence through her writing. This science fiction vision of worlds within worlds suggests another origin of science

fiction in the ancient literary genre of Menippean satire, a type of fiction that appeals to highly cosmopolitan,

alienated readers who seek to renew contact with the sources of consciousness from which technological and social

change have alienated them.

Keywords: DainaChaviano, science fiction, shaman, Menippean satire

Introduction DainaChaviano’s protagonists are often deeply alienated, displaced, conflicted women living in an

oppressive Havana that menaces them like the monster in a Gothic romance. Surrounded by other planets, other worlds, other pasts, they find special powers to make contact with those hidden and forgotten past memories, special power to cross boundaries between parallel universes, to find the forgotten points of contact preserved only in genetic memory, often through ghosts and spirit messengers from a lost past.

Writing as Shamanic Spirit Flight Ana, the protagonist of Chaviano’s novel, is an adolescent girl discovering her latent powers as a writer

while she quarrels with her boyfriends and retreats into her bedroom from her mother. For Ana, writing does not engage reality or imitate it, writing creates an imaginary world, a microcosm containing many worlds, that has an autonomy, a life of its own:

Her book is a world of night and snow where the most extraordinary creatures are encountered or avoided, obeying unpredictable laws, even for her, sinking her into an almost orgasmic mental trance in which—like a small god or an

Robin McAllister, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of English, Sacred Heart University.

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omniscient mother—she is able to give release to beings of another universe, whose notion of happiness seems to manifest itself in the act of existing. (Chaviano, 1988, p. 25; the author’s own translation)

Writing for her is a form of possession that withdraws her from her immediate reality into a visionary state of consciousness that resembles that of a shaman. The shaman is a religious practitioner who temporarily leaves this world in a state of trance and flies to the world of the ancestors or spirits to return with knowledge and power that will heal and liberate (Eliade, 1964, p. 13). The shaman is a shape-changer, able to assume bird form or other shapes, to negotiate the boundaries between this world and another in spirit flights which begin with a withdrawal from waking consciousness.

Like a shaman, Ana uses all her techniques of mental exercises—automatic writing, memory games, yogic meditation, to detach herself from ordinary reality and temporarily regress (or fly) to a pre-rational, pre-literate state of consciousness. Here she uses Yogic meditation, not to fly to the Ancestor, but to make contact with Arlena, the fictional character she is in the act of writing about:

It is not the first time she’s had recourse to this method to escape daily tensions. Following the instructions in the manual it is easy to arrive at this absolute-forgetfulness-of-self… She submerges herself in a suspended state of almost voluptuous emotions. Her attention concentrates itself in a zone near her diaphragm and travels over her solar plexus until a hint of temperature occupies the area. A certain light flowers in her interior. She feels a sudden mixture of fear and well-being, an ecstasy that prevents her thinking of any other thing than the eternity of that instant. Then she goes sinking into the dark gas of a new dimension. She wants to cry out and cannot. She tries to move, but her body is now a subtly dense organism. She comprehends that her normal senses have changed: now unknown perceptions surge forth. Ana does not realize that certain mental exercises bring extraordinary faculties into play… It is as if she was dreaming. “If I cry out, I’ll awake… ”. It produces an interior dispersal, or something or someone is attempting to snatch her out of her own body. She has converted herself into a fragile bud whose unknown forces rise up toward the light. She floats. Or, at least, believes she floats. Now she is someone sharing the body of another person… Perhaps her fear—or perhaps some other impulse—drags her out of that body. She closes her eyes while she is hoisted anew. An alien will throws her without compassion. (Chaviano, 1988, p. 126)

The mental exercises that Ana uses to renew contact with the subconscious and make contact with lost or inaccessible dimensions of reality—automatic writing, memory games, yogic meditation—resemble shamanic trance and spirit flight (Van Pool, 2002, p. 41).

Automatic writing represents her writing in its purest form:

During various minutes she writes without stopping. Her mind receives a flood of images that are translated into words and immediately transcribed on paper. Now she opens her eyes because thus she better controls her writing—strangely deformed, as if that of an unknown writer. Then she blinks in a stupor. She knows the fleeting connection established between her and some point of time or space has ended, but she can’t avoid the anxiety that unlinks the end of each session. (Chaviano, 1988, p. 40)

Where are these images, these memories appearing during her automatic writing, coming from? Is she making them up? Or is she reliving someone else’s actual memories from past existences accidentally converging in her receptive subconscious? Here Ana has recourse to a “memory game” based on a theory of “genetic memory”:

It is the game of memories, it is playing to recover lost images, the molecules of love and danger that remain imprinted in the temporal space of some past, the actions and verses that everyone—except the blind memory of the genes—forgets. (Chaviano, 1988, p.86)

The images and words that have surfaced from Ana’s subconscious during automatic writing are the first


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fragmentary vision of the various worlds Ana will be writing about in the three or four interconnected plots of Fables—The Neolithic Celtic world of Merlin and Stonehenge; Faidir, the planet of Ijje and the winged psyches with three eyes; and Rybel, the world of Arlena, the “jumen” on the run in an alien planet after being wrecked in a space ship. Significantly, Arlena is Ana’s fantasy of herself, a woman with extraordinary mental powers, in exile on a planet that is not her own, bringing with her memories of her former existence as an astronaut flying from one planet to another, a woman constantly on the run with her Stone of the Past. She is escaping from vengeful priests of a patriarchal tyranny that have imprisoned her as a slave in the Royal Kitchens before she escapes into the jungle in search of the Sylphs, pure psyches who guard the Mirror of the Future. Priests have perverted the liberating, benevolent doctrines of Merlin, the Celtic magician and converted them into a tool of tyranny.

Initially Ana had begun the stories of Ijje and Arlena as one story, then continued them as two separate ones; on the planet of Faidir, Ijje’s grandmother is in the process of telling him the story, which turns out to what Ana is writing of Arlena. In the meantime Merlin, using the name Soio from his exile on the planet of Rybel, is watching all of this unfold as a vision in his Crystal Ball, even the image of Ana at her desk writing, as appears to Ana in a dream. Now in her automatic writing trances and dreams, incidents from one story are appearing in the other, as if these separate imaginary realities will not obey the dictates of their writer to remain apart in separate works and worlds, but are interpenetrating and crossing in the locus of her subconscious.

Ana is in the process of writing Arlena’s part of the story, but we soon find that she is not inventing fantasies as a normal SF might. She is merely the locus of visions, not the creator, as she tries to explain to her friend, Rita:

“The dreams are as clear as if I had lived them, but they have nothing to do with what comes out in the automatic writing”. “What sort of things do you dream?”—Rita continues asking. “Last night I dreamed of a magician… Most extravagant of all, I existed in the dream like one more character. The magician caressed the ball with his hands. In the opaque that began to illumine itself from within, I appeared… Or at least I believe it was I, only I found myself in the same situation as Arlena”. “Who is Arlena?”… “Arlena is a character in the novel I am writing. At this stage of the book, she is fleeing through the woods… In the dream Arlena had my face, or perhaps it was the reverse; I, Ana, was Arlena… I’m unable to know with certainty because my real I saw it all as if it were a film in the cinema. That is, my eyes saw the scene: the magician with his magic ball and a woman who resembled me (or was I) fleeing through the forest. She (or I) seemed to have much fear… In a while that image was erased from the crystal, but the magician continued, come what may, caressing the ball until I appeared. And here, yes, I am sure, because I saw myself writing in my room”. (Chaviano, 1988, pp. 37-38)

Ana is a writer being invented and written by her own characters. The stories she thinks she is inventing are not fictions but already existing realities making their existence actual through her act of writing. These worlds exist already as parallel universes in different dimensions of time and space, and she is just a channel by which they are suddenly able to manifest their existence through her writing.

A Celtic shaman, like Merlin, is a winged birdman, a Merlin or small falcon. The other imaginary world in this novel, the imaginary planet of Faidir with Ijje and the other winged “psyches”, is a world of shamans in trance flight, birdmen and women, symbols of shamanic flight. Except for their wings and third eye, the “zhifes” resemble humans. Their third eye suggests the Yogic chachra, the third eye of meditation. In Ana’s novel Merlin is another exiled, alienated wander in a planet that is not his home, but Ana’s writings will open the borders of space and time to allow Merlin to renew contact with this cosmos. He is the symbol of the shamanic consciousness that sustains the world of the novel in his role as Soio, or “Soy yo” (in English, “I am”) the


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consciousness of the solitary writer, Ana, as she seeks to renew contact with cosmic energies through writing. The mantra she chants throughout the novel expands her identity by merging it with the cosmos: “I am alone; I and the universe. The universe is a cosmos that contains other lands, but I am alone in my universe, and all its energy is mine because I AM THE UNIVERSE” (Chaviano, 1988, p. 17).

Science Fiction as Menippean Satire No term exists for the kind of SF Chaviano is writing here, a vision of worlds within worlds in which the

Mirror of the Future is discovered by spirit flight to the past. This type of literature combines the most sophisticated philosophical or religious speculation with a temporary return in the act of writing to prerational, preliterate modes of thinking and genres of storytelling. In Chaviano’s novel this takes a form analogous to that of the shaman, a religious practitioner, who brings healing and knowledge to a disharmonious tribal society by detaching temporarily from waking consciousness through trance, flying to the land of the spirits and ancestors, and returning with knowledge and healing. Ana, the writer/protagonist, does not invent characters like an ordinary fiction writer, rather she is the medium through which already existing characters can return from exile and perilous situations bringing lost knowledge of the future and the present.

Gothic romance—or pure quest romance, as in Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother—are not the only genres at the origin of SF that I encounter in Chaviano’s novel. In making her young protagonist, Ana, a writer of the very novel we are reading, Chaviano also makes a statement about her own poetics of science fiction, her concept of what a science fiction writer is doing or creating. Although the author agrees with Brian Aldiss’s source of the genre in Gothic romance and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “I am also going to risk what he calls the illusion of false continuity to suggest once again a remote source in the Menippean satire of Lucian and Apuleius” (Aldiss, 1973, p. 28). The concept of the novel as a miniature universe that contains other worlds as well, the idea of parallel universes, separated but capable of contact over space and time, if one knows where and how to make that contact, suggests for me an ancient tradition of storytelling using fantasy for philosophical and religious speculation often in the form of stories within stories called Menippean satire.

Menippean satire has its origin among urbanized, cosmopolitan writers and readers during the Hellinistic period and uses myth and earlier oral forms of narrative as its content. Menippean satire appeals to writers and readers who are alienated, displaced, and cosmopolitan—exile and wanderers in a world not their own—who seek to renew contact with the sources of consciousness from which too much change, social and technological, have alienated us. Often this fiction seeks to recapture the voices of gods once heard in the past but silent in the present. Such writers and readers have learned to live a spiritually amphibious existence with one foot in a former world of language, culture, and place, and another in alien lands and languages, but they have learned to cross these borders of language, time, and place almost at will and sometimes in play.

Conclusion The work of fiction as a cosmos, the use of fantasy for philosophical speculation, and the combination of

contemporary, popular genres with myth and oral tale, create a mode of fiction that appeals to all of us who try to renew contact with the sources of consciousness from which contemporary social and technological change have alienated us, sources of consciousness in myth, magic, and childhood memory. Thus, not just the writer, but the reader of Chaviano’s Fables must learn to play the role of a shaman.


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References Aldiss, B. W. (1973). Trillion year spree: The history of science fiction. New York, N.Y.: Avon. Chaviano, D. (1988). Fabulas de unaabuelaextraterrestre (Fables of an extraterrestrial grandmother). La Habana, Cuba:

Editorial LetrasCubana. Eliade, M. (1964). Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstasy. In M. Eliade & W. R. Trask (trans.). Princeton, New Jersey:

Princeton University Press. Van Pool, C. (2002). Flight of the shaman. Archaeology, 55, 40-43.


Contesting Veterans’ Identities: Reflections Upon Gender Roles

and History in Pat Barker’s Regeneration

Denise Borille de Abreu Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

This paper aims to reflect upon the approximations between literature and history in Pat Barker’s novel

Regeneration (1991). The novel fictionalizes the conversations held by three war veterans who wrote and fought in

the First World War (Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves) during their stay at Craiglockart’s

Hospital—a war hospital for the treatment of shell-shocked officers, in Scotland. The paper addresses more

emphatically how traditional male and female roles are renegotiated in Barker’s metafiction. Finally, it provides

some considerations on British women war writing of the First World War, a tradition in which Regeneration is

rooted and emerges as a remarkable contemporary example.

Keywords: women war writing, gender studies, life writing, First World War studies, trauma theory

Women in War: Myth and History Mythically, women war narratives have been associated with the complex weaving of the Greek moiras,

women weavers who did not just thread plots but also fate. In Greek mythology, three primeval entities were associated with Fate, Moira, who lived in a hidden cave.

The idea of a Moira acting on the fate of all mortals evolved in many ways. In Hesiod’s Theogony (1998), the thread is associated with human life. Most of the time, fate-related entities are represented by feminine images, once the job of threading, warping, and weaving was delegated to women. The Hellenic influence allowed other women entities to be associated with fate, in different cultures and societies. What is possibly the first literary reference to women and war (the mention of the Amazons) appears in the Iliad (1996), the inaugurating war narrative by Homer. The Amazons, also known as a tribe of women warriors, were referred to by Herodotus (2003), in the fifth century BCE, as the Sauromatae from Scythia, “a society where women hunt on horseback alongside men, often wear men’s clothing, and even fight in wars” (p. 117). They fought against several male heroes, namely, Bellerophontes, the young Priam, Heracles, and Achilles.

Mary R. Lefkowitz (2007) acknowledges the Greek historian’s words and mentions the discrepancy between the roles performed by the Amazons and those expected from women in Ancient Greece: “Women did not hunt or go to war; women’s initiation rites did not involve exposure to physical danger; women nursed their children and stayed at home” (p. 4). Such thesis suggests the contradiction between myths preventing women from direct participation in the battlefields, largely reinforced by the Greek patriarchal society and, it may be inferred, some possible intent by women to subvert that idea. The etymological implications of the term

Denise Borille de Abreu, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Pontifical Catholic University of Minas

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Amazons imply an idea of counteraction to what was imposed on those women in the first place: A version, according to which the Amazons’ right breast was removed, explained as a-mazos (no-breast), followed by a neglect of matriarchal duties like breastfeeding.

Another reading of the myth of the Amazons inspired German composer Richard Wagner to create the opera “Die Walküre” (1870), based on a supposed equivalence between the Greek women warriors and the Valkyries from Old Norse mythology. In the opera, specifically in the Third Act, the Valkyries are portrayed as women entities who would ride on their winged horses across the battlefields to transport the dead warriors to Walhalla, where they would find joy and eternal life. It was a duty those women performed with dramatic joy because it empowered them with the important task of rewarding heroes for their bravery.

A similar task is conducted, again in the Iliad, by the goddess Thetis towards her heroic son, Achilles. In Book One, he implores his mother to intervene in favor of the Trojans, aware of her significant influence over Zeus. The father of the gods acquiesces in Thetis’s plea on behalf of her son. The goddess’s high status in the Olympus is explained by Laura M. Slatkin (1991) as follows:

No complaint is made against Thetis herself; no mention is made of her less-than-Olympian status; no question is raised as to the appropriateness of her involvement in, as it were, the strategy of the war—in the way, for example, that Aphrodite’s participation on behalf of Aeneas calls for caustic humor at her expense. How is the poem’s audience to make sense of Thetis’s extraordinary authority? It claims a divine consent—and consensus—that is significantly tacit. (p. 54)

The passage stresses Thetis’s high standing in the Olympus, possibly over other gods and even her warrior son who, however invincible, was himself a demi-god and, therefore, a mortal. Also, it makes Thetis’s intervention in the war more evident. Given the mortal condition of her son, she develops a caring attitude that confers on her a far more important role than is apparent.

A question remains: Why does Achilles address his request to Zeus through his mother and not directly? He certainly makes a prayer directly to Zeus in Book Sixteen, in favor of Patroklos. Nevertheless, Achilles’ preference for his mother’s mediation ascribes Thetis another major role: that of intermediary between soldiers in the battlefield and the gods. Slatkin (1991) ponders that “it can be no trivial service that is recalled in exchange for reversing the course of the war, with drastic results that Zeus can anticipate” (p. 64). Moreover, Zeus’s willingness to assent to Thetis’s request enhances her privileged position as a female divinity. Her powerful role is exerted in relation to both mortals (her son) and the gods (Zeus). In addition, her task as a mediatrix can also be read as that of a peacemaker, moderating agent in times of war. As Slatkin (1991) concludes:

The most general, but most telling, statement of Thetis’s power is expressed by the formula “ward off destruction.” The ability to ward off destruction within the Iliad is shared exclusively by Achilles, Apollo, and Zeus. Although others are put in a position to do so and make the attempt, only these three have the power to “ward off destruction,” to be efficacious in restoring order to the world of the poem. (pp. 65-66)

Her skill to confer with Zeus in order to reach a settlement during the Trojan War empowers Thetis with a decisive function over the resolution of that conflict. Her performance is as important, if not more significant, than that played by the warriors in the battlefields. She may be left in a place “outside the line of fire” but she certainly has an unparalleled position between mortals and gods in the war epic.

Another piece of evidence of women’s mythical participation in wars is expressed by Penelope’s controversial, and no less important function, in The Odyssey (1996).


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Odysseus’s wife was obviously not a divine entity, but the kind of power she exercises during her husband’s absence, due to the war, makes her an even more intriguing character. She is the Queen of Ithaca, who is capable of evading the expectations imposed by her own family by developing a cunning maneuver to put off her suitors. Although Penelope was an aristocrat, it was common, in Mycenaean societies, to see queens perform house chores, such as washing clothes, making bread and olive oil, looking after children, and weaving. Nonetheless, there are several maids in the Megaron. In The World of Odysseus (1982), M. I. Finley clarifies that:

Denied the right to a heroic way of life, to feats of prowess, competitive games, and leadership in organized activity of any kind, women worked, regardless of class. With her maids, Nausicaa, daughter of the Phaeacian king, did the household laundry. Queen Penelope found in her weaving the trick with which to hold off the suitors. Her stratagem, however, of undoing at night what she had woven in the day, repeated without detection for three full years until one of her maids revealed the secret, suggests that her labor was not exactly indispensable. The women of the aristocracy, like their men, possessed all the necessary work skills, and they used them more often. Nevertheless, their real role was managerial. The house was their domain, the cooking and washing, the cleaning and the clothes-making. (p. 70)

Historically, Penelope would have to yield to the idea of returning to her father’s house while her husband was not around. Instead, she chooses to remain at her house at all costs. Sue Blundell (1995) confirms the nobility of Penelope’s feat but poses a valid question concerning the ambiguous meaning of Penelope’s actions:

Penelope certainly emerges as a clever and determined woman, who is quite capable of evading the pressures placed on her both by the suitors and by her own family. But in order to achieve this she employs the weapons traditionally associated with females; the deceptive use of weaving and of words is typical of the behaviour ascribed to women in the Odyssey, and it lends Penelope a shady and ambiguous character not unlike the one accorded to Helen. (p. 55)

The passage stresses Penelope’s equivocal plan to undo her weaving at night for the sake of keeping the suitors around her for over three years. The obscurity of her plot is compared to Helen’s adultery, which seems to be an overstatement. It is important to note that, before leaving for war, Odysseus had given his wife full powers over the palace at Ithaca. Keeping the household is a job his wife does legitimately and proudly and reveals her sense of personal duty. More importantly, guarding the home gives her control over the property and the serving-maids.

Her failure to remarry is counterbalanced by the power she wields in the palace. The negotiation of power roles between Odysseus and Penelope appears as a challenging issue, much more provocative a questioning than her shadowy inability to deal satisfactorily with her suitors. Blundell (1995) reminds us that:

This model of gender relations is in some ways quite different from anything which can be derived from the later literature of the Classical Age, in which the spheres of activity of male and female are seen as fundamentally distinct. In the Homeric world, where political power is rooted in the royal household, the boundary between the domestic and the political, between the private and the public, is not nearly so rigid. The roles of men and women overlap, and it is for this reason that a woman can come close—in the absence of her husband—to the exercise of political power. (p. 57)

It may be assumed that Penelope’s role played in the narrative surpasses the domestic realm; by insisting on remaining in the palace, and doing her best to keep it running, she plays a leading role as the provider for her own home, something unprecedented in historical terms and largely perpetrated by the Trojan war scenario. By emphasizing the inversion of male and female roles, war narratives have, throughout history, focused on the universal experience of human collapse. This may be understood as an attempt to reinforce the idea that the


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lives of men and women can be equally affected during wartime and their social roles, especially the ones delegated to women, may be evenly redefined.

Women and World War I Writing Paradoxically, traditional and archetypical gender roles appear to have been subverted by the First War,

which contributed to the evolution of women’s social roles. On one hand, men, had their emotional frailty and susceptibility to psychological collapse revealed in women’s war writings, such as those described in Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier (2004) and in Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991). On the other hand, some women started working as political activists, Red Cross volunteers, ambulance drivers, journalists and munitions workers, just to name a few examples from women’s testimonials. Others evolved from the condition of silent witnesses to that of active thinkers, such as Vera Brittain in her autobiography, Testament of Youth (1994), and Virginia Woolf, in her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1996). The literary writings by Woolf, Brittain, West, and Barker are imbued with precise and latent historical meaning and play significant role in the construction of the cultural memory of the First World War.

In Barker’s contemporary fiction Regeneration (1991), psychological implications are suggested, especially with respect to the writer’s mentioning of interpolated male and female roles. War veterans sent to Craiglockart hospital for psychiatric treatment had, above all, a hard time displacing and sharing the terrible emotional experiences that they underwent in war, mostly because in the Army “[t]hey’d been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men” (Barker, 1991, p. 48). However, the relationships between soldiers, based mainly on comradeship, as well as the doctor-patient contacts described in Barker’s narrative, suggest the interposition of male and female behavior in those men. Dr. Rivers’ care and compassion for Prior, for instance, is defined as a feminine attitude and represents, in the doctor’s words, “One of the paradoxes of the war—one of the many—was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was… domestic. Caring. As Layard would undoubtedly have said, maternal” (Barker, 1991, p. 107). Note the ellipsis that precedes the word “domestic”, a sign of hesitation, and the adjective “Caring” in an isolated position between two periods, as if something shameful was being declared. The most compelling word appears in the end, proffered by another voice, a distant one. Santanu Das (2006) explains that:

It is a great irony that the world’s first industrial war, which brutalized the male body on such an enormous scale, also nurtured the most intense of human bonds… A very different order of male experience, one that accommodated fear, vulnerability, support and physical tenderness, sprang up in its place. (p. 136)

Despite the presumed disparity between men’s and women’s emotional attitudes, the novel reveals how both roles intercalate in some of the patients at Craiglockart. Siegfried Sassoon is admired by Rivers for “His love for his men. The need he had to prove his courage. By any rational standard, he’d already proved it, over and over again, but then the need wasn’t altogether rational” (Barker, 1991, p. 118). A feeling like Sassoon’s love for the training of his men would be emotionally understood but never rationally explained by Rivers. The reasons why most men soldiers experienced emotional susceptibility are, in the words of Das (2006):

Because war places sexuality on a continuum of emotions such as vulnerability, helplessness, fear and the universal need to be loved and cared for: in the meeting of “lips”, the erotics of greed are overwhelmed by the reassurances of affection. Rather than celebrating…the gay love of the trenches, it should be read in the context of imminent mutilation and mortality. (p. 135)


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Not only have women’s social roles evolved since the First War but some change in women’s attitude may also be triggered by that tragic event, especially regarding the rise of women’s optimism towards the construction of a society with equal opportunities.

Interweaving Past and Present in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Contemporary writers, such as Pat Barker, have perpetuated the tradition going far back in time to the

Greek moiras. Not only does Barker provide a contemporary woman’s gaze on the First War, Regeneration also offers particular views on the writing of history.

Barker wrote about 600 pages asking questions about what the boys who went to War had to suffer. Regeneration is Barker’s first installment of a trilogy of novels about the First World War, followed by The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995). The novel is the fictionalization of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s stay in a mental hospital, Craiglockart, in 1917, shortly after he wrote “A Soldier’s Declaration”, protesting against the First War and its unnecessary extension. While he is treated by a psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers, whose methods were influenced both by Freudian views and Dr. Yealland’s more “orthodox” approach, he meets patients Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, two other poets. After giving Owen valuable advice on his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917), Sassoon and Dr. Rivers become acquainted with Billy Prior, another fictional patient struck by post-traumatic stress disorder and homosexual issues, complex themes to be explored by soldiers in the First War, which were still seen as a threat to a fighting man’s bravery and virility. Although Dr. Rivers’ humanitarian attempts help Sassoon and the other inmates confront the trauma and pain that haunt them, it may be observed that the doctor’s task consists of giving these patients proper care so as to assure their return to the battlefront.

Barker’s use of intense imagination in order to reassess the past (of the First War) is, however, controversial, as far as it concerns historical narratives. Pihlainen (2002) explains that:

We are here reminded again of Hayden White’s exhortations that historians should make use of forms of narration that are common to contemporary literature; yet the idea that various viewpoints could be presented without assessment seems hostile to the task of historical narration. (p. 10)

Note that White’s explicit encouragement of fictional elements for the writing of history, especially in postmodern historical metafiction, may be directly associated with Regeneration.

Nevertheless, Pihlainen (2002) ponders the importance of revisiting the past by means of imagination and seems to approach the essence of Barker’s metafictional exercise, as follows:

In taking liberties with focalization and attempting to leave out the authoritative voice of the historian-narrator, one possible way to counterbalance the one-sidedness of the perspectives provided by sources, “speaking for themselves” could, of course, be through the introduction of fictional characters presenting alternative perspectives and opinions. (p. 10)

The last two lines of the passage stress the use of many “I’s”, or “eyes” through which the past of the First War is observed in Barker’s fiction. Also contemporary is the concept that historical sources, which would traditionally “speak for themselves”, may do so in fiction.

It is a contemporary approach because this kind of debate has been prompted by Meta and Micro historians. As polemical as Hayden White’s theory may sound, his ability to grasp the fictional technique used by contemporary writers of history is worth admiration.


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In the following passage there may be seen a kind of “prophecy” that would define current interdisciplinary debates, involving literary and historical studies. It also addresses the “fictionalization of history”, a key element to Barker’s writing about the War. White (1978) argues the following:

In my view, we experience the “fictionalization” of history as an “explanation” for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In both, we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit comfortably. (p. 99)

A practical example of White’s above-mentioned postulate is found in Regeneration, when the character Sassoon arrives at Craiglockart Hospital for psychiatric treatment, after having written his anti-war manifest, entitled “A Soldier’s Declaration”. The original document written by him (available at the U.S. Public Domain Organization website) matches the transcription made by Barker in her novel. The dialogue between Graves and Sassoon, supposedly right after the publication of the Manifest, is a fictional representation of the impact that the document might have had on his friend Graves, concerned with the reaction from local authorities. Barker (1991) writes:

“What else could I do? After getting this.” Graves dug into his tunic pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper. “A covering letter would have been nice.” “I wrote.” “No, you didn’t, Sass. You just sent me this. Couldn’t you at least have talked about it first?” “I thought I’d written.” They sat down, facing each other across a small table. Cold northern light streamed in through the high windows, draining Graves’s face of the little colour it had. “Sass, you’ve got to give this up.” (pp. 5-6)

The passage suggests that Graves bears a copy of “A Soldier’s Declaration”, possibly one that had been printed by local newspapers. It also implies that Graves disapproved of his friend’s way of protest, which was reported by Graves in his own autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929). Also doubtful is their conversation after the publication. It is important to note, however, that no matter how fictional this dialogue may have been, the document’s authenticity remains intact. Fiction, here, has appeared simply to grant one of the many possible interpretations, an “illumination”, in White’s words, we inhabit with Barker’s fiction.

Another elucidation appears when the character Dr. Rivers receives an envelope from his patient Siegfried (Barker, 1991, p. 24), containing two of Sassoon’s poems, “The General”, and “To the Warmongers”. The doctor’s reaction, according to the narrative, is:

Rivers knew so little about poetry that he was almost embarrassed at the thought of having to comment on these. But then he reminded himself they’d been given to him as a therapist, not as a literary critic, and from that point of view they were certainly interesting, particularly the last. (Barker, 1991, p. 25)

Whether Sassoon wrote the poems as a kind of healing therapy and submitted them to his doctor may not be proved. The doctor’s reading and appreciation of the poems, followed by his preference for “To the Warmongers” is an assumption. However, what is depicted in fiction does not alter Sassoon’s compilation containing these and other poems. Instead, Barker’s fictional representation instigates the reader to think of what might have led Sassoon to write them, without changing a line of their content.

Barker’s interplay of reality/fiction does not dismiss in any respect the author’s intent with the veracity of documents. The original medical report written by Dr. William Rivers, which allowed Sassoon to be readmitted to the Army, is the property of the Imperial War Museum’s permanent archives. It is identical to Barker’s transcription (Barker, 1991, pp. 71-72). In all the above-mentioned writings by Sassoon (the manifest and the two poems), as well as in the letter by Rivers, fidelity to the originals has been maintained by the fiction writer.


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In fact, a distinctive printing device warns the reader about the documents’ authenticity: They are printed in the same font as the rest of the text, except that it is one size smaller than the text containing the fictionalized conversations.

Through the use of fiction, war myths and emotions held by a whole generation of men, who fought from 1914-1918, are revisited by Barker. What is peculiar about this contemporary woman’s narrative is the emphasis on men’s recurrent feelings of fear and despair, contrary to the values of masculine repression imposed upon those men. Feelings of vulnerability, largely expected from women, were to be found among soldiers and all the men involved in war activities, too. In the middle of the narrative, it may be seen that Dr. Rivers struggles against his compassionate impulses while assisting one of his patients, Prior. The doctor wonders:

He disliked the term “male mother”. He thought he could remember disliking it even at the time. He distrusted the implication that nurturing, even when done by a man, remains female, as if the ability were in some way borrowed, or even stolen, from women—a sort of moral equivalent of the couvade. (Barker, 1991, p. 107)

It should be reminded that Rivers’ thoughts are tormented, on one hand, by an archetypical view of male behavior embodied by one of his male colleagues, Dr. Layard. On the other hand, his consideration for his patients poses more than an ethical dilemma: a personal tendency to sympathize with the drama lived by his comrades in wartime.

Rivers’ lack of explanation for his deep commitment to the men who suffered in the trenches and sought help at Craiglockart culminates in a “reversed” self-image, according to which he might be acting like a WVAD (Women’s Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse, not as a military doctor. His thoughts range from cowardice to sexual preferences, and he ponders about the similarity between the faces of his patients, young officers, and a certain kind of woman:

Worrying about socks, boots, blisters, food, hot drinks. And that perpetually harried expression of theirs. Rivers had only seen that look in one other place: in the public wards of hospitals, on the faces of women who were bringing up large families on very low incomes, women who, in their early thirties, could easily be taken for fifty or more. It was the look of people who are totally responsible for lives they have no power to save. (Barker, 1991, p. 107)

The author finds worth mentioning Rivers’ vividness in portraying women’s wartime drama, not only a concern for his woman colleagues, WVAD nurses, but for the women who precociously lost their husbands to war and became the family’s breadwinner. More importantly, it reveals women’s unconditional support for men in the battlefields, despite society restrictions on their direct participation in war.

The importance of women’s intervention in favor of soldiers can be seen in classical literature, mainly by Thetis, towards her son Achilles in the Iliad. One of the most elucidating attitudes of the mother goddess for her heroic son, however, has intentionally not been mentioned in Chapter I. It may be found in Book XVIII and it illustrates more emphatically the inversion of men’s and women’s roles, just as Pat Barker’s novel seems to address this topic more specifically than in the three other narratives.

The episode referred to is Achilles’ sorrow for Patroclus’ death. The depth of his grief is described in physical details.1 It is so intense that it causes the women slaves to sympathize with their master’s pain: “From

1 Fitzgerald’s translation of the Iliad describes the pain felt by the most powerful of all Greek warriors as follows: “A black storm-cloud of pain shrouded Achilles./On his bowed head he scattered dust and ash/in handfuls and befouled his beautiful face,/letting black ash sift on his fragrant chiton./Then in the dust he stretched his giant length/and tore his hair with both hands” (Iliad 18: 22-27).


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the hut/the women who had been spoils of war to him/and to Patroclus flocked in haste around him,/crying loud in grief. All beat their breasts,/and trembling came upon their knees” (Iliad 18: 28-31). Next, Achilles weeps profusely, to the extent that his weeping may be heard by his mother, who dwells in the sea. Also moved by the great warrior’s sorrow, Thetis’s sisters, the Nereids, are compelled to join the mother goddess towards the Trojan shore, where her son is calling for help.2 The spatial motion is important here: the cry resonates to the depths and the help comes ashore. These movements reinforce the idea of inversion, added to the great hero’s vulnerability to pain, which leads him to cry for his mother’s help. In the Iliad, the absurdity of such an inversion may be seen by a long listing of the Nereids’ names (the list comprises ten lines), along with a reference to the place they came from: “and other Nereids of the deep salt sea,/filling her glimmering silvery cave” (Iliad 18: 51-52). With great endeavor the women reach the Trojan shore, where the Myrmidon ships lay (Iliad 18: 69-75). The author quotes the dramatic description of the mother’s meeting with her son: “Bending near/her groaning son, the gentle goddess wailed/and took his head between her hands in pity,/saying softly: Child, why are you weeping?/What great sorrow came to you?/Speak out, do not conceal it” (Iliad 18: 76-81).

After partaking in her son’s drama, the immortal mother must, at great pain, reveal her son’s tragic doom in the Trojan War.3 Achilles accepts his fate, transcribed by Fitzgerald as “destiny”, from the original Greek word moira. Going back to the war and killing Hector, and, therefore, avenging Patroclus’ death, no matter if that cost him his life, is the only comfort that will come to Thetis’ son.4 Aware of her son’s fate, Thetis tells the Nereids to come back to the bosom of the sea, whereupon she goes up to Mount Olympus, where she will plead to Hephaestus to forge new armor for her son:

She rose at this and, turning from her son,/told her sisters Nereids: “Go down/into the cool broad body of the sea/to the sea’s Ancient; visit Father’s hall,/and make all known to him. Meanwhile, I’ll visit/Olympus’ great height and the lord of crafts,/Hephaestus, hoping he will give me/new and shining armor for my son.” (Iliad 18: 138-144)

Note the reverse of both roles and the importance of distances: The goddess mother intervenes in favor of her son once again, and her mediation is contrasted by references of distance, “go down”, “great height”, and other opposites, such as “Ancient” vs. “new and shining”, “sea” vs. “Olympus”.

Conclusion In Regeneration, role inversion appears as Rivers behaves not as a male doctor, but as a mother. Those

who are supposed to act like war heroes, for they survived a great part of the War, as brave soldiers do, plead to their superiors for help, like children. While Prior yields to Rivers’ care, his lover, Sarah, struggles to maintain their home, as a munitions factory worker. Male and female roles are reversed, fictions and realities intermingle. In the gap between two extremes, history is regenerated: Men disclose their frailty, women workers gain equal

2 The author quotes the following lines from Fitzgerald’s version: “And now Achilles gave a dreadful cry. Her ladyship/his mother heard him, in the depths offshore/lolling near her ancient father. Nymphs/were gathered round her, all the Nereids/who haunted the green chambers of the sea” (Iliad 18: 35-39). 3 According to the following passage: “Letting a tear fall, Thetis said: ‘You’ll be/swift to meet your end, child, as you say:/your doom comes close on the heels of Hector’s own’” (Iliad 18: 107-109). 4 Emphasis given. It would make more sense to write “Peleus’ son”, for the remarkable men in Ancient Greece were referred to by patronimics. In this passage, however, given the proximity and the importance of the meeting between mother and son, the author refers to Achilles as “Thetis’ son”.


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rights as men’s, and history’s “mobility”, using the term by Auerbach5, generates an evolution towards new directions for humankind.

When seen by contemporary eyes, or I’s, the history of the First War does not appear as a frozen instance in time. What may be observed is that its history is made by human experiences, recognizable by different generations in different times. There is a mimetic aspect to history, as Auerbach presupposed, that is perpetually regenerated, as inevitable as if it had been carefully treaded by a Moira, but in contemporary times.

References Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The representation of reality in western literature. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University

Press. Barker, P. (1991). Regeneration. New York: Plume. Blundell, S. (1995). Women in ancient Greece. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brittain, V. (1994). Testament of youth: An autobiographical study of the years 1900-1925. London: Penguin Books. Das, S. (2006). Touch and intimacy in First World War literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finley, M. I. (1982). The world of Odysseus. New York: New York Review Books. Fussell, P. (1975). The great war and modern memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Graves, R. (2000). Goodbye to all that. London: Penguin Classics. Herodotus. (2003). The histories. London: Penguin Classics. Hesiod. (1998). The theogony. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Higonnet, M. (1999). Lines of fire: Women war writers of World War I. New York: Plume. Homer. (1996). The Iliad. London: Penguin Books. Homer. (1996). The Odyssey. London: Penguin Books. Lefkowitz, M. (2007). Women in Greek myth. London: Duckworth. Owen, W. (1965). The collected poems of Wilfred Owen. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. Pihlainen, K. (2002). The moral of the historical story: Textual differences in fact and fiction. In New Literary History (pp. 39-60).

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sassoon, S. (1986). Collected poems, 1908-1956. London: Faber and Faber. Slatkin, L. (1991). The power of Thetis: Allusion and interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley: University of California Press. West, R. (2004). The return of the soldier. New York: Random House. White, H. (1978). Tropics of discourse: Essays in cultural criticism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Woolf, V. (1996). Mrs. Dalloway. London: Penguin Books.

5 Erich Auerbach presents this concept in Mimesis (1953), as he states that epochs and societies should be studied according to their own presuppositions. Historical events should not be only apprehended by abstract and general facts, in reality: “Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development” (Auerbach, 1953, pp. 443-444).


Verbal Images Paradigm in Different Lingual Cultures

Yermekova Zhannat L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan, Astana

This article is aimed at the analysis of the images of consciousness that the representatives of the Kazakh and

Russian nations possess. The analysis has been carried on the man-horse paradigm. It has been discovered that the

ability to associatively connect the objects and phenomena of the world around bring together the Kazakh and

Russian writers as well as does the ability to see common features of different objects. At the same time in the

Russian literature sometimes a person is identified with a horse, which does physical work, and characterizes

people exhausted by hard work which is not typical for the Kazakhs. But the Russians do not compare their child

with a foal whereas for the Kazakhs it is the kindest term of endearment. It is supposed that interesting image

paradigms with “horse” element can also be discovered in the English language.

Keywords: image paradigm, association, mentality, lingual culture

Introduction

The Kazakh and Russian nations are not only neighbours according to their geographical location but are also tied by politics and economy, thus their community has been reflected in the language, mentality, and communication culture. An attempt has been made to analyze images of consciousness that the representatives of these nations possess. They are these images that are the symbols of actions, facts, and myths, the observances of etiquette habits and rituals. They also convey national spirituality, historical memory, and world perception of the representatives belonging to different lingual cultures.

Main Part

The system of images most clearly manifests itself in the artistic speech. That is why at the beginning the analysis was carried on the works of the Kazakh and Russian writers, since it is the artwork that actualizes all the aspects of speech and thought activity. Auezov’s (2007) epic novel and Sholokhov’s (1980, 1991, 1995, 2003) short stories have been chosen as the basis for the research where the former is a worldwide known representative of the Kazakh literature and the latter was the Russian national writer. The choice of the material investigated is explained by the rhythmic pulse of life the two nations have in the great steppes, the pulse which is beating in the works of two great artists of the word literary artists. Later the idea appeared to compare the features of associative thinking of modern Kazakhstani people, brought up on the basis of different cultures, including those who are natural bilinguals.

Yermekova Zhannat, Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, associate professor, Department of the Theoretical and Applied

Linguistics, L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University.

DAVID PUBLISHING

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“By creating an image and appealing to the imagination”, tropes, in particular, the metaphor generates the sense perceived by the mind (Arutyunova, 1990, p. 10).

In consciousness the images immerse into network of connections and ties where this network is fundamentally different if compared with the position that the originals occupy in the real world. Consciousness supplies them with a new context in which the primary role is given to associative relationships that reorganize or rather, organize the picture. (Arutyunova, 1988, p. 121)

The inner world of a person is based on clearly defined means of expression, that may disclose as transcendental truths both external to the person as the order of the universe and internal presented by moral values, family traditions, ideas, destiny of the soul, etc.. The main place of symbols concentration is unconscious sphere of the person, where the symbolic function is expressed most clearly.

The image is a category of consciousness, emerging with certain language features that contribute to the inadequate representation of the perceived world. Images are present in the depths of the human psyche.

What is the mechanism of the creation of artistic image? Undoubtedly, the image is formed by certain language features that contribute to an inadequate representation of the perceived world. In a figurative thinking of everyone who creates a work of art, there is something common. It is the ability to associate objects and phenomena of the world, the ability to see the common features, the quality of the different items as a result of common or similar impressions of them (Fedorov, 1985, p. 54).

Images of animals are carriers of specific projective function, symbols of the human psyche, forming the second feature that explains the possibility of knowledge of human psychology by means of animal images. Animals represent a base which humans select character traits, motivations, and feelings. Creating a certain image of the animal in the imagination or on paper, the person ascribes it to some personal meaning, “personal attitude of the person is shown in any perceptual act, as well as the whole varied life is reflected” (Burlachuk, 1997, p. 25).

Extensive empirical material is accumulated and systematized in science, multifaceted theoretical generalizations are made, however, on the one hand, the individuality of the artist’s personality, on the other hand, a kind of “genetic code allegory... which determines the organization of different types of semantic information in the texts” (Fateyeva, 1995, p. 181) continue to arouse the interest of researchers.

“The genetic code includes multi-valued semantic clusters that have multidimensional structure, and directly correlated with episodic, semantic and verbal memory of the individual” (Fateyeva, 1995, p. 182). We attempted to give a number of nationally-specific semantic images of linguistic consciousness, which are genetic codes, symbols, actions, facts and myths, etiquette habits and rituals that transmit national spirituality, historical memory, to show the picture of the world through the prism, the mentality that reflects the perception of the world and representatives of the Kazakh and Russian nations.

A variety of associations connected with the horse suggests respect which a person feels toward the animal. In both steppes, Kazakh and Russian, graceful, fast, and tireless horses were highly thought of, alongside with the unpretentious ones with great stamina.

It is well known that the Kazakhs, giving the name to the horse, use rich paradigmatic series of words describing the animal not only according to its suit (sauran—hardy light-brown horse with black mane and tale, argamak—tall blood breed horse), purpose (aygyr—stallion maker, tulpar—fairy-footed racer horse), but also by


age (tye—one-year-old colt, kunan—three-year-old horse, and donen—five-year-old horse) with all this allowing to take into account the importance of the species-age Kazakh nominations (Tuksaitova, 2007, p. 197).

In an embodiment of the image of the horse in the Kazakh and Russian language consciousness the associative relationship “a person- a horse” is revealed. In both linguistic cultures a person as the carrier of the state, feelings, and mental qualities becomes the associate of the horse. In this case the particular aspect of characteristics is reached by actualizing the image of the horse concerning its psycho-physiological features in the semantic structure. Within this basic association, we can observe a fairly wide range of continuously updated meanings of symbols that characterize the person from the point of view of the conditions, feelings, psycho-physiological properties (character, temperament, motivation, behavior, etc.). Information can be presented explicitly and implicitly, the latter requires in-depth analysis of the meaning of the text.

The analysis of factual material allows us to make certain observations. The identity of the association in the language consciousness of the Kazakhs and Russians is evident when it comes to:

(1) A person who is impatient and cannot control the emotions:

A dark, like cast iron, plump face with twisted flaring nostrils exposed the nature which was raw, rough and irritable (about Bozhey’s wife). (Auezov, 2007, p. 216)

-You do not get angry, do you know, where they go? He is as hot-tempered (about Gregory), as an unbroken horse (Sholokhov, 2003, V. 1, p. 460);

(2) A person who does not accept subordination, and shows resistance:

He (Kunanbai-Zh.Y.) punished the stubborn by depriving them of their share in the aggressive loots and the unruly were tamed by his power. (Auezov, 2007, p. 86); Recently for some reason he (Abay-Zh.Y.) wanted to argue with the olderly as if a kind of latent obstinacy was hidden lurking in his heart. (Auezov, 2007, p. 336); Then Ospan ran and jumped on his brother Smagul’s back so suddenly that the latter barely kept on his feet... You dare throw me down? Are you serious? Even the white yearling couldn’t throw him down in the morning! Do not kick! (Auezov, 2007, p. 236)

(3) A person who is threatened by restrictions:

This name (Dildy-Zh.Y.) was associated by him (by Abai-Zh.Y.) with a foreign imposed will and hateful marriage bonds. (Auezov, 2007, p. 131)

We would rather stay away from old days, otherwise we will be so yoked even worse than by the Tsar’s one. And who will rule us? We will! On our own!—Podtyolkov bucked up. We take the power—that’s the rule. Wish the saddle-girth were a bit but loosened, and we then can throw down the Kaledins! (Sholokhov, 1980, p. 197)

(4) A person who is tired physically, exhausted taken over by the will of the strong:

(Jumping on the back of his brother...) Smagul, suppressed by the will of the rider, rushed towards Abai, galloped past him and together with Ospan plopped into the water. A bit later Kunanbay who was unusually sad as if he got tamed, continued half-voice “A person is a weak and sinful creature”… (Auezov, 2007, p. 237)

Pain in the heart grew heavier. The sweat appeared on his forehead. He came down the steps, anxiously clutching his hand to the left side of the chest and thought “So the grey horse, are you worn out by steep hills?”(Sholokhov, 1995, p. 197); “Hello there, you ataman-the gang leader!—It is a great jolt! It should carry the four-inched ones!” (Sholokhov, 2003, p. 428); “It is so exhausted tell me how it could carry the cart”? “In two-week time he got exhausted like a horse that made a back-breaking run”. (Sholokhov, 1995, p. 546)


(5) A person who protests and loves freedom:

But Dunyashka took the bit between her teeth: she, too, turned pale with indignation and anger already practically bursting into shout she continued... (Sholokhov, 1991, p. 131)

(6) A person who is patient and humble:

Previous expression of a submissive beat-up horse remained holistic on the face. (Sholokhov, 1995, p. 68)

(7) A person who feels the sense of solidarity with others:

He looked around and saw more than a hundred of dismounted fighters scattered on a snowy slope of a gully and felt more confident and stronger. The herd feeling always strongly possessed him as well as anyone else in the battle. (Sholokhov, 2003, p. 448)

(8) A person who is the competent authority, an owner:

They (the opponents—Zh.Y.) all do not believe that the place of Agha-Sultan has been lost for them forever, no! They hope to get it again. And on every path now they will not cease to be in the watch for you (Kunanbay-Zh.Y.) and will try of course to pull you off your horse! (speaking of the land ownership—Zh.Y.). (Auezov, 2007, p. 139)

Well, this means that the owner of the horse is Akberdy now. Will he want-you are seated behind him, he will not—you get it in the neck! “If you’re anything to think, you will understand—this mosque for our myrza (lord) will bring a lot of benefits. And along with it, and we’ll be on a horse. (Auezov, 2007, p. 179)

In linguistic consciousness of a nomad semantic structure of the image of the animal, in particular a horse, is quite often associated with implication of space-time relations, which determines the peculiarity of the ideological installations that the Kazakh nomads have.

For example, “Time when mares were tied for milking preceded the hour when all sat down to drink kymyz (fermented mare’s milk)” (Auezov, 2007, p. 74).

On the basis of the given examples it is possible to make the assumption that Kazakhs do not associate with a horse a person who protests and loves freedom, patient, and humble, feels the sense of solidarity with others, and Russians do not draw associative parallels with a horse a person who does not accept subordination, and shows resistance, who is the competent authority, an owner.

However, the limited material does not allow us to make deeper conclusions within the article. The ability to associatively connect the objects and phenomena of the world around bring together the

Kazakh and Russian writers as well as does the ability to see common features of different objects resulted from the generality or closeness of the impression they produce. Thus the man-horse paradigm being most productive is the invariant of the explicit lexical chain which includes the words a horse, a mare, a foal and a trimmed mane

year-old colt. And the implicit one includes such words as obstinate, rebellious, raise the horse on its hind legs,

bridle, ride away in a gallop.

In the Russian literature a person who does weary work is identified with a horse, which does physical work, in such a case the person is honest, down to earth, and often consider themselves to be the bread-winner of the family at the same time used by others to their own advantages, e.g., “in two-week time he got exhausted like a horse that made a back-breaking run”. The Kazakh literature has no such identifications.

At the same time the language of the Kazakh writer encodes and transmits the specific native culture into the


text where the national consciousness and original interpretation of the reality are traces. “Umay, my Goddess, as a mother I pray to you to bless the every step of my foal” (speaking of a child). Time-horse paradigm is a characteristic feature of a nomadic society, e.g., “Time when mares were tied for milking preceded the hour when all sat down to drink kymyz (fermented mare’s milk)”.

Model of translating the image of the horse is being implemented in the exteriorization of various psychological components (emotions, thoughts, feelings etc.), i.e., their substantive nomination and, as a consequence, views being independent entities. Arutyunova (1988) thinks we:

tend to externalize the components—feelings, passions, desires, will, mind, soul, heart, conscience, shame, dreams, beliefs, experiences, memories, hopes, defects, virtues, remorse, suffering, and others, representing them not only as something separate from us, but as something which gets with our inner world into certain friendly or hostile relations… (p. 94)

For example, exterior components of personality can be directly associates with the image of a horse:

Hardly had he loosened the bridle off his complaisant memory, Natalya alive and smiling appeared before his eyes (memory-horse). (Sholokhov, 1995, p. 420)

The pride which did not allow her being the outcast, stay in Yagodnoye reared and pranced and resisted. The will beyond her control directed her words and actions (pride-horse). (Sholokhov, 2003, V. 2, p. 53)

Analysis of the literature has shown that the semantic potential of the image of the horse in linguistic consciousness of the Kazakh and Russian authors is implemented in an associative operation and is determined not only by the amount of human knowledge about the relevant circumstances but also by peculiarities of the historical roots of the socio-cultural paradigm.

These specific phenomena were confirmed by the results of the associative experiment, conducted in the leading universities of Kazakhstan, namely, Nazarbayev University and the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University in Astana. Among other things, the emblem of the latter University is a proud rider on the warhorse galloping into the future.

Most of the students were poly- and bilinguals grown up in a multicultural environment. According to the results of the survey, 40% of respondents associate the horse with the wind, horse-races, mane waving in the wind, freedom, baiga and kokpar (national traditional games on the horses), riding a horse, that is, with speed and movement, whereas 40% of the respondents identify horse with food: salty meat, horse meat, kazy and karta (horse meat sausages), besbarmak, (boiled horse or mutton meat with a boiled pasta sheet), kymyz (fermented milk drink), 15%—with hard work, a woman with shopping bags, 5%—other.

It should be noted that university students surprised us with a rich creative imagination (horse—wind, horse—waving mane, horse—freedom). What generated this in children who have never in their lives ridden a horse? Is that a genetic code? Or is it the result of aesthetic education? After all, the capital of Kazakhstan is richly decorated with sculptural images of fabulous horses, Batyrs (warriors) on warhorses, and the apartments and houses of many Kazakhs, as well as offices are decorated with pictures of racing horses, but not the Dutch still life painting.

Thus, there are no negative connotations carried by a horse in the language consciousness of a modern Kazakh.


Conclusion

The variety of meanings that can be explicated in a specific way in its associative use cannot be absolutely represented as they are entirely determined by properties of the reality in the perception of the person in different situations this trend provides the breadth of the range of semantic variation of the image.

It is necessary to note that a horse is also significant in the British culture and in everyday life on the level of consciousness, since from the ancient time this animal has been depicted in the architecture, folklore and literature and involved in various customs and traditions. It is supposed that comparative analysis of verbal associations with the horse produced by the Kazakh, Russian, and British creators can be the subject of further investigation.

References Arutyunova, A. (1990). Metaphor and discourse а theory of a metaphor. Moscow: Progress. Arutyunova, N. (1988). Image (Experience of conceptual analysis) reference and problems of text formation. Moscow: Nauka. Auezov, M. (2007). The path of Abay. Almaty: Zhibek Zholy. Burlachuk, L. F. (1997). Introduction to projective psychology. Kiev: Nick Center. Fateyeva, N. A. (1995). Semantic transformation in the poetry and prose of one author, and in the system of poetic language/Essays

on the history of the language of Russian poetry of the 20th century: The imagery means of poetic language and its transformation. Moscow: Nauka-M.

Fedorov, A. I. (1985). Figurative speech. Novosibirsk: Nauka. Sholokhov, M. (1980) Collection of essays in eight volumes (V. 1). Moscow: Pravda. Sholokhov, M. (1991). The Russian writers—Nobel Prize laureates. In Favourites (V. 3). Moscow: Molodaya gvardia. Sholokhov, M. (1995). Quiet Don: Novel in 4 volume (V. 3-4). Moscow: Voyennoe izdanie. Sholokhov, M. (2003). Quiet Don: Novel in 2 volume (V. 1, 2). Moscow: OLMA-PRESS. Tuksaitova, R. O. (2007). Speech tolerance in bilingual text (Based on the Russian-Kazakh fiction and journalism) (Doctoral thesis).

Yekaterinburg.


Tagore’s Poetry—Universal Psychospirituality

Tinni Dutta Asutosh College, Kolkata, India

Life was full of pathos and stress to Tagore. Tagore remains preoccupied with the irrecoverable losses but finally

has felt—soothing thought spring out of human suffering. He did not grieve rather find strengths in what remains

behind. The poet has gained abundant pleasure from the natural world knowing nature never did betray.

Psychodynamically by identifying and introjecting mother figure he felt the most enduring human

passion—“Serenity”. Thus despite the barriers of time and space, nation and race, Tagore as an affectionate father

may embrace fellow human beings most endearingly. The principal objective is to probe Tagore’s psychodynamics

and creative processes. Dynamic analysis was done by following the methods of Freud, Jung, and Kris. Findings

highlighted that Tagore was a man who could be rightly called “Lord of speech with mind for all”.

Keywords: Psychodynamics, Tagore, creative processes

Introduction and Literature Survey Tagore viewed consciousness which include psychological as well as metaphysical notions. According to

Tagore, consciousness has its objective and subjective aspects. Objective aspects refer to knowledge, information, and perception of events. Subjective aspect means phenomenal experience. Paradoxical awareness and subliminal perception—Tagore experienced it and these are reflected in his songs and poetry. Paradoxical awareness is a kind of knowing without knowing and subliminal perception means that human beings might be influenced by objects and events of which they have no subjective awareness.

Tagore’s experience of spirituality is a function of the soul in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles. It is the condition sine qua non of the world as an object. Upanishadic singular consciousness is echoed in Tagore’s poetry. We can utter—“The colour of my consciousness turned emerald to green, ruby turned crimson. I looked up to the sky, the light was lit… Across to the east and west. I looked at the roses, said ‘beautiful’, they became beautiful” (Tagore, 1936).

According to Sanyal (2012) there is increasing evidence that many people who experience extra ordinary states of consciousness accompanied by various emotional, perceptual, and psychosomatic experiences are actually undergoing an evolutionary crisis. She has also stated Grof used the term “spiritual emergence” and “spiritual emergency” to refer to this profound personal transformation.

Methodology Dynamic analysis: The transcendental element in Tagore’s treatment of bereavement and loss, his ability

to pass from grief to spiritual realization makes the reader’s mind puzzled and is quizzical. This is an analysis of way he does this and it reveals beautifully in Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song offerings).

Tinni Dutta, Ph.D., Asutosh College, University of Calcutta.

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A rational study of the psychology behind the profundity of the literary wealth of Gitanjali is rewarding and fruitful. The philosophical content is wonderful in its range and scope. The universal appeal of the thought-content touches the chord of every subject under sun.

Poems are analyzed in the light of Psycho dynamic School. Such personal transformation is evidenced in Tagore’s poetry. In Gitanjali, Tagore’s quest for spirituality is marked by his eternal pursuit of realizing his essential unity with the infinite. According to him “Consciousness is the light by the help of which we travel along our path of life” and “Spiritual life is the emancipation of consciousness” (Roy, 2010, p. 308). “When the veil is removed, we not only see the fleeting forms of the world but also come close to its eternal being which is ineffable beauty” (Roy, 2010, p. 308). Union with higher power is revealed in the following poetry of Tagore:

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long. I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light and pursued my voyage through the wilderness of the worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet. (Tagore 1912—Song No 12—Song offerings)

When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy. When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song. (Tagore 1912—Song No 39—Song offerings)

Have you not heard his silent steps? He comes, comes ever comes. (Tagore 1912—Song No 45—Song offerings)

I know not from what distant time thou art ever coming nearer to meet me. Thy sun and stars can never keep the hidden from me for aye. (Tagore 1912—Song No 46—Song offerings)

A feeling of eternity and oneness with the universe resounds in the hearts of the romantic poets. This encompasses a “peculiar feeling”, “a sense of eternity”, “a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded as if it were oceanic”. Freud understands this oceanic feeling as being a feeling of an indissoluble bond of being one with the external world.

Feeling of gratitude with higher power is also pronounced in Tagore’s poetry.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. (Tagore, 1912—Song No 1—Song offerings)

This is my prayer to thee, my lord-strike strike at the root of penury in my heart. Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows… Give me the strength to make my love fruitful and service. (Tagore 1912—Song No 36—Song offerings)

Is it beyond thee to be glad with the gladness of this rhythm? To be tossed and lost and broken in the whirl of this fearful joy? (Tagore 1912—Song No 70—Song offerings)

My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through. (Tagore 1912—Song No 14—Song offerings)

Tagore has shown a process of reforming the psyche as a form of self healing. Here we can quote Sanyal (2012) again “It indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of

unbearable conflicts by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form”. The mastery and specialty of Tagore lie in that by his extraordinary creation he could convey his unique

experiences and impart sense of spirituality amongst his readers. Tagore has written:

From infancy I had been seeing only with my eyes, now I began to see with the whole of my consciousness… I sensed the fathomless depths of the eternal well of joy, from which numberless sprays of laughter fly and scatter throughout the world. (Tagore, 1917, p. 156)

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Life was full of pathos and stress to Tagore. Tagore remains preoccupied with the irrecoverable losses but finally has felt—soothing thought spring out of human suffering. He did not grieve rather find strengths in what remains behind. The poet has gained abundant pleasure from the natural world knowing nature never did betray. Psychodynamically by identifying and introjecting mother figure he felt the most enduring human passion—“Serenity”. Thus despite the barriers of time and space, nation and race, Tagore as an affectionate father may embrace fellow human beings most endearingly.

Conclusion The sense of oceanic wonder, the most sublimated expression of the self transcending emotions is the root

of Tagore’s creation. The emotions expressed in such creations reveal the universal characteristics of psychospirituality. According to Freud (1917), the artist loses in his dreams what is personal about him and makes it possible for others to save enjoyment, to derive consolation and alleviation from their own sources of pleasures in their unconscious’. Tagore has dedicated his extraordinary vision to Lord of Life and we can conclude by uttering these following lines—“In one salutation to thee, my God, let all my senses spread out and touch this world at thy feet”.

References Freud, S. (1917). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. London: Hograth Press. Roy, K. (2010).Rabindranath Tagore’s quest for spirituality “Spirituality and science of consciousness”. Kolkata: The

Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Clcutta. Sanyal, N. (2012). The petals of “Forgiveness” in the platter of “Metanoia”. Bulletin of the Ramkrishna Mission Institute of

Culture, Golpark, No. 5. Tagore, R. (1917). Reminiscences. New Delhi: Macmillan. Tagore, R. (1965). Gitanjali. London: Macmillan Limited. Tagore, S. (1936). I. Rabindra Rachanabali transcreation.


A Great Citizen Is Still “Under-Construction”: The Conflicting

Self-Identity in Sayonara 1945

LEE Shin-yi China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan

CHEN Jui-sung Mingdao University, Changhua, Taiwan

Sayonara 1945, performed by Golden Bough Theatre in 2010 in Taipei, was claimed to be a “Heart Taiwan

Magical Musical”. This “Heart Taiwan Magical Musical” is actually an adaptation of Taiwanese Opela, a reformed

and adapted style of Taiwanese local opera (gezaixi), which has been strongly influenced by Japanese Colonization.

Sayanara 1945 fictionalizes a troop of Taiwanese youths who join the Imperial Army being lied and cheated to dig

gold for the Japanese Emperor after the war is over. This play gives a conflicting scenario of being Taiwanese in

1945, while everything that defined Taiwanese suddenly turned out to be treason to the country. By adapting the

form of Opela, the play structurally presents a society where diverse and plural cultural elements counteract each

other in Taiwan. Furthermore, as the title suggests, the play says Sayonara (“Goodbye” in Japanese) to 1945, yet the

confusion and conflict generated in 1945 still haunt Taiwanese society. In other words, the play responds to an

on-going self-conflict of being Taiwanese that still continues even after the war and unto the present symbolically.

Presented in the year before “the Republic of China” celebrated her hundredth birthday, this play portrays the

anxiety about who the Taiwanese really are over the island, just like in the summer of 1945 when everything was

also uncertain and confusing. This paper intends to discuss, by adopting the form and techniques of Opela, how this

reformed Opela speaks for Taiwanese local arts and culture, and how the Taiwanese identity is framed and shaped

ever since the colonization era.

Keywords: Opela, Sayonara 1945, Golden Bough Theatre, Taiwanese opera, Taiwanese identity, Japanese

colonization, Japanization movement

Introduction

Sayonara 1945, performed by Golden Bough Theatre (金枝演社) in 2010 in Taipei, one year earlier before the Republic of China celebrated her 100th national birthday. Sayonara 1945 is also titled in Chinese, A March of Great Citizens (大國民進行曲/Da guo min jin xing qu). Both English and Chinese titles suggest 1945 is not only a watershed between Japanese Colonization and the Kuomintang Administration in Taiwan, but at this critical divide, Taiwanese people have experienced a political confusion about who they believe they are and who they really are. As WANG Rong-yu, director of this play, has put it, “[T]his play tells not only a simple story that took place in 1945, but provides a fable just as suitable for modern Taiwan. The illustration of ‘One Country, Two

LEE Shin-yi, Ph.D., assistant professor, General Education Center, China Medical University. CHEN Jui-sung, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of English Studies, Ming-Dao University.

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Worlds’ creates a vivid projection of how people feel at this current moment”.1 Wang would like to utilize this illustration of “One Country, Two Worlds” to point out the inner conflict of today’s Taiwanese people, that although Taiwan has gone through several democratic revolutions, the anxiety about uncertain future and quest for a national identity still haunt the island. While the government celebrated with great pleasure the 100th national birthday of the Republic of China which actually reigns over Taiwan only after 1945, the doubt and anxiety about who Taiwanese really are also enhance simultaneously.

Golden Bough Theatre has been established in 1993, and claims to draw inspirations from local Taiwanese opera (i.e., Gezaixi/歌仔戲 in Chinese) and western theatrical practices.2 Its grassroots spirit and innovative ways of merging Taiwanese opera and modern theatre stand out above the other local theatrical troupes in Taiwan. Golden Bough Theatre has been best-known for its Opela productions, a hybrid form of Taiwanese local opera and foreign arts. Opela is a transliterated term from “opera” (オペラ) in Japanese, whose origin could be dated back to the colonization era. During Japanese Occupation Era (1895-1945), a lot of western theatrical ideas and practices were introduced to Taiwan by overseas Chinese and Japanese. Later on, due to the severe suppression of the Japanization Movement (Kominka Movement/皇民化運動, 1937-1945), Opela survived and boosted as the major public entertainment for Taiwanese people, when all Taiwanese indigenous arts were strictly censored and controlled. Opela has long been a street demonstration, played along with religious festivals or ceremonies. Golden Bough Theatre now promotes it as a high art to be performed in National Theatre. This shift of the performing locales of Opela is phenomenal, for it highlights this hybrid and somewhat vulgarized street art and reminds the audience of the colonial past on this island. In this paper, the authors would like to discuss, by adopting the form of Opela, how Taiwanese identity is presented in Sayonara 1945 and ever since the colonization era, and how the form of Opela represents one trait of Taiwanese identity.

A False Glory of Being a Great Citizen

Sayonara 1945 features a troop of Taiwanese youths who join the Imperial Army being lied and cheated by their superiors, Takabashi and Kobayashi, to dig gold for the Japanese Emperor, when the Pacific war is over in 1945. Then, Kobayashi asks help from a female traveling opera troupe to cover the truth and pretend they are Women’s Volunteer Corp sent by the Japanese Government to comfort the soldiers. Kobayashi promises that once gold is found, he would share gold with all of opera performers. With the help from these opera performers, the soldiers are pacified and deeply believe once they succeed, gold would bring them good fortune and fame, and soon they all could return home with honor and wealth. However, as time flies, no gold is found and the opera performers find it more and more difficult to keep deceiving. Eventually, a soldier decides to run away with an opera girl. As he learns their plan, Takabashi is eager to stop them by killing the girl. In order to stop Takabashi, the master of the opera troupe, who turns out to be a secret agent of China, Tamsui Number 3, reveals the truth, and the soldiers finally come to realize all they believe is nothing but a lie, a dream they build in the air.

Structurally, in Sayonara 1945, there are a series of illusions and lies. Takabashi, unwilling to accept the

1 This part is quoted from 1945, Dream On written by WANG Rong-yu from the pamphlet packed along with the DVD that recorded actual performance. 2 See the official website of Golden Bough Theatre, http://www.goldenbough.com.tw/ (25 March 2014). The major western practice is from the Grotowski training system.


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truth of being defeated, still hangs on his ambitious dream and imperial glory. In order to realize his dream, Takabashi conspires with Kobayashi and leads the troop to mine gold. He believes once gold is found, he could have enough supply to fight back and prove his loyalty to the Emperor. Kobayashi and the soldiers simply follow the order of mining and regard mining as a great contribution to the country. Meanwhile, the opera performers, who already know the truth that the war is over and Japan is no longer their home country, still consent to help realize the illusion for intriguing financial incentives. Despite the truth of losing the war, everyone in the play seems to believe the dream he or she is building and tries hard to make it come true.

The series of illusions and lies here in this play carry a double meaning. First, the ideal of the imperial glory and great citizens is only an illusion, a make-believe. The play begins with the Japanese Emperor’s declaration of defeat in 1945. As the play reveals, Takabashi and Kobayashi are kneeling down in the background and prepare to commit suicide as they learn the war is over. In the meantime, down in the foreground, a group of young opera actresses sing the song of victory. Their master teaches them now the national language is no longer Japanese; they have to practice Mandarin Chinese. Soon, a band of soldiers appear onstage complaining that when the Japanese rule Taiwan, they have to learn Japanese; now if the Chinese come, they all have to learn Mandarin Chinese; they are always busy adjusting themselves to the new ruler. This scenario shows in 1945 everything that Taiwanese people used to be familiar or even identify with, such as language and the nation, suddenly turns out to be foreign and strange. Naturally, the idea of “great citizens” would be always challenged by different political powers. In fact, before 1945, the Japanese colonial government propagandized the idea of being an imperial subject was an honor for the Taiwanese, and the Chinese were the enemy. However, as Japan lost the war, the honor of being an imperial subject soon turned out to be treason, although the Chinese language could be as foreign as Japanese to Taiwanese people at that time. The very first scene just reveals the truth that Taiwanese people are not only between political reigns but between new national identities; yet, their identity is never defined by themselves. The real Japanese, like Takabashi, choose to die for honor, while the Taiwanese adjust themselves for survival. Under this condition, the idea of being great citizens is only a way out for survival under the colonial reign. As the play progresses, the need for survival and reuniting with the family for Taiwanese people stands out above the need for a national identity. Despite the fact that they are between two different political reigns, all Taiwanese characters in the play are busy covering or prevented from knowing the truth in order to survive, which makes the idea of imperial glory and great citizens that Takabashi propagandizes seem to be airy and vain.

Second, ironically, the series of illusions and lies presented in the play help the Taiwanese to recognize the truth that they are not unified and their lack of a core identity. In this play, Kobayashi and Haruko, the leading actress of the opera troupe, both are aware of the truth that the war is over, and work together to prevent the soldiers from knowing it. They could be seen as representative as how Taiwanese people come to realize the need to control their fate and define their own identity in the times of turbulence. In Act 3, seeing the soldiers being deceived and trapped in lies, Haruko starts to feel troubled by her sense of guilt. She constantly feels confused in her “play” of deception, asking herself who the winner is. Or is everyone the loser who has gold but loses the home (or the home country they used to believe)? Later in Act 4, Haruko decides to confront with Kobayashi and persuades him into ending their “play”. She thinks it is time to reveal the truth, and even blames Kobayashi for being coward to face the fact. Kobayashi replies all he wishes is love and survival, so that he could move onto his


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own life. He is reluctant to face the truth. It is until Takabashi threatens to kill Yokmui who decides to run away with the soldier, Ario, and the Chinese secret agent, Tamsui Number 3, stays indifferent and detached coldly from the possible murder, that Kobayashi realizes he is not Japanese or Chinese, for the Japanese or Chinese never regards him as one of them. He then shouts, “Taiwanese people should be unified” (Act 4). Surviving between different political powers, the desire for survival may suppress Taiwanese people from searching for a national identity; however, it is also the strong need to survive helps the Taiwanese realize their identity is torn and not unified. Presenting the change of Kobayashi’s political stand, Sayonara 1945 points out the struggle of Taiwanese people during the war and colonization. The shift of political powers and suppressive colonial reigns result in the confusion and dilemma of Taiwanese people, but at the same time activates the desperate need for a national identity.

In this play, the most significant metaphor is the act of mining. On the surface, gold mining is an order from Takabashi, and the soldiers just follow it dutifully. Nevertheless, as they begin digging, the soldiers become hopeful and dream to be shrouded with gold when returning home. This act of mining then turns into a process of dream realizing. For these Taiwanese soldiers, following the order and then getting rewards could lead them to the path of success. Yet, the act of mining displays a submissive and docile body gesture here: bending, sweating, and laboring in darkness; these soldiers are invisible to the Japanese Emperor and even to China, their new ruler. This act of mining demonstrates a vivid contrast to the promise made by Takabashi and Kobayashi: They build the castle in the air, while the soldiers take actions to work for their dreams.

It is worth noting that by the end of the play, all characters find what really shines before them is not gold, but miscanthus flowers, a widespread wild plants in Taiwan. Miscanthus flowers survive even in harsh conditions; once cut or destroyed, they could always survive and bloom. Miscanthus flowers are a symbol of life-force and indigene. During the Japanese Occupation Era, many Taiwanese people would compare themselves as miscanthus flowers which bloom and thrive when being mistreated.3 In this play, all characters are eager to find gold, an expensive but dead substance to transform them and grant their wishes; however, what really gives rays of life is a native wild plant grown out of the soil. Miscanthus flowers are a reminder to all characters that they all have to move on despite the shift of governments:

All: Coming to a new age/There’s nothing after all. When the sun rises above the mountains We’ll see the light Shining on our bodies Giving us warmth Though the dream is over We’ll still move forward. (Act 4)

Ending with the image of miscanthus flowers, Sayonara 1945 does not seem to provide a solution to the identity dilemma of Taiwanese people. Facing the colonial past and the coming threat from China, Sayonara 1945 raises the question and reflection about whom Taiwanese people should identify with. However, the image

3 For example, in 1943, DENG Yu-xian (鄧雨賢/1906-1944), a Taiwanese musician, composed a song titled Miscanthus Flowers, depicting the strong life-force of miscathus flowers to survive even when being discarded, neglected, or mistreated. This is metaphorical about Taiwanese people’s life during Japanese Occupation Era. Retrieved April 30, 2014, from http://blog.ilc.edu.tw/blog/blog/3226/catid=12775.


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of miscanthus flowers has implied more than it appears: both Japan and China in this play are regarded as foreign powers and neither of them could represent Taiwan; therefore, Sayonara 1945 strongly suggests the indigenous and native are true Taiwanese, which is the cause of “One Country, Two Worlds” in Taiwan. When Taiwanese people say sayonara to the Japanese reign and the Koumintang Chinese came along, for more than 60 years, many Taiwanese people still feel they do not have a say in their freedom and rights. Recently, with the forceful economic and political threat from China, this play once again reminds Taiwanese people of 1945, which is analogous to the present condition: We already said sayonara to colonization, but we are anxious and uncertain about the future. Will there be another colonization? In between, the Taiwanese could only hang on to what they have and find the way to survive.

An Ambivalent Identity

Although Sayonara 1945 strongly suggests the indigenous and native are what the Taiwanese would identify with, the form of the play does not respond to the idea; on the contrary, the form is a hybrid product of colonization and cultural exchanges. On the posters and promotion ads, Golden Bough Theatre claims Sayonara 1945 is “Heart Taiwan Magical Musical” (哈台魔幻歌舞劇), a musical form of the Tai style. Actually, this style of the magical musical is a modified and refined form of Opela, a reformed and adapted style of Taiwanese local opera. Of all the traditional arts in Taiwan, Taiwanese opera is considered the only art originated locally and developed on the island. The root of Taiwanese opera is religious, for it is commonly seen during all kinds of rituals or festivals as a public demonstration, which makes it closely related to people’s life. Before TV was popular in the 1960s, Taiwanese opera used to be the major form of public entertainment.4 One of the reasons for Taiwanese opera to be popular among people is its being accommodating to different political and social realities. The most drastic transformation of Taiwanese opera occurred during the Japanese Occupation Era. At the early stage of the Japanese colonization, the Taiwanese culture and customs were not strictly monitored; on the contrary, the Japanese government tried to understand and preserve all kinds of Taiwanese cultural activities in order to manage this new colony. The political strategy was pacification and assimilation then. However, with the outbreak of the Pacific War (1937-1945), the attitude of the Japanese government changed and it treated Taiwan as a military base for Japan’s invasion to South Asia (i.e., the policy of Southern Expansion/南進政策), and issued a series of political and social campaigns to transform Taiwanese people’s ways of life. In 1941, the Kominhokokai (the Public Service Association of Imperial Subjects/皇民奉公會) was established to officially “reform” Taiwanese society , and helped all imperial subjects establish extreme patriotic loyalty in their life. This is the Kominka Movement, or Japanization Movement in Taiwan. The Kominka movement actually is a series of political brain-washing campaigns: The colonial government provided economical incentives for people to use the Japanese language and customs, spread the cult of the Japanese Emperor and the Shinto religion, and change Taiwanese people’s names and customs. This movement virtually urged the Taiwanese to deny their own culture

4 According to ZENG Yong-yi, CHEN Cong-ming (陳聰明), the director of Taiwanese opera and TV programs, pointed out the golden age of Taiwanese opera should be the 1940s, especially after 1945 when the Japanese colonial government retreated from Taiwan. There were about 300 troupes in Taiwan, and Taiwanese opera was even more popular than movies. This is the time when the art reached maturity. Later in the 1950s, the development of this art reached the summit and there were about 500 troupes, and 30 to 60 persons per troupe. Taiwanese opera was the most popular pubic entertainment at this time (ZENG, 1988, pp. 66-67).


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and forced Taiwanese people to identify with Japan solely. In order to “Japanize” entertainment business in Taiwan, the Kominhokokai issued two principles in

“refining” Taiwanese arts: (1) Taiwanese songs and languages were banned from stage, but only Japanese songs and language were officially allowed; (2) All plays should be strictly censored and controlled, including the scripts, contents, and costumes. All performers should wear Kimono and sing Japanese songs (ZENG, 1988, p. 63). Thus, any theatrical production that followed these two principles were regarded as “refined drama” (改良

劇). Under this circumstance, Taiwanese opera was devastated, for the tradition was overthrown and the art was forced to propagandize the Japanization ideal. In order to survive, many opera troupes tried to adapt to this cruel reality and merged Japanese music, performing styles and even imaginary or magical plots, and then a new breed of art, Opela, came into being.

Of all the Taiwanese traditional arts, Opela is the only one that is modified and strongly influenced by the political power. According to SHIH Wan-shun, before the colonial government promoted the Kominka Movement, many Taiwanese opera troupes had already added some pop music or Japanese songs in their performance, and termed their performance as “opera” (Ge-ju/歌劇) instead of using its Taiwanese name, Gezaixi, for the term stands for “western art” and “modernity” (p. 35-36). This is the early form of Opela, which is produced based on the box office consideration and desire for modernity. Shih (2008) thinks at this time Taiwanese people might not have a comprehensive understanding about what opera is, but people were eager to modernize and enrich the traditional arts by merging exotic elements and novel ideas, which makes Taiwanese opera prone to changes and modification (p. 37). Therefore, as the Kominka Movement started to limit that the only aesthetic standard for Taiwanese traditional arts is “de-sinicization” and “Japanization”, Opela survived political persecution and found a way out to preserve Taiwanese culture at the critical moments.

Many critics find it nondescript when it comes to terming Opela, for it presents various music styles and its non-conventional ways of acting which are quite different from orthodox Taiwanese Gezaixi, and some even despise this art for it betrays the tradition and fawns on foreign powers (CHEN, 2005, p. 155). However, being nondescript and subversive to the Taiwanese opera tradition just shapes the uniqueness of Opela. We could find various elements that are popular with the crowds in it, such as flashy light, tacky costume, traditional performing skills, and exotic dance. WANG Rong-yu, director and founder of Golden Bough Theatre, thinks the nature of Opela is collage (YE, 2011, p. 140), a projection of commoners’ life and taste. Opela usually features a fusion of traditional and modern theatrical arts, just like a variety show where all kinds of dramatic elements could be accepted and performed onstage.

Therefore, it is significant for Golden Bough Theatre to deal with the conflicting identity issue of the Taiwanese via the form of Opela. The choice itself is ambivalent enough. Though a modified form from Taiwanese opera, Opela is also a reminder of the colonial past, for the background when and where it was nourished. It is a transformation out of the traditional local opera, a hybrid product of various exotic elements. Furthermore, it has been developed based on the ideas of “de-sinicization” and “Japanization”. When Golden Bough Theatre claims to choose the local and grassroots path to produce theatrical works, it has—whether consciously or unconsciously—accepted the aesthetic standard established during the colonization era as a part of the Taiwanese culture, and brought it out to the spotlights of National Theatre. This shift of performing locales—from the street demonstration to National Theatre—shows the ambition of Golden Bough Theatre to


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celebrate and centralize Taiwanese local arts and traditions; however, Golden Bough Theatre’s choice of Opela to speak for Taiwanese spirit seems to suggest the ideas of “de-sinicization” and “Japanization” are not the past, but the present condition.

Like miscanthus flowers, Opela is very accommodating and adaptive to various challenges and even threats. Yet, Opela is hardly termed as indigenous, for it has subverted the Chinese cultural heritage and presented distorted Japanese culture. It is sometimes tacky and hilarious, and before Golden Bough Theatre’s productions of Opela, it was never a high art. WANG Rong-yu’s idea of “One Country; Two Worlds” presented in Sayonara 1945 shows Taiwanese people now are still between political powers. We cannot deny the colonial past and overlook the forceful Chinese power, since Japanese and Chinese cultures are already parts of Taiwanese culture. But the characteristics of “great Taiwanese citizens” are still “under-construction”: No one could give a definite picture, but only an ambivalent image of the Taiwanese.

Conclusion

According to a poll made by Taiwan Thinkbank in 2013, when asked if Taiwan and China belong to “One China”, or they are two different countries, 79.9% of Taiwanese people replied they think Taiwan and China are two different countries. In terms of self-identification, 78% of people see themselves as Taiwanese, 7.8% think they are Chinese, while 10.8% view themselves as both.5 The statistics show the majority of Taiwanese people’s self-identification does not correspond to “One China Policy” that has long been recognized officially and internationally. There seems to be a gap between what Taiwanese people think they are and what the government or other countries think the Taiwanese are. Sayonara 1945 allegorizes the present conflicting self-identification of Taiwanese people with a fictional scenario when Taiwanese people actually have to choose their national identity. The play raises the question who Taiwanese are instead of giving a definitive answer, which reflects the truth of Taiwanese conflicting self-image. Now facing China who sticks on “One China Policy” and its strong economic and political power, at the same time the anxiety and fear of being “colonized” are evoked in many Taiwanese people’s mind. It seems 1945 does not go away from people’s memories; it lingers and still haunts Taiwan.

References CHEN, H. L. (2005). The combination of the outdoor Taiwanese opera and popular culture—In the light of the development of

O-pei-la-hi. Arts Journal, 10, 151-165. CHEN, W. H. (2010). 曲韻悠揚：台灣傳統戲曲歌仔戲 (Melodious tunes: Traditional Taiwanese opera). Taipei: LiWen

Publishers. HO, W. C. (2007). Music and cultural politics in Taiwan. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(4), 463-483. HSIEH, H. M. (2007). From “Refined Gezaixi” to “Opela”: Discourses of Gezaixi under the changing Taiwanese national identity.

Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore, 155(3), 79-110. LEE, S. Y. (2011). Introduction to Traditional Theatrical Arts in Taiwan. Taichung: China Medical University. SHIH, W. S. (2008). Glimmers from a dark age: Taiwanese Theatre under the Kominka Movement (1936.9~1940.11). Journal of

Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore, 159(3), 7-81. SILVIO, T. J. (2009). The nostalgic community and the reintegrated individual: The “New Opeila” performances of the Golden

Bough Theatre and the Formosa Zephyr Opera Troupe. Journal of Theatre Studies, 4, 45-74.

5 See “Taiwanese attitudes toward cross-strait relations: Findings from the polls”. Retrieved April 30, 2014, from http://www.taiwanthinktank.org/page/chinese_attachment_1/2704/Taiwanese_Attitudes_Towards_Cross_strait_relations.pdf.


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Taiwan Thinkbank. (2013). Taiwanese attitudes toward cross-strait relations: Findings from the polls. Retrieved from http://www.taiwanthinktank.org/page/chinese_attachment_1/2704/Taiwanese_Attitudes_Towards_Cross_strait_relations.pdf

XIAN, Y. Y. (2005). Call Me Tai Ke ! = Call Me TK! Taipei: Net and Books. YE, Z. H. (2011). 難忘的心愛的人：金枝演社的胡撇仔美學 (My unforgettable lover: The Opela aesthetic of Golden Bough

Theatre). New Taipei City: Fa Yan Quan (發言權).

ZENG, Y. Y. (1988). 台灣歌仔戲的發展與變遷 (The development and changes of Taiwanese opera). Taipei: Linking

Publishing.


The Concept of Peace in the Pentateuch

Uri Zur Ariel University, Ariel, Israel

Peace is a key concept in Jewish tradition with an extensive history. It is also an extremely broad concept. As

former deputy to the president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Chief Justice Prof. M. Elon, stated at a lecture he

delivered at a 2004 conference at Haifa University, that peace is equivalent to liberty, justice, and equity. The

purpose of this chapter is to discuss various attitudes and ideals concerning peace that are reflected in a selection of

sources from the Hebrew Bible and are complemented by other Jewish sources.

Keywords: peace, Judaism, Pentateuch

Introduction

The concept of peace in early Jewish sources will be defined on three levels. The first level encompasses the relationship of peace to God, man’s relation to God, and God’s relation to man, and the divine blessing of peace from God to man. Next, the author discusses peace as a condition of an individual’s state and a feature of an individual’s relationships with others, including relationships with their spouses and their environment. The author also discusses biblical Moses and Aaron, as exemplars of peace. Finally, the author examines the concepts of peace and war between nations, and the potential conflict between peace and truth.

Today, while opinions in Judaism are divided on many issues, all streams within the Jewish tradition believe in the concept of peace although each stream supports a concept of peace that is subject to different limitations or reservations.

The Jewish Concepts of Peace

In Judaism, the concept of peace encompasses three main elements: First is the lexical meaning of the word “peace” which is a description of a condition—tranquility, serenity, quiet, a condition that is opposite to the state of war; its second meaning stems from the linguistic inflections of the Hebrew root of the word: “Shalom” and denotes completion, perfection, and reward (Schwartz, 1997, pp. 7-11); and the third meaning of peace, which is based on Abarbanel’s commentary, is harmony.

Don Yitzhak Abarbanel, a biblical philosopher and commentator who lived in 15th century Portugal, interpreted the word “peace” as peace pertaining to the common good. “True peace between opposing forces which [God] created in his world” (Abarbanel, 2013, p. 49). According to this interpretation, peace implies harmony (Schwartz, 1997, p. 15) and a reconciliation of different things, people or opinions with each element making its own unique contribution to the completeness of the whole. Schwartz (1997) describes his approach to

Uri Zur, Ph.D., Israel Heritage Department, Ariel University.

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peace as follows: “Peace in an individual’s life is the state of harmony and serenity, goodness and tranquility, fecundity of the land and seed, physical health, and longevity” (p. 15).

Peace Pertaining to God and God’s Attitude Towards Man

The concept of peace is also used to describe God’s actions, and is reflected in several of the many names of God. Shalom is one of God’s names. According to a legend on the Book of Numbers (Num. 6:24), peace is one of the names of God. Peace is immanent in God, or in God’s ontology, and has enormous universal significance. God grants worthy individuals a “covenant of peace” as a reward, a token of God’s appreciation of an individual’s commendable actions.

In the book of Numbers, Pinhas is awarded God’s covenant of peace (Num. 25:12-13). God treats Pinhas as a perfect individual whose exemplary conduct during a crisis is described in book of Numbers (Num. 25:6-8). Zimri ben Salu, president of the Tribe of Shimon, had intimate relations with the Midianite woman openly, and his actions became known to Moshe and the entire nation. Everyone was distraught and no one knew what to do. Pinhas was the first to regain his composure and put an end to the disgrace by killing them both. On the face of it, this is an absurd situation, in which Pinhas killed two possibly innocent individuals who were not convicted of a crime by any court, yet he is rewarded with a covenant of peace. The story, however, should be examined from a biblical perspective: Zimri’s actions were a blatant public expression of rebellion and protest against Moses, the God-appointed leader, and as such, were considered as a sin in the eyes of God. When Zimri’s rebellious acts began, the nation was smitten with a plague that killed 24,000 individuals. Pinhas understood that if the sin was not stopped immediately, the plague would kill off the entire nation. In fact, after he killed Zimri, the plague stopped.

As a result, God rewarded Pinhas for his actions with a “covenant of peace”: God granted Pinhasand his offspring special priestly status (“everlasting covenant of priesthood”) (Num. 25:12-13), which is the supreme status among the people of Israel.

Yitzhaki, who lived in France in the 11th century, considered the most lucid Biblical commentator, interprets the biblical phrase “covenant of peace” as a relationship of amity between God and man. Yitzhaki uses the simile of a “…as a man who returns a favor” (Yitzhaki, 1960, Num. 25:12) to illustrate the relationship between God in the story of Pinhas: Pinhas’s actions benefited God, and God rewarded Pinhas for his actions by benefiting Pinhas. According to Yitzhaki (1960), the relationship between man and God is reciprocal, and a man’s actions can be rewarded in many ways, including a covenant of peace, as in the case of Pinhas.

The Blessing of Peace

God’s blessing is called “peace”. The majority of anonymous Sages concluded this from Psalms (Ps. 29:11): “The LORD will bless his people with peace” (Megila 18a). Peace is so important to God, and so significant an element in God’s attitude to man, that the word peace is used on a daily basis when individuals meet and greet each other, according to Jewish tradition.

God greets his nation with peace every day through a special blessing conveyed through the nation’s supreme status holders, the priests. The priests greet the nation in morning prayers, whose main message is peace, as we learn: “The LORD lift up His countenance on you, and give you peace” (Num. 6:26). As we see here, the


blessing that God bestows is the blessing of peace. Another Biblical commentator, R. Avraham ibn Ezra, who lived in Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries,

typically bases his interpretations on the specific linguistic character of biblical verses and oral traditions. He interprets this greeting as “no harm shall come to you, not from a stone or a wild beast, or an enemy” (ibn Ezra, 1960, Num. 6:26). According to ibn Ezra, peace is the absence of harm or damage, a state of tranquility that surrounds the individual on all sides, and as a result of which man attains perfection, with no enemies; man enjoys physical safety in daily life.

Individual “Peace”—Personal Safety and Well-Being

Genesis (Gen. 28:21) offers an account of Jacob’s vow during his journey from Be’er Sheva to Haran. Jacob, the third of the three forefathers of the Hebrew nation, asks God to watch over him as he traveled, to provide him with food to eat and clothes to wear, and to ensure that he returns “safely to his father’s house”. Legends, add interpretive details to Jacob’s request as livelihood (Bereshit Rabbah 69:6), avoidance of bloodshed (Bereshit Rabbah 70:4), wholeness of the body (Yalkut Shim’oni 22:908), and absence of illness (Seforno, 1960, Gen. 28:21).These legends, which mainly rely on early legends sources from the second century AD onward, interpret Jacob’s request for peace as specific requests concerning Jacob’s personal affairs, the realization of which is considered his own individual peace based on his personal interests: a request for livelihood, a request that he never be compelled to harm others, and a request that he himself not be harmed by disease or by others. These are all existential and commonplace requests that in being realized create peace for the individual, ensuring the concrete existence of an individual—in this case, Jacob.

In contrast, the following legend interprets the verse “I return to my father’s house in safety” (Gen. 28:21) as a request for personal peace from a different perspective (Yalkut Shim’oni, Job 22:908). According to this legend, Jacob not request all the other elements noted above but rather asks for peace for himself, that is to live in peace, without inner conflict for himself and for others in general.

Ibn Ezra, mentioned above, also interprets the verse “Now Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem” (Gen. 33:18) as “he comes in peace, so that no event should befall him”, or no harm be caused to him by anything (ibn Ezra, Gen. 33:18).

In this condition, he is physically whole, meaning that he was not distracted, injured, or harmed by any adverse event and he is content with himself and his environment. Yitzhaki the commentator noted above, however, rejects such a simplistic explanation for this verse and he interprets “returns safely” from a spiritual perspective as “perfect without sin, so that I should not sin in Laban’s house” (Yitzhaki, 1960, Gen. 33:18). Laban was Jacob’s uncle (his mother’s brother). Jacob was sent at his father’s request, to his mother’s family in Aram, to find a woman to marry (Gen. 28:2; 29:10). Rav, an early third century Babylonian sage, expresses a combination of these two approaches, the material and the spiritual. Rav interprets “return in safety” on the basis of another verse that appears later in the story of Jacob: “And Jacob came safely” (Gen. 33:18) and he says, “Whole in body, whole in his money, and whole in his beliefs” (Shabbat 33b). On this verse, Yitzhaki states,

Whole in his body [means] he was cured of his limp; whole in his money [means] he did not lose money despite the monetary value of his gift to his brother Esau; and whole in his belief [means] that he did not forget his teaching while he was in Laban’s house. (Yitzhaki, 1960, Gen. 33:18)


Yitzhaki’s grandson, R. Shmuel ben Meir, who lived in France in the 12th century, uses a stylistic feature and logical argument to reject his grandfather’s interpretation. He stated:

He who interprets this as whole in his money and whole in his belief—is in error because this is not the typical style of the Bible, and in any case, what is the point—for such a small gift as was given to Esau, what was the need to write it in this way? (ben Meir, 1960, Gen. 33:18)

Literally, ben Meir is correct, because it is no typical of the Bible to note whether an individual who granted a gift was reimbursed for the value of the gift he gave, especially in the specific case at hand, in which Jacob gave a gift to his brother Esau in order to appease him and prevent him from harming him or his family. Although the gift included a large number of animals and camels, it was considered as a small gift compared to Jacob’s immense wealth. Therefore, ben Meir argues that Yitzhaki’s explanation is not typical of the Bible, that is, the Bible would not typically note that Jacob recovered the value of the gift that he awarded his brother, especially in view of the fact that the gift was a small one, in relation to Jacob’s immense wealth. ben Meir therefore rejects Yitzhaki’s explanation and offers the literal explanation of the word “shalem”.

Ben Meir believes that the word “Shalem” (Gen. 33:18) signifies the city that Jacob reached, which was Shechem’s city of residence. In fact, the root of the dispute among the three commentators mentioned above focuses on whether the word “Shalem” should be treated hermeneutically, as ibn Ezra and Yitzhaki argue, or literally, as ben Meir argues. In other words, these are two opposing perspectives, each with its own justifications.

In view of Jacob’s conduct and statements resonate with the Jewish tradition that fosters in each individual the ideal of perfection, and the goal of becoming complete, because the individual is part of the whole. Thus, each person has the individual duty to aspire to wholeness and to attain inner peace with himself as a fundamental, material goal in life. In my opinion, ben Meir’s literal approach has greater merit than the interpretive approach, because the literal approach is closer to the realistic meaning of the biblical text, without imposing any interpretations that diverge from the simple meaning of the text.

Peace Among Friends

Peace among friends is reflected in the Bible in the Book of Leviticus (Lev. 19:18): “You shall love thy neighbor as yourself”. Of this verse, R. Akiva, a sage living in late first century AD Israel, says, “this is a major rule in the Bible” (Sifra, Kedoshim 84).

Ben Maimon, a 12th century Jewish philosopher and decisor in matter of Jewish law (Halakhah), states that this is one of the 613 commandments that observant Jews are obligated to perform: “All persons are commanded to love each person in Israel as they love their own self” (Ben Maimon, 1954a, De’ot 6:3).

The biblical verse calls to love every man, whichever nation he belongs to, as a human being. This also appears in the New Testament: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as they self” (Matthew 19:19; Mark 12:31; Paul, Romans 13:9).

Still, with regards to members of the Hebrew nation, this verse is also a practical commandment, as Ben Maimon elaborates: “A person should love others just as he loves himself; a person should care for the property of others just as he cares for his own property; a person should aspire to things for his friends, just as he aspires to things for himself” (Ben Maimon, 1954b, Asse 206). This is also true for all other things such as a friends’ dignity, his interests, retelling his good deeds, and treating him with affection and respect (Azkari, 1966, p. 9).


This type of behavior leads to peace between companions in society because it prevents any possibility of improper conduct or infliction of harm (HaLevi, 1960, p. 243). The following story about Shamai and Hillel, two first century sages, and its moral for social relations is a classic example of peace among friends:

A gentile once came to Shammai, and wanted to convert to Judaism. But he insisted on learning the whole Torah while standing on one foot. Shammai rejected him, so he went to Hillel, who taught him: “What you dislike, do not do to your friend. That is the basis of the Torah. The rest is commentary; go and learn!” (Shabbat 31a).

Shammai rejected the gentile’s request to convert while standing on one foot because considered the gentile’s request a snub that reflected contempt for the Torah (since it is not practically feasible to learn the entire Torah in this manner).

Hillel reduced the entire Torah to the single facet of peace in society: “What you dislike, do not do to your friend” (Shabbat 31a). This short sentence can be recited while standing on one foot, and is based on the biblical verse “Love thy neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18) .

But even more so, every individual is commanded by the majority of the anonymous sages, to live in peace with his friends, and neighbors, and always be first to enquire into their welfare (Avot 15:4). According to Boaz, they must even invoke the name of God in making such enquiries, just as Boaz invoked the name of God when he greeted the laborers in the field: “Just then Boaz arrived from Beth Lehem and greeted the harvesters”, “The LORD be with you!” “The LORD bless you! they called back” (Ruth 2:4). R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, a first century sage, is applauded for always being the very first person to greet someone (Berachot 17a).

The significance of peace among friends is reflected in Judaism’s attitude to the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year according to Jewish tradition, on which Jews pray for atonement for the sins they committed against God. Individuals must ask forgiveness directly from those they have sinned against (Yoma 85b).

The attainment of peace therefore requires not only the individual refraining from fighting, but also individuals proactively working toward the attainment of peace, through actions that include compromise or concessions. Furthermore, the absence of peace between individuals is an intolerable situation which might lead to a collective punishment by God, which is what occurred to the 24,000 pupils of R. Akiva, who died because they did not treat each other with respect (Yevamot 62b). According to this story, peace among friends is difficult to attain. When an individual is compelled to make peace with his friend, the effort takes a huge toll in terms of the personal resources required to overcome his own sense of pride. Jewish tradition acknowledged this challenge, and strongly emphasized and encouraged peace among friends.

Biblical Men of Peace: Moses and Aaron

Several figures in the Pentateuch were known as men of peace, including Moshe and his brother Aaron. The Book of Numbers (Num. 16:1-35) recounts the story of Moses’ dispute between Korah, who was Moses’ cousin, and his entourage. Korah challenged Moses’ leadership, because he was angered by the fact that he did not receive an official appointment that fit what he believed was his high status, being an important person who was closely related to Moses’ family. He therefore accuses both Moses and his brother Aaron of being inappropriately patronizing or condescending. Moses is shocked by the accusation and his initial reaction is to literally prostrate himself on the ground (Num.16:4). But, in contrast to what could be expected of an ordinary person, Moses does


not respond. The absence of any verbal response, in combination with his physical reaction, symbolize Moses’ attempt to avoid an altercation with Korah and his desire to achieve a peaceful resolution of the matter. The nation’s leader is willing to humiliate himself and personally go to Korah to settle the matter peacefully, rather than use his authority to put Korach in his place. Moses tries to convince Korah that God chose him as the leader, and tries to convince Korah to take back his accusations, otherwise he will be punished. Yitzhaki, the commentator mentioned earlier, interprets Moses’ actions as implying that disputes should not be prolonged (Yitzhaki, 1960, Num. 16:12): Moses made a personal effort to persuade Korah and his company to make peace with him .There are no grounds for Korah’s accusations, and Moses emphasizes that his leadership and his actions comply with God’s orders and instructions. Moses is a theocratic leader and he proves this to Korah through a test: God must choose which is correct, and God chooses Moses (Num. 16:5-7).

Aaron is described as a man of peace. We learn this from the account of his death, especially when it is compared to the biblical story of Moses’ death. When Aaron dies, it is written “When all the congregation saw that Aaron had died, all the house of Israel wept for Aaron thirty days” (Num. 20:29), while when Moses dies, the verse says, “So the sons of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days” (Deut. 34:8). Although the period of mourning for both leaders was identical, the participants were not the same. The entire house of Israel mourned Aaron, with an emphasis on the terms “house”, yet for Moses, the mourners were “the sons of Israel” with no reference to the word “house” (Kallah 3). Yitzhaki views this difference as a significant one, and interprets the phrase “house of Israel” to include “the men and the women, because Aaron advocated peace and imposed love between combatants and between man and his wife” (Yitzhaki, 1960, Deut. 34:8). By contrast, women did not mourn for Moses.

Aaron’s method of instilling peace between two people in an argument was to speak to each party separately and say that the other party was very sorry. When the parties next met, they reconciled (Kallah 3; Yalkut Shim’oni, Malachi 2:588). Aaron employed a similar method in reconciling spouses. He would turn to the husband and say, “I doubt that you could find another woman like her”, and convince the husband to reconcile with his wife.

The following summarizes Aaron’s characterization as a man of peace: Hillel, the first century sage, also described Aaron as a person who was “loving peace, and pursuing peace; loving mankind, and bringing them nigh to the Torah” [The written Law of the Jewish, the Pentateuch] (Avot 1:13).

Domestic Harmony

Peace is a fundamental element of the family. Judaism emphasizes the need for harmony and cooperation between the partners in order to build a joint home on a harmonious foundation. In the Bible, the significance of harmonious domestic relations is reflected in the ritual relating to the portion on unfaithful wives (Num. 5:11-31).

The Sotah [In Hebrew] is a woman whose husband suspects of being unfaithful, although he has no proof. During the time of the First Temple (10th century BC to 586 BC) and the Second Temple (516 BC-70 AD) in Jerusalem, the priests would test the truth of the woman’s claim that she was faithful by giving her holy water from the Temple sink in a cup, into which a crumb-size piece of the text of portion Sotah was crumbled (Num. 5:23). “The priest shall then write these curses on a scroll, and he shall wash them off into the water of bitterness and the name of God was crushed” (Shabbat 116a).

Erasing the name of God from a scroll is strictly forbidden, according to the explanation of Yitzhaki to the


verse: “You shall not act like this toward the LORD your God” (Yitzhaki, 1960, Deut. 12:4). Still, God allowed his name to be obliterated by this water (Sifrei, Num. 17; Sukkah 53b) to test whether the woman was telling the truth and to facilitate reconciliation between husband and wife (Yitzhaki, Sukkah 53b, s.v.: ‘La’assot’). The purpose of this test was to prove whether the woman was innocent or whether she was unfaithful to her husband with another man. The test was conducted only when the husband had no proof of his suspicions and when his wife did not admit her transgression. According to the commentators, God would determine the women’s guilt and the outcome of the test (Num. 5:11-31).

When the wife insisted on her innocence, there were two options. If the water test proved that she had cheated on her husband, her husband would divorce her without being required to pay her the amount stated in their Ketubah, their prenuptial agreement. If the wife was telling the truth, they would continue to live in peace.

Herr argues that the use of this test changed over time, and from a test applied to unfaithful women to prove their infidelity, it became a test applied to innocent women to prove their innocence (Herr, 1997, pp. 26-27). The water test was designed to convince the husband of his wife’s innocence, lest he continue to live in doubt and suspicion, a situation that could create incessant tension and mistrust in their marriage. Thus we learn that “peace between husband and wife” implies normal, harmonious relations. The Bible contains no instructions to perform such a ceremony in the event that a wife suspects her husband of infidelity.

As early as the first century, R. Yohanan ben Zakkai, a first century sage who lived in the Land of Israel, suspended the use of this test. Apparently adultery by both sexes was more common in his era: He claimed that the water test could prove the wife’s unfaithfulness only if the husband was free of sin (Sotah 47a-b). However, the test may have been suspended because the sages were uncomfortable with the fact that the test was not being used for its original purpose (there were attempts to use the test for women who were unable to conceive) (Sifrei, Nasso 19; Berachot 31b; Sotah 26a).

God attributed such great significance to domestic harmony between husband and wife that God exempted women from the obligation to perform the positive, calendar-dependent, commandments (Kiddushin 1:7) such as prayers, the study of the Bible, or using Tefillin (phylacteries) (Kiddushin 34a). The rationale was to facilitate domestic harmony by allowing the wife to perform all her many domestic duties, which she might otherwise neglect had she been obligated to follow these commandments (HaLevi, 1960, p. 5).

We stress, this does not imply that women are domestic servants. Rather, the term “domestic harmony” represents a coordinated division of labor between the spouses, without which harmony is unattainable. The understanding and agreement to conclude such a division of labor does not detract from the status of any partner, but rather enhances peace and harmony in the family nucleus.

Peace Between Israel and the Nations

Judaism views peace as the normative relations between Israel and other nations. Not only during times of peace but even, and perhaps most importantly, during war, there is an obligation to initiate a call for peace with all nations and avoid warfare. As the Bibles says, “When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace… However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it” (Deut. 20:10-12). Even if the city does not make peace, the nation of Israel is obligated first to make a siege against it in order to win and only then conquer the city (Schwartz, 1997, pp. 16-17). This is the reason that R.


Yossi the Galilean, a sage who lived in the Galilee in the late first century AD, praises peace and says that peace is great: In time of war, nothing should be initiated but peace (Derech Eretz Zuta, Chapter HaShalom).

Moses chose to follow the instruction on international relations (Deut. 20:10-12) and refused to follow God’s orders to battle against Sihon (Num. 21:21) the Amorite kind, without first offering peace. Instead, Moses sent messengers to Sihon to offer him terms of peace. Ultimately, God agreed with Moses (Deut. 2:24-32; Compare Num. 21:21-24). Therefore, Moses cautions the people of Israel and tells them always to offer terms of peace to the enemy (Tanhuma, Shoftim19) before going to war against any city or nation (Yalkut Shom’oni, Num. 21:764), as natural law (Ius naturale, the laws common to all beings, based on a rationale that can be inferred from nature, which represents God’s wisdom) requires (Herr, 1997, p. 34). If possible, war should be avoided entirely, just as Moses did with the Edomites, by sending the messengers to the King of Edom requesting a right of passage through his kingdom. The Edomites refused to grant this request, and instead declared war against Israel. The Israelites, however, circumvented Edom in order to avoid a war (Num. 20:14-21).

Joshua, Moses’ successor, behaved in a similar manner by addressing a letter of peace to each city in Israel before going to war against it. The people of Hiwi and Giv’on made peace with Israel, while 31 other kings preferred war and were vanquished (yShevi’it 6:1; Devarim Rabbah 5:4; Bar Nachman, 1960, Deut. 20:10).

We also see that the wise woman from Avel Beth-Ma’acah (Sam. 2, 20:15-23) reproaches Joab, commander of David’s army, for his attempt to destroy the city’s walls without first offering peace. Then she spoke, saying, “They were wont to speak in old time, saying: They shall surely ask counsel at Abel; and so they ended the matter” (Sam. 2, 20:18). By doing so, she reminded him of the words of the Bible first to offer terms of peace before waging war. Joab admits his mistake: “Far be it from me that I should swallow up or destroy!” (Sam. 2, 20:20).

Ben Maimon firmly states that the nation of Israel should call for peace before initiating a war. God commands that when the people of Israel come to wage war against a city, they must first ask the city’s inhabitants for peace. That is, they are obligated to ask them to make peace with Israel before any war is initiated (Ben Maimon, 1954b, Lo Ta’asse 56). Ben Maimon elaborates on this commandment and applies it to all individuals. Unequivocally he states that no war should be waged without first calling to the enemy for peace (Ben Maimon, 1954a, Melechim 6:1).

Ben Maimon’ approach leads naturally to the principle of universal peace among nations. Peace is a supreme value and one of the three foundations of the world (Avot 1:17). Peace is the means through which Israel is blessed in its relations with other nations (Uktzin 3:12), and peace is the model that describes ideal international relations that make a significant contribution to world peace.

In summary, all Jewish individuals, and the Jewish nation as a whole, are obligated to strive toward peace. Individuals should strive to achieve inner peace, and peaceful relations with others in their environment, including their spouses, neighbors, and acquaintances. This universal rule should also be applied vis a vis all nations at all times, including our time, such as with Israel’s contemporary peace efforts.

Conclusion

The concept of peace in the pentateuch has three essential elements: First is the lexical meaning of the word “peace” which is a description of a condition—tranquility, serenity, and quiet. The second meaning stems from


the linguistic inflections of the Hebrew root of the word: “Shalom” and denotes completion, perfection, and reward. The third meaning of peace is harmony.

The concept of peace in early Jewish sources defined on three levels: The first level encompasses the relationship of peace to God and man and vice versa including the blessing of peace from God to man. Next, is peace as a condition of an individual’s state and an individual’s relationships with others, including relationships with their spouses and their environment. Finally, the concepts of peace and war between nations, and the potential conflict between peace and truth.

Today, all streams within the Jewish tradition believe in the concept of peace established on the pentateuch although each stream supports a concept of peace that has different limitations or reservations.

References Abarbanel, D. Y. (2013). Perush LeMassechet Avot (Commentary to Avot). Israel: Ashkelon, O. Golan edition. Azkari, E. (1966). Sefer Haredim (The book of tremble). Israel: Jerusalem. Bar Nachman, M. (1960). Perush LaTorah (Commentary to Pentateuch). Israel: Jerusalem, Hassid & Sinai edition. Ben Maimon, M. (1954a). HaYad HaHazakah (Maimonides’ Deuteronomy). Israel: Jerusalem. Ben Maimon, M. (1954b). Sefer HaMitzvot (The book of commandments). Israel: Jerusalem. Ben Meir, S. (1960). Perush LaTorah (Commentary to Pentateuch). Israel: Jerusalem, Hassid & Sinai edition. HaLevi, A. (1960). Sefer HaHinuch (The book of education) (4th ed.). Israel: Jerusalem. Herr, M. D. (1997). Peace in the philosophy of the sages. In B. J. Schwartz & M. D. Herr (Eds.), Peace in the Jewish heritage (pp.

2-39). Israel: Jerusalem. Ibn Ezra, A. (1960). Perush LaTorah (Commentary to Pentateuch). Israel: Jerusalem, Hassid & Sinai edition. Schwartz, B. J. (1997). Peace in Israel and the nations—The biblical vision. In B. J. Schwartz & M. D. Herr (Eds.), Peace in the

Jewish heritage (pp. 11-22). Israel: Jerusalem. Seforno, O. (1960). Perush LaTorah (Commentary to Pentateuch). Israel: Jerusalem, Hassid & Sinai edition. Yitzhaki, S. (1960). Perush LaTorah (Commentary to Pentateuch). Israel: Jerusalem, Hassid & Sinai edition.


Popular Catholicism Based on Sensory Engagement and

Corporeal Perception

Euna Lee Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Pat Mora’s House of Houses is a collection of memories about a Southwestern Mexican immigrant family. She

develops multilayered meanings of the house in terms of psychological, spiritual, and sensory influences on both

her private and communal life. She deploys sensory signifiers to portray religious and spiritual memories in a

picturesque or performative way. The book reveals that the primacy of the senses as a perceptual device transforms

the habitual religious rituals of popular Catholicism into the unconscious. This book shows how sensory perception

is engaged in appropriating mystical space/time and interiorizing spiritual objects of family life. Thus, the paper

investigates how the sensory agencies contribute to exploring culturally plural ways of experiencing the divine. It

also illustrates how Mora’s deployment of corporeality is related to her reassessment of femaleness and

understanding of a meaning of the divine, which is distinctively embodied through lo cotidiano. In effect, it focuses

on Mora’s treatment of the sensible body in connection with spiritual and religious connotations.

Keywords: Pat Mora, House of Houses, popular Catholicism, sensory perception, corporeality

Introduction Mora’s (1997) House of Houses, both as an autobiographical memoir and as a collection of memories,

reconstructs the story of her family through the fusion of reality, fantasy, and imagination. Mora projects her imaginative interpretation into the representation of reality: she combines her poetic fictionality with what remains in the family’s memoirs. In this respect, the house can be resignified as a “dwelling that shapes us” (p. 272) through dreams and the unconscious as Gaston Bachelard defines in The Poetics of Space. She draws on them to resurface visibly.

Due to the full engagement of the senses, Mora accompanies boundless links between the living and the dead, here and there, indeed body and spirit. The paper examines her deployment of sensory signifiers both as a dominant textual strategy and as an enactment of spirituality in her family. This paper delves into “authentic” meanings of her spiritual quest by studying how popular Catholicism is transmitted and inherited through the senses as the memoir recuperates the repressed corporeality of official religious culture. It will investigate how the sensory agencies contribute to exploring the culturally plural ways of experiencing the sacred. The analysis will also take into account Mora’s desire to discover a particular religiosity. In effect, the paper illustrates how sensory faculties and corporeal perception are engaged in appropriating spiritual space/time and interiorizing religious objects of family life.

Euna Lee, Ph.D., BK professor, Department of Hispanic Language and Literature, Seoul National University.

DAVID PUBLISHING

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POPULAR CATHOLICISM BASED ON SENSORY ENGAGEMENT

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The Deployment of the Senses as Perceptive Devices of Religion It is evident that the memoir is partly a subtext of biblical messages because it clearly shows how she

accommodates the Catholic heritage in her particular cultural environment. Nevertheless, Mora crafts a personal spiritual outlook that neither dissociates itself from religious orthodoxy nor binds to it. Her remark on Catholicism may hint at this position:

What I am very much interested in is the power of faith and spirit in our lives. And the natural world is part of that interest, how we can deepen our awareness of what our work should be in this world. But I do not tie it to a particular institutionalized religion. I will always be fascinated by Roman Catholicism because of its role in my life as well as its role in the history of Mexico and the Southwest. (Mora, cited in Ikas, 2002, p. 144)

Mora herself no longer practices Catholicism, but she admits that she misses the “protected intimacy” (p. 3) of the church: the same affinity afforded her at home. Her fondness for the church is explicitly expressed by detailing the sensory impressions that she experienced in church:

Opening a choir book, I press my fingers on the desk the way I used to press piano keys, in the majestic style of organ music. I’ll always be nostalgic for the old church, the Latin church, the invisible choir, the priest’s back rather than his face, the intoxication of incense and flickering candles. (Mora, 1997, p. 18)

For Mora, the religious experience during her adolescence is more intuitively embedded rather than indoctrinated into her senses. The familiarity with visible and audible characteristics of the indoors appears to allow her to remember “the pleasure of being encircled by earth, the poetry of place” (p. 3), while she is writing the memoir.

Mora articulates that what she encapsulated through sensory faculties was elevated into the spiritual, which eventually inhabited itself deeply in the realm of the unconscious. She explains, “In our creations, the unconscious surfaces, becomes visible, and in reflecting us, lets us reflect on who we are, offers epiphanies” (Mora, 1997, p. 272). In order to reveal the interconnectedness between Catholic spirituality and the unconscious, she explores the transmission of sensory memories. Frequently, she stimulates the auricular sense to encapsulate and transmit something essential yet elusive that occupies the family space. She condenses the history of generations to “slow conversations”, and reduces them to “voices”. The reader’s attention is drawn to hear the voices that reverberate from the domestic space:

This is a “world that we can call our own”, this family space through which generations move, each bringing its gifts, handing down languages and stories, recipes for living, gathering around the kitchen table to serve one another; in the walled garden, engaging in the slow conversation of families sitting to pass the time. Voices mingle with the voice of the fountain, parrot, broom, wind, voces del jardín. (Mora, 1997, p. 7)

Hearing the sounds of the rolling pin at the ranch, Aunt Elena says that “sounds seep into a body or a house. Be careful what you let within these walls. And where is the crucifix, I keep asking. Every good kitchen needs a small altar, candles we can light dedicating our work to the honor and glory of Our Lord” (Mora, 1997, p. 71). The Aunt Elena episode guides readers to follow her flow of thought from a rolling pin, food, and kitchen to an altar and finally “Our Lord”. The underlying association between sense perception and habitual religious behavior is so prevalent that readers can easily recognize similar episodes throughout the memoir.

I savor each simple gesture in this kitchen, filling the tea kettle, lighting the stove, click of the cup in the saucer. They’ve all been here, are here, the family of women, nursing one another with teas—de canela, hierba, gordolobo. Straight and erect in their good health or bent with age and arthritis, sacramental acts for another woman, or a husband,


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father, or child, steeping an old cure that began underground. “It is strange to be so many women” as Adrienne Rich says. (Mora, 1997, p. 11)

The process of awareness of female relatives’ presence needs a more concrete and personal mode than mere cognitive remembrance, requiring a channel more deeply embedded in her own body. Mora highlights the act of savoring, which permits her to encounter them through smells. It is because the fragrance immediately enables her to remember what is engraved in her memories. Thus, the act of savoring becomes remembering and articulating the women’s services in the kitchen and sacramental acts. In this episode, their intermingling with smells and savors is not only for philosophizing on the significance of food but also for fulfilling sacramental acts performed by themselves.

Mora points out that stopping the practice of religious formalities is easier than eradicating one’s ingrained religious metaphors. Certainly, such metaphors associated with religious formalities often underlie structures and details of family life. To bring herself and her readers to a fuller appreciation of such insider material, she textures every page of her memoir with details of Catholic Chicano life (Christian, 2000, p. 121). The parallelism between smell, color, and religious figure illustrates that their Catholicism can be translated as the habits, symbols, and words embedded in the circular itinerary of family life: “The seasons should be respected and savored for what they bring, just as we savor the liturgical seasons, el año liturgico, like Advent, these four weeks of anticipation” (Mora, 1997, p. 276).

In the December chapter, Mamá Cleta reminds the family of the importance of religious rituals. Her “savoring” of Christmas is soon articulated by the scent of dry herbs and the color of flowers. She adds,

I’ve saved some dry herbs to scent the resting place para El Niño Dios. We’ll send someone to buy flores de nochebuena that grow into bushes in México, the bracts turned into red by the tears of a devout boy with no gift for the Christ Child. (Mora, 1997, p. 276)

Mamá Cleta explicitly shows that their sensory experiences even in habitual behaviors are nearly systematically synchronized with the sensations which are evoked by religious stories and their implications. Mamá Cleta’s account of religious rituals embedded in sense-perception evinces that there is no separation between the cognitive and perceptive dimension in their religious life. Perception, cognition, and reflection are so intermingled in experience as to become wholly integrated.

Merleau-Ponty’s theory on phenomenological body offers useful groundwork to gain a basic understanding regarding the sense-perception mentioned above. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2002) argues that “it is the body which speaks” (p. 197). This statement means that the body is an expressive and intentional body and, as such, a source of meaning. He suggests that the most primordial level of experience is embodied perception, not pure consciousness (p. 218). His analysis of embodied perception undermines the subject-object dichotomy of traditional epistemology; the percipient and the perceived are together in the same perceptual field. As he asserts that “my body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension’” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 273); in this vein, it can be understood that Mora reassesses sense-perception as something vital—transcending the dualism of the mind and body, self and world.

One sense arouses another: they are so intrinsically interconnected that one easily becomes a stimulus of the other. Mora fills the space of pages with simultaneous invocation of sensory representations. She invites readers to experience the overlap of two different senses, that is, synesthesia: “prayers and faith weave through


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our relatives’ words like floral scents weave through the garden” (Mora, 1997, p. 16). Rebolledo (1999) agrees that prayers are acknowledged both as words and voices, and naturally as scents.

Throughout the book, Mora especially portrays the women at work, talking, philosophizing, and remembering. They are intimately connected with senses and smells, with eating and spices, and with gardens. The descriptions of women and the work they do are so sensual as to create a virtual texture imbued with synesthesia: multiple sensory aspects of touch, smell, sight, taste, and sound. (p. 50)

Her analysis points to the prevalence of synesthesia in all the realms of female lives. According to Merleau-Ponty, synesthesia is said to occur because the unity and diversity of the senses can amount to a form of shared existence per se. He conveys how it technically works: “when I say that I see a sound, I mean that I echo the vibration of the sound with my whole sensory being, and particularly with that sector of myself which is susceptible to colors” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002, p. 272). His explanation illustrates how Mora appropriates the senses in such a way that they translate each other without any intrusion, in accord with their own transmissible structure (p. 273). Mora’s description of synesthesia posits sense-perception as a creative receptivity that is inseparable from modalities of being itself. It particularly presents itself while translating religious experiences.

We read in a book on Persian gardens, about a hundred-petaled rose and the custom of sprinkling guests with rose water, of consuming the essence of the mesmerizing flower in rose preserves and sherbets. Mamá Cleta, never embarrassed by her synesthesia, sighs, “¿La oyes? Do you hear organ music when you look long at the yellow rose?”. (Mora, 1997, p. 10)

Mamá Cleta’s question reveals how deeply Catholic practices are involved in her perception of a subject. The question also shows the way in which religion exerts a determinative reference for daily life and a prevalent sensory modality. Just as the remembrance of sense is linked to the unconscious, liturgical performance subtly unfolds in unconscious sensory representation. This fact indicates that the meaning of the religious rituals, as opposed to what is learned by moral discipline, remains deep in their subliminal realm. By asking, “How much does our body know that we know not? Can it be cajoled to release it secrets?” (Mora, 1997, p. 2), she paradoxically emphasizes the density and firmness of what the senses know, given that what the body knows is stored in the unconscious. Consequently, searching for her memories in the unconscious is always linked to exploring her own senses and becoming in tune with them.

Mora reveals that the response of the senses is also needed to recall the souls of the dead since sense becomes a bodily agency that allows the living and dead to communicate with one another. In recalling the ancestor’s spirits, Mora (1997) says that they “have no use for cemeteries, staying underground. They drift through the rooms like incense, like a prayer, a melody, a breath” (p. 268). Spiritual presences appear accompanied by the spirits’ smell and sound. Their smell and sound saturate the space in such an organic way that the traces are not effaceable in the present.

In the November chapter, Aunt Chole covers an altar with a white tablecloth and adds “tiny coffins made of hard sugar—purple, blue, pink; sugar skulls staring at us with their foil eyes, miniature plates, breads, candy baskets, bananas, flowers, candles” (Mora, 1997, p. 253). She explains, “The dead are lured back by what they love, sweet temptations” (p. 157). In a similar vein, sensory communications between the living and the dead also offer the family a concealed way of incorporating communal experience into performing religious rituals. The spontaneous decoding of the spirits as sensory presences provides them with an unsanctioned religious path for expressing the sensuousness as well. Mora might say that it is an awareness resulting from


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verbalization of what she configures by exploring her dream house, that is, the unconscious. To her, writing certainly means free expression of sense-perception: embracing her sensuousness, communal conversation, and unconscious reflection, which have ultimately become the modalities of being in her family.

The Corporeality and Re-envisioning of Popular Catholicism What Mora seeks to literalize in women’s lives is interrelated with her spiritual reassessment of

femaleness. There are several voices interweaving the stories, albeit all the voices are uttered through Mora’s revision. Since most of the chapters are unveiled through women’s stories, recipes, and activities, their presence is effectively transmitted through her visualization of their daily lives. Mora shows some significant episodes as performative religious representation to reveal how women in the family personify Catholicism. In these performative ways, they generate records and transmit knowledge in the form of memory.

Ygnacia Delgado, Mora’s maternal aunt, who is better known by her nickname Lobo, becomes one of her main informants. Mora describes her as an “irrepressible storyteller” (p. 20). She provides central memories based on which Mora delineates the core story of the family’s life. Lobo’s narrated stories, devoid of her own private life, make Mora wonder how she selects and keeps them. By actualizing her story, she reveals how memory-images can be developed into narration.

Aunt Lobo who is portrayed at once as a domestic goddess and priestess offers eternally patient, giving, concerned love and devotion to her “children” even though they are not her own biological descendants. Thus motherhood is ascribed to her: “sensing, though unable to understand, the dark, pulsing depths of love, its wild abandon of the self, the pain she would inflict to protect us, we’re both terrified and safe” (Mora, 1997, p. 40). Positioning Lobo in this manner, she validates the idea that real experience constitutes fertile ground for reconfiguring the meaning of motherhood. Mora’s brother Roy notes: “She’d sail us to sleep, work her nightly magic, securing our night voyage. Prayers were her passion, her fragrance, her melody. With sweeps of her hand, she’d build crosses of air” (Mora, 1997, p. 40). Lobo evoked through sense-memory is commemorated with transcendental images: “Lobo, the frustrated, frenzied sweeper and cleaner, struggled to control the gritty desert and its wildness, but also to clear space for a more genteel life, a clean life, a pure life” (Mora, 1997, p. 41).

Unlike Chicana writer, Gloria Anzaldúa who strongly criticizes Catholicism and favors the Indian over the Spanish tradition, Mora rather focuses on positive values unraveled in her relatives’ lives instead of utterly criticizing the negative aspects of Catholicism. Mora does not wholly rebuke the ritualized practices of Catholicism, nor does she rebel against the oppressive moral messages it has imposed on women. Instead, she attempts to recapture what really underlies formal religion, in order to reveal “culturally plural truths” remaining in the women’s religiosity: motherhood, sacrifice, and self-discipline. One of Mora’s remarks on femaleness provides an important insight: “Women see the psychological value of bringing their spirit and talents into the world for its betterment while developing the capacity for protecting and nurturing. Selfishness is no virtue” (interview with Oliver-Rotger). She connects femaleness to an unconditional love and unselfishness whose implications in her reality at times do not necessarily correspond with the sacred virtues that official Catholicism has inspired. She surmises that the concepts have never been totally encapsulated by the framework of traditional Catholicism, nor by any syncretic religion.

Aunt Chole, who is nearly blind and lives alone despite enduring several hardships, is depicted as a mystical nun. She is capable of noticing and sensing what normal people cannot see: “my aunt says she sees


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with her hands” (Mora, 1997, p. 136). Her confession can be understood in the same sense as in medieval mysticism where, in a certain devotional act, visual perception gives way to a more diffuse and bodily sense perception as the mystic finds herself “touched” by the image, as Mary Carruthers illustrates through the medieval spectator: “the early writers make no distinction between auditory, tactile or olfactory memory and visual memory on the basis that sensory impressions are received through the ranges of senses” (Carrthers, 1990, p. 17). Aunt Chole’s faith stems from the loss of vision since the absence of sight ultimately enables her to surpass the suffering and to experience a mystical encounter with the “Sacred Heart”. She recalls, “When I woke up this morning, I have my eyes closed, but I see. I see el Sagrado Corazón, there at the corner of my bed. He looks as if He is made of four pieces, of plaster, and I think, ‘Just look. I can see His heart’” (Mora, 1997, p. 139). This confession reveals that mystical experience happens in an ordinary routine, not merely in times of devotion. In this scene, Mora, by taking a role of a female hagiographer, engages in addressing spiritual truths and divine experience that Aunt Chole articulates as a speaking subject. It can be said that Aunt Chole is portrayed as a female mystic. In Sensible Ecstacy, Hollywood (1999) argues that “feminist philosophy can learn from the doubleness of mystical discourse and practice, which reflects and speaks to the deep ambiguities within bodily existence” (p. 278). By reading female mystics who are poised between the desire to transcend the body’s limitation and the recognition that transcendence occurs only through the body, Hollywood implies the possibility of devising new ways to think of desire in the juncture of the political, the religious, and the mystical. Drawing on this theory, Mora’s description of mystical experience can be seen not only as a fictional representation, but also interpreted as her attempt to understand the spiritual meaning that underlies the “real” through sensory perception.

She asks herself “who is living, who is dead?” (Mora, 1997, p. 253). Since both presence and absence have an equal role in the composition of any discourse, what she wants to say through “the revelry of present absences?” (Torres, 1998, p. 236) is related to her perception of cyclical and heterogeneous time. Indeed, it implicitly reveals her philosophical/ontological worldview, suggesting that the heterogeneity of time could allow her another access to the “real”, beyond the limits of historical time.

“Lo cotidiano” and the Appropriation of Religiosity Even though the women in her memoir are, of course, not theologians, they share some core ideas with

Hispanic/Latino theologians with regard to Christianity’s essential and ultimate aims. One important example is that their understanding of “lo cotidiano” is a locus for inherited traditions as well as ongoing spirituality. In effect, their appreciation for lo cotidiano leads them to acknowledge that there is no disconnection between the secular and the sacred.

Isasi-Díaz (1996) explains the importance of lo cotidiano as a hermeneutical framework:

Lo cotidiano for us is also a way of understanding theology, our attempt to explain how we understand the divine, what we know about the divine. I contrast this to the academic and churchly attempts to see theology as being about God instead of about what we humans know about God. (p. 71)

In the same vein, Mora mostly illustrates an intimate encounter or real conversation with the divine, not mere repetition of conventional prayers. Aunt Chole answers Mora’s question, “Prayers you learned a long time ago?” with “No, no, I don’t like those novenas or prayers in books. I pray my way, and no one is going to change that, I say, ‘Mi Diosito, help me to stay here in our home until the last days of my life.’… I just talk to


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Him like that. I just say what comes out of me, lo que me sale” (Mora, 1997, p. 279). Mora implicitly resists the formality of Catholicism in this portrayal of Aunt Chole, who speaks in her own ordinary language as she prays rather than in the official utterances that the Church prescribes.

Traditionally associated with the mind in the mind/body binary, official Catholicism removes sensuous joy from what their “cotidiano” spirituality offers them. Removing conscious conformity to religious formality, they simply express joy in performing religious actions, which emphasize immediacy and individuality. Along with narrative eloquence, visual imagining plays a central role in embodying personal relationships with religious figures. Remembering the figure of Jesus, Aunt Chole asserts, “He is dressed in a dry green, and I can see His pretty pink face and curly hair. I’m not sacred. I can’t see, but I can see the pleats in His robe” (Mora, 1997, p. 279). Inner visual perception gives Aunt Chole power to attain religious faith based on her inspiration and psychology, rather than through a mediatory agency. Mora effectively demonstrates how wonderful it is to engage corporeality to formulate and perform their spirituality. In Our Cry for Life, liberation theologian Maria Pilar Aquino discusses the fact that liberation can only be accomplished through “the full restitution of human corporeality… because it is there in the body where the human person enacts the spiritual and material acts and no where else” (Aquino, 1993, p. 160).

Like Aunt Chole, in the September chapter, Mamá Cleta shows the family how to reappropriate the sacred symbols of the Virgin and Jesus. She invites Saint Rafael, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and all her favorite saints to the feast of San Rafael. Wistful Mamá Cleta deftly delineates the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the sensory contact with the religious figures in lo cotidiano allows her to represent their presences in a fictional and also a performative way:

Quickly, Nuestra Señora reaches for the pan dulce, sinks her teeth into the sweet bread, says as soon as she’s swallowed, “Ay qué delicioso! Forgive me”, she laughs licking the last bits of topping from her firgertips, “I just couldn’t wait. Pan dulce is one of my weaknesses. Please, sit, sit. Doña Anacleta, how can I help? How kind of you to invite us into this wonderful garden on the feast of San Rafael”. (Mora, 1997, p. 231)

While highlighting that they generate records and transmit religious knowledge to next generations in these performative ways, Mora engages herself in delivering what are kept in the form of memory through rendering its dramatic version. This kind of memory can be understood as “archival memory” in Taylor’s (2003) terms. In The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor interprets embodied performance primarily as expressive transmission of knowledge based on epistemic and mnemonic systems. Since “the process of selection, memorization or internalization, and transmission takes place within specific systems of re-presentation” (Taylor, 2003, p. 21), “archival memory” retains the hermeneutical values of generational interaction and meditation, a constant state of presentness and againness. Similarly, women’s performative appropriation of religious figures points to hermeneutical method transmitted by generational contact in appropriating official Catholicism and proposing alternative ways to it.

The “performative characteristics” in family ritual expresses what relates to their experience, precisely what resonates within their bodily senses. For example, Jesus is represented in response to their affective imagery. In The Future of Ritual, Schechner (1995) argues that “the future of ritual is the continued encounter between imagination and memory translated into doable acts of the body” (p. 263). His assertion is valid for the family ritual. The ritual in performative form and imagination has operated and certainly will remain in conjunction with the affective intensity of sense-memory and imaginative interpretation.


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Accordingly, Mora’s representation of the Virgin rich with performative features helps readers to get a clear glimpse of her singular feminist perspective. It is not unusual for the articulation of the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe to be an image of feminist strength. However, her account of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a wistful and friendly mother alludes to the fact that Mora does not exclusively depend on the presence of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol of liberation and empowerment. In fact, she says, “I don’t think that Our Lady of Guadalupe is so important for me that I would define her as a force in my life” (Mora, cited in Ikas, 2002, p. 141). Mora aims at broadening and deepening the femaleness which is hermeneutically monopolized by religious discourse in their community.

Defining her feminism, Mora says that her interest in issues of power leads her to write in order to resist internalized oppression. She thinks that some authors’ versions of the Latino life are too “heavy-handed” or didactic, at least for her artistic taste (interview with Norma Alarcón, p. 125), and this view may be implicit evidence of her quiet resistance. Her path toward resistance is to highlight the performativity of the divine characters. Even though the memoir is not articulated in theological language, Mora shows that the women are obviously seeking for a meaning of the divine, not as a theological definition that has historically been imposed on the community, but as plural ways of experiencing the divine understood through performative representations embedded in lo cotidiano.

Conclusion In opposition to official Catholicism whose transcendental orientation was apt to lead to an

underestimation of the present, Mora endeavors to reinterpret the role and meaning of religion based on the present by engaging in sensory acquisition. Aligning with the sense of the “popular” of “popular religiosity”, Mora aspires towards the transcendental, the existence of which she can intuit through the commonalities of community. Since an un-corresponding symmetry has existed between official Catholicism and what the community really considers as divine revelation, she alternatively portrays what can be termed as “the popular Catholicism” as a religiosity that should bridge the gap between the two; it is the communally shared experiences of the sacred.

Mora engages in rehabilitation of the sensible body in order to reassess communal spiritual values. Mora implies that religiosity, as one aspect of daily life, is perceived as what has been felt, through revealing the worldview formulated by sensory engagement. In effect, whole senses experienced in fullness are in tune with a spiritual sense. She presents family parties in which religious figures and the deceased gathered, with what García-Rivera (1999) calls “fullness of sensing” (p. 173) in Community of the Beautiful and “fullness of the cosmos” (p. 172). According to his ideas, the sensing of the world entails “sensing” both the material and spiritual dimensions of the world (p. 173); accordingly, Mora implicates the cosmos of the visible and the invisible by exploring the sensible body.

References Alarcón, N. (1986). Interview with Pat Mora. Third Woman, 3(1-2), 121-126. Aquino, M. P. (1993). Our cry for life: Feminist theology from Latin America. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Bachelard, G. (1994). Poetics of space. Boston: Beacon Press. Carrthers, M. (1990). The book of memory: A study of memory in Medieval culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Christian, B. M. (2000). Folk Catholicism in the works six U.S. Latina writers (Ph.D. diss., Indiana: Indiana U of Pennsylvania). García-Rivera, A. (1999). The community of the beautiful. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press.


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Hollywood, A. (1999). Sensible ecstasy: Mysticism, sexual difference, and the demands of history. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Ikas, K. R. (2002). Chicana ways: Converstaions with ten Chicana writers. Reno: U of Nevada Press. Isasi-Díaz, A. M. (1996). Mujerista theology. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Routledge. Mora, P. (1997). House of houses. Boston: Beacon Press. Oliver-Rotger, M. A. (2003). Battlegrounds and croosroads: Social and imaginary space in writings by Chicanas. New York:

Rodopi. Rebolledo, T. D. (1999). The tools in the toolbox: Representing work in Chicana writing. Genre, 32, 41-52. Schechner, R. (1995). The future of ritual: Writings on culture and performance. New York: Routledge. Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University. Torres, H. A. (1998). House of houses by Pat Mora. Aztlán, 23(2), 233-238.

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