On the meaningfulness of transgressions Andreas Mahler Without the drawing up of borders there would arguably be no meaning; without a neat distinction between what something is and what it is not, we would probably be unable to discriminate, and communicate, stable identities (or at least share the illusion of having them). If borders guarantee meaning, transgressions are apt to modify them, bringing potentially new meaning into the world. This paper first focuses on how man/ woman, as the meaning-generating animal, starts, relies on, and becomes dependent on the meaning-making process, and then goes on to discuss this process as a continuous discursive (and aesthetic) negotiation as well as re-negotiation of shifting identities in what has culturally been called the ‘semiosphere’. I. Referring to a remark by physicist Niels Bohr, according to which “the distinguishing trait of non-trivial truth is that a directly opposite claim is not manifestly absurd”, the Estonian semiotician Jurij Lotman, founder of the so-called Tartu school, once formulated the basic insight that “only that which has an antithesis is meaningful” (1977: 265). I want to take this as my point of departure. 1 Reading it in a strong sense, I understand this as saying that something only appears to us as ‘meaningful’, ‘filled’, ‘endowed’ or ‘invested’ with meaning whenever we see ourselves mentally (or factually) able to construct a border, on the other side of which we imagine to be something different from what we 1 This paper is the revised written version of a keynote lecture delivered at the final TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern England) conference held at Freie Universität Berlin from May 24-26, 2018, under the title “Texts & Events Across Borders”. For its argument, I largely rely on what I have developed in a different context in Mahler (2012). I wish to thank the organizers, above all Sabine Schülting, for the kind invitation and the participants for a lively and stimulating debate. All remaining shortcomings are, of course, my own. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0001 Andreas Mahler 4 think is this side of the border - such as knowing that you are ‘English’ because you are (luckily/ unluckily) not ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Irish’, ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘American’, ‘Indian’, ‘Pakistani’, whatever. 2 This addresses the linguistic principle of ‘difference’, according to which something is ‘something’ because it is not ‘something else’. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure has summed this up as: “Everything we have said so far comes down to this. In the language itself, there are only differences.” (2009: 118; his italics) An evergreen traffic light is meaningless without some kind of border constituting a difference against which its green can be filled with meaning: if it cannnot turn red, the green does not mean anything, and the traffic lights can be switched off, removed, since they do not work as a signal. They are meaningless, not endowed/ not endowable with semantics. This is to say that, without borders, language will never become ‘meaningful’. As a matter of fact, without an arbitrary cut creating two sides, without the creation of a borderline or threshold, it will never become a language, since what we call ‘language’ (as with regard to any semiotic system) is based on relations enabling us to create ‘difference’, and it is through difference that we construct the illusion of ‘identity’. Only through difference are we enabled to turn material into meaningful material (a green light for ‘go’), and it is only difference that enables us to turn ideas into distinct ideas. This is what Saussure addresses as the “somewhat mysterious process” by which language - as what he calls an ‘intermediary’ - produces meaningful signs by correlating (in his words) the two ‘swirly clouds’ of indistinct ideas and indistinct materiality, turning them, through one cut, into a distinct verso and a distinct recto side and thus creating an arbitrary element that can be used for signification (ibid.: 110-111). In other words, this is what turns language into a meaning-making machine. It explains famous cocktail-party phrases such as Wittgenstein’s ‘the borders of my language mean the borders of my world’ (‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt’) or Derrida’s ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’): for things to become ‘meaningful’ they have to be within language, pitted against an outside, the borders of which, imagined or real, endow them with a difference that generates meaning. II. This ability of generating meaning through a paradoxical use of borders seems to be grounded in man’s/ woman’s disposition to understand nonanalogical, ‘symbolic’ signs (cf. Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson 2011: 41- 2 One could do this for practically all the regions of the world: people think that they know their ‘identities’ because they think they know what they are not. On the meaningfulness of transgressions 5 48). It emerges in the first human semiotic act of - still analogically, through similitude - detecting ‘oneself’ in the mirror. In the mirror image, I recognize myself (a similitude of myself) as something that I am not; in the representation, I see a sign for/ of myself and become aware of myself as being somewhere where I am not (cf. Lacan 2003). 3 This is indicated by the paradoxical deictics of the sentence ‘this is me’ as pronounced in front of a mirror: pointing away from myself across the border to the mirror, the ‘I’ as ‘subject’ in front of the mirror (literally) ‘objectifies’ him/ herself into a ‘me’ in the mirror, turning the mirror-image into a signifier for the signified self. This is the beginning of any semiotic activity, it is the entry into what Lotman (1990) has called the semiosphere. Similarly, in digital language use, I designate myself by using the deictic ‘I’, by (literally) ‘uttering’ a pronoun that does not ‘belong’ to me but can be used/ uttered by everybody else (for him/ herself) and, in doing so, I represent myself in language with the help of a sign that is, by nature, outside myself, separated from me by a threshold or border that I linguistically transgress to endow my ‘self’ with meaning: ‘this is me’ (cf. Bühler 1982). In both my use of the mirror-image and my use of the deictic ‘I’, I transgress a border between myself and my environment but, at the same time, I have to keep the transgression hidden to make sure it works. If you begin to worry whether what you see is really you, or whether the pronoun ‘I’ truthfully represents your personality, you are lost. This is what has been theorized as the phenomenon of ‘latency’ (cf. Luhmann 1995): we construct ourselves in a way that we have to keep some relevant, if not fundamental, aspects of the construction hidden in order to guarantee their functioning. The transgression at stake thus looks like a step outside: I turn to an outward mirror-image and get an idea of my own self; I turn to an external pronoun and produce insights concerning my own person. This refers to the idea which the anthropologist/ sociologist Helmuth Plessner has described as ‘excentric positionality’ (2003: 360-425). 4 Humans are excentric in the sense that, though they may of course quite simply ‘be’ in the world, they also always experience a need to ‘have themselves’ in order to understand who they are. In other words, in addition to ‘being’ a body in the world, we mentally, in crossing a border or ‘closing’ a gap, attempt to ‘have ourselves’ through the construction, or projection, of an image of ourselves (a ‘mirror-image’ or a ‘language-image’) that gives us an idea - a consciousness - of the ‘identity’ that we may have (cf. Plessner 2003a: 194). 5 3 For this and what follows, I draw on what I have tried to develop, among other things, in Mahler (2012a). 4 For a brief introduction to Plessner’s thinking cf. de Mul (2014), who also announces an English translation of Plessner (2003) which, to my knowledge, has not yet appeared. I prefer the spelling of ’excentricity’ to ‘eccentricity’ to avoid confusion with the everyday English use of the term. 5 For the notion that we as human beings, in contradistinction to animals, are the ones who ‘are’ but do ‘not have ourselves’, cf. Plessner (2003a: 194). The Italian Andreas Mahler 6 Intellectually, I am not simply ‘centric’ but ‘ex-centric’ in the sense that only the turning outside myself endows me with a signifier that simultaneously - in ‘co-emergence’ - also endows me with a signified whose meaning is ‘me’. In a way, this is the first semiotic cut: in taking an obvious detour, I become aware of a concept of ‘myself’. Only in transgressing the gap, the border, do I become ‘meaningful’ to myself. This mechanism, however, is not only observable anthropologically in the identity formation of the human subject (and its simultaneous split into subject and object), but also socially in the emergence of ‘cultures’, i.e. in the production of a culturally more or less unified semiosphere: “Every culture”, Lotman says, “begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space.” (1990: 131) Again, what is important is not so much the question as to who or, as for that, ‘how’ the ‘others’ are. The identity formation also seems to be successful if the ‘other’ is only fantasized or imagined or projected as something that one does not want to ascribe to one’s own culture. 6 One can see this easily in early Christian chronicles, separating their own ‘Christian’ culture from a foreign ‘pagan’ culture fantasized as lying across the border, as does, e.g., the eleventhcentury Kievan chronicler-monk quoted here: The Drevlyans lived like animals, like cattle; ate unclean foods, had no marriage, but abducted girls at the waterside. While the Radmichi, Vyatichi and northern tribes shared the same custom: they lived in the forest like wild beasts, ate unclean food and used foul language in front of fathers and female relatives, and they had no marriages, but held games between villages and gathered at these games for dancing and all kinds of devilish songs. (Qtd. Lotman 1990: 131) If the others are like animals, unclean, know neither morals nor respect, and waste their time in idle pastimes, you can ascribe to yourself that you are ‘human’, ‘clean’, and that you have ‘morals’, ‘respect’, and a ‘work ethic’. The same applies to how, as early as in the eighth century, a Frankish chronicler represented the Saxons: Fierce by nature, worshippers of the devil, enemies of our religion, they respect neither human nor divine rules, and they permit themselves to do what is not permissible. (Ibid.: 132) philosopher Giorgio Agamben has more recently discussed the same phenomenon under the terms ‘closed’ and ‘open’, concluding, “that man [woman] is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human” (2004: 26). 6 This would be what in gender criticism has been described as the ‘death-dealing’ nature of binaries; cf. classically Kristeva (1981). On the meaningfulness of transgressions 7 This is the classical contrast between ‘them’ and ‘us’: a binary-like or, to quote Lotman again, “mirror-like relationship between ‘our’ world and ‘their’ one: what is not allowed with us is allowed with them” (ibid.) - albeit with a little grain of envy. And it brings us back to the category of ‘difference’: apparently, cultures constitute themselves (consciously/ subconsciously) by drawing a borderline between themselves and other cultures, whose features they deny in order to create a positive self-image through that denial. Again, it is only via a (fantasized) border that a culture manages to acquire a ‘meaning’ or ‘meaningfulness’ of its own. Only through the arbitrary establishment of a (separating) border does it become possible for a culture to ascribe to itself what and who they are: their ‘identity’. III. This is where we get to the core of things. Because this explains why we are surrounded by a continuous process of text-making. We seem to be constantly producing texts in order to be able to keep up the illusion of having an identity, of being endowed with meanings that only determine, that only belong to, ‘us’. ‘Texts’ can thus be said to be ‘meaning-generating’, meaning-stabilizing, agencies (cf. Lotman 1990: 11-119) that, in an endless process, make the world appear, again and again, as what a culture would like to see it. 7 They are endlessly renewed contractual formulas of a cultural consensus that determines what ‘a’ culture collectively wants to be. At the same time, however, this poses the question why, in all cultures, there is such an “enormous number of texts relating events which are known not to have taken place” (Lotman 1979-1980: 161). This is the question concerning the existence of the plot-text or the sjuzhet (cf. Lotman 1977: 209-284). What this means is that there are apparently two basic types of texts in cultures. On the one hand, there seem to be texts that back up the consensus, that (quite literally) ‘re-present’, again and again, the communal phantasm, or build up the ‘social imaginary’ (cf. Castoriadis 1987) of a culture - in Lotman’s words its ‘centre’ -, with the intention to affirm it, to classify things, to “bolster up” (Iser 1987: 83) the apparent status quo: these would be the ‘plotless texts’. And on the other hand, there are those texts that explore, question, negotiate this centre: and these would be the ‘plot texts’, the sjuzhets, agencies of alterity, spaces of the imaginary let loose, articulations of the ‘periphery’, probing into, testing out, ‘difference’ - addressing the suspicion that everything could be altogether different (Lotman 1990: 123-214). In a way, texts of the centre act as meaning generators that 7 This also refers to what Foucault has classically described as a ‘will to truth’ with its concomitant systems of exclusion: mechanisms of discursive control such as, among other things, the ‘commentary’ as an instrument which guarantees that meaning across texts largely remains stable (cf. Foucault 1971: 12). Andreas Mahler 8 stabilize a culture, whereas texts of the periphery act as if they were questioning catalysts. The second type is important because it (fictionalizingly) stages events that a culture could normally only interpret as a danger to its order. In other words, what sjuzhets do is explore the world as it is (or rather seems to be) by way of addressing alternatives, other possibilities, alterizing imaginations, and, in doing so, they attribute to the world meaning from outside, through what they are not, i.e. ‘differential’ meaning (again). This is precisely what turns them into catalysts: “By creating plot-texts,” Lotman concludes, “man [woman] learnt to distinguish plots in life and thus to make sense of life.” (1979-1980: 183) In a sense, plot texts are perhaps not so much the periphery but the differential outside stabilizing the internal meaningfulness. Plot texts - others might call them ‘narratives’ - can thus be said to be agencies of balancing out cultural meaning (in a sense they are, as it were, ‘mirrors of mirrors’). As cultural catalysts, they are themselves operating on and with borders. Like the beginning of Shakespeare’s As You Like It: As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, and, as thou sayst, charged my brother on his blessing to breed me well - and there begins my sadness. My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit. For my part, he keeps me rustically at home - or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better, for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manège, and to that end riders dearly hired. But I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I. Besides this nothing that he so plentifully gives me, the something that nature gave me his countenance seems to take from me. He lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education. This is it, Adam, that grieves me; and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude. I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it. (AYL, 1.1.1-21) 8 Orlando’s initial monologue is quite visibly constructed around a border: the difference between ‘keeps’ and ‘unkept’. It opposes the norm of appropriate care and education (‘My brother Jaques he keeps at school’) and its violation through neglect (‘but I gain nothing under him but growth’). Between the fatherly command ‘to breed me well’, and its realization through Oliver, there is a gap: ‘He bars me the place of a brother’. In other words, 8 All quotes are, under the usual abbreviations, to the widely accessible edition of Shakespeare (1997) (for King Lear I have used the version of the “Conflated Text”). In what follows, I draw on Mahler (1998) and Mahler (2016) (see there for more detail). On the meaningfulness of transgressions 9 topologically speaking, Orlando is not where he belongs. His natural ‘gentility’ is undermined (‘mines’) by a ‘keeping that differs not from the stalling of an ox’, putting him on the same level with ‘hinds’ and ‘animals on dunghills’. His position is scandalously opposed to that of the horses (‘His horses are bred better, they are taught’): Orlando is too low, he is kept in pure ‘servitude’. The ‘otherworld’ of As You Like It thus begins to constitute itself as vertically organized, with a border in the middle. It presents the idea of order as a vertical hierarchy following the model of the chain of being, separating an ‘above’ from a ‘below’, in this case ‘humans’ from ‘animals’ or, as it were, ‘gentlemen’ from ‘peasants’. And it shows an anomaly in the transference of Orlando by his own brother across the border from the ‘above’ to the ‘below’. This is the play’s ‘event’ (cf. Lotman 1977: 240). This kind of ‘eventness’ finds itself reduplicated in the dukes. The younger Duke Frederick has usurped the throne, and Duke Senior - there is something in a name - has been ousted and has left the court. This kind of topological arrangement is not untypical of early modern plot-making. Early modern plots still follow a medieval phantasm of meaningfulness. This is the feudal logic of a ‘brotherhood of love’, according to which cultural order is won, and held, by the mutual respect governing the relations between a caste, a ‘happy band’ of brothers, with the ruler as their ‘first’ (‘senior’) brother, the primus inter pares. 9 Plots of this type are plots of restitution. Their interest is, after an eventful transgression creating disorder, to bring back feudal order as the only imaginable form of organizing society. This is precisely what happens in As You Like It. As soon as they find out that they are too low, the characters shifted across the border from the ‘above’ to the ‘below’ immediately take themselves out of the game and escape to a kind of carnivalesque ‘enclave’ outside society, the Forest of Arden, a space of suspension neutralizing differences (and cultural meanings), where they remain until things are resolved, and they are allowed to return. This kind of self-eclipsing detour via a neutralizing enclave (cf. Mahler 2016) is the ‘wise remedy’ Orlando is still seeking for at the beginning of the play (but since it is a comedy we already know that he is going to find it). Carnival is, as Mikhail Bakhtin has classically put it, “the festival of allannihilating and all-renewing time” (1984: 124). ‘Time’, cyclical time in particular, and ‘love’, are forces of healing. 10 They are apt to turn the initial ‘sadness’ into ‘mirth’ and to bring about the ‘promised end’: “Then there is mirth in heaven”, says towards the end of act V harmonious Hymen, “When 9 For a discussion of the idea of a feudal ‘Personenverband’ as a union of brotherly ‘love’ ideally acknowledging each member of that union as ‘even’, cf. Mahler (2005: 182-184). 10 Cf. Viola’s desperate sigh in Twelfth Night: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I. / It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.” (TN 2.2.38-39). Andreas Mahler 10 earthly things made even / Atone together.” (AYL 5.4.97-99) ‘Atonement’, being ‘at one’/ ‘even’ again in view of unwanted strife, is a visible sign of restitution: the transgressions are taken back, first through Oliver’s “conversion” (4.3.135) upon his entry into the forest and, then, through Duke Frederick, who, in the enclave, too, is “converted / Both from his enterprise and from the world, / His crown bequeathing to his banished brother, / And all their lands restored to them again / That were with him exiled” (5.4.150-154). This shows the validity of the restitution. “Welcome, young man”, says Duke Senior to Oliver, “Thou offer’st fairly to thy brothers’ wedding: / To one his lands withheld, and to the other / A land itself at large, a potent dukedom.” (155-158) The end of As You Like It thus stages “the good of our returnèd fortune” (163). Its ‘harmony’ and the final “music” with its “measures” (167-168) symbolize that the old ‘meaning’ (as the one and only one existing) has been found again and that the world can start afresh. In Lotmanian terms, the “chance occurrence”, the event, has been done away with, and the general “principle” finds itself successfully, and rightfully, re-established; the “anomaly” (of not respecting one’s own brother as is his due) has been banned and what reigns again is the “law” (Lotman 1979-1980: 163; cf. Lotman 1990: 153). As a plot-text, As You Like It presents itself as a circle of restoring the harmony of the world. It moves its main (feudal) characters - the ones that are shifted across the border: Orlando, Duke Senior, Rosalind and Aliena - from a ‘high’ position to one that is ‘too low’. In the end, however, via a heterotopian enclave that neutralizes the ‘high’-‘low’ distinction, it brings them back to their original ‘high’ position, and in doing so, it fulfills the ‘promise’ of ‘restoring’ everything ‘back to normal’ in the sense that this is precisely what the audience ‘likes’ to see. In a way, this seems to hold true for practically all Shakespearean plots. It is typical of how fictions (‘otherworlds’) negotiate the world around the year 1600. In Julius Caesar (c. 1599), this plot model splits up into either the variant that Caesar aspires to absolute authority shifting all free Romans into the role of ‘slaves’, or the variant that the conspirators, in killing Caesar, turn themselves into usurpers destroying the ‘brotherly’ commonwealth and thus the very basis on which they thrive. This resurges in Hamlet (c. 1601-1602) in the eponymous hero’s predicament (‘born to set it right’) of either taking revenge against Claudius the usurper via the enclave of the ‘antic disposition’, or of risking that he becomes a usurper himself by ‘unlawfully’ killing Claudius on the grounds of having listened to an ‘evil’ ghost. It shows again in King Lear (c. 1605-1606) in Lear stating, after her famous ‘nothing’, that Cordelia’s ‘price has fallen’, with her fleeing to France (the enclave) and then coming back in act IV in order to ‘restore’/ ‘remediate’ what has been broken, only to see that even though things may look as if “[t]he wheel is come full circle” (Lr. 5.3.172), there is no longer any hope for restitution. The sjuzhet of King Lear, it is true, On the meaningfulness of transgressions 11 does bring back order, but it no longer disposes of any living character to represent it: “The weight of this sad time we must obey,” says Kent - or is it Albany? -, articulating the embarrassing final lack of meaning in the play, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” (322-323) That all this is not something specifically English can for example be seen in the plots offered roughly at the same time by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. As has been shown, a lot of his Exemplary Novellas stage precisely the same cultural trajectory of feudal restitution that one can see at work in the Shakespearean plays (cf. Dürr 2010). IV. So, 1600 seems to be a time literally crying out for new plots. Instead of affirming the ‘principle’ - the conventional ‘meaning’ guaranteeing ‘order’ - they tend to focus the ‘chance occurrence’ - a ‘new’ meaning to be negotiated - and (hopefully) thwarted. This seems to be wrapped up with a new way of seeing ‘the world’ as no longer a (hierarchical, cosmic) ‘reality guaranteed by God’ through his creation but, rather, ‘a world’ ‘realized individually’ through one’s own individual actions and decisions (cf. Blumenberg 1979: 31-33). What this brings with it is on the one hand new actants or ‘heroes’, no longer exclusively representing the feudal class but introducing the (‘bourgeois’) middle classes as potentially new actants worth making stories about. What it entails on the other hand is, topologically speaking, a ‘linearization’ as well as what can be called a ‘horizontalization’ of the plot-making. One of its main representatives is Shakespeare’s eternal ‘rival’ Ben Jonson. Already the titles of Jonson’s early plays indicate that there is a shift in plot-making. His first two comedies of Every Man in His Humour (1598) und Every Man out of His Humour (1599) sketch the modelling of a world that opposes an (inner) field of ‘reason’ and, hence, of sociability, to an (outer) field of ‘madness’ and exclusion from society, with a border between the two. 11 And it imagines ‘order’ as the state when all subscribe to a social contract that reassembles them within the (rational) bounds of society. Whoever is ‘in’ his/ her humour is ‘out of’ society, and as soon as they have (therapeutically) been transported ‘out of’ their humours, they are back ‘in’ society again, and the comedy can stop. This horizontal kind of plot-making with a field of ‘reason’ and a field of ‘unreason’ separated by a border not to be transgressed (unless for the sake of producing comedic laughter), is typical of classical comedy as one can also find it in Molière. What these comedies celebrate is less a ‘cosmic 11 For the discursive disqualification mechanism of considering an utterance as ‘mad’ and casting it outside cf. Foucault (1971: 9-10); for a history of madness in general cf. Foucault (1965). Andreas Mahler 12 harmony’ (as in As You Like It) than ‘social reintegration’ (a modern word would be ‘inclusion’). In a way, what they do, is turn the former ‘enclave’ into a kind of ‘no-go area’ where one is not allowed to be if they want to be part of society. There is hardly a play to demonstrate this better than Molière’s Misanthropist (1666). Not unlike Jaques in As You Like It, Alceste, the eponymous hero who (unreasonably) ‘hates’ people, is continuously trying to escape society, with precisely that society always catching up on him, so that he never truly manages to get ‘away’. Topologically speaking, again, this paves the way for a type of plot-making that seems to be entirely focused on the ‘inner’ field of society. What becomes ‘meaningful’ are indeed now results of some individual ‘realization’: either positively in crossing the border and creating a ‘new’ world, or negatively in annulling the transgression and re-establishing the ‘old’ world again. This new type of plot-making begins to produce stories that show how an individual finally succeeds in ‘making it’ (significantly to the ‘top’) as in Jonson’s Volpone (1606) where inadvertently Mosca, the ‘slave’, at least for a period of time, manages to take over Volpone’s position - or (more classically later) as in the novels of a Balzac or a Dickens. It produces stories that justify how an individual ‘dis-covers’ distant lands and declares them to be his own as in Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) or in Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). And it produces stories that show an individual who, despite her protestations that she ‘is not going about to create a new world’, is in fact ‘cased up like a holy relic’, and eventually murdered, as is John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. This is the class/ race/ gender triad of the sjuzhets of social rise, of expansion, and of domestication. 12 What they have in common is the ‘realization’, in time, of something ‘new’ - or its avoidance. This ideology of creating something in its own right - this new kind of individual meaningfulness - begins in turn to come under intense negotiation and severe questioning in the second half of the nineteenth century. As from the 1850s onwards, there is a marked increase in plots that stage a kind of ‘thwarted eventfulness’, with characters incessantly crossing ‘borders’ without ever achieving ‘meaning’. 13 In Gustave Flaubert’s Ma-dame Bovary, the eponymous heroine Emma is incessantly dreaming of leaving the ‘inner’ field of provincial boredom in order to reach the ‘meaningful’ life of the Parisian ‘grand monde’ but, no matter how many borders she crosses in her mind, she always remains in the same field of eventlessness and ennui. The plot is no longer unfolding a story of individual achievement but one of paradigmatic failure: instead of reaching romantic happiness, Emma has to put up with the monotonies of humdrum bourgeois routines; instead of experiencing an ‘event’, all she gets is the mere glimpse of an 12 For a discussion of this triad cf. Mahler (1998: 42-45). 13 For further detail in this and in what follows cf. Mahler (2013). On the meaningfulness of transgressions 13 ‘eventuality’. This can be seen in one of her very first fantasies of transgression: Quand sa mère mourut, elle pleura beaucoup les premiers jours. Elle se fit faire un tableau funèbre avec les cheveux de la défunte, et, dans une lettre qu’elle envoyait aux Bertaux, toute pleine de réflexions tristes sur la vie, elle demandait qu’on l’ensevelît plus tard dans le même tombeau. Le bonhomme la crut malade et vint la voir. Emma fut intérieurement satisfaite de se sentir arrivée du premier coup à ce rare idéal des existences pâles, où ne parviennent jamais les cœurs médiocres. Elle se laissa donc glisser dans les méandres lamartiniens, écouta les harpes sur les lacs, tous les chants des cygnes mourants, toutes les chutes des feuilles, les vierges pures qui montent au ciel, et la voix de l’Éternel discourant dans les vallons. Elle s’en ennuya, n’en voulut point convenir, continua par habitude, et fut enfin surprise de se sentir apaisée, et sans plus de tristesse au cœur que de rides sur son front. (MB 98-99) 14 When her mother died she wept much the first few days. She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter sent home full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, to the words of the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing through the valleys. Finally she wearied of it, but would not confess it; she continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow. (MB 37- 38) One can see this as the core of all transgressions-to-come. Emma seems to move from the monotonies of her everyday life to an autosuggestive ‘rare ideal’ which, after ‘attaining’ it (‘parviennent’), turns out to be nothing but another part of the same world of boredom and ennui (‘Elle s’en ennuya’). This persistent negation of any kind of ‘eventfulness’ is characteristic of the entire novel. Her return home to her father’s house with the option of ‘commanding the servants’ leads to nothing but ‘disillusionment’. So, notoriously, does her meeting with Charles: “La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue” (“Charles’s conversation was as commonplace as a street pavement”; MB 101/ 40). Finally, even the aristocratic ball at la Vaubyessard, with its promise of leaving the mediocrity of her existence, ends in disillusionment again: Tout ce qui l’entourait immédiatement, campagne ennuyeuse, petit-bourgeois imbéciles, médiocrité de l’existence, lui semblait une exception dans le monde, 14 All quotes are, under the abbreviation MB, to Flaubert (1986) and Flaubert (1919). Andreas Mahler 14 un hasard particulier où elle se trouvait prise, tandis qu’au-delà s’étendait à perte de vue l’immense pays des félicités et des passions. (MB 119) All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to be exceptional, a peculiar chance that had entrapped her, while beyond, as far as eye could see, spread an immense land of joys and passions. (MB 57) This ‘au-delà’ / this ‘beyond’ is never reached. After two love affairs, she is still where she began: “Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage” (“Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage”; MB 364/ 304). Whatever Emma undertakes, she will never get to the ‘outer’ sphere of her dreams: the definitive transcending of the boundary never materializes; the supposed eventfulness of her love for Rodolphe disintegrates, as does later her love for Léon; only in her perspective does the shabby Hirondelle remain the emblem of Romantic longing, only in her perspective does Rouen, that ‘old Norman city’, become a ‘capital huge beyond measure’ [...], in which she is transformed into a Babylonian courtesan. Precisely the repetitive quality of her journey serves to undercut its supposed eventfulness. [...] Actual conflict does not materialize. Emma is the heroine of her dreams. (Warning 1980-1981: 276) Transgressing without end, Emma always remains where she was. To some extent, she is like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Behind the Looking-Glass: “‘[I]n our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.’/ ‘A slow sort of country! ’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’” (Carroll 1976: 210; original emphases) Just as Shakespeare begins to question cyclical plot-making with regard to its potential ‘meaningfulness’ of affirming a view of the world as having been unquestionably created (and ‘guaranteed’) by God, Flaubert starts to experiment with linear plot-making questioning the myth of ‘realizability’ as view of a ‘man’-made world where everybody is master of his/ her own fate - and only has to reach out in order to make his/ her dreams come true. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education seems to be even more radical in this. Like Madame Bovary, it is paradigmatic in its organization, adding failure after failure, eventlessness after eventlessness. But it ends with a spectacular analepsis that leaps to a moment before the actual start of the novel where the two boys (meaningfully) attempt to cross the border between the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘anti-bourgeois’ in trying to visit a brothel, with one of the boys fleeing in panic and the other having to follow him because the friend has got the money. This looks like the programmatic ‘key’ to all that follows: there is no transgression, everything is and always will be On the meaningfulness of transgressions 15 ‘platitude’, romanticism is always already ‘elsewhere’, the world is condemned to the meaningless. This can be seen as a deconstruction of the linear realization paradigm into mere contingency (cf. Blumenberg 1979: 33-34). Just as King Lear has deconstructed cyclicality in making the wheel ‘come full circle’ without leaving a character still able to ‘represent’ it, the Sentimental Education sends its characters on a syntagmatic trajectory and makes them end up with their first paradigmatic failure. Only the pattern is reversed: if a sjuzhet like Lear stages a syntagmatic ‘chance event’ that denies the paradigmatic (God-guaranteed) ‘principle’ of things always coming back to ‘normal’, a sjuzhet like the Education, 250 years later, begins to stage a whole paradigm of contingent ‘chance events’ that begin to deny the syntagmatic ‘principle’ of being able to realize one’s own way. In other words, the ‘bourgeois’ model established around 1600 now in turn slowly begins to abdicate. Around 1900, one can see this kind of ‘defeatist’, meaningless plot-making directed against a belief in ‘realizability’ all over the place. It shows in a novel such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a consequent denial of a ‘significant’ story; it can be seen in Joyce’s Dubliners (especially in a story such as “Eveline”) in the programmatic staging of failures of ‘breaking out’ and leaving; it reappears in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a kind of negative bildungsroman in a consecutive figural hope of finally being able to get out of the narrowness of the humdrum Dublin world; and even Stephen’s transgressive flight to Paris finds its disillusioned denial in the first chapters of Ulysses. Similar trajectories could be sketched for Proust, Virginia Woolf, Musil, Faulkner, and many others. V. Seeing the world as a world of ‘contingency’ implies a fundamental loss of belief in ‘meaningfulness’. It entails a redefinition of the ‘tellable’. If a story is tellable, i.e. ‘worth telling’ because of its ‘meaning’, its meaning-making is always wrapped up with its negotation of borders. European plot-making begins, as we have seen, by corroborating these borders. It reaches a first ‘crisis of representation’ where these borders are no longer apt to produce the ‘promised’ meaning. This is what has been called ‘secularization’. It opens up the option of producing ‘new’ meaning by transgressing borders and ‘realizing’ a ‘new’ world through the transgression - the possibility to ‘rise’; the appropriation of the ‘foreign’; the self-authorization of ‘female action’. This kind of plot-making reaches a second ‘crisis of representation’ with the suspicion that these transgressions are nothing but expansions of one’s own. This annuls their ‘eventfulness’. It also takes away their ‘meaning’. If the first crisis of representation is a deconstruction of cyclical Andreas Mahler 16 meaningfulness, this second crisis is a deconstruction of linear meaningfulness. Instead of negotiating internal borders, the telling of tales is now reaching a border itself. This is what the Flaubertian project of a ‘livre sur rien’, of writing a ‘book on nothing’, is about: the annulment of the plot and, with it, the eradication of any meaningfulness of its borders. It is also characteristic of the Joycean project of producing nothing but prose by programmatically undermining the semantics of the text. The sjuzhet becomes secondary: it no longer endows the world with meaning but only functions as the basis for the production of textual art, of ‘aesthetics’. In other words, where there are no borders, there is no meaning. One of the consequences of this is the annulment of the act of telling itself as the eradication of an act of (‘realizingly’ in turn) bringing ‘meaningfulness’ into the world. This can be seen in Flaubert’s notorious dictum: “L’auteur, dans son œuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, visible nulle part” (‘The author, in his work, should be like God in the universe, present everywhere but visible nowhere’; Flaubert 1963: 95), as well as in its Joycean replica: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (Joyce 1993: 207). It can be interpreted as a shift from a modelling with borders to the modelling of borders itself. In hiding itself, the act of telling paradoxically begins to come to the fore. Such a shift can be described as a move from the mimetic to the performative: from telling events along the syntagmatic axis to repetitively producing text. This is what has been called ‘paradigmatic narration’ (cf. Warning 2001): a means of textual production in which the author shows his/ her mastery in treating the same differently, again and again and again, as in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, or Joyce’s Ulysses or his Finnegans Wake, all instances of a ‘writing without end’. All this is apt to show that the text itself is now approaching a border. Its textuality becomes cyclical, its principle is that of ‘seriality’. What we now get are textual experiments foregrounding language games, signifiers, explorations of the text’s mediality. From a medial point of view, this is an attempt to unveil the ‘latency’ governing our language use - an attempt to look behind the mechanism that is apt to ‘endow with meaning’ in the first place, as in Beckett’s prose or in the nouveau nouveau roman of a Jean Ricardou oder in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru, to name but a few. It is an attempt to discover the conditions of our own transgression-based ‘excentricity’. 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