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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Andreas Mahler Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft: Interaktion und Macht in Malcolm Bradburys The History Man .......................................................... 143 Christian Quendler Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema .......................... 163 Peter Freese T.C. Boyle’s East Is East. A Samurai in Georgia, or the Failure of Intercultural Understanding......................................................................... 187 David Weber English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing .............. 227 Georg Marko My painful self. Health Identity Construction in Discussion Forums on Headaches and Migraines ............................................................................ 245 Rezensionen: Virginia Richter Margarete Rubik (ed.), Aphra Behn and Her Female Successors ................... 273 Ute Berns Christoph Bode, Fremd-Erfahrungen: Diskursive Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik. Bd. 2: Identität auf Reisen ................................... 276 Silke Stroh Anna Gonerko-Frej, Małgorzata Sokół, Joanna Witkowska & Uwe Zagratzki (eds.), Us and Them - Them and Us. Constructions of the Other in Cultural Stereotypes .................................................................................. 279 Inhaltsverzeichnis 142 Mar Gallego Astrid M. Fellner (ed.), Body Signs: The Latino/ a Body in Cultural Production..................................................................................................... 284 Johannes Wally Swantje Möller, Coming to Terms with Crisis. Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan .................................................... 289 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 36, 2011 ist nach Autoren alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / www-gewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). Gefördert von der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung und der Geisteswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. Bezugspreis jährlich € 84,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 68,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft € 52,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 2012 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5, 72070 Tübingen E-mail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft Interaktion und Macht in Malcolm Bradburys The History Man Andreas Mahler Wolfgang Weiß zum 20.2.2012 I. Vielleicht eine der schönsten Überschriften in einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Monographie ist diejenige aus Wolfgang Weiß’ akademischer Pionierstudie aus dem Jahr 1988 1 Der anglo-amerikanische Universitätsroman: Kapitel “9. Schluss: Der Professor entdeckt die Welt” (S. 156). 2 Das Kapitel stellt dort den Ausblick dar. Es skizziert den Ende der achtziger Jahre sich abzeichnenden Wandel des vor allem geisteswissenschaftlichen Selbstverständnisses vom fachlichen Experten, der sich in der Sache auskennt, deren Gewissheiten wie Problematiken auslotet und sodann methodisch kontrolliert zur Artikulation bringt, hin zu dem des akademischen global player, eines weltumspannenden Wissenschaftstouristen, der seinen Titel und sein Renommée nutzt als Insignie kostenlosen Reisens wie bezahlten Redens und sich weitgehend phatisch-gratifikatorisch in der eigenen Klugheit sonnt. 3 Es ist dies der Wandel vom Fachvertreter zum Fachperformer. Die Welt, die der Professor da entdeckt, ist vornehmlich die des ökonomischen Funktionalismus. Wie alle anderen Kapitalis- 1 Eine zweite durchgesehene und bibliographisch ergänzte Auflage erschien im selben Verlag 1994. 2 Zur Aktualität des Universitätsromans - und seiner Notwendigkeit insbesondere als Forum zur Diskussion akademischen Selbstverständnisses in Deutschland - siehe das jüngst vorgebrachte Plädoyer von Martin Huber (2012), “Wer erzählt die Universität? Warum wir deutsche Campusromane brauchen.” 3 Dieser Wandel wird im Universitätsroman in den achtziger Jahren vornehmlich angesprochen in Bradburys Rates of Exchange (1983) oder auch David Lodges Small World (1984). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Andreas Mahler 144 musspieler auch verkauft er weltweit seine Ware ‘Wissen’, und je teurer er sich macht, so begehrter wird er auch. Der Professor wird auf diese Weise zur Attraktion, zum Star, sein Vortrag zum event. Und als interessierter Adressat geht man folgerecht nicht mehr so sehr zum Zuhören, sondern zum celebrity-Schauen: ‘Judith Butler-Schauen’, ‘Homi Bhabha- Gucken’, ‘Gumbrecht-Sehen’ sind akademische Ereignisse, die, wie events gefeiert, nicht in Diskussion enden, sondern, als Programmpunkt abgehakt, im Kino, mit einem Essen beim Italiener oder auf einen Drink an der Bar - beim nächsten event also. Ein solcher Hochschullehrer stellt nicht so recht etwas dar, er funktioniert. Er ist nicht so sehr Amateur, ein Liebhaber seines Fachs - und Teilgebiets -, sondern ‘professionell’: 4 elegant fremdbestimmt von externen Anforderungen, stromlinienförmiger Erfüllungsgehilfe bürokratischgesellschaftlicher Erwartungen, williger Drittmittelbeschaffer, Zahl, Rädlein im Wind der Kultusmaschinerie und Administrationsperistaltik 5 - effizient, funktionierend, frag- und problemlos exzellent, ein nützlicher (Fach)Idiot. Dies zeigt Hochschullehrertum als Rollenspiel. Wie bei vielen gegenwärtigen Professionen hängt die Erwartung weniger am Inhalt denn am Funktionieren. 6 Individualität und Persönlichkeit treten in den Hintergrund. Weniger interessiert, wer jemand substantiell ist; vielmehr scheint von Relevanz, welchen Wert er hat und was er einbringt. Folgerecht wird die Universität zum Bildungsdienstleister, und die Verantwortung des exzellenzseligen Professors liegt vornehmlich symbolisch im profitablen Verkauf dieser Leistung. Hierin zeigt sich ein fundamentaler Wechsel der Wissenschaft von der Inhaltsauf die Beziehungsebene: 7 der einstmals ehrenwerte Fachvertreter wird zum bloßen ‘Vertreter’ für sein Fach. Er putzt die Klinken und hält seine Ware feil; und dabei kann die Ware noch so dürftig sein, als gewiefter Verkäufer bringt er sie dennoch erfolgreich an die Kundschaft. Der Protagonist von Malcolm Bradburys 1975 erstmals erschienener Universitätssatire The History Man ist genau ein solcher die Welt entde- 4 Der Regisseur Orson Welles hat einmal sehr schön differenziert zwischen Amateuren als denjenigen, die etwas lieben, und Professionellen, die auf der Straße laufen. 5 Letzteren Begriff verdanke ich Wolfgang Weiß. 6 Zum in der frühen Neuzeit sich abzeichnenden westlichen Wandel in der Gesellschaftsstruktur von einer stratifikatorischen, und damit inhaltlich-semantisch besetzbaren, zu einer funktionalen, rein nach pragmatischer Einsetzbarkeit vorgenommenen sozialen Differenzierung siehe die Studien Niklas Luhmanns, vor allem die Bände Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft (Luhmann 1993). 7 Zur beständigen Präsenz einer objektbezogenen Inhaltsebene und einer die Subjekte relationierenden Beziehungsebene in menschlicher Kommunikation siehe die Einsichten bei Paul Watzlawick/ Janet H. Beavin/ Don D. Jackson 1982. Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 145 ckender Dozentendarsteller. 8 Allerdings ist die von ihm entdeckte Welt nicht so sehr eine ökonomische denn eine politische. Aufgewachsen mit dem soziologisch geprägten Bewusstsein, dass wir alle nur Rollenspieler sind, 9 begreift er sich als “performer”, als “self-made actor on the social stage” (HM 38), 10 dessen vornehmliche Aufgabe in der ‘Realisierung’ der ihm genehmen Welt besteht, im “fighting” (HM 40) für bessere Bedingungen, vorwiegend der eigenen. 11 In solcher Sicht ist der Dozent weniger ein dem disziplinären Gegenstand seiner Untersuchung verpflichteter Forscher als ein prinzipiell dem allgemeinen Fortschritt, nicht zuletzt dem eigenen, verpflichteter ‘Macher’, wie es sich generationstypisch im Roman formuliert findet als Versprechen wie auch als Androhung der permanenten Revolution zugleich: “the task is to realize ourselves by changing the environment” (HM 74). Die maßgebliche Agentur eines solchen unaufhaltsamen Realisierungsgebots ist fortschrittbewusstes Handeln, vor allem fortschrittbewusst sprachliches Handeln. Sprache ist der Ort der Artikulation und Aufbewahrung gefundener akademischer Wahrheit, die Debatte stets ein hohes Gut. Denn dort entscheidet sich im austauschenden, abwägenden, überdenkenden Dialog, was wissenschaftlich überzeugt und was verworfen wird. Die Verhandlung der Befunde ist mithin diskursiv. Diesem zentralen Element der Wissenschaftskommunikation gilt in der Folge mein Augenmerk. Meine These lautet: Der Bradbury’sche Universitätsroman inszeniert und debattiert die Akademia als ‘Diskursgemeinschaft’, allerdings jedoch als solche, die sich nicht mehr so recht bestimmt als zusammenhängende ‘Gemeinschaft’ mit gemeinsamer Basis, sondern eher als funktionale ‘Gesellschaft’ zusammengewürfelter Interes- 8 Zu Bradburys History Man siehe Weiß 1988: 151-154; Barbara Himmelsbach 1992: 239-271; Martin Goch 1992: 252-286; Heinz Antor 1996: 672-677; Cordelia Borchardt 1997: 195-203; Thomas Kühn 2002: 220-235; Monika Reif-Hülser 2000: 165-184; vgl. auch allgemein die Überblicke bei Erhard Reckwitz 1987: 199-217; Rüdiger Imhof 1993: 130-148. 9 Zum Topos menschlicher Rollenbewusstheit siehe bekanntlich schon die Rede des Jaques in Shakespeares As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (1975: II.7.139 f.); zur Entfaltung der soziologischen Rollentheorie siehe die Arbeiten Erving Goffmans, vor allem seine Studie Wir alle spielen Theater. Die Selbstdarstellung im Alltag (Goffman 1985). 10 Alle Zitate folgen mit dem Sigel HM der Ausgabe Malcolm Bradbury (1982). The History Man. London: Arrow Books. 11 Der Gedanke, dass die Wirklichkeit konzeptuell begriffen werden kann als das “Resultat einer Realisierung” durch ein tatkräftiges Individuum, entspringt frühneuzeitlich-aufklärerisch geprägten Vorstellungen vom Primat der Zeit als einem linearen Entwicklungsmodell, welches unhintergehbar den Fortschritt als permanenten Zug der Verbesserung in sein System einbaut; zu diesem - und alternativen - Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen siehe die historisch-epistemologische Skizze bei Hans Blumenberg (1964) “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans”, das Zitat S. 12. Andreas Mahler 146 sen, welche in stetem, oftmals fremdbestimmtem Wettbewerb miteinander stehen. 12 Dies führt mich zunächst zum Diskurs-Begriff. II. Der Diskurs-Begriff ist von Wolfgang Weiß als maßgeblicher in die Diskussion um den Universitätsroman eingebracht worden. Die Gattung, so Weiß, bestimme sich selbst als eine dialogische über ihre Verankerung in einer gesellschaftlichen Debatte darüber, was ‘Bildung’ sei und wie diese von den Universitäten repräsentiert und vermittelt werde. Entsprechend sei “der Universitätsroman seit seinen Anfängen Teil eines gesellschaftlichen Diskurses, in dem am Beispiel der Universität über die Normen, den Sinn und die Funktionen von Bildung gerungen wird” (Weiß 1988: 9). 13 Dieser die meisten Folgeuntersuchungen unterspannende Gedanke ist späterhin in aller Ausführlichkeit nochmals aufgegriffen und weiter ausformuliert worden in Cordelia Borchardts am Bildungsbegriff festgemachter Untersuchung zum anglo-amerikanischen Universitätsroman (siehe Borchardt 1997: 24-32). Der Diskurs-Begriff ist schillernd; sein Gebrauch lokalisiert sich auf mindestens vier Ebenen (siehe hierzu Mahler 2010: 153-173). Die obige Auffassung etwa fände sich wieder im Konzept eines ‘gesellschaftlichen Diskurses’ im Sinne einer prägenden Debatte über ein gemeinschaftliches Grundverständnis, auf das man sich in freier, offener Diskussion konsensuell zu einigen versucht. 14 Für kulturspezifische sprachlichliterarische Untersuchungen wesentlich am Diskurs-Begriff scheinen jedoch vor allen Dingen zwei Aspekte: (1.) Inhaltlich-semantisch stellt sich ein Diskurs dar als ein “System des Denkens und Argumentierens” 15 wie etwa der Wissenschaftsdiskurs als ein System wissensbezogenen Denkens und Argumentierens mit möglichen Kriterien wie ‘Objektadäquatheit’, ‘intersubjektive Nachvollziehbarkeit’, ‘Widerspruchsfreiheit’ und - im 12 Zur soziologischen These von der spätmodernen Ablösung von ‘Gemeinschaft’ durch ‘Gesellschaft’ in allen Lebensbereichen siehe den Roman selbst, wo es angesichts der sozialen Veränderungen der sechziger Jahre analytisch heißt: “Gemeinschaft yielded to Gesellschaft; community was placed by the fleeting, passing contacts of city life” (HM 64); zu einer Diskussion der universitären Institutionen im Universitätsroman siehe Ulrike Dubber 1991: 160-183. 13 Vgl. auch ebda.: 22: “Es ist die Grundthese dieser Studie über den Universitätsroman, dass die spannungsreiche Beziehung zwischen der relativ abgeschlossenen Institution Universität und der Gesellschaft erst eigentlich diese Untergattung des Romans hervorgebracht hat und deren wechselreiche Geschichte konstituiert.” In dieser Grundthese zeigt sich zudem bereits eine gewisse Gegenüberstellung von ‘Professor’ und ‘Welt’. 14 Ein solches Konzept findet sich etwa in den Untersuchungen von Jürgen Habermas, näherhin in seiner zweibändigen Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1988). 15 So die bislang einleuchtendste und maßgeblichste Definition des Diskurs-Begriffs bei Michael Titzmann 1989: 51. Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 147 jeweiligen Rahmen - ‘Veri- und Falsifizierbarkeit’ (vgl. hierzu etwa Titzmann 1977). (2.) Funktional-pragmatisch erscheint ein Diskurs als interessierter Sprachgebrauch: als Instrument ideologischer - und auch handfesterer - Interessen und von Macht. Letzteres findet sich bekanntlich einlässig formuliert bei Michel Foucault in seiner programmatischen Antrittsvorlesung am Collège de France. Dort konstatiert er: Ich setze voraus, dass in jeder Gesellschaft die Produktion des Diskurses zugleich kontrolliert, selektiert, organisiert und kanalisiert wird - und zwar durch gewisse Prozeduren, deren Aufgabe es ist, die Kräfte und die Gefahren zu bändigen, sein unberechenbar Ereignishaftes zu bannen, seine schwere und bedrohliche Materialität zu umgehen. (Foucault 1982: 7) Und er fügt - gegen die weitverbreitete Ansicht demokratischer Pazifizierbarkeit sozialer Konfliktlagen durch sprachliches Handeln 16 - angesichts der Kontroversen und Tabus hinsichtlich der Beredbarkeit etwa des Politischen oder des Sexuellen hinzu: Offensichtlich ist der Diskurs keineswegs jenes transparente und neutrale Element, in dem die Sexualität sich entwaffnet und die Politik sich befriedet, vielmehr ist er ein bevorzugter Ort, einige ihrer bedrohlichsten Kräfte zu entfalten. Der Diskurs mag dem Anschein nach fast ein Nichts sein - die Verbote, die ihn treffen, offenbaren nur allzubald seine Verbindung mit dem Begehren und der Macht. Und das ist nicht erstaunlich. Der Diskurs - die Psychoanalyse hat es uns gezeigt - ist nicht einfach das, was das Begehren offenbart (oder verbirgt); er ist auch Gegenstand des Begehrens; und der Diskurs - dies lehrt uns immer wieder die Geschichte - ist auch nicht bloß das, was die Kämpfe und Systeme der Beherrschung in Sprache übersetzt: er ist dasjenige, worum und womit man kämpft; er ist die Macht, deren man sich zu bemächtigen sucht. (Foucault 1982: 8) Diskurse sind mithin nicht, wie die Aufklärung uns hat weismachen wollen, bloße transparente Mittler außerhalb der Sprache liegender Inhalte, keine reinen ‘unschuldigen’ Instrumente, keine Werkzeuge problemloser Repräsentation. Sie sind ihrerseits beteiligt an der Formung der Inhalte selbst; sie verteilen die Dinge in Sagbarkeit und Rauschen; sie sind die Orte, an denen sich Begehren artikuliert. Insofern ist der Diskurs stets umkämpftes Wort. Als solches untersteht er ständigen Bemühungen der Bändigung. Foucault selbst hat solche Prozeduren beschrieben als diejenigen der Ausschließung (also des Themenverbots, des Tabus), der Einschränkung (also des Auslegungsprivilegs, der einsinnigen Festlegung, der Monologizität) und der Verknappung der Benutzer (der Exklusivierung von Autorität, der Zulassung zur Rede). (Foucault 1982: 7-35). Diese Prozeduren schaffen einen Raum des lizenzierten Innen und grenzen ihn ab von einem ‘wilden Außen’; sie fungie- 16 So die Grundthese bei Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1988). Andreas Mahler 148 ren gewissermaßen als ‘diskursive Polizei’, deren Funktion in der Regelung von Sagbarkeit besteht. So noch einmal Foucault: Es ist immer möglich, dass man im Raum eines wilden Außen die Wahrheit sagt; aber im Wahren ist man nur, wenn man den Regeln einer diskursiven “Polizei” gehorcht, die man in jedem seiner Diskurse reaktivieren muss. (Foucault 1982: 25) Dabei scheint entscheidend, wer der ‘Polizist’ ist; wer sich im Diskursspiel als derjenige begreift bzw. glaubt, begreifen zu können, der bestimmt, was gesagt werden darf und was nicht, wer wann reden darf und wann nicht, was das Gesagte bedeutet und was nicht. Im Diskursuniversum von Bradburys Universitätsroman The History Man ist diese Entscheidungsinstanz - wenn man literaturwissenschaftlich so will, gewissermaßen der selbsternannte arbitre de la situation 17 - der Soziologe Dr Howard Kirk. Sein Name bereits verweist auf nordenglischprotestantisches, vor allen Dingen theologisch-priesterhaftes Gebaren. Entsprechend hält Kirk aus seiner Sicht die diskursive Situationsmacht und sucht sie vorsorglich auch mit allen Mitteln zu halten. Dies modelliert Bradbury vornehmlich an universitären Interaktionsformen. Maßgeblich hierfür sind vor allem die Kapitel VIII und IX des Romans. Darin geht es um zum einen um das Seminar, also die Interaktion Dozent - Student, und zum anderen um die Fachbereichsratssitzung, die Interaktion der Hochschullehrer untereinander. Hierauf werde ich mich im folgenden konzentrieren. III. Kapitel VIII spricht zunächst von der universitären Institution Seminar. Wie der gesamte Roman ist es satirisch erzählt. Es baut die innere Weltim-Text nicht mimetisch auf, sondern setzt die Kenntnis dessen, was erzählt wird, in der implizit abgerufenen Wirklichkeit des Rezipienten immer schon voraus. Dies ist der Gedanke einer satirischen Überformung, wie ihn Wolfgang Weiß im Anschluss an Überlegungen des Romanisten Klaus W. Hempfer als typisch formuliert hat für die satirische Schreibweise: Die spezifische Schreibweise der Satire, aber nicht nur sie, ist in einer Sprechsituation fundiert, in der der Sprecher beim Adressaten die Ver- 17 Zum arbitre als entscheidungsmächtiger Instanz in einem (in der Regel eher fiktiven) Handlungsgefüge siehe, im Anschluss an Étienne Souriaus Theorie der Situationsfunktionen, Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (1990: 571-583). Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 149 trautheit mit der politischen, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Situation, über die er redet, als gegeben voraussetzt. (Weiß 1982: 14) 18 Dies beginnt bereits bei der Beschreibung des Seminarraums: The seminar room where Howard meets this weekly class, Socsci 4.17, is an interior room without windows, lit by artificial light. The room is a small one; on three of its walls are pinned large charts, illustrating global poverty, while the fourth wall is occupied by a large green chalkboard, on which someone has written, as people are always writing, “Workers unite”. The room contains a number of tables with gunmetal legs and bright yellow tops; these have been pushed together in the centre to form one large table, where some previous tutor has been holding a formal class. (HM 127) Die Beschreibung verlängert das architektonische Werk der Betonuniversität von Watermouth, in diesem Fall entworfen durch den finnischen Architekten Kaakinen (vgl. HM 34), in die Innenraumgestaltung. 19 Zugleich ruft sie die bekannte Innenarchitektur der westeuropäischen 70er Jahre-Universitäten ab. Funktionsmöbel, Betroffenheitsposter, Klassenkampfparole bis hin zur Raumnummerierung signalisieren dem Leser Bekanntes. Die Voraussetzung von Vertrautheit wird zudem gestützt durch den komplizenhaften, eigentümlich adressatlosen Verweis der in der Regel zurückgenommenen auktorialen Erzählinstanz ‘as people are always writing’. Der Roman teilt also weniger einem nicht-akademischen Publikum mit, wie Universitäten im Inneren beschaffen sind, denn dass er einem akademischen Publikum Vertrautheit signalisiert mit diesem bereits bekannten Gegebenheiten. In gleicher Weise verhält es sich mit der Symbolik der Formen, aufgrund deren man etwa aus der Tischzusammenstellung den Grad didaktischer Aufgeschlossenheit - in diesem Fall bereits negativ charakterisiert über das abqualifizierende Adjektiv ‘formal’ - abzulesen vermeint. 20 Entsprechend erweist sich das universitäre Miteinander in beständigem Fluss, in unaufhaltsamem, revolutionärem Wandel: [I]t does not do, at Watermouth, to take it for granted that a room arrangement that suits one teacher will ever suit another. Classes at Watermouth are not simply occasions for the one-directional transmission 18 Zum Problem des A-mimetischen siehe Weiß 1982: 7. Vgl. auch den etwas früher gemachten Vorschlag einer auch das Utopische mit einbeziehenden ‘tendenziellen Schreibweise’ bei Weiß 1979: 134 f. 19 Mit dem Verweis auf den finnischen Architekten knüpft Bradbury zugleich an die satirische Tradition Evelyn Waughs an; vgl. etwa die Figur des Professor Silenus in dessen Decline and Fall (1928). 20 Vgl. hierzu Pierre Bourdieu, Zur Soziologie symbolischer Formen (1974). Andreas Mahler 150 of knowledge; no, they are events, moments of communal interaction, or, like Howard’s party, happenings. (HM 127) 21 In dieses vorsemantisierte Arrangement fällt dann - nach Veränderung der Sitzordnung in einen Kreis ohne Tische zur Erzielung eines interaktions- und gemeinschaftsfördernden “eye-to-eye ecological huddle” (HM 128), welche Howard zufrieden kommentiert mit “that should improve interaction” (HM 129) - die eigentliche Seminarsitzung. Das Seminarthema lautet “Theorien des Sozialen Wandels”; die Sitzung selbst ist gewidmet den Positionen der Sozialphilosophen John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx und Max Weber. Vorerst allerdings fehlt noch der Referent. Es ist der etwas konfuse, nicht ganz sympathische, durch konservative Kleidung und konservative Ansichten aus dem Rahmen fallende George Carmody. Dieser trifft schließlich mit der üblichen Verspätung ein. Er trägt einen Stapel Bücher mit einer eindrucksvollen Fülle an Einmerkblättern, zieht aus seiner Aktentasche einen blauen Heftordner mit einer stattlichen Anzahl dicht beschriebener Blätter und zeigt sich sodann bereit. Seine Absicht ist erklärtermaßen “to be as scholarly as possible” (HM 130). Bereits dies stößt auf allfälliges Misstrauen und gelinde Zweifel. Gleichwohl darf er beginnen. Now he looks at Howard, with bright eyes; he says, “You asked me to look at theories about the workings of social change in the works of Mill, Marx and Weber. I hope this is a justifiable interpretation.” Howard looks at the intolerable figure; he says, “I hope it is.” Carmody now dips his head, and draws the fat document from its folder; he begins to read the first sentence from the handwritten page. “Wait a minute,” says Howard, “are you proposing to read all that? ” (HM 131) Die studentische Rede dauert genau zwei Sätze. Es sind dies Sätze der Rekapitulation der Aufgabenstellung und der über das Wort ‘interpretation’ erfolgenden Andeutung der gewählten - hermeneutischen - Methode. Dann wird die Rede bereits jäh unterbrochen. Im Handumdrehen geht es um Verfahrensfragen; es geht um die korrekte Regelung der Rede, um - mit Foucault zu sprechen - ‘diskursive Polizierung’ durch das situationsmächtige Subjekt: Reden darf - und soll natürlich auch - der aufgeforderte Referent, d.h. die Kontrolle des Gebrauchs weist ihm die Rolle des Sprechers zu und gewährt ihm so auf pragmatischer Ebene eine gewisse diskursive Lizenz. Zugleich aber zeigen sich sofort auch Prozeduren 21 An diesem Beispiel lässt sich im Übrigen auch sehr schön verdeutlichen, dass es in der Satire, wie Wolfgang Weiß im Anschluss an Klaus Hempfer immer wieder betont hat, nicht um eine das ‘Richtige’ artikulierende Norm, sondern um eine Tendenz, um einen fiktiv eingenommenen Standpunkt geht, von dem aus ein Objekt beleuchtet werden kann, ohne dass sich der Satiriker etwa auf die Richtigkeit des Gegenteils einlassen muss. Malcolm Bradbury vorzuwerfen, er halte hier ein womöglich noch als ‘reaktionär’ zu etikettierendes Plädoyer für universitären Frontalunterricht im Stil der Vorlesung, liefe also völlig an der Intention des Texts vorbei. Siehe Weiß 1982: 7-9. Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 151 der Ausschließung und der Einschränkung. Zwar darf der Referent reden, wohl aber darf er nicht alles sagen, d.h. es gibt Tabus auf der Ebene der Semantik, Beschränkungen von außen. Und ihn trifft zudem die kommentierende Kontrolle von innen, welche seine Äußerungen wiederholend einzuschränken sucht auf die interne Wahrheit der gewählten Disziplin - das System soziologischen Denkens und Argumentierens als dem soziologischen Diskurs, in welchem die Aussagen zu treffen sind und außerhalb dessen alles Gesagte lediglich als störend empfunden wird, wofern es nicht als ungesagt verhallt oder gar überhaupt nicht zur Rede kommt. Der Bradbury’sche Text inszeniert mithin geradezu idealtypisch das von Foucault beschriebene Diskursgeschehen: “Drei große Ausschließungssysteme treffen den Diskurs: das verbotene Wort; die Ausgrenzung des Wahnsinns; der Wille zur Wahrheit.” (Foucault 1982: 14) Genau darum geht es also im vorliegenden Passus: um die Regelung der Interaktion im Seminar und um die Frage, wer die Macht hat, sich im gegebenen Kontext sprachlich durchzusetzen. Vor allem aber geht es aus funktionaler Sicht ums Verfahren, um die zu spielenden Rollen und deren attribuierten politischen Gehalt. Auf Howards Frage, ob er allen Ernstes alle vorformulierten Blätter vorzulesen gedenke, antwortet George Carmody im alten Stil mit einer Ehrfurchtsfloskel, und es entspannt sich erneut ein verfahrensbezogener Dialog: “Yes, sir,” says Carmody. “I’m not ‘sir’,” says Howard, “I don’t want your deference. Now, what did I ask you to do? ” “You asked me to look at Mill, Marx and Weber, and make a report,” says Carmody. “I asked you to go away and read their works, over the vacation,” says Howard, “and then make a spontaneous verbal statement to this class, summing up your impressions. I didn’t ask you to produce a written paper, and then sit here with your head hanging over it, presenting formalized and finished thoughts. What kind of group experience is that? ” “You did say that, sir,” says Carmody, “but I thought I could do something more developed. I’ve put in so much time on this.” “I don’t want it developed,” says Howard, “I want development to occur in discussion.” (HM 131 f.) Der Ausschnitt ist konstruiert um eine Anzahl von Oppositionen: hier Hierarchie und Autorität (‘sir’, ‘deference’), dort Egalität und Gemeinschaftserlebnis (‘group experience’, ‘discussion’); hier Insistenz auf Formalität (‘report’, ‘written paper’, ‘formalized and finished thoughts’), dort Informelles (‘spontaneous verbal statement’, ‘impressions’). Medial geht es um den Gegensatz von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, interaktiv um die Unterscheidung zwischen Vortragsmonolog und dialogischer Erarbeitung, didaktisch um autoritative Frontalvermittlung im Gegensatz zu gemeinschaftlicher Diskussion. Konzentriert sich Carmodys Ansatz auf Erkenntnis als vermeintliches Resultat einer abgeschlossenen und schriftlich fixierten Interpretation, geht es Kirk dezidiert um Erkenntnis als vermeintlichen Prozess im Rahmen einer offenen und nie abschließbaren mündlichen Diskussion. Andreas Mahler 152 Zwischen diesen beiden Positionen oszilliert nunmehr die Verfahrensdiskussion. Carmody besteht auf dem Vortrag seines ‘report’, Kirk auf einem frei gehaltenen spontanen ‘statement’ als eröffnender Diskussionseinleitung, als das, was man heutzutage wohl ‘Impulsreferat’ nennen würde. Aus diskursiver Sicht stagniert das Seminar. Man debattiert, ob der designierte Redner das, was er sagen soll, in der Form sagen darf, in der er es sagen möchte. Schließlich fallen Wertungen: Kirk bezeichnet Carmody despektierlich als “heavy, anal type” und seine gewählte Vorgehensweise als “heavy, anal job” (HM 132). Doch gerade dies gibt Carmody eine neue Chance. Er identifiziert sich nämlich mit dieser Bezeichnung und formuliert daraus, gewissermaßen essentialistisch abgefedert, erneut die dringende Bitte: “Please let me read my paper.” (ebd.) Dem kann sich der auf Demokratie und Chancengleichheit pochende Soziologiedozent nicht unmittelbar widersetzen. Es kommt zur demokratischen Abstimmung im Seminar. Carmody gewinnt, wenn auch knapp, und darf wieder lesen. Diskursiv gesehen, erhält er also erneut die Situationsmacht der Rede: “‘Well,’ says Howard, ‘you’ve got the consent of these tolerant people. Go ahead and read your formal paper’” (ebd.). Scheinbar auktorial berichtet im unmittelbaren Anschluss der Erzähler von der Wiederaufnahme der Lektüre: It is dull, dogged stuff, an old scheme of words, a weak little plot, a culling of obvious quotations surrounded by obvious comments, untouched with sympathy or that note of radical fire that, in Howard’s eyes, has so much to do with true intellectual awareness. (HM 133) Was sich hier zunächst als einvernehmliche Erzählerrede gibt, wandelt sich hinterrücks gegen Ende des Satzes über den Einschub ‘in Howard’s eyes’ zum Eindruck einer bloßen Wiedergabe von Figurenrede, zur perspektivisch gebundenen Gedankenwiedergabe einer sich in ihren Erwartungen bestätigenden Wahrnehmungsinstanz. Dies folgt einer personalisierenden Technik, deren sich Bradbury immer wieder in seinem Text bedient, um einen möglichen eigenen Standpunkt tunlichst zu verwischen. 22 22 Zum History Man als radikal dekonstruktivem Text, der nicht eine vermeintlich ‘falsche’ Position gegen eine ‘richtigere’ ausspielt, sondern vielmehr alle Positionen relativiert, siehe Borchardt 1997: 202 f.; ähnlich auch Reif-Hülser 2000: insbes. 176-178, welche sowohl Carmody als auch Kirk als zwei Seiten derselben - vergangenheitsbzw. zukunftsfixierten - ‘History Man’-Medaille auszuweisen vermag (S. 177). Zu einer - Cordelia Borchardts Einsicht eher wieder reduzierenden - Kritik hieran siehe Kühn 2002: 220 f. Vgl. auch die bierernste, satireungeschulte Empörung gegen den Roman als “an unpleasantly damaging book, damaging to sociology, to higher education, to politics, to any challenge to a worn-out ideology which, let us be clear, in its weakness and apolitical culturalism is complicit in the present success of the new right” bei Peter Widdowson 1984: 20. Howard Kirk hätte es nicht besser formulieren können. Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 153 Inhaltlich jedoch erfahren wir nichts: “The clock, on the wall above the greenboard, ticks and turns; the circle of people is bored” (ebd.). Schließlich meldet sich eine Studentin mit einer Frage. Die Interaktion geht in die entscheidende Phase: “Well,” says Merion, leaning forward, “I just want George to explain the methodology of this paper. So that I can understand it.” Carmody says, “Isn’t it evident? It’s an objective summary of my findings.” “But it doesn’t have any ideology, does it? ” asks Merion. “It’s filled with it,” says Michael Bennard, “The ideology of bourgeois self-justification.” “I meant ideological self-awareness,” says Merion. “Oh, I realize it doesn’t agree with your politics,” says Carmody, “but I think someone ought to stand back and look critically at these critics of society for a change.” “It doesn’t even agree with life,” says Michael Bennard. “You’re seeing society as a consensus which bad people from outside set out to upset, by wanting change. But people desire and need change; it’s their only hope, not some paranoid little deviance.” “That’s pure politics,” says Carmody, “may I get on with my paper? ” “It won’t do, George,” says Howard, intervening. “I’m afraid this is an anal, repressed paper in every way. Your model of society is static, as Michael says. It’s an entity with no internal momentum and no internal conflict. In short, it’s not sociologically valid.” A redness comes up Carmody’s neck, and reaches his lower face. He says, insistently, “I think it’s a possible point of view, sir.” “It may be in conservative circles,” says Howard, “it isn’t in sociological ones.” Carmody stares at Howard; some of the polite finish begins to come off him. “Isn’t that debatable, Dr Kirk? ” he asks, “I mean, are you sociology? ” “Yes,” says Howard, “for the present purpose, I am.” (HM 133f.) Dies ist der Moment des show-down; es ist der Moment diskursiver Disqualifikation, aber zugleich auch derjenige der Selbstdisqualifikation. Carmody ist es wissenstheoretisch zu tun um ein ‘objective summary of my findings’, um eine distanzierte Betrachtung der Gegebenheiten und deren anschließende neutrale Bewertung (‘someone ought to stand back and look critically at these critics of society’). Dass dies nicht geht, ist immer schon klar; dass es der Wissenschaftler gleichwohl stets neu versucht, ebenfalls - das ist schließlich seine Utopie. 23 Was auf diese Weise entsteht, ist nicht der letzthinnige, aber doch ein ‘possible point of view’: etwas, das im Sinne der Universität als einer Diskursgemeinschaft artikulierbar und dementsprechend sodann auch nach den genannten Prinzipien der Objektadäquatheit, intersubjektiven Nachvollziehbarkeit, Überprüfbarkeit als anderer Standpunkt, als alternative Möglichkeit, als Alterität zumindest ‘debatable’ sein müsste. 23 Zur Bewusstheit von der Standpunktabhängigkeit des Wissenschaftlers, der als Beobachter der Welt immer schon auch Teil der Welt ist, siehe, im Anschluss an den Heisenberg’schen Gedanken der Unschärfe, die Überlegungen bei Jurij M. Lotman, Die Innenwelt des Denkens. Eine semiotische Theorie der Kultur (2010: insbes. 370-376). Andreas Mahler 154 Doch gerade das ist es für den Dozenten Howard Kirk offensichtlich nicht. Er disqualifiziert die geäußerte Rede als ‘sociologically not valid’, als außerhalb des Sagbaren liegend, eigentlich nicht geäußert, nicht gehört. Damit bedient er sich genau der - andernorts von ihm inkriminierten - Strategien der Ausgrenzung, welche den Umgang mit dem Diskurs typischerweise charakterisieren. Das Gesagte gehört aus seiner Sicht nicht in die gewählte “Disziplin” (Foucault 1982: 21-25). Es ist von daher nicht debattierbar, denn es ist aus seiner Sicht schlechthin indiskutabel. Auf der schiefen Opposition von ‘conservative’ vs. ‘sociological’ verstummt das Wissenschaftsgespräch. Der Dozent arrogiert sich absolute Macht und weist den Andersdenkenden aus ‘seinem’ Feld der Wissenschaft. Hierin zeigt sich nunmehr in aller Deutlichkeit der Diskurs - speziell der wissenschaftliche Diskurs - als umkämpftes Wort. Und dieses Wort ist im fiktiven Wissenschaftskontext der Soziologie in Watermouth - und damit hat Carmody dann womöglich doch auch wieder recht - bloßer Spielball von ‘Politik’. Es geht trotz aller Rauminszenierung nicht um gleichberechtigten Austausch, sondern um machtvollen Ausschluss; nicht um die Debatte auch möglicher Standpunkte, sondern um das Ersticken der anderen Meinung im Keim zur überzeugten, womöglich auch verzweifelten, politischen Sicherung der eigenen, gegen vielfache Widerstände gerade erst mühsam prozessual erworbenen Position. Wo sich die Wissenschaft mitten im Leben (‘life’) wähnt, hat sie womöglich schon ihre - gleichwohl utopische - Distanz verloren. Wohl scheint sie mit einem Mal ‘relevant’, 24 doch ist sie gerade darin immer schon parteilich und riskiert erkenntnisvermeidende ‘blinde Flecken’. Statt in unmöglicher Weise fiktiv und illusionär von außen her ‘der Wahrheit verpflichtet’ zu sein, 25 ist sie ‘im Wahren’ und damit immer schon bedroht, wo nicht ‘beschädigt’. Denn worum es geht, ist nicht mehr so sehr die Sicherung objektbezogener Erkenntnis, sondern die Sicherstellung subjektgeleiteter Beziehung: Wo sich die Inhalte vermeintlich revolutionär wandeln, bleiben Beziehung und Machtgefälle auf interessierte Weise stabil. Entsprechend lautet Carmodys Analyse: 24 Zum in den sechziger Jahren insbesondere über die Soziologie bedienten Relevanzphantasma der Geisteswissenschaften siehe auch den Roman selbst: “The university, having aspirations to relevance, has made much of sociology; and it would be hard to find anyone in the field with a greater sense of relevance than Howard.” (HM 3) 25 So das Plädoyer des fiktiven Professors Hanno Hackmann in Dietrich Schwanitz’ Der Campus (1995). Schwanitz’ Roman ist insofern mit Wolfgang Weiß verknüpft, als erst Weiß’ These, der Universitätsroman sei aufgrund der dort herrschenden öffentlichen Bildungsdebatte, also eines etablierten ‘Diskurses’ über Bildung, eine kulturspezifisch anglo-amerikanische Angelegenheit, Schwanitz zum Abfassen einer Weiß vermeintlich Lügen strafenden deutschsprachigen campus novel provoziert hat. Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 155 “Of course you all do have a conflict model. Everyone’s interest conflicts with everyone else’s. But better not conflict with Dr Kirk. Oh, no, it’s not a consensus model for his classes all right. I mean, we’re democratic, and we vote, but no dirty old conservative standpoints here. Sociology’s revolutionary, and we’d better agree.” (HM 134) Wie bei den geschmähten ‘Konservativen’ auch, fallen bei den ‘Revolutionären’ Theorie und Praxis immer dann auseinander, wenn es um die Rettung der eigenen Haut geht. 26 So wie das Konsensmodell eines George Carmody - unter Umständen verschwiegene - Konflikte voraussetzt, die es vorgeblich zu pazifizieren sucht, setzt das Konfliktmodell Konsens voraus, den es tunlichst im Verborgenen hält, im gegebenen Fall der Bedrohung aber mit Macht herstellen muss, um sich nicht selbst in Gefahr zu bringen. Folgerecht ist dies der Moment, wo Howard die Notbremse zieht. Er verwirft Carmodys Rede in den Wahnsinn, verleiht ihr einen durch emotionale Aufgewühltheit ausgelösten Krankheitsstatus (“I don’t think you’re in a state to understand anything that’s being said to you”; ebd.), verspricht scheinheilig alles bisher Gesagte zu ‘vergessen’ und die Sitzung ganz neu zu beginnen. Doch Carmody spielt nicht mehr mit. Er verlässt türenschlagend den Raum, in dem sich sodann, ohne seine störende Anwesenheit, eine vergnügliche Lehrstunde entfaltet. Diese endet schließlich mit einem gemeinsamen Kaffee. Dort bilanziert Howards Studentin Felicity Phee das bisherige diskursive Machtspiel mit den Worten: “I hope you never decide to destroy me like that.” (HM 135) IV. Widerlegung oder Vernichtung ist nunmehr also die entscheidende Opposition im akademischen Diskursspiel. “No chances for people like that” (ebd.), bilanziert seinerseits der Soziologiedozent und etikettiert sein studentisches Gegenüber wohlfeil als “imperialist fascist” und “the enemy personified” (HM 136), d.h. als Gegner im politischen Kampf und nicht als Partner in der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion. Entsprechend potenzieren sich die diskursiven Ausschlussmechanismen in der sich anschließenden, von George Carmody gesuchten Aussprache. Kirk besteht auf seiner exklusiven Besetzung des Feldes der Soziologie und verwirft alles außerhalb dieses von ihm selbst gezogenen Rahmens Geäußerte ins Feld des Wahnsinns. Zugleich bedient er sich der Notenmacht und bedroht Carmody auch auf diese Weise mit dem Ausschluss. Carmody ist intelligent genug, die aufgemachte Zwickmühle eines pseudodemokratischen 26 Zum Zusammenhang von theoretischer Position und individuellem Interesse vgl. auch die Überlegungen bei Christoph Bode, Den Text? Die Haut retten! Bemerkungen zur “Flut der Interpretationen” und zur institutionalisierten Literaturwissenschaft (1992). Andreas Mahler 156 double-bind 27 zu erkennen, ist aber ohnmächtig, sich in irgendeiner Weise dagegenstemmen zu können, ohne nicht zugleich Kirk so zu bedrohen, dass dieser dies als Attacke oder Erpressung zu deuten vermag: “Oh, you get me every way, don’t you? ” asks Carmody, leaning his back against the door, “I fit in, or I fail. And if I try to fight back, and preserve myself, well, you’re my teacher, you can tear me to pieces in public, and mark my essays down in private. Can’t I exist as well? ” (ebd.) Trotz dieser flehentlichen Bitte auf Existenzrecht eskaliert die Situation. Diskursiv disqualifiziert und annulliert Howard zusehends seinen Studenten: Carmodys Essays seien “bad work”, “this same old stuff rolled out” (HM 137), sein Benehmen erratisch (“You never quite do what you’ve been asked to do”; HM 138). In der Kommunikation mit Carmodys Tutorin dreht er den Spieß der Bedrohung um: “He wants to destroy me” (HM 142). Und im abschließenden Gespräch mit dem Institutsvorstand, welcher im Versuch, Einvernehmen zu erzielen, noch einmal das die Universität leitende - Kirk wie Carmody gleichermaßen betreffende - “concept of academic disinterestedness” (HM 144) ins Spiel bringt, verlangt er - nun seinerseits vollends formal - Carmodys endgültige Elimination ins ‘wilde Außen’: “I want him banned from the department. I want him disciplined.” (HM 145) Im Foucault’schen Sinne ‘diszipliniert’ werden sollen hätte er in die Kirk’sche Soziologie; und da dies nicht gelungen ist, muss sein Verhalten geahndet werden. Aus Kirks Sicht gehört Carmody ganz ins Außen. Und was immer er dort dann sagt, verhallt ungehört. Carmody wird verwiesen ins Feld des verbotenen Worts. Diese Konstellation des verbotenen Worts wiederholt sich sodann noch einmal im Folgekapitel IX: in der Departmentsbzw. Fachbereichsratssitzung. Inmitten der Fülle furios umkämpfter Redelizenzen und Redeverhinderungsstrategien, die wiederum nicht als direkte fiktive Modellierung zu verstehen sind, sondern in satirischer Erzählweise beim Leser Vertrautes abzurufen suchen, 28 kommt dort die Rede auf den innerhalb des Faches auch biologisch-genetische Argumente nicht ausschließenden Soziologen Mangel, der als renommierter Kollege möglicherweise zum Gastvortrag geladen werden soll. Es ist dies in der Tagesordnung TOP 17 “Visiting speakers” (HM 156). Bradbury überdreht dabei die Situation um ein weiteres, denn Mangel ist zunächst gar nicht eingeladen. Eine ominöse, vermutlich über Howard Kirk initiierte Nachricht auf dem Diktaphon der Sekretärin des Departmentleiters Professor Marvin verbreitet das Gerücht von einem möglichen Gastvortrag Mangels und löst eine entspre- 27 Zur paradoxalen Struktur des double-bind als einer - in diesem Fall - lose-lose- Situation siehe Watzlawick/ Beavin/ Jackson 1982: 194-203. 28 Aus diesem Grund vorausgesetzter Referenzierbarkeit scheint eine Übersetzung von ‘departmental meeting’ auch mit dem Ausdruck ‘Fachbereichsratssitzung’ legitim; vgl. auch die konstatierte Nähe der fiktiven Universität Watermouth zum “Konstanzer Modell” bei Reif-Hülser 2000: 169. Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 157 chend empörte Diskussion aus. Auf den Verweis auf die Nichtigkeit der Diskussion verstummt die Debatte nicht, sondern kippt ins Fiktive. Howard erkundigt sich, ob denn das Department Mangel einladen würde, wenn er vorgeschlagen wäre. Hierauf erfolgt ein ganz ähnliches Ausschlussverfahren wie im Fall des missliebigen Studenten: “The point is that Professor Mangel’s work is fascist, and we’ve no business to confirm that by inviting him here,” says Moira Millikin. “I had always thought that the distinguishing mark of fascism was its refusal to tolerate free enquiry, Dr Millikin,” says Marvin, “but the question needs no discussion, since there’s no proposal to invite this man. […]” (HM 157) Diskursiv wird also der unerwünschten Person ein Etikett aufgeheftet, welches sie von vornherein disqualifiziert und ins wilde Außen versetzt, ohne dass eine weitere Debatte vonnöten wäre. Noch einmal ist dies das leichtfertige Etikett des ‘Faschisten’. Der soziologische Wille zur Wahrheit duldet keine solchermaßen etikettierbaren Äußerungen; er erklärt sie zum verbotenen Wort und verwirft sie ins indiskutable wilde Außen wahnhaft verirrter Sprache. Dies ruft den aus Nazi-Deutschland vertriebenen Dr Zachery auf den Plan. Vor dem Hintergrund, dass der Vorsitzende in einem abwiegelnden Nebensatz auch gar keine Chance für eine erfolgreiche Einladung Mangels sehen will, blickt Zachery aus gelangweilt vertiefter Lektüre auf und stellt die Frage nach einem möglichen Grund hierfür: “May I ask why? ” asks Dr Zachery, the British Journal of Sociology forgotten. “Why? ” asks Fundy. “Do you know what the consequences of inviting this man would be? One doesn’t tolerate . . .” “But that is just what one does,” says Dr Zachery. “One tolerates. May I propose, and I think this is in order, since the agenda permits us to make suggestions for visiting speakers, that we issue a formal invitation from this department to Professor Mangel to come and speak to this department? ” (HM 157f.) Es geht erneut ums Rederecht, um Freiheit als die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden, um Toleranz des unbequemen Standpunkts; statt um Ausschluss und selbstbestätigende Ausgrenzung geht es um Hereinholung, um Zuhören, um Auseinandersetzung. Entsprechend begründet Dr Zachery seinen Antrag: “You wish to put that as a motion? ” asks Marvin, looking at Zachery. “I do,” says Zachery, “and I should like to speak to my motion. I observe, among some of my younger colleagues, perhaps less experienced in recent history than some of us, a real ignorance of the state of affairs we are discussing. Professor Mangel and myself have a background in common; we are both Jewish, and both grew up in Nazi Germany, and fled here from the rise of fascism. I think we know the meaning of this term. Fascism, and the associated genocide, arose because a climate developed in Germany in which it was held that all intellectual activity conform with an accepted, approved ideology. To make this happen, it was necessary to Andreas Mahler 158 make a climate in which it became virtually impossible to think, or exist, outside the dominant ideological construct. Those who did were isolated, as now some of our colleagues seek to isolate Professor Mangel. […] Fascism is therefore an elegant sociological construct, a one-system world. Its opposite is contingency or pluralism or liberalism. That means a chaos of opinion and ideology; there are people who find that hard to endure. But in the interest of it, I think we must ask Professor Mangel to come here and lecture.” (HM 158) Dies ist ein engagiertes Plädoyer für eine plurale offene Gesellschaft: 29 gegen eine einzige, exklusive Geltung beanspruchende ‘Wahrheit’, gegen Absolutheitsansprüche, Ausschluss und ‘Isolation’; für Meinungsvielfalt, Relativierung, das Aushalten von Kontingenz. Dem kann sich trotz aller politischer Bedenken auch ein solches Gremium kaum widersetzen. Folgerecht kommt es zur Abstimmung und schließlich sogar zur unerwarteten Annahme des - an sich gar nicht vorgesehenen - Antrags mit 11 zu 10 Stimmen. Mangel wird eingeladen. Allerdings erweist sich das Ganze im Nachhinein in Bradburys Fiktion als Strategie Howards, um Mangel entsprechend vorführen zu können. Am konkreten Beispiel will er nämlich verdeutlichen, wie intolerabel Figuren wie Mangel in der zeitgenössischen Universität geworden sind. Erzählt wird dies alles jedoch nicht. Erst sehr viel später erfährt der Leser en passant, wie Mangel eingeladen wurde (HM 217 f.), wie sich die studentische Öffentlichkeit gegen seinen Auftritt mobilisieren ließ, wie es zu Protestaktionen kam; wie sowohl der Departmentleiter Professor Marvin als auch die Mangel-Schülerin Dr Beniform sich verhindert sahen, Mangel einzuführen; wie stattdessen Henry Beamish dazu ausersehen ward, dies zu tun; wie er, sobald er selbst das Wort ergreifen wollte, niedergezischt wurde und er sich hinreißen ließ zum ungeschickt-empörten Ausruf: “You’re the fascists; this is a crime against free speech.” (HM 218) Dies löste einen Aufschrei und eine Stampede der Rechtschaffenen aus, unter der Beamish niedergetrampelt und sein Büro vandalisiert wurde, ohne dass jemand je bemerkt hätte, dass Mangel gar nicht anwesend war. In fact it was not until the next day, when Henry was in hospital, that the news about Mangel became known; of the many there that day, only Mangel had neglected to come, having died, the evening previous to the lecture, of a heart attack, in his London apartment. (HM 219) Die allgemeine Erregung einer hysterisierten Menge hat entsprechend eine Stimme vertrieben, die gar nicht mehr in der Lage gewesen wäre, zu sprechen. Die Grenze zwischen ausgegrenzt zu haltendem Wahn und ausgrenzendem Fanatismus wird fließend. Die ‘Guten’ und die ‘Bösen’ sind nurmehr schwer zu scheiden. 29 Zur offenen Gesellschaft und ihren Bedrohungen siehe die klassische Studie von Karl Popper, Die Offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde (1980). Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 159 V. Bradburys History Man modelliert ein Diskursuniversum, in dem die Oppositionen umso schärfer gezogen werden, je mehr sie riskieren, zu kollabieren. Der Roman zeigt die Panik derjenigen, die sich in langen Jahren Macht erstritten haben, davor, diese wieder zu verlieren. Diese Macht lässt sich vornehmlich beschreiben als diskursive Macht, welche über rhetorische Spiele zu halten gesucht wird, koste es, was es wolle. Es sind dies Spiele, die genau von dem leben, was sie inkriminieren. Dagegen setzt der Roman den Gestus der Dekonstruktion. Ein Anliegen dekonstruktiven Denkens, dem Bradbury selbst nicht unbedingt gewogen war, 30 besteht gerade darin, die in ihren Fixierungen ‘todbringenden’ Oppositionen westlichen Denkens zu beseitigen, 31 um auf diese Weise zur Utopie der freien Rede, des freien Gedankenaustauschs vorzudringen. Vielleicht aber zeigt sich hierin auch eine entscheidende Bestimmung der Universität selbst: nämlich der Universität als Freiraum, als Raum der Möglichkeit, des Ausprobierens, des Nebeneinanderstellens immer wieder neuer und anderer Systeme des Denkens und Argumentierens, welche Wahrheit erproben, ohne sie zu fetischisieren, welche Erkenntnis fördern, ohne sie zu verabsolutieren, welche sich einer - wie auch immer utopischen, fiktiven, im Als-Ob verbleibenden - ‘Interesselosigkeit’ verpflichtet sehen, bevor sie notgedrungen sodann wiederum in den Widerstreit unmittelbarer politischer Interessen geraten. Insofern wäre die eingangs konstatierte ‘Entdeckung der Welt’ durch den Professor im Sinne einer unmittelbaren Einmischung und Verpflichtung gegenüber der Lebenswelt - dem, was als ‘life’ gilt - gar nicht unbedingt wünschenswert. Denn die Universität muss vielmehr Laboratorium sein, Elfenbeinturm, Utopie bzw. Heterotopie, um genau darin ihre Funktion der intellektuell-distanziert gesellschaftsbeschreibenden, gesellschaftsbegleitenden, gesellschaftsverändernden Alterierung, des Denkens und Vorstellens anderer Möglichkeiten als lediglich der gegebenen zu erfüllen. 32 Das Motto zu Weiß’ Universitätsromanbuch verweist auf ein dem elisabethanischen Dichter und Prediger John Donne entnommenes Bild von der Universität als hortus conclusus - zugegebenermaßen zugleich auch auf das der “wildernesse”, des Dr Zacheryschen ‘Chaos’. 33 Vielleicht, so 30 Siehe etwa seinen Text My Strange Quest for Mensonge (1987). 31 Zum Gedanken, dass es in der postaufklärerischen Gesellschaft vor allem darum gehe, “to deconstruct […] death-dealing binary oppositions”, siehe, am Beispiel der gender-Opposition und mit Bezug auf Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Sexual/ Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory (1985). 32 Zum Konzept der Heterotopie als einer ‘tatsachlich realisierten Utopie’ mit charakteristisch gleicher Geltung des Bestehenden und Nicht-Bestehenden siehe Michel Foucault, “Andere Räume” (1991: v.a. 39). 33 “The University is a Paradise, Rivers of Knowledge are there. Arts and Sciences flow from thence. Counsell Tables are Horti conclusi, (as it is said in the Canticles), Gardens that are walled in, and they are Fontes signati, Wells that are sealed up; bot- Andreas Mahler 160 zeigt Bradburys Universitätssatire, müssen Universitäten genau auch solche abgegrenzten Biotope sein und nicht nur - wie oft vermeint - Brennpunkte des Politischen, um ihre Aufgabe in der heutigen - in jeder - Gesellschaft zu erfüllen. Literaturverzeichnis Antor, Heinz (1996). Der englische Universitätsroman. Bildungskonzepte und Erziehungsziele. (Anglistische Forschungen 238). Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Blumenberg, Hans (1964). “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans.” In: Hans Robert Jauß (ed.). Nachahmung und Illusion. München: Fink. 9-27. Bode, Christoph (1992). Den Text? Die Haut retten! Bemerkungen zur “Flut der Interpretationen” und zur institutionalisierten Literaturwissenschaft. (Essay 12). Graz: Droschl. Borchardt, Cordelia (1997). Vom Bild der Bildung. Bildungsideale im angloamerikanischen Universitätsroman des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. (Studien zur englischen Literatur 8). Münster: L IT . Bourdieu, Pierre (1974). Zur Soziologie symbolischer Formen. Transl. Wolfgang Fietkau, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp (stw 107). Bradbury, Malcolm (1982). The History Man. London: Arrow Books. Donne, John (1953-1962). The Sermons. Ed. George R. Potter/ Evelyn M. Simpson. 10 Bde. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dubber, Ulrike (1991). Der englische Universitätsroman der Nachkriegszeit. Ein Beitrag zur Gattungsbestimmung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Foucault, Michel (1982). Die Ordnung des Diskurses. Inauguralvorlesung am Collège de France - 2. Dezember 1970. (Ullstein Materialien). Transl. Walter Seitter. Frankfurt a.M. & Berlin & Wien: Ullstein. [Original (1971). L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard]. Foucault, Michel ( 2 1991). “Andere Räume.” In: Karlheinz Barck/ Peter Gente/ Heidi Paris/ Stefan Richter (eds.). Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik. Leipzig: Reclam. 34-46. Goch, Martin (1992). Der englische Universitätsroman nach 1945. “Welcome to Bradbury Lodge.” (Horizonte 10). Trier: wvt. Goffman, Erving ( 5 1985). Wir alle spielen Theater. Die Selbstdarstellung im Alltag. Transl. Peter Weber-Schäfer. München: Piper. Habermas, Jürgen (1988). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. 2 Bde. Frankfurt a.M.. Suhrkamp (es 1502/ 1503). Himmelsbach, Barbara (1992). Der englische Universitätsroman. Frankfurt a.M. [etc.]: Peter Lang. Huber, Martin (2012). “Wer erzählt die Universität? Warum wir deutsche Campusromane brauchen.” Forschung und Lehre 19/ 1. 47-48. Imhof, Rüdiger (1993). “Akademia im Roman.” In: Annegret Maack/ Rüdiger Imhof (eds.). Radikalität und Mäßigung. Der englische Roman seit 1960. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. 130-148. tomless depths of unsearchable Counsels there” - “an University is but a wildernesse, though we gather our learning there”; John Donne, The Sermons (1953-1962: Bd. VI: 227 u. Bd. IV: 160) (vgl. Weiß 1988: VII). Die Universität als Diskursgemeinschaft 161 Kühn, Thomas (2002). Two Cultures, Universities and Intellectuals. Der englische Universitätsroman der 70er und 80er Jahre im Kontext des Hochschuldiskurses. Tübingen: Narr. 220-235. Lausberg, Heinrich ( 3 1990). Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner. Lotman, Jurij M. (2010). Die Innenwelt des Denkens. Eine semiotische Theorie der Kultur. Transl. Gabriele Leupold & Olga Radetzkaja. Berlin: Suhrkamp (stw 1944). Luhmann, Niklas (1993). Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft. 3 Bde. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp (stw 1091- 1093). Mahler, Andreas (2010). “Diskurs. Versuch einer Entwirrung.” ZfSL 120. 153-173. Moi, Toril (1985). Sexual/ Textual Politics. Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen. Popper, Karl ( 6 1980). Die Offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde. 2 Bde. Transl. Paul K. Feyerabend. München & Bern: Francke (UTB 472-473). Reckwitz, Erhard (1987). “Literaturprofessoren als Romanciers. Die Romane von David Lodge und Malcolm Bradbury.” GRM 37. 199-217. Reif-Hülser, Monika (2000). “Vom schwierigen Verhältnis zwischen Theorie und Praxis. Überlegungen zu Malcolm Bradburys Universitätsroman The History Man.” In: Reingard M. Nischik (ed.). Uni literarisch. Lebenswelt Universität in literarischer Repräsentation. Konstanz: UVK. 165-184. Shakespeare, William (1975). As You Like It. (New Arden). Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Methuen. Titzmann, Michael (1977). Strukturale Textanalyse. Theorie und Praxis der Interpretation, München: Fink (UTB 582). Titzmann, Michael (1989). “Kulturelles Wissen - Diskurs - Denksystem. Zu einigen Grundbegriffen der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung.” ZfSL 99. 47-61. Watzlawick, Paul/ Janet H. Beavin/ Don D. Jackson ( 6 1982). Menschliche Kommunikation. Formen, Störungen, Paradoxien. Bern & Stuttgart & Wien: Huber. Weiß, Wolfgang (1979). Das Studium der englischen Literatur. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart [etc.]: Kohlhammer (Urban Tb. 303). Weiß, Wolfgang (1982).“Probleme der Satireforschung und das heutige Verständnis der Satire. Einleitung.” In: Wolfgang Weiß (ed.). Die englische Satire. (Wege der Forschung 562). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Weiß, Wolfgang (1988 [1994, erweiterte Ausgabe]). Der anglo-amerikanische Universitätsroman. Eine historische Skizze. Darmstadt. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Erträge der Forschung 260). Widdowson, Peter (1984). “The Anti-History Men. Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.” Critical Quarterly 26. 5-32. Andreas Mahler FU Berlin Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 1 Christian Quendler The ability to capture impressions of movement and to store them for replay as a more or less stable record of the world are without doubt film’s most celebrated features. Although this double function of film as a perceptual and a mnemonic medium has lent itself to a variety of uses, it has been studied mostly in its narrative application: the recording of perceptual experiences and their reproduction within a narrative frame. As film historians such as Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have pointed out, the predominant focus on narrative cinema in orthodox film histories has led to a bias that defines early cinema for what it lacks rather than study early films on their own terms and in their historical contexts. This article proposes an alternative approach. Instead of subsuming the perceptual and mnemonic functions of film exclusively within a narrative scope, I will examine them as mediated practices of autopsy and autography. These notions of seeing with one’s own eyes and recording with one’s own hand are defining constituents of testimonial genres such as travelogues, diaries and notebooks, which played a key role in the early development of film. As these notions and their generic contexts lend themselves to narrative as well as non-narrative uses, they are particularly apt to address the diversity of early cinema and its intersections with artistic, scientific, legal and medical discourses. Further, the deeper meanings of these concepts draw attention to the meta-implications of media use: Just as autopsy not only refers to an act of eyewitnessing but also signifies reflecting on the self and being in the absence of life, the autograph extends its literal meaning when it promises to trace something (about the writer or writing) that seems irreplaceable and individual. Discussing early film criticism and films from the first two decades of the twentieth century, I will examine instances of filmic autopsy and autography as strategies of exploring a novel medium and self through that medium. 1 The research for this article was supported by the project of the Austrian Science Fund “Framing Media: The Periphery of Fiction and Film.” AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Christian Quendler 164 In coming to terms with the diversity of cinematic technologies and uses, media theorists, philosophers and historians have variously called for reflexive approaches that acknowledge the continuities and discontinuities of cinema’s relations across time, cultural practices as well as other arts and media. In order to avoid teleological traps of historiography and mono-dimensional accounts, André Gaudreault suggested that film historical research should assume a multiplicity of perspectives that is adequate to the polymorphous nature of cinema and sensitive to the heterogeneity of visual cultures: “[T]he film historian must devote himself or herself to adopting a panoptic vision, to privileging a panoramic view, assuming a battery of successive observation posts no less complex than the most complicated of Muybridge’s devices” (Gaudreault 2000: 9). Gaudreault’s methodological alternative can be described as a network model of cultural practices that emerges from studying intermedial relations. Such intermedial research perspectives have proved to be immensely productive. They shed light on intricate continuities among periods commonly referred to as pre-cinema and early cinema, rather than presenting the invention of the cinematograph as a radical rupture in the media landscape: “New mediums [sic] are reputed to take their first steps by reproducing in a rather servile manner the other mediums [sic] from which they are more or less derived, and the cinema does not seem to stray from this model” (Gaudreault 2000: 9). Intermedial histories of cinema have also helped to revise shortcomings of film historical approaches that unduly privilege narrative forms. Instead of regarding early cinema as a primitive or initial stage in film’s evolutionary development towards a narrative master medium, media historicist frameworks appear more adept at appraising early cinema in its own terms and accounting for the historical discontinuities with subsequent periods associated with the ‘rise of narrative cinema’. Drawing on intermediality research and insights in media archeology that focus on operational images responding to the demands of the body and the senses, this article proposes a complementary approach. 2 I will examine two notions supported by the cinematic dispositif that pervade the history and theory of cinema as a means of reflection and expression: autopsy and autography,which can be defined as acts of personal witnessing and recording that are also endowed with the reflexive meanings of ‘self-view’ or introspection, on one hand, and of affirming or ‘signing’ of one’s singular identity, on the other. The heuristic power of these notions is expansive. Autopsy and autography are constitutive features of testimonial genres including travelogues, journals and diaries. They interlink narrative and non-narrative as well as fictional and non-fictional genres. They are critical to artistic and scientific discourses as well as 2 I am particularly indebted to Thomas Elseasser’s research program outlined in “The Troubled Trope.” Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 165 legal, medical and philosophical domains. What makes these concepts particularly useful for a historical analysis of cinema is that they describe specific practices that address the three dimensions of art that Jacques Rancière refers to as ethical, representational and aesthetic regimes. 3 Instead of singling out abstract modes that refer to each of these dimensions (such as, for instance, the representational distinction between showing and telling, or the ethical distinction between conscious and unconscious or intentional and unintentional) autopsy and autography refer to embodied practices or gestures where these dimensions are always already negotiated. 4 I will begin by defining the terms autopsy and autography in relation to their ethical, representational and aesthetic implications. Although the notions of autopsy and autography are traditionally regarded as personal acts that highlight human agency, I will argue that a film historical reading that replaces the sense of self in the prefix ‘auto’ with the mechanical automatism of the camera sheds light on the formation of media identity in this early period of film history and its repercussions on modern conceptions of self. 1. Ethical, representational and aesthetic implications of autopsy and autography My discussion in this part is organized around Jacques Rancière’s tripartite conception of art as being distributed across ethical, representational and aesthetic regimes. The ethical regime concerns the social function of art. Ethics is understood here in a pragmatic sense that focuses less on norms of good ethical behavior than on the subject’s situation in a scene that is described in ethical terms. Accordingly, the ethical dimension of images and media can be described in values that qualify their social uses and effects (e.g. diverting vs. instructive, or harmful vs. beneficial). The representational dimension referes to the means and techniques of artistic expression as a repertoire of formal conventions, which Rancière relates back to the ancient meaning of art as a craft. By contrast, the aesthetic regime is understood in a distinctly modern sense. It describes a realm of reflection and intervention where representational conventions and ethical values are suspended, interrogated and negotiated. 3 For the distinctions of these dimensions in artistic works see Rancière 2000. 4 I am not arguing against the usefulness of such representational and ethical categories. They are extremely useful for systematic approaches in intermediality research as, among others, Werner Wolf’s important publications document. See also Rajewsky 2002. Yet, historical or genetic approaches to intermediality will inevitably have to address specific configurations of these categories such as autopsy and autography that are established through genres and other cultural practices of use. On historical research programs of intermediality see also Gaudreault/ Marion 2005. Christian Quendler 166 What are the ethical, representational and aesthetic implications of the notions of autopsy and autography? Perhaps the strongest implications of these terms are ethical, which also accounts for the prominent role they play in diaries and travelogues. The ethical bearings of autopsy and autography result from the sense of authenticity and authority that they connote. The assertion of having witnessed something with one’s own eyes situates the observer in the immediate context with the observed. The focus on the situational context in acts of autopsy can be associated with certain representational conventions. As a central trope in travel literature, the autopsy principle does not only focus on detailed descriptions of objects or events observed, it also includes minute descriptions of the observer’s personal circumstances, his or her thoughts and habits. 5 The ethics of autopsy gauge the distance between the observer and the observed and his or her commitment in the situation. As I will discuss below, this ethical dimension relates especially to the possibility of situating a camera as a secret observer or using it as an invasive instrument. This secrecy may be evaluated negatively as a form of voyeurism (where the observer’s role in the siutation is ethically dubious) or it may be legitimized by placing the camera in the service of a private detective. Similarly, the invasive dimension of the camera can be seen as a threat to privacy or re-evaluated with reference to a scientific or medical context, where such invasions are considered acceptable. While autopsy as an authenticity claim deals primarily with experiential aspects, autography asserts authenticity by claiming authority over the production and representation of the experiential content. The autograph quite literally vouchsafes for the authenticity of an expression and its author. Autography extends its literal meaning when it promises to trace something about the writer or the writing that is irreplaceable and individual. Just as writing can stand in for the writer, style can become a signature for the author. The sense in which autography is used here differs somewhat from Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic arts, which he explicitly introduced without implications “concerning the individuality of expression demanded by or attainable in these arts” (Goodman 1969: 119). However, to the extent that his distinction addresses a basic problem related to the production, mediation and reception of an artwork, it is also pertinent to my discussion. Goodman uses these terms to determine which features of an artwork are constitutive and which are merely contingent. Whereas autographic arts like painting come with the proclamation of singularity and genuineness 5 See esp. William E. Stewart’s (1978) Die Reisebeschreibung und ihre Theorie in Deutschland. More recently, Vanessa Angew has revisited this notion of the autopsy in the diaries of Thomas Cook. Laura Rascaroli (2009) also briefly touches upon the autopsy principle in her discussion of diary films. Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 167 (which qualifies even the most exact duplication as a fake), allographic arts, like music or architecture, seem resistant to such forgeries. Differences in the performance of a musical work do not falsify the aesthetic genuineness of a musical composition but are rather incidental to its actualization during a performance: Initially, perhaps, all arts are autographic. Where works are transitory, as in singing and reciting, or require many persons for their production, as in architecture and symphonic music, a notation may be devised in order to transcend the limitations of time and the individual. (Goodman 1969: 121) Whereas Goodman probes the question whether the “institution of a notational system [could] transform painting or etching from an autographic to an allographic art” (195), I will reverse the question by approaching it from a perspective of media anthropology: To what extent can an allographic dimension associated with film technology attain an autographic status? Goodman’s reflections on modes of production as art-specific criteria have already touched upon representational aspects. As Rancière puts it, the representational regime identifies the substance of art by means of the conceptual pair of poesies and mimesis. In its most basic sense, the representational regime defines art as an activity and the arts as specific ways of doing or making. Artistic processes are guided externally in acts of imitations (e.g. in copying a spectacle of nature) and regulated internally by creative interventions (e.g. by arranging such a spectacle as a scene or entangling it in a plot). While the former, mimetic principle stresses resemblance of external relations, the latter, poetic principle highlights the organicity or surplus of meaning brought about by internal relations. Thus, on the representational level, autopsy and autography align with the pure spectacle of the senses, on one hand, and the arrangement and fabrication of these in narrative and non-narrative forms, on the other. Finally, the aesthetic implications of the concepts of autopsy and autography can be found in the deeper meanings of these terms. As introduced at the beginning of this part, in the aesthetic regime, we can contemplate, investigate or probe the senses and meanings attributed to what is sensible. These meanings address the sensible in experiential and representational terms (i.e., what can be perceived as form) as well as in ethical terms (i.e., what is likely to be of benefit). This reflexive dimension is manifest in an existential interpretation of autopsy as a reflection on the self in the presence or absence of life. This sense of autopsy falls right between the psychological and the pathological uses of the term and can Christian Quendler 168 be defined as reflecting on being and living in the face of death. 6 As an alternative to the transcendental concept of death, the limits of the self can be reflected in the light of inanimate mechanical objects and routines that interrupt and displace the experiential stream that informs our notions of self. While autopsy is a form of self-reflection guided by a sense of alterity (e.g. non-human or non-living), autography is a form of self-reflection that builds upon metonymic relations (e.g. by understanding the writer through his or her writing). Having outlined how practices of autopsy and autography shape notions of self across ethical, representational and aesthetic dimensions, I want to examine what happens when the sense of self in the prefix ‘auto’ is replaced by the idea of a cinematic automatism. We can describe this process as mutual re-description of self and media. On the one hand, novel media allow us to experience ourselves in new ways and this defamiliarizing experience can serve as an expression of what escapes our notions of self. Conversely, media can also help to reduce the complexity in our conception of personal identities by breaking it down to a humanscale scenario of media user. Media thereby offer a way of understanding ourselves by blending vague notions of the self with those of the self as a user of technology, such as language users, readers or movie goers. 7 On the other hand, we identify media by blending them with familiar practices and human-scale scenarios of use. For instance, early terms for cinema such as screen play and motion pictures project theatrical and painterly frames on this novel technology. Accordingly, projecting notions of autopsy and autography onto cinema entails a two-fold process of endowing cinema with a functional sense of identity and re-experiencing oneself. In the first step, cinema simply serves as an instrument of autopsy and autography; in the second step, the experience of autopsy and autography mediated by film is related to the film user. The second part of this article will focus on the first step, where autopsy and autography reflects upon cinema as a means of seeing and recording. In the third part, I will turn to the second step, focusing on filmic instances of autopsy and autography that reveal insights about the user. Before discussing specific filmic practices of autopsy and autography as well as their ethical, representational and aesthetic ramifications, it is helpful to contextualize these practices by outlining how early and classi- 6 In Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, Marius Mjaaland (2008: 9) proposed defining autopsy as “a continuous reflection on self, facing the interruption of death and the problem of despair.” 7 Following George Lakoff’s and Mark Johnson’s theories of embodiment, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have proposed a model of conceptual integration that builds on analogies and disanalogies between basic human-scale stories and the environments we live in. See esp. Lakoff/ Johnson 1999, as well as Fauconnier/ Turner 2002; see also Turner 2008. Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 169 cal film theorists responded to the challenge film posed to established ethical and representational conceptions of art. I will conclude this part by looking at three exemplary positions: early pictorial theories of film as well as approaches to cinema that evolved in the context of futurism and critical theory. A central problem in early art criticism on film concerns the representational nature of the photographic image, which became a test case for renegotiating the boundaries between art and science. One main concern in early writings on film as art was scientific precision, which was either deemed to exceed or fall short of the aesthetic imperatives of realism and naturalism. 8 A strain of early film theory, which is sometimes dubbed as pictorial film theory for its heavy recourse to classical art theories, aligned its notion of realism with aesthetic programs found in literature and painting. In The Photodrama and its Place among the Fine Arts (1915), the screenwriter William Morgan Hannon argues for a cinematic realism that is modeled on the idealism found in Charles Dickens’ fiction and on pictorial impressionism: Photography is too exact - it includes the non-essentials as well as the essential - to give merely the essence of things […] In short, the photodrama is not quite equal to the demands of those hyper-aesthetic and super-sensitive souls who expect in all art-products a subtle revelation of the essence of things -- nay, what might be termed the elusive essence of things. (Hannon 1915: 21) In the same year, the poet Vachel Lindsay emphasized the symbolic virtue of filmmaking. In his anthropological poetics, which placed motion pictures in a history of picture-writing that included ancient and hieroglyphic scripts, he considered this fad with cinematic exactitude and precision merely a transitory phase: Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, be allowed to ponder over scientific truth. He is at present the victim of the alleged truth of the specious and sentimental variety of photograph. It gives precise edges of the coat or collar of the smirking masher and the exact fibre in the dress of the jumping-jack. The eye grows weary of sharp points and hard edges that mean nothing. All this idiotic precision is going to waste. It should be enlisted in the cause of science and abated everywhere else. The edges in art are as mysterious as in science they are exact. (Lindsay 2000: 155) Such explicit and implicit alignments with other art theories can be found across a variety of theoretical approaches of film. As an example of an avant-gardist approach, the writer and critic Ricciotto Canudo proposed an interesting alternative to such pictorial approaches to film, which had a great impact on contemporary and later generations of avant-garde filmmakers. Rather than privileging art over 8 For the debate on photorealistic precision in literature see Orvell 1989. Christian Quendler 170 science, Canudo regarded film as a synthesis of the two. He re-conceptualized the classical representational modes of mimesis and poesis, which he associated with the aspects of the real and the symbolic. For Canudo, both aspects are characteristic of the modern spirit. While the aspect of the real belongs to the scientific rationale of the filmic apparatus, he sees the symbolic, above all, in the combinatory power of movement and speed. 9 His reflections on the seventh art represent a radical synthesis, inspired in part by ancient and medieval disciplinary canons that encompassed both the arts and sciences. The figure of the magician is a recurring metaphor in early and classical film theory that nicely illustrates film’s position in relation to the representational practices associated with the arts and sciences, respectively. Lindsay envisioned the filmmaker as a magician and prophet-wizard that reconciled scientific and poetic imagination by following a Romantic and post-Romantic tradition modeled on William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Articulating a post- Romantic stance in “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (1936), Walter Benjamin returned to the distinction between magician and scientist to illustrate differences between painting and cinema. Magician and surgeon are representative of two orders located at opposing poles in the spectrum of the arts. Comparing the painter to a magician and the filmmaker to a surgeon, Benjamin stated the contrast as follows: Die Haltung des Magiers, der einen Kranken durch Auflegung der Hand heilt, ist verschieden von der des Chirurgen, der einen Eingriff in den Kranken vornimmt. Der Magier erhält die natürliche Distanz zwischen sich und den Behandelnden aufrecht; genauer gesagt: er vermindert sie - kraft seiner aufgelegten Hand - nur wenig und steigert sie - kraft seiner Autorität - sehr. Der Chirurg verfährt umgekehrt: er vermindert die Distanz zum Behandelden sehr - indem er in sein Inneres dringt-, und er vermehrt sie nur wenig - durch die Behutsamkeit, mit der seine Hand sich hunter den Organen bewegt. (Benjamin 1989: 373-74) 10 However, the loss of this respectful distance or aura brought about by technological media is not a reduction in the process of mediation. The 9 “L’aspect symbolique est celui de la vitesse. Une série forte multiple de combinaisons, d’activités combinées, est offerte à la vitesse qui en compose un spectacle, c’est-à dire une série de visions et d’aspects liés dans un faisceau vibrant et vu comme un organisme vivant” (Canudo 1995: 33). 10 “The attitude of the magician, who heals a sick person by a laying-on of hands, differs from that of the surgeon, who makes an intervention in the patient. The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the person treated; more precisely, he reduces it slightly by laying on his hands, but increases it greatly by his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse: he greatly diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body, and increases it only slightly by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs” (Translation in Benjamin 2002: 115). Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 171 illusion of immediacy is, of course, a highly fabricated effect. As Scott Curtis (2004: 227) has pointed out, the “physical and psychic penetration associated with motion pictures (and the surgeon)” relies on a highly complex apparatus that encompasses processes of filmmaking, editing and projection. While magic defies close reading, the surgical act of cinematography depends on it. In place of an aura that channels our aesthetic experience and directs our sensibilities to the ‘elusive essence of things’ or any other kind of aesthetic goal, an apparatus or network of procedures emerges that manipulates and frames photographic reality. The presentation of the documentary implicitly or explicitly includes framings that facilitate its legibility and sustain (if necessary or desired) the illusion of an authentic and immediate reality. Such framings typically contain both ethical and aesthetic descriptions through which the image is perceived. Thus, the redescription of cinema as magic vision (as favored by Lindsay) to what Benjamin describes as a scrutinizing gaze beyond scruples of distance and shame implies changes in the frame of reception that promote and legitimize what in a non-scientific context may be considered transgressive and voyeuristic (see Bottomore 1985). The changing politics of the aesthetic may be described as a shift from framing a space of contemplation to framing an opportunity that legitimizes communal acts of voyeurism. 2. Cinema as vicarious agent of autopsy and autography Framing techniques in early films are revealing of this need to develop a way of reading filmic documents as representations and managing their ethical transgressive potential. In the Biograph short A Search for Evidence (1903), viewers are presented with a series of point-of-view shots that - framed by a keyhole mask - reveal the private interiors of people living in a hotel. The first shows a young man in a nightgown pacing up and down the room as he tries to lull a baby to sleep. The second depicts a man stumbling over a chair in an attempt to light a ceiling lamp. The third witnesses a doctor attending the sickbed of a girl. In the fourth room, we see a party of men playing cards and drinking wine. In the fifth, a woman gets ready for bed. These glimpses into the lives of others are framed and held together by shots that show a detective leading a woman through the corridor in search of her unfaithful husband, who is eventually revealed in the final, sixth point-of-view shot. When the betrayed wife confirms the identity of her husband, the detective bullies his way into the room, and the film ends with a violent scene in which the detective and the husband hold back the enraged wife. In this intrusion and exposure of private lives, the detective performs an authoritative role as he guides the woman through a series of moving vignettes of everyday Christian Quendler 172 life. The detective personifies the ethical frame. His presence frames and legitimizes a series of voyeuristic glimpses into the private lives of others. His guidance draws attention to the mediated quality of this eyewitnessing act. He also serves as a vehicle that accounts for the representational dimension. He figuratively embodies the pointing device of the camera, which is complemented by the keyhole masks that marks the detective’s and the woman’s gazes. It shapes and outlines a shared firstperson perspective for both the diegesis and the film audience. In this sense, the role of the detective combines the function of a male guardian and projectionist. He can serve as an allegory for the cinematic apparatus that controls and enables women to see for themselves spectacles to which they hitherto had no access (see Hansen 1991, esp. chapter one “A Cinema in Search of a Spectator: Film-Viewer Relations before Hollywood,” 23-59). Another common practice of invoking film as a form of vicarious autopsy was to deploy the camera itself as a detective agent. As Tom Gunning (1995: 35) observes, the camera often played an “essential role as the mute yet unassailable witness of a crime.” In many early films such as Falsely Accused (1908) or Zigmor vs. Nick Carter (1912), the camera delivers the hard and fast evidence that rights the wrong or - as in Getting Evidence (1906) and The Story the Biograph Told (1904) - exposes sexual transgressions and betrayal. In the latter film, the role of the detective is replaced by a mischievous office boy who secretly sets up a camera to film his boss kissing his secretary. When the movie is shown in the theater, the affair is exposed and the secretary is soon replaced by a man. Władysław Starewicz’s insect puppet animation film The Cameraman’s Revenge (Miest Kinomatograficheskovo Operatora, 1912) combines visual themes and plot elements found in The Story the Biograph Told, In Search for Evidence and other early films (see Figures 1 to 6). Bored by his country life, Mr. Beetle seizes the occasion to visit a nightclub and brothel on one of his many trips to the city. At the nightclub, he bumps into an aggressive and vengeful cameraman, who then follows Mr. Beetle and records his erotic adventures. When Mr. Beetle returns to his wife, he catches her in the arms of her artist lover. Mr. Beetle generously forgives his wife and takes her to a movie theater, where the revengeful cameraman turns out to be the projectionist. Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 173 Fig. 1-6: The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912) As in The Story the Biography Told, the cinematic apparatus appears both as a recording and a projection device. Even though autopsy and autography in this film aims at the objective world rather than the filming subject, Starewicz adds a reflexive twist to the idea of filmic autopsy. By animating dead insects, he addresses not only a core principle of animation theory, but also a key concern of early film theory in general. For film theoreticians as diverse as Jean Epstein and Vachel Lindsay, the idea of animating something inanimate or capturing things in movement was synonymous with getting to the essence or the soul of things. 11 The keyhole masking and the prominent display of the cinematic apparatus, which was characteristic of early cinematic self-reflexivity, are integrated in a narrative where human and camera vision are calibrated for non-professional purposes. Staging the cameraman’s filming and screening and representing the camera’s gaze multiply the narrative and representational levels of the story. The keyhole frame in Figure 6, for instance, shows the screening of a recording that depicts the cameraman’s perspective as captured by the camera. The next sill in Figure 7, shows Mr. Beetle’s furious response to the film as he jumps at the movie screen. His drastic reaction is itself an allusion to a common motif in early films, such as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), where viewers mis- 11 See e.g. Jean Epstein (1921), “The Senses I (b)” or Vachel Lindsay (1921), The Art of the Moving Picture, esp. chapter 10 “Furniture, Trappings and Inventions in Motion,” 84-95. Christian Quendler 174 take the filmic image for reality. However, Mr. Beetle is, of course, not a naïve viewer. What literally looks like a metalepsis, i.e. a paradoxical leap across ontologically distinct representational or narrative levels, is an emotionally charged but not a delusional act. While this scene is a visual pun that combines early cinematic stock figures such as the enraged wife in A Search for Evidence with the myth of naïve film viewers, Mr. Beetle does not aim at entering into the scene depicted on the screen, but tries to get through the screen in order to take it out with the projectionist. Such disruptions and displacements of a represented scenes point to the ethical and aesthetic undercurrent that self-reflexively addresses the relation between the cinematic dispositif and its operator. In the hand of a mischievous apprentice or a vengeful cameraman, visual technologies become a threat to established boundaries between private and public life: The viewer of the film negotiates this propulsion of private deeds into public exposure, positioned as both voyeur-witness and moral judge through the surrogate apparatus. But the power of this fantasy also contains its inverse, the paranoia of constant surreptitious surveillance. (Gunning 1999: 46) The camera thereby becomes another figure of spying and eavesdropping that allows for novel imaginative scenarios, which Mikhail Bakhtin considered a driving force in the development of novelistic fiction: In addition to the figures of rogue, servant, adventurer, pimp, the novel devised other means for spying and eavesdropping on private life - and while these other means are at times very clever and subtle, they became neither typical nor essential to the genre as such. For example: the Lame Devil in Lesage (in his novel Le Diable boiteux) removes the roofs from houses and exposes personal life at those moments when ‘a third person’s’ presence would not be permitted. (Bakhtin 1981: 127) While the camera may act as an agent, it cannot be held liable. A cinematic record can be appropriated for purposes that seem legitimate even if the recording involved devious practices. On the one hand, the recording of the camera is viewed as a mechanical event independent of human agency, on the other, the camera is attributed human or psychological features. As Gunning points out, the camera embodies an observing agent with characteristic modern features: First, since the witnessing is technological rather than human, its evidence has a correspondingly greater claim to truth, since the “apparatus cannot lie.” […] The lack of human intention in the operation of the camera mirrors an equally important aspect of the photography of guilt which connects it to the detective’s other techniques of evidence and identification. In most cases, the camera takes the culprit’s photo when he is caught Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 175 unawares. Therefore, like Holmes’s keenly perceived trifles, the camera captures the guilty one in a moment of unconscious self-betrayal. (Gunning 1995: 36) The auto-mechanism of the camera seems to offer a double benefit. Not only does it eliminate a human bias in observing, it can also reveal what lies beyond the intentions of the observed subject. The camera, it seems, affords a disjunction from human perception that brings forth what normally passes as unnoticed or even unintentional; it facilitates an emotional, legal or ethical distance between the person who operates the camera and the record created. However, the instrumental function of the camera as a human extension also fosters a new junction between the camera and embodied human perception. To what extent does the mechanism deflect the moral repercussions involved in such acts of spying and eavesdropping? Gunning draws attention to a revealing detail in the technological development of smaller portable photographic cameras that can help qualify this question. The original name for hand cameras, which are best known through George Eastman’s model of the Kodak, was ‘detective camera,’ a term that was later abandoned for its negative connotations. In April 1890, W.H. Burbank wrote in The American Amateur Photographer: “The word savors too much of devious ways and shady practices to be retained by any true lover of the camera” (Burbank 1890a: 136). The shift in terminology from an investigative practice of detection to the basic physical act of holding nicely illustrates a change in the cultural use of cameras: “The hand camera was apparently originally seen as a specialist camera whose small size, instantaneous exposure, and ease of operation allowed it to be used unobtrusively or even surreptitiously” (Gunning 1999: 49). For Gunning, the hand camera “brought nothing less than a social revolution that affected the legal definition of self and privacy as well as the nature of social embodied behavior” (Gunning 1999: 57). The wider cultural use of the hand camera was particularly targeted at amateur travel photography. As Burbank notes in a later issue of The American Amateur Photographer the same year: “The hand camera may be said to have opened new possibilities and have done much towards hastening the coming of the time when the whole world will lie within easy reach of one’s hand as he sits by his own ingle nook” (Burbank 1890b: 328). The introduction of the hand camera to tourism and travel literature had crucial ramifications that filmmakers throughout the twentieth century have returned to in different ways. The hand camera can vouchsafe for and amplify the principle of autopsy so central to the travelogue genre. More importantly, as Burbank’s phrase “within easy reach of one’s hands” suggests, the hand camera highlights the connection between hand and eye, which throughout the twentieth century will become a crucial conceptual link for innovating cinematography (such as Christian Quendler 176 the systematic explorations of a disembodied perspective, the recording of personal experiences and states or the manipulation of recordings by painting or etching or film). 12 The notion of the hand camera not only underscores the idea of the camera as a human extension, it also offers a new means of personal self-reflection. 3. Cinematic discoveries of self The popular uses of the portable camera in travelogue photography as well as in new forms of social tourism and muckraking journalism, which, like the work of Jacob Riis, ventured to ‘exotic’ places among the poor and lower class life, set the mode for filmic travelogue genres. A remarkable film that combined panoramic tracking shots with the exotic lure of people living on the fringes of society was A Day with the Gypsies (1906), directed by Cecil Hepworth for Gaston Quiribet. The film has been equally praised for its smooth landscape tracking shots and its consistent use of a subjective camera throughout the entire film. In this sense, A Day with the Gypsies (1906) can be seen as an early remarkable instance of exploring the ideal of travelogue autopsy in a motion picture film. Notably, this film has not only become a reference point for cinematic realism but has also been invoked as a cinematic model in theorizing video games (see Guneratne 1998, as well as Mark J.P. Wolf 2001). The film begins with a title card that reads “Early one morning I discovered some gipsies [sic] preparing for the road.” The first shot opens rather inconspicuously with a tableau of three gypsies: an old woman standing, an elderly man sitting and a young man lying on the ground. Soon, however, we notice that their relation to the camera changes as they start to look grimly into the camera. Although a first-person perspective has been introduced by the intertitle, the effect of this shot is quite startling. The intrusion that disrupts the gypsies’ idle morning repose is first displayed on their faces. We first read the faces of the gypsies before we recognize that it is the camera that causes this disruption. The viewer’s ‘identification’ with the camera is less an immersive or empathic effect of re-centering than a conscious act of recognition and inference. We recognize that the gypsies are staring at the camera; we infer a camera-persona and attribute a first-person value to this persona. The change in the register of gazes in the opening shot is only the first of a series of exchanges with the camera, in which the viewer is invited to take on the role of a filmic other. In order to persuade the gypsies to let him spend the day with them, the camera-persona offers the old 12 See esp. Thomas Elsaesser’s essay “The Future of ‘Art’ and ‘Work’ in the Age of Vision Machines” (2008), where he discusses this ‘primal gesture’ of the camera eye in the work of Harun Farocki. See also Silverman 1993. Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 177 women some money. We see an empty hand reaching towards the camera and a hand filled with money withdrawing from the camera’s off-space. At noon, their caravan approaches a small village where they stop for refreshments. Panoramic shots filmed sideways give way to shots of streets and houses filmed from the front of the caravan. When the gypsies jump off the caravan to buy drinks, an intertitle reminds us of the subjective camera: “Although I remained in the caravan I was not forgotten.” Mirroring the previous money transaction, we then see a young woman offering a mug to the camera. The last interaction of this kind occurs at the end of the film. After we have seen the gypsies set up their camp and dance by their fireplace, the first-person protagonist decides to have his palm read. Framed in a close-up, the old women starts reading his hand before an intertitle ends the film with the fortuneteller’s words: “You have got a lucky face.” This final twist of having the fortuneteller read the face of the ‘camera’ represents the inverse of the opening shot, in which the camera captures and makes legible its presence in the gypsies’ faces. A Day with the Gypsies documents a characteristic feature of filmic observation and selfreflection in early cinema. While the camera and especially mobile cameras mark a paradigmatic change in the perception of self and everyday life, this process of self-reflection evolved primarily through observing an other rather than using the camera directly as a means of introspection. 13 Louis Feuillade’s Tragic Error (Erreur tragique, 1912) can serve as a complementary example that stages film viewing as a process of discovery that, like A Day with the Gypsies, includes a dimension of self-discovery. The two-act drama of Tragic Error unfolds in close, frame-by-frame reading of a film that anticipates Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) by some fifty years. René and Suzanne de Romiguières’ honeymoon at the foothills of the Cévennes is briefly interrupted when René receives a letter that asks him to attend some business in Paris. Finding some spare time in the city, René goes to the movies to watch a Gaumont comedy entitled Onésime vagabond (see Figure 7). However, instead of enjoying a moment of diverting repose, René is shocked to discover his own wife arm in arm with another man passing through the background of a scene (see Figures 9 to 10). By staging in depth and combining different acting styles, Feuillade depicts a filmic space where reality and fiction are presented as at once mixed and distinct. 14 Suzanne and her male company are set off spatially, their ‘natural’ acting (Suzanne even tries to conceal her face when she notices that she has just walked into a 13 The possibility of having one’s picture taken unawares leads to important revelations about oneself. Gunning (see e.g. 1999: 57) has numerously reported on such early defamiliarizing experiences of recognizing oneself through the medium of film and photography. 14 See also Richard Abel’s discussion of this film in The Ciné Goes to Town (Abel 1994: 350-351). Christian Quendler 178 film scene; see Figure 10) contrasts with the exuberant and comic pantomime of the vagabond fighting two policemen (see Figures 8-9). Such confusions of fact and fiction are common themes in early narrative cinema. These self-reflexive moments reveal a contemporary fascination with cinema’s mimetic power. Rather than considering them as expressions of an actual confusion about cinema’s ontological status, they address an ambiguity in the representational mode of cinema. The coexistence of the fictional and real elements on the same representational plane correlates with two interpretive frames. Conventionally, these frames are seen in a hierarchical relationship: e.g. a filmic recording captures a dramatic enactment of real actors. 15 Immediately after the show, René acquires a copy of the film and sets out to study it frame by frame (see Figures 11-13). He then returns to his wife without notice, hoping to catch her by surprise. The first reel of the film ends with René studying the stills again. He is already consumed with jealousy. As one intertitle suggests, the filmic images branded onto his brain increasingly undermine his sense of reality: “Et René croirait avoir fait un mauvais rêve, si l’image maudite n’était là pour entretenir sa volonté sauvage d’observer et de savoir […]” 16 Unlike the dream image, the virtue of the filmic resides between the mental and material reality. Finally, René’s suspicions are confirmed when he comes across a letter from a man named Roger, who asks Suzanne to meet him at the local train station (see Figure 14). Blind with rage, Roger sabotages his wife’s carriage by placing a burning wick in the harness of the horse. After she is already on her way, René discovers that the suspected rival is Suzanne’s brother. He rushes off and finds the wrecked carriage and his wife miraculously alive. 15 In early narrative films shot-on-location, dramatic enactment and non-scripted reality sometimes appear in an adjacent relation. A case in point is a scene in Frank S. Mottershaw’s chase film A Daring Daylight Burglary (1903). The film, which may itself be viewed as loosely based on a historical chase that happened some twenty years prior to the shooting, ends with the burglar’s arrest. While the thief first manages to escape the police by train, he is eventually overpowered at the next train stop. His arrest at the track shows passengers getting on and off the train that appear to be uninformed about the film shooting. 16 ‘René would have believed he was having a bad dream had the accursed image not instilled in him the wild desire to observe and know’ (my translation). The English intertitle on the Kino edition of Gaumont Treasures reads “He cannot remove the images from his mind. He has to see and know for himself.” Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 179 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Christian Quendler 180 Figure 13 Figure 14 Feuillade’s Tragic Error adds another aspect to the notion of the camera as a locus of authentic or genuine reality. As a dispositif of reality or truth the camera is not only contingent on frames of recognition (e.g. when we put ourselves into the position of the subjective camera in A Day with the Gypsies) but also on frames of misrecognition (as is the case when René’s anxieties block out other possible interpretations of the image). 17 These two frames relate to two complementary instrumental functions of the camera as an extension of the human sensorium. Whereas A Day with the Gypsies stresses the immediacy of perception, Tragic Error addresses problems of inferences in the reception process. Both films highlight the interface between unaided and camera vision as a site where cinematic autopsy emerges. A great deal of our fascination with A Day with the Gypsies results from identifying or recognizing the ‘otherness’ of the camera as our vicarious perception. In Tragic Error the evidential power of the film is not only resistant to close frame-by-frame readings, it is so strong that René cannot resolve his conflict unless he sees and knows for himself. 17 In this regard Tragic Error stands out from other films at the time that employed the cinema as a revelatory agent. Shortly after Tragic Error, Lawrence Marston and Edwin Thanhouser released The Evidence of the Film (1913), which like Tragic Error contains self-reflexive scenes of reading a filmstrip and exhibiting a film where fictional and real worlds collide. In contrast to the Tragic Error, the evidence accidentally captured by a moving picture company does not complicate reality in dramatic ways but as in many other evidence movies helps to solve a crime. Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 181 4. Conclusion: The narrative integration of autopsy and autography In the first decades of cinema, the dissonances and differences between human perception and camera vision represent an attraction for themselves and are frequently the object of playful explorations. Reconciling these differences can be seen as a lure for film technology, industry as well as film narration. Like The Story the Biograph Told, Tragic Error consciously exploits this lure as a means of self-promotion. The (meta-)reference to the cinematic apparatus as a corporate identity that includes the production and distribution network of the companies plays a crucial role in integrating filmic perception and reception in a unified frame. Linking the camera’s visual evidence to the corporate identity of a film production company thus creates a sense agency that cuts across the diegetic and non-diegetic as well as the fictional and non-fictional realms. We can contrast this corporate notion of filmic vision with an autographic figure of viewing that refracts and reconciles human and filmic vision: the keyhole mask. As the examples discussed in this article illustrate, the keyhole mask has an important mediating function. It offers a common frame for the human gaze and the camera’s field of vision as much as it integrates the latter into a stereotypical scenario of spying. By constraining human and camera vision, it effectively neutralizes their respective differences. In other words, it can serve as a vehicle of media mimesis that naturalizes the defamiliarizing effects of camera vision. Film history has developed an impressive repertoire of strategies that assimilate human and camera vision by either inserting a filtering media on the diegetic level (such as a keyhole, camcorders, etc.) or through expressionist and stylistic devices that render peculiar and extraordinary mental states (such as dreams, intoxications, hallucinations, etc.). Such devices are regularly interpreted as phenomena closely linked to the experiential world of characters. They focalize by rendering certain aspects of subjectivity visible. In contrast, the ‘corporate camera’ is linked to a storytelling frame as is spelled out in the title of The Story the Biograph Told. It subsumes the selective and compositional processes of recording and editing. Yet, the The Story the Biograph Told and Tragic Error stage the revelatory power of the camera within complex plots that include parallel actions and embedded narratives. Staging acts of filming and screening in a movie selfreflexively gestures toward the actual production and exhibition of the film. It also turns the camera and the screen into props that act as counterparts of the machinery that makes up the ‘real’ cinematic apparatus. The Story the Biograph Told, The Cameraman’s Revenge and Tragic Error all depend on this playful doubling of filmic acts as fictional events or what amounts to the narrative reproduction of cinematic autopsy and autography. The narrative integration of these testimonial gestures and Christian Quendler 182 their reproduction in a fictional context also opens up new horizons of symbolization. As Abel (1994: 360) suggests, Tragic Error can be viewed as Gaumont’s allegorical response to the increase of censorship at that time. Filmic records do not seem to speak for themselves unless their focalizing and storytelling functions are fused or fabricated into a unified experience. A Day with the Gypsies comes closest to such an endeavor. This film illustrates nicely what André Gaudreault has dubbed the film monstrator and the film narrator. The intertitles, which are all written in the historical past, situate the presentation of the film within a ‘narrative order’ or, more precisely, a temporal itinerary. They fulfill basic tasks of the film narrator: they mark temporal and spatial gaps, set the pace and rhythm of the story, offer a commentary of what is shown and provide a rationale for the montage. It is characteristic of the time between 1904 and 1907 that the narrative import of intertitles is rather modest (see Gaudreault 2009: 124-134). Apart from framing the spectacular transactions with the camera, their main narrative function is to set the times of the respective scenes. This has to do with the fact that the main syntagmatic juxtaposition of shots draws on well-established genres of the panoramic picture and the chase movie. The historical past used throughout the intertitles draws attention to the disparity between the two narrative modes: the scenic presentation of the filmic images and the verbal narration that assists this monstrative entertainment. The tensions that result from the different narrative and temporal modes in the verbal and visual information reflect the challenge of reconciling the film monstrator and the film narrator as one persona that brings together past and present as well as self and other. A Day with the Gypsies is illustrative of a historical development in filmic narration before the emergence of what Tom Gunning called the narrator-system, where the narrative function is no longer exterior to the filmic image (such as the explanations of a film lecturer or intertitles projected on behalf of a film lecturer) but emerges from the filmic images and their juxtaposition on the screen. 18 Although the two gestures of autopsy and autography surfaced prominently in the first decades of cinema, as new forms of viewing and writing, they are seldom explored as unified or systematic visions of self and medium. The narrative identity of cinema that emerges during the transitional period from 1907 to 1915 shows one way of reconciling self and medium within a representational framework of narrative conventions (see Brewster 2004). A Day with the Gypsies points to an influential genre that cuts across narrative and non-narrative discourses: the diary. Even 18 In D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Gunning describes the narrator-system as “one particular synthesis of filmic discourse occurring in the general move to a cinema of narrative integration” (1991: 25). Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 183 though the time frame of the movie and the historical past of the intertitles deviate from the rigorous temporal regime of the diary, which Philippe Lejeune so elegantly defined as “a series of dated traces” (179), the consistent use of subjective camera and its appeal to explore the camera interactively bear strong affinities to this genre. A Day with the Gypsies not only anticipates video-gaming aesthetics but can also be aligned with a tradition of filmmaking that has resorted to the diary and similar testimonial genres as an explorative venue for reinventing cinema. Notably, Dziga Vertov invoked the diary as a programmatic frame for his quest for an absolute film language in Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Journals and notebooks also play a crucial role in the auteur cinema of the 1950s, where the autographic dimension of cinema found a poignant expression in Alexandre Astruc’s notion of the camera-pen. Beyond the confines of narrative feature films, the film diary epitomizes a shift to personal filmmaking in the avant-garde of the 1960 and 70s (see also Rascaroli 2009). Movies A Daring Daylight Burglary (1903). Dir. Frank S. Mottershaw. Sheffield Photo Company. A Day with the Gypsies (1906). Dir. Cecil Hepworth for Gaston Quiribet. Erreur tragique (Tragic Error) (1912). Dir. Louis Feuillade. Gaumont. The Evidence of the Film (1913). Dir. Lawrence Marston and Edwin Thanhouser. Thanhouser Film Corporation. Falsely Accused! (1908). Dir.G.W. Bitzer. Biograph. Getting Evidence (1906). Dir. Edwin S. Porter. Edison Manifacturing Company. Mest Kinomatograficheskovo Operatora (The Cameraman’s Revenge) (1912). Dir. Władysław Starewicz. Khanzhonkov. A Search for Evidence (1903). Dir.G.W. Bitzer. American Mutoscope and Biograph. The Story the Biograph Told (1904). Dir. A.E. Weed. American Mutoscope and Biograph. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902). Dir. Edwin S. Porter. Edison Manifacturing Company. Zigmor vs. Nick Carter (1912). Dir. Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset. Éclair. References Abel, Richard (1994). The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benjamin, Walter (1989).”Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.” Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 7/ 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. 350-84. Christian Quendler 184 Benjamin, Walter (2002). “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 3. Ed. Howard Eiland/ Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. 101-133. Bottomore, Stephen (1985). “Le thème de témoignage dans le cinéma primitif.” Les premiers ans du cinema Français. Perpignan: Institute Jean Vigo. 155-161. Burbank, W.H. (1890b). “The Dangers of Hand Camera Work.” The American Amateur Photographer 2/ 9 (September). 327-29. Burbank, W.H. (1890a). “Hand Cameras.” The American Amateur Photographer 2/ 4 (April). 136-143. Brewster, Ben (2004). “Periodization of Early Cinema.” In: Charley Keil/ Schelley Stamp (eds.). American Cinema’s Transitional Era. Berkley: University of California Press. 66-75. Canudo, Ricciotto (1995). “La naissance d’un sixième art.” In: Jean-Paul Morel (ed.). L’Usine aux images. Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Séguier et Arte Éditions. 32-40. Charney, Leo/ Vanessa R. Schwartz (1995). Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Curtis, Scott (2004). “Still/ Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics.” In: Lauren Rabinowitz/ Abraham Geil (eds.). 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(1995). “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema.” In: Leo Charney/ Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.). Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. 15-45. Autopsy and Autography in the First Decades of Cinema 185 Hannon, William Morgan (1915). The Photodrama and Its Place among the Fine Arts. New Orleans: The Ruskin Press. Hansen, Miriam (1991). Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lejeune, Philippe (2009). On Diary. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Lindsay, Vachel (2000). The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Modern Library, Mjaaland, Marius Timmann (2008). Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, Orvell, Miles (1989). The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Rancière, Jacques (2003). Le destin des images. Paris: La fabrique-éditions, Rancière, Jacques (2007). The Future of the Image. London: Verso, Rancière, Jacques (2000). Le partage du sensible: esthétique et politique. Paris: La fabrique-éditions. Rancière, Jacques. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. Rajewsky, Irina O. (2002). Intermedialität. Tübingen: Francke. Rascaroli, Laura (2009). The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. New York: Wallflower Press. Silverman, Kaja (1993). “What Is a Camera? Or: History in the Field of Vision.” Discourse 15/ 3. 2-56 Stewart, William E. (1978). Die Reisebeschreibung und ihre Theorie im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts. Bonn: Bouvier. Strauven, Wanda (ed.) (2006). The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP. Turner, Mark (2008). “What Are We? The Convergence of Self and Communications Technology.” In: Kristóf Nyíri (ed.). Integration and Ubiquity: Towards a Philosphy of Telecommunications Convergence. Vienna: Passagen. 21-28. Wolf, Mark J.P. (2001). The Medium of the Video Game. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wolf, Werner (1996). “Intermedialität als neues Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft? Plädoyer für eine literaturzentrierte Erforschung von Grenzüberschreitungen zwischen Wortkunst und anderen Medien am Beispiel von Virgina Woolfs The String Quartet.” AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 21/ 1. 85-116. Christian Quendler Department of American Studies University of Innssbruck T.C. Boyle’s East Is East A Samurai in Georgia, or the Failure of Intercultural Understanding Peter Freese The article shows that T.C. Boyle’s novel East Is East (1990) is based on a ‘real’ incident and mixes fact and fiction in Boyle’s idiosyncratic manner. It then demonstrates how artfully the many-faceted story combines the traditional plotlines of the innocent youth on a search for a better world and the lonely son on a quest for his lost father with the satiric thrust of a Künstlerroman and how it connects these narrative strands by means of a tightly woven net of both direct and implied allusions to many facets of American culture on the one hand and major aspects of the Japanese samurai tradition on the other, thus allowing for diverse variations of the chances and pitfalls of intercultural negotiation. The unusual combination of these narrative strands and the constantly alternating points of view enable the reader to see the events from contrasted perspectives. And Boyle’s linguistic mastery or what he once called “the mad, language-obsessed part of me” allows him to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of conveying a depressing truth in a hilarious way and to embed his harsh critique of American parochialism and racism and his plea for an unprejudiced attitude towards ‘others’ in a fast-paced, entertaining and captivating tale. In many of his fourteen novels, T.C. Boyle arranges his fictitious plots around historical people and events. Thus, in his first novel, Water Music (1982), he contrasts the historical explorer Mungo Park with the fictional figure of the petty criminal Ned Rise and, in an introductory “Apologia,” grants “the exigencies of invention” precedence over “historical fact”: As the impetus behind Water Music is principally aesthetic rather than scholarly, I’ve made use of the historical background because of the joy and fascination I find in it, and not out of a desire to scrupulously dramatize or reconstruct events that are a matter of record. I have been deliber- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Peter Freese 188 ately anachronistic, I have invented language and terminology, I have strayed from and expanded upon my original sources. Where historical fact proved a barrier to the exigencies of invention, I have, with full knowledge and clear conscience, reshaped it to fit my purposes. (Boyle 1983: “Apologia”) Boyle, then, discards the traditional distinction between fact and fiction and bridges the ontological divide between the historian’s discovery of pre-existing events and the novelist’s invention of newly made stories with the strategies of historiographical metafiction. Consequently, for him the difference between historiography and novel writing is no longer one of principle but of accentuation only, and in his books, history and story can freely intermingle because he assumes with E.L. Doctorow that “there is no history except as it is composed” (Doctorow 1994: 160). Thus, the fictional plot of The Road to Wellville (1993) revolves around John Harvey Kellog, the inventor of cornflakes, and much of it takes place in an imaginative recreation of Kellog’s historical Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. The action of Riven Rock (1998) unfolds around Stanley McCormick, the youngest son of the inventor of the reaper and founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and his wife Katharine Dexter McCormick, a well-known women’s rights activist and philanthropist, and most of the action takes place in Riven Rock, the actual McCormick estate in Montecito, CA. In The Inner Circle (2004), a novel about the controversial founder of sexology, “all characters and situations have been invented, with the exception of the historical figures of Alfred C. Kinsey and his wife, Clara Bracken (McMillen) Kinsey” (Boyle 2005: “Author’s Note”). And The Women (2009) is “a fictional re-creation of certain events in the lives of Frank Lloyd Wright, his three wives […] and his mistress,” but “while actual events and historical personages are depicted here, all situations and dialogue are invented, except where direct quotes have been extracted from newspaper accounts of the period” (Boyle 2009: “Author’s Note”). Boyle’s fictional recreation of historical people and events made his Paris Review interviewer assume that his “books and stories suggest a lot of research,” to which Boyle replied: Yes, I do my homework. Particularly in the historical novels, and I’ve done four of those to date and am working on another now. On the other hand, I do agree with E.L. Doctorow, who said that he does enough research to get him going, and then adds what he needs as he works. I do like to see things - locations, I mean - if possible, but that isn’t as important to me as it may be for other writers. Again, I am writing from the imagination, for the unconquerable rush of seeing a scene in my head and transposing it to words. So I spent a grueling three days with my three favorite drinking buddies in the Okefenokee Swamp doing the research for East Is East. For The Road to Wellville I spent three days in Battle Creek, Michigan, haunting the library, walking the streets, poking around the T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 189 graveyard, and being denied access to the Kellogg Company’s offices. That was all I needed. (Boyle 2000) One of the topics that recur in Boyle’s socio-critical novels is the tension between ethnic, economic and ideological groups and the momentous role which mutual stereotypes and prejudices play in their encounters. This is obvious in World’s End, which deals with centuries of exploitation and oppression of Native Americans by Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley, and in The Tortilla Curtain, which explores the antagonism between well-to-do Anglos and poor Mexican indocumentados in greater Los Angeles. But the most dramatic intercultural encounter is presented in Boyle’s fourth novel, East Is East (1990), which explores the confrontations of a Japanese half-breed who jumps ship at the coast of Georgia with southern rednecks, Gullah-speaking blacks 1 and fame-hungry members of a writers’ colony and plays off the popular stereotypes of America held by the Japanese seaman against the ill-founded notions of Asia held by assorted Americans. Once again, this outrageous plot is not Boyle’s invention, but goes back to a historical event. In 1974, a Taiwanese merchant sailor jumped ship off Florida and lived in the alligator-infested Green Swamp near Disneyland for eight months until he was captured by the authorities and committed suicide before being shipped back home (see Douglas 1997). This sensational event was widely covered by newspapers and on TV shows and even found its way into Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel China Men (1980). Thus, one can assume that Bonnie Lyons’ vague hint that East Is East “was inspired by a newspaper article from a friend who dropped by while Boyle was writing World’s End and announced he had found Boyle a subject for his new book” (Lyons 2003: 77), refers to one of the articles about this much talked-about case. When Boyle was working on East Is East in 1988, he said that it would be a novel set in Georgia in 1990, which is not that far away. When the book comes out is when it’s set. It concerns some of the themes of Water Music: racism in particular, cultural predetermination, cultural dislocation. It’s a southern novel written by a guy who knows nothing about the south. It’s about a Japanese man in Georgia and his trials and tribulations there. Written, again, by a man who knows nothing about Japan, either. (Adams 1990/ 1991: 61f.) This was certainly a self-ironical understatement because most reviewers considered East Is East an impressive success. In the Raleigh News and Observer, David Raney, himself a writer from Atlanta, observed that the novel had “all of Mr. Boyle’s trademark word wizardry while offering, 1 Gullah is a Creole language spoken today by about 250,000 African Americans in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The language of the Gullah people or “Geechees” mixes English with West and Central African languages, and its vocabulary comes primarily from English, but also has words of African origin. Peter Freese 190 like World’s End, characters of depth and asking provocative questions about American society.” And he stated: Mr. Boyle assembles a Keystone Kops troupe of minor characters - idiot sheriffs, ego-driven artists, a rapacious press corps and assorted xenophobic busybodies - on which to indulge his considerable gift for caricature. The central characters, though, are fleshed out and fully alive. He makes us laugh at Ruth and Hiro but feel for them, too, and the ending he concocts feels, as in the best fiction, both surprising and right. As the title suggests, it is gaps in understanding, between couples or whole cultures, that provide the comic core of East Is East and also its edge of sadness. […] T. Coraghessan Boyle has much to tell us about the dangers involved in holding fixed images, whether of oneself or of races, of nations or of the future. (Raney 1990) In the New York Times, Michito Kakutani read the novel as “a hilarious black farce about racial stereotypes, selfish dreams and ambitions run hopelessly amok,” and praised Boyle’s “hyperkinetic language and gift for wild invention to create a rollicking, old-fashioned tale full of cartoony heroes and villains and deliciously satiric incidents.” He found that “much of the humor in East Is East derives from Mr. Boyle’s keen sociological eye and his ability to parody cultural preconceptions through manic exaggeration,” but ended his review with a critical note when he observed that “unfortunately, the novel’s startling conclusion buys into just such stereotypes. Though this ending does not diminish the reader’s enjoyment of all that goes before, it does undermine the philosophical underpinnings of the book, leaving the reader with a faintly sour aftertaste.” (Kakutani 1990) In her detailed review in the New York Times Book Review, Gail Godwin, herself an accomplished story-teller, found East Is East “an absorbing tragedy” told with “consummate artistry” and said: That we find ourselves laughing all the way to the increasingly inevitable catastrophe does not in any way blur the book’s impact, for ours is the laughter of recognition and revelation, rueful and cleansing. All of us who have ever weighed the desperate desire to belong against the coexisting need for self-respect will recognize ourselves in Mr. Boyle’s lowly Japanese sailor as well as in his counterprotagonist, the frantically ambitious young writer Ruth Dershowitz, who becomes Hiro Tanaka’s protector and, ultimately, his nemesis. That Hiro - the hero - at last does the honorable, albeit doomed, thing, according to his code, and that Ruth, in marked contrast, joyfully sells out after a brief pang of conscience, results in a double catharsis. When it comes to an ending, the reader gets to have it both ways. After pointing out sundry highlights of the book’s fast-paced action, she concluded her comments by observing that “Mr. Boyle gives us an absolutely stunning work, full of brilliant cross-cultural insights, his usual virtuoso language and one marvelous scene after another,” and by defin- T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 191 ing East Is East as “a novel about the way we appear to others, the way others appear to us and the lengths to which some of us will go to be accepted by others - or to become acceptable to ourselves.” (Godwin 1990) In his review in the New York Review of Books, Robert Towers read East Is East as a book about “cross-cultural blind spots” in a fast-paced satire which is “broad rather than subtle, more farcical than witty,” and he concluded that while there is a considerable degree of Waugh-like cruelty in the fate Boyle metes out to his antihero, who follows the example of Mishima to its bloody conclusion, Hiro himself is engaging enough to provide a pathos at the end that in no way clashes with the comedy that precedes it. This is an exuberant reworking of the innocents-abroad theme that goes back at least as far as Voltaire’s L’Ingénu. (Towers 1991: 31 and 32) According to its laudatory reviews, then, East Is East is an impressive fictional treatment of “the dangers involved in holding fixed images, whether of oneself or of races, of nations or of the future” (Raney), and it contains the “brilliant cross-cultural insights” (Godwin) of a gifted writer who uses his unique “ability to parody cultural preconceptions through manic exaggeration” (Kakutani) for the purpose of presenting his readers with an “exuberant reworking of the innocents-abroad theme” (Towers). But there is more, and the following analysis will show that Boyle’s novel ‣ is not only a contemporary variation of Mark Twain’s ‘innocents abroad’ theme, but also a retelling of the search of Voltaire’s Candide for Leibniz’s best of all worlds and a reconstruction of the son’s archetypal quest for his lost father; ‣ solves the seemingly impossible task of conveying a depressing truth in a hilarious way by artfully combining a fictional exploration of the havoc wrought by national hetero-stereotypes with the satiric thrust of a Künstlerroman; ‣ connects its diverse elements by means of a tightly woven net of direct and implied allusions to Western traditions in general and the many facets of American culture in particular and thus opens additional horizons; and ‣ succeeds in delivering its harsh critique of American parochialism and racism and its plea for an unprejudiced attitude towards ‘others’ in the form of a many-faceted tale. ***** Boyle re-imagines the 1974 drama of the fugitive Taiwanese sailor in the Green Swamp near Disneyland as taking place in 1990 in rural Georgia, and he structures his novel’s fast-paced plot according to locality, with Savannah and the Okefenokee Swamp being ‘real’ locations and Tupelo Island being a fictional place. But when we combine the facts that it takes Peter Freese 192 Abercorn a “seventy-minute drive” (60) from Savannah to Tupelo Island, that the inhabitants cannot do their shopping on the island but have to “catch the ferry to the mainland” (123) and go to the actual town of Darien (26; 115), a small coastal town in McIntosh County, GA fifty miles south of Savannah at the mouth of the Altamaha River, and that Hiro’s unlucky confrontation with Olmstead White, the ironically named black man who speaks “the Gullah dialect of his ancestors” (40), occurs in the black settlement of “Hog Hammock on Tupelo Island” (41), we recognize that here, too, Boyle employs his characteristic mixture of fact and fiction. The fictional Tupelo Island is closely modeled on the state-protected Sapelo Island in McIntosh County, GA that can only be reached by airplane or boat and is connected with what Hiro calls the ‘mainrand’ by a ferry from the Sapelo Island Visitors Center in Meridian in a twentyminute trip. Today, most of the island is owned by the State of Georgia and managed by the Department of Natural Resources, with The University of Georgia Marine Institute on its south end. In the early 19 th century, Thomas Spalding, a Georgia politician and supporter of slavery, bought Sapelo Island and brought four hundred slaves from West Africa and the West Indies there to work his plantation and build the Spalding Mansion. During the Civil War, the mansion was ruined, and the freed slaves established several settlements. In 1912, Howard E. Coffin, the founder of the Hudson Motor Company in Detroit, bought the island for $150,000 and rebuilt the mansion into an outstanding home in which he received such famous guests as Charles Lindbergh, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. In 1933, R.J. Reynolds, Jr. of Reynolds Tobacco bought Sapelo Island, resettled the African-American residents in Hog Hammock, and established the basis for the university facilities. In 1965, his widow sold the island to the State of Georgia. Today, the Reynolds Mansion can be booked by organized tours, and Hog Hammock is a tiny settlement with a general store and less than fifty Gullah-speaking inhabitants whose families have been living on the island for generations and whose children now take the ferry to the mainland and a bus to school since the island school closed in 1978. When we relate these facts to the fictional geography of East Is East, it becomes clear that all the details - the ferry to the mainland, the trips to Darien, the boat tours on Peagler Sound (the fictional equivalent of Doboy Sound) - are closely modeled on reality, that Thanatopsis House is Boyle’s fictional recreation of the Reynolds Mansion, and that the name of the black village of Hog Hammock has even been taken over unchanged. The same is true with regard to the Okefenokee Swamp, the largest ‘blackwater’ swamp in North America. When Saxby drives there, “heading for Waycross, Ciceroville and the western verge of the Okefenokee Swamp” (237), and then progresses to “the dock at Stephen C. Foster State Park” (240) from which he plans to catch his albino fish, his trip can be traced on a map, because the Stephen C. Foster State Park is as T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 193 much a ‘real’ place as the town of Waycross, the county seat of Ware County, GA with its 15,000 inhabitants, which Saxby has to pass on his way from Darien. In the swamp, there really is a “Billy’s Island” (298), and only the village of “Ciceroville, the ‘Gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness’” (287), is a place that Boyle invented. ***** It has become a critical commonplace that “the choice of a point of view in the writing of fiction is at least as crucial as the choice of a verse form in the composing of a poem” (Friedman 1955: 1180), and in a novel about mutual prejudices such a choice is especially important since the readers’ evaluation of the fictional events depends on whose individual perception they are filtered through. In East Is East, ‘America’ is experienced through Asian eyes and the behavior of a Japanese interloper is judged through American eyes. Therefore, Boyle can only do justice to both points of view by narrating his story from alternating perspectives, each of which is limited by the prejudiced perception of an individual character, but whose totality provides his readers with an overview and lets them recognize that the novel’s different ‘realities’ exist in the eyes of their beholders. The novel is made up of three parts of unequal length and its point of view constantly alternates between the characters whose names are given in brackets: I: Tupelo Island (13 chapters; 198 pages) 1: Small Matters (Hiro/ Ruth) 2: The Tokachi-maru (Hiro) 3: Thanatopsis House (Ruth) 4: Hog Hammock (Hiro/ Olmstead White) 5: The Squarest People in the World (Detlef Abercorn) 6: Queen Bee (Ruth) 7: Fea Purê (Hiro) 8: Behind a Wall of Glass (Saxby) 9: Rusu (Ruth) 10: The Other Half (Hiro/ Olmstead White) 11: Still at Large (Ruth) 12: Parfait in Chrome (Saxby) 13: The Dogs Are Barking - Woof-Woof (Hiro/ Royal)) II: The Okefenokee (9 chapters; 142 pages) 1: Everybody’s Secret (Ruth) 2: Four Walls (Hiro) 3: The Whiteness of the Fish (Turco/ Saxby) 4: A Jungle (Ruth) 5: Where the Earth Trembles (omniscient voice/ Hiro/ the Jeffcoat family) Peter Freese 194 6: Tender Sproats (Detlef Abercorn) 7: Cheap Thrills (Ruth) 8: The Power of the Human Voice (Saxby/ Ruth) 9: Haha (Hiro) III: Port of Savannah (2 chapters; 19 pages) 1: Journalism (Ruth) 2: The City of Brotherly Love (Hiro) This list shows that the half-Japanese intruder Hiro Tanaka and the Jewish-American would-be writer Ruth Dershowitz provide the dominant perspectives, but that Ruth’s lover Saxby and minor actors like Abercorn and Turco and even Olmstead White and his nephew Royal also add their perceptions of the world to the overall picture. Now and then an omniscient narrator takes over to inform his readers about past events such as Hiro’s childhood (16ff.), the early history of Saxby (111-113), or the history of the Okefenokee Swamp and “Jackson’s Folly” (265-267). 2 But these are not the only intrusions because Boyle is so intent upon what he himself once called “the mad, language-obsessed part of me” (Adams 1990/ 1991: 60) that he frequently oversteps his characters’ limitations and makes them think or say things that are beyond their capacities. Unusual and funny comparisons such as that Abercorn feels “his face reddening like bratwurst on a rotisserie” (294), that Septima is “clutching at the microphone as if it were a cobra she’d discovered in bed and seized in desperation” (303), that Saxby is glad about Ruth “shining like a supernova in the Thanatopsis firmament” (179), that Sheriff Tibbets sits “chewing his cud and stroking his gut as if it were a crystal ball” (324), or that a disappointed Ruth experiences the Thanatopsis party as “the geriatric ball at the 4-H fairgrounds” (164), 3 do not fit the respective characters’ knowledge and language and reveal that Boyle finds linguistic ingenuity more important than the consistency of his chosen points of view. This is also true of descriptions such as that of Hiro in the swamp 2 In 1889, the state of Georgia allowed The Suwanee Canal Co. to purchase 430,000 acres of the Okefenokee Swamp for $62,101.80 with the intention of draining the swamp so that its fertile soil could be farmed. Captain Harry Jackson (see 266) undertook the task of digging a canal from the eastern side of the swamp toward St Mary’s River. Over a million dollars and twenty-two miles of canals later, Captain Jackson was no closer to draining the swamp than when he started because instead of flowing east toward St Mary’s River, the water in the new canals flowed west toward the Okefenokee’s interior. Consequently, the project was abandoned and local history refers to the abortive project as “Jackson’s Folly.” - For details see Tara D. Fields. 3 4-H is an American youth organization with over 6.5 million members administered by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture with the mission of “engaging youth to reach their fullest potential while advancing the field of youth development.” The name represents the four developmental fields of head, heart, hands, and health, and it is often used as a derogatory reference to rural America. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 195 as an “amphibious Japanese” (321) or of the content of Roy Dotson’s garage as “an aggregation of household refuse that would make the careers of any twenty future archeologists” (242). And when Brie Sullivan’s admiration of the writers at Thanatopsis is “trailing off into frequencies audible only to more sensitive lifeforms” (258) and her adulation of Jane Shine makes her behave “as if one of the secret names of Jehovah had just been revealed to her” (264), the readers once more hear Boyle’s sarcastic voice taking over. When Irving Thalamus “extract[s] the dicotyledonous kernel [of a peanut] from the shell” (30) or when Septima’s voice “float[s] over the sudden crepuscular hush of the room” at the time at which Ruth is “in the first stages of the metamorphosis that would make her the cynosure of Irving Thalamus’s clique” (68), the elevated language might still be appropriate. But when the uneducated Olmstead White’s frying oysters “sen[d] up their ambrosial aroma” (43) and make “a fancy Charleston kind of potted-palm restaurant out of the two-room clapboard shack” (40), both language and imagery are beyond what he would be able to muster and clearly belong to the intruding author who is in love with uncommon terms and surprising metaphors. And when the Jewish Ruth muses about her daily routine that before lunch “it was the Calvary of the morning; after, the naked cross of the afternoon, winding down to the resurrection and ascension of cocktail hour” (33), the Christian imagery is definitely Boyle’s. The discrepancy between narration and focalization is most obvious in the chapters that are told from Hiro’s point of view. Thus, his thirst is described as “the kind of implacable thirst that shrivels Joshua trees and lays waste to whole villages in Africa” (35). In his confrontation with Olmstead White the latter’s howl is said to “have unraveled the topknot of even the staunchest of samurai” (44). After his discovery of the Coca Cola sign he goes “faint with gastric epiphany” (47), and he cries out “in peristaltic anguish” (88) when Ruth forgets to bring him food. With Ambly Wooster he thinks about “how to dam up the torrent of banality that lashed her tongue like a whip across her palate” (144) and is relieved when she becomes silent, having “spilled her continents, her oceans, her worlds of breath” (145). He experiences the furious Olmstead White as a “transmogrified Negro […] writhing and gasping and choking out a curse in the thick wadded language of the shaman and the witch doctor” (146). His childhood dream is “a dream of the cradle, an oneiric memory, idealized and distilled from a stack of photographs” (184), and he experiences his three interrogators “shuffl[ing] their feet in unison as if it were part of an elaborate soft-shoe routine” (225). His lie that he is a stranded Chinese tourist makes Mr. Jeffcoat produce a laugh “which burst from an orthodontic marvel of a mouth” (281), and his skin is swollen “till it felt like a text in braille” (337). Since the uneducated young Japanese neither knows about drought in Africa, oneiric memories and braille nor about shamans , soft-shoe routines and American orthodontics, these Peter Freese 196 discrepancies between what he can think and say according to his characterization and what he actually reflects on and expresses have an illusionbreaking effect. They constantly remind the readers of the ordering author behind the scene and thus prevent them from developing empathy or even identification with the hapless protagonist. Boyle also oversteps the limitations of Hiro’s uneducated and prejudiced point of view because he uses the ‘Martian perspective’ of the visiting alien to vent his own criticism of things American. Thus, when Hiro muses that “this was America, and nothing about these people would surprise him. Whether they were buffalo skinners, young Republicans or crack dealers, it was all the same to him” (279), the jibe at young Republicans cannot be his but comes from Boyle who also employs Ruth and Saxby as his mouthpieces when he has Ruth think that the model for her story “Two Toes” had “galvanized the attention of the whole slumbering and self-obsessed country” (254) and when he has Saxby criticize the sensation-hungry Americans who watch the chase for Hiro: “They were gathered here as they gathered at the site of any disaster, patient as vultures. They were waiting for bloodshed, violence, criminality and despair, waiting for excess and humiliation, for the formula that would unlock the tedium of their lives.” (293) Similar instances occur when Hiro denounces his prison wardens as “oafs, drugged and violent and overfed” and not “pay[ing] attention to detail,” and infers that “that’s why the factories had shut down, that’s why the automakers had gone belly up” (226), thus alluding to the eighties when a growing anti-Japanese sentiment had articulated itself in so-called “Japan-bashing.” Even more importantly, Boyle must provide Hiro with some basic knowledge of English in order to make his plot work, and by doing so he can express another implicit critique of American parochialism when he has Hiro react to Ruth’s question whether he can read English by thinking: He did. Of course he did. And he was proud of the accomplishment. Americans with their big feet and blustering condescension to the rest of the world, knew no language but their own. But the Japanese, the most literate people on earth, learned to read English in their schools, from the elementary grades on. Of course, since there were few native speakers in Japan, and since the Japanese system relied on rote learning, the comprehensive skills of the average Japanese were far more highly developed than the conversational. (153) ***** The action of East Is East combines several traditional plotlines. On one level, the novel varies the ancient plot of the outsider’s search for a better world. In The Tortilla Curtain, the Mexican indocumentado who comes to California in pursuit of the American Dream, bears the programmatic name Cándido Rincon, and Boyle explained that choice in an interview by stating that his name “comes from Candide. Voltaire’s Candide, who T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 197 is, you know, famous in literature. He is the man who bears all this ill luck, all the ill luck sent upon him. This is why I chose Cándido.” (Freese 1998: 30; for details see Freese 2000) Cándido, then, is a hapless successor of the naive picaro in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide (1759), who encounters nothing but ill luck in his search for Leibniz’s best of all worlds. Quite obviously, Hiro Tanaka, the ‘hero’ of East Is East, is on a similar quest, and like both Voltaire’s Candide and Boyle’s Cándido he does not find Leibniz’s best of all worlds in the promised land of America, but stumbles from one misfortune into the next. In the end, the poor young man who did nothing wrong is “facing twenty-two criminal charges brought by the State of Georgia and twelve others at the hands of the INS” (356). 4 This is of course an outrageous misjudgement of what really happened, and Ruth is right when she muses that Hiro’s experiences were “just an escalating series of misunderstandings” and that “he was nothing more than an overgrown boy, an innocent, a naïf,” whose deeds were not “criminal” but “pathetic” (357), a judgment which Hiro himself confirms when, before his suicide, he thinks that the only thing he was guilty of was “stupidity, naiveté, guilty of thinking the Amerikajin would accept him in common humanity” (362). On another and closely related level, Hiro’s odyssey varies the archetypal quest for the father since, like Homer’s Telemachus, the motherless youth wants to find his lost father, the unkempt hippie nicknamed Doggo who got his mother pregnant and then left without a trace. At the novel’s beginning, Hiro enjoys the naïve vision that in America he “maybe even discover his father in some gleaming, spacious ranch house and sit down to cheeseburgers with him” (18), and the central role which the absent father plays in his life is also indicated by the fact that he has not only taped The Way of the Samurai and some dollar bills to his chest, but also “his father’s picture” (29). When he jumps into the Atlantic, the text revealingly reads: “And the sea sustained him, embraced him, wrapped him up like the arms of a long-lost father.” (21) In the accelerating series of encounters with unfailingly hostile Americans the motif of the search for the father is constantly kept alive through passing references. Thus, when the delirious youth is shockingly confronted with Olmstead White, “his dead mother and his lost father dance[ed] round him like fairies” (41), and before he enters the rural grocery store he checks his money and finds that “the bills were still there, along with the cracked and bleached photo of his father” (48). During the few happy days with Ambly Wooster, he entertains the fantasy “of looking up his father in the telephone directory and inviting him down” (145). When he is impris- 4 The INS (= United States Immigration and Naturalization Service) ceased to exist in March 2003, when as part of a reorganization following the attacks of September 11, 2001, its functions were transferred to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Peter Freese 198 oned in the old slave cell he recalls that the sheriff has taken the Mishima book “along with the picture of Doggo” (218), and when he is questioned by the sheriff, Abercorn and Turco, it strikes him “how much [Turco] resembled the photo of Doggo, with his long blond hair and beard, a hippie for all his military trappings” (222). Lost in the Okefenokee Swamp, he realizes to his dismay that he can barely recall the faces of “Doggo” (270) and others, and soon afterwards he begins to curse “himself, his hakujin father and strong-legged mother” (278). When he meets the friendly Jeffcoats, he is deeply impressed by their togetherness: “Father, mother, son: this was a family” (284), and how much he pains for such a community for himself, is confirmed when he sees them paddle away “in perfect harmony, father, mother, son” (286). When he becomes seriously sick in the swamp and begins to hallucinate, he remembers that as an abandoned child he had thought that “his only recourse was to go to America, to find Doggo and live there among the American hippies” (340), and when the boat with Ruth and Turco comes closer, he mistakes them for his mother and “Doggo, yes, Doggo, his own Amerikajin father” (342). At the novel’s end, while slowly recovering from his terrible experience in a Savannah hospital, he refuses to talk to anybody, contemplates suicide and fleetingly imagines “his father coming to his rescue like a cowboy on a horse. But it was stupid. Foolish. The burned-out core of a dream - ashes, that was all it was” (362). Hiro’s quest for both the best of all worlds and his lost father is ironically undercut because it is presented as his constant search for food, and that is a topic which plays a prominent role in all of Boyle’s novels. He once said to a German interviewer that “Essen oder Hunger [sind] Teile meiner schriftstellerischen Obsession” (Hilbert 1992: 17), and Ted Friend rightly observed about him that “emblems of man’s corporeal nature - a morbid fascination with the food that goes in one orifice and the fluids that come out the others - are a recurrent memento mori in Boyle’s work” (Friend 1990). In East Is East, however, the search for food is not just one motif among others since Hiro is primarily characterized as a being that craves food. “Like most Japanese, Hiro regarded his stomach - his hara - as the center of his being, the source of all his physical and spiritual strength. […] For Hiro, though, the hara took on an even more exaggerated importance, for he lived to eat.” (37). The first thing he does after getting ashore is search for food and locate what he takes to be a symbol of the promised land, namely “one of the towering ubiquitous refrigerators in which Americans keep the things they like to eat” (38). Throughout the book, he evaluates Americans on the basis of their eating habits. Thus, when he stays with Ambly Wooster, he likes the abundant food, but nevertheless criticizes that “the Americans made such a mess of their food - just served it in a heap, with no thought of grace or proportion, as if eating were a shameful thing” (144). And when he is imprisoned in the T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 199 old slave cell and given a “Hardee’s bag” (228), 5 “it never ceased to amaze him how the Americans could eat this stuff - it wasn’t even food, really” (226). Hiro’s incessant foraging has an important structural function because it keeps the plot in motion (see Schröder 1997: 83f.). It is a fight about the correct preparation of a Japanese dish that makes him a prisoner in the ship’s brig where “he thought of food, day and night” (18), before he manages to break out and jump ship. Having reached the shore, he is “focused solely on his alimentary needs” (35) and thinks that there is no “joy in dignity, in life even, without food” (36). Following the tempting smell of frying oysters, he confronts a frightened Olmstead White, brings about the accidental burning of the latter’s hut and thus, in the skewed eyes of the law, becomes a dangerous arsonist. Lured by a Coca Cola sign, he tries to buy some groceries in a rural store and thus has his first abortive contact with the natives. Attracted by Ruth’s daily lunch bag, he gets to know her and thus finally finds someone who is willing to help him but who also, stupidly misjudging what a Japanese might like to eat, contributes to his eventual discovery. Lost in the Okefenokee Swamp, he is saved from starvation by the Jeffcoats’ generous offer of food. And when he finally ends his life by committing hara-kiri, that is, suicide by ritual disembowelment, he does not use an appropriate weapon but, in a last and bitter irony, the handle of a spoon he has honed into a blade. There are only two encounters in which Hiro experiences American hospitality. When he stays in Ambly Wooster’s mansion and gets all he wants to eat, he muses that “this was paradise, this was America” (136), and begins to think that “America wasn’t so bad after all” (145). But this feeling does not last long because when he sees himself in a mirror, he realizes that “he was twenty years old and he looked sixty - this was what America had done for him” (138). When the Jeffcoats treat him in a friendly and helpful manner, he is surprised: “Gayin: he would never understand them” (280). Having received food and even a pair of expensive shoes from them, Hiro realizes with wonder and envy that Jeff with his “hearty, beautifully formed laugh” (281), Julie with her “beautiful Amerikajin smile” (285), and well-behaved little Jeff form what he has missed all his life, namely, a functioning family. ***** East Is East is not only a picaresque novel that unfolds its escape and pursuit structure on two parallel levels by making Hiro both a modern-day Candide and a contemporary Telemachus, but on a third level it is a Künstlerroman that offers a hilarious satire on the literary establishment. 5 Hardee’s is the number five chain of fast food restaurants in the U.S., founded in 1960 in Greenville, South Carolina, and located mostly in the Southeast and Midwest. Peter Freese 200 The depiction of the motley group of writers assembled at Thanatopsis House, with the established stars among them representing major schools, probably owes a lot to Boyle’s personal experiences. It is very close to open parody, and the scene in which Patsy Arena gives a gruesome piano recital (179) provides the most obvious example. Irving Thalamus, whose family name refers to a major part of the brain, is “one of the legends of Jewish-American letters” (123) “whose trade-in-stock - urban Jewish angst - throve on confusion” (23). Laura Grobian, whose name combines the name of the woman whom Petrarca idolized with an obscure German loanword for crude, sloppy, or buffoonish persons, is “the doyenne of the dark-eyed semi-mysterious upper-middle-class former bohemian school of WASP novelists, famous for a bloodless 209-page trilogy set in 1967 San Francisco” (213), and Peter Anserine, who bears the name of an antioxidant that helps to reduce fatigue, constantly reads books, “always European, and never in translation” (23) and it is probably no accident that “the great divorced Brahmin novelist of ideas” (164) shares his initials with Paul Auster. The numerous lesser writers which circle around these stars are driven by ambition and consumed by jealousy, fight desperately for the attention of their idols, and engage in all kinds of complicated intrigues. And the ruthless fight between Ruth Dershowitz and Jane Shine assumes almost existential proportions. Ruth Derhowitz, Hiro’s would-be savior, antagonist, and eventual nemesis, is a ‘Jewish American Princess,’ 6 and the fact that this makes her another ‘JAP’ might well be an additional joke sneaked in by Boyle. From details scattered throughout the book one can reconstruct her biography: she grew up in Santa Monica (24, 154) with a father who was an influential “lawgiver” (247). She holds “a shaky B.A. in anthropology from Sonoma State” (24), spent a year each at Iowa and at Irvine “without managing to come away with a degree from either” (24f.), and her burning desire to become a famous writer has so far only resulted in “four intense and gloomy stories” (25) published in unknown little magazines. Ruth is much better in bed than at the writing desk, and she, who secretly devours “fat pulp romances” (249), makes strategic use of her irresistible sex appeal to get the attention she craves. She owes her hardwon place as “queen of the hive” (214) in the Thanatopsis community not to her artistic accomplishments but to the fact that she is the lover of Saxby, the son of the house. Her constant “play-acting” (31), her talent for “playing the game” (106), for “networking” (110, see 114) and for “getting the feel of the role” (347) she is playing, her losing fight with 6 Ruth’s Old Testament name, her memories of her father having “the look of the mensch” (247), the sheriff’s question about her: “Was she a Jew? She was, wasn’t she? ” (225), Abercorn’s characterization of her as “the little Jew bitch” (235), and the enraged Turco’s reference to her as “a lying Jew bitch” (249) imply that she is Jewish. This is finally confirmed when Septima says: “Well, when my son told me he was bringin’ home a Jewish girl I didn’t bat an eye” (315). T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 201 “the misery of writing” (24), and her obsession with Jane Shine, the hated enemy who has made the very career she is dreaming of, makes her a character who is more than a mere caricature and who thus subverts the very stereotypes whose encounter fuels the novel’s central action. In an interview with Ted Friend, Boyle made a surprising comment about her: East Is East has a female character - Ruth Dershowitz, an ambitious but undertalented writer - who, in her zest for fame, her yearnings for love and bursts of altruism and her ultimate self-deceptions, quivers with the contradictions and sadness of a real person. Boyle believes she is his pinnacle in character development. “Ruth Dershowitz,” he says, “and I’ve been saving this for these interviews - c’est moi, as Flaubert said of Emma Bovary. I had all her anxieties and petty jealousies when I was young and at Iowa.” (Friend 1990) Ruth’s small triumphs with the coterie of other writers to whom she artfully endears herself, her bitter fight with Jane Shine, about whom she says that “all her talent’s between her legs” (117), thus projecting upon her detested rival what characterizes herself, and her final embarrassing defeat when her reading turns out to be a miserable failure and her role as the fugitive Hiro’s accomplice is revealed and puts her to shame, constitute a major strand of the novel’s action. Therefore, it can hardly surprise that a book that is partly a Künstlerroman contains sundry references and allusions to earlier authors and texts. The first reference is implied in the novel’s title. In 1889, Rudyard Kipling, who coined the charged phrase “the white man’s burden,” published his much anthologized poem “The Ballad of East and West,” whose refrain reads: Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! (Kipling) The opening line is often read as proof of Kipling’s supremacist ideas about race and empire, but it is qualified by its context. Kipling maintains that different regions of the world will remain separated, but the ballad shows that in an encounter of two strong men representing these regions the accidents of nationality or race do not matter and that in such an encounter Asians and Europeans can turn out to be equals. Since Boyle is certainly conversant with the ballad, the title of his novel only seems to announce the impossibility of intercultural understanding, but ironically subverts this notion and implies that, given sufficient education and unprejudiced attitudes, such an understanding might well be achieved. Peter Freese 202 A second referential horizon, which also concerns the interaction of two ethnic groups, this time between blacks and whites in America, is evoked by one of the novel’s two mottos: Bred and bawn in de briar patch, Br’er Fox, bred and bawn. Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus Joel Chandler Harris lived in Atlanta, GA where he worked as an associate editor for the very Atlanta Constitution, which is one of the papers that cover the hunt for Hiro Tanaka (28). In 1880, he published Uncle Remus: His Songs and Saying, a collection of African-American oral folktales and songs, and had them told in a Deep South black dialect by Uncle Remus, a kindly old slave, to the children gathered around him. This collection was so successful that it was followed by eight more volumes. Most of Uncle Remus’ tales are animal stories, with their main character Br’er Rabbit being a trickster and trouble-maker who is often opposed by Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. In the best-known tale, Br’er Fox constructs a lump of tar and puts clothing on it. When Br’er Rabbit comes along, he politely greets the “tar baby” but receives no response. Offended by what he takes to be Tar Baby’s lack of manners, he punches it and gets stuck. About to be fried and eaten by B’rer Fox, he cleverly begs him to be killed in any other way than by being thrown into the briar patch. As expected, B’rer Fox, who hates B’rer Rabbit for having frequently tricked him, stupidly does that very thing, and B’rer Rabbit escapes because he is at home in the briar patch. “Skin me, Brer Fox,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, “snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,” sezee, “but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch,” sezee. Co’se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch ‘im by de behime legs en slung ‘im right in de middle er de brier-patch. Dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang ‘roun‘ fer ter see w’at wuz gwineter happen. Bimeby he hear somebody call ‘im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin’ crosslegged on a chinkapin log koamin’ de pitch outen his har wid a chip. Den Brer Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out: “Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox - bred en bawn in a brierpatch! ” en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers. (Uncle Remus - Songs and Sayings) Both the notion of the “tar baby,” which Toni Morrison used as the title of one of her novels, and the concept of the “briar patch” have become part of popular U.S. culture, with the latter referring to a place where rich and powerful people would hate to be, but poor and clever people can fend for themselves. Boyle makes repeated use of these notions when he has an elated Saxby whistle “like Uncle Remus himself” (110), says about Olmstead White that “he moved […] like Br’er Rabbit stuck to the T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 203 tar baby” (41) when confronted with Hiro, has Turco announce: “I’m Br’er Fox, and this here [the boom box] is my tarbaby” (62), and later has him say to Abercorn: “What do you think, it’s just a coincidence that he brings this Nip out here and lets him go like Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch? ” (291f.) Apart from the unspoken implications of each of these references - Turco’s notion that Hiro will be as much at home in the swamp as Br’er Rabbit was in the briar patch is an inane misjudgment - the Uncle Remus allusions place Hiro in the rich literary tradition that deals with the constellation of a poor underdog managing to outwit his stronger and more powerful antagonists by means of his cunning ways and thus fulfills an important function in directing the readers’ empathy. A third literary horizon is established by means of the unusual name of the writers’ colony. Soon after Marion Lights, the owner of the mansion on Tupelo Island, had committed suicide, his widow Septima converted the mansion into a writers’ colony on the model of “Yaddo, MacDowell and Cummington” (22). 7 Returning to “the poetry that had been the romantic bulwark of her youth,” she calls it “Thanatopsis House, ‘that mysterious realm, where each shall take/ His chamber in the silent halls …’” (113). These lines are taken from an early American poem written around 1811 by William Cullen Bryant. Having read the British ‘graveyard poets,’ especially Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Churchyard,” the seventeen-year old Bryant wrote a meditation on death which, combining Greek thanatos (death) and -opsis (sight), he called “Thanatopsis.” Later he enlarged the poem, added a final injunction, and published it in Thanatopsis and Other Poems, the first major book of American poetry. The final lines read: So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, that moves To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustain’d and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. (Bryant 1994: I, 975) This admonition to trustfully “approach [one’s] grave” led to Septima’s decision to name every writer’s cabin, in memory of her husband’s voluntary death, “after a famous suicide” (25). Thus, Ruth lives in “Hart Crane” (25), named after the author of The Bridge who killed himself at thirtytwo; another writer lives in “John Berryman” (204), named after the poet who jumped from a bridge; and yet another cabin is named after “Diane 7 Yaddo was opened in 1926 in Saratoga Springs, NY; MacDowell was founded in 1907 in Peterborough, NH; The Cummington Community for the Arts is situated in western Massachusetts. Peter Freese 204 Arbus” (71), the photographer who took barbiturates and slashed her wrists. Septima’s obsession with suicide might seem to be just a personal oddity, but it functions as an American counterpart to Hiro’s samurai notion of an honorable death and shows that the Japanese notion of ritual suicide, which xenophobic Americans might consider an exotic aberration, has its western equivalents. And that suicide is a phenomenon to be found in all cultures is stressed by the extensive references to the mass suicides in Masada, Saipan, and Jonestown (261ff.), which span centuries from Roman times through World War II to 1978. 8 A fourth, less obvious chain of iterative references has to do with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In the same way in which the monomaniacal Ahab pursues the white whale, but revealingly on a much smaller scale, Saxby searches for the albino version of the “pigmy sunfish” (181) or elassoma okefenokee and dreams that this hitherto unclassified fish might eventually even be named after him and become the “elassoma okefenokee lightsei” (319). The pigmy sunfish really exists, and Boyle bolsters this aspect of his fictional world by having Saxby, after the failure of his first attempt to populate his new aquarium, turn “to the pages of Axelrod’s Exotic Aquarium Fishes for enlightenment” (175, see 171) 9 and later having him dream of “going to take his place among the great amateur aquarists of the century: William Voderwinkler, Daniel DiCoco and Paul Hahnel, father of the fancy guppy” (181). 10 But what is more important is that Saxby’s ambition is ironically subverted. During his protracted search for the fish, he muses: “Ahab hadn’t found the white whale in a day, either” (115), and later even thinks of himself as “a man on the verge of a special communion with the mysteries of nature and the whiteness of the fish” (240f.). His fellow student Roy Dotson’s flatboat has “the legend Pequod II stenciled on its bow, one of Roy’s little jokes” 8 In 72, the Roman governor of Iudaea laid siege to Masada, a fortified palace in the south of Israel on top of an isolated rock plateau. When, after several months of siege, the Roman legion entered the fortress, they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had set fire to all the buildings and committed mass suicide. - In June 1944, Emperor Hirohito realized that the Battle of Saipan would be lost and sent out an imperial order encouraging the civilians of Saipan to commit suicide and authorizing the commander of Saipan to promise civilians who died there a spiritual status in the afterlife equal to those of soldiers perishing in combat. In the last days of the battle, over 20,000 Japanese civilians committed suicide, some jumping from “Suicide Cliff” to take the offered privileged place in the afterlife. - On November 18, 1978, Jonestown, a community in northwestern Guyana formed by the Peoples Temple and led by Jim Jones, made headlines when 909 Temple members committed “revolutionary suicide” by cyanide poisoning and thus created the largest mass suicide in modern history. 9 Herbert Richard Axelrod (*1927) is a tropical fish expert who wrote Handbook of Tropical Aquarium Fishes (1955) Saltwater Aquarium Fishes (1987) and Dr. Axelrod’s Atlas of Freshwater Aquarium Fishes (2004). 10 Both Voderwinkler and Hahnel are well-known fish experts; DiCoco could not be identified. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 205 (244), and later it is said: “Their [Roy’s and Saxby’s] eyes fastened on the stenciled legend - the Pequod II - and both smiled.” (321) The parallel between Ahab’s single-minded pursuit of the huge white whale and Saxby’s quest for the tiny albino sunfish insinuates that people’s claims and accomplishments have shrunk and that what the pampered heir of an old Southern family manages to achieve is only a miniature version of the events of the past. And the seemingly unrelated fact that the incompetent and racist INS representative Detlef Abercorn suffers from the chronic illness of vitiligo or white-blotch disease and that, therefore, for him the notion of “legendary whiteness” (243) exists only in the form of unseemly white blotches of melanin-deprived skin is another subversive comment on how useless the charged old myth of whiteness has become as a justification of racial superiority. 11 Besides the four literary horizons named so far, the novel is punctuated by references to other writers and their works. Thus, Detlef Abercorn is a fan of John le Carré (54, 56), and when he realizes that the hunt for Hiro becomes more complicated and that his job is at stake, he thinks that he better “forget the le Carré […] from here on out it was more like James M. Cain” (287), thus replacing the rational problem solving in an espionage novel like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold with the conflicting human urges in a roman noir like The Postman Always Rings Twice. Other references range from Walt Whitman (240), Ernest Hemingway (213, 355) and Eudora Welty (259) to Samuel Beckett (33), Truman Capote (213) and J.D. Salinger (259), from William Shakespeare (303), Elizabeth Gaskell (304), William Wordsworth (309) and Virginia Woolf (304) to John Ashbery (259), James Baldwin (263), Eldridge Cleaver (263), Joan Didion (356) and Flannery O’Connor (304). Aesop (311) is mentioned as well as Pearl S. Buck (304), Gone With the Wind (27, 163, 164) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (167) are referred to as well as The Confessions of Nat Turner (27) and Alex Hailey’s Roots (27), Tolstoy’s War and Peace (183) and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (251). Kate Douglas Wiggin’s children’s book Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (235) is mentioned as well as Dr. Seuss’ bestselling children’s book Green Eggs and Ham (241) and the fairy tale “Goldilocks” (128). Shakespeare’s Juliet (126) is alluded to as well as Petrarca’s Beatrice (126), and the description of a Southerner as “as slippery, low-browed and loose-jointed as a Snopes” (295) refers to Faulkner. The dense net of references to assorted authors and texts is complemented by a long list of allusions to such regional newspapers as the Atlanta Constitution (26), the Savannah Star (28, 294) and The San Francisco Chronicle (353), and to such nationwide magazines as National 11 Hicks 2003: 45, refers to yet another implication when she reads Abercorn’s vitiligo as marking “the presence of a white supremacist sensibility within the activities of [the INS] .” Peter Freese 206 Geographic (181) and Architectural Digest (345), to such widely read magazines as Parade (6), the women’s magazine Cosmo(politan) and the men’s magazine Esquire (121), the fashion magazine National Velvet (353) and Larry Flint’s pornographic magazine Hustler (257). Since the Thanatopsians are keen on having their texts published in respected journals, there are also recurring references to such outstanding publications as Harper’s Magazine (256) with its tradition of cultural commentary and the liberal Boston magazine The Atlantic (121, 256, 311) with its national reputation, to Harold Ross’ The New Yorker (65, 121, 256) with its rigorously edited short stories and the Partisan Review (121) with its influential political comments. And as the writers assembled in Thanatopsis House long for positive reviews of their work, they also carefully study The New York Times (353) and The New York Times Magazine (345) as well as The New York Review of Books (352). These references greatly help to anchor the novel’s action in American ‘reality.’ But it is not only ‘high’ literature that plays an important role in East Is East but also - hardly surprising in a novel dealing with mutual national stereotypes - popular culture in all its expressions from film and TV to pop songs and cartoons. Thus, Ruth, who in the Thanatopsis weekly film program sees Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 surreal movie The Woman in the Dunes (179) based on Kobo Abe’s novel, thinks of more popular fare when she considers Turco and Abercorn as incompetent as “Laurel and Hardy” (161). When she learns that Hiro has moved from one swamp into another and even worse one, she muses that this is “something out of Heart of Darkness - or the Keystone Kops. Yes, that was it: The Keystone Kops Meet Heart of Darkness” (251), using the Keystone Kops in their proverbial meaning as a group criticized for its mistakes growing out of a lack of coordination despite the investment of energy and activity. When she is interrogated by the INS agents about her role in Hiro’s flight she thinks that if this happened to somebody else it would be “comical, like something out of Dragnet or Miami Vice” (208), thus conjuring up the most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history that began as a radio series in 1949, became a TV version in 1951 and had its latest remake in 2004, and an NBC television series about two detectives working undercover in Miami. And when she learns that Hiro has been caught and is now in prison, she thinks of “Alec Guinness emerging from the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai” (209). When the thirsty Hiro drinks sea water, he knows he should not do that because “he’d seen the movies, seen Lifeboat and Mutiny on the Bounty” (36) and learned what that leads to from Hitchcock’s 1944 war film and the 1962 film with Marlon Brando. When he runs from the posse, he thinks of himself as “Tarzan the Ape Man” (198). When he manages to escape from the prison and passes the sleeping guard, he steals his fried chicken “as casually as Yojimbo hiking up his yucata or Dirty Harry scratching his stubble” (230), and here it is the intruding T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 207 voice of Boyle that conjures up both Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo about a masterless samurai and Don Siegel’s crime thrillers with Clint Eastwood as the San Francisco Police Department Inspector ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan. In other situations, Hiro tries to imitate Clint Eastwood (50, 279) and Burt Reynolds (50). Ruth hates Jane Shine for pretending to be Meryl Streep (306), and Hiro reminds her of Toshiro Mifune (66), the internationally known Japanese actor and director. Abercorn thinks that down south everybody “talked like Barney Fife and had an IQ to match” (288), referring to a character from The Andy Griffith Show. And when he drives into the Okefenokee Swamp with Roy Dotson, he awaits “something out of The African Queen” (299), a 1951 American adventure drama with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Olmstead White’s young relatives are characterized by watching “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” (195) on their VCR, a 1979 musical comedy film featuring the Ramones. Sandy De Haven thinks that Hiro’s flight is “like something out of The Chase” (151), referring to a 1966 American film about a series of events set in motion by a prison break. Young Saxby sees his father as either a kind of Pecos Bill (112), the cowboy hero of tall tales of the Old West, or as someone resembling Paul Bunyan (112), the mythical lumberjack with his superhuman skills. When Ambly Wooster enthuses about “the shadings [Seiji] brought to Billy the Kid” (133), she thinks of Aaron Copland’s ballet about the famous frontier outlaw and gunman. And when Jeff Jeffcoat tells his son about Chief Billy Bowlegs (270, 275ff.), the leader of the Seminoles during their wars against the U.S., he acquaints him with the ‘Alligator Chief” after whom Billy’s Island in the Okefenokee Swamp is named. To make the novel’s cultural canvas as broad as possible, Boyle has Ruth put up a poster by David Hockney (154), the famous English painter, in her hut, and one of the Thanatopsis artists is depicted as having “stepped out of a Botero painting” (179) and thus linked to the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Finally, the numerous references to high and pop literature, film, television, folk legend, and painting are supplemented by allusions to such famous American photographers as Yousuf Karsh (213), Annie Leibovitz (213) and Richard Avedon (213), about whom Ruth recalls with envy that all of them did portraits of Laura Grobian, the most famous of the Thanatopsis writers. As far as music is concerned, there are some references to serious music and numerous ones to popular music. The writers at Thanatopsis with their cultural aspirations listen to musical performances “with the adagio from Mozart’s concerto or a Gershwin medley” (211). Dotty Ambly Wooster mistakes Hiro for “Seiji” (132) - an easily missed reference to Seiji Ozawa, the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera - and refers to him having directed “[Charles] Ives, [Aaron] Copeland and [Samuel] Barber” (133) at Atlanta. When Ruth discovers Saxby together with Jane Shine, she feels “like Madame Butterfly” (167). Saxby dislikes “Arnold Schoen- Peter Freese 208 berg” (179), whereas his mother’s favorite is the Venetian Baroque composer “Albinoni” (181). And in the Okefenokee Swamp, Jeff Jeffcoat Jr. has to play his clarinet, producing “the angst-ridden strains of Carl Nielsen” (275), the Danish composer of concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. These few references to classical music are contrasted with a host of allusions to pop music, and here most of the references belong to three major types. The first is conjured up in connection with Hiro’s mother who, as a Japanese high school graduate dreamed of forming a band and playing “American rock and roll” (16) of the sixties. The bands and singers evoked are Buffalo Springfield (16), the rock group that served as a springboard for Neil Young’s career and whose best-known song was “For What It’s Worth”; The Doors (16), the Los Angeles band that took its name from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and was, mainly due to their iconic frontman Jim Morrison (17), one of the most controversial rock acts of the 1960s; The Grateful Dead (16), the band from the San Francisco Bay area that became famous for its psychedelic space rock; Iron Butterfly (16), the psychedelic rock band known for their hit “In-A- Gadda-Da-Vida.” And the singers Hiro’s mother admired besides Jim Morrison were Janis Joplin (16), one of the great solo artists of the sixties who died young of an overdose of heroin, and Grace Slick (16), the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane and a major figure in the 1960s psychedelic rock genre. This music from the ‘wild sixties’ conjures up the hippie revolution against the rat-race of a success-driven society, the possibility of unlimited self-realization, and the prospect of a better word, and poor Hiro does not know that by the time he comes to America this music has become a thing of the past and the prospect of a better world has thinned into a nostalgic memory. Another type of pop music is introduced when, after Jane Shine’s triumphant reading, the reception at Thanatopsis is accompanied by “a tape of old Motown hits” (306). The bands, singers and songs mentioned are Marvin Gay (306), who began in the late fifties as a member of the doo-wop group The Moonglows and became a top-selling solo artist in the sixties; Martha and the Vandellas (306), who were among the most successful groups of the Motown roster from 1963 to 1967 and, in contrast to The Supremes or The Marvelettes, produced a harder R&B sound and whose signature song was “Dancing in the Street”; and The Four Tops (306), whose repertoire included many styles from doo-wop to hard rock. And songs like James Brown’s 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (307), seminal in the genre of funk, and Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” (307) stand for yet another variant. Still another and totally different type of pop music is conjured up when, on his way to the swamp, Saxby listens to the car radio. He likes T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 209 “soft rock, Steely Dan 12 and that sort of thing” (238), but he cannot find such music because “once you left the city you got nothing but your hardcore redneck honky-tonk psychodrama” (238), and he is so elated about having found his albino fish that he sings along with the music in a voice “that would have cleared the Grand Ole Opry in ten seconds flat” (238). This refers to the influential tradition of country music as represented by the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, 13 and the song that is then quoted is so inane that one expects it to be Boyle’s tongue-in-cheek invention: I don’t care if it rains or freezes, Long as I got my plastic Jesus Glued up on the dashboard of my car. (238) Once more, however, what seems to be fiction turns out to be fact, since this song really exists. Its authorship is controversial, but usually Ernie Marrs (1932-1998) is credited with its lyrics that were published in the magazine Sing Out! in 1964, and the song became prominent when Paul Newman sang in the movie Cool Hand Luke (1967). Of Hiro it is said that “he liked American music, personally, disco and soul” (144), and then the following examples are named: Little Anthony and the Imperials (144), a rhythm and blues, soul and doo-wop vocal group from New York, first active in the 1950s and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009; Michael Jackson (62, 144, 228), the King of Pop and most successful entertainer of all times, whose contribution to music, dance, and fashion made him a global figure in popular culture for over four decades; Donna Summers (62, 70, 144, 161, 228, 350, 357), who gained prominence during the disco era of the 1970s and has sold more than 130 million albums and singles worldwide. Thus, with psychedelic rock of the sixties, the music of the Motown label, the country music of the South, and Hiro’s eclectic choices, several very different types of pop are introduced. Whereas the carefully integrated chains of references to Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West,” Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus, William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick provide East Is East with additional shades of meaning by embedding particular characters or specific motifs of the novel in larger literary traditions, the enormous wealth of further cultural allusions seems to be just 12 Steely Dan was an American rock band whose popularity peaked in the late 1970s and whom Rolling Stone called “the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.” 13 Since 1925 the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, has presented weekly concerts with the biggest stars of country music. Having opened one of the longestrunning broadcasts with a one-hour radio “barn dance” on WSM-AM, the Opry concentrates on country music and presents a mixture of old and new stars who perform country, bluegrass, folk, comedy, and gospel. It draws thousands of visitors and millions of radio listeners and is one of the country’s most famous stages. Peter Freese 210 ornamental. This might be true if one looks at each reference individually, but in their entirety they, too, perform a thematic function. The passing hints at ‘high’ literature from Petrarca and Shakespeare to Baldwin and Didion, at American folk mythology from Paul Bunyan to Billy the Kid, and at numerous forms of popular entertainment from western movies to TV detective series as well as the countless allusions to ‘serious’ music from Mozart and Schoenberg and to popular music from psychedelic rock through Motown songs to Southern country music paint a huge cultural canvas which makes the novel’s readers recognize that American culture is extremely diverse and variegated and that thereby constantly and effectively reduces the very notion of national hetero-stereotypes to absurdity. ***** It is the ingenious combination of the satirical Künstlerroman and the related plots of the naïve outsider in search of a better world and the abandoned son on a quest for his lost father that makes it possible for Boyle to intertwine humor and pathos and to establish a scenario in which to test the power of national hetero-images. While the world of the Künstlerroman abounds with references to literature, films and music as well as newspapers and journals, for the other plot lines Boyle uses the strategy of firmly embedding his novel’s action in American reality by means of a string of passing references to people and events from contemporary history. When Detlef Abercorn is said to be “about as folksy as Bernhard Goetz” (69), this helps to characterize the INS agent by implication. 14 The same technique is employed when Ruth feels “almost saintly” like “a Mother Theresa herself” (126), since the inappropriate comparison with the Albanian nun who won the Nobel Prize for her humanitarian work in Calcutta ironically subverts Ruth’s pretense. When Ruth puts on a special dress for a party and doubts whether it is right for the season, she consoles herself by thinking that “it was a Geoffrey Beene” (163) 15 and thus reveals the degree of her other-directedness. When Hiro is questioned by the sheriff, the helpless victim of accumulated misunderstandings is asked whether he is “familiar with the Red Brigades” and “the 14 On December 22, 1984, Goetz shot four young black men whom he thought planned to rob him in a Manhattan express subway. This incident came to symbolize the anger of New Yorkers about the high crime rates of the 1980s and triggered a national debate on the limits of self-defense, the connections between race and crime, and the need for vigilantism. Goetz was charged with attempted murder, assault, and reckless endangerment, but a jury found him only guilty of the illegal possession of firearms, for which he served a sentence of less than a year. 15 Geoffrey Beene (1924-2004) was an American fashion designer whose clients included Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Faye Dunaway and Glenn Close. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 211 name Abu Nidal mean[s] anything to him” (223). These references to the Marxist-Leninist terrorist group Brigate Rosse that tried to destabilize Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s through sabotage attacks, and to Abu Nidal, the founder of the militant Palestinian group Fatah, illustrate the extent to which the prejudiced police (whom Boyle grants more historical knowledge than seems probable) misjudge poor Hiro’s importance. When Saxby elates over the whiteness of his albino fish, he takes it to be “a legendary whiteness, the whiteness of purity, of June brides, Christo’s running fence, the inner wrappings of the Hershey bar” (243), and the incongruity between purity and June brides on the one hand and Hershey bars on the other is strengthened by the reference to Christo and his wife’s environmental art work, the 24-mile long Running Fence in Sonoma and Marin counties in California. When Saxby remembers that his father was not as successful as he wanted to be, he expresses that by thinking that “he didn’t exactly unseat the Rockefellers, Morgans and Harrimans” (112), referring to three of the most successful dynasties in the American business world. When Abercorn thinks of Hiro as “a Japanese Manson” (55) and Turco maintains that Hiro is “as guilty as Charlie Manson, Adolf Hitler” (292), they compare the guiltless Japanese sailor not only with the German instigator of unprecedented mass murder, but also with an American criminal who had members of his group commit the ghastly Tate/ LaBianca murders and whose connection with rock music turned him into an emblem of insane violence and the macabre in American pop culture. And when Ruth connects her arch enemy Jane Shine to “P.T. Barnum” (309), the reference to the first American ‘show business’ millionaire, who was famous for his celebrated hoaxes, implies that Jane’s performance was also nothing but a well-executed hoax. There are also passing references to “a Di or a Fergie” (357), conjuring up the talked-about in-laws of the British royal family, to “McEnroe and Connors” and “Chrissie Evert too” (232), bringing famous tennis players into the world of the novel, to “Jim Paciorek, Matt Keough, Ty Van Burkelo” (91), outstanding baseball players admired by Hiro, to “Reggie Jackson” (338), the former Major League baseball right fielder of whom Hiro dreams in his hallucinations, and to “Leo Durocher” (87), one of the most successful managers in Major League baseball, whose famous saying “Nice guys finish last” (87) is adopted by Hiro when he decides to become ruthless and crafty. And when Hiro thinks of all the people who will come to hunt him in the Okefenokee Swamp, he mentions Abercorn und Turco and “Captain Nishizawa” (283). Here Boyle smuggles in yet another passing reference to the fighter pilot Lieutenant Hiroyoshi Nishizawa (1920-1944) of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, who was probably the most successful Japanese fighter in World War II. Thus, East Is East not only portrays America as a huge and stunningly diverse country populated by people that range from blasé New York Peter Freese 212 writers specializing in urban Jewish angst to illiterate southern blacks speaking Gullah and from racist INS-agents from Los Angeles to taciturn sheriffs in “Crackerland” (296) and even has a Punjabi named Gobi Aloo run a motel in Ciceroville (239), 16 but the novel also unfolds an enormous wealth of cultural references that conjure up a wide range of both high and popular literature, classical and pop music, genre movies and artistic films, folk legends and fairy tales, and sports heroes, politicians, and criminals. This very diversity continuously unmasks the notion of ‘national character’ as untenable, and this is why the novel’s central action, the tragicomic sequence of ever more serious misunderstandings generated by Hiro’s hetero-images of ‘America’ on the one hand and the American characters’ stereotypical notions of ‘Asia’ on the other, is constantly exposed as both stupid and dangerous by the multi-faceted nature of the very world in which it so unrelentingly unfolds. ***** It has been shown that Ruth, as one of the major actors in the confrontation of mutual national images, is anything but a ‘typical’ American. The same is true of Hiro Tanaka, who, in the novel’s dramatic clash of ethnic hetero-stereotypes, functions as the representative of Japan but is the very opposite of what might be considered an average twentieth-century Japanese. He is the son of an American hippie who cowardly disappeared before his child was born and a Japanese woman who fell for the foreigner, descended the social scale to become a despised bar girl, and committed suicide six months after her son’s birth. Thus Hiro, who grows up with his grandparents, is not only an orphan but also “a half-breed, a happa” (17) who is “forever a foreigner in his own society” (17). Since the Japanese are “a pure race, intolerant of miscegenation to the point of fanaticism” (17), the big and overweight boy becomes a harassed and bullied outsider who finds solace in eating - “he lived to eat” (37) - and in bēsubōru, the American import of baseball which he plays “with savage devotion” (91). One day, at the age of “seventeen” (91), this unhappy outsider who dreams of a reunion with his father in a multicultural America, sees a poster in a bookstore window of “a nearly naked man in the throes of death” (91). He discovers that this gory picture shows the author Yukio Mishima and buys his book The Way of the Samurai (93). Like most Japanese boys, Hiro knew the mythos of the samurai as thoroughly as his American counterpart knew that of the gunslinger, the dance-hall girl and the cattle rustler. The wandering samurai, like the lone man on the horse, was a mainstay of network TV, the movie theater, 16 This is an implied reference to the “Patel motel” phenomenon that has made a major impact on the American hospitality industry. As many as 60% of mid-sized motels and hotel properties throughout the US are owned by people of Indian origin of whom almost one-third have the surname Patel. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 213 cheap adventure novels and lurid comics, not to mention classics like The Forty-Seven Ronin 17 that were on every school reading list. (93) 18 As a child, Hiro had played at being a samurai but later lost interest. But reading Hagakure, he becomes fascinated by the samurai code of behavior and recognizes that its adoption would change him from a despised outcast into a proud and self-confident man, from a Hiro into a hero: “He’d been made to feel inferior all his life, and here was a way to conquer it […] with the oldest weapon in the Japanese arsenal. He would become a modern samurai.” (95) 17 The national legend of the Forty-Seven Ronin is based on historical facts. It deals with a group of samurai who are left without a leader after their feudal lord had to commit seppuku for assaulting a court official. Having avenged their master’s honor by killing that official, they are themselves forced to commit seppuku for having committed the crime of murder. Their story exemplifies the loyalty, sacrifice, and honor that all good people should show in their daily lives and is retold in numerous versions. 18 In “The Art of Fiction No. 161” Boyle said about the Japanese ingredients of his novel that “I had written two-thirds of the book before I got to Japan - I spent two weeks there on a book tour, and it was exactly as I imagined it to be. Well, almost. There were smells I hadn’t anticipated, an essence, unagi smoking in the night, seven-hundred-yen-a-shot bars in Kyoto, twisting alleys, a pristine lake in Hokkaido. You want to get the details right, absolutely, but if the truth stands in the way of a better fiction, then I don’t mind fiddling with it a little.” Peter Freese 214 In the course of several centuries, the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan, the samurai, developed a complex set of rules that came to be known as bushido (‘the way of the warrior’), and although they made up less than ten percent of the population, they developed a culture that influenced Japan as a whole and found its expression not only in a strict code of the retainer’s death-defying loyalty to his lord and such martial arts like kendo (‘the way of the sword’), but also in such aspects as the tea-ceremony and rock gardens, monochrome ink painting and poetry. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, a samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1719) retired to a hermitage in the mountains after thirty years of faithful service to his lord. He changed his name to Yamamoto Jōchō and narrated his thoughts to a fellow monk. In 1716, these thoughts were published under the title of Hagakure (‘hidden leaves’ or ‘in the shadow of the leaves’). They circle around the idea that the highest attainment of purity is to become one with death in one’s thoughts and that the resolution to die results in a life filled with beauty and grace that is beyond the reach of those who only care about self-preservation. 19 By the 1930s, the Hagakure had become one of the most famous representations of bushido in Japan, and after World War II its teachings were taken up by the author, poet, playwright, actor and film director Kimitake Hiraoka (1925-1970) known by his pen name of Yukio Mishima. He was a sickly mama’s boy who avoided the draft by lying about his health, his first major work, Confessions of a Mask (1949), dealt with the discovery of his homosexuality, and later he expressed his masochistic fantasies by posing in photographs as a drowned sailor, St. Sebastian shot dead with arrows, 20 or a samurai committing ritual suicide. But since he craved a perfect and ageless body, in 1955 he started body building and became an expert in karate and kendo. In 1968, he formed a private student army, and in 1970 he and four members of his army visited the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self- Defense Forces. Having tied the commandant to his chair, he stepped out on the balcony and addressed the soldiers gathered below with a prepared manifesto. He wanted to inspire a coup d’etat, but when he was jeered at and insulted, he returned to the commandant’s office and com- 19 English translations of Jōchō’s work are available in many editions, even in a Manga version. The internet offers complete texts under http: / / chabrieres. pagesperso-orange.fr/ texts/ hagakure.html and http: / / www.rosenoire.org/ archives / Hagakure.pdf. In 1999, Jim Jarmusch released his crime action film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai about a mysterious mafia hitman who follows the ancient code of the samurai as outlined in Jōchō’s Hagakure. In 2002, a PlayStation 2 action-adventure game called Way of the Samurai was released, and there is even a long paper dealing with “Hagakure für Führungskräfte” (http: / / www.reinerwahnsinn.net/ download/ Ausarbeitung_HagakureF%FCrF%FChrungskr% E4fte_2002.pdf) (June 2012). 20 The picture of Mishima as San Sebastian was taken from http: / / takimag.com/ article/ mishimapaleocon_as_samurai#axzz1VIw9W4JL (June 2012). T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 215 mitted seppuku (‘stomach cutting’), thus acting out what he had learned from the Hagakure and planned for over a year. Mishima, who was internationally famous for his avant-garde work that focuses on sexuality, death, and political reform and who was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, has gone down in history as a leading author of twentieth-century Japan, but while his literary achievements are widely recognized, his idiosyncratic brand of fascism and his anachronistic commitment to bushido appeal especially to right-wingers. 21 While one would assume that Jōchō’s archaic rules of conduct as adapted by Mishima (see Sparling 1977) are anything but an appropriate means of success for an illegal alien in a foreign country, it is one of the great ironies of Boyle’s novel that it is the very samurai code which enables an overweight and unarmed twenty-year-old refugee to evade the combined legal forces of the U.S. for several months. East Is East is permeated with references to both Jōchō and Mishima since “like his idol Yukio Mishima, and Mishima’s idol before him, Jocho Yamamoto, Hiro Tanaka was a man of decision” (11). 22 Thus, quotations from Hagakure accompany him from the very beginning when, swimming ashore, he thinks of “Mishima and Jocho and the book [= The Way of the Samurai] he’d taped around his chest” (3), to the very end when, honing the blade with which he will kill himself, he remembers that Jōchō had said: “While we live, death is irrelevant; when we are dead, we do not exist. There is no reason to fear death” (364). Aboard the ship, Hiro attacks his warden “in what Mishima would call ‘an explosion of pure action’” (14). Having jumped ship and being close to death after hours of drifting in the sea, he remembers Jōchō’s advice that “one cannot accomplish feats of greatness in a normal frame of mind. One must turn fanatic and develop a mania for dying” (15). Driven by hunger and approaching the frightened Olmstead White to get some of his oysters, he recalls Jōchō’s words that “a true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart. He must push on courageously as though sure to come out on top. Otherwise he is utterly useless” (43). When he is surrounded by the sheriff’s posse with their bloodhounds and finds himself in an absolutely hopeless situation, “all at once, magically, insidiously, the words of Jocho whispered to him - The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death; sometimes ten men cannot topple a man with such conviction” (197), and he makes yet another desperate attempt to escape. Imprisoned in the old slave cell, he thinks “of Jocho and Mishima. In defeat, there was only one path to honor, and that was death” (218), and whereas anybody else would have given up, he 21 See, e.g., the laudatory entry on the homepage of The Friends of Oswald Mosley (http: / / www.oswaldmosley.com/ yukio-mishima.htm) (June 2012). 22 The passing mention of another samurai, “Musashi” (335), refers to Miyamoto Musashi (c.1584-1645), the founder of a specific style of swordsmanship and the author of The Book of Five Rings about strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still studied today. Peter Freese 216 ponders that “perhaps he wasn’t defeated yet. It was all in the interpretation, wasn’t it? Small matters should be taken seriously, Jocho said.” (219) He actually finds a way out of the cell, and during his flight he recalls that “a true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart” (231). Hiding in the trunk of Saxby’s Mercedes, he waits “like a samurai, like Jocho, like Mishima” (267), and when he jumps suicidally into the Okefenokee Swamp, he “invoke[s] Jocho, inflating his hara” (269). When he becomes ill and feverish, he feels the pain “tearing at him like Mishima’s sword” (334), and when he is faced by a huge alligator, Boyle makes him think that “this was a situation that might have taxed Jocho himself” (336). 23 ***** Hiro Tanaka derived his extremely selective, one-sided and often factually wrong hetero-images of ‘America’ from the popular culture which the U.S. exports to the world in the form of movies, TV series and pop music on the one hand, and from his fractured memories about his American father on the other, which he unduly generalizes when he thinks that “like all Americans, he was lazy, stoned and undisciplined” (16). Rejected in Japan as a “Gajin. Long-nose. Butter-stinker” (15), 24 Hiro knows when he swims ashore “that there were people there, Americans, with their butter-stink and their pots of ketchup and mayonnaise and all the rest” (4). Thus, he adopts the very stereotype he was a victim of and applies it to the Americans, as when he later meets Ambly Wooster and notices that she carries “a sickening odor with her, the odor of the hakujin, the meat-eaters and butter-stinkers - only worse” (134). The self-styled samurai’s image of ‘America’ is curiously contradictory. On the one hand, he dreams of the U.S. as a land of liberty, equality and unhampered self-fulfillment in which members of all races are welcome and even a half-breed like him can ‘make it’: […] the Americans, he knew, were a polyglot tribe, mutts and mulattoes and worse - or better, depending on your point of view. In America you could be one part Negro, two parts Serbo-Croatian and three parts Eskimo and walk down the street with your head held high. If his own society was closed, the American was wide open - he knew it, he’d seen the films, read the books, listened to the LPs - and anyone could do anything he pleased there. (17f.) 23 Further references to Jōchō and Mishima can be found on pp. 4, 18, 19, 20, 44, 48, 85, 86, 132, 282, 363. 24 Gaijin, literally “outside person,” denotes a “non-Japanese” or “alien.” It can refer to nationality, race, or ethnicity, but since the Japanese nation is taken to be composed of a single ethnic group these meanings usually coalesce. Some take the word to be pejorative and offensive, others think that it can be used neutrally, but in Japan it is taken to be politically incorrect and avoided. - Since a person’s eating habits influence the smell of their sweat, Europeans and Americans who eat a lot of dairy products are called “butter-stinker” (bata-kusai) by the Japanese and Chinese. - “Long-nose” is another all-purpose word for Europeans and Americans. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 217 Thus, the young man who at home had been a scorned outsider, dreams the popular immigrant’s dream and thinks that America is a country “where everyone was a gaijin and no one cared” (95) and where he too can find “a new way to live” (95). He envisions big multicultural cities where “every face was different - they were white and black and yellow and everything in between - and they all glowed with the rapture of brotherly love” (95), and he plans […] to get to Beantown, the Big Apple, to the City of Brotherly Love; 25 he had to blend in with the masses, find himself a job, an apartment with western furniture and Japanese appliances, with toaster ovens and end tables and deep thick woolly carpets that climbed up the walls like a surging tide. Then he’d be safe, then he could play miniature golf and eat cheeseburgers or stroll down the street with an armload of groceries and no one would blink twice. (99) When Hiro imagines “a distant wide sun-streaked highway” that leads to “all the glorious polyglot cities of the land of the free and the home of the brave” (99), or when he is dead set on beginning “a new life” (131) in one of “the great mongrel cities” (131) even if he has “to walk all the way to the City of Brotherly Love” (131), all the traditional clichés from the American metropolis as the proverbial melting pot through the Horatio Alger version of the American Dream to the Marlboro Man riding into the sunset coalesce and seem to confirm the expectations which he and his shipmates had exchanged about “America with its movie stars and rock and roll and long-legged women and beef [and] the Amerikajin in their mansions with four bathrooms and their Cadillacs with whiskey bars in the back seat.” (337) But Hiro soon learns the hard way that the reality differs greatly from his wishful version of ‘America,’ and eventually he has to admit that “the City of Brotherly Love was an illusion, a fairy tale” (218), a “naked cheat” (267) and “a fraud” (280) and that the U.S. is a “Buddha-forsaken country” (219) where he is “a prisoner in perpetuity, hopeless and defeated” (218). On the other hand, however, from the moment he gets ashore Hiro knows from the American films and TV series he has eagerly watched at home that the very country which he envisions as lovingly multicultural is also thoroughly racist. And, ironically enough, he reveals himself as a racist. Thus, when he encounters Olmstead White, the illiterate black with the inappropriate name, “he knew, as every Japanese does, that Negroes were depraved and vicious, hairier, sweatier and even more potent than their white counterparts, the hakujin. They were violent and physical, they were addicted to drugs and they thought only with their sexual organs.” (42) He shows some inkling of Southern segregation when he ponders “that Georgia was in the South where the Negroes 25 At another occasion, Hiro adds Chicago, “the Windy City” (47) to Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Peter Freese 218 harvested cotton and the hakujin made them use separate toilets and drinking fountains” (46), and of both black slavery and Indian ethnocide when he describes his cell as “a relic of the times when the Negroes were shackled and the red Indians butchered” (220). Thus, Hiro who runs away from Japanese racism and hopes to be accepted in a pluralistic America, makes disparaging racist remarks about blacks and in doing so contradicts his very dream. But it takes a long series of failed encounters and months of suffering before the harmless naïf who is wrongly charged with two dozen crimes resignedly recognizes that he was guilty of “stupidity, naiveté, guilty of thinking the Amerikajin would accept him in common humanity. He was wrong, and that was his crime. He had failed, and that was his fate.” (362) The most frequently mentioned trait of Hiro’s self-contradictory image of ‘America’ is its all-pervasive violence. When he first contrasts Japan and the U.S., he thinks of America as “dangerous, yes. Seething with crime and degeneracy and individualism” (18). He remembers “all those American movies with their tattooed gangs and the feints and thrusts of their knife fights” (20), and therefore thinks that as a prisoner he will be “brutalized by the half-breeds and child molesters and patricides that infested the dark gaijin cells like mold” (47). Obviously, he has not only seen gangster films but also many Westerns because when, in one of the funniest scenes of the novel, he tries to pass as an American in a rural grocery store he imitates Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood and addresses the perplexed salesgirl with “Mothafucka,” because he believes that “Americans began any exchange of pleasantries with a string of curses” (50). When he runs away from Saxby, who wants to help him, he thinks: “Americans. They killed each other over dinner, shot one another for sport, mugged old ladies in the street” (52); when the sheriff’s posse chase him with bloodhounds, he thinks of them as “Americans. Killers. Individualists gone rampant” (196f.); and when he is caught and put in the old slave cell he muses: They shoved him, abused him, humiliated him, made him walk the gauntlet of them as if they were red Indians in the forest, jeering and spitting and cursing him for a Jap, a Nip, a gook and a Chinaman. Yes. But they weren’t red Indians. They were white-faced and black-faced, blueeyed, kinky-haired, they stank of butter and whiskey and the loam that blackened their fingernails, and it was they who’d exterminated the red Indians with ferocity so pitiless and primeval it made the savages seem civilized. […] this was American violence, bred in the bone. This was the mob, the riot, this was dog eat dog. (216) […] there was no glimmer of humanity in any of them. […] They were hunters. Killers. (217) To the man who finds himself on a swampy island, the violence of the people he encounters seems only to mirror what he experiences as “the wilderness of America” (45) and “a wild continent” (130) that is “vast and untamed and seething with bear, lion, wolf and crocodile” (45). T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 219 Thus, not only the people are dangerous but also the country is frighteningly inhospitable: “Now he was in America, where nature was primeval, seething, a cauldron of snapping reptiles, insects and filth, where halfcrazed Negroes and homicidal whites lurked behind every tree” (130f.). When, later, he runs into the Okefenokee Swamp, “as far as he could see there was nothing but water, muck, creeper and vine, the damnable unending fetid stinking wilderness of America” (268). And when he contracts swamp fever and begins to hallucinate, he has “to crawl back up the orifice of America the primitive” (334), thinks of all Americans as “beasts” (334), and even understands the huge alligator that confronts him as “the dinosaur that was America” (338). ***** Whereas Hiro’s hetero-images of ‘America’ as both a multicultural paradise welcoming all ethnicities and a dangerous wilderness populated by bloodthirsty, racist and superficial individualists with bad eating habits are based on how the U.S. depicts itself in the pop culture it exports worldwide, the notions that the American characters of the novel have of Asians in general and Japanese in particular are based on ignorance and xenophobia and hardly go beyond Ruth’s initial remark that Hiro “looked different somehow” (8). Detlef Abercorn of the INS, a man who has professional experience with foreigners and should know about their cultures, is an outspoken racist not only with regard to all kinds of ‘aliens’, but also Americans from regions other than his Californian home. Having worked in Los Angeles, “the innermost circle of INS hell” (53), he remembers “Guatemalans shooting at Salvadorans, Hmong tribesmen microwaving dogs, Turks and Iranians setting fire to carpet stores and the like” (53f., see 294) and consequently thinks that arresting a lonely Japanese in Georgia, even if he is classified as “IAADA - Illegal Alien, Armed, Dangerous and Amok” (53), will be simple, and instead makes insulting remarks about backward Southerners: “A Nip 26 in Georgia? These people ate weasel, picked their teeth with their feet, grew right up out of the ground like weeds, like kudzu; the poor dumb Nip - Japanese - wouldn’t last a day, six hours even.” (54) He states that he “never had a problem, not that he could remember, with the Japanese. […] They never entered the country illegally. Didn’t want to. They figured they had it all and more over there, so why bother? Plenty of them came in to run factories and open banks and whatnot, but all that was done at the highest levels” 26 “Nip” is a derogatory term for a person of Japanese descent that was used by American soldiers in World War II. It is short for Nipponese, from Nippon, the Japanese name for Japan. Peter Freese 220 (56). Abercorn’s dwarfish helper, the crazy Lewis Turco, “an ex-LURP 27 and part-time special agent” (56) who is thought to know everything about Asians, is certain that catching a Japanese is no problem: “What you got to realize about the Nips is they’re the squarest people in the world. I mean the hokiest bar none. […] They’re all part of this big team, this like Eagle Scout thing where everybody fits in and works real hard and makes this perfect and totally unique society. Because they’re superior to everybody else, they’re purer - that’s what they think. Nobody but Japanese in Japan. You fuck up, you let the whole race down. […] Squarest people in the world.” (61, see 228) Having thus spouted the widespread clichés of Japanese kaizen (‘change for the better’), the Japanese philosophy focusing upon the steady improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, and management, he outlines his crazy plan that he will catch the fugitive Hiro with pop music (62) and later explains to Ruth that he will use a designer T-shirt as bait (161). Thus, the two representatives of the federal law know absolutely nothing about the man they are supposed to arrest, and that is the major reason while they abjectly fail in their pursuit. It is Ambly Wooster, the rich old lady suffering from senile dementia, who expresses in one of her endless monologues what average Americans in the eighties knew about Japan: “You’re so clever, you Japanese, what with your automobile factories and your Suzuki method 28 and that exquisite Satsuma ware - busy as a hive of bees, aren’t you? You’ve even got whiskey now, so they tell me, and of course you’ve got your beers - your Kirin and your Suntory and your Sapporo - and they’re every bit as good as our lackadaisical brewing giants have been able to produce, but sake, sake I could never understand, how do you drink that odious stuff? And your educational system, why, it’s the wonder of the world, engineers and scientists and chemists and what have you, and all because you’re not afraid of work, back to the basics and all of that. You know, sometimes I almost wish you had won the war - I just think it would shake this spineless society up, muggings in the street, millions of homeless, AIDS, but of course you have no crime whatsoever, do you? I’ve walked the streets of Tokyo myself, at the witching hour and past it, well past it” - and here the old lady gave him an exaggerated wink - “helpless as I am, and nothing, nothing did I find 27 LURP is the phonetic transcription of LRRP = ‘Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol’, a small four to six-man team in the Vietnam War on highly dangerous special reconnaissance missions deep into enemy territory. 28 The Suzuki method is an educational strategy that aims to create great abilities in its students through a nurturing environment. Its major vehicle is music education, and it is modeled on an early childhood education focused on factors Shinichi Suzuki observed in native language acquisition: immersion, encouragement, small steps, and an unforced timetable for learning material based on each person’s developmental readiness to imitate examples and internalize principles. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 221 but courtesy, courtesy, courtesy - manners, that’s what you people are all about.” (133) And she, too, refers to the Japanophobia of the times when she finds it “so unfair and irresponsible to characterize such a thrifty and hardworking, no-nonsense, nose-to-the-grindstone race as yours as robots living in rabbit hutches” (134). One need only add Roy Dotson’s observation that “From what I’ve heard of the Japanese - they’re pretty resourceful, aren’t they? ” (321), and the severely limited range of what the educated Americans in the novel know about Japan is complete. Even a well-meaning liberal like Saxby reverts to ingrained clichés when he discovers Hiro in the trunk of his Mercedes and shouts after the fleeing man “you Nip, you Jap, you gook! ” (320) 29 Olmstead White’s uneducated nephew Royal, who erroneously thinks that Hiro has killed his uncle, calls him “you gook son of a bitch” (198), and upon Hiro’s arrest the Tupelo Islanders are “jeering and spitting and cursing him for a Jap, a Nip, a gook and a Chinaman” (216). 30 What is crucial for the novel’s plot is Ruth’s attitude towards Asians in general and Hiro in particular. At the very beginning she stupidly remarks about the naked man in the water that “he looked different somehow” (8) and thus introduces the concept of ethnic and cultural ‘difference’ in a rather inconspicuous way. It is in this context that Hiro’s desperate yelp is called a pre-linguistic utterance that “transcended the puny limitations of language and culture” (7), thus implying, in the same way as Rudyard Kipling did in “The Ballad of East and West,” that despite their cultural differences all humans share basic feelings and needs. When Ruth later thinks about the naked Asian she and Saxby encountered at night, she muses: Chinese. She thought he was Chinese. But then she’d never traveled any farther east than the sushi bars of Little Japan or the chop suey houses of Chinatown, and to this point in her life she’d never had any need to differentiate one nationality from another. If the sign outside said Vietnamese, then they were Vietnamese; if it said Thai, then they were Thai. She knew Asians only as people who served dishes with rice. (27) By then she has learned that the fugitive is a Japanese, and since she is working on “a multiple point of view thing about a Japanese housewife who’d tried to drown herself and her two young children in Santa Monica Bay after her husband deserted her” (26), she welcomes Hiro’s appear- 29 First used in the 1920s, “Gook” is a disparaging slang term of unknown origin for an Asian person, especially for North Vietnamese soldiers in the Vietnam War. 30 “Chinaman” denotes a Chinese man or, in some cases, a native of East Asia. In older dictionaries, like “Englishman” or “Frenchman,” the term has no negative connotations, but modern dictionaries consider it offensive and Asian American organizations discourage its usage. Peter Freese 222 ance as providential for her own purposes and cannot stop thinking about him. Boyle’s admission that “Ruth Dershowitz […] c’est moi, as Flaubert said of Emma Bovary,” is confirmed by the fact that like him, but with disastrously different results, Ruth bases her fictions on real events. “Two Toes,” an “old, half-finished story she’d been meaning to rework” (254), is based on a news story about a real incident, namely “the story of Jessica McClure, the eighteen-month-old girl who’d fallen down a well shaft in Texas and wound up wedged tight in a pipe less than a foot in diameter” (254). 31 And her present story “Of Tears and the Tide” (118, see 188) also deals with a tragedy that “had been in all the papers” (26). Since Ruth lacks the necessary imagination, she makes only slow progress, and when Hiro starts stealing her lunch buckets, she convinces herself that his appearance will provide her with creative inspiration. But she also thinks about him as “her secret, her pet, her own” (66), and since he has seen her naked in the boat, “he stirred something in her, he did” (66). Although he is still only a vague image to her - “Blink once and he was Toshiro Mifune, 32 blink again, and he was something else” (66) - in her fantasies she begins to turn him into “a creature that needed to be stroked and appeased and comforted - an exotic and fascinating creature” (69) and, what is even more important, into a welcome weapon in her fight for dominance among the other writers. Sometimes she thinks that “maybe he was dangerous, […] Maybe the reports were true. He was a foreigner, after all. He had different values. He could be a fanatic. A maniac. A killer.” (72), but she nevertheless hopes that he will come back. Working on her Japanese story, she muses that Hiro is “a living story, a fiction come to life” (119) and convinces herself that “she needed him” (119). But he disappears, and thus there is “no cross-cultural attraction there, no communication. No seduction” (119). When he re-appears and they start talking, she promises to help him, and when he is washed and cleaned, she finds - the counterpart to the “butter-stinker” motif - 31 Once again, this is not Boyle’s invention but a true case that gained nationwide attention. See http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Jessica_McClure (June 2012): “Jessica McClure Morales (born March 26, 1986) became famous at the age of 18 months after falling into a well in the backyard of 3309 Tanner Dr. Midland, Texas, on October 14, 1987. Between that day and October 16, rescuers worked for 58 hours to free ‘Baby Jessica’ from the eight-inch-wide well casing 22 feet (6.7 metres) below the ground. The story gained worldwide attention (leading to some criticism as a media circus), and later became the subject of a 1989 ABC TV movie. As presented in the movie, a vital part of the rescue was the use of the then relatively new technology of waterjet cutting.” 32 Toshiro Mifune (1920-1997) was a Japanese actor who appeared in 170 feature films. He is best known for his collaboration with filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, from 1948 to 1965, in works such as Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and Yojimbo, and also popular for portraying Musashi Miyamoto in Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy. T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 223 that his “odor wasn’t unpleasant, not at all. Just different” (157) and turns him into “her own pet” (158). Caught in her stereotypical notions, she buys him “dried fishheads, bark shavings […] , flat black mushrooms […] , bamboo shoots” (190) which she considers typical Asian food but which he heartily dislikes. Finally, attracted by his otherness and wanting revenge for Saxby’s alleged flirtation with Jane Shine, she even sleeps with him (169, 185) and justifies that to herself by thinking that she did it “for the novelty, yes, and because the moment was right” (209). When her role as an accessory is revealed and she is interrogated by the furious representatives of the law, she denies having been intimate with Hiro, argues that she “needed him for this story [she’s] writing” (202), and swears to Septima that she had only been “using him for a story, for research, for art” (316), thus gaining the admiration of her co-writers for doing what is considered dangerous field research. But when poor Hiro is in jail, she thinks about beginning a new story and “forget[s] all about the Japanese and their weird rites and customs” (210). In the end, accepting her failure as a fiction writer, she mutates into a journalist and secures a contract for a book about Hiro’s adventures. Thus, she is just “playing another role, using him as she’s used him before” (362) and once again betraying him for egotistical reasons. ***** Mixing fact and fiction in his inimitable fashion in East Is East, Boyle offers a composite action which intertwines the plotlines of several traditional genres. His picaresque tale unfolds ‘on the road’ and arranges the protagonist’s experiences as the subsequent stations of a life journey. But what is traditionally the accidental movement of the picaro as a lowerclass survival artist through various strata of an inhospitable society is here made goal-directed and transformed from an additive story into a causal plot in which the naïf protagonist’s progress is caused by his incessant search for food. This surface motivation, however, is enhanced and charged with additional meaning because Hiro is not just a hungry outcast driven by the demands of his insatiable hara, but both a latter-day Candide on his search for Leibnitz’s best of all worlds and a contemporary Telemachus on a quest for his lost father. This combination of well established plotlines not only opens additional contexts, but provides the basis for an exploration of the encounter between mutual national stereotypes and for a demonstration of what can happen if unfounded self-images and expectations clash with a faulty reality. The contradictory expectations which Hiro has derived from the image of ‘America’ exported all over the world by the U.S. mass media let him envision the U.S. as a country that is both a multi-ethnic paradise ready to welcome any immigrant and a world of racist violence between white law-enforcers and black criminals. Since the real America which the de- Peter Freese 224 luded half-Japanese, who is himself a prejudiced racist, encounters in rural Georgia is a parochial world of rabid racists with stupidly prejudiced notions of Asia, the increasingly dramatic confrontations between the naïve ‘alien’ and his xenophobic ‘hosts’ cannot but end in a disaster. Consequently, any attempt at intercultural understanding fails dramatically since the hopeful young immigrant who is looking for a better world and the inhabitants of this world who reject anybody who is ‘different’ are both victims of their ignorance and the stereotypes they harbor of the respective ‘other.’ Because the Jewish would-be writer Ruth Dershowitz with her contradictory aims and urges is the very opposite of a ‘typical’ American, because the half-breed Hiro is anything but a ‘typical’ Japanese, and because the novel accumulates an enormous wealth of cultural details to show that America is a richly diverse and variegated country, the very notion of national hetero-stereotypes is unmasked as completely unfounded and reduced to absurdity, and it becomes painfully obvious that the disastrous failure of communication between East and West could be avoided by the simple strategy of a better education. The ‘message’ of East Is East, then, is a very pessimistic one, but the book is nevertheless extremely funny because it thrives on comic exaggeration, caricature, and situational comedy, and the major vehicle for these aspects is yet another plotline that Boyle incorporates into his book, namely that of the satirical Künstlerroman. The motley group of writers and would-be artists coexisting within the limited space of Thanatopsis House constitutes a veritable microcosm of the literary scene in the contemporary U.S., and the charged mixture of ambition, jealousy and intrigue among these people allows Boyle to lash out at human shortcomings and to create, especially in the hilarious subplot about the competition between Ruth Dershowitz and Jane Shine, brilliant examples of situational comedy. Moreover, this strand of the plot makes a broad range of literary allusions possible and thus contributes to an enriching contextualization of the action within larger cultural contexts by relating the American-Japanese encounter to Rudyard Kipling’s ballad, making Hiro another Br’er Rabbit trying to survive in the briar patch, turning Saxby into an ironically reduced replica of Herman Melville’s Ahab, and contrasting, through William Cullen Bryant’s poem and the names of the cabins in the writers’ resort, the samurai suicide motif with a western variant. It is typical of a satirical text that none of the numerous characters earns the readers’ unconditional empathy because all of them are driven by questionable characteristics ranging from alarming ignorance and blinding vanity to boundless ambition and rabid racism, and because their weaknesses are farcically exaggerated and relentlessly exposed by the sarcastic comments of the intruding author. With the exception of Ruth who comes close to being a ‘round’ character, the other actors remain ‘flat’ or even are, as Olmstead White, Turco and most of the writ- T.C. Boyle’s East Is East 225 ers, mere caricatures. What makes the novel a success is not only its artful combination of a fast-paced action with a high degree of suspense, a broad canvas of unobtrusively integrated references and allusions that establish numerous horizons of additional meaning, and a wildly inventive linguistic performance, but its creation of a unique amalgam of pathos and comedy, of the sad story of a naïf immigrant’s unwarranted destruction and the hilarious exposure of a group of vain American writers. It leaves its readers with the frightening insight that our world would be a much better place if we were able to do away with our cultural preconceptions, our faulty self-estimates and our mutual national stereotypes and open ourselves to what we often talk about but rarely manage to realize, namely, open-minded intercultural communication. Works Cited Adams, Elizabeth (1990/ 1991). “An Interview with T. Coraghessan Boyle.” Chicago Review 37: 2/ 3. 51-63. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (1983). Water Music. New York: Penguin. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (1991). East Is East. New York: Penguin. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (2005). The Inner Circle. New York: Penguin. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (2009). The Women. New York: Penguin. Boyle, T. Coraghessan (2010). “The Art of Fiction No. 161, interviewed by Elizabeth E. Adams.” The Paris Review 155 (Summer 2000). [Online] http: / / www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/ 651/ the-art-of-fiction-no-161-tcoraghessan-boyle (Jun 2012). Bryant, William Cullen (1994). “Thanatopsis.” In: The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4 th ed. Ed. by Nina Baym et al. New York: W.W. Norton. Vol. I. 975. Doctorow, E.L. (1994). “False Documents.” In: Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution: Selected Essays, 1977-1992. New York: Harper Perennial. 149-164. Douglas, Christopher (1997). “Tracking ‘The Wild Man of the Green Swamp’: Orientalism, Clichés, and the Preoccupation of Language.” English Studies in Canada 23: 3 (September 1997). 331-355. Fields, Tara D. (n.d.). “The Okefenokee Swamp of Charlton County, Georgia.” [Online] http: / / www.camdencounty.org/ The_Okefenokee_Swamp.pdf (Jun 2012). Freese, Peter (ed.) (1998). Erica Jong und T. Coraghessan Boyle, Zwei Interviews. Paderborn: Paderborner Universitätsreden 64. Freese, Peter (2000) “T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain: A Case Study in the Genesis of Xenophobia.” In: Heinz Antor/ Klaus Stierstorfer (eds.). English Literatures in International Contexts. Heidelberg: Winter. 221-243. Friedman, Norman (1955). “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept.” PMLA 70. 1160-1184. Friend, Tad (1990). “Rolling Boyle.” New York Times Magazine. 9 December 1990. [Online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ books/ 98/ 02/ 08/ home/ boyle-rolling.html (June 2012). Peter Freese 226 Godwin, Gail (1990). “Samurai on the Run.” New York Times Book Review. [Online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 1990/ 09/ 09/ books/ samurai-on-the-run.html? ref=gailgodwin (Jun 2012). Harris, Joel Chandler (2012). Uncle Remus - Songs and Sayings. [Online] http: / / www.heritage-history.com/ www/ heritage-books.php? Dir=books& MenuItem=display&author=harris&book=remus&story=fox (Jun 2012). Hicks, Heather J. (2003). “On Whiteness in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 45: 1. 43-64. Hilbert, Alexander (1992). “Bloß kein Abschied vom Leben auf der Überholspur.” Rheinischer Merkur. 13 November 1992. 17. Kakutani, Michito (1990). “A Samurai in the South and a Joke on America: East Is East by T. Coraghessan Boyle.” New York Times. 7 September 1990. [Online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ books/ 98/ 02/ 08/ home/ boyle-east.html? _r=2 (Jun 2012). Kingston, Maxine Hong (1981). “The Wild Man of the Green Swamp.” In: China Men. New York: Ballantine Books. 222-224. Kipling, Rudyard (n.d.). “The Ballad of East and West.” [Online] http: / / www.kipling.org.uk/ poems_eastwest.htm (Jun 2012). Lyons, Bonnie (2003). “T. Coraghessan Boyle.” In: James R. Giles/ Wanda H. Giles (eds.). American Novelists Since World War II: Seventh Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark-Layman. 73-80. Raney, David (1990). “A Word-Drunk Writer Who Sees Us Too Well.” Raleigh [NC] News and Observer, 28 October 1990. [Online] http: / / www.tcboyle.net/ raney.html (Jun 2012). Schröder, Markus (1997). ‘Nice guys finish last’: Sozialkritik in den Romanen T. Coraghessan Boyles. Essen: Blaue Eule. Sparling, Kathryn (1977). The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure in Modern Life. English translation. New York: Basic Books. Towers, Robert (1991). “Enigma Variations.” New York Review of Books, 17 January 1991. 31 and 32. English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing David Weber The paper intends to trace the four hundred years of the history of English grammar writing with special reference to English prepositions. It provides the reader with some of the most influential definitions of prepositions and scrutinizes approaches to their study as adopted in these grammars. It comes with a conclusion that, as far as prepositions are concerned, the history of English grammar writing can be seen as one of relative stagnation, only exceptionally interrupted by certain more influential authors like Bullokar, Miège, Maittaire, Brightland, Greenwood or Lowth. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the situation radically changed and since then, grammarians have introduced scientifically precise definitions and developed detailed and elaborate frameworks for their decription. 1. Introduction The present paper aims to examine the development of different linguistic definitions and treatments of prepositions in selected reference grammars of English. Although one of the first grammarians to introduce the term preposition was Dionysius Thrax, who lived in Alexandria some time around the second and first century BCE, in the present paper, I shall limit myself strictly to the English grammatical tradition, whose roots date back to the second half of the sixteenth century. A demarcation of the object of my research in these terms, however, is not sufficient enough. The reason is that in the very beginnings of English grammatical tradition, the term English grammar might have referred to a grammar of Latin written in English, a grammar of English written in Latin, as well as a grammar of English written in English. It must be stressed, therefore, that in the present survey, attention will only be paid to reference grammars of English written in English. And yet, this still includes vast amount of works by various authors. Accordingly, the scope of the pre- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen David Weber 228 sent paper is highly selective in what it covers and the majority of grammars were simply not included. Nevertheless, the author of these lines focused on, in his opinion, the most representative ones and believes that these will provide readers with a sufficient insight into the research topic. 2. The situation before 1586 Although the year 1586 marks the beginning of English grammar writing, a definition of prepositions can already be found in Old English literature: Præpositio is foresetnyss, se byð geðeod naman and worde and stent æfra on foreweardan: ab illo homine ‘fram ðam man’: her is se ab præpositio. (Aelfricʼs Preface to his translation of Ars Grammatica by Donatus Aelius) This definition is far from being linguistically correct, since already in the Old English period, there sometimes occurred postposed prepositions. Aelfricʼs definition, as well as the term foresetnyss itself, imitates the Latin original by Donatus Aelius. The Anglo-Saxon term for a preposition is derived from the Latin term praepositio, the morpheme for meaning ‘before’, the root settan meaning ‘to place’ and the derivational morpheme +nyss indicates the class of nouns. The Anglo-Saxon calque, nevertheless, did not gain much popularity and the Latin original penetrated into the English lexical system in the late fourteenth century (cf. Oxford English Dictionary). 3. English grammars in the shackles of Latin grammars By the end of the sixteenth century, grammars had been written for nearly all of the European vernacular languages. It is a well-known fact that there was a strong influence of Latin grammatical traditions upon these grammars and the English ones were no exception. In fact, in the case of English grammars, this trend continued up to the eighteenth century, when certain grammarians finally realized that differences between Latin and English were too great and Latin grammars could not form the basis for the description of English. In a word, one can undoubtedly claim that “the history of English grammar writing was one of gradual and hard-won liberation from the shackles of Latin grammar” (Linn 2006: 74). Grammarians influenced by Latin traditions were, for instance, likely to consider English prepositional phrases as pure equivalents of Latin cases. Prepositions with a different function were usually deemed to be adverbs or, in some cases, were assigned to a separate word class. As far as the first hundred and fifty years of English grammar writing are concerned, Vorlat discerns the following tendencies: English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing 229 a. Poole, Newton, the 1706 grammar, Turner and Entick - copy Latin grammars, without insight into a specific functioning of the English prepositions b. some valuabe remarks are made right at the beginning of English grammar writing by Bullokar, however much he may generally depend on his Latin source c. authors as Miège, Duncan, Maittaire and Brightland (with Loughton) appear to have an original contribution to make. (Vorlat 1975: 403) 4. Bullokar and after The oldest study of English prepositions is represented right at the beginning of English grammar writing by William Bullokarʼs Bref Grammar for English (Bullokar 1586), the first English grammar written in English. Bullokar defines prepositions as a part of speech properly used prepositively, that is governing an accusative case set next after it (except sometime in verse it is set after his casual word) as, I go too the church: and is sometime postpositively used, that is, when it governeth the relative, that, or which, coming before a verb, whose governing preposition is set after such verb: as, this is the man whom we spoke of, or whome we spoke; and is some time used in composition after a verb, but being severed from the verb by the adverb, not, or by an accusative case, may be said to be set in apposition adverbially. (Bullokar 1586: 47) First of all, it is interesting to observe that Bullokar takes notice of the fact that prepositions can occur postpositively, an important syntactic property commonly disregarded by later grammarians. Bullokar considers as prepositions those items which govern the accusative case, otherwise, he regards them as adverbs. A unique feature of his work is that in his analysis, the prepositions up, down, in, before, beneath, behynd, beyond, under, nær and nih can form their respective comparative and superlative degrees, and in this way form adjectives or adverbials: up → uper, upermost/ upmost down → downer, downermost/ downmost in → iner, inermost/ inmost before → former, foremost beneath → næther, næthermost behynd → hynder, hyndermost/ hyndmost beyond → yonderer, yondermost/ yondmost under → undermost nær → nærer, next nih → niher, next (Bullokar 1586: 48-49) David Weber 230 Bullokarʼs grammar did not miss word-formative aspect of English prepositions either. He notes that some prepositions can take the suffix +ward, e.g. inward, outward, in this way creating adjectives which can be further modified into adverbs by adding +ly, e.g. inwardly. To present-day speakers of English, affixation to prepositions might seem odd. Nevertheless, especially during the Middle English period, the suffix +ward really occurred in combinations with certain prepositions (cf. Mustanoja 1960: 423). The only remnant of this process in Present-day English is toward(s). As far as semantics is concerned, Bullokar observes that prepositions compounded before a verb commonly change the meaning of a respective verb while prepositions compounded after a verb retain its proper signification. To sum up, the first English grammar provides a relatively thorough treatment of prepositions, studying them on morphological, syntactic and semantic levels. The following decades, and the grammars they produced, devoted considerably less space to the study of prepositions and most of them, as already mentioned, were strongly influenced by definitions from Latin grammars. In The English Accidence, prepositions are defined simply as “a part of speech undeclined, most commonly set before the words which they govern” (Poole 1646: 19). Subsequently, Poole provides the reader with a syntactic classification of prepositions into three basic groups. Those which govern accusative, those which govern ablative, and those which govern both accusative and ablative. A similar definition can be found in Whartonʼs grammar: “A Preposition is a part of speech set before other parts; either in Apposition, or Composition” (Wharton 1654: 58). Another definition strongly influenced by Latin grammatical tradition is Newtonʼs: “A Preposition is a word commonly set before other Parts of Speech, either in Apposition […] or in Composition” (Newton 1669: 51). A very vague definition can be found in a grammar by Miège: “A Preposition is a Word that expreses some Circumstance or other of the Noun” (Miège 1688: 7). In his description, Miège observes that “[a]lthough the Prepositions took that Name from their being commonly placed before Nouns, yet in English they are often placed at the end of a Sentence” (Miège 1688: 80). Miège is therefore the second author after Bullokar to explicitly notice the possiblity of a postposition. As he puts it, postposition takes place especially after the pronouns who and what. As far as the relation of the verb and preposition is concerned, Miège claims that when preceded by a preposition, the verb forms one compound word with it, while when used after the verb, it is distinct from it. Finally, Miège deals with the ellipsis of prepositions which, according to his observations, takes place when two nouns are transposed (e.g. Glory of God → Godʼs Glory), after some verbs (e.g. send it me, bring it me), before the word home (e.g. to go home), and in some fixed expressions (e.g. a house forty foot high instead of a house to the height of forty foot). Cases when prepositions are not followed by a noun are regarded as an adverbial uses. English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing 231 In Aickinʼs grammar, no chapter is dedicated specifically to prepositions, and their definition is also quite simple: “A Preposition is a part of Speech, which is commonly set before other parts of Speech, either in Apposition, as of me, to God: or else in Composition as, toward, upward, forward” (Aickin 1693: 5-6). Another simple definitions of prepositions can be found in an anonymous grammar of 1706, where we read that “[a] Preposition is a Part of Speech set before other Words” (Anonym 1706: 17) and in Turnerʼs grammar: “A Preposition is a Word set before other Words, either to govern them […] or else in Composition with them” (Turner 1710: 35). In Brightland and Gildonʼs grammar, we can discern the first hints of prepositions considered as functions expressing relations among things. “Prepositions, or Foreplaced Words, were invented […] to show the Relations, that Things have to one another” (Brightland/ Gildon 1711: 117). Their definition is extralinguistically focused since they claim that prepositions express relations among things rather than words. However, the first truly systematic treatment of English prepositions can be found in Greenwoodʼs Practical English Grammar. “A Preposition is a Part of Speech, which being added to any other Parts of Speech, serves to mark or signify their State or Reference to each other” (Greenwood 1711: 71). Greenwood subsequently clarifies that by using the word added, he wants to stress that prepositions are used before as well as after a word. He names nouns, pronouns, verbs, participles, article and adverbs as those parts of speech which can be preceded by a preposition. On the following page, Greenwood paraphrases his previous definition, stating that “[a] Preposition is a Word added to other Words, to show the Respect, or Relation one Thing has to another” (Greenwood 1711: 72), concluding that all relations expressed in Greek or Latin partly by a diversity of cases and partly by prepositions, are expressed exclusively by prepositions in English. Finally, Greenwood provides the reader with a first detailed empirical account of syntactic and semantic properties of selected English prepositions. A novel approach to the study of prepositions can easily be discerned in Maittaire’s definition (1712: 92-93): [The term preposition] signifies a word placed before, and therefore governing and requiring another to follow […] A Preposition is a Particle, which qualifies and explains the signification of some part of speech, by going before a word, which it governs or brings into the clause or sentence […] The Preposition has (no signification) without the word which it precedes, and to which it is in the nature of a sign. Maittaireʼs originality rests in the fact that he considers prepositions to be synsemantic particles that only contribute to the meanings of the word they govern. David Weber 232 Let me add the following definitions of prepositions from other grammars from this period: It is a Word set before another, either separate from it, or, joined to it. (Entick 1728: 25) Preposition is an Indeclinable that governs the Nouns that follow it. It serves to modify or circumstantiate the Noun. (Duncan 1731: 43) A Preposition is a Part of Speech set before other Words, and shews the Relation that the Word following it has to some Word before it. (Barker 1733? : 22-23). A careful reader can detect the shortcomings of these definitions like merging the concept of the preposition with that of the prefix, neglecting the possible postposition or limiting the attention to the relation between prepositions and nouns only. These were most commonly mistakes of grammarians influenced by the Latin tradition. From time to time, a more elaborate definition occurred: Prepositions, or Foreplaced Words, are either little Words joyned with other Words in Composition; or such as being put betwixt other Words, (chiefly Names) shew their relation to each other, in afinity, distance, or some other casual circumstance. Some Prepositions are joined in Composition […] Or being put between Words they shew the relation they stand in to each other, usually called Case. (Collyer 1735: 40) An anonymous 1736 grammar focuses on a contrastive definition: A Preposition is a Part of Speech set before other Word before it […] In the Latin Grammar, they are usually ranked under these two Heads, viz. Prepositions in Apposition, and Prepositions in Composition […] the English Tongue […] not only applies them to the same uses and ends that the Latin Tongue doth; but also to supply that which the Latin Tongue does another way, viz. in making up the several Cases of Nouns, which the Latins do by different Terminations or Endings thereof. (Anonym 1736: 67-69) Other authorative grammars of this period include Saxon’s and Priestley’s: A Preposition […] is a Word set before others; either to govern them […] or else in Composition with them […] Prepositions govern Nouns, &c. and being placed before them, shew the Production, Motion or Situation of Things. (Saxon 1737: 75) A Preposition is a word that expresseth the relation that one word hath to another. (Priestley 1761: 28) A year after the publication of Priestleyʼs work, one of the most influential grammars of English, written by Robert Lowth, was published. It started the age of prescriptivism. Lowthʼs grammar became one of the most popular English grammars and went through over twenty editions in English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing 233 the following decades. Lowthʼs definition of prepositions summarizes the best of the preceding ones in addition to introducing etymological notes on their semantic origin according to which the original function of prepositions was to express place relations, which were later widened to other relations. To put it in his own words (Lowth 1762: 91-92): Prepositions, so called because they are commonly put before the words to which they are applied, serve to connect words with one another, and to show the relation between them. One great use of Prepositions in English, is to express those relations which in some languages are chiefly marked by Cases, or the different endings of the Noun. Most Prepositions originally denote the relation of Place, and have been thence transferred to denote by similitude other relations. Lowth was also among the first grammarians to support the prescriptivist suggestion that sentences ending in a preposition are inappropriate. 5. The 19 th century By the end of the eighteenth century, more than 270 grammatical works on English had been published (Gneuss 1996: 28). This number grew dramatically during the nineteenth century, rising up to 1, 930 titles listed by Gorlach (1998). At the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, some important grammars were published in America, including especially the work of Webster, Murrey, Cobbett and Brown. One of the first grammars in America was Websterʼs two volume Grammatical Institute. In the second volume, Webster (1784: 64) defines prepositions as “words set before nouns and pronouns to show their relation to other words.” He distinguishes two sorts of prepositions - separable, which can stand alone, and inseparable, which are used only in connection with other words and “commonly give a new meaning to the word” (Webster 1784: 65). According to Murray (1795: 77), “a preposition is a word set chiefly before nouns or pronouns, to connect them with other words, and to show their relation to those words.” Similarly to Webster, he divides prepositions into separable and inseparable ones. “The separable prepositions are those which may be used separate from other words […] Some of these are sometimes conjoined with other words […] The inseparable prepositions are used only in the composition of words” (Murray 1795: 77). Cobbett (1819: 41) states that prepositions “are called Prepositions from two Latin words, meaning before and place; and this name is given them because they are in most cases placed before Nouns and Pronouns.” Although the morphological part of Cobbettʼs grammar deals mainly with etymological aspects of particular parts of speech, when it comes to prepositions and their history, Cobbett (1819: 74) claims that “it is useless to attempt to go into curious inquiries as to the origin of prepositions. They never change their endings; they are David Weber 234 always written in the same manner. Their use is the main thing to be considered.” The last American grammarian to be mentioned here is Goold Brown, who defines the preposition as “a word used to express some relation of different things or thoughts to each other, and is generally placed before a noun or a pronoun” (Brown 1823: 90). Brownʼs defintion is not very innovative and counts to the extralinguistically focused ones for it claims that prepositions express relations among things or ideas rather than words. As for British grammars of the 19 th century, Ian Michael (1991: 11) notes that “most grammars of English published in Britain during the nineteenth century are dull […] They are dull, especially during the second half of the century, because they impose on the language a stifling form of analysis.” Nevertheless, Murrayʼs grammar of 1795 became particularly popular even in the following century with many editions and abridgements published in the USA as well as in Britain. It can therefore be considered one of the most influential grammars of the nineteenth century. Another influential grammar is Nesfield’s. It defines a preposition as “a word placed before a noun or noun-equivalent to show in what relation the person or thing denoted thereby stands to something else” (Nesfield 1898/ 1949: 93). Nesfield introduces the term object for what will later be called prepositional complement and names nouns, pronouns, adverbs, infinitives, phrases and clauses as possible objects to a preposition. A special category distinguished in his grammar are disguised prepositions, which can be illustrated with an example of the preposition of, which can be changed into the disguised preposition o, as in four o’clock, Jack o’latern, etc., or the preposition on, being changed into a in Four sells at tenpence a pound, which, as Nesfield states, can sometimes be falsely identified as an indefinite article. In the “idiom and construction” section, Nesfield provides readers with examples of nouns, adjectives, participles, verbs and adverbs which are followed by prepositions on purely idiomatic grounds. In addition to simpler prepositions, he also distinguishes participial prepositions that are of participial or adjectival origin. 6. The 20 th century As phonology became a full-fledged field, scholars started to write phonologically focused grammars. In his A Grammar of Spoken English, Palmer includes a description of intonation patterns of English with all the example words and sentences given in phonemic transcription. As for prepositions, he focuses his attention on the fact that certain prepositions have both strong and weak forms: English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing 235 strong form weak form æt ət (at) bai bə (by) fɔə fə (for) frɔm frəm (from) ɔv əv, v, ə, əf, f (of) tu: tə, tu (to) intu: intə, intu (into) (Palmer 1924: 11) He then adds that strong forms are used when the preposition is isolated, when it is stressed, when it occurs at the end of a sentence or breath group, when not followed immediately by an object or generally when followed by an unstressed pronoun. He also delineates a category of group-prepositions which comprise of adverb + preposition, adverb + noun + preposition, or preposition + noun + preposition constructions. The following section is dedicated to the function of English prepositions, which is to form (together with a following noun, noun-group or pronoun) adverbial and adjectival phrases of various kinds. As for syntax, Palmer states that the normal position of the preposition is before the object that it governs. If the object governed by a preposition is an interrogative or a connective word, usually occurring at the beginning of the sentence, the preposition does not generally accompany it, but retains the place it would occupy if the object were not so shifted. (Palmer 1924: 199) In the second volume of his three-volume grammar of English, Curme (1935: 87) writes that “a preposition is a word that indicates a relation between the noun or pronoun it governs and another word, which may be a verb, an adjective, or another noun or pronoun.” Curme introduces the term prepositional unit, which can be understood as a complex consisting of preposition + prepositional object. Prepositional units can be of two kinds. If the object of the preposition is a single word, the prepositional unit is a prepositional phrase. If the object of the preposition is a clause, the prepositional unit is a prepositional clause. Syntactically, Curme states that the prepositional unit can be employed as an adverbial, as an object, or as an adjective element in predicative and attributive function. Curme also mentions a special class of prepositions which he calls inflectional prepositions. As he puts it, inflectional prepositions “have often lost a good deal of their original concrete meaning and are no longer felt as prepositions, for they have developed into inflectional particles which indicate definite grammatical relations, often taking the place of old inflectional endings” (Curme 1935: 91). This means that since the nouns and adjectives lost their old inflectional endings, we often employ the preposition to to indicate the dative relation and the preposition of to indicate the genitive relation. In the case of verbs, the inflec- David Weber 236 tional preposition standing behind a given intransitive verb serves to convert it into a transitive one. There are several grammars of the 20 th century which do not devote a single chapter to the study of prepositions, and do not provide us with definitions either. These include Zandvoortʼs Handbook of English Grammar or Jespersenʼs seven volume Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, Kruisinga and Eradesʼs two volume English Grammar as well as Poutsmaʼs Grammar of Late Modern English. Moreover, Jespersen in his Philosophy of Grammar refuses to acknowledge prepositions as a separate word class, suggesting treating them alongside with adverbs and conjunctions as a single word class of particles instead (Jespersen 1925: 87). On the other hand, Schibsbyeʼs Modern English Grammar with an Appendix on Semantically Related Prepositions, originally published in Danish in 1957, devotes ninety pages to the study of prepositions, with a special focus on their semantics. The renewed attention to prepositions was a necessary consequence of the intention to write a comprehensive synchronic description of English grammar, resulting in the publication of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik’s The Comprehensive Grammar of English Language (1985). One of the most authoritative twentieth century grammars, it was preceded and followed by less comprehensive volumes. However, for the sake of putting limits to the present paper, I will restrict my attention only to the main volume (this also applies to Huddleston and Pullumʼs grammars mentioned further below). Prepositions are here generally defined as items expressing “a relation between two entities, one being that represented by the prepositional complement, the other by another part of the sentence” (Quirk et al. 1985: 657). The authors differentiate between central prepositions and marginal prepositions. Central prepositions are defined negatively as items that cannot take a that-clause, an infinitive clause, or a subjective-case form of a personal pronoun as a complement. Marginal prepositions are those which behave in many ways like prepositions, although they share features with other word classes such as verbs or adjectives, e.g. bar, barring, excepting, excluding, save, concerning etc. Morphologically, the authors make a distinction between simple and complex prepositions. Simple prepositions consist of one word only and are further subdivided according to phonological criteria into monosyllabic and polysyllabic. Complex prepositions are subdivided into twoand three-word sequences. Syntactically, the prepositional phrase is defined as a sequence of preposition + prepositional complement. The prepositional complement is most often realized by a noun phrase, a nominal wh-clause, or a nominal -ing clause. The following syntactic functions of prepositional phrases are mentioned: a. postmodifier in a noun phrase b. adverbial English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing 237 c. complementation of a verb d. complementation of an adjective As far as semantics is concerned, the authors make a note that “so varied are prepositional meanings that no more than a presentation of the most notable semantic similarities and contrasts can be attempted” (Quirk et al. 1985: 573). In a very general sense, their semantic framework can be sketched as follows: a. prepositions expressing time relations b. prepositions expressing space relations c. prepositions expressing the cause/ purpose spectrum d. prepositions expressing the means/ agentive spectrum e. prepositions expressing accompaniment f. prepositions expressing support and opposition g. other prepositional meanings In the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, the first grammar entirely based on corpus data, Biber et al. (1999: 74) define prepositions as “links which introduce prepositional phrases.” In addition, they draw a distinction between free vs. bound prepositions. “Free prepositions have an independent meaning; the choice of preposition is not dependent upon any specific words in the context. In contrast, bound prepositions often have little independent meaning, and the choice of the preposition depends upon some other word (often the preceding verb)” (Biber et al. 1999: 74). Formally, they further differentiate between simple prepositions and complex prepositions, which can be further subdivided into two-word, three-word and four-word prepositions. Other sequences are considered free variations. Another great milestone of English grammar writing was the publication of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Huddleston and Pullum in 2002. In their view, prepositions can be generally defined as “a relatively closed grammatically distinct class of words whose most central members characteristically express spatial relations or serve to mark various syntactic functions and semantic roles” (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 603). Prepositions are syntactically “heads of phrases - phrases comparable to those headed by verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, and containing dependents of many different sorts” (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 598). Influenced by X-bar theory, the phrase structure component in more recent versions of generative grammar, the authors assume that similarly to adjective phrases, noun phrases and verb phrases, prepositional phrases, too, can be premodified: She died [two years after their divorce]. (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 599) David Weber 238 By contrast, traditional grammars like Quirk et al. (1985) would consider this case as a separate adverbial realized by a noun phrase. Furthermore, according to Huddleston and Pullum, prepositional phrases can stand on their own even without a prepositional complement: I haven’t seen [her since the war]. I haven’t seen her [since]. (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 600) Again, in Quirk et al. (1985), since from the second sentence would be considered an adverb. Huddleston and Pullum name nouns, pronouns, embedded prepositional phrases, noun phrases, adverbial phrases, adjective phrases, interrogative and declarative clauses as items which can follow a preposition. In mentioning declarative clauses, they once again diverge from the view of more traditional grammarians. Their view is slightly different in that the preposition category includes all of the subordinating conjunctions of traditional grammar, with the exception of whether, if (when equivalent to whether) and that when it introduces a subordinate clause. An absolutely new distinction made by Huddleston and Pullum is that of grammaticised vs. non-grammaticised uses of prepositions. In grammaticised use, “the preposition has no identifiable meaning independent of the grammatical construction in which it occurs” (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 601). He was interviewed by the police. They were mourning the death of their king. You look very pleased with yourself. (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 601) On the other hand, in non-grammaticised use, prepositions have an identifiable meaning on their own: I left the parcel by the back-door. This is of little importance. Heʼs with Angela. (Huddleston/ Pullum 2002: 601) The last grammar to be mentioned here is the Oxford Modern English Grammar written by Bas Aarts and published in 2011. According to Aarts, prepositions function as the Heads of prepositional phrases. They are uninflected, usually short words which often express spatial meanings which can be literal (in the box, near the school, on the desk) or figurative (in love, beyond belief, beneath contempt). Other meanings are non-spatial and abstract, as in the phrases for your benefit, the first of July (Aarts 2011: 74). Morphologically, Aarts accepts the traditional division into simple, compound and complex prepositions. However, he offers a relatively new English Prepositions in the History of English Grammar Writing 239 syntactic division of prepositions into transitive and intransitive ones. Intransitive prepositions do not take complements while transitive do. After Huddleston and Pullumʼs grammar, Aartʼs is therefore another one that does not consider prepositions elements with obligatory complementation. In this sense, it restricts the scope of the category of adverbs in favour of prepositions. Transitive prepositions are further subdivided into regular prepositions, which take noun phrases, adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, or prepositional phrases as complements, and conjunctive prepositions, which take clauses as complements. In order to achieve greater precision, Aarts further differentiates between transitive prepositions which follow their complement, which he calls postpositions, and those which take the same form as -ing participles or -ed participles, which he calls deverbal prepositions. These labels have become generally well established. 7. Conclusion To sum up, we can distinguish the following tendencies in the history of English grammar writing with respect to the analysis of prepositions. Especially in the very first decades, there were only a few grammarians - e.g. Hume, Jonson, or Fisher - who did not assume that prepositions constituted a word class in its own right. Other grammarians acknowledged the traditional status of prepositions as a separate word class, although not all considered them important enough to deal with them in their grammars. Generally, the history of English grammar writing with regard to prepositions can be seen as one of relative stagnation, exceptionally interrupted by certain more thorough studies represented by authors like Bullokar, Miège, Maittaire, Brightland, Greenwood or Lowth. The relative negligence of prepositions culminated in the first half of the twentieth century, when most of the grammarians completely omitted sections on prepositions in their works. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the situation radically changed and since then, grammarians like Schibsbye, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, Svartvik, Huddleston, Pullum and Aarts have introduced scientifically precise definitions and developed detailed and elaborate frameworks for description, which in most cases reflect contemporary developments in theoretical linguistics. David Weber 240 References Aarts, Bas (2011). Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: OUP. Aickin, Joseph (1693). The English Grammar: or, The English Tongue Reduced to Grammatical Rules: Containing The Four Parts of Grammar, viz.Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, Prosody or Poetry. 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With in apendix, containing rules and observations for promoting perspicuity in speaking and writing. By L. Murrey. York: Wilson, Spence, and Mawman. Mustanoja, Tauno F. (1960). A Middle English Syntax. Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique. Nesfield, John Collinson (1898/ 1949). English Grammar: Past and Present. London: Macmillan and Co. David Weber 242 Newton, John (1669). School Pastime For Young Children: Or the Rudiments of Grammar, in an easie and delightful Method, for teaching of Children to read English distinctly, and write it truly. In which, by way of Preface, a New Method is propounded, for the fitting of Children first for Trades, and then for the Latin, and other Languages. By John Newton Doctor in Divinity, and one of his Majesties Chaplains. London. Palmer, Harold E. (1924). A Grammar of Spoken English: On a Strictly Phonetic Basis. Cambridge: Heffer. Poole, Joshua (1646). The English Accidence: or, A Short, Plaine, and Easie way, for the more speedy attaining to the Latine tongue, by the help of English. Set out For the use and profit of young Children, & framed so, as they may bee exercised in it, as soon as they can but indiferrently read English. By Joshua Poole. London. Priestley, Joseph (1761). The Rudiments of English Grammar; Adapted to the use of schools with observations on style. By Joseph Priestley. London. Quirk, Randolph/ Sidney Greenbaum/ Geoffrey Leech/ Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Saxon, Samuel (1737). The English Schollarʼs Assistant: Or, The Rudiments of the English Tongue. In Fours Parts. Part I. Treats of Letters in general, their Origin, their Division into Vowels, Consonants, Diphthongs, Triphthongs, and their various Use, &c. Part II. Treats of Syllables and their Division in Spelling, &c. Of Notes and Marks belonging to Syllables, with their Use; and of Points and Stops. Part III. Treats of Words, or Parts of Speech, with the Accidents of each Part, in a practical and useful Method. Part IV. Treats of Sentences or Syntax, with proper Examples to each Rule in Concord and Government, explaining fully the Use of both, and Remarks upon each Rule for the Help of the Learner. And for a further Assitance to Teachers, &c fit Interrogatories are annex’d under each Head to examine Children by. With an Appendix of the Lordʼs Prayer by way of Question and Answer for Exercise. By Samuel Saxon. Sloth sits and censures what the Industrious teach: Foxes despise the Grapes they cannot reach. The Second Edition. Reading. Schibsbye, Knud (1965). A Modern English Grammar with an Appendix on Semantically Related Prepositions. London: OUP. Turner, William (1710). A Short Grammar for the English Tongue: For the Use of English Schools. Dedicated to the Honourable Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge. By William Turner, M.A. Master of the Free-School at Stamford in Lincolnshire. London. Vortlat, Emma (1975). The Development of English Grammatical Theory 1586-1737, with Special Reference to the Theory of Parts of Speech. Lueven: Lueven University Press. Webster, Noah (1784). A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, comprising, An easy, concise, and systematic Method of Education, Designed for the Use of English Schools In America. In Three Parts. Part II. Containing, A plain and comprehensive Grammar, grounded on the true Principles and Idioms of the Language; with an analytical Differtation, in which the various Uses of the Auxiliary Signs are unfolded and explained: And an Essay towards investigating the Rules of English Verse. By Noah Webster, Jun. Efq. Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin. 243 Wharton, Jeremiah (1654). The English Grammar: or, The Institution of Letters, Syllables, and Words in the English-Tongue. Conteining all Rules and Directions necessary to bee known for the judicious Reading, Right-speaking, and Writing thereof. Very useful for all, that desire to bee expert in the foresaid properties. More especially profitable for Scholars, immediately before their entrance into the Rudiments of the Latine-tongue. Likewise to strangers that desire to learn our Language, it will bee the most certain Guide, that ever yet was exstant. Composed by Jer. Wharton, Mr of Arts. London. David Weber Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Masaryk University, Brno My Painful Self. Health Identity Construction in Discussion Forums on Headaches and Migraines Georg Marko This article looks at how people with chronic headaches perceive themselves by examining how they represent their (health) identities in and through language. It focuses on health forums/ message boards where lay people suffering from headaches and migraines discuss different aspects of their conditions because forums are a potential site for challenging roles defined by medicine and institutional healthcare. The study is based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of a 850,000-word-corpus comprising 5,000 postings to headache & migraine forums, drawing on the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. I analyse the most frequent lexemes found in the corpus in order to get an overview of the most salient semantic domains at work in the discourse, and verbs used in connection with the headache sufferers, descriptors attributed to the pain itself, and the use of terms for medications. The data reviewed suggests that headache sufferers usually accept medicalized conceptions of their identities, but also emphasize the subjective experience of their condition, mostly subtly, however. 1. Introduction It is estimated that approximately 4-5% of the people in Western societies suffer from daily primary headaches (esp. migraines and tension-type headaches) (cf. Kernick/ Goadsby 2009: 2, Mauskop 2009: 3), and many more have them at least regularly. This means that a relatively large proportion of the population has to organize and manage their everyday lives around headaches or at least with headaches in mind. This condition will thus play a central role for their sense of who and what they are. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Georg Marko 246 This article looks at the role that language plays in the construction of headache identities, focusing on sufferers’ 1 interaction with each other on internet discussion forums dedicated to headaches and migraines. Even a cursory look at lay forums on headaches and migraines reveals a certain ambivalence with which contributors seem to be using and approaching such sites, an ambivalence which becomes obvious in the following two examples (both taken from the corpus I used for the research to be presented - mistakes have been corrected in this version). I really need your opinions on this one. […] I went to ER for TIA like symptoms and was diagnosed with migraines. I was put on topamax. This is EXACTLY what I am experiencing. I am constantly having pressure pain above and behind my right eye As can be seen from the first example, for some posters, a forum is an informal and anonymous expansion of medical counselling. In a factual and partly technical manner (highlighted by the use of the medical acronyms ER ‘emergency room’ and TIA ‘transient ischaemic attack’), the writer recounts the events leading up to a current problem. As the explicit purpose of her contribution is to hear some advice from others (signalled by the initial sentence), she remains in the role of the patient awaiting instructions from outside, seemingly content with the passivity associated with this position (note the passive role she assigns to herself in I was diagnosed and I was put on). For others, the forum is a site for exchanging personal stories focusing on the experience of disease and pain and for the expression of subjective thought and emotions. This becomes manifest in the second passage, for example in the use of the progressive aspect (I am experiencing, I am constantly having), the intensification through adverbs (exactly, constantly - one even more strongly highlighted by the use of capitals EXACTLY), and the simple fact that the post starts with a statement on a shared experience, immediately creating an atmosphere of empathy. In this article, I will examine to what extent these two tendencies play a role in headache sufferers’ construction of their (health) identities in and through the language they use in such forums. I will embed the analysis in a wider discussion of health identities as a site of struggle or tension between two competing forces in the social domain of health - medicalization, associated with medicine and institutionalized healthcare, and de-medicalization, associated with lay people’s lifeworld/ s - and of the 1 I will use this noun rather than patient since not all people having headaches actually seek professional medical help. Readers should also note that if I am speaking of headache sufferers interacting in forums, this - to be precise - also includes those related to them (family and friends) because the latter also contribute to discussions - in the sense of My girlfriends has daily headaches, what can I do? Contributions by family and friends are rarer with headaches than with heart disease or psychotic disorders, though). My Painful Self. 247 special part that internet forums play for this conflict. But before embarking upon this, let me briefly answer the following question. 1.1 Why headaches? Despite the article’s more general concern with health, identity and discourse, I have chosen to focus on headaches because they provide a more fertile ground for the analysis of the tension and struggle between medical and experiential conceptions of health than, for instance, infectious, life-threatening or severely degenerative diseases, as the latter probably require more immediate trust in traditional medicine. Headaches generally appear to have an ambivalent and hybrid status. On the one hand, they are probably the most common medical condition experienced. Just to provide some (further) figures on the USA (which probably are similar for other Western countries): 90% of the population have headaches at least once a year, almost 10% suffer from migraines, and approx. 9% see a healthcare professional about headaches (cf. Evans/ Mathew 2005: 1). On the other hand, headaches do not fit our general understanding of ill health considering that, for instance, many people self-medicate for headaches (more than 80% of the US population, for instance, cf. Evans/ Mathew 2005: 1) and will not stay in bed or take time off from work. Although I will not focus on it specifically in my study, I need to mention that headaches have a gender dimension, too, with women being more likely to suffer from them than men (cf. ihateheadaches n.d.: online), which would be a further reason warranting socio-culturallyoriented research into this condition. 2. Identity, health and discourse As mentioned, I assume that internet forums, especially those featuring interaction between non-experts, play - or at least could theoretically play - a special role in the construction of identities based on health conditions. In this chapter, I will discuss this role, based on my theoretical conceptions of identities, health identities and the communicative potential of discussion forums. 2.1 Identity My theoretical framework of identity is based on the distinction between who I am as a concrete individual person (= personal identity) and what I am, i.e. the categories of ‘being’ that society provides (which I call social identity categories or SICs) - an opposition often found (in different forms and meanings) in social theory (cf., e.g., Kelly/ Millward Georg Marko 248 2004: 1, Jenkins 2004: 89, referring to Tajfel und Turner’s Social Identity Theory). 2 Personal identity is how I interpret myself and how others interpret me, in general and/ or at any given moment. Although we probably strive for unity, continuity and coherence of self, self-interpretation is a constantly ongoing process which draws upon - and thus works via association and identification with - different social identity categories. Usually we draw upon several SICs at the same time, with biographical and situational variation concerning the categories, their numbers, and their relative salience. We might thus be parents, medical doctors and migraine sufferers (among other things), with the parent category being situationally more salient when we are together with our children and biographically more salient as long as our children live with us. Personal identity is social in two interrelated senses. Firstly, interpretation is not a solipsistic cognitive event, but happens in contact with other people. How I am behaving and how I am talking provides explicit and implicit cues to my self-interpretation, which may be accepted, rejected and/ or relativized by my social environment. The latter may offer their interpretations of my self in return so that eventually the construction of personal identity happens in negotiations of interpretations in social interaction. Secondly, interpretations of identity, as mentioned, are based on SICs, i.e. categories that are accepted and are (made) available in a society as something that I can be and something that may have an impact on who I am. 3 The meanings of these categories are, of course, also constantly being constructed and reconstructed in social interaction. What all this means for my concrete topic is that discourses focusing on the personal experience of headaches necessarily involves negotiations of the following three questions:  Am I (or are you) a headache sufferer?  In what sense am I (or are you) a headache sufferer?  What does it mean to be a headache sufferer? These questions are interconnected, forming a hermeneutic circle as any answer to one will necessarily have implications for the meanings of the other two. 4 2 Who/ what I am is short for who/ what I think I am, who/ what I think I want to be, who/ what I think I’m supposed to be, who/ what you think I am, who/ what you think you want me to be, who/ what you think I’m supposed to be, etc. 3 Belonging to a certain income-class has such an impact and hence is socially consequential, while the shape of my ears - if not part of a set of features defining another category - is not. 4 This does, however, not mean that the construction of SICs - and thus answers to the last questions - cannot happen independently from the construction of My Painful Self. 249 My focus will be on the last question because it is the most generalizing one, allowing more far-reaching conclusions. 2.2 Social identity categories I have said above that SICs are categories that society presents as something to be and as something that is socially consequential. This definition has to remain vague because it will always involve elements that are dependent on the particular society we are talking about. Suffice to say that SICs may differ with respect to the following three features. 1. Ownership: Is the category a members’ category, i.e. one that members of a society are aware of and orient towards, or is the category imposed from outside? (The concept of members’ category is borrowed from ethnomethodology, cf. Benwell/ Stokoe 2006: 36) 2. Conceptual orientation: (This refers to the nature of the defining features of a category.) Is the category defined syntagmatically - to use a concept from linguistics - i.e. with reference to complementary relationships and interactive contact between those belonging to the category (e.g. teachers and students), or paradigmatically, i.e. with reference to relationships of similarity between members and contrast to nonmembers (e.g. people with special needs). There are often both syntagmatic and paradigmatic features involved in defining categories, but usually one is predominant. (The distinction is mine, but it is similar to Jenkin’s (2004: 82) between group identification and categorization.) 3. Institutionalization: Is the category part of an institution or organization, i.e. are its meaning and especially the forms of interaction it entails more or less strictly defined and thus limited, or is it more or less unconstrained within the members’ lifeworld? These features can be conceived of as scales, with SICs being positioned somewhere between the following poles: Owned ------------------------------------------------------------Imposed Syntagmatic---------------------------------------------- Paradigmatic Institutionalized ----------------------------- Non-institutionalized I will now briefly discuss the role of health as a SIC. personal identity. It is, e.g., possible for medical researchers to define what headaches are and what it means to suffer from them without being personally affected. Georg Marko 250 2.3 Health identity Health 5 is certainly not one of the dimensions traditional categories of identities are based on, neither informing people’s own sense of self nor being part of researchers’ theories of identities. This, however, is and has been changing as a result of the changing realities and perceptions of health in the second half of the 20 th century. The two major aspects relevant here are a. the epidemiological shift from infectious to chronic diseases and b. the rise of the risk society in late modernity. The 20 th century saw a decrease of infectious diseases in western societies and an increase in chronic diseases. The major reasons for the former include progress in medicine and healthcare and improvement of living conditions (esp. regarding hygiene), the principal reasons for the latter is the growing prevalence of sedentary lifestyles, increasing numbers of potential stressors in the physical and social environment, and a continuing rise in life expectancy, with older people being more susceptible to most long-term conditions (cf. Nettleton 2006: 234, Borgetto/ Kälble 2007: 86-90). The epidemiological shift may change our prototypical conceptions of disease. A disease is more and more being conceived of as something that does not just temporarily affect our lives, ending in cure (or death), but which can have massive long-term effects on sufferers, who have to (re- )organize their lives around the disease. Diseases can thus be said to have the potential of being biographically disruptive and thus having a stronger impact on our identities (on the concept of biographical disruption in long-term conditions, cf. Bury 1982: 169, cit. in Nettleton 2006: 93). As for (b.), there is one notion that has received increased attention in the theorizing of late 20 th -century and early 21 st -century social changes, namely the concept of risk (cf. Lupton 1999). Ulrich Beck (1986) has even characterised today’s society as risk society, with risk being the most important aspect in our conceptions of and our actions in the world (cf. Lupton 1999: 59-64). This particularly applies to health because risk is strongly associated or perhaps even based on our perceptions of bodily vulnerabilities. This means that health concerns are playing an increasingly important part in our lives. We might even go so far as to claim that the risk society is actually first and foremost a health society. This leads to the conclusion that health also plays a substantial part in the conceptions of our selves. 5 It is commonly agreed that health and disease no longer represent a binary opposition, but rather two poles on a health scale (cf. Nettleton 2006: 120). This is why I will talk of health rather than of disease identities. My Painful Self. 251 What is now the special role of discussion forms for the construction of health SICs? The last section of this chapter will be concerned with this question. 2.4 Health identity construction and the empowering function of discussion forums Given the demographic rarity of diseases - not the epidemiological rarity (the difference lies in the quantitative comparison to either other diseases in the case of epidemiological rarity, or to healthy individuals in the case of demographic rarity) - and/ or the physical constraints they may impose on our mobility, we do not normally meet many other people suffering from the same condition. This entails that those affected do not often have the opportunity to interact with each other and to thereby contribute to the meaning of the social identity category. In the domain of health, relevant SICs are defined paradigmatically, i.e. with reference to similarities between those with the same disease and to differences from those with other diseases and, more importantly, from those healthy. The specific features shared by sufferers are described by medicine. Health identities, especially those defined by a specific disease, also have a syntagmatic dimension in that sufferers have to fulfil the patient role in institutionalized healthcare, a role that also puts them in subordinate position to healthcare experts. We may speak of a medicalized health identity, which means that the social identity category associated with a particular disease is first and foremost defined by medicine and institutionalized healthcare. Medicalization means that medicine and institutionalized healthcare provide the conceptual grid through which we perceive and interpret the world, especially those aspects relevant to health (cf. Kettemann/ Marko/ Triebl 2010; for more thorough discussions of medicalization, cf. Conrad 2007). What is important concerning medicalized SICs is that they are based on definitions of health conditions that do not come from those affected, who are also assigned the passive role of the patients in healthcare by these definitions. Headache sufferers - and people with any other disease, for that matter - as a consequence find themselves in a weak and powerless position. This may be depressing as sufferers, being mostly isolated from each other, for a long time have not had the resources to modify medicalized SICs or offer alternatives. This problem is aggravated by the fact that, as mentioned, sufferers today are very likely to be afflicted by long-term conditions, which are often defined as being manageable rather than curable (cf. Lupton 2003: 98). This will make sufferers more reluctant to accept the traditional patient role, requiring them to fully subject themselves to the agency of the healthcare system in exchange for cure, Georg Marko 252 and it will also motivate them to seek for alternatives, alternatives in treatment and alternatives in the meanings of SICs. The situation might, however, be changing with the introduction of discussion forums and message boards, especially those featuring lay people, who usually are sufferers, discussing health issues. This new genre could be argued to have the strongest impact on health identity construction since it allows members of paradigmatically defined SICs, i.e. people suffering from a medical condition, to get into interactive contact with each other. The interaction in forums enables sufferers to construct the meanings of the SIC in negotiation with people in the same or in a similar situation. So paradigmatic SICs acquire a syntagmatic dimension, one that is based on equality, unlike the clinical scenario based on an expert-lay gap. This increases the chances of alternative meanings being added to an existing SIC or new SICs being created, which in turn will lead to ambivalence, tension and competition. It is difficult to predict to what extent sufferers’ conceptions of SICs differ from medicalized ones. But it seems plausible to assume that there will be some difference as sufferers are likely to - among other things - concentrate more on their subjective experience of a medical condition, on the consequences for their relationships with their environment, and on their own agency. This does not mean that medicalized elements will be missing from their conceptions, but there will also be a tendency to de-medicalize the condition or, to use an opposition often mentioned in health sociology, to see it as an illness (the personal experience of being unwell) and not just as a disease (the medically defined pathological condition) (for de-medicalization, cf. Kettemann/ Marko/ Triebl 2010, for illness and disease, cf. Eisenberg 1977, cit. in Clarke 2010: 29, Blaxter 2004: 20). It is, of course, not a foregone conclusion that health is a contested category on internet forums. But it will be interesting to see in what sense it could be argued to be one, and it will be sensible to investigate this by means of this oppositional complex. Why is this an issue worth exploring critically? Or, in other words, what is problematic about it? A medicalized view of the world in itself is not problematic - after all, it is medicine and institutionalized healthcare that in many cases provides the most efficient help. We, however, have to critically review to what extent and how a system that sustains power differences and competence gaps between healthcare professionals and patients is omnipotent and omnipresent even in defining sufferers’ identities and therefore is not or cannot be challenged. And we have to critically review to what extent and how the agency and self-determination of those affected by a disease is made visible. My Painful Self. 253 3. Research question Taking all these ideas into account, the research question my study seeks to answer is: How do discussion forums focusing on headaches & migraines construct the social identity category of the headache sufferer especially with respect to the potential tension between disease and illness, between the medicalized role of the patient and the de-medicalized role of the experiencer and agent? Based on my experience with health forums, 6 I think that medicalization is so strong a force that medical conceptions will still strongly predominate in the construction of health identities, with contestation and resistance only occurring occasionally and in subtle, modifying terms. Possibly the concept of patient empowerment is to be taken literally, i.e. empowering people but at the same time keeping them in the patient role. 4. Approach & Data 4.1 Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis The approach taken for my study is Critical Discourse Analysis, which seeks to critically examine socio-culturally problematic and contested issues and the role that language plays in creating and maintaining them. The analysis encompasses three interrelated stages: (a.) the description of linguistic forms in texts, (b.) the interpretation of the meanings created by these forms, and (c.) the evaluation of the socio-cultural significance of these meanings (cf. Marko 2008, Fairclough 1992, and the contributions in Wodak/ Meyer 2009). My version of CDA mainly concentrates on global meaning patterns conceptually organizing the specific ideas and attitudes of discourses, i.e. on conceptual strategies. 7 Assuming that these large-scale conceptual patterns become manifest in recurrent discursive patterns - including recurrence of form and meaning but also recurrence of meaning independent of form (e.g. lexical variation) - found across different texts, the computer-assisted investigation of large electronic corpora is my preferred method. Using this method in discourse analysis implies that qualitative description and interpretation of linguistic details is complemented by quantitative information about frequencies and distributions. 6 For private and professional purposes, I have spent considerable time on various forums. 7 Strategy is here used in the sense introduced by van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) as cognitive macroprocesses, not presupposing conscious awareness. Georg Marko 254 4.2 Data The corpus used in this study of identity construction by headache sufferers consists of postings to three general health websites with (mainly lay) discussion forums, each with an individual section focusing on headaches & migraines. Two of these - ehealthforum, MedHelp - are based in the US, and one - HealingWell - in the UK. There probably is a tendency for natives of the respective country to contribute more often, but discussion forums are not restricted to the respective countries, which means there are many contributions by people from other countries and also by people whose native language obviously is not English. I therefore believe that national and geographical variation does not really play a significant role. The corpus was compiled in April 2011. The same approach was applied for all three websites: I started with the most recent thread (i.e. the one with the most recent contribution) and then worked my way backwards chronologically, including all postings to each thread until the corpus produced reached a certain size (300,000 words, later reduced by editing). The corpus has been edited and structurally annotated, e.g. inserting thread and posting boundaries, correcting spelling errors (and marking them so that information about the original version is still retrievable), and marking editorial elements (i.e. language not produced by the posters for a specific message) such as dates, names, signature lines or internal quotes so that they can be included or ignored - usually the latter - in the analysis, depending on my purpose. The corpus has also been tagged for word categories, using the automatic tagger CLAWS available through Wmatrix (Rayson 2009). Here are the general statistical details of the corpus. Number of word tokens 843,981 No. of threads 890 No. of postings 5,486 Avg. no. of postings per thread 6.2 Avg. no. of words/ posting 153 Posters 2,902 Postings per poster 1.9 One-time posters 2,219 (76.5%) Table 1: Statistical information on the headache forum corpus. Just to provide some comparison: I have also compiled corpora on other health forums (cf. Marko, in preparation) and the average numbers - e.g. lengths of contributions, numbers of postings per thread - are similar to heart disease, stroke or multiple sclerosis forums. There, however, appears to be a significantly higher number of one-time posters in the headache forum, with more than 40% of all contributions produced by them. My Painful Self. 255 As one-time posters usually briefly present an urgent problem in their single posts rather than discussing their condition in greater depth, their number may indicate that the headache forums are not very likely to create any radically alternative conceptions of headache sufferer identities. I have chosen not to use a comparative corpus even though this means that some of the results yielded by the analyses will be difficult to bring into perspective. However, I think that there is no genre or discourse that would differ from lay forums on headache and migraines in ways that would make a comparison shed light on my research question. Just to give one example: one obvious choice are scientific texts (e.g. articles from medical journals). These, however, differ from forum postings not only in attitude and perspective, but also with respect to interactiveness and formality so that it might be difficult to judge which of these factors results in which differences on the level of language. The concordancing software used for the analysis is WordSmith Tools 5.0, created by Mike Scott. 4.4 Overview of analyses As an exhaustive study of all aspects relevant to the issue is impossible, my focus necessarily has to be selective. I have therefore chosen to present the analyses of four very different phenomena, phenomena that appear to allow at least a partial view of what is going on with respect to health identity construction and SIC construction in headache forums. One of these phenomena is more global in nature, two focus on structures representing the two major ‘protagonists’ of the textual world created in the forums, viz. the sufferers and the pain, and one starts at a particular assumption about a specific conceptual strategy and then looks at the linguistic elements that could be argued to contribute to the salience of this strategy. More specifically and more linguistically speaking, the four phenomena are: 1. General semantic profile What is the general conceptual structure of the discourse? 2. Verb collocating with first person I, i.e. the poster In terms of which actions and events are headache sufferers represented? 3. Adjectives and determiners collocating with nouns referring to the pain In terms of which attributes are headaches represented? 4. Pharmacologicalization To what extent does medication play a central role in headache sufferers’ experience of pain? Georg Marko 256 5. General semantic profile Semantic profiling means looking at particular linguistic structures - usually lexemes - and the semantic categories they represent - usually a mixture of universally relevant ones and classes that appear to play a substantial role in the discourse under scrutiny (partly judging from the material analysed) in order to find out which of these categories are the most salient ones. Salience is quantitatively measured in terms of token frequencies (How often do elements of a particular category appear overall in the corpus? ) and lexical variation (How many different elements belong to a particular category? ). One objection sometimes raised against this approach is that it imposes meaning - in the shape of the semantic categories - on the data rather than finding it there. This point, however, could be made with the act of describing in general since describing always amounts to assigning elements to categories, which entails that results are contingent on the set of categories applied in the first place. It is true, however, that semantic categorization involves problems absent from, for example, grammatical categorization as meanings necessarily involve fuzzy edges and polyvalence (elements potentially belonging to several classes), thus defying easy categorization. This problem is partly mitigated by making the researcher’s choices transparent and presenting the categorized data sets. It is also relativized to some extent by the quantitative approach and the focus on salience as the frequency of elements in a corpus is a much less controversial aspect than their semantic classification. In my study, I took the 1,000 most frequent content lexemes of my corpus and categorized them according to semantic categories. These categories combine general classes based on the semantic tagging approach of USAS (= UCREL [= University Centre for Computer Corpus Research of Language] Semantic Analysis System) (cf. Archer/ Wilson/ Rayson 2002) and my own experience with semantic profiling and specific classes suggested by the data at hand. The list of lexemes has been lemmatized, which means that different word forms of the same lexeme are subsumed under the same entry (e.g. woman, women  woman). The full list, with all elements found assigned to their respective categories and subcategories - the latter introduced mostly for a clearer presentation of data rather than for analytical purposes - can be found on my homepage (cf. Marko n.d.). The table below - and all further tables - contains absolute and relative frequencies. The percentages included in the table represent the relative sizes of the categories in relation to the other categories. A number of 25% would thus mean that a fourth of all words - types or tokens - can be assigned to the respective category. Types Tokens My Painful Self. 257 Discourse markers 8 9 0.9% 2,499 0.9% General 59 5.8% 15,413 5.7% Time 79 7.8% 26,943 9.9% Space & movement 56 5.5% 17,292 6.4% Change 27 2.7% 5,720 2.1% Conation 9 1 0.1% 1,787 0.7% Quantification 109 10.8% 22,349 8.2% Evaluation 125 12.4% 27,166 10.0% Mental processes 113 11.2% 33,852 12.5% Social processes & relations 23 2.3% 6,881 2.5% Communication 46 4.5% 12,489 4.6% Food 7 0.7% 992 0.4% Chemistry & physics 14 1.4% 2,735 1.0% Anatomy & physiology 77 7.6% 21,481 7.9% Medicine & healthcare 148 14.6% 46,659 17.2% Scientific practice 7 0.7% 1,341 0.5% Undefined 10 112 11.1% 25,405 9.4% 1,012 271,004 Table 2: Relative sizes of different semantic categories for the 1,000 most frequent lexemes in the headache forum corpus. Although difficult to interpret - especially without a comparative corpus - the figures in Table 2 provide a first indication of which aspects are important in the lives of headache sufferers as described by themselves. We see the predominance of the “Medicine & healthcare” category with respect to both frequency and lexical variation. If we add the numbers for “Anatomy & physiology,” which is closely associated with medicine, the salience of this semantic domain becomes even clearer. This supports the assumption that medicalization is more influential in the headache forums than more experiential and subjective aspects. The fact that psychological and evaluative words also show lexical variation and high token frequencies could, however, be interpreted as a slight countermovement to this general tendency, as they introduce an element of subjectivity to the world of headaches. However, some caution is warranted considering that these two semantic categories are commonly among the largest ones in any discourse or genre. Let me briefly comment on “Evaluation,” which is not only one of the largest semantic categories but which is also interesting for its ambiguity. On the one hand, evaluations by definition introduce a subjective and thus de-medicalizing element. On the other hand, characterizing health conditions negatively, i.e. as problems that require solutions - usually cure - is a pattern typical of a medicalized world view. If the latter is predominant in the SIC of headache sufferers created by the discourse 8 Strictly speaking, not a semantic but a pragmatic category, including elements whose only/ primary function is interactive, especially greetings and farewells. 9 Processes of trying and achieving. 10 Highly polysemous words such as get or keep were assigned to the “Undefined” category as an exhaustive disambiguation was not feasible. Georg Marko 258 examined here - as suggested by the data reviewed above - “Evaluation” could be expected to contain mainly negative elements. A look at the words in the “Value” subcategory (cf. Marko n.d.), however, shows a balance between negative and positive terms (see the table below), indicating that this semantic category does more than just define pain as a problem, which in turn means that the results do not add further weight to the conclusion about the predominance of medicalization. awful odd ability nice bad problem able ok damage serious benefit okay difficult strange ease positive difficulty terrible easily proper freak trouble easy properly hell unable effective safe horrible unfortunately fine success negative weird good/ better/ best welcome great wonderful luck Table 3: Positive and negative lexemes in the “Value” subcategory of the semantic category “Evaluation.” In sum, the data examined in this chapter suggests that medicalization is the predominant strategy in the construction of the SIC of headache sufferers and their environment, with only a few aspects introducing more subjective and experiential elements. It remains to be seen whether the more in-depth analysis of linguistic details supports or relativizes this conclusion. 6. Representation of the sufferer While the general semantic profile examined in the previous chapter can give a rough outline of how posters to headache and migraine forums conceptualize the world and thus the context of health identities, it does not concentrate specifically on the latter. Representations of sufferers, on the other hand, are mainly concerned with their identities. Linguistically speaking, headache sufferers are mainly represented by the nouns used to refer to them (nomination) or by verbs and adjectives (or verb phrases and adjective phrases) that are used to describe them or the processes in which they are involved (predication) (for nomination and predication, cf. Reisigl/ Wodak 2009). I will only take a very short look at nomination. The most common nouns representing headache sufferers are patient (190 occurrences), sufferer (133 occurrences), and migraineur (31 occurrences). The frequencies between brackets indicate that posters to the headache and migraine forums use a relatively high proportion of terms that do not foreground My Painful Self. 259 the institutional role of the patient. Sufferer emphasizes the negative experience of pain and migraineurs, too, by using migraine as the basis of the derivation, highlights the condition. Interestingly, sufferer takes fellow as a common premodifier (in addition to headache and migraine), which underscores the relational and social value of the term in the interactive community in the forum. However, since first persons do not often refer to themselves by nominal expressions, 11 predication, i.e. the processes in which the posters are involved and the semantic roles they take in these processes, are a more fertile field for examining the tension between medicalization and demedicalization in health identity construction. A full analysis of all occurrences of I and me is not feasible considering that the corpus contains more than 40,000 occurrences of these two forms. I have therefore decided to limit my analysis to the use of progressive tenses - or progressive aspect, to be linguistically more precise - with I as the subject (progressive aspect with object me is rare and has therefore not been considered; me does not occur as subject with progressive aspect in the corpus, e.g. I want them to be sleeping). The focus is not arbitrary as one of the central functions of progressive aspect is to represent an event as ongoing and as dynamically progressing. This dynamic dimension is probably the reason why the immediate experience of processes is most likely to be expressed by progressives. If progressive aspect indeed has an experiential function, this means that if there is a general countermovement to a disease-oriented and medicalized SIC of headache sufferers, this tendency should become more clearly manifest in progressives than in non-progressives/ simple aspect. I have looked at all occurrences of the search structure mentioned, i.e. progressive aspect with I as subject, and produced a semantic profile of the verbs and verb groups found. The details - including subcategories - can be found on my homepage (cf. Marko n.d.). The following table represents the relative sizes of the semantic categories used, using the same form of quantification as with the general semantic profile in the preceding chapter. Types Tokens General 21 4.5% 150 4.6% Time 18 3.9% 118 3.6% Space & movement 37 8.0% 150 4.6% Quantitative & qualitative change 19 4.1% 41 1.3% Conation 31 6.7% 213 6.6% Evaluation 6 1.3% 11 0.3% Mental processes 123 26.5% 903 27.8% Social processes & relations 23 4.9% 51 1.6% 11 I ignore the use of nouns in predicative complements - as in I am a headache patient - as references to the condition will be rare considering that this is almost a prerequisite for participating in the discussions. Georg Marko 260 Communication 36 7.7% 201 6.2% Anatomy & physiology 31 6.7% 105 3.2% Medicine & healthcare 87 18.7% 1,247 38.5% Undefined 33 7.1% 53 1.6% Totals 465 3,243 Table 4: Relative sizes of the semantic categories of verbs found in the structure ‘I am + V-ing’ in the headache forum corpus. As can be seen from the table, verbs concerned with medicine and healthcare occur most often. These primarily include expressions referring to having a disease and taking medication, which can be interpreted as contributing to a medicalizing conception of headaches. However, especially the subcategory of pathology is ambivalent. On the one hand, there are relatively neutral expressions such as have a condition (e.g. headaches) or get a condition, which might support medicalization. But even with these, the question remains whether the progressive aspect is mostly used to indicate temporariness or whether it also adds a dynamic and experiential element even to these basic combinations, as in: Now I’m having headaches and the back of my head is numb. Also, I have been having headaches and migraines for one and a half years. On the other hand, we also see many expressions that combine perceptive/ emotional verbs with references to a disease, e.g. feel a condition 12 and suffer from a condition, and proprioceptive physiological processes, e.g. pass out, shake. These appear to add more weight to subjectivity and thus to de-medicalization. Overall, however, the fact that regarding token frequencies, the neutral expressions by far outnumber those with a more experiential dimension - e.g. have a condition occurs 426 times, get a condition 162 times, while suffer from a condition occurs 100 times, and feel a condition 34 times - and that there are also many expressions in the subcategory of “Diagnosis & therapy,” which do not show the same kind of ambiguity, still lends weight to the conclusion about a medicalizing effect produced by the “Medicine & healthcare”-category. The second very salient semantic class of verbs is that covering processes of thinking, feeling and perceiving. This category, which by definition represents subjectivity and experience, shows even higher lexical variation than “Medicine & healthcare” and would be on level terms regarding token frequencies if I had included all medically-connoted proprioceptive expressions (suffer from a condition, etc.). Its salience thus can be argued to undermine the medicalization created by the other category discussed. The data reviewed in this section suggests that the meaning of the identity of the headache sufferer is indeed ambivalent, including medi- 12 Condition here stands for expressions for any health condition, e.g. feel a strange kind of pain or feel intense pressure in my lower abdomen. My Painful Self. 261 calizing and de-medicalizing aspects, aspects of disease and illness. We, however, have to take this conclusion with a grain of salt since, as mentioned, I specifically focused on a structure clearly favouring experiential values. Considering that progressives account for only about a tenth of all verbs phrases with a first person singular I as the subject, this probably only allows a partial view. 7. Representation of the condition This chapter is concerned with the representations of pain by posters to headache and migraine forums and their implications for health identity constructions. I will look at which words are used in combination with headache and what they reveal about the dimensions of headaches that sufferers feel need underlining. The first section will examine premodifiers, the second one determiners. 7.1 Premodifiers Premodifiers are words that specify and/ or foreground particular semantic dimensions of a head noun, preceding this noun either syntactically, i.e. inside a noun phrase, e.g. a terrible headache, or morphologically, i.e. inside a compound, e.g. sinus headaches (I will not discuss the distinction further here). Examining which words premodify nouns for headaches will thus reveal whether sufferers tend to speak of the conditions more in terms of disease or in terms of illness. Here are three examples of the structures I will analyse. a constant 24/ 7 headache massive headaches medication-overuse headaches In these examples, I will look at the modifiers constant, 24/ 7, massive and medication-overuse and the fact that the first two specify the duration and frequency of headaches, the second one their intensity, and the third one their causes. Predicative descriptions of pains, e.g. my headaches are 24/ 7 and so debilitating, will probably be preferred when talking about the immediate experience, while attributive descriptions - i.e. those involving premodifiers - e.g. a constant 24/ 7 headache, are used when referring to an established (or quasi established) category. I have nevertheless chosen to focus on modifying elements because predicative descriptions are rare. I limit my analysis to the words headache, migraine and head pain as these most generally and neutrally denote the condition investigated in this article. I examined all elements modifying these headwords, irrespective of the word category (adjectives - in a broad sense, including Georg Marko 262 participles - and nouns) or the embedding structure (compound nouns or noun phrases). I included all modifiers related to the pain, even if part of a larger compound, e.g. tension headache patient, but not if the modifier refers to the headword of such a compound, e.g. American Headache Society. In some compounds referring to pathological conditions, e.g. headache attack or headache syndrome, the distinction can often not be made because in sudden-onset headache syndrome, it might in fact be the headache or the syndrome that starts abruptly. But as this does not make a great semantic difference, I included modifiers in such constructions. The resulting list of modifiers was categorized semantically, producing a semantic profile of the dimensions of headache that seem particularly relevant and salient. In contrast to the semantic profiles in the last two chapters, I cannot rely on general semantic classes with this specific task, but the categories have been motivated by looking at the concrete results yielded by the analysis. As the classes are not self-explanatory, I will briefly introduce them below. ‣ Basic categories: 13 Basic categories in established clinical taxonomies that cannot be defined otherwise, e.g. migrainous, primary. 14 ‣ Co-occurrence: Phenomena co-occurring with, or caused by, headaches, including co-morbidity (e.g. aura, vomiting) and perception/ sensation, i.e. perceptions co-occurring with or caused by headaches (e.g. painful, dizzy). ‣ Causal factors: Phenomena triggering headaches, including actions and events (e.g. sexual, crash), substances (ice cream, alcohol-related), body parts, i.e. the trigger is localized in the anatomy or physiology of a body part other than the brain (e.g. sinus-related), co-morbidity, i.e. if the trigger is another condition (e.g. sinusitis 15 ), therapeutic, i.e. if a particular treatment leads to headaches (e.g. lumbar puncture), and genetics (e.g. familial). ‣ Diagnostics & therapy: Diagnostic status and therapeutic measures, e.g. undiagnosed, indomethacin-responsive. ‣ Location: Place in the head where the pains (are perceived) to appear, e.g. unilateral. ‣ Time: Time-related features such as duration (e.g. 3-hour), frequency (e.g. daily, chronic), phase (initiation, continuation, comple- 13 The definitions read: Describing headaches with respect to or in terms of… 14 For a full appreciation of the examples given, add headache/ s (or migraine/ s), e.g. migrainous headaches, primary headaches, vomiting headaches, etc. 15 The difference to co-occurring comorbidity is the direction of causality: in aura migraines, for instance, the visual aura - a temporary distortion of visual perception - occurs together with the headache and is caused by the latter, while in sinusitis headaches, the sinus infection triggers the headache. My Painful Self. 263 tion) (e.g. sudden-onset), and point in time (e.g. early-morning, subsequent). ‣ Person-related: Personal features of the patient (usually age), e.g. adult, baby. ‣ Evaluation: Aspects such as value (e.g. awful), intensity (e.g. intensive, unbearable), quality (e.g. throbbing), comparison (e.g. different), or epistemology (e.g. true). The full set of data, organized in categories and subcategories (allowing a better overview) can be found on my homepage (Marko n.d.). Table 5 contains absolute and relative frequencies of elements assigned to the respective categories. Types Tokens Basic categories 12 2.5% 676 17.7% Co-occurrence 35 7.4% 317 8.3% Causality 92 19.3% 382 10.0% Diagnostics & therapy 9 1.9% 15 0.3% Person-related 4 0.8% 5 0.1% Location 37 7.8% 276 7.2% Time 107 22.5% 885 23.2% Evaluation 175 36.8% 1,253 32.8% Undefined 5 1.1% 9 0.2% Totals 476 3,818 Table 5: Relative sizes of the semantic categories of modifiers of headache, migraine and head pain in the headache forum corpus. The categories themselves, which have been inductively established from the data, allow insights into the conceptualizations at work. It is striking that most of them - at face value - would feature in medical consultations, having diagnostic value. We could thus be expected to be asked about things such as “Where in your head? When, how often, and for how long? How strong? Accompanied by what? What did you do before? What other conditions do you have? ” This in combination with the fact that none of the categories - with the exception of “Diagnostics & therapy” and “Person-related” - is insignificantly small can be taken as evidence that posters conceptualize headaches in those categories that have medical relevance, which will translate into a medicalizing effect. We, however, also have to take into account that the two categories “Evaluation” and “Time” are more prominent than the others. Together they represent more than half of all modifiers, whether with respect to the numbers of different lexemes or token frequencies. A closer look at the subcategories reveals that there are two conceptual dimensions that stand out here, namely negative intensity and long duration. Looking at the elements representing these subcategories (see Table 6) indicates that these two aspects show what I call cluster overwording, i.e. many near- Georg Marko 264 synonyms are used for the same concept (in contrast to taxonomic overwording, which is intended to create fine distinctions). Negative intensity Long duration aggressive full-on [number] -day lingering agonizing giant [number]hour(s) long all-out horrendous [number] -month long lasting awful horrible [number] -week (long/ old) month long bad horrid 24/ 7 non-stop big horrific all-day on-going blasted huge consistent permanent blinding incapacitating constant persistence burning increased continual persistent crazy intense continuous prolonged crippling killer extended unending crushing major never-ending week-long debilitating massive lasting deep raging disabling severe exacerbated splitting excruciating strong excruciation suicide extreme terrible fierce unbearable full out violent full-blown Table 6: Modifiers of headache/ migraine/ head pain denoting negative intensity and long duration. Cluster overwording is an indication of a subjective preoccupation with an aspect, unlike taxonomic overwording, which could be argued to be objectively required by the circumstances (however problematic this claim is). The words in the list do not represent the discrete labels of standardized diagnostic procedures, and doctors trying to categorize the headaches would not be happy to see that much variation in the characterization of the condition. But the variation of terms suggests that sufferers may have been looking for a particularly ‘strong’ word with a superlative meaning, promising a high emotional impact, and not one that they are familiar with from their visits to the doctor’s. This, in turn, points to their desire to stress the experiential value of the intensity and the length of their pains. This also shows in the fact that especially negative intensity modifiers themselves are often intensified by different means. Intensification underlines the subjective and experiential value of the modifiers. Intensification commonly draws upon the pattern ‘intensifier + adjective’ as can be seen from the concordance from my corpus below (extract). My Painful Self. 265 Table 7: Concordance of the structure ‘Intensifier + adjective + headache/ migraine’ (extract showing adjective expressing negative intensity) Intensification is also expressed by means of reduplication, either by word reduplication, e.g.: massive, massive pressure in my sinuses terrible terrible pain painful, painful headaches or semantic reduplication, where synonymous or near-synonymous words are coordinated, e.g.: severe and disabling migraine totally aggressive and debilitating headache extremely severe and extremely violent sinus like pain severe, excruciating, throbbing headache horrible, horrendous headaches excruciating, debilitating headaches Semantic reduplication may also involve the head noun, with intensity being created by mentioning the pain twice. Although this phenomenon goes beyond the negative intensity premodifiers analysed, it has the same effect and therefore is worth mentioning here. Examples are: sharp headache pain sharp painful headaches migraine pain The commonness of various types of intensification in connection with negative intensity will, as mentioned, further enhance the de-medicalizing dimension of this type of modifiers. Georg Marko 266 The data examined in this section supports the conclusions drawn above. Medicalization and disease are foregrounded, but there are also subtle or even more significant attempts to relativize it, too. 7.2 Determination In addition to modifiers, noun phrases also can - or perhaps even must 16 - contain a determiner. The function of determiners is usually not to add semantic content to the headword, but rather to define its information value. They thus indicate whether something has already been mentioned or should generally be known, whether something belongs to somebody, whether I am talking about a specific referent or about a category in general, etc. There are different determiners that a noun such as headache can take: the definite article (e.g. The headaches are accompanied by dizziness and nausea.), the indefinite article (e.g. I had a headache for two days.), a possessive pronoun (e.g. My headaches are almost completely gone.), a demonstrative pronoun (e.g. It’s almost self-fulfilling prophecy sometimes with these headaches! ), an indefinite pronoun or a quantifier (e.g. […] drugs which also work for some migraines.), or no determiner (in indefinite plural noun phrases, e.g. Headaches usually are the last symptom to emerge, or elliptical sentences, e.g. Severe headaches, please help! ). The most interesting determiners with respect to the representation of headaches and its relevance for the construction of health identities are possessive pronouns, especially first person singular possessive my, and demonstrative pronouns, i.e. this/ that/ these/ those. I will briefly explain why. There are various motives for using a possessive with a health condition, but it usually presupposes some subjective acceptance of its existence and presence in one’s life. This in turn points to a more personal, subjective relationship with the condition, which could be argued to be part of a more experiential approach and thus of an emphasis of illness over disease. Demonstrative pronouns usually have an endophoric function if they combine with the headword headache or migraine, singling out specific headaches that have already been mentioned before. However, there is often an exophoric or deictic dimension present, too, creating a certain distance - evaluative or not - between the sufferer and the condition, e.g. in These headaches aren’t just a headache. The apparent need to distance oneself presupposes a certain emotional involvement and thus again a subjective and experiential moment. As both possessive and demonstrative pronouns thus can be argued to contribute to de-medicalization, it will be interesting to see how often 16 If we interpret the absence of an overt determiner as one form of determination. My Painful Self. 267 they are used as determiners for noun phrases headed by either headache or migraine, especially in comparison to definite and indefinite articles, which by themselves do not add a subjective element. I looked at all the noun phrases with these headwords and counted the occurrences of the different forms of determiners. Table 8 contains the absolute and relative frequencies. headache migraine Ellipsis 488 8.9% 243 6.8% No determiner & indefinite article 3,154 57.5% 2,294 64.7% Definite article 860 15.7% 378 10.7% Possessives 489 8.9% 414 11.7% Demonstratives 307 5.6% 103 2.9% Quantifiers & indefinites 187 3.4% 116 3.3% Totals 5,485 3,548 Table 8: Relative sizes of the different classes of determiners of NPs headed by headache and migraine in the headache forum corpus. The results show that demonstratives and possessives are used in about a seventh of the noun phrases with headache and migraine, while definite and indefinite articles (or indefinite reference created by the omission of any article in the plural) account for approximately three quarters of all determiners. Without a comparison to other corpora, it is difficult to judge whether this is more or less than average, so conclusions have to remain tentative. But the data does not seem to suggest that determiners of nouns for headaches add a strong subjective and thus de-medicalizing element to health identity construction in forums. The data reveals an interesting side aspect, namely that indefiniteness, normally used when introducing something new, is significantly more common than definiteness, normally used when referring to something already mentioned, in connection with headaches in the discourse examined (for a more thorough discussion of definiteness, cf. Lambrecht 1994: 79-87). Part of this can definitely be explained by the fact that forums feature short units - whether postings or threads - where the likelihood of repeated reference to the same phenomenon is not as high as in longer texts. But it may also indicate that headache sufferers speak of individual instances of the condition, with each instance being introduced as new, rather than about a general disease. This focus on individual instances, in turn, could be seen as a tendency to foreground experience rather than the medicalized conception of disease. Considering that indefiniteness - and definiteness, too - also has other functions, particularly the generic reference to categories (e.g. men suffer from cluster headaches more often than women), this is just an idea rather than a conclusion really supported by the data, and overall the data on determination rather suggests that the discourse on headaches in lay discussion forums on headaches and migraines adds to medicalization. Georg Marko 268 8. Conceptual strategies: Pharmacologicalization Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis can also start with an assumption about a conceptual strategy and work its way backwards to the data. This is what I will do in this chapter, focusing on a strategy which I call - excuse the clumsy term - pharmacologicalization. Pharmacologicalization means foregrounding the importance of drugs and medications in conceptualizations of the world in general and of the world of health and disease specifically. Pharmacologicalization is part and parcel of the superordinate strategy of medicalization. If we assume that the headache identities presented in the forums rest more strongly on the traditional institutionalized model of medicine and healthcare, then we will expect this strategy to play a prominent role. What are now the linguistic structures that might contribute to the construction of pharmacologicalization in a discourse? Unsurprisingly, the most obvious one is to make explicit reference to drugs and medications, i.e. to use nouns (or complex nominal expressions) for chemical substances used as therapy or prophylaxis. These are the structures I will be looking at in the following. Searching a corpus for such expressions is problematic since they do not share any formal features that would make tracing them feasible. While it is not possible to perform an exhaustive search, we can do an approximative search by using lists of established drugs - including brand names (e.g. Aspirin), generic terms (e.g. acetaminophen), general terms (e.g. meds), and also forms of administration (e.g. shot) - and having the concordancing programme look for any occurrence of each item included in the list. I produced such a list on the basis of two modified lists from the Internet (United States National Library of Medicine n.d. and DrugindexOnline 2012), including some 10,000 items. With the help of this list, I searched the corpus for pharmacological expressions. Table 9 contains the type and token frequencies of the expressions found. The full set is provided on my homepage (Marko n.d.). Types Tokens Expressions for medications 1,062 8,335(~ 1%) Table 9: Type and token frequencies of expressions for medications in the headache forum corpus. Even though the corpus contains more than 800,000 words and I was not too strict in classifying complex structures as different expressions (e.g. over-the-counter allergy pill counts as different from allergy pill), 1,062 different lexemes for drugs appears a high number, so that we can safely say that medications are a heavily overworded semantic field, even without comparative data. The token number does not appear very high at first sight, considering that we find reference to a drug only every 100 th word. But if considered My Painful Self. 269 in relation to the number of postings or the number of threads, we see the wide distribution and prevalence of the category because we find 1.5 references to drugs per posting and almost 10 references per thread. Average numbers have to be treated with caution, though, because looking at the data we may get the impression - although I cannot produce formal evidence for this - that many of the more technical references to drugs are not evenly distributed across the whole corpus, but tend to occur in lists and catalogues, as the following examples illustrate. I tried Gabapentin, Amitriptyline, Imitrex, Butalbital, Propanol and now Topamax . Moderately helpful, side effects: natural progesterone, sodium naproxen, diphenhydramine, aspirin, Tylenol 3, Lorazepam (too addicting). Moderately helpful no side effects: Reglan along with Ativan, Maxalt, Imitrex, Nortriptyline, Topamax, Valproate, Etodolac, rest I probably don’t even remember. To what extent this influences the effect of pharmacologicalization is difficult to judge. Generally speaking, the data seems to suggest that there is a strong moment of pharmacologicalization in the discourse of the headache forums, contributing to a medicalized conception of the world and thus also of the identities of the headache sufferers. However, a closer look at the data also shows that there are aspects that could be argued to work against the impact of the overuse of terms for drugs. Firstly, the list includes many general references to drugs (e.g. drug, medication, pill, tablet, pain killer), which in this non-technical sense may be integrated into our daily lives - e.g. in self-medication - so that they lose the strong link to medicine. Secondly, the list also features many references to complementary and alternative medication and general supplements, all of these coming from outside traditional medicine. Thirdly, the list contains many informal words such as clippings (e.g. med, combo, asp, ibu), paraphrasing compounds (mood changing pill, stress reducer, anti-inflammatory shot), or metonymies (effect for medication, e.g. an anti-seizure, birth control), which point to a more informal and more casual relation to the medication. Fourthly, posters make spelling errors with the more technical terms, indicating that they are not particularly careful about correctly representing the technicality of the terms. Here are examples of orthographic variation for the drug nortriptyline found in the corpus: nortiptyline nortriptiline nortriptilyne nortriptilyne nortriptylin nortryptaline nortryptoline nortrytiline nortyptaline Georg Marko 270 All these are aspects that will certainly introduce a subjective element, relativizing at least the technical and expert rigidity of pharmacologicalization. However, the overall impression remains that this strategy plays an important role in the construction of the headache identity and thus pushes it more in the direction of disease and medicalization. 9. Conclusion The question this article set out to answer is whether and to what extent there are two opposing trends - medicalization and de-medicalization - at work in how headache sufferers construct their identities (and their worlds) when interacting with each other in discussion forums on the Internet. The assumption is that if people affected by a certain health condition talk among each other, they might construct meanings of the social identity category of the headache sufferer that will go beyond or challenge the conceptions promoted by medicine and institutionalized healthcare, meanings that highlight subjective, experiential, or agentive aspects of the condition over scientific, impersonal, or passive ones, seeing headaches and migraines as illness and not just as a disease. Taking a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analytical approach, I tried to answer this question by examining a 850,000-word corpus of postings to discussion forums on headaches and migraines. The analysis was concerned with giving a general overview of meanings at work in the discourse (focusing on a general semantic profile of the 1,000 most common content lexemes), with representations of the headache sufferers (focusing on the verbs used by the posters when talking about themselves), with representations of the condition (focusing on adjectives and nouns used to modify references to pains), and with pharmacologicalization, i.e. the emphasis on drugs in conceptualizations of health (focusing on the use of terms for drugs and medications). The data examined in the article suggests that my initial expectation, viz. that medicalization will predominate, with de-medicalization becoming manifest only occasionally and subtly, appears plausible even though de-medicalizing elements might be slightly more prominent than assumed. I still have to conclude that headache sufferers seem to conceive of themselves, in relation to their condition and to their environment, in terms imposed by medicine and institutional healthcare rather than offering alternatives highlighting the subjective experience of the condition and an agentive approach to it. The reason for the predominance of medicalization in health identity constructions in the forums may be that many posters do not see them as sites for an interactive exchange between equals, but rather treat the communication My Painful Self. 271 on the sites as an extension of medical consultations, mostly seeking immediate preor praeter-clinical advice from ‘lay experts’ (as part of what Freidson (1970, cit. Nettleton 2006: 76) calls lay referral system). This shows in the fact that a large majority of posters contribute just a single message. It remains to be seen whether health forums will develop in this direction of quasi-medical counselling or will further enhance its challenging potential. References Archer, Dawn/ Andrew Wilson/ Paul Rayson (2002). “Introduction to the USAS category system.” University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language: Lancaster University. [Online] http: / / ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/ usas/ usas% 20guide.pdf (20 Oct 2012). Beck, Ulrich (1986). Riskogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. Benwell, Bethan/ Elizabeth Stokoe (2006). Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Blaxter, Mildred (2004). Health. Cambridge: Polity. Borgetto, Bernhard/ Karl Kälble (2007). Medizinsoziologie. Sozialer Wandel, Krankheit, Gesundheit und das Gesundheitssystem. Unter Mitarbeit von Birgit Babitsch. Weinheim & München: Juventa. Bury, Michael (1982). “Chronic illness as biographical disruption.” Sociology of Health & Illness 4/ 2. 167-182. Clarke, Alan (2010). The Sociology of Healthcare. 2 nd edition. Harlow [etc.]: Longman. Conrad, Peter (2007). The Medicalization of Society. On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP. de Cillia, Rudolf/ Helmut Gruber/ Michał Krzyżanowski/ Florian Menz (eds.) (2010). Diskurs - Politik - Identität/ Discourse - Politics - Identity. Festschrift für Ruth Wodak zum 60. Geburtstag. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. DrugindexOnline (2012). 2 nd edition. [Online] http: / / drugindexonline.com/ letter_a3.html (15 Oct 2012). Eisenberg, Leon (1977). “Disease and illness: distinctions between professional and popular ideas of sickness.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1. 9-23. Evans, Randolph W./ Ninan T. Mathew (2005). Handbook of Headache. 2 nd revised edition. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Fairclough, Norman (1992). Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press. Freidson, Eliot (1970). Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. ihateheadaches (n.d.). “Headache Statistics.” [Online] http: / / www.ihateheadaches.org/ headache-statistics.html (9 Oct 2012). Jenkins, Richard (2004). Social Identity. 2 nd edition. London & New York: Routledge. Kelleher, David/ Gerard Leavey (eds.) (2004). Identity and Health. London: Routledge. Kelly, Michael P./ Louise M. Millward (2004). “Identity and Illness.” In: Kelleher/ Leavey (2004). 1-18. Georg Marko 272 Kernick, David/ Peter J. Goadsby (2009). Headache: A Practical Manual. Oxford: OUP. Kettemann, Bernhard/ Georg Marko/ Eva Triebl (2010). “‘I have MS, MS doesn’t have me.’ Social identity construction in the discourse of multiple sclerosis forums.” In: de Cillia/ Gruber/ Krzyżanowski/ Menz (2010). 355-367. Lambrecht, Knud (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge [etc.]: CUP. Lupton, Deborah (1999). Risk. London: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah (2003). Medicine as Culture. 2 nd edition. Los Angeles [etc.]: Sage. Marko, Georg (2008). Penetrating Language. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Pornography. Tübingen: Narr. Marko, Georg (in preparation). “‘Your story has made me feel angry on your behalf.’ Empathy and hierarchy in lay-to-lay interaction on chronic diseases.” Marko, Georg (n.d.). Personal homepage. [Online] http: / / www.unigraz.at/ georg.marko (3 Oct 2012). Mauskopp, Alex (2009). Migraine and Headache. Oxford: OUP. Nettleton, Sarah (2006). The Sociology of Health and Illness. 2 nd edition. Cambridge & Malden, MA: Polity. Rayson, Paul (2009). “Wmatrix: a web-based corpus processing environment.” Computing Department: Lancaster University. [Online] http: / / ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/ wmatrix (accessed 20 Oct 2012). Reisigl, Martin/ Ruth Wodak (2009). “The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).” In: Wodak/ Meyer (2009). 87-121. United States National Library of Medicine (National Institutes of Health) (n.d.). Drug Information Portal. [Online] http: / / druginfo.nlm.nih.gov/ drugportal/ drugportal.jsp (3 Oct 2012). van Dijk, Teun/ Walter Kintsch (1983). Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press. Wodak, Ruth/ Michael Meyer (eds.) (2009). Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. 2 nd edition. London [etc.]: Sage. Corpus ehealthforum (n.d.). “Headache and Migraines Forum.” [Online] http: / / ehealthforum.com/ health/ migraine_headaches.html (21 Apr 2011) HealingWell (n.d.). “Migraine - Headache.” [Online] http: / / www.healingwell.com/ community/ default.aspx? f=31 (27 Apr 2011) MedHelp (n.d.). “Migraines & Headaches Community.” [Online] http: / / www.medhelp.org/ forums/ Migraines--Headaches/ show/ 123 (20 Apr 2011) AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 Rezensionen Margarete Rubik (ed.), Aphra Behn and Her Female Successors. Vienna & Berlin: L IT , 2011. Virginia Richter The Restoration is a period vigorously ignored by students of English literary history. Eclipsed by the splendour of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama preceding it and the rise of a new genre, the novel, following it, Restoration plays, poetry and fiction make it comparatively rarely into contemporary curricula and even more rarely onto readers’ bookshelves. Who reads Dryden if they do not have to? Who, in the age of easily available internet pornography, still gets excited by the Earl of Rochester’s naughty verse? The Restoration is not sufficiently ‘other’ from us to exert the fascination of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; nor are the germs of modernity that connect it to our own times - the beginnings of a popular print culture, the inception of modern science, the emergence of a culture of consumption - sufficiently developed to make its literature familiar in the way the realist novel of the nineteenth century is ‘familiar’ and hence readable. However, there is one author of the period who in recent years has received a growing amount of attention thanks to the crossing of two critical trends in her work: Aphra Behn is generally considered the first female professional author in the English language; her short novel Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave (1688) is the first piece of anti-slavery fiction, or possibly just the first fiction about a slave, in English literature. Since the 1970s, Behn consequently has become a nodal point of interest for both Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies. From an almost exclusive focus on Oroonoko, the critical interest in her work has spread to include her entire literary output: her epistolary novel Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1687), her tales, her plays, her poetry and the self-reflexive poetological work scattered through her prefaces and dedications. Today, Behn’s oeuvre is accessible in a scholarly edition and in various paperbacks. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 37 (2012) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 274 One of the latest fruits of Behn’s critical rediscovery is the collection of essays under review. The strength of the volume edited by Margarete Rubik is that it takes Aphra Behn seriously as “one of the most versatile writers in English literary history” (10), and as a self-confident author in pursuit of economic success as well as everlasting ‘Fame’. The contributions look at the various genres Behn engaged in, situate her in the context of diverse literary and generic figurations, establish intertextual relations and literary parallels with the work of other authors and trace at least some stages of her posthumous reception. Out of the eleven essays, seven look at Behn’s work in a contemporary context, while the remaining four discuss her afterlife from the eighteenth century onward. Clearly, an effort has been made to present a comprehensive picture and to highlight the great variety of Behn’s writing. Rebecka Gronstedt, for instance, analyses the tension within Behn’s dramatic works between her position as a critic and her position as a professional playwright writing for an audience wanting to be entertained. Gronstedt assesses Behn as a critic who, in the querelle des anciens et des modernes, repudiates classical authority and rather affiliates herself with modern French criticism, notably the Abbé d’Aubignac’s The Whole Art of the Stage. However, the stress on the improvement of an educated audience that Behn adopts in, for example, her Dedication to The Lucky Chance, is subverted in this and many other plays by her need to please an audience eager for ‘low’ entertainment. The discussion of Behn’s dramatic work is continued in Rubik’s contribution on “Amazons in Aphra Behn’s Plays”, while other essays cover her utopian poem A Voyage to the Isle of Love (Oddvar Holmesland), her poems and tales concerned with women’s use of eroticism and sexual power (Antoinette Curtin, Jorge Figueroa-Dorrego) and her other prose fiction, including the best-known Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister and Oroonoko (Violetta Trofimova, Roy Eriksen). In comparison to the comprehensive study of Behn as a prolific Restoration author in the first part, the exploration of her literary afterlife is by necessity more sporadic but sheds light on some hitherto unexplored connections. Barbara Britton Wenner compares Behn’s descriptions of West Africa - which she never visited in person - in Oroonoko to Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Narrative of Two Voyages to the Sierra Leone River (1794), a series of letters based on the writer’s sojourn in West Africa. According to Wenner, Falconbridge may not have been familiar with the original version of Oroonoko, but probably with Thomas Southerne’s very popular play based on the novel. Despite the rather tenuous link between Behn’s novel and Falconbridge’s travelogue, the difference of genre and degree of personal observation (or lack thereof in Behn’s case) and the length of time that elapsed between the publications of the two texts, Wenner suggests that Behn’s and Falconbridge’s descriptions of the country and its inhabitants were remarkably similar, due perhaps to Behn’s thorough research as well as to a similar positioning of the two writers as white female observers. From the eighteenth century, the volume jumps to the twentieth in Claudia Heuer’s analysis of Virginia Woolf’s use of Aphra Behn as a problematic figure in the history of women’s writing. While Behn, the first woman to live by her pen, is an im- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 275 portant precursor within Woolf’s female literary historiography, she fails as an enabling figure - due to her shady reputation as a ‘poet-prostitute’ - for the following generations of middle-class women writers. Hence, in Woolf’s assessment Behn “is given credit for the liberation of the female voice and at the same time made responsible for a continuing restriction of women’s opportunities” (163). The two remaining contributions to the collection finally bring us up to very recent creative engagements with Aphra Behn. Aspasia Velissariou analyses Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda (2003), a gynocentric rewriting of Oroonoko; and Wolfgang Görtschacher briefly discusses Molly Brown’s historical detective novel Invitation to a Funeral (1995), in which Behn appears as a fictional character. The essays collected in Aphra Behn and Her Female Successors share an interest in literary history; most address questions of genre or discuss literary figures such as the amoral but clever ‘jilt’. There is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. However, two dimensions of critical literary analysis are absent from the majority of the contributions: first, a sensibility for and attention to language, to the rhetorical and formal qualities of Behn’s works. Thematic, biographical and historical aspects are explored, but not the way the text is constituted through language as an aesthetic object. Second, beyond the most obvious citing of secondary literature, there is little engagement - with a few exceptions - with larger theoretical questions. The bibliographies of most of the contributions are indicative of this theoretical reticence. Out of eleven essays, four have less than ten entries under Secondary Sources; only three have more than twenty. A huge proportion of these references can be classified as literary historiography or biographical studies. Again, nothing wrong with that; and I certainly do not claim that bibliographical quantity necessarily results in quality of argument. However, this intellectual modesty, while producing solid, worthy interpretations, fails to convey a sense of urgency. Why is it important, vital, imperative to read Aphra Behn? And why should we spend time reading essays about her? Academics must go to conferences, and conference proceedings must be published. But is there anything beyond the mere functioning of this machinery? To be fair, a few of the essays collected here do address issues that point beyond academic routine. Notably, Aspasia Velissariou shifts her comparative analysis of Behn and Anim-Addo to a meta-level, discussing explicitly what is at stake in concepts of identity, corporeality and subjectivity debated in contemporary feminist theory. Behn’s Oroonoko appears as both the ground of negotiations between radical and institutional feminist positions, and as a text that resists facile appropriations and thereby challenges theoretical foundationalism. This complex analysis shows us how exciting the study of Aphra Behn can be if critics display the same kind of ambition as their object of study. Virginia Richter Department of English University of Bern Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 276 Christoph Bode, Fremd-Erfahrungen: Diskursive Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik. Bd. 2: Identität auf Reisen. (Studien zur Englischen Romantik, Neue Folge 7). Trier: wvt, 2009. Ute Berns Mit der Monographie Fremd-Erfahrungen, folgend auf den Band Selbst-Begründungen (2008), führt Christoph Bode seine nun in zwei Teilen vorliegende Studie zur Diskursiven Konstruktion von Identität in der britischen Romantik fort. Wiewohl die Fremd-Erfahrungen in jeder Hinsicht für sich stehen können, gewinnen sie neben den Selbst-Begründungen zusätzliches Profil. Beiden ist die Prämisse gemeinsam, dass sich im Zuge gesellschaftlicher Ausdifferenzierung in der Neuzeit vormals streng binäre Identitätskonstruktionen hin zu ‘differentiell-diskursiven Konstruktionen’ verschieben. Der erste Teil der Studie folgt dem traditionellen, um Charlotte Smith erweiterten Autorenkanon Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley und Keats und richtet den Blick auf die Begründungsstrategien subjektiver Identität - auf epistemologisch-philosophische oder theologische, d.h. wesentlich reflektierende Versuche der Selbst- Setzung in Poetiken, Essays und literarischen Texten. Der zweite Teil widmet sich, mit einer Ausnahme, dem Genre der Reiseliteratur und zielt auf die Identitäts-Effekte, welche die Erfahrung mit dem konkreten Anderen zeitigt. Dabei erscheinen die Texte (Briefe, Reisetagebücher, Berichte usf.) in zweierlei heuristischer Perspektive: Zum einen werden sie als komplexe Verarbeitungsprogramme der Konfrontation mit dem Anderen verstanden, die Identitätskonstruktionen modifizieren, in Selbstwidersprüche geraten und die Mechanismen ihrer Konstruktionen auf unterschiedliche Weisen verdecken und verschieben können. Zum anderen werden sie als materialisierte Spuren einer Performanz gelesen, einer (Schreib-)Bewegung, deren jeweilige Spezifik im Text freizulegen und zu analysieren ist. Ob man der unterstellten historischen Abfolge ‘rigid-binär’ versus ‘diskursiv-different’ auf der Ebene textuell erzeugter Identität zustimmen will, sei dahingestellt - entscheidend für die folgenden Untersuchungen ist die bestechende Flexibilität, mit der Bode die konstruktivistisch fundierte Terminologie handhabt, um die Dynamik von Selbst und Anderem in den Eigenbewegungen spezifischer Genres und Schreibstile zu analysieren. Die Studie widmet sich, ungefähr chronologisch, Reisedarstellungen von Mary Wortley Montagu (1763) bis Mungo Park (1799), wobei die scharfsichtigen Lektüren durch die spezifische Anordnung des Primärmaterials zusätzlich Kontur gewinnen. Das Auftaktkapitel kontrastiert die europaweit gefeierten Turkish Embassy Letters, in denen die Aufklärerin Montagu ihre Reise nach Konstantinopel beschreibt, mit den unter dem Titel A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople erschienen Briefen, in denen Lady Craven 70 Jahre später am gleichen Ort ihre reaktionäre Britishness inszeniert. Bode argumentiert überzeugend, dass Montagu das Fremde zwar zunächst im Katholizismus verortet, letztlich aber an einem religiösen Obskurantismus und Aberglauben festmacht, der die Geister sowohl innerhalb des Westens wie innerhalb des Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 277 Osmanischen Reichs scheide. Dies erlaubt der Kosmopolitin, die gebildete Elite, sei sie nun türkisch oder britisch, auf der selben Seite zu sehen. Die Briefform betont hier die subjektive Sicht, die stilistisch noch einmal auf verschiedene Adressaten abgestimmt wird. In der kontroversen Diskussion um Montagus selbst-reflexive Beschreibung der Frauen im türkischen Bad verteidigt Bode engagiert die transgressive, gegen den eigenen Kulturkreis gekehrte Ironie ihres Textes und findet die Projektionsfalle des damaligen Orientalismus wiederbelebt in den Orient-Phantasien, welche einige der heutigen Literaturkritiker und -kritikerinnen dem Text zuschössen. Während Bode in Montagus Text die Offenheit für die Erfahrung des anderen nicht nur durch aufklärerische Überzeugungen, sondern vor allem durch ein ausgeprägtes Klassenbewusstsein stabilisiert sieht, stellt er mit Georg Forsters A Voyage round the World (1777) einen Text vor, der sich eine weitaus radikalere Selbstbefragung zumutet. Der junge Deutsche, der mit seinem Vater an der zweiten großen Entdeckungsfahrt James Cooks in die Südsee teilnahm, sucht das bloße Faktensammeln im Modus des Erzählens zu überwinden und dabei zugleich die Voreingenommenheit des erzählenden Subjekts sichtbar zu machen. Den auf Englisch verfassten Bericht Forsters mit seinen ebenso subtilen wie widersprüchlichen Reflexionen über kulturelle Differenz, die Relativität der Fortschrittlichkeit und die zum Teil desaströsen Folgen der europäischen Expeditionen für die Kulturen, denen sie gelten, liest Bode als narrative Fixierung standpunktgebundener Überlegungen und sukzessiver Horizontverschiebungen, kurz als eine veritable Ausstellung dynamisierter Identität. Dabei bricht er zu Recht einem Text die Lanze, der in der britischen Reiseliteratur und Romantik nicht die Stellung innehat, die er verdient. Schreibt sich in Forsters Text die durch die Fortbewegung des Autors generierte Mannigfaltigkeit der Differenzerfahrung in Standpunktverschiebungen und Identitätsmodifikationen ein, so ist es im Fall Arthur Youngs, Reisender im revolutionären Frankreich, die epochale Veränderung im beschriebenen Gegenstand, die den Aufzeichnungsprozess in unerwartete Bahnen zwingt und seine expliziten und impliziten Identitätskonstruktionen affiziert. Dem Agrarreformer dient das britische government in Travels in France and Italy (1793) zunächst als positive Folie für die durch falsches government verursachten vorrevolutionären Missstände der französischen Landwirtschaft. Im Zuge der revolutionären Ereignisse verkehrt sich diese Entgegensetzung - modifiziert durch Reisen nach Italien und Katalonien - in ihr radikales Gegenteil: im letzten Kapitel sprengt Young das Thema ‘Landwirtschaft’ und verficht mit Verve die revolutionäre Idee ebenso wie das Vorgehen der französischen Revolutionäre gegenüber seinen britischen Zeitgenossen. (Diese pro-revolutionäre Position wird in einem späteren, zweiten Text vollständig zurückgenommen.) Auf brillante Weise liest Bode der Struktur von Youngs Text, der sich zunächst in ein Reisetagebuch und eine thematisch-enzyklopädische Darstellung aufteilt, aber unter dem Druck der Ereignisse schließlich seine eigene Systematik durchkreuzt, die unvermeidliche Dynamisierung von Identitätsentwürfen im Angesicht eines sich radikal verändernden Fremden ab. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 278 Mungo Parks Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799) verdeutlichen in Bodes Lektüre vor allem, wie dominante Narrative - in diesem Fall religiöse - die Wahrnehmung des ethnisch Fremden ebenso wie die Konzeption der eigenen Identität überformen. Der Schotte Park, der für die African Society in Westafrika den Verlauf des Niger aufklären soll, begegnet den ‘harmlos abergläubigen’ schwarzen Nichtmuslimen mit herablassendem Wohlwollen und reserviert seinen rassistischen Abscheu für die arabisch sprechenden Nomaden (Moors), die sich zum Islam bekennen. Sentimentalische Darstellung und opportunistische Selbstpositionierung (zur Frage der Sklaverei) werden hier eingebunden in die Komplementärkonstruktion muslimisch-tyrannischer Aggression (Moors) und eigenen christlichen Duldens, verbunden mit der Vision zukünftiger Missionierung der nicht-muslimischen Schwarzen. In einer späteren Expedition, von der niemand zurückkehrt, verkehrt sich Parks Haltung der Duldung in die Verbreitung von Gewalt und Schrecken. Der zweite Teil des Kapitels ergänzt das fundierende religiöse Narrativ durch die metaphorische Ordnung, die dem Erkundungsgegenstand ‘Fluss’ eigen ist (Quelle - Verlauf - Mündung). Hier wird ein aufschlussreiches Panorama von Texten entfaltet (von James Bruce, Anna Laetitia Barbauld und Felicia Hemans), auch wenn offen bleibt, wie weit die am Beispiel des Nil als vorgestelltem Ursprungsort der Menschheit gewonnene symbolische Aufladung dieses Schemas in Parks erster Expedition zum Niger mitgedacht werden muss. Am Beispiel von Mary Wollstonecrafts Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), verfasst nach ihrer Rückkehr von einer Reise, die sie in großer Verzweiflung zwischen ihrem ersten und zweiten Selbstmordversuch mit ihrer einjährigen Tochter und einem Kindermädchen unternahm, wird die im Zuge der Identitätskonstruktion zentrale Frage nach der Offenheit für das Andere noch einmal anders differenziert. Bode unterstreicht den Kunstcharakter der um alles Geschäftliche oder Private gekürzten Letters und kontrastiert dann die radikal verschiedenen Haltungen der Verfasserin gegenüber den Menschen in Skandinavien einerseits und der skandinavischen Natur andererseits, die in dieser Inszenierung ‘weiblicher Melancholie und Verstoßenheit’ sichtbar werden. So steht Wollstonecrafts abwertender, die fremde Rückständigkeit festschreibender Sicht auf die meisten ihrer Gegenüber eine - von Bode vorzüglich herausgearbeitete - emphatische ‘Dialogizität’ im Umgang mit der Landschaft gegenüber. Wenn Bode jedoch wiederholt hervorhebt, dass Wollstonecraft Schwierigkeiten mit der von den skandinavischen Frauen freier gelebten Sexualität und Sinnlichkeit gehabt habe, und dies ihrem moralischen Rigorismus zuschreibt, so erlaubt der Blick in ihre übrigen Texte eine etwas andere Einschätzung. Schließlich insistiert die Frauenrechtlerin in ihrer Streitschrift Vindication of the Rights of Woman - auch für manche britische Zeitgenossinnen auf geradezu frauenfeindliche Weise - dass die kurzlebige sinnlich-sexuelle Attraktivität, auf welche die Frauen in den patriarchalen Strukturen häufig angewiesen waren, nicht zum Lebensinhalt werden dürfe, weil allein die Bildung des Geistes und die daran geknüpfte Forderung nach gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe den zentralen Schritt auf dem Weg zur weiblichen Emanzipation darstelle. Das letzte Kapitel, noch einmal Byron gewidmet, verklammert nicht nur den Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 279 ersten und zweiten Teil der Studie, sondern durchbricht mit der Analyse der Fremderfahrung in Byrons The Giaour auch eine allzu schematische Genretrennung. Bodes lebendig dargebotene, textzentrierte Analysen registrieren sensibel generische, narrative und symbolische Schemata ebenso wie die räumlichen und zeitlichen Parameter der Schreibbewegung. Sie nehmen die postkoloniale, auf die Konstruktion des Anderen gerichtete Diskurskritik auf, ja setzen diese geradezu voraus, richten jedoch den eigenen Fokus klar auf die Selbstkonstruktionen der Reisenden. Damit trägt die Studie auch zur Erforschung nationaler Identitäten im betrachteten Zeitraum bei, doch geben die ungemein nuancenreichen Analysen der Relationierung von Fremd- und Selbstkonstruktion weit darüber hinausgehende, erhellende Einblicke in die Verfertigung von Subjektivität in der britischen Romantik. Glücklicherweise ist der Band auch ohne großes Vorwissen zugänglich, da die untersuchten Texte historisch-biographisch ausführlich eingeführt werden. Ute Berns Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Hamburg Anna Gonerko-Frej, Małgorzata Sokół, Joanna Witkowska & Uwe Zagratzki (eds.), Us and Them - Them and Us. Constructions of the Other in Cultural Stereotypes. (Sprache & Kultur). Aachen: Shaker, 2011. Silke Stroh Stereotypes, processes of othering and their function in the construction of group identities are a highly important topic, not only in the ongoing boom of postcolonial studies, but also with regard to nationalism, transnationalism, ethnicity, migration, European integration, globalisation, English as a world language, and intercultural communication. The centrality of these issues to contemporary social developments makes them a crucial field of inquiry in the Humanities and Social Sciences. This is also reflected in the volume under review, a massive tome of nearly 700 pages containing the proceedings of a conference which took place at the University of Szczecin, Poland, in May 2009, under the motto “Us and Them - Them and Us. Constructions of the Other in Cultural Stereotypes - Perceptions, Challenges, Meanings”. The collection examines stereotypes, othering, and boundary construction from many different angles. English Studies takes centre stage, but there are also perspectives from Cultural Studies, Communication and Media Studies, Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 280 French and Polish Philology, Turkology, Political Science, and Social Pedagogy. Contributors hail mainly from Poland and Germany, though some are also based in Russia, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Oman, and the USA. A recurrent feature of the discussion is that stereotypes are, on the one hand, an inevitable by-product of the human cognitive need for simplification and categorisation, while on the other hand they can impede dialogue and foster misunderstandings, hatred, discrimination, inequality, and exclusion. In this collection, such antagonisms and power structures are mainly explored with regard to gender as well to cultural and national groups. Here, most space is given to East/ West relations, with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, the UK, and the USA, although other contexts also make an occasional appearance. Essays explore both autoand hetero-stereotypes, mainly concentrating on the twentieth and twenty-first century. The collection opens with a brief three-page preface by one of the editors, Uwe Zagratzki, highlighting key features of stereotypes and giving some pointers as to how the study of stereotypes has developed over time in different fields of inquiry. After this, the book plunges immediately in medias res, i.e. the individual case studies and theoretical problems discussed by the contributors. Section I, “Seeing and Perceiving”, features theoretical reflections and case studies of visual culture (film, TV, comics, decorative arts, architecture), popular opinion, politics, law and policing, print journalism, internet fora, marketing and consumer habits. Marija Liudvika Drazdauskiene offers philosophical reflections on elements of modern culture which reinforce the tendency to stereotype. She also discusses the relationship between stereotype and myth. Further general reflections are provided by Charles E. Gannon, who shows “[…] how cultural truths get lost in (re-)translation”, illustrated by Western images of Eastern Europe, problems of academic East/ West dialogue due to different academic styles, as well as auto-stereotypes and European hetero-stereotypes of the USA. East/ West relations are also the focus of Joanna Witkowska’s case study “The other in communist Poland - on anti-American propaganda in socio-cultural weeklies”. The role of stereotypes within US-American culture is likewise a recurrent topic: Piotr Zazula charts white American images of noble savagery in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Belgacem Mehdaoui traces continuities in the (mainly negative) stereotyping of Arabs in Hollywood films between 1894 and 2000, and Ryan Dorr shows how the racial hierarchies and stereotypes that pervaded American social reality influenced patterns of othering in the portrayal of extra-terrestrial beings in science fiction films of the 1950s. Dorr also makes some reference to gender stereotypes. Racial stereotypes in Japan are the focus of Kaori Mori’s paper, which traces changing perceptions of racial diversity and racial mixing in relation to national identity. A fascinating paper by Mieste Hotopp-Riecke charts the role of the Tartars in the history (and perception) of Islam in Europe, taking in toponyms, architecture, handicrafts, ornament, writing, and memory culture. Wolfgang K. Hünig’s richly illustrated paper “Stereotypes and invectives in British and German political cartoons of World War I and II” explores the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 281 images which the two nations had of each other at two crucial points of political confrontation. Class (rather than national) stereotypes are the focus of Elke Schuch’s brilliant investigation of the perception of ‘chavs’ in postindustrial Britain; whereas Marcin Pędich explores the image of a particular profession, namely “The stereotype of the library and librarians in Polish and American (pop) culture”. Section II, “Reading and writing”, concentrates on literature. Occupational and class-based stereotypes are further examined in Barbara Braid’s paper on Victorian female servants. At the time, middle-class perspectives othered these servants in terms of both gender and class; whereas modern neo- Victorian literature attempts to reconstruct these women’s own perspectives, deconstruct stereotypes, and transgress social limitations. Critical scrutiny of Victorian notions also features prominently in Anna Kwiatkowska’s reading of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread as an ironic comment on Victorian clichés about artistic merit and about the relationship between art and life. British images of Germany are analysed in Richard Stinshoff’s chapter on Erskine Childers’s play The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which is interesting to read alongside Hünig’s earlier chapter on the World Wars. We return to the USA in Brygida Gasztold’s study on “[…] Jewish New York in the eyes of early twentieth century American writers”, where we see both ethnic and class-based othering, and encounter interesting facets of wider American debates on assimilation, multiculturalism, and national identity. An individual migrant’s identity is the focus of Anna Łakowicz- Dopiera’s paper about the diary of the Polish poet Jan Lechoń, who moved to the USA in the mid-twentieth century. The Vietnam plays of American playwright David Rabe are analysed in Kurt Müller’s chapter, which centres on race and gender stereotypes in relation to social violence. Uwe Zagratzki examines a recent Native Canadian novel set at the time of World War I: Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road. It explores relations between Native Canadians, the white Canadian mainstream, and Europe, with regard to culture clashes, Native cultural resilience, and healing. Further, Agata Zawiszewska illuminates the Polish reception of French culture through the inter-war journalism of feminist writer and critic Irena Krzywicka. In addition to these examinations of stereotyping and communication between cultural and national groups, two papers in this section focus on other kinds of boundaries (and boundary-crossings) between groups and individuals. Christopher Whyte examines love poems by Edwin Morgan, Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean), Luis Cernuda and Marina Tsvetaeva in terms of gender, sexual orientation as well as the shifting relations between author, beloved addressee, and reader. A short story is the focus of Bartosz Cierach’s paper, which analyses narrative strategies, family relationships, and the creation of empathy in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude”. Section III, “Speaking and Interacting”, has a linguistic orientation. Anna Duszak’s theoretical reflections consider the potential of politeness and impoliteness studies for the illumination of us/ them-boundaries. She also argues the need to extend politeness studies to non-anglocentric and non- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 282 western frameworks, and analyses an example of othering in Polish political discourse. Politeness and impoliteness are also central to Małgorzata Sokół’s study of ‘us’/ ‘them’ constructions on an internet forum for small-scale investors on the Polish stock market. Other papers focus on gender stereotypes. Douglas Mark Ponton explores the role which images of femininity played in the press conference that followed Margaret Thatcher’s election as Conservative Party leader in 1975. Victoria Akulicheva examines “Gender stereotypes in the language of advertising in French magazines”, and Marta Dynel illuminates the subversion of gender stereotypes in two contemporary Polish comedy films, Lejdis and Testosteron. Dorota Guttfeld scrutinises the representation of linguistic otherness (among different human groups, animals, and non-terrestrial life forms) in fantasy and science fiction, in the original texts by anglophone authors, and in translations of these texts into other languages, notably Polish. Katarzyna Mołek-Kozakowska analyses stereotypes of Russia in the British and American press coverage of the Georgian crisis in 2008. Further Western stereotypes of ‘the East’ in print journalism are explored in Agnieszka Sowińska’s chapter on the way in which Poland and Polish economic migrants were portrayed in The Economist from 2005 to 2007. Theories of metaphor (as developed by George Lakoff and others) play an important role here, as they do in Magdalena Zyga’s paper on the play Everything Must Go by anglophone Welsh writer Patrick Jones. Here, the construction and transgression of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is mainly related to economic or political hierarchies and the perspective of the marginalised. Judith Bündgens-Kosten explores evaluative responses by teachers to African-American Vernacular English in terms of attitude, ambivalence, and stereotypes about speakers of the said variety. This already anticipates some concerns of Section IV, “Learning and teaching”, where educational matters take centre stage. Laurenz Volkmann opens with key theoretical reflections “On the nature and function of stereotypes in intercultural learning”. Anke Fedrowitz likewise offers general reflections on intercultural learning, followed by practical examples from school life and a few teaching suggestions. Various papers criticise an anglophone or western bias in prevalent approaches to intercultural learning and the teaching of English as a foreign language. Anna Linka does so with regard to international schools, whose (usually) western bias hinders the development of a more genuinely global intercultural competence. Agnieszka Dzięcioł cites different educational and cultural norms as a reason why Polish students often have problems with western-style communicative approaches in language teaching. Anna Gonerko-Frej likewise criticises the disregard for Polish traditions and needs in current EFL teaching in Poland, which is biased towards native-speaker teachers and the cultures of anglophone countries. Robert McLaughlin identifies similar problems elsewhere: although he mainly draws on the situation at German universities, he also makes a more general argument against native-speaker-based normativity in EFL teaching. The latter does not always reflect the communicative needs of students, who Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 283 might mainly use English as a global lingua franca to communicate with people from outside the Anglo-American cultural sphere. The wide thematic and methodical range of this collection is probably its greatest strength, making it a very useful, inspiring and thought-provoking resource for any scholar or student interested in the study of stereotypes and boundary constructions. The interdisciplinary and interlingual approach transcends the limits within which the study of these issues often operates, for instance within postcolonial English Studies, where languages other than English and countries which have never belonged to the British Empire are usually neglected, so that opportunities for more wide-ranging comparative approaches are frequently lost. The present book offers welcome additional perspectives. Despite the general usefulness of this volume, the papers are of somewhat variable quality. While many of them are well-researched and convincing, others seem a little too cursory and would have profited from greater logical stringency or an extension of scope. The book would also have benefitted from more rigorous editing. Inconsistent and incomplete bibliographies as well as an abundance of typographical, formatting and language mistakes, can distract the reader from the contents. The retention of ‘non-native’ grammar and syntax might be justified with reference to some contributors’ theoretical arguments against normativity and does not usually prevent comprehension. Nonetheless, readers from different linguistic backgrounds might find this distracting, and in a few passages it actually does render the argument hard to follow. Besides, some details valid at the time of writing and submitting should have been updated before the book’s publication. It would also have been helpful if the editors had provided a more substantial introduction surveying key definitions, theories and approaches to stereotypes, othering, and us/ them-boundaries which have been offered by the different disciplines. However, even as it is, the volume does form a very helpful compendium; and it will be interesting to see the results of further conferences in this Szczecin series. The 2009 conference, which forms the basis of the present collection, was followed by a second symposium in September 2011 (“Who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ after 9/ 11 - Reflections on Language, Culture and Literature in Times of Ideological Clashes”), which will also result in a proceedings volume. A third conference is planned for 2013. Silke Stroh Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 284 Astrid M. Fellner (ed.), Body Signs: The Latino/ a Body in Cultural Production. (American Studies in Austria 6). Zürich [etc.]: Lit, 2011. Mar Gallego 1 The volume edited by Astrid Fellner intends to claim the importance of the body in US Latino/ a culture by focusing its attention on the manifold ways in which the racialized and gendered body figures prominently in many Latino/ a writers and artists’ production, going from the colonial Americas to recent literary and visual representations. Aptly entitled Body Signs, Fellner’s groundbreaking publication engages in the interaction of body and identity politics, revealing how Latino/ a bodies are (re)imagined and (re)constructed as the suitable scenario where to enact metaphoric and symbolic renderings of the ‘other,’ or the ‘abject’ with respect to mainstream political and cultural representations of ‘acceptable’ bodies. As a whole, the volume succeeds in its alleged purpose of bringing to the forefront the primacy of the body in order to present a more complete picture of US Latino/ a cultural production. The different sections into which the book is divided testify to this intentional rewriting of the crucial role played by Latino/ a bodies in Latino/ a culture by covering three main areas of interest, namely memory politics through the historical renditions that are traced back to the colonial period, border theory and its remapping of the canon, and the influence of performativity studies on textual reconfigurations of the Latino/ a body as a site for difference. The last section of the book is devoted to recent works by Latino/ a writers which reflect the “diversity of corporeal discourses in Latino/ a culture” (16), as the editor suitably explains. The historical section opens with a very interesting discussion of Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación (1537), according to its author Juan Bruce-Novoa the socalled “ur-moment of American expression” (24). Analyzing the significance of Cabeza de Vaca’s enunciation, Bruce-Novoa’s insightfully problematizes it by drawing attention to issues of identity formulations of the we (Christians) and the they (Indians). Addressing related topics such as the rewriting of (hi)story, criminal and religious discourses of the time, the critic foregrounds a particular episode in The Account, in which the intentional burning of native bodies is manipulated by Cabeza de Vaca to purposely engage in a redemptive narrative that ultimately “saved the bodies from de facto excommunication” (27). Thus, Bruce-Novoa’s excellent study proves quite useful: it resignifies the ambiguity of those bodies as they are read and reread according to different codes of interpretation. This endless process of resignification, appropriation and reinvention can be applied not only to Cabeza de Vaca’s work but also to other seminal texts, such as William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s La historia de la Nuevo México, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes of the State of Virginia, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, to 1 The author wishes to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Research for the writing of this review (Research Project FEM2010- 18142). Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 285 end up analyzing Walt Disney’s documentaries released during World War II. Bruce-Novoa’s impressive collection of literary and visual texts attests to the common need felt by all these writers and cultural workers to represent the ‘other’ bodies and reassign them an inferior and disposable status, since they are ‘used and abused’ in order to ground firm notions of the dominant subject as the only viable configuration of the American self. In the second chapter devoted to the analysis of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s La noche oscura del Niño Avilés, certain features are shared with the previous chapter in terms of the rewriting of (hi)story and its significant impact on identity politics, in this case in Puerto Rican literature. John Waldron contextualizes Juliá’s novel as a response to the long colonial history of Puerto Rico and its everlasting influence on modes of representation by choosing to center on a slave revolt during the Spanish colonial period. In doing so, Waldron manages to throw light on the strategic representational devices Juliá employs in order to unsettle the established order based on the classical notion of the Great Chain of Being. 2 Especially enlightening in Waldron’s contribution is his revisiting of the different historical discourses and practices since the Enlightenment and their crucial connection to hegemonic positions that supported the twin projects of colonization and enslavement. Claiming the importance of oral Puerto Rican representations and African retentions, Waldron’s reading of Juliá’s text expands the very notion of Puerto Rican identity by unraveling the politics of canon formation that excluded any modes or tropes different from those dictated by Western tradition. Moreover, through the disordering of the body and the creation of a new embodied subjectivity, Juliá destabilizes Western hierarchical order and enables a blatant critique of European colonialism. Claudia Leitner’s chapter on the influential figure of the Malinzi is an extremely interesting and nuanced investigation into the politics of memory in colonial times, informed by what feminist and gender critics identify as blind spots in Foucault’s theories. In this case, the rewriting of history runs parallel to a necessary reassessment of the Malinzi or Malinche in Chicana discursive practices. Concretely, Leitner embarks on the alleged project of what Foucault defined as the “mirage of sex” by exploring D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (published in 1926) and other textual renderings that purposely revisit the figure of the Malinche, such as Octavio Paz’s “Los hijos de la Malinche” (‘The Sons of Malinche’) in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950). Leitner highlights the multiple ways in which this figure is constantly recontextualized and reinterpreted but remains tied up with notions of “rupture, displacement, and dissolution” (77). Besides, La Malinche tends to fuse with La Chingada, which reenacts the primordial violation of the conquest, thus condemning her to the status of sexual object, even in later feminist perspec- 2 For more information, see Arthur Lovejoy’s classical text The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea (1976), and a more recent take in Hossain’s “‘Scientific Racism’ in Enlightened Europe: Linneaus, Darwin, and Galton” (2008). Gates also comments on the influence of this concept in the eighteenth century in order to substantiate racist theories in The Signifying Monkey (1988). Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 286 tives. 3 Although the author acknowledges that there have been recent critical attempts to read her as a multicultural symbol, Leitner urges to rethink this figure within the framework of indigenous mythology and ritual ceremonials, showing her impressive knowledge of ancient native beliefs and worldview. By questioning the logic of Western hierarchies and notions of sex and desire, Leitner brilliantly argues for the reinterpretation of this figure as emblematic in the initial phase of European colonization in the Americas and the pervading influence of the effects of cultural colonization in Mexican consciousness and identity. The second section is headed by Alexandra Ganser’s slightly tenuous interrogation of cultural memory and trauma in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. The author substantiates her chapter on Silko’s mixed ancestry to examine the effects of multiple heritage and hybrid identities in a Southwestern context. In this contribution, memory and trauma studies facilitate a critical perspective that is particularly interested in describing the body as a site for traumatic inscriptions and identities. What Ganser’s analysis accounts for is precisely the lingering effects of different kinds of “cultural traumata” 4 Silko’s seminal novel deals with, especially after its protagonist Tayo’s confrontation with the two kinds of oppression that suffocate him: white hegemony and the Laguna community. In Ganser’s reading, Tayo’s fashioning of identity is equally informed by the rediscovery of the Laguna Pueblo and the rest of his multilayered and pluriethnic legacy. To achieve this new understanding of identity, Tayo needs to discard internalized fragmented visions of the “tragic half-breed” (111) by probing into the creative negotiations of different cultural heritages. In doing so, the author is careful to theorize that a new cultural space can be recreated to debunk old hierarchies by transgressing borders. Recalling notions of border theory (although not explicitly), Ganser finally reassesses the importance of the hybrid figure as a privileged medium for reconstruction and integration of the diverse cultural (hi)stories and memories into a coherent whole. Markus Heide adds new layers of meaning in his perceptive study of John Rechy’s City of Night and the Miraculous Day of Amalia López. Similar to Silko, Rechy has repeatedly refused to be ‘labeled,’ in his case as gay or Chicano, arguing for a dynamic and inclusive sense of identity and literary constructions. Despite his overt refusal, Heide contends that Rechy’s texts actually allow for a profound revision of hegemonic epistemologies and ideologies by centering on hybrid identities and cultural worlds, either ethnic or sexual, that “explode from within” those given categories. Hence, the central aim of this chapter is the exploration of Rechy’s use of two strategic devices, ambivalence and self-reflexivity, as “strategies of infiltration, or as a form of narra- 3 Most surprisingly, eminent Chicana feminists such as Rosario Castellanos endorsed this oversexualization and commodification of the Malinche, which eventually speaks back to the pervasive and long-standing influence of a Westernized conception of the figure as inscribed in the narrative of conquest. 4 In trauma studies, cultural traumata are defined as the traumatic experiences that plague collective memory after terrible episodes such as slavery or the Holocaust (Fellner 106). Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 287 tive sabotage,” in the author’s words (126). Emphasizing the role of Rechy’s texts as performing cultural critique, Heide skillfully discusses the impossibility of establishing identity demarcations or simplifying assumptions about ethnic or engaged literature by delving into the criticism of Chicano/ a cultural practices and literary history. What is tremendously stimulating is precisely Rechy’s critical viewpoint about Chicano/ a discourses, which clearly enriches our own understanding of cultural imagery and its impact on the reconfiguration of body and identity politics. Marcus Embry’s suggestive contribution once more tackles key questions of the definition of Latinidad and Latino/ a culture by delimiting the contours of the Caribbean through an overview of Latin American literature. His main concerns evolve around issues of the costs of mainstreaming and appropriation propitiated by the contemporary scenario of globalization and late capitalism, as they are intrinsically associated with processes of canon formation, but also with the commodification of ethnic identities. Specifically, Embry makes lucid use of Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness to question the legacy of Magical Realism as imbricated with the Caribbean geography itself. Extinction, dispossession, imperialism and cold war are conjured up by Montero’s text as it affects Chicano/ a bodies and identities. The author consistently problematizes the processes of assimilation and marketing in mainstream culture, and how this inclusion can enlarge and reconceptualize the category of American literature itself. By acknowledging the theoretical insights it draws from, Astrid Fellner’s captivating contribution on Laura Aguilar’s photography inaugurates the third section of the publication and proves to be one of the most significant chapters in the collection. Her pertinent analysis of colored queer theory undoubtedly sheds light on the ways in which the recognition of difference - ethnic or sexual - may imply processes of subversion and empowerment. Following Butler’s ideas, Fellner makes much of Aguilar’s provocative depiction of the body as a politically inscribed entity, especially as it touches upon notions of the abject and performative gender that help to question the heteronormative ideal of beauty, while simultaneously enabling to challenge the dominant tradition of nude art represented by Mexican painter Botero. Underlining the instability of gender categories, Fellner’s persuasive discussion further defies Chicano/ a iconography that assigns women the opposite roles of either La Virgen de Guadalupe or La Malinche, which is interpreted in yet another possible way: as the “site of cultural betrayal: the repressed, submissive, heterosexual body” (158). 5 Thus, Fellner convincingly argues, Aguilar’s photography not only attempts to expose the fragility of gender categories but effectively meditates on the fascination with the power of abjection her nudes so consistently provide to visual spectators. Doris Einsiedel’s chapter offers an illuminating reading on Julia Alvarez’s novel ¡Yo! and her essay collection Something to Declare, even though one feels she tries to comprise too many topics that should be dealt with in more 5 In this sense, Fellner seems to be responding to the debate about the Malinche proposed by Leitner’s piece, although it is not explicitly stated by the editor. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 288 depth. She also revisits the instability of gender categories and the devastating effects of the mainstream beauty standard with its pervasive cult around the human body in her Chicana protagonists, who feel torn between their conflicting and shifting allegiances. Particularly informative is her insight into the commodification of appearance and body shapes, as she relates it to the postmodern class-systems both in the Dominican Republic and in the United States. In her project of deconstruction of the white body as the norm, the author includes three invisible forces that constitutes, as she claims, “a turning point in the interpretation of the construction of the body [...] familyties, religion and writing” (176-7). She eventually concludes that identity issues ultimately are predicated on what Turner terms “the project of the body” (cited in Fellner 184), and literature can still be regarded as the only refuge to explore disembodied subjectivity. The final chapter of this section closely returns to both border theories and Butler’s critical approaches, testifying once more to the importance of these theoretical frameworks for an adequate understanding of recent Chicana literature. Angelita Köhler commits herself to further disclosing the ways in which gender categories are arbitrary, especially as they refer to bodies that are signified upon as the excluded Other. Concretely, her work takes issue with the body as borderland in Cherrie Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and Ana Castillo’s Peel my Love like an Onion in order to assert the potentiality of the body to articulate multilayered and multifaceted selves. Addressing key issues such as the language of the body and the claim of speaking for oneself, both writers portray the disabled female body as a site for empowerment, rewriting the stereotype of the victimized Chicana and redefining the culturally assigned marginal spaces through a new understanding of the corporeality of the body and its discursive constructedness. The very last section of the book, devoted to Latino/ a fiction and poetry, is indeed remarkable and thought-provoking, providing textual examples of the above-mentioned aspects in the works of Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Juanita Luna Lawhn, Cecile Pineda, and Takeo Rivera. There is a certain unease about the grounds for the inclusion of Rivera, of Japanese and Filipino ancestry, who claims “a strong sense of solidarity with the history and politics of the Latino body” (229). Not willing to easily dismiss such a moving claim, the argument extends the influence of Latino/ a cultural work to other contexts and performs the intricacies of constructing multiple and hybrid identities, always in transit. Quite logically, these ideas lends coherence to the present volume, despite the obvious differences in the production of the four writers included in this section. All in all, the volume is a significant contribution and welcome addition to the growing field of studies on Latino/ a cultural production and on body studies in general. Its interdisciplinary approach to the controversial issue of the discursive and cultural constructedness of Latino/ a bodies will surely pave the way for future productive research and investigation. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 289 References Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1998). The Signifying Monkey. New York [etc.]: OUP. Hossain, Shah Ashna (2000). “‘Scientific Racism’ in Enlightened Europe: Linneaus, Darwin, and Galton.” [Online] http: / / serendip.brynmawr.edu/ exchange/ node/ 1852 (17 Sep 2008). Lovejoy, Arthur (1976). The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mar Gallego Department of English Philology University of Huelva Möller, Swantje. Coming to Terms with Crisis. Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan. (Anglistische Forschungen 415). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011. Johannes Wally Post-modernism has often been thought to equal the notorious slogan “anything goes,” especially when it comes to questions of how one should lead one’s life. The emphasis on contingency as a shaping factor of life as well as the awareness of the constructedness of human sense-making has earned postmodernism the reputation of being inherently anti-ethical, incapable of producing anything more substantial than moral relativism. After 9/ 11, this alleged lack of moral orientation even became a matter of political concern. On 22 September 2001, cultural critic Edward Rothstein (2001: online) published a piece in the New York Times in which he blamed postmodernism (as well as post-colonialism) for challenging the value of “truth and ethical judgement” and thus for indirectly justifying the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This article started a substantial public debate and although Rothstein’s position is an exception, the term post-modernism often seems to smack of something negative, such as the loss of centre, the dissolution of any bonds holding between signifier and signified and limitless subjectivity. What such an understanding of post-modernism overlooks is that “[p]ostmodernism, implicitly or explicitly, is about ethics before it is anything else” (Eaglestone 2004: 183). If one has to manoeuvre through a world where once well-established patterns offer no orientation anymore, the questions what is right and what is wrong do not simply become meaningless. They become all the more important. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 290 The importance of ethics in post-modern times has also left its marks on literary criticism. After two decades which were characterised by the focus on the linguistic materiality and self-referentiality of literary texts, literary criticism took up the issue of ethics again in the 1980s. 6 To date a substantial body of criticism examining the relationship between ethics and literature has emerged. It is in this tradition of literary criticism that Swantje Möller’s monograph Coming to Terms with Crisis (2011) stands. By drawing on philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, Möller develops a notion of ethics which, instead of rules, places the dialogical self at its core. As she writes: “Ethics in Levinas’s conception is not a preconceived set of rules, but an originary response to the face of the other, from which arises an immediate responsibility for the other” (40). Ethical behaviour is thus understood as a dialogue between the self and the other, which means that identity construction is “inseparable from ethical evaluation” (28). This perspective on ethics has also come to inform literature, in particular the representation of characters. McEwan’s novels can be seen as a case in point. Indeed, how characters in McEwan’s novels orient themselves or fail to orient themselves respectively in the face of a sudden crisis and which notion(s) of ethics can be derived from their behaviour is the major focus of Möller’s monograph. The study is divided into six chapters plus a bibliography. After a brief introduction, Möller offers a very good overview of ethics in postmodernity and develops the philosophical basis for her study. Chapters three through five are devoted to a discussion of McEwan’s novels. In this discussion, Möller resorts to an analytic structure. Hence, McEwan’s novels are not analysed chronologically but according to a thematic focus. There is a methodological advantage to this. Through this structure, Möller succeeds in demonstrating that questions of orientation and thus questions of ethics have been central to McEwan’s writing from the very beginning, in spite of the shock quality of his early publications, which earned him the notorious nickname Ian McCabre. Furthermore, it allows Möller to group texts together whose similarities are sometimes overlooked. A prime example, and perhaps the best section of the book, is chapter 4.1, in which the two consecutive novels The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992) but also the much later novella On Chesil Beach (2007) are discussed. Möller shows how the ability to negotiate various viewpoints is a central ethical value in McEwan’s writing. Failure to communicate always results in a catastrophe. Since McEwan’s fiction has sometimes been criticised for unambiguously favouring certain ideological positions (cf. for instance Beattie 2007: 157f.), Möller’s reading rightly highlights the polyphony of McEwan’s work. However, abstaining from a chronological dimension also has a disadvantage. It obfuscates how much McEwan has developed and even changed as an author during a writing career which spans well over thirty years. 6 Cf., for instance, the special issue of New Literary History 15/ 1 (1983), which titled Literature and/ as Moral Philosophy. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 291 McEwan has predominantly been a writer of novels of ideas who has analysed human behaviour, as one critic ironically puts it, “with more scientific rigor than the job strictly speaking requires” (Zawalski 2009: online). Hence, if Möller concludes that McEwan’s characters often resort to “frameworks of orientation which are explicitly subjective and often prove to be provisional” (189), this is only part of the story. Although characters might represent various frameworks of orientation, one needs to bear in mind that the characters themselves (as well as their predicaments) are always developed with reference to scientific master-narratives, most prominently psycho-analysis in McEwan’s early fiction and evolutionary psychology - “the study of how the Darwinian principle of natural selection continues to affect our mental processes and behaviour to serve the ends of survival and reproduction” (Childs 2007: 21) - in his later work. This dimension seems to largely escape Möller’s analysis. A minor detail may serve as a case in point. In her discussion of Atonement (2001), Möller quotes Briony’s startling reflection on the ontology of her own hand (54). Does her hand, Briony asks herself, “this fleshy spider on the end of her arm”, really belong to her or does it have “some little life on its own” (McEwan 2002: 35). As Möller argues, this reflection causes Briony to formulate the question of alterity, the novel’s central philosophical concern. This is certainly true. However, what Möller misses is that Briony’s reflection on her hand is not the intriguing but somewhat random association of a sensitive child trying to make sense of the world. Rather, Briony’s thoughts allude to a neurological disorder, the so called “alien-hand-syndrome” or “autonomous hand-syndrome”, a neurological disorder which causes people to no longer recognise their own hand as a part of their body (cf. Harris 2012: 139, 279). This reflection, which arguably is out of keeping with the character of a 13 year-old-girl in the year 1935, points to a clear ideological bias in McEwan’s character conception. By having Briony allude to a neurological condition, the universal human question ‘Who am I and who am I to others’ is framed in neurological, Darwinian terms and not, for instance, in terms of Christian ethics or post-modern ethics of alterity. Hence, for all the ambiguities and ambivalences that abound in McEwan’s writing (and which render a simple categorisation impossible), the clear scientific bias of his fiction cannot be denied. It is no coincidence that from Enduring Love onwards, characters who suffer from neurological conditions populate McEwan’s fiction in abundance. To McEwan, consciousness (and thus all behaviour including ethical behaviour) is a matter of the brain. As the novel Saturday (2005) demonstrates unambiguously, if the brain does not function properly, we do not function properly; we might even lose our very sense of self. This is, I think, an unambiguous stance on metaphysics, which cannot be disconnected from ethics and thus relativises Möller’s conclusion that McEwan’s novels are informed by “anti-essentialist, non-universalist ethics” (189). 7 7 There is a direct link between Briony’s work as a nurse in Atonement and Henry Perowne’s work as a neurosurgeon in Saturday. Both professions can be seen as symbolising a materialist worldview, which is clearly expressed in Atonement. Re- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 292 Möller’s conclusion might also stem from a focus which is somewhat narrow. In her analysis, much of McEwan’s extra-fictional writing is not taken into account. This is unfortunate, since McEwan has been exceptionally outspoken about his socio-political views and about how his literary output interacts with these views. Among others, he has contributed to the criticism of religion as voiced by the so called New Atheists (cf. e.g. McEwan 2007: 361- 365); he has published an essay in favour of evolutionary literary criticism, in which he expressis verbis denounced the “Standard Social Science Model”, or as it is sometimes referred to ‘social constructivism’ (cf. McEwan 2005: 5-19); and he has made an attempt at establishing a “scientific literary tradition” (cf. McEwan 2006: 4). Although I agree with the widely accepted notion that an author’s interpretation of his or her text is not necessarily any truer than that of a reader, I think that an application of Möller’s model of an ethics of dialogue to McEwan’s entire oeuvre - fictional and extra-fictional - would have yielded interesting results. Such an analysis would have supported Möller’s conclusion that McEwan’s novels are informed by “postmodern ethics, [which] acknowledges the existence of a plurality of systems of value and explanatory patterns” (188). It might, however, also have shown that such a co-existence of explanatory patterns is not at all free of friction, paradoxes or preferences. Indeed, all of this might have helped refute the claim that post-modernism equals disinterested relativism. In spite of these reservations, Coming to Terms with Crisis offers a series of intelligent readings of McEwan’s novels and a wealth of interesting details. It thus is an insightful contribution to the growing body of secondary literature on Ian McEwan. References Beattie, Tina (2007). The New Atheists. The Twilight of Reason & the War on Religion. London: Darton Longman & Todd. Childs, Peter (ed.) (2007). Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Routledge Guides to Literature. London & New York: Routledge. Eaglestone, Robert (2004). “Postmodernism and Ethics against the Metaphysics of Comprehension”. In: Steven Connor (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: CUP. 182-195. Harris, Sam (2012 [2010]). The Moral Landscape. New York: Black Swan. McEwan, Ian (2001/ 2002). Atonement. London: Vintage. McEwan, Ian (2005). “Literature, Science, and Human Nature.” In: Jonathan Gottschall/ David Sloan Wilson (eds.). The Literary Animal. Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Forewords by E.O. Wilson and Frederick Crews. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 5-19. McEwan, Ian (2006). “A Parallel Tradition”. The Guardian Review (1 Apr 2006). 4. membering a war patient with a severe head injury, Briony realises “that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended” (McEwan 2002: 304). For a detailed analysis of the manifold links between McEwan’s fiction and neurology cf. Salisbury 2010: 884-912. Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2012) Heft 2 293 McEwan, Ian (2007). “End of the World Blues.” In: Christopher Hitchens (ed.). The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer. London: Da Capo Press. 351-365. Rothstein, Edward (2001). “Attacks on U.S. Challange the Perspective of Postmodern True Believers”. The New York Times (22 Sep 2006) [Online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2001/ 09/ 22/ arts/ connections-attacks-us-challengeperspectives-postmodern-true-believers.html? pagewanted=all [1 Aug 2012] Salisbury, Laura (2010). “Narration and Neurology: Ian McEwan’s Mother Tongue”. Textual Practice 24.5. 883-912. Zalewski, Daniel (2009). “The Background Hum”. The New Yorker (23 February) [Online] http: / / www.newyorker.com/ reporting/ 2009/ 02/ 23/ 090223fa_fact_zalewski [10 Feb 2011] Johannes Wally Institut für Anglistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz