eJournals

periodicals.narr.de Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Klaus Rieser Bruce Gaston Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz Gašper Ilc Keyvan Sarkhosh Anne Enderwitz Band 41 · Heft 2 | 2016 Band 41 · Heft 2 | 2016 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Klaus Rieser Daddy‟s Girls: Vater-Tochter Beziehungen im Film .............................................. 3 Bruce Gaston „But that‟s not what it was built for‟. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh‟s work ....................................................................................... 23 Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative in 21 st -Century Novels. The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok. ............................................ 49 Gašper Ilc The Lexicographic Treatment of English Negation-Related Phraseological Units. ........................................................................................... 73 Rezensionen: Keyvan Sarkhosh Jeff Thoss, When Storyworlds Collide. Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics (Studies in Intermediality 7), 2015 ............................................. 93 Anne Enderwitz Johannes Wally, Secular Falls from Grace: Religion and (New) Atheism in the Implied Worldview of Ian McEwan‟s Fiction (Studies in English Literary and Cultural History 62), 2015................................. 98 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 40 , 201 5 ist nach AutorInnen alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / wwwgewi.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 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 € 8 8 ,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 72 ,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft € 5 4 ,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 201 6 · 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 Daddy’s Girls Vater-Tochter Beziehungen im Film Klaus Rieser Dieser Artikel blickt zunächst auf ein breites Korpus von Filmen, die Vater- Tochter Beziehungen inszenieren. Er spürt den häufig vorhandenen patriarchalen Missbrauchsstrukturen nach und wirft Fragen nach der Marginalisierung/ Absenz der Mutter und einem damit verbundenen Dilemma der Triangulation auf. Schließlich wendet sich der Blick von ausbeuterischen und missbräuchlichen Bildern auf ein junges Kino, welches Töchtern neue Beziehungs- und Handlungsmöglichkeiten eröffnet. Auf den ersten Blick wirkt es, als würde das Kino Familiendarstellungen nach Lust und Laune verdrehen und verzerren. Tatsächlich werden im Vater-Tochter Kino ganz spezifische - manifeste oder auch latente - Inhalte verhandelt, die sich komödienhaft oder tragisch um Gefürchtetes, Begehrtes, Gehasstes und Geliebtes drehen. Rein quantitativ gesehen erfahren die Beziehungen zwischen Vätern und Söhnen signifikant mehr Aufmerksamkeit als jene zwischen Vätern und Töchtern (Bruzzi 2006: xv). Erstere konstituieren zudem via das Moment der Ödipalität ein autonomes Motiv, während letztere unter andere Genres subsumiert werden. 1 Auch in die feministische Filmtheorie mit ihrem sorgfältigen Fokus auf die (Re)konstruktion von Patriarchalität im Film fand diese Beziehung (anders als zwischen Mutter und Tochter) bislang wenig Eingang. Feministische Filmwissenschaft hat sich von Anbeginn auf die Analyse von Vaterschaft konzentriert, schließlich stellt sie die Rolle des Kinos für die Kontinuität patriarchaler Episteme ins Zentrum ihrer Forschung. Dabei fokussiert sie allerdings mehr auf die symbolische Vaterschaft - die patriarchale Macht- und Gewaltkonstellation - als auf den realen Vater als 1 So etwa unter Thriller (z.B. Hustle, 1975), Komödien (z.B. Father of the Bride, 1950, 1991; Parenthood, 1989) oder Drama (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1961; Beasts of the Southern Wild, 2012), etc. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 2 Klaus Rieser 4 komplexe und konflikthafte Figur. Weitgehend unbeachtet blieben damit bisher auch Vater-Tochter-Konstellationen. Dabei würden sich diese hervorragend für die Analyse weiblicher Subjektwerdung im Spannungsfeld patriarchaler Strukturen anbieten. So wird etwa die Zentralität von Vaterschaft zumeist über eine Marginalisierung der Mutter erkauft und bemerkenswert oft in positive Repräsentationen quasi-/ inzestuöser Beziehungen verpackt, die wiederum einer Quasi-Legitimation von patriarchalen Missbrauchspositionen gleichkommen. Dazu stellt Linda Nielsen (2012) fest: In [an] analysis of movies and Broadway plays from the 1930s through the 1960s, the father-daughter relationship is often problematic, tense, or dysfunctional. Their problems range from the father‟s refusal to let his daughter grow up to his being sexually attracted to her. He is often overbearing, suspicious, critical, demanding, distant, narcissistic, or exploitative (Nash 2005). Dysfunctional, distant, awkward relationships between fathers and daughters continue to be a common theme in contemporary films (Stetz 2007). Teil 1 dieses Artikels identifiziert die in Vater-Tochter-Filmen vorherrschenden Topoi als jene Rahmenbedingungen, innerhalb derer sich die soziale Konstruktion von Vaterschaft einerseits und die töchterliche Sozialisation andererseits gestaltet. Teil 2 enthüllt, beispielhaft am Film The Descendants (2011), ein genretypisches Phänomen der Repräsentation von Vater-Tochter Beziehungen: die Marginalisierung der Mutter und die damit einhergehende Problematik der Triangulation. Teil 3 schließlich widmet sich anderen rezenten Filmbeispielen wie Winter‟s Bone (2010), in denen Töchtern gegenüber Vätern neue Handlungsmöglichkeiten zugestanden werden. 1. Topoi Klassische Machtstrukturen: Vulnerabilität und Protektion Töchterpositionen als Metapher für Verletzlichkeit und Vaterpositionen als Metapher für das Protektorat inszenieren klassische Muster. Drehbücher mit entführten/ vergewaltigten Töchtern und rettenden/ rächenden Vätern werden heute meist ins Action-Kino und diverse B-Genres (Horror, Western, Rape-Revenge Filme) verwiesen 2 . Die Opfersituation der Tochter (passiv) ‚aktiviert„ den Vater und ermöglicht seine Inszenierung als Heros. Die familiäre Situation spiegelt zugleich die nationale Ebene, in welcher 2 Vgl. Hustle (1975), Law Abiding Citizen (2009), Edge of Darkness (2010), Taken (2008), The Last House on the Left (2009), The Horseman (2008). In Mainstreamfilmen wie Steven Spielbergs War of the Worlds (2005), John Badhams Nick of Time (1995), oder Len Wisemans Live Free or Die Hard (2007) wird der rächende Vater üblicherweise in einen rettenden Vater transformiert. Daddy’s Girls 5 das Mädchen in seiner Gebärfähigkeit die zu schützende Heimat symbolisiert (sie soll keine „fremden“ Bürger gebären) und der Vater den - maskulinen - Protektor gibt: I would suggest that, just as in all pre-feminist eras (and, it now appears, in a so-called “post-feminist” era), femininity remains a trope in general for vulnerability. The young girl is still the collective emblem for that which is in need of guarding. She remains, in effect, the embodiment of the problem - to employ a politically loaded phrase - of homeland security. (Stetz 2007: 367) Romantisierung und Ästhetisierung von Inzest/ Missbrauch Vater-Tochter-Paare können auch in anderer Hinsicht unter einem patriarchalen Paradigma, nämlich dem Inzest bzw. Missbrauch, vereint werden. Dabei wird die Problematik, entsprechend dem Inzesttabu, häufig auf eine Konstellation „väterlicher Senior - sehr junge Frau“ verschoben, exemplarisch in Daddy Long Legs (1955), wo ein reicher Playboy (Fred Astaire) ein sehr junges Mädchen aus dem Waisenheim holt, um sich dann in sie zu verlieben. Auch Lolita (1962, 1997), American Beauty (1999), Starting Out In The Evening (2007) oder The Wrestler (2008) rekurrieren auf ähnliche Muster. Den Negativrekord hält Woody Allen; Kristin Iversen (2014) hat die Altersunterschiede von Liebespaaren in 16 seiner Filme mit 20 bis über 40 Jahren (! ) berechnet: „That‟s not the age difference of very many romantic couples, rather that‟s the age difference of a father and daughter. Or, maybe, a man and his girlfriend‟s daughter.” Freilich verharmlosen oder ästhetisieren nicht alle Filme die Problematik, einige, wie A Thousand Acres (1997) oder The War Zone (1999), werfen ein sehr schmerzliches Licht auf die katastrophalen Folgen für das Leben von missbrauchten Töchtern. Inzest und Patriarchat sind nicht nur auf der Leinwand eng verknüpft: Feministische Forschungen aus historischer (Gordon 1988), psychologischer (Herman & Hirschman 1981) oder textwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Giffen 2003) belegen, dass väterlicher Missbrauch nicht eine Perversion innerhalb, sondern vielmehr ein Effekt normativer patriarchaler Familienkonstellationen ist. 3 Das auf die Töchter projizierte inzestuöse Begehren gegenüber dem Vater „hilft“ diesen in eine „richtige“ (subordinierte) Weiblichkeit hineinzufinden. Dem entsprechend liest Kathleen Rowe Karlyn etwa American Beauty (1999) als „incest scenario that guides the daughter to learn the skills of femininity.” (2004: 84) In The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) wird Inzestuosität schließlich offen (aber verharmlosend) inszeniert: Während die Eröffnungssequenz die Vater-Tochter Intimität visuell etabliert, zirkelt die Narration anschließend um wechselseitige Lösungsversuche. Schließlich kippt die wiedererlangte Nähe mit 3 Vgl. auch Modleski 1988. Klaus Rieser 6 erotischen Küssen ins Inzestuöse. Der Vater wird dabei exkulpiert: Es ist die Tochter, die den Kuss begonnen hat, während er sich - nach einiger Zeit - schockiert abwendet. The Wrestler (2008) lässt eine Vater-Tochter- Aussöhnung in einer romantischen Tanzszene kulminieren, in der das „Paar“ in einen abgesperrten Ballsaal einbricht, also verbotenes Territorium betritt. Die vorausgegangene väterliche Kindesvernachlässigung wird hier ausgerechnet durch ein romantisch-erotisches Mann-Frau- Schema überwunden. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn stellt, ausgehend von American Beauty, väterliche Gefühle gegenüber der Tochter generell als durch inzestuöses Begehren motiviert dar: „When [the father's] desire stops short of overstepping conventional boundaries it can manifest itself as an intense ‚protectiveness„ or an emotional involvement with the daughter …“ (2004: 70) Soweit möchte ich nicht gehen, denn dann wäre jede Vater-Tochter-Emotion a priori proto-inzestuös und damit positive Bevaterung unmöglich. Einzuräumen ist jedoch, dass das Repertoire filmischer Vater-Tochter-Nähe zumeist nicht von Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen, sondern von Romantik und solcherart von inzestuöser Latenz geprägt ist. Entfremdung Ein drittes, schmerzliches Beziehungsthema stellen Entfremdungen aller Nuancierungen dar. Filme wie On Golden Pond (1981), Regarding Henry (1991), Magnolia (1999), About Schmidt (2002), Million Dollar Baby (2004), The Wrestler (2008), The Kids Are All Right (2010) widmen sich typischerweise der väterlichen Reue oder dem Altersleid und werben beim Publikum um Verständnis für den Vater und seine oft lebenslangen Verfehlungen. Gutes Bevatern Gute Väter ergeben sich am einfachsten durch den Kontrast mit schlechten Vätern - To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), American Beauty (1999) - oder schlechten Müttern - American Beauty (1999), Daddy‟s Little Girls (2007). Dazu gesellen sich Väter, die „endlich“ ihre Rolle annehmen möchten: Raining Stones (1993), The Snapper (1993), Fly Away Home (1996), Million Dollar Baby (2004), The Game Plan (2007). Auffallend häufig wird die Frage des positiven Bevaterns über Ersatzväter abgehandelt, mit durchaus heterogenen politischen wie textuellen Ergebnissen: Paper Moon (1973), Alice in the Cities (1974), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Million Dollar Baby (2004). Million Dollar Baby (2004) ist ein düsteres Beispiel für Grenzen, die ein Ersatz-Vater im Unterschied zu einem biologischer Vater überschreiten darf. Hier drängt sich die junge Maggie einem alternden Boxtrainer (Clint Eastwood) auf. Von ihrer Zielstrebigkeit eingenommen, trainiert er sie Daddy’s Girls 7 zuerst unwillig und begleitet sie schließlich wider besseres Wissen in einen fatalen Kampf. Auf ihren Wunsch hin tötet er zuletzt die Querschnittgelähmte, wobei seine Lage - nämlich das moralische Dilemma - als das tragisch-heroische Drama inszeniert wird. In „Million Dollar Baby: A Split Decision“ nennt Tania Modleski diesen Film, welcher das Leid des Vaters über jenes der geopferten Wahltochter situiert, ein „male weepie“ (Sklar & Modleski 2005: 10): Frankie„s Verantwortung verschwindet hinter der melodramatischen Verbrämung, während Maggies Mutter nur durch Geldgier charakterisiert wird. 4 In Beispielen wie Paper Moon (1973) und Alice in the Cities (1974) dient der Ersatzvater hingegen als positives Rollenmodell für eine vorsichtige, empathische Vaterschaft, wie sie für biologische Filmväter schwer zu erreichen scheint: Vaterschaft wird als Aufgabe angenommen, zunächst widerstrebend, dann vorsichtig und schließlich von ganzem Herzen. Die sich entwickelnden Beziehungen sind wechselseitig und emotional, jedoch frei von Frivolitäten. Die (Neo-)Väter entdecken ihr Verantwortungsgefühl und beginnen schließlich nicht nur das Kind, sondern auch ihre Rolle zu schätzen. Generell weisen Filme, welche die Vaterschaft ins Zentrum rücken, eine an sich nur implizite, erst in der Analyse zu explizierende, Vorstellung von guter Vaterschaft auf. Diese besteht aus einem Konglomerat disparater, auch kontradiktorischer Qualitäten. Der ideale Vater, meist unerreicht von den dargestellten realen Vätern, wäre einerseits erwachsen und verantwortungsbewusst, andererseits offen und verspielt; emotional, aber in voller Kontrolle seiner (sexuellen) Bedürfnisse; liebevoll, aber nicht inzestuös; souverän und autonom, aber doch beziehungsfähig - und solcherart im Imaginären und im Symbolischen gleichermaßen zu Hause. Der filmisch dargestellte, „reale“ Vater tritt jedenfalls üblicherweise nicht als Vertreter des machtvollen Patriarchats (des Phallus in der Lacanschen Terminologie) auf, sondern ist recht machtlos, ja „kastriert“: ein erfolgloser Aussteiger, ein abgetakelter Ringer, oder ein Niemand mit Midlife- Crisis. Damit werden diese Filmväter Embleme einer Paradoxie auch in der Realität: die Vaterschaft als imaginärer Zugang zu patriarchaler Macht wird dadurch unterlaufen, dass konkrete Vaterschaft „entmännlicht“. So unterstreicht Stella Bruzzi in einem Interview: „Something of a renunciation of masculinity happens when one becomes a father. […] There is a sense in which the father becomes emasculated, despite, and this is the huge irony of it all, becoming a symbol for what men supposedly aspire to be” (Zee-Jotti 2006: 16). Wenn also reale Vaterschaft aus Verantwortlichkeit, Emotionalität und Unterordnung unter das Gesetz des VATERS besteht, dann ist Vaterschaft zumindest in Teilen gleichbedeu- 4 Das Drehbuch weicht hier vielsagend von der realen Vorlage ab, denn Katie Dallam hat den Kampf mit bleibenden Verletzungen überlebt und wird seitdem von ihrer Familie gepflegt. Klaus Rieser 8 tend mit Kastration. Das Gros der Filme überdeckt diesen Widerspruch durch imaginäre Bestätigung des Patriarchalen; anspruchsvolle Filme hingegen tendieren dazu, Väter mit diesen Idealen zu konfrontieren. Individuation / Loslösung Von Interesse in der Vater-Tochter-Beziehung ist aber nicht nur das Hineinwachsen der Männer in die Vaterrolle, sondern auch das Herauswachsen von Mädchen aus der Tochterrolle. Welche Angebote zur Individuation und Subjektwerdung finden Mädchen? Seichte Komödien im Stil von Father of the Bride (1950, 1991), Meet the Parents (2000), Meet the Fockers (2004), Nicht ohne Meinen Schwiegervater (2005), oder The In-Laws (2003) beschwören einerseits männliche Konkurrenz und väterlichen Verlust und verharmlosen andererseits inzestuöse Begehrensstrukturen - wie sie im emotionalen Tohuwabohu rund um Hochzeiten aufblitzen - entsprechen dem von Claude Levi-Strauss formulierten Modell: The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners ... this remains true even when the girl‟s feelings are taken into consideration, as, moreover, is usually the case. (1969: 115) Allison Giffen weist in ihrer Analyse von gehorsamen Töchtern in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts darauf hin, dass die Notwendigkeit der Lösung der Töchter von ihren Vätern durch die patriarchale Familienstruktur mit ihren inhärenten Missbrauchsstrukturen verschärft wird. Sie rekurriert auf Linda Boose, [who] observes that in many of Western culture‟s central narratives, … while the central conflict between fathers and sons is displacement and usurpation, between fathers and daughters is separation and retention: bad daughters fleeing their fathers or bad fathers retaining their daughters (32-3). Unlike sons, whose destiny within the family is to assume their father‟s name and inherit his property, daughters function as property, to be (first possessed and later) given away by fathers. (Giffen 2003: 258). Es überrascht also nicht, wenn Tochter-Vater Loslösungen oft tragische Dimensionen annehmen. Denn die Lösung ist mit der Maturität der Tochter, also ihrer Identität als sexuelle Frau, verflochten und impliziert die potenziell inzestuöse Konstellation. Seriöse Darstellungen wie Yasujirō Ozu‟s Late Spring (1949) oder Claire Denis‟ 35 Shots of Rum (2008) repräsentieren demgegenüber ein weites Spektrum von weiblicher Individuati- Daddy’s Girls 9 on über Trennungsmelancholie bis hin zur biographischen Entwicklung. 5 Beide Filme beschwören die Väter, ihre Töchter loszulassen, beide gestehen diesen Emanzipation und Individuation zu. Beide konzedieren aber auch die emotionalen Kosten einer Gesellschaft, in welcher eine negativödipale Entwicklung für Töchter vorgezeichnet und in der ihre radikale Loslösung von beiden Eltern verlangt wird. „Drei-Mäderl-Haus“ Einen Sonderfall stellt die Konstellation eines alleinerziehenden Vaters mit gleich mehreren (häufig drei) Töchtern dar. Am nachvollziehbarsten ist dies wohl in A Thousand Acres (1997), da dieser Film, aus der Perspektive der ältesten, jahrelang missbrauchten Tochter erzählt, deutlich auf King Lear rekurriert. 6 In anderen Fällen stellt die Mehrtochterfamilie hingegen eine Abweichung von der klassisch-ödipalen Narration - diese Töchter haben keine Brüder - dar. Überdies wird durch die Mehrzahl von Töchtern, die - laut Konvention - in besonderem Maße einer Mutter bedürfen, den Filmvätern besonders umfassend elterliche Verantwortung zugewiesen. Dieser löst das Problem der Mutterabsenz entweder durch Wiederverheiratung (The Sound of Music, 1965) oder „Integration“ der Mütterlichkeit - so in Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) oder Daddy‟s Little Girls (2007). Die Anwesenheit von mehreren Töchtern erlaubt zudem ein Rollensplitting: Tochtersein wird hier aufgeteilt in Kindlichkeit einerseits und - inzestuöse - Übernahme der Funktion der „kleinen Frau“ andererseits, wie es in verstörender Weise in The Descendants (2011) geschieht. 2. Triangulation und die abwesende Mutter Während die oben genannten Topoi die Heterogenität von Beziehungsstrukturen in Vater-Tochter Filmen kategorisieren, lässt sich ein durchgängiges Phänomen identifizieren: die Marginalisierung der Mutter (zugleich Frau) und die dadurch bedingte gesellschaftliche Konstruktion von Tochterschaft. Bis dato gibt es keine umfassende Antwort darauf, warum filmische Vater-Tochter Repräsentationen typischerweise ohne Mutter auskommen - wohl aber werden in der Filmtheorie verschiedene Motive und Effekte der Ehefrau/ Mutter-Absenz aufgezeigt. 5 Mit Late Spring (1949) und 35 Shot of Rum (2008) setzte ich mich im Detail in einer anderen Publikation auseinander. 6 Vlg. Leslie (1998) oder Lynch (2002). Klaus Rieser 10 Märchen und Demographie als Basis Viele Filmnarrative basieren auf traditionellen Erzählungen, in denen Mutterlosigkeit demographisch begründet war: Aufgrund der hohen Müttersterblichkeit wurde die elterliche Kontinuität oft nur von Vätern gewahrt. Das Leiden der Kinder an Mutterlosigkeit ist daher weltweit zu einem zentralen Motiv von Märchenerzählungen geworden. In Disney- und anderen Animationsfilmen, in denen Mütter oft gleich in den ersten Minuten getötet oder eingesperrt werden, 7 wird dieses Motiv jedoch mehr als überstrapaziert. Textuelle Reaktion auf real abwesende Väter Alleinerziehende Filmväter können auch als Reaktion auf die sinkende Präsenz realer Väter gewertet werden. Neben der „normalen“ Absenz von Vätern im Alltag vieler Kinder hat sich der Prozentsatz jener Kinder, die getrennt von ihren biologischen Vätern aufwachsen von 1970 bis 1990 verdoppelt und ist bis 2009 auf 24 Prozent gestiegen (Kreider & Ellis 2011). Nicht wenige Filme schlagen Kapital aus einer Sehnsucht nach Vätern, indem sie diese als besonderen, oft „besseren“ Elternteil rezentrieren (von Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979 bis Daddy‟s Little Girls, 2007). Die Mutter als Spaßbremse Mütterliche Behütung wird als lästig und überflüssig entlarvt (Disney! ), wenn kleine Filmhelden und -heldinnen auch ganz alleine atemberaubende, actionreiche Risiken mit garantiertem Happy End erleben können. Zentrierung der Tochter-Vater Beziehung Was auch immer die Gründe für die Mutterabsenz sein mögen, ihre (ideologischen) Effekte sind beunruhigend. Für eine Deutung bietet sich das psychoanalytische Konzept der Triangulation an. Aus Freudscher Sicht wird der ödipale Prozess - der Übergang von Kind zu erwachsener Person, von Familie zu Gesellschaft - durch die „Intervention eines dritten Terminus“ (Stam 2005: 133) ausgelöst, welche letztlich zu einem „subjektiven Gefühl der Kontrolle über Aggression und Sexualität“ (Holtzmann & Kulish 2003: 1146-7) führen sollte. In der (Freudschen) patriarchalen 7 Im Internet findet sich reiches Datenmaterial zu Matriphobie in Disney- Produktionen. Selina Kyle etwa listet folgende mutterlose ProtagonistInnen auf: Pinocchio, The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Chicken Little, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Little Mermaid, Bambi, The Fox and the Hound Tod, Dumbo, Jungle Book, Finding Nemo… Ähnlich einige “Nicht-Disney”- Filme: Lilo & Stich, Brother Bear, Ice Age, How to Train Your Dragon, A Little Princess, Casper, The Neverending Story… Daddy’s Girls 11 Konstellation bilden Mutter und Kind eine Dyade, welche durch den Vater als dritten Terminus idealerweise „gestört“ oder gar aufgelöst wird. So postuliert Lebeau, Kristeva folgend, dass [T]he loving father becomes the break on the fusion between the mother-child dyad … saving the child from abjection in the sense of an auto-erotic submersion that blocks any recognition of a difference between self and other, thus cutting the child off from love and from the social. (Lebeau 1992: 245) Der Vater als dritter Terminus führt damit jene Differenz ein, welche das Kind aus der primären Verbindung heraus in das Soziale katapultiert. Was aber, wenn ein kultureller Text die primäre Verbindung der Tochter nicht zur Mutter, sondern zum Vater setzt? In diesem Fall müsste eine andere Person den dritten Terminus stellen, etwa die Mutter. Eine solche Umkehrung wird durch die herrschenden Verhältnisse negiert: Schwangerschaft, Gebärakt und Stillzeit positionieren Mütter nach wie vor als primäre Hauptbezugspersonen. Die daraus resultierenden kulturellen Kodes kreieren beim Publikum die fixe Erwartungshaltung, bei Anwesenheit beider Eltern in einem Text die Dyade zwischen Mutter und Kind, die Transformation hingegen durch den Vater anzunehmen. Somit scheint eine intensive Vater-Tochter Beziehung, zumindest im Film, am ehesten über den Ausschluss der Mutter/ Frau zu funktionieren. Filme, welche die Vater-Tochter Beziehung ins Zentrum stellen, blenden im Regelfall Mütter komplett aus oder peripherisieren sie zumindest. Ist diese abwesend, gerät der Vater in dyadische Beziehung zur Tochter und kann seine Funktion als dritter Terminus nicht oder nur erschwert einnehmen. Dies ermöglicht es den Filmen, die Tochter in ein ‚ödipales„ Verhältnis zum Vater zu setzen. Silencing (Othering) the Mother Typischerweise erhalten Mütter aufgrund der angesprochenen Marginalisierung keine Stimme - ein Phänomen, das E. Ann Kaplan (1993) als „silencing of the mother“ bezeichnet hat. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn geht so weit zu behaupten, dass die fehlende Mutter per Definition eine schuldige Mutter sei (2004: 85). Diese implizite Schuld wird in The Descendants (2011) zum unterschwelligen Leitmotiv. Der Film zirkuliert um die Figur des schwerreichen Anwalts Matt King, Nachkomme eines hawaiianischen Familienklans. Der ‚arme„ Matt hat es dennoch nicht einfach: Er verhandelt über den Verkauf von riesigen Ländereien, als seine Frau Elizabeth verunglückt und er sich erstmals um seine verwöhnten Töchter kümmern muss. Die Erzählung nimmt aber erst Schwung auf, als Matt herausfindet, dass Elizabeth ihn für ihren Liebhaber verlassen wollte: Mit seinen Töchtern im Schlepptau will Matt nun diesen aufspüren. Klaus Rieser 12 Der Text bringt die Mutter nicht nur zum Schweigen (unfallbedingtes Koma), er lässt uns wissen, dass sie es, durch ihre Untreue und Leichtsinnigkeit, nicht besser verdient. Ihre Hilflosigkeit - entsprechend Elizabeths Patientenverfügung sind die lebenserhaltenden Maschinen in Kürze abzuschalten - wird überdies für einen running gag benützt: Im Krankenhaus wird die Sterbende beleidigt und verhöhnt. Den Anfang macht Ehemann Matt, besetzt mit einem der größten Sympathieträger des zeitgenössischen Kinos - George Clooney: Matt: You were going to ask me for a divorce? So you could be with some fucking fuckhead Brian Speer? Are you kidding me? Who are you? Because the only thing I know for sure is that you're a goddamned liar. So what do you have to say for yourself? Go ahead, make a little joke and tell me I've got it all wrong. Tell me again I'm too out of touch with my feelings and need to go to therapy. (Pause) Isn't the idea of marriage to make your partner's way in life a little easier? For me it was always harder with you. And you're still making it harder. Lying there on a ventilator and still fucking up my life. You're relentless. You know what? I was going to ask you for a divorce some day. (grabbing a DOLL, tossing it) Daddy's little girl. (Payne, Faxon & Rash 2011: 54) Etwas später spricht die ältere Tochter Alexandra, vom Vater bedrängt, „etwas Nettes“ zu sagen: „Hi, Mom. Sorry for being bad. For wasting your money on expensive private schools. Money you could have used on facials and massages and sports equipment.” Und nach einem Blick zu ihrem Vater: „Sorry we weren't good enough for you - especially Dad” (Payne/ Faxon/ Rash 2011: 55). Zuletzt tritt auch die Frau von Elizabeths Liebhaber ans Krankenbett: „Elizabeth, I'm Julie. Brian's wife. I just want to say I forgive you. I forgive you for trying to take Brian. I forgive you for almost destroying my family …” (Payne/ Faxon/ Rash 2011: 110). Wer denkt, dass solch aggressives mother bashing nur exotische Perversionen bedient, sei daran erinnert, dass der Oscar-gekrönte Film ein enormer Bild 1: The Descendants (2011) Die zum Schweigen verdammte Frau/ Mutter Daddy’s Girls 13 Publikumserfolg war. Das renommierte Lexikon des internationalen Films jubilierte gar, der Film sei „[e]in bewegender … Film über die Neuentdeckung von Familienwerten, der eindrucksvoll die komplexe Seelenlage des Vaters beschreibt … [und dabei] stets den richtigen Ton [findet]“ (Descendants, The). Im Zentrum des Films steht konsequent der betrogene Ehemann. Was dem Film tatsächlich gelingt, ist, dessen egozentrische und skrupellose Manöver zu verschleiern. An der Oberfläche ist er ein etwas gedankenverlorener und unvollkommener, im Herzen jedoch sympathischer Charakter. Dass er sich nie um seine Kinder gekümmert hat, wird damit ‚geadelt„, dass er seinen Lebensunterhalt - trotz Erbe - selbst bestreiten wollte, wobei sich der Film nicht um Glaubwürdigkeit bemüht, denn Matt wird kaum je beim Arbeiten gezeigt. Sein Reichtum kommt hingegen, neben der patriarchalen Erbfolge, als Kolonialismus in Disneyverpackung daher: „Matt: My missionary ancestors came to the islands and … made business deals along the way - buying an island, or marrying a princess and inheriting her land” (Payne/ Faxon/ Rash 2011: 1). Diese ethnischen Wurzeln begründen bei ihm jedoch keinerlei Verbindlichkeit gegenüber dem Land oder der Urbevölkerung. Bei aller Widersprüchlichkeit der Figur wird Matt uns doch als primäre emotionale Identifikationsfigur angeboten. Mit einer Mischung aus neu erwachsenem Verantwortungsgefühl (für seine Kinder, die nächsten „descendants“), Emotionalität (Ausbrüche, Eifersucht) und Unternehmungsgeist wird er uns als „everyman“ nähergebracht. In eklatantem Widerspruch zu Matt‟s Zeichnung als superreichem Erbe, gespielt vom begehrtesten Leinwandstar unserer Zeit, charakterisiert Drehbuchautor und Regisseur Alexander Payne seine Protagonisten folgendermaßen: „They‟re just people. They‟re like me or like you or like people I know.” (Foundas 2011: 27) 8 Der größte Widerspruch allerdings besteht wohl zwischen von Kritikern gepriesenen „Familienwerten“ und dem mother bashing. Wie Livingstone & Liebes (1995) in ihren soap opera-Analysen gezeigt haben, dient dieses meist der Desidentifikation mit der Mutterrolle: Demnach sind „böse“ Mütter - solche, die ihre Töchter vernachlässigen oder im Stich lassen - in Soaps sehr populär. Livingstone & Liebes postulieren, dass Soaps die Mutter als das ‚andere„ positionieren und damit eine (patriarchale) Tochterposition für das Publikum anlegen (1995: 155-6). Auch The Descendants (2011) bietet neben der Identifikation mit dem ‚leidgeplagten„ everyman (Clanchef/ Großgrundbesitzer) sekundär eine solche patriarchal-töchterliche Muttermord-Identifikation an. Während wir uns über Elizabeth‟s Herabwürdigung amüsieren (sollen), entwickelt sich die Tochter exemplarisch zur Ersatzpartnerin des 8 Scott Foundas selbst geht noch weiter: „All of them, up to and including Matt King in The Descendants, are people who have become waylaid on life‟s highway, stopped somewhere short of their own expectations ….” Klaus Rieser 14 Vaters. Alexandra komplettiert die rigorose Ablehnung der Mutter mit Zuwendung zum Vater, den sie als Gefährtin auf seiner inselhüpfenden Odyssee beim Aufspüren des Rivalen begleitet. Der Eintritt der Tochter in die Mutter/ Partnerin-Rolle forciert eine inzestuöse Latenz: Die Übernahme von Mütterlichkeit (Kinderversorgung u.a.m.) durch die Tochter könnte zu weiteren ‚ehelichen„ Agenden führen (mehr dazu später). Narrative wie diese mythifizieren (d.h. sie stellen dar und verschleiern gleichzeitig) missbräuchliche Beziehungen in verschiedener Intensität, zum Beispiel durch die Besetzung von Matt mit dem ‚Frauenliebling„ George Clooney in The Descendants (2011). 9 Sie laden dazu ein, die Brutalität eines sozialen Paradigmas zu verdauen, das sich gegenüber inzestuösem Missbrauch zumindest blindstellt. Das Drehbuch kommt Matt insofern entgegen, als Elizabeth ihre Rolle als Mutter ohnehin nie erfüllt hatte und das erlaubt ihr auch nicht, ihre Sicht der Dinge darzulegen. Ein einziges Mal nur wird ihr Blick inszeniert - wenn wir das Boot mit der mutterlosen Familie und die auf dem Wasser schwimmenden hawaiianischen Blumenkränze von unten, aus ‚Sicht„ der zu Asche gewordenen Mutter sehen. ‚Über Leichen„ gehen die Descendants schließlich in der Schlusseinstellung, in der Patrilinearität verabsolutiert wird: Vater und Töchter sitzen auf dem Sofa, zugedeckt mit dem Quilt von Elizabeths Sterbebett. Im Fernseher läuft dabei March of the Penguins (2005) - wohl nicht zufällig als Hommage an die legendären Vaterqualitäten dieser Vögel. Selbst wenn die Schlussszene ironisch sein sollte, so wäre es eine kritiklose Ironie: Niemand scheint Elizabeth zu vermissen, während sich die diversen Verfehlungen der Töchter (Aggressionen und Alkoholexzesse) ebenso erledigt haben wie die des Vaters (Vernachlässigung und Narzissmus), sodass das Bild einer ‚ganz normalen„ Familie entsteht - Eis essend, vor dem TV. Am Ende ist alles gut, obwohl (oder weil) die Mutter fehlt. In diesem Zusammenhang ist bemerkenswert, dass Publikum wie Kritik die fehlende Mutter nicht nur als Mutter nicht vermissen, sondern auch nicht als Partnerin, also als erwachsene, sexuelle Frau. Tatsächlich fehlt in The Descendants (2011) - wie in den anderen Filmen mit Mutterabsenz - ja nicht nur die Mutter, sondern auch die Ehefrau. Die Täuschung gelingt - die Mutter/ Gattin wird nicht als fehlend wahrgenommen. Haushaltsführung und Kinderbetreuung werden von Matt bald problemlos neben seinen beruflichen Verpflichtungen geleistet. Als ‚Partnerin„ springt ja Alexandra ein, sodass der Film uns als Schlussbild besagtes Familienidyll bietet (Bild 2). 9 Mythifizierung ist ein Begriff von Roland Barthes, der meinte „myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts“, d.h. er verschleiert Machtverhältnisse durch Naturalisierung (Barthes 1972: 129). Daddy’s Girls 15 Im Vordergrund des Films stehen aber nicht ‚Familienwerte„, wie das Lexikon des Internationalen Films behauptet, sondern weibliche Untreue und männliche Eifersucht, welche die Rache-Erzählung motivieren. Wenn Matt im Lauf des Films seinen Plan, die Familienlatifundien gewinnbringend an ein Immobilien-Konsortium zu verkaufen ändert, dann nicht aus ökologischen Gründen, sondern um dem Ex-Rivalen, der davon ökonomisch profitieren würde, ‚eins auszuwischen„. Muttervakanz als Identifikationspotentiale Nicht alle matrivakanten Filme sind so ausgeprägt misogyn und matriphob. Grundsätzlich kreiert die mütterliche Abwesenheit zunächst eine Leerstelle innerhalb des Textes. Während diese in The Descendants (2011) mit patriarchalen Zoten gefüllt wird, öffnet sie in anderen Filmen (etwa 35 Shots of Rum, 2008) Raum für die Entwicklungsgeschichte einer Tochter hin zur Maturität. Es gibt aber eine dritte Option: Die Leerstelle kann auch als solche im Text konserviert werden, wodurch sie - bei entsprechend imaginativer Textkonstruktion - heterogene und flexible Publikumspositionen im Verhältnis zu dieser Leerstelle ermöglicht. Entgegen der Schlussfolgerung von Livingstone/ Liebes (1995) aus ihren Soap-Recherchen muss die Abwesenheit der Mutter nicht notwendigerweise dazu führen, dass diese als „das andere“ und die sich von ihr abgrenzende Tochter als einzige Identifikationsfigur kreiert wird. Tania Modleski etwa hat bemerkt, dass das Publikum von Soaps oft selbst in eine Position der „guten Mutter“ eingeladen wird, wo es liebevollesorgende Anteilnahme gegenüber allen Charakteren (Kindern! ), unabhängig von deren individuellen Schwächen, entwickelt (1979: 14). In anderen Fällen öffnet sich die Mutterleerstelle für heterogene Identifikationen unabhängig von der „primäre[n] Identifikation“ (i.S. von Christian Metz, Bild 2: The Descendants (2011). Am Schluss des Films ein trautes ‚Familien‘bild Klaus Rieser 16 also jener mit Kameraposition und narrativer Fokalisierung). In 35 Shots of Rum (2008) etwa wird subjektive Kameraführung weitgehend vermieden und die narrative Perspektive zwischen Vater und Tochter ausbalanciert: Das Publikum kann die Identifikation wählen und wechseln. In diesem Sinn bietet das oben angesprochene Schlussbild von The Descendants rund um die befremdliche Abwesenheit von Trauer der nun mutterlosen Familie eine weitere Lesart des Films an. Denn die Leerstelle (der fehlenden Trauer) öffnet eine neue Identifikationsmöglichkeit: Die Zuseherin kann sich als Bezugspunkt dieser ‚Familie ohne Frau„ sehen: Der geläuterte Matt ist nun auch als Partner attraktiv (George Clooney! ), die Töchter sind gebändigt. Solange die Zuseherin kooperiert, indem auch sie alles Böse in Elizabeth projiziert, kann sie sich komplementierend in die Familienidylle hineinimaginieren. Dem würde der Blickwinkel der Schlusseinstellung entgegenkommen. Denn Matt und die Töchter blicken nicht nur auf den Fernseher, sondern direkt in die Kamera. Das ist durchaus mehr als ein selbstreferenzieller Gag (in Hinblick auf die folgende DVD-Version); es ist diese zum Tableau geronnene Familienfotografie, deren Blickbezug etwas außerhalb des Bildes sucht - und damit die Positionierung der Zuschauerinnen vis-à-vis der Familie forciert. In dieser Lesart ist die Zuseherin der angesprochene Bezugspunkt. Indikator normativer Heterosexualität Das Motiv der Matrivakanz kann schließlich auch als Indikator normativer Heterosexualität gesehen werden, welche die Beziehung der Tochter zur Mutter kompliziert oder behindert. Judith Butler (1990) zufolge muss in heteronormativen, patriarchalen Gesellschaften die Tochter, um eine heterosexuelle Weiblichkeit einzunehmen, sowohl ihr Begehren für den Vater als auch das für die Mutter überwinden. Im Unterschied zu Freud deklariert Butler letzteres als den dramatischeren Verlust der Tochter: „Whereas it is possible to grieve the consequences of the incest taboo in a heterosexual culture, the taboo against homosexuality cannot be grieved and so the response to the taboo against homosexuality is melancholia rather than mourning” (1990: 69). Tatsächlich scheint die Vakanz der Frauen-/ Mutterstelle in Filmen Melancholie statt Trauer zu evozieren. 10 Folglich kann die Matrivakanz auch die Schwierigkeit der Tochter darstellen, unter heteronormativen Bedingungen die Beziehung zur Mutter aufrecht zu erhalten oder diesen Verlust zu betrauern. Wie wir gesehen haben, handeln matrivakante Filme oft vordergründig von inzestuösödipalen Problemen, z.B. den Leiden der Loslösung der Tochter vom Vater (Inzesttabu). Die Mutter-Tochter-Beziehung bzw. deren „Überwindung“ (indikativ für das Tabu gegen Homosexualität) wird jedoch nur über die Abwesenheit der Mutter abgehandelt. Das heißt, die fehlende 10 Vgl. Late Spring, 1949; Million Dollar Baby, 2004; 35 Shots of Rum, 2008; etc. Daddy’s Girls 17 Mutter bezeichnet einen a priori Verlust, der nicht betrauert werden kann, eine homosexuelle Cathexis, die - für die heterosexuelle Frau - nicht Trauer, sondern Melancholie begründet. 3. Transformationen und Gegentrends Vater-Tochter-Filme können das Dilemma beleuchten (und zugleich in Barthes„ Sinne verschleiern), welches heteronormative patriarchale Kulturen für die psychosoziale Entwicklung von Töchtern produzieren. Manche Filme ‚lösen„ dies durch Affirmation des Patriarchats (The Descendants, 2011), andere, indem sie dessen Normen Skepsis entgegenbringen (35 Shots of Rum, 2008). Zwar gilt nach wie vor, dass viele Texte die Mutter als Abjekt konstruieren und Söhne über Töchter privilegieren, es entstehen aber auch zunehmend Filme, die die Welt von Töchtern in ihrer Komplexität, inklusive ihrer Beziehungen zu Vätern, darstellen. Sie entsprechen damit auch einem allgemeinen, ‚kindzentrierten„ Trend. Joan Driscoll Lynch jedenfalls meint: Many family melodramas of the 'eighties and 'nineties can no longer be considered gynocentric (Kuhn 339) or patricentric (Seiter 25); rather they are child-centered. While the parents may still claim the majority of screen time, there has been a shift in the focus of the narrative from the adults to the effects that the negative dynamics of the parental relationship have on children, particularly the child who is positioned as the protagonist or key character. (1999: 48) Dennoch bleibt die oben angesprochene Parentifizierung (Übernahme der Frauen-/ Mutterrolle) der ersten Tochter ein häufiges Phänomen in solchen pädozentrischen Texten. In seinen Studien zu dysfunktionalen Familien hat John Bradshaw (1988) aufgezeigt, dass Töchter häufig Versorgungsrollen übernehmen und die emotionalen Bedürfnisse von Eltern erfüllen müssen, ein Faktum, das Joan Driscoll Lynch als emotionalen Missbrauch bezeichnet: „When a parent uses a child for emotional support and companionship that should be found in a spouse, the relationship may be viewed as emotional incest” (1999: 54). Die Emotionen der Töchter können dann nicht im Umgang mit peers ausgelebt werden, sondern werden durch die Väter konsumiert. Allison Giffen hat aufgezeigt, dass die bloße vermehrte Darstellung von ‚frühreifen„, d.h. sexualisierten, Mädchen als Konstruktionen eines väterlichen Begehrens gelesen werden können: Contemporary images of ‚daddy‟s little girl,„ the sex kitten, and the nymphet merely offer a more explicit version of displaced paternal desire. These sexua- Klaus Rieser 18 lized daughters offer their fathers, or father figures, a potent (and titillating) combination of childishness and sexuality. (2003: 275) Allerdings weisen töchterzentrierte Filme nicht nur Rückfälle in heteronormativ patriarchale Verhältnisse auf, sondern bieten zunehmend auch weiblich-ödipale (medusische) Entwürfe. Die Protagonistin des gleichnamigen Actionfilms Hanna (2011) etwa dient weder als Ersatzfrau noch als erotischer Bezugspunkt für den Vater; sie tritt ganz nach Sohnesmanier in die väterlichen Fußstapfen und erlernt Kampfkunst und Tötungstechniken. In ähnlicher Weise begibt sich die 14-jährige Mattie in True Grit (2010) auf eine Western-Odyssee, um ihren Vater zu rächen und solcherart die Vorzeichen des revenge movie umzudrehen. Im Südstaatendrama Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) lernt die kleine Hushpuppy von ihrem todkranken Vater Überlebenstechniken. Er ermächtigt sie (wenn auch mitunter grob) wo immer möglich - und obwohl sie bei ihm lebt, ist sie frei und gut in die Gemeinschaft eingebunden und maximal befähigt, nach seinem Tod einer ungewissen, aber selbstbestimmten Zukunft entgegen zu schreiten. Ein weiteres Beispiel für dieses neue Paradigma ist die preisgekrönte unabhängige Produktion Winter‟s Bone (2010) von Debra Granik. Im Stil eines melancholisch neorealistischen Dramas mit Thriller-Elementen paart der Film Lokalkolorit mit archaischen Kräften: Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), ein 17-jähriges Mädchen in white trash Missouri, hat eine schwer depressive Mutter und muss ihre beiden jüngeren Geschwister versorgen. Ihre größte Herausforderung beginnt jedoch, als ihr das Gericht nur eine Woche Zeit gibt, um ihren Vater - tot oder lebendig - zu finden: Denn der Vater, auf Bewährung freigesetzt und seither abgängig, hatte das Haus als Sicherheit verpfänden müssen. Ree, überzeugt, dass der Vater sie niemals freiwillig im Stich gelassen hätte, begibt sich auf eine Tour-de-Force durch ein desolates amerikanisches Hinterland voll Gewalt und Drogenkriminalität. Die staatlichen Institutionen sind dysfunktional, die regionale Ökonomie besteht aus illegalen Crystal Meth Laboren, die Bewohner sind aggressiv. Im Verlauf ihrer Erkenntnissuche beweist Ree enormen Mut und Willensstärke um ihre doppelte Aufgabe - den Vater zu finden und die Familie zu retten - zu meistern. Schließlich erwirbt sich Ree den Respekt der Frauen eines regionalen Drogenclans, sodass diese sie eines Nachts zu jenem See bringen, in dem die Leiche ihres Vaters (zum Schutz der Mörder) versenkt wurde. Da Ree es nicht schafft, den Leichnam an Bord zu ziehen - um seinen Tod vor Gericht zu beweisen - hält sie nun seine toten Hände, während die Milton-Frauen diese mit einer Kettensäge abtrennen. Sein Tod bezeugt, dass er die Familie nicht im Stich gelassen hat - und bestätigt jenes Vertrauen seiner Tochter, das ihre Odyssee überhaupt erst motiviert hat. Ree trägt die abgesägten Hände zum Sheriff und verhindert die Delogierung. Hier übernimmt eine Tochter nicht nur in die Position der Mut- Daddy’s Girls 19 ter (sie versorgt ihre Geschwister), sondern auch jene des Vaters (sie sorgt für das Haus). Die tiefenpsychologischen Aspekte dieser Sukzession werden nicht geglättet, sondern in starke Symbolbilder gepackt, wenn Ree die Zerlegung des patriarchalen Körpers - einen Akt der Kastration - mithilfe anderer Frauen selbst vornimmt. Die emotionale Bindung an den Vater, auf den sie stolz ist, und die quasi-ödipale Nachfolge machen sie nicht zu einem Daddy‟s Girl (Papas Liebling): Schließlich besteht sein Erbe, also seine patriarchale Gabe, nur aus seinem Leichnam - den Rest muss sie sich selbst erarbeiten. Tatsächlich leitet ein harter, ironischer Schnitt von der Szene am See über zur Polizeistation, wo wir Ree mit einem Plastiksack (die abgesägten Hände enthaltend), mit folgendem Aufdruck sehen: „THANK YOU; THANK YOU; THANK YOU; THANK YOU; Have a Nice Day”. Die Dankbarkeit gegenüber dem Vater und der staatlichen Institution wird ad absurdum geführt: Die familiäre wie auch die gesellschaftliche Hegemonie wird durch einen Plastiksack repräsentiert. Auf der Polizeistation kann sich Ree noch einmal von der patriarchalen Instanz abgrenzen. Der Sheriff, der zuvor von einigen hillbillies eingeschüchtert worden war, versucht Ree nun mit seiner Position zu beeindrucken und seine Demütigung schönzureden. Doch sie bleibt unbeeindruckt: Sheriff: Hey! I didn‟t shoot the other night „cause you were there in the truck. He never backed me down. Ree: It looked to me like he did. Sheriff: --- Don‟t you let me hear that‟s the story getting around. Bild 3: Winter’s Bone (2010) Ironischer Verweis auf patriarchale Institutionen Klaus Rieser 20 Ree: I don‟t talk much about you, man. --- Ever. (Granik & Rosellini 2010: 69-70) Hier begegnen wir also einem Film, der auf die oben dargestellten Muster rekurriert - eine abwesende Mutter, eine Identifikation der Tochter mit dem Vater, sowie deren Parentifizierung - diese aber in eine neue Richtung wendet. Dies gelingt nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil hier konsequent der Blickwinkel der Tochter dominiert. Dolly in Winter„s Bone (2010), Mattie in True Grit (2010), Hanna in Hanna (2011) und Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) - sind die Heldinnen eines neuen Genres. Filme wie diese lassen hoffen, dass ein neues, töchterzentriertes Kino entsteht. Ein Kino, in welchem Töchter von ihren Vätern nicht verraten, missbraucht und zerstört werden, sondern in dem sie durch die väterliche Unterstützung und Ermächtigung, mehr noch, durch die Auseinandersetzung mit dem realen Vater und mit der Gesellschaft, ihren Weg finden. Bibliographie Barthes, Roland (1972). Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape. Boose, Lynda E. (1989). “The Father‟s House and the Daughter in It: The Structures of Western Culture‟s Daughter-Father Relationship”. In: Lynda E. Boose & Betty S. Flowers (Eds.). Daughters and Fathers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Bradshaw, John (1988). Bradshaw on: The Family. Deerfield Beach: Health Communications. Bruzzi, Stella (2006). Bringing Up Daddy. Fatherhood and Masculinity in Postwar Hollywood. London: British Film Institute. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. “Descendants, The.” Lexikon des Internationalen Films. Zweitausendeins. [online] (http: / / www.zweitausendeins.de/ filmlexikon/ ? wert=538754&sucheNach=ti tel) (23. Februar 2016) Foundas, Scott (2011). “Small Is Beautiful. (Alexander Payne's Movie The Descendants).” Film Comment 6. 22-7. Giffen, Allison (2003). “Dutiful Daughters and Needy Fathers: Lydia Sigourney and Nineteenth-Century Popular Literature.” Women‟s Studies (32). 255-280. Gordon, Linda (1988). Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence. Boston 1880-1960. New York: Viking. Granik, Debra & Anne Rosellini (2010). Winter‟s Bone (Drehbuch). [online] (http: / / www.raindance.org/ site/ scripts/ wintersbone.pdf) (27. August 2015) Herman, Judith Lewis & Lisa Hirschman (1981). Father-Daughter Incest. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Holtzman, Deanna & Nancy Kulish (2003). “The Feminization of the Female Oedipal Complex, Part II: Aggression Reconsidered.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51(4). 1127-51. Iversen, Kristin (2014). “Woody Allen‟s Films Ranked By Age Disparity.” Brooklyn Magazine, 22.5.2014. [online] (http: / / www.bkmag.com/ 2014/ 05/ 22/ woody -allens-films-ranked-by-age-disparity/ ) (27. August 2015) Daddy’s Girls 21 Kaplan, E. Ann (1993). “The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor's Stella Dallas.” Heresies (16). 81-5. Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe (2004). “‟Too Close for Comfort‟: American Beauty and the Incest Motif.” Cinema Journal 44(1). 69-93. Kreider, Rose M. & Renee Ellis (2011). “Living Arrangements of Children: 2009.” Current Population Reports. P70-126. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Kuhn, Annette (1984). “Women‟s Genres: Annette Kuhn Considers Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory.” Screen, 25(1).18-29 Kyle, Selina (2011). “Missing Moms and 'Evil' Females in Disney Films.” Fanpop. [online](http: / / www.fanpop.com/ clubs/ being-a-woman/ articles/ 79126/ title/ missing-moms-evil-females-disney-films) (27. August 2015) Lebeau, Vicky (1992). “Daddy's Cinema: Femininity and Mass Spectatorship.” Screen 33(3). 244-58. Leslie, Marina (1998). “Incest, Incorporation, and „King Lear‟ in Jane Smiley's „A Thousand Acres‟.” College English 60(1). 31-50. Levi-Strauss, Claude (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press. Livingstone, Sonia & Tamar Liebes (1995). “Where Have All the Mothers Gone? Soap Opera's Replaying of the Oedipal Story.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12(2). 155-175. Lynch, Joan Driscoll (1999). “Therapeutic Discourse and ACOA Films of the '80's and '90's.” Journal of Film and Video (3-4). 48-60. Lynch, Joan Driscoll (2002). “Incest Discourse and Cinematic Representation.” Journal of Film and Video (2-3). 43-55. Metz, Christian (1977). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Modleski, Tania (1979). “The Search for Tomorrow in Today's Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form.” Film Quarterly 33(1). 12-21. Modleski, Tania (1988). “Three Men and Baby M.” Camera Obscura (17). 68-81. Nielsen, Linda (2012). Father-Daughter Relationships. Contemporary Research and Issues. (Textbooks in Family Studies Series) New York: Routledge. Online verfügbar unter http: / / lib.myilibrary.com/ detail.asp? id=364181. Payne, Alexander; Faxon, Nat & Jim Rash (2011). The Descendants (Drehbuch). The Internet Movie Script Database. [online] (http: / / www.imsdb.com/ scripts/ Descendants,-The.html). (27. August) 2015. Seiter, Ellen (1983). “Men, Sex and Money in Recent Family Melodramas.” Journal of the University Film and Video Association 35(1).17-27. Sklar, Robert & Tania Modleski (2005). “Million Dollar Baby: A Split Decision.” Cineaste 30(3). 6-11. Stam, Robert (Ed.). (2005). Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden/ Mass: Blackwell. Stetz, Margaret D. (2007). “‟Orienting‟ to New „Worlds‟: Hollywood Fathers and Daughters „Adapt‟ in 1964 and 2004.” Literature-Film Quarterly 35(1). 358-368. Zee-Jotti, Marco (2006). “Bringing Up Daddy.” Filmwaves (30). 14-5. Mag. Dr. Klaus Rieser Institut für Amerikanistik Universität Graz Graz, Austria Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de Britta Viebrock (ed.) Feature Films in English Language Teaching narr studienbücher 2016, 253 Seiten, € 24,99 ISBN 978-3-8233-6952-3 Feature Films in English Language Teaching deals with the use of motion pictures in the advanced EFL (English as a foreign language) classroom. It provides a general introduction to film literacy and explains the rationale, methods, and objectives of working with feature films. In addition, the book contains in-depth considerations on sixteen selected films, which are grouped regionally (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, USA, Great Britain). Each chapter describes the topical focus of the film and its central theme and provides background information on social, historical, political, and geographical issues. A profound analysis of selected scenes lays the foundation for considerations on the teaching potential of the film. In a download section, the chapters are complemented with readyto-use teaching materials on film-specific aspects (narrative, dramatic and cinematographic dimensions), which are organised as pre-/ while-/ postviewing activities. A glossary on technical terms for film analysis completes the volume. ‘But that’s not what it was built for’ The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work Bruce Gaston Architecture is everywhere in Evelyn Waugh‟s works, but critical analysis has concentrated on his depictions of country houses, which it usually views from an antiquarian and aesthetic perspective. Although this approach is understandable in an age when sightseers troop around stately homes, it is both anachronistic and limiting. In fact, a desire to preserve buildings just because they are old is a modern phenomenon. Starting from an investigation of Waugh‟s use of the term architecture, this article offers an alternative way of reading not only the canonical texts such as Brideshead Revisited but also less well-known parts of Waugh‟s oeuvre. It shows how Waugh‟s views of architecture were formed and informed by the classical architectural theories which underpinned Palladianism and specifically by the Roman architect and writer Vitruvius‟s trinity of values: durability, utility and beauty. Taken together, these criteria enable Waugh to explore the experience of architecture in its totality. One should stress the term experience, for if any definite verdict on architectural value is possible, then it is not a building‟s artistic merit that matters but its suitability for fulfilling its original function. 1. Introduction From an early age Evelyn Waugh was interested in architecture and the built environment, as references in the diary he kept as a schoolboy make clear 1 . In his autobiography A Little Learning he recalled that as a child he linked styles of church decoration to types of Anglicanism 2 . His time at Oxford and then at art school sharpened his appreciation of architecture, 1 See the entries for Sunday 13, Thursday 17 and Friday 18 August 1916; Wednesday 5 November 1919; Wednesday 2 June and Saturday 11 September 1920; Thursday 24 March and Sunday 7 August 1921. 2 “Prot, Mod, High, spiky” (Waugh 1964: 93). AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 2 Bruce Gaston 24 an interest which apparently received expression in his destroyed first novel The Temple at Thatch, about “an undergraduate who inherited a property of which nothing was left except an eighteenth-century classical folly [my emphasis] where he set up house and […] practised black magic” (Waugh 1964: 16, 31, 223). Indeed, Waugh‟s name is most associated with a building and Brideshead Revisited is a key text of what has come to be called „country house literature‟. But Brideshead Castle is only the most well-known of the upper-class country houses that are a recurring motif in Waugh‟s fiction: King‟s Thursday, Doubting Hall, Hetton Abbey, Boot Magna Hall … These stately homes are generally held to represent the decline of the English aristocracy and nostalgia for a more „civilised‟ age: In Brideshead the house, stripped and defaced by the military authorities who use it as a headquarters, represents the decline of social order and another step in the destruction of old monuments which had begun with the dismantling of Marchmain House. (Sullivan 1984: 449-50) Most critics leave it at that. It seems strange that there has been no full study of Waugh‟s opinions about architecture and of his depictions of buildings (both country houses and other constructions), especially given his evident interest in the subject, as evinced by both his fiction and nonfiction. This article cannot, of course, be a full study. Its purpose is to advance some preliminary ideas towards understanding Waugh‟s attitudes towards architecture 3 , especially as they are informed by neoclassical aesthetics, and specifically neo-classical architectural theory. The advantage of the approach proposed here is that it can encompass not only stately homes but many other types of built structures; furthermore, it facilitates critical readings that move beyond from the prevailing tendency to write about and evaluate buildings in Waugh‟s works on aesthetic criteria (criteria which, moreover, will be shown to be anachronistic). There is little to dispute in the general argument, made by Malcolm Kelsall and Richard Gill among others, that over the course of the twentieth century the country house became aestheticised and platonised, and thus gained symbolic potentiality, at just the time that it was losing its real social significance; nor can one deny that the country house lent itself to Waugh‟s critique of the values of the modern world. But build- 3 The term architecture is not unproblematic; indeed, it is the subject of lively debate among architects. Pace those (among them Pevsner and Le Corbusier) who would reserve the designation architecture for important buildings, I am using the word here in its everyday sense to refer to both the science of designing structures intended for habitation or some other practical purpose and the end result of these processes (building as verb and noun, as it were), with an attendant recognition that both architectural theory and its end-products vary according to period, location, culture and fashion and can thus be read semiotically. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 25 ings in Waugh‟s work are more than just symbols: they have a very real existence, as is shown by the emphasis put on how they are experienced by the characters, and indeed even to an extent how they affect the course of some characters‟ lives. Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited is the obvious example here, but it should also be considered how two of the motive forces of the plot in “Work Suspended” are John Plant‟s need to dispose of his father‟s home on the one hand and to find a home for himself on the other. The end result of this approach will be a readjustment of focus which at the minute tends too much towards what one might call the „National Trust‟ perspective. As will be seen, Waugh is less romantic and more practical than he is often given credit for. 2. Architectural Writing As has been mentioned, Waugh‟s writings are packed with references to buildings and architectural styles; indeed, the topic was so immediately present to his mind that he often resorted to architecture as a source of metaphors and similes, especially when discussing writing. For example, describing A Handful of Dust to Lady Diana Cooper, Waugh wrote that “the general architecture is masterly” [emphasis in original] (quoted in Villar Flor 2005: 82). It is worth considering this metaphorical use in some detail, for this choice of analogy inevitably emphasises some aspects of the writing process while eliding others. Indeed, analogies for the creative process are often unconsciously chosen to match the user‟s own pre-existing opinions and theories about it. What is important is therefore not the accuracy of the analogy per se but what the use of a particular form of analogy reveals. Detailed analysis of such comments and of the specific ways in which Waugh employs architectural terms figuratively reveals a great deal about his unspoken preconceptions and preoccupations concerning architecture. 4 In “Present Discontents”, his review of Cyril Connolly‟s Enemies of Promise (1938), Waugh explained in more detail what he meant by architecture in reference to writing: […] “Creative” is an invidious term too often used at the expense of the critic. A better word, except that it would always involve explanation, would be “architectural.” I believe that what makes a writer, as distinct from a clever and cultured man who can write, is an added energy and breadth of vision which enables him to conceive and complete a structure. Critics, so far as they are critics only, lack this; Mr. Connolly very evidently, for his book, full as it is of phrase after phrase of lapidary form, of delicious exercises in parody, of good narrative, of luminous metaphors, and once at any rate - in the passages describing the nightmare of the man of promise - of haunting originality, is 4 My thoughts on this are based on Abrams (1953: 4-5). Bruce Gaston 26 structurally jerry-built. It consists of the secondary stages of three separate books, an autobiography, an essay on the main division of modern literature between the esoteric (which he happily names the Mandarin School) and the popular, and a kind of Rogues Handbook of practical advice to an aspiring author. He comes very near to dishonesty in the way in which he fakes the transitions between these elements and attempts to pass them off as the expansion of a single theme. Nor does he seem to be fully aware of this defect either in his own work or in those he examines; on page nine he recommends the habit of examining isolated passages, as a wine taster judges a vintage by rinsing a spoonful round his mouth; thus, says Mr. Connolly, the style may be separated from the impure considerations of subject matter. But the style is the whole. Wine is a homogeneous substance: a spoonful and a Jeraboam [sic] have identical properties; writing is an art which exists in a time sequence; each sentence and each page is dependent on its predecessors and successors; a sentence which he admires may owe its significance to another fifty pages distant. I beg Mr. Connolly to believe that even quite popular writers take great trouble sometimes in this matter. (Waugh 1977: 124) Waugh concretises this rebuttal of Connolly‟s claim in the introduction he wrote for the 1947 reprint of The Unbearable Bassington by “Saki” (H.H. Munro). In it, he praises the style and wit of the novel, but deplores “faults in construction” (Waugh 1977: 87). Specifically, in his opinion, the first chapters are a series of false starts, misleading the reader as to what the novel will be about, and as a result the story only really begins in chapter four. Later, “an inexplicable interlude in chapter eight […] only serves to arouse unfulfilled expectations in chapter fifteen. (Surely the mysterious Keriway will reappear in Vienna? But no.)” (Waugh 1977: 88). “Saki” (who, as Waugh comments, was more successful as a shortstory writer) therefore fails to sustain all his elements within a single, harmonizing design in the way Waugh says a good writer should be able to: the novel‟s “architecture” is unsound. To return to Waugh‟s own work, probably the most famous example of a sentence owing its significance to another occurs in Brideshead Revisited. In Book One, Lady Marchmain reads part of G.K. Chesterton‟s The Wisdom of Father Brown aloud to the family and Charles (128). Cordelia alludes to this event at the end of Book Two (of the 1960 version), explaining to Charles that God will eventually bring the others back into His grace (212). Father Brown‟s religious metaphor then provides Book Three with its title: “A Twitch Upon The Thread”, in which Cordelia‟s prediction comes true. The inclusion of Cordelia‟s explanation leads one to conclude that an intertextual reference by itself was not considered sufficient; its significance also needed to be reinforced through explicit repetition. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 27 As a structuring principle, repetition is frequently combined with variation, such as in the short summaries that accompany the chapters on the Contents page of Brideshead Revisited: “Sebastian at home - Lord Marchmain abroad”, “Samgrass revealed”, “Rex revealed”, “the purpose revealed”, etc. These peritextual summaries reveal how episodes and themes are paralleled and counterpointed in the narrative itself, and this use of echoes and contrasts is typical of the way the novel is structured throughout 5 . Intratextual references, spaced out across the novel‟s parts, help give it unity, in much the same way that architectural features (for example, windows, chimneys, or decorative features such as pilasters) are spaced out and repeated to give a physical structure definition. A further way a good writer can give structure to a novel is by ensuring balance and even a kind of symmetry between its various parts. Waugh originally divided Brideshead Revisited into four parts: a framing prologue and epilogue, and two books of unequal length, with the break coming before the chapter “Orphans of the Storm”, and thus at the point in the narrative where there is a ten-year gap. A defect of this was that it made Book One disproportionately long or Book Two disproportionately short. Possibly to address this criticism, Waugh‟s 1960 revision used the final three chapters of Book One to create a new, comparatively short Book Two (Davis 1990: 16). The old Book Two then was renumbered as Book Three. After the reassignment, the proportions are now (counting pages) the almost symmetrical 2: 20: 12: 19: 1. Waugh‟s most elaborate use of the “writing as architecture” metaphor appeared in the article “Literary Style in England and America” (1955): From the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth there was published in England a series of architectural designs for the use of provincial builders and private patrons. The plates display buildings of varying sizes, from gate-lodges to mansions, decorated in various “styles”, Palladian, Greek, Gothic, even Chinese. The ground plans are identical, the “style” consists of surface enrichment 6 . At the end of this period it was even possible for very important works such as the Houses of Parliament in London to be the work of two hands, Barry designing the structure, Pugin overlaying it with medieval ornament. And the result is not to be despised. In the present half century we have seen architects abandon all attempt at “style” and our eyes are everywhere sickened with boredom at the blank, unlovely, unlovable facades which have arisen from Constantinople to Los Angeles. But this use of style is literally superficial. Properly understood style is not a seductive decoration 5 On all of this, see Davis (1990: 39-45, 85) and passim. 6 For example, Robert Lugar, Architectural Sketches for Cottages, Rural Dwellings and Villas: in the Grecian, Gothic, and fancy styles, with plans, suitable to persons of genteel life and moderate fortune: preceded by some observations on scenery and character proper for picturesque buildings (Josiah Taylor, London, 1805), which Waugh owned. Bruce Gaston 28 added to a functional structure; it is of the essence of a work of art. [My emphasis] This is unconsciously recognized by popular usage. When anyone speaks of Literary Style the probability is that he is thinking of prose. A poem is dimly recognized as existing in its form. There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances and, as Wordsworth pointed out, the true antithesis is not between prose and poetry, but between prose and metre. Now that poets have largely abandoned metre, the distinction has become so vague as to be hardly recognizable. Instead of two separate bodies of writing, we must see a series of innumerable gradations from the melodious and mystical to the scientific. Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash. (Waugh 1977: 106) If one compares this extract with the earlier one, it can be seen that Waugh‟s thoughts on this matter have remained unchanged across two decades. The writer as architect was a common metaphor in neo-classical poetics (Abrams 1953: 166-7). It implies conscious craftsmanship in choosing materials and shaping them according to a preconceived plan; it correspondingly involves a rejection of Romantic notions such as genius, inspiration etc. In this context one may recall Waugh‟s oft-quoted comment about writing being for him “an exercise in the use of language” (Jebb 1963). Moreover, his comments about writing are phrased in the architectural language of a particular debate between the neo-classical and the gothic styles. For critics of the gothic style, its fault was “excess ornamentation or barbarism”, the style being a set of architectural features that could be copied without reference to the structure they were to be placed on. “This distinction allows for the condemnation of Gothic as decorative repetition without concrete reference” (Bernstein 2008: 45). The parallel with Waugh‟s comment about how style should not be abstracted away from structure and considered on its own is unmistakeable. Equally, Waugh‟s comment that “style […] is of the essence of a work of art” has a parallel in neo-classical architectural theory, according to which outer appearance inheres in the materials and their use: “even what are now the ornamental Parts of an Edifice, originally were created by Necessity” (John Gilbert Cooper, “Letters Concerning Taste” [1757], quoted by Gibson 1971: 492). That is to say, purpose, structure and form are inseparable and indistinguishable. This view applies to both building and writing, and is reflected across Waugh‟s work. By extension, neo-classical values such as unity, proportion, balance and symmetry are viewed positively. In its proportions and symmetry, the revised structure of Brideshead Revisited described earlier is very reminis- The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 29 cent of a neo-classical façade, taking Book Two as the main building, the other two Books as wings, and the prologue and epilogue as the terminating loggias, as in a Palladian villa. 3. Waugh and Neo-Classical Architecture That the analysis set out above is more than just speculation can be seen from Waugh‟s most detailed consideration of architecture as architecture: the article “A Call to the Orders”, written in late 1937. “I think it is much the best thing I have written for Nash Harpers and ought to appear somewhere,” he wrote to his agent, A.D. Peters, urging him to find a suitable outlet after it was rejected by Harpers Bazaar 7 . Subsequently offered to Country Life, it was published in a supplement in February 1938. The “orders” refer in the narrowest sense to the classical categories of column styles (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite, of which the first and last are Roman additions to the original Greek three). More broadly, the term means the system of measurements, proportions, hierarchies and appropriate decoration worked out by Italian Renaissance architectural theorists (principally Sebastiano Serlio and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola) on the basis of their studies of Roman architecture, and popularised by the success above all of the architect Andrea Palladio in the sixteenth century. Waugh‟s article is a paean to classically inspired and in particular English Palladian architecture, 8 and should be seen in the context of the „Georgian revival‟ of the 1930s. At that time, appreciation for historic structures was mostly limited to “The Mansions of England in the Olden Time” 9 and to historic churches, whose gothic architecture matched aesthetic preferences moulded by the Arts and Crafts movement of the Victorian period. The Little Guides that began to appear in 1897 and became the standard architectural handbooks of their generation tended to ignore classical architecture entirely, giving exhaustive coverage of secular and domestic architecture 7 Quoted in the notes to its reprinting in Waugh (1977: 60). 8 It is difficult to find a single satisfactory term to describe this period style. Architectural historians would distinguish between Palladian and neo-classical. “Georgian” is also less than ideal, as it refers to a time period rather than a style. As a further complication, Castle Howard, which is strongly associated with Waugh thanks to its use in both the 1981 television series and the 2008 film of Brideshead Revisited, is actually an example of English baroque. In this article I have chosen to use “neo-classical” in a loose way, as it usefully describes a wider school of thought than just architecture. 9 The quotation is the title of a very successful series of lithographs by Joseph Nash, published 1839-1849, depicting both the interiors and exteriors of Tudor and Jacobean great houses as it was imagined they would have looked. See Mandler 1997: 40-5. Bruce Gaston 30 before the sixteenth century but petering out rapidly after that. Their more opinionated contributors were not above applying epithets such as „wretched‟ and „rubbish‟ to plain Georgian work. (Mandler 1997: 145) Even notable Georgian buildings such as Nash‟s Regent Street, Soane‟s Bank of England or Adam‟s Adelphi were torn down or redeveloped with very little public protest during this period. “There were the occasional expressions of regret and nostalgia in the editorial columns, but a sense of resignation rather than sustained protest” (Delafons 1997: 49). In response, a movement to raise public awareness of the value of Georgian architecture was spearheaded by Country Life magazine under Christopher Hussey, its editor from 1933. Waugh‟s contemporary and friend John Betjeman launched the Shell Guides series of guidebooks in 1934 “with the idea of counteracting the antiquarian, Gothic effect of the Little Guides […] and making people interested in Georgian” (Betjeman 1976: 58). The pressure group The Georgian Group was founded in the year Waugh composed his article. “A Call to the Orders” therefore both reflects and seeks to effect a change in opinions about the buildings of this era. As such, it is a good example of how public taste can be consciously shaped by a small group of individuals, a point that will have significance later in this discussion. Campaigners for Georgian architecture were no doubt aided by the fact that by the 1930s the taste for Tudor and Jacobean buildings had been commodified and debased into the „Tudorbethan‟ style beloved of suburban house-builders. Betjeman (who is often erroneously credited with inventing this portmanteau term) criticised the misappropriation and misuse of the style both in his poetry and in his writing for the Architectural Review, while Osbert Lancaster published satirical drawings of the styles of houses built in their thousands in the Garden City developments, categorizing them into mock architectural genres: „Stockbroker‟s Tudor‟, „By-pass Variegated‟ and the like (Carpenter 1989: 210-8). Waugh had already attacked “ye oldeness” in his 1930 travel book Labels 10 and in “A Call to the Orders” he now returned to the theme, contrasting classically inspired architecture favorably not just with Tudor and Gothic but also with modern architecture. Waugh begins by praising “the monuments of our Augustan age of architecture”, within which he encompasses not just the great stately homes but also lesser buildings: the houses of the bourgeoisie, old rectories, coaching inns and the like (Waugh 1977: 61). It is worth noting that Georgian country houses were among the least appreciated examples of that period‟s buildings, attention being principally directed at Georgian urban architecture (Mandler 1997: 278, 282). He remarks with satisfaction that, after a brief period of infatuation with modernist architecture, 10 On p. 65-6 there is a long, mocking list (unfortunately too long to quote here) of the various manifestations of this tendency. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 31 the British are returning to older, more appropriate models. This is followed by a section which offers, I think, the key to understanding Waugh‟s attitudes to architecture. After bemoaning the disregard once given to Georgian architecture, he writes: Now the trouble is all the other way; enthusiasm has outrun knowledge, and we are in danger of doing to the styles of the eighteenth century what our fathers and grandfathers did to Tudor and Jacobean. It is a serious danger, because imitation, if extensive enough, really does debauch one‟s taste for the genuine. It is almost impossible now to take any real delight in Elizabethan half-timber - logical and honourable as it is - because we are so sickened with the miles of shoddy imitation with which we are surrounded. We are now threatened with a new disorder, the first symptom of which is, usually, a formidable outcrop of urns; they are bristling up everywhere - on filling stations and cafés and cottage chimneypieces. Now, there is nothing specifically beautiful about an urn as such - its value depends on its precise shape and where it is put. The builders of the eighteenth century used them liberally, but with clear purpose. Nowadays, we not only scatter them indiscriminately, but we seem to have lost the art of designing them - witness the ghastly jars that have been stuck up in Oxford along the St. Aldates wall of the new gardens at Christ Church. And even where recent decorators have been to the trouble to buy up - only too easily, from the yards of the contractors who are demolishing London - genuine pieces of eighteenth-century work, they have often re-erected them with scant regard for architectural propriety. […] Eighteenth-century ornament is singularly ill adapted for use as bric-à-brac; every piece of it has been designed for a specific purpose in accordance with a system of artistic law. (62-3) Here, no doubt, is the original of Waugh‟s use of architectural analogy in his discussion of Connolly‟s Enemies of Promise, quoted in the previous section. The close link between a building‟s form and its function is an example of another neo-classical value, namely “congruity, which is perceived when the form and ornaments of a structure are suited to the purpose for which it is intended.” (Home 2005: vol II, 706). Even here, however, his point about the relationship between ornament and overall design is not new. The trinity of the good, the useful and the beautiful goes all the way back to Socrates 11 , and a corresponding thread can be followed in architectural theory from Vitruvius through Palladio to their British disseminators and popularisers, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury or Lord Burlington. The latter was the addressee of one of Alexander Pope‟s Moral Essays, in which the poet mocked the same kind of misuse of architectural features: 11 “For all things are good and beautiful in relation to those purposes for which they are well adapted, bad and ugly in relation to those for which they are ill adapted.” (Xenophon 1923: III.viii.7). Bruce Gaston 32 Yet shall (my Lord) your just, your noble rules Fill half the land with imitating fools; Who random drawings from your sheets shall take, And of one beauty many blunders make; Load some vain church with old theatric state, Turn arcs of triumph to a garden gate; Reverse your ornaments, and hang them all On some patch‟d dog-hole ek‟d with ends of wall; Then clap four slices of pilaster on‟t, That lac‟d with bits of rustic, makes a front. (“Epistle IV”: ll. 23-34) Waugh won a prize at school for an essay on Pope (Patey 1998: 7). Given his lifelong interest in architecture, it seems fair to assume he knew this poem, which deals with the correct application of neo-classical principles for building and landscaping. Both writers perceive architecture as a complete system, of which sculptural architectural features are only one aspect. It is therefore worth considering this system in more detail. 4. Utilitas: Buildings in Use Waugh‟s neo-classical understanding of architecture is therefore derived ultimately from Vitruvius, but it is in fact not so much the technical aspects of the classical orders that inform his views but rather Vitruvius‟s trinity of virtues. In De architectura, the Roman architect wrote that good buildings combine firmitas (durability), utilitas (convenience or usefulness) and venustas (beauty) (bk. 1, ch. 3, sec. 2). These criteria became cornerstones of Renaissance architectural theory. In England, Vitruvius‟s trinity was modified by his earliest disseminator in English, Sir Henry Wotton, who gave utilitas precedence, a preference I find echoed in Waugh‟s attitudes towards architecture for reasons set out below. Irrespective of whether Waugh had actually read Wotton or not 12 , he had clearly absorbed the general principles of Vitruvian and Palladian theory 13 and would have been in full agreement with Wotton that “[t]he 12 I ought to make it clear that I have no evidence that Waugh definitely had read Wotton, but Wotton‟s influence on later English writers on architecture was immense (Worsley 1995: 34). 13 Waugh‟s library, stored at the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, Texas, contains editions of Vitruvius (in English), Palladio‟s I Quattro Libri Dell‟Architettura, and key texts in the English Palladian tradition: James Gibbs‟s A Book of Architecture; Isaac Ware‟s The Plans, Elevations, and Sections, Chimney-pieces, and Ceilings of Houghton in Norfolk; Sir William Chambers‟s A Treatise on Civil Architecture; Sir John Soane‟s Sketches in Architecture; as well as two examples of popular practical handbooks that helped spread the Palladian style: The Builder‟s Jewel: or, The Youth‟s Instructor, and Workman‟s Remembrancer by Batty Langley; and The Country Gentleman‟s Pocket Companion, and Builder‟s Assistant by William Halfpenny. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 33 end is to build well” 14 . For example, in “A Call to the Orders” he grounds his criticism of “concrete-and-glass functional architecture” (62) as much in practicality as in aesthetics, art deco being unsuited to the British climate: In a few months our climate began to expose the imposture. The white flat walls that had looked as cheerful as a surgical sterilising plant became mottled with damp; our east winds howled through the steel frames of the windows. The triumphs of the New Architecture began to assume the melancholy air of a deserted exhibition, almost before the tubular furniture within had become bent and tarnished. (62) 15 Waugh‟s satirisation of modern architecture in his fiction is based upon the same considerations. The purpose of Otto Silenus‟s inclusion in Decline and Fall is not only to mock modern architects such as Le Corbusier; rather, the point is equally that his replacement for King‟s Thursday is poorly conceived, impractical (Silenus only grudgingly gives it a staircase) and soon replaced (120, 143). It thus fails to meet any of Vitruvius‟s criteria for a good building. A similar point is made in “Work Suspended”: the “decent house” of John Plant‟s father, built nearly a century earlier (118), is literally overshadowed by the shoddily built flats put up beside it. John sells the house, predicting that it will be replaced by “another great, uninhabitable barrack” which will in its turn deteriorate and be demolished (120). Note the use of the word “uninhabitable” here: the building is characterised as not being fit for its purpose. The test of a successful house is therefore whether it fulfils the function it was designed for. This same principle is applied to evaluate other types of buildings and constructions. One could point to the approving comment in Labels on the fact that Malta has not: lapsed into bogus autonomy as a carefully nurtured „quaint survival‟. […] The occupation by the British Navy has prevented all that; the fortifications have not been allowed to crumble and grow mossy; they are kept in good order, garrisoned and, whenever it was expedient, ruthlessly modified; roads have been cut through them and ditches filled up. Nothing, except the one museum in the Auberge d‟Italie, has been allowed to become a show place; everything is put to a soundly practical purpose. [My emphasis] (104) The paramount importance of the correct use of buildings can be seen by contrasting the chapels of Brideshead and Broome (in the Sword of Honour trilogy). Broome, the ancestral home of the Crouchbacks, may have 14 This dictum is to be found on the very first page of Wotton‟s The Elements of Architecture (1624). 15 Again, a parallel with Pope‟s “Epistle to Burlington” may be noted: “Or call the winds through long arcades to roar” (l. 35). Bruce Gaston 34 been let to a convent for want of a better use, but this is given a positive gloss by the fact that the building and above all the chapel remain in use: “And the sanctuary lamp still burned at Broome as of old” (10). In contrast, Brideshead chapel has been used only rarely and is then deconsecrated, becoming (in Cordelia‟s words) “just an oddly decorated room” (212) 16 . And it is its return to use as a place of worship that offers Charles hope at the end of the novel, whatever despoliation may have befallen the rest of the house. The inverse is also true. Throughout Waugh‟s work one finds a rejection of all kinds of what is called in German Zweckentfremdung, that is to say, using things for a purpose other than their intended one. For example, in Put Out More Flags, Basil Seal visits the home of the Harknesses, an old mill which has been converted “into a dwelling house by a disciple of William Morris”, who in the process had the stream diverted and the mill pool drained (93). Far from presenting this action as an exemplary rescue of an old building from ruination, Waugh uses the mill‟s alteration as one subtle component in his characterisation of its owners as pretentious and self-serving hypocrites. “It looks quite a little place from the road, but is surprisingly large, really, when you count up all the rooms,” comments Mr Harkness smugly (93). The Harknesses are play-acting a bohemian fantasy of rural life and their country mill is just as inauthentic as the Tudor-style suburban villas referred to earlier. 5. Discomfort in a Stately Home Recognising the fact that buildings, for Waugh, are to be used, not to be looked at, can act as a corrective to the view of him as a country house snob, but one can go a step further with this analysis. In the previous sections excerpts from Waugh‟s novels were introduced to support claims, derived from a reading of his non-fiction, about the unarticulated premises of his understanding of architecture. This conflation of fictional and non-fictional references can be justified for a number of reasons. Firstly, one would be hard put to find a critic who would deny that Waugh‟s personal experiences and opinions fed into his writing. Most obviously, both the early satires and the late Catholic apologetic novels are written from a definite standpoint; Waugh himself made very definite remarks about their instructional import. Accepting this does not necessarily mean succumbing to the temptation of a simplistic biographical form of criticism. Secondly, in contrast to Waugh‟s frequent and vocal declarations of his Catholic beliefs, his attitudes about architecture are rarely expressed as 16 Cordelia makes this comment after the chapel is closed following her mother‟s requiem mass. It is reminiscent of Heidegger‟s observation in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes that temples become works of art when their gods have fled. See Handa 2011: 187. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 35 clearly and intentionally as in “A Call to the Orders”. Rather, they arise from an unconsciously held base of premises, prejudices and preferences which delineate the basic parameters and principles that come into operation whenever he writes or speaks of architecture. Finally, as I intend to demonstrate in what follows, neo-classical architectural theory offers a perspective that permits a broader reading which is sustainable across the whole of Waugh‟s written works. If one bears in mind the significance Palladian theory accords to utilitas when looking at Waugh‟s portrayals of country houses, it is not hard to find an acknowledgement that such houses are often uncomfortable and invariably expensive to live in. Take, for example, the introductory description of King‟s Thursday in Decline and Fall (115-19) - the first half is often quoted (as an example of modernity‟s destructiveness and of Waugh‟s nostalgia for a past age), the second (starting at “But the time came when King‟s Thursday had to be sold”) is not. In this description (too long to quote in full here) there is a good deal of irony, largely directed at the type of country house fetishist Waugh is often accused of being. [A]fter tea Lord Pastmaster would lead the newcomers on a tour round the house, along the great galleries and into the bedrooms, and would point out the priest-hole and the closet where the third Earl imprisoned his wife for wishing to rebuild a smoking chimney. “That chimney still smokes when the wind‟s in the east,” he would say, “but we haven‟t rebuilt it yet.” (116) Such pride in the refusal to fix a faulty chimney is clearly intended as mockery of the antiquarian tendency, as is a reference to “clergymen devis[ing] folk-tales of the disasters that should come to crops and herds when there was no longer a Beste-Chetwynde at King‟s Thursday”. The romantic nostalgia King‟s Thursday evokes in its admirers is based on a false appreciation of the past. The age‟s fad for the Tudor, which translated into the popularity of whatever looked Tudor, has already been mentioned 17 , and the campaign to save King‟s Thursday is populated with “Merry Englande” enthusiasts. It is led by a journalist, “Jack Spire” of the “London Hercules”. Spire is a transparent allusion to J. C. Squire, who (Waugh thought) represented the folklore image of a merry-old, cricket-playing England that Waugh considered as spurious as modern timbered architecture. The Waugh of Decline and Fall scorned, or affected to scorn, sentimental wistfulness for preindustrial life, or at least for the quaint trappings of agrarian England. (Garnett 1990: 52) 17 See also Mandler 1997: 230. Bruce Gaston 36 Such antiquarianism is dismissed for being purely aesthetic, a kind of tourism that is satisfied with an inauthentic experience that does not represent full reality. Those campaigning to save King‟s Thursday want to be able to admire it, but would not be willing to actually live in it. They are implicitly accused of hypocrisy for valuing something they have themselves rejected in favour of “modernized manors” with hot baths and electricity (116). It is crucial to bear in mind that in the first thirty years of the twentieth century conservation remained the concern of a small and elitist group (Delafons 1997: 43). While the Ancient Monuments Department of the Office of Works was slowly extending its powers and the number of sites under its protection, its remit was limited. As the name suggests, it principally looked after monuments and sites of historical interest, such as ruined monasteries and castles, as well as archaeological remains and a few buildings that belonged to the government such as the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace. Its unofficial cut-off was 1714 and it emphatically did not get involved with buildings that were either still in use, or had been recently (Thurley 2013: 183, 181). Conservation bodies have always had to cope with the charge that their interventions constituted unwarranted interference in private property rights (Mandler 1997: 154, 178-80, 188-91, 273-4). At first, private houses did not come within their remit at all. The pioneering conservation group, The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB, founded in 1877 by John Ruskin), focussed on protecting medieval buildings, especially churches and cathedrals. It remained a tiny pressure group with eccentric political views and almost no influence beyond architectural specialists (Mandler 1997: 160). The original purpose of the National Trust (founded in 1895) was to protect the British countryside; it was not until the mid-thirties that it began to reorient itself towards the conservation of grand country houses with which it is most associated today. In fact, Pastmaster‟s selling of King‟s Thursday would have been regarded by many contemporaries as completely understandable behaviour. The Great War had brought about changes in social attitudes and behaviour, as well as in politico-economic conditions. As a result, between the two wars, many aristocrats were quite happy to sell up and move somewhere cheaper and closer to „society‟, where the cachet of a title could be exploited (Mandler 1997: 245) 18 . A similarly unromantic attitude can be found in the 1932 short story “Love in the Slump” (“The choice was between discomfort with her parents in a Stately Home and discomfort with a husband in a London mews” (Waugh 1997: 58)) and in A Handful of Dust. 18 Margot Beste-Chetwynde comments that she doesn‟t want her brother-in-law to marry because she wants the Pastmaster title for her son Peter (Waugh 2003: 135). The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 37 This intensely pragmatic attitude is also motivated by financial considerations. Throughout Waugh‟s fiction there is a clear recognition that it is almost ruinously expensive to own and run a grand house. This was especially true in the 1920s and ‟30s, when higher taxation and falling land values hit the land-owing aristocracy very hard (Mandler 1997: 225- 8 and passim). Country houses could no longer support themselves on land rents from their estates and it was nearly impossible to realise the cash value of an estate. Waugh frequently thematises these financial difficulties, particularly through references to death duties 19 . They are a contributory factor to the Lasts‟ relative poverty in A Handful of Dust (14, for example), but figure most prominently in the short story “Winner Takes All”, in which they are the trigger for the whole plot. The chapter on this period in Peter Mandler‟s book The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home is entitled “White Elephants” and that is how many owners of large country houses viewed their properties 20 . What Brenda Last tells John Beaver about Hetton Abbey sums up the conflicting feelings many families must have had about their homes at that time: “I detest it … at least I don‟t mean that really, but I do wish sometimes that it wasn‟t all, every bit of it, so appallingly ugly. Only I‟d die rather than say that to Tony. We could never live anywhere else, of course. He‟s crazy about the place … It‟s funny. None of us minded very much when my brother Reggie sold our house - and that was built by Vanbrugh, you know … I suppose we‟re lucky to be able to afford to keep it up at all. Do you know how much it costs just to live here? We should be quite rich if it wasn‟t for that. As it is we support fifteen servants indoors, besides gardeners and carpenters and a night watchman and all the people at the farm and odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, while Tony and I have to fuss about whether it‟s cheaper to take a car up to London for the night or buy an excursion ticket … l shouldn‟t feel so badly about it if it were a really lovely house - like my home for instance … but of course Tony‟s been brought up here and sees it all differently …” (45) 6. The Value of Architecture Brenda‟s comments, quoted above, bring us to the question of a building‟s value, be it monetary or other. In maintaining the primacy of utilitas, I have been arguing that Waugh sees buildings primarily in terms of their “use value”. In one sense, this claim is a banality: after all, at the most basic level, the purpose of a building is to enclose a space for the purpose 19 On this topic and its effects, see Mandler 1997; its importance may be gauged from the fact that “death duties” take up 8cm in the index. 20 On all of this, see Mandler 1997: 244-5, 254 and passim. (Indeed, the whole chapter is eye-opening.) Bruce Gaston 38 of shelter, and what it looks like from the outside is the least important thing. However, this is clearly only true in a limited sense and the disproportionate importance accorded to a building‟s external appearance is a paradox that is often discussed in architectural theory 21 . This raises another question, namely whether a building has a value if it is not of any use? Do the buildings mentioned in Waugh‟s work have any real financial value? Although it may surprise us to find so, Waugh in his fiction seems to suggest that the only economic significance buildings have is due to the land they stand on. In the interwar period it was very difficult to sell a large country house: they were out of fashion and very expensive to maintain. Consequently, the buildings themselves often had no “exchange value” (to continue for a moment with the Marxist terminology). The contradiction is neatly presented in Decline and Fall: At dinner Margot talked about […] how Bobby Pastmaster was trying to borrow money from her again, on the grounds that she had misled him when she bought his house and that if he had known she was going to pull it down he would have made her pay more. “Which is not logical of Bobby,” she said. “The less I valued this house, the less I ought to have paid, surely? ” (135) Lord Pastmaster thinks he is selling a house, but Mrs Beste-Chetwynde buys a site. Changes in land use recur throughout Waugh‟s work, mostly as demolitions and erections of new structures. In Brideshead Revisited Marchmain House is sold and pulled down to make space for flats (209), just like John Plant‟s family home in “Work Suspended”. In Men at Arms, Apthorpe is disconcerted to find his school has been replaced with suburban housing (Waugh 2001: 86) and, similarly, the army camp near Glasgow where Brideshead Revisited begins is surrounded by farmland recently rezoned and marked out for housing (9-10). In each case, a change in the land‟s use affects its value. Staying with the question of value, if a stately home doesn‟t have a monetary value, can it have an aesthetic value? The point is touched on three times in Brideshead Revisted. The first time occurs when Charles asks whether Brideshead Castle‟s dome is by Inigo Jones. Sebastian, embodying the pure „art for art‟s sake‟ tendency, retorts, “What does it matter when it was built, if it‟s pretty? ” (78). The second occurrence is when Sebastian‟s elder brother mentions at dinner that the local bishop is considering closing the house‟s art nouveau private chapel. “[…] The point is whether it wouldn‟t be better to let it [the chapel] go now. You are an artist, Ryder, what do you think of it aesthetically? ” “I think it‟s beautiful,” said Cordelia with tears in her eyes. 21 Bernstein 2008: 8-9; or Germann and Schnell 2014: 106-7. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 39 “Is it Good Art? ” “Well, I don‟t quite know what you mean,” I said warily. “I think it‟s a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired.” “But surely it can‟t be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years, and not good now? ” “Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don‟t happen to like it much.” “But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good? ” “Bridey, don‟t be so Jesuitical,‟ said Sebastian, but I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could. (89-90) Sebastian‟s purely instinctual reaction to the architecture of his family home exemplifies his childish attitude to life, which makes him incapable of coping with the realities of adult existence and in the end renders him an alcoholic - it is clearly an inadequate response (O‟Brien 2013: 21). In contrast, Cordelia‟s reaction to a place she loves, though also on an emotional level, is understandable since she really is still a child. Charles tries to fudge his response, probably out of politeness, and instead attempts a cultured, objective answer by relating the chapel to the standards of a particular style and period. Nonetheless, Brideshead‟s persistent questioning finally forces him into answering according to his gut feeling. Later still in the novel, Charles and Bridey once again return to the question of architectural merit. Referring to the imminent demolition of the family‟s London residence, Bridey says: “Well, I‟m sorry of course. But do you think it good architecturally? ” “One of the most beautiful houses I know.” “Can‟t see it. I‟ve always thought it rather ugly. Perhaps your pictures will make me see it differently.” (209) It is perhaps a measure of how far Charles‟ opinions and feelings have changed that this time he does not query Bridey‟s use of the word good and himself uses the word Cordelia had used about the chapel. But one suspects that the change is at least partly due to Charles‟ increasing emotional attachment to the Marchmain family and their world. If so, then that would suggest that there is no objective way of measuring a building‟s aesthetic value: in this extract Bridey even is suggesting that a two- Bruce Gaston 40 dimensional, partial representation (a painting) may help change his opinion of an actual physical structure. 22 How much taste is fickle and alters according to fashion and personal investment in a place also becomes clear from a close reading of A Handful of Dust. All critics are in agreement that Waugh intended Hetton Abbey to be the ugliest and most ridiculous stately home he could imagine. “I instructed the architect [sic] to design the worst possible 1860,” Waugh wrote to Tom Driberg, referring to the frontispiece of the novel, drawn by J.D.M. Harvey (Waugh 2009: September 1934). There are plenty of opinions expressed about the house in the novel. The tone is set by its very first mention, when Mrs Beaver tells John, “I‟ve never seen it but I‟ve an idea it‟s huge and quite hideous.” This is followed in the next chapter by condemnation of the house as “devoid of interest” by the county Guide Book, which a reader would probably assume to be an impartial judge (13). But is Hetton Abbey really so awful? In fact, it is hinted that it is more unfashionable than intrinsically bad; the main thing that makes it only semi-habitable is lack of money. The criticisms directed at Hetton can be categorised into the aesthetic and the practical. Chief among the latter are the facts that the house is cold, hard to maintain, and does not have enough bathrooms. On the aesthetic level, the harshest condemnations of the house are undermined by being put into the mouths of some of the novel‟s more objectionable characters: Mrs Beaver (whose artistic taste is hardly presented as a model for the reader to follow) and Brenda‟s shallow London friends (106-7). Additionally, the reader is reminded early on of how tastes change: They [the house‟s features] were not in the fashion, he [Tony] fully realized. Twenty years ago people had liked half timber and old pewter; now it was urns and colonnades; but the time would come, perhaps in John Andrew‟s day, when opinion would reinstate Hetton in its proper place. Already it was referred to as „amusing‟, and a very civil young man had asked permission to photograph it for an architectural review. (15) Despite - or perhaps precisely because of - his love for the house, Tony has no desire to preserve the place in aspic. Instead, he is slowly but sympathetically renovating it: “For the most part that morning he occupied himself with the question of bathrooms and lavatories, and of how more of them could be introduced without disturbing the character of the house” (38; see also 13-14 and 88). In so doing, he is displaying the will to make the house habitable - to use it. 22 In “The Rejection of Beauty in Waugh‟s Brideshead Revisited” (Renascence 58.3 (2006): 181-194.) Laura White argues that the message of the novel is that Christian belief requires renunciation of worldly things like art and beauty. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 41 In A Handful of Dust the characters‟ attitudes to Hetton Abbey exemplify the various possible criteria for forming an opinion about a building: affective, aesthetic, financial and practical. While some characters judge based on only one or a couple of them, Tony is the nexus at which they all meet. Moreover, in uniting them he shows how they are interconnected, a point that this article will return to later. However, interconnected does not mean interchangeable: aesthetic value is not the same thing as monetary value, nor can the one always be easily converted into the other. 7. The Hell of the National Trust In the case of old houses, if one cannot sell them, then one of the only other ways to make money from them is to sell tickets to see them. Country house visiting itself is not a new phenomenon, as anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice will know, but it had peaked in the 1870s and then declined (Thurley 2013: 150). In the twentieth century it moved onto a more professional, business footing. Many historians see financial pressure behind this development: opening to the public was a way of getting the costs off the owners‟ hands. Pioneering tourist attractions such as Warwick Castle were very clearly commercial enterprises (Mandler 1997: 217-21). The sites managed by the government‟s Ancient Monuments Department (see section 5) did not need to generate a profit but were nonetheless expected to attract enough visitors to be self-financing. Advocates of preservation realised early on that to succeed they would have to “educate” the public so that it understood the value of these sites and buildings and would come and visit them. At first, education was understood in the literal sense: the AMD choose its acquisitions on the basis of their suitability to represent British national history. (Thurley 2013: 76-7). But what happened was also an education of the public‟s taste. It was a shift, moreover, that was partly engineered by a minority, in which specialinterest organisations such as The Georgian Group and the National Trust played a significant role. The most successful reorientation of public opinion was the revolution in attitudes towards the British country house. From being derided as “white elephants”, they came to be seen as “arguably Britain‟s greatest contribution to civilization” (Lord Charteris of Amisfield, speaking in the House of Lords, 24 April 1985) 23 . The stately home is omnipresent in today‟s culture: the National Trust is one of the largest membership organisations in the world, proudly claiming on its website to have “about 23 HL Deb 24 April 1985, vol. 462, cc. 1184-211 [online] http: / / hansard.millbank systems.com/ lords/ 1985/ apr/ 24/ cultural-heritage-tax-concessions (16 May 2016) Bruce Gaston 42 six times more members than all the main political parties put together” (National Trust 2016: website), and the television series “Downton Abbey” is the most successful British costume drama since the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. This reassessment occurred surprisingly quickly. Waugh himself admitted in the 1959 preface to Brideshead Revisited that when he wrote the novel he had not foreseen “the present cult of the English country house” (8). The novel was written at a low point for architectural conservation in general: military requisitions, high taxation, general privation, German bombing and insensitive central planning all contributed to buildings being destroyed or abandoned in the forties and well into the fifties. In a development no one had foreseen, the number of stately homes open to the public more than doubled between 1951 and 1961 with a corresponding boom in visitor numbers (Mandler 1997: 371-3; Thurley 2013: 195). Concerted action was taken to protect at least some of those threatened with destruction. This was only possible due to a shift in public attitudes in which country houses became identified with British national identity, culture and history. It is, as numerous commentators have pointed out, a fiction, as is the concomitant image of the owners as enlightened stewards holding their possessions in trust for some nebulous notion such as “the nation” or “future generations” 24 . The success of Brideshead Revisited, of course, helped to foster this incorrect belief. Musing on Brideshead Castle at the end of the novel, Charles employs figures of speech that emphasise organic, incremental growth: The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation by generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper. (331) Such thoughts are a romantic idealisation, their teleology unjustified. Instead, the part of this quotation that should make us stop and think is actually the statement “they made a new house with the stones of the old castle”. This is a reference to the house‟s history, which Charles learned from Sebastian: “We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down. Carted the stones up here, and built a new house” (77). Certainly, an earlier generation of Flytes had no concept of an obligation to preserve or protect an ancient structure. In this they were not unusual: 24 See Adams 2013 for an overview. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 43 We should remember also that from Tudor to Victorian times country houses were bought and sold, built and demolished at will, as architectural fashion changed, and as owners came and went. They were not then regarded as shrines to be venerated, as relics of a vanished golden age which must be preserved untouched and unchanged, at all cost. Instead, they were viewed more dispassionately as machines to be lived in, and they were regularly (and often scathingly) criticised by contemporaries on utilitarian or artistic grounds if they failed to fulfill their functions. (Cannadine 1994: 243) The change in public feeling has been so complete that it is hard nowadays to accept that once it was otherwise. It is now “common sense” in the Gramscian sense that, provided they are of a certain age, the ostentatious houses of the upper classes should be protected and maintained, if necessary with public money and through government action. Nonetheless, an extract from the late story “Basil Seal Rides Again” suggests that Waugh did not view this development wholly positively. Basil‟s daughter has just returned from a stay at Malfrey, the country house of his sister Barbara (which featured more fully in Put Out More Flags), and complains to him: You know what Malfrey‟s like as well as I do. Oh the hell of the National Trust. It‟s not so bad in the summer with the charabancs. Now it‟s only the French art experts - half a dozen a week, and all the rooms still full of oilcloth promenades and rope barriers and Aunt Barbara in the flat over the stables and those ridiculous Sothills in the bachelors‟ wing […]. (Waugh 1997: 509) We can infer from real-life practice what has happened. Presumably, Malfry has been considered worthy of protection. Of the six main reasons for taking over a house, it most likely falls into the category of “Country house museum: Product of multi-generational development of the house, furnishings, collections and gardens.” (Young 2006: 3). Like many stately homes in the post-war period, Malfrey has been given into the care of the National Trust, which has opened the grand state rooms and gardens to the public. The family remains in residence in the less „interesting‟ parts of the buildings (Pugh 2008: 351; Thurley 2013: 182). But while such action may have saved the house from a fate such as demolition, this commodification is only possible by making the house a musealised object. It can no longer be altered but must be preserved as it is (or the semblance thereof maintained). In a self-reinforcing process of giving the visitors, i.e. consumers, what they expect, the house is altered to meet their needs: the family are moved away, areas roped off, explanatory signs installed, floors given protective coverings, and so on. This “staged authenticity” (MacCannell‟s term; cf. Germann and Schnell 2014: 88-9), which is itself often highly inauthentic, abstracts a house from its original Bruce Gaston 44 purpose and makes it inconvenient to live in, and this again returns us to the earlier point about Waugh valuing the practical use of a building. 8. The Totality Of Architectural Experience Writing to the Times in 1942, Waugh pointed out that “there is always dead ground immediately in front of the lines of popular taste extending for two generations. It is only recently, still imperfectly and after heavy losses, that the work of the eighteenth century has been recognised as having aesthetic value” (Waugh 1983: 269). Here we may see the influence of the architectural historian Geoffrey Scott, whose The Architecture of Humanism (subtitled A Study in the History of Taste) Waugh owned 25 . Scott‟s comment in his introduction that “whatever has once genuinely pleased is likely to be again found pleasing” is reminiscent of the sentiments expressed by both Bridey and Tony Last, as quoted earlier. In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that Tony was correct: it is evidence of the changed attitude to Victorian architecture that the National Trust‟s most recent major acquisition was a real-life Hetton Abbey: Tyntesfield Hall, an 1860s Victorian gothic remodelling of older house. This acquisition by the National Trust does not just represent a value judgement but is a constitutive process, heritage being what one declares heritage (Adams 2013: 2). Changing trends in architectural preservation remind us that aestheticisation depends on a consensus that something is worth seeing - a consensus which (as far as stately homes are concerned) was absent throughout the major part of Waugh‟s writing life. This insight has far-reaching implications, for it is here that Waugh is forced to depart from classical architectural theory. Vitruvius, writing in the age of Augustus, at what was arguably the highpoint of Western culture thus far, could well believe that the triad of virtues in architecture was as god-given, inevitable and immutable as the laws of mathematics and that what he set forth in his treatise was the best (indeed, the only correct) way of building. But in fact, only two of the Vitruvian virtues can be considered as being unchanged in status from Roman times to the modern age: durability and usefulness 26 . Waugh, writing nearly two millennia later, knew that tastes change with time. It has been proposed that the three elements of the Vitruvian triad should be understood as being interdependent: The Roman architect and writer Vitruvius said that the essentials of architecture were „commodity, firmness and delight‟, an observation at once so obvious and so dull that it is hard to know what to do or say next. The Swiss archi- 25 The bookplate is dated 1921. 26 The actual manner of using buildings is not unchanged, but the principle that a building must fulfil a use remains valid. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 45 tect Jacques Herzog, however, has pointed out that the trinity becomes more interesting if its parts are interrelated. The commodity of a building, its ability to serve us well, might make it delightful. If a building charms no one, and has no commodity, it will also lack firmness - in that people will want to destroy it - as the various concrete tower blocks that have been blown up testify. Conversely, if a building inspires delight, but is made of fragile stuff, it will have strength. (Moore 2013: chap. 8). If this is true, then the instability of the third virtue („venustas‟ - beauty) makes any definitive verdict on architectural merit impossible. A building‟s beauty may move us to compensate for its lack of usefulness or lack of durability, but beauty is not absolute or eternal, and so by itself is not enough. So although Waugh praised “Augustan” architecture in “A Call to the Orders”, his high opinion of it should not be oversimplified into an aesthetic valuation or a regard for such buildings‟ relative antiquity. Take the final point in the article: One of the difficulties is that during the last twenty years the architecture schools have been getting into the hands of a generation who do not understand the Orders; they can most of them do you a presentable reproduction of a Cotswold farm (for exactly ten times the cost of buying a genuine one) […] but very few of them have had that grinding, back-breaking apprenticeship with the “Orders” about which the great architects of the past complained so bitterly and from which they profited so much. (63-4) I think that Waugh‟s use of the adjective presentable here is telling, for it suggests an object that is to be put on show, rather than used. It is on a par with his earlier choice of the surprising attribute homely to describe the “palaces” of the “Whig oligarchs” (61). In both cases the words do not so much describe the things as indicate the way they are to be used. “A Call to the Orders” can therefore perhaps be seen as an attempt at moulding not just readers‟ aesthetic preferences but also their understanding of the principles behind architecture. The advantage of the classical approach to architecture was its ability to encompass the totality of architectural experience. The rival theories were too one-sided: the Gothic style was all about surface decoration and thus lacked a “totalizing structure that would organize parts and whole, detail and purpose” (Bernstein 2008: 45), while modern architecture rejected aesthetic effects entirely and prioritised building forms 27 . Only Palladian architectural theory united all elements within a single system. 28 27 I was already thinking along these lines when I read Gordon Graham‟s 2003 essay on architectural aesthetics, which proposes a similar division between aesthetic and what he calls “teleological” approaches to architecture. 28 This is not entirely true, but it is what I take Waugh‟s view to be. Bruce Gaston 46 9. Conclusion To summarise, if we concentrate on stately homes, our modern attitudes to these mislead us into concentrating on aesthetics, and if we concentrate on aesthetics, we lose sight of other qualities. Instead, we should remember, as the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Lord Kames wrote in his Elements of Criticism, “[t]here is a beauty in utility; and in discoursing of beauty, that of utility must not be neglected” (Home 2005: vol. II, 685). For Waugh buildings should be used, they should be designed so that they can be used, and, what is more, they should be used for the purpose they were intended for. All three criteria are found grotesquely reversed in the dystopian satire “Love Among The Ruins.” Mountjoy Castle, once a stately home with extensive landscaped gardens, is now used as rehabilitation centre for criminals. This still fine building contrasts with the Dome of Security, an exemplar of modern architecture which is ugly, poorly built and doesn‟t work after less than twenty years, and the primitive “huts” that normal people have to live in (Waugh 1997: 455, 458, 466). Of course, questions of use open up questions about the conditions that allow use. The outrages against architecture in “Love Among The Ruins” are, Waugh wished to suggest, an inevitable consequence of the left-wing, socially liberal, atheistic policies of post-war governments. Equally, one finds elsewhere in Waugh‟s works allusions to financial matters and even government policies (such as death duties or planning regulations) that have an impact on how and where one can live. Being a response to a basic human need, architecture quite literally makes concrete for everyone a whole gamut of economic, social, political and cultural factors. Vitruvius, as a practising architect, was aware of this, but so too was Waugh. Thus, when reading his fiction one needs to keep in mind the full breadth of possible human interactions with architecture. He, like Burlington in Pope‟s poem, truly shows us “pompous buildings once were things of use” (l. 24). References Abrams, M.H. (1953). The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Adams, Ruth (2013). “The V&A, the Destruction of the Country House and the Creation of „English Heritage.‟” Museum and Society 11/ 1. 1-18. Bernstein, Susan (2008). Housing Problems. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, California: Stanford Univ. Press. Betjeman, John (1976). “A Preservationist‟s Progress”. In: Jane Fawcett (ed.). The Future of the Past: Attitudes to Conservation 1174-1974. London: Thames and Hudson. 54-63. The use of architecture in Evelyn Waugh’s work 47 Boulting, Nikolaus (1976). “The Law‟s Delays”. In: Jane Fawcett (ed.). The Future of the Past: Attitudes to Conservation 1174-1974. London: Thames and Hudson. 9-33. Cannadine, David (1994). Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Carpenter, Humphrey (1989). The Brideshead Generation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Davis, Robert Murray (1990). Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed. Twayne‟s Masterwork Studies 59. Boston: Twayne. Delafons, John (1997). Politics and Preservation: A Policy History of the Built Heritage, 1882-1996. Studies in History, Planning and the Environment 22. London: E & F.N. Spon. Garnett, Robert Reginald (1990). From Grimes to Brideshead: The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh. Lewisburg, Pa.; London: Bucknell Univ. Press. Germann, Georg, and Dieter Schnell (2014). Conserver ou démolir? le patrimoine bâti à l‟aune de l‟éthique. Collection archigraphy poche. Gollion: Infolio. Gibson, William A. (1971). “Three Principles of Renaissance Architectural Theory in Pope‟s Epistle to Burlington”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 11/ 3. 487-505. Gill, Richard (1972). Happy Rural Seat. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Graham, Gordon (2003). “Architecture”. In: Jerrold Levinson (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 555-571. Handa, Rumiko, ed. (2011). Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Fiction. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Home, Henry, Lord Kames (1785/ 2005). Elements of Criticism. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Jebb, Julian (1963). “The Art of Fiction No. 30 - Evelyn Waugh”. The Paris Review, Summer-Fall 1963, no. 30. [online] www.theparisreview.org/ inter views/ 4537/ the-art-of-fiction-no-30-evelyn-waugh (accessed 12 May 2016). Kelsall, Malcolm (1993). The Great Good Place. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Mandler, Peter (1997). The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home. New Haven/ London: Yale Univ. Press. MacCannell, Dean (1973). “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings”. American Journal of Sociology 79/ 3. 589-603. Moore, Rowan (2013). Why We Build. London: Picador. National Trust (n.d.). “Fascinating Facts and Figures”. Website of the National Trust. [online] http: / / www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ lists/ fascinating-facts-andfigures (accessed 22 April 2016). O‟Brien, Ellen (2013). “Evelyn Waugh‟s Brideshead Revisited and the Country- House Tradition”. Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies 44/ 2. 19-24. Patey, Douglas Lane (1998). The Life of Evelyn Waugh. Blackwell Critical Biographies 8. Oxford: Blackwell. Pope, Alexander (1731/ 1966). “Epistle IV: To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” In: John Butt (ed.). The Poems of Alexander Pope. A One Volume Edition of the TWICKENHAM POPE. London: Methuen. 586-595. Pugh, Martin (2008). We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars. London: Bodley Head. Scott, Geoffrey (1914/ 1965). The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste. Repr. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. Sullivan, Walter (1984). “Waugh Revisited”. The Sewanee Review 92/ 3. 442-50. Bruce Gaston 48 Thurley, Simon (2013). The Men from the Ministry: How Britain Saved its Heritage. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press. Villar Flor, Carlos, ed. (2005). Waugh without End. Bern/ Berlin/ Frankfurt am Main/ Wien: Lang. Vitruvius (n.d./ 1999). De Architectura (Ten Books on Architecture). Edited by Thomas Noble Howe. Translated by Ingrid D. Rowland. Cambridge: CUP. Waugh, Evelyn (1928/ 2003). Decline and Fall. London: Penguin Classics. Waugh, Evelyn (1934/ 2011). A Handful of Dust. London: Penguin Classics. Waugh, Evelyn (1930/ 1995). Labels: A Mediterranean Journal. London: Penguin Classics. Waugh, Evelyn (1945/ 2000a). Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. London: Penguin Classics. Waugh, Evelyn (1964). A Little Learning. An Autobiography. London: Chapman & Hall. Waugh, Evelyn (1965/ 2001). The Sword of Honour Trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Unconditional Surrender. London: Penguin Classics. Waugh, Evelyn (1976/ 1982). The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Edited by Michael Davie. Rev. ed. London: Penguin. Waugh, Evelyn (1977). A Little Order: A Selection from His Journalism. Edited by Donat Gallagher. London: Eyre Methuen. Waugh, Evelyn (1980/ 1982). The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Edited by Mark Amory. Paperback ed. London: Penguin. Waugh, Evelyn (1983). The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh. Edited by Donat Gallagher. London: Methuen. Waugh, Evelyn (1997). The Complete Short Stories. New edition. London/ New York/ Toronto: Everyman. Waugh, Evelyn (2000b). Work Suspended and Other Stories. London: Penguin Classics. Worsley, Giles (1995). Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age. London: Yale Univ. Press. Wotton, Sir Henry (1624). The Elements of Architecture. London: John Bill [online] https: / / archive.org/ details/ architectureelem00wott (accessed 8 Jan 2016). Xenophon (after 371 BC/ 1923). Memorabilia. In: E. C. Marchant. (ed.). Xenophon in Seven Volumes, 4. Ed. Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA.; William Heinemann, Ltd., London. [online] http: / / www.perseus.tufts.edu/ hopper/ text? doc=urn: cts: greekLit: tlg0032.tlg002.perseus-eng1: 1 (accessed 8 Jan 2016). Young, Linda (2006). “House Museology: Houses as museums in the age of heritage”. Demeures Historiques (ICOM). Conference paper. Valletta, Malta. [online] http: / / www.academia.edu/ 8460846/ House_museology (accessed 12 April 2016). Bruce Gaston Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative in 21 st -Century Novels The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz This article addresses relations of frame tale, nested narrative and mise en abyme in two recent novels: The Fall of Troy (2006) by Peter Ackroyd and Ragnarok (2011) by A.S. Byatt. Both make an atypical use of the device of framing stories. In third-person narration, these novels - in spite of their great differences - present the fictionalised history of an individual‟s particular reading experience of an ancient poetical text which is embedded in a modern historic reception situation. The exceptionality of the novels lies in their peculiar arrangement of frame story and embedded mythological epic. They constantly interfere with each other so that in each text, instead of two homogeneous and coherent stories which the reader can clearly distinguish, fragmentation, shifting and fusion of the different narrative levels prevail. In both novels the ancient poetical myth has the greater weight and impact, because it builds an aesthetic illusion which dominates the fictionalised reader figure of the frame tale, which becomes a „secondary story‟. The myth - Greek, respectively Scandinavian - might therefore be called the „primary story‟, despite the aversion of poststructuralist literature towards any hierarchical narrative order. Through the repeated intrusion of the „frame‟ and the lack of coherence in the telling of both frame story and mythology, the present readers‟ immersion in the imaginary world of the mythology is subverted. The „embedded‟ myth, however, interprets the frame and even anticipates the fate of its intradiegetic - possibly also of the extradiegetic - reader. 1. The Problematic Re-Structuring of Frame in Narratives The structure of framing and embedded narratives, including the special case of the mise en abyme, constitutes a curiosity of literature that has AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 2 Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 50 been appropriated in England since the Middle Ages. 1 Numerous examples of an inserted narrative or play-within-a-play can be found in drama, and narrative fictions with framing tales abound in British literature. 2 The novel of the postmodern era with its ingrained self-reflexivity and tendency to subversion has a special affinity to this device. It is particularly apt to problematise the fiction/ reality binary in a quest for „truth‟, taking issues of authenticity, identity and perception centre stage. Among the most well-known contemporary novels in English that epitomise the motifs of the novel-within-a-novel and narrator-as-writer is Ian McEwan‟s Atonement. The novel uses the form of a “simple reflexion”, whereas Margaret Atwood‟s award-winning novel The Blind Assassin starts an “infinite reflexion” of three narratives, each with the same title. This figure of multiplying the incidence of the novel-within-the-novel is also referred to with the images of “Russian Doll” or “Chinese Box”. Lucien Dällenbach, whose study The Mirror in the Text (1989, fr. orig. 1977) developed the theory of this widespread construct in visual arts and imaginative literature, adds as a third basic category to the two above the “paradoxical reflexion” (124). This term addresses a structure like that of the ancient epigram about the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars. 3 Two unusual third-person narratives by established contemporary British authors, which have not been given a great deal of attention in literary criticism, strike me as peculiar and intriguing. They were described by some recipients as little more than unaltered rewritings of well-known tales and not apt to provoke critical interest. Irrespective of these reactions the novels in hand, Peter Ackroyd‟s The Fall of Troy (2006) and Antonia Byatt‟s Ragnarok (2011), display structural concepts 1 Mise en abyme is originally a heraldic term that was metaphorically applied to paintings and literature by André Gide. Abyme is the centre of the heraldic shield, where an identical picture en miniature is sometimes placed, which contains itself an abyme etc., possibly ad infinitum. The coat-of-arms of the United Kingdom implemented during the reign of King George III. (1816-1837) showed such a picture which was then abolished under Queen Victoria. In literature, a repetition or „mirror‟ of the same figure is meant by mise en abyme - that of the narrator telling a story to a narratee or reader in the embedded narrative(s). 2 For frame theory, which addresses cognitive frames and different media, terminological distinctions and recent research, see Werner Wolf‟s “Introduction” (2006, 1- 40), and for definitions concerning narrative texts his chapter “Framing Borders in Frame Stories” (2006: 179-82), where he also debates “liminal cases” of framings (182-85). Nelles (1997) in his narratological study gives an overview and discusses „frame‟ and the history of its theory in his concluding chapter “Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative“. 3 Dällenbach mainly investigates the French nouveau roman, but also includes narrative literature in German. His only briefly mentioned examples in English are - apart from Hamlet with the interlude called “The Mousetrap Scene” (The Murder of Gonzago) - narrative texts from the 19 th century: E.A. Poe‟s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Walter Scott‟s Waverley. A concise explanation (in German) of the mirror-in-the-text motif and its terminology can be found in Goebel (2002: 85-88). Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 51 and narrative modes that do not fit the notion of faithfulness to the original. Nor do they represent postmodern adaptations of myths and fairytales in the wake of - for example - Angela Carter‟s feminist collection The Bloody Chamber or Emma Tennant‟s short story “Philomela”. The framings in The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok consist of narrativised historic events: in Ackroyd‟s novel they comprise the archaeological work of Heinrich Schliemann, introduced as a foreground tale. Byatt, who had already used nested narratives in her historical novels Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), creates the frame story out of the experience of a child in England during the Blitz. The historically documented subjects of the novels‟ „frames‟ additionally call up the problematic opposition of factional/ fictional narratives. According to a general generic statement, fantasy and myths - the Greek and the Scandinavian mythology in this case - are deemed to be particularly in need of framings (Rubik 2006: 342 n. 2, quoting Bateson). In my article I propose to firstly examine the relation between what I here provisionally present as „frame tales‟ and „embedded stories‟. 4 Secondly, I wish to explain how these narratives mutually interact inside a novel and thereby affect each other‟s reception. Thirdly, my intention is to explore the meaning of the different types of narratives. In Ackroyd‟s novel they consist of the combination of Greek mythology, on which he also published a book for children (Ancient Greece, 2005), with the existent biofiction on Heinrich Schliemann. 5 Byatt‟s narrator retells the Norse myth of the beginning and end of the world. S/ he combines it with a child‟s, perhaps autobiographical, recollection of religious education, her memory of past times and the experience of an ongoing war. In examining the strategies by which a “double reading” of these novels is invited - through recognising noticeable references between the framing and the embedded stories - Dällenbach‟s list (1989: 46-47) can be useful. For the exploration of my topic I have also consulted Dorrit Cohn‟s methodologi- 4 The terms “nested” or “embedded” narrative and “frame” literally apply to fictional texts such as The Canterbury Tales, Mary Shelley‟s Frankenstein or in lyrical poetry to Percy B. Shelley‟s “Ozymandias”, since one narrative encloses the other. Yet many divergences are observed e.g. in Wolf‟s 2006 typology (“Framing Borders”). My article will focus on the conspicuous structural and diegetic violations of the classical pattern in the two examples by Ackroyd and Byatt. 5 It is possible that Ackroyd also happened to know about the 2001/ 2002 renewed and widely publicised academic debate mainly among German scholars who doubted not only Schliemann‟s localisation of ancient Troy and his belief in the historicity of Homer‟s epic, but also more recent research results. Interests of Turkish politicians that were made public may also have played a role in the discussion of whether „Ilion‟ was a colonial city belonging to the Graeco-European cultural sphere or to Asia Minor and that of the Ancient Orient. A monograph (see website 1) by one of the main contestants of this “Battle of Troy with Spades as Weapons” bears the title Crime Scene Troy (Tatort Troja, 2010), which could equally serve as a superscription of Ackroyd‟s novel and supply a recipient‟s epitextual „framing story‟. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 52 cal statements in her 2012 article. Among the abundant publications criticising Gérard Genette‟s narratological propositions on „metalepsis‟, this article is especially relevant for my analysis of the novels. The term “frame breaking” is used by Wolf (2006: 9) for a specific use of metalepsis in framing tales. Cohn distinguishes different forms of mise en abyme and metalepsis - the shift from one narrative level to another. Additionally, I will consider the two chosen example texts with respect to the empowerment/ disempowerment binary. Structurally, the two novels with interpenetrating stories show noticeable analogies: both confront the reader with several narratives of tremendous significance, whose degree of fictionalisation differs. For each of the novels, the ancient poetic myth remains the weightiest of the entangled narratives, thus relating back to the announcement made by the book titles. In Ackroyd‟s text, the plot consists of the life and death of Heinrich Obermann (alias Schliemann), told by an omniscient but partial third-person narrator. Three narratives are interwoven in The Fall of Troy. They are - in historical-chronological order - the following: the first thematises the forgotten and incomprehensible fragile clay tablets of a written culture found in the ruins at Hissarlik, whose origins may lie in the distant past before the Trojan War that probably - if at all - took place in the 12 th century B.C. On the second historical level, the narrator places the Iliad, which was presumably composed either by several poets or one poet who is himself a mythological figure; this occurred about 450 years after the destruction of Troy (“Ilion”) by the Greeks from the mainland (Homer‟s “Achaeans”). The third level consists of a modern reception situation. Obermann/ Schliemann read the Iliad as a history book with exact topographical information; this was the interpretation the epic poem also received in antiquity. The narrativised popular history of the hero figure Heinrich Obermann-Schliemann as obsessed by and finally identifying with the contents of the Homeric poem amounts to a modern mythology and establishes a fourth level. In Byatt‟s work, a distinct frame story marks the beginning and the end of the myth‟s rewrite. A third-person narrator, who assumes the viewpoint of a small child without omitting the adult perspective of the subject matter, describes the life of a little girl in England during the Second World War. The story embedded in this frame is the Scandinavian myth known from the Edda. After the frame is closed, a conclusion to the novel follows. It consists of a first-person narrative by a well-informed contemporary who presents the dramatic ecological changes on a doomed earth to 21 st -century readers. This section links the apocalyptic contents of The Twilight of the Gods with the world war and the destruction of the environment. The graded ensemble of narratives in Ragnarok comprises the Bible with the Christian doctrine of salvation and eschatology, which is the oldest text referred to and remembered in the frame story. The second level is taken up by the cosmology and end of the world as told in Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 53 the early medieval Scandinavian (Poetic) Edda, whose authorship is hypothetical. 6 Thirdly, we get the memorised childhood experience of the Second World War in England, including the apprehensions of the grownups and the thin child. The fourth and last level is that of the adult thirdperson narrator, about whose identity we may speculatively state that s/ he is conceived as the voice of the writer A.S. Byatt. Only the firstperson epilogue, related by an extradiegetic intellectual and entitled “Thoughts on Myths” (Byatt 2011: 157-61), reveals the preceding intrusive frame narrative about the thin child as autobiographical. With regard to reader response, it can be observed that the reception situation represented in both The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok is multiplied by the „mirror(s)‟ in the text: the protagonist of the frame narrative is in each case a character absorbing a famous ancient literary work. However, a reiterated interlocking of frame story and nested narrative subverts the extradiegetic recipient‟s immersion in the fictional universe during the reading process. This interference disrupts the reader‟s expectation initially built up by the paratextual framings of the book titles, which promise ancient mythological epics and demand disambiguation in view of the contrast they form with the first sentences. For Byatt‟s novel, the publication in a „mythology‟ series, the dedication to her mother who gave her little daughter mythology books, and the prefatory “note on names” establish an additional paratextual framing device. 7 The opening sentence in Ragnarok reads: “The thin child thought less (or so it now seems) of where she herself came from, and more about that old question, why is there something rather than nothing? ” (Byatt 2011: 7) In The Fall of Troy the first sentences are the following: “He fell down heavily on his knees, took her hand, and brought it up to his mouth. „I kiss the hand of the future Mrs Obermann.‟ He spoke in English. Neither she nor her parents understood German, and he disliked speaking demotic Greek.” (Ackroyd 2007: 1) The paratextual framings, which contrast with the first sentences, account for a discontinuous reading experience of the extradiegetic recipient. Instead of retold famous Norse or Greek myths as indicated by the book titles, we are confronted at the narratives‟ beginnings with biographical details of persons who have 6 The Poetic Edda is traditionally distinguished from the younger Prose Edda, which was written by the historian Snorri Sturluson. 7 Pignagnoli (2016: 102; also 105) explains Gérard Genette‟s terminology (1997: 344) that separates paratexts into peritexts, which are part of the narrative as frame or interference, and epitexts, which contextually „surround‟ the published narrative either in printed or digital form (e.g. Byatt‟s 2011a article as well as websites, publisher‟s announcements etc.). Epitextual elements are published separately from the fictional work. For the novels under consideration, title, preface or afterword would belong to the category of peritextual elements, while the publication of Ragnarok in a mythology series has to be classified as an epitextual detail, which directs reader expectations. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 54 already been addressed as avid receivers of these myths. This creates the device of the mise-en-abyme. The strategy of duplicating the story of fall or destruction as well as the reading of it by introducing an intradiegetic recipient completes this device in both novels. On the other hand, the way of interfering with the embedded narrative, thereby disrupting an immersion in the narrated world of the myth, continues beyond the openings of the novels. The ruptures take place on the intradiegetic as well as the extradiegetic level. In each of the novels, there are two narrated universes - that of the embedded or evoked mythology and that of its intradiegetic recipient - the nameless thin child, respectively Heinrich Obermann. In preference to the usual structure of the enclosing frame narrative and a coherent enclosed story, the texts present discontinuous recollections of mythologies alternating with events and impressions experienced by the central characters in the 20 th , respectively the 19 th century. For the 21 st -century reader, a repeated hampering of the aesthetic illusion is the consequence. This essay attempts at the end to clarify the purpose of this type of fragmentation in either novel. The reception situation in the „framing‟ texts shows parallels to the reception situation of the „framing‟ texts. Ackroyd‟s Heinrich Obermann is obsessed by his reading of Homer‟s Iliad which relates the War and Destruction of Troy, as was the historical German merchant Heinrich Schliemann, who spent all his wealth and much of his lifetime on financing and leading excavations on a hill in Turkey. Both Schliemann‟s biography as discoverer of „Priam‟s Treasure‟ in the ruins of Troy and the Greek epic, whose general contents is not told but presupposed and intertextually invoked, belong to the collective cultural memory of Europeans. They used to ignore the fact that the place in question lies in Anatolia 8 and those inhabitants of Troy were in all probability Asians. 9 In Ragnarok, with the subtitle The End of the Gods, a third-person narrator retrieves the reading experience of a little girl - presumably the narrator‟s younger self - and her situation during the evacuation in the Second World War, when she studies an English translation of the Edda. The historiographic narrative about the 1940s is as well known as Schliemann‟s biofiction, whereas the juvenile point-of-view surprises the reader. The child walks through the countryside far away from bombed British cities and finds herself absorbed by the medieval Scandinavian mythology of doom and destruction. Hitherto, the retrospective story tells us, this child had only been familiar with the Christian history of Salvation, mediated also by litera- 8 Since the founding of the Turkish state in 1923 the whole of Turkey with the exception of Thrace, which lies in Europe, is called Anatolia. For the region between the Mediterranean and the river Euphrat the Latin name Asia Minor was usual before 1923. 9 This is the novel‟s supposition. Actually, there is no historical certainty as to the origin of the inhabitants of Troy in the Bronze Age. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 55 ture such as Bunyan‟s The Pilgrim‟s Progress. In Ragnarok and in The Fall of Troy, nemesis and the sense of endangered survival characterise both the represented modern reception situation of the thin child, respectively Obermann with his team, and the ancient „embedded‟ tales, which for hundreds and thousands of years held a position as unifying myths with a religious dimension for a cultural community. In contrast to the “Thoughts on Myth”, the three narrativised accounts in Ragnarok are worked into the „story‟ told by a third-person narrator. It is related to an uncommon authorial consciousness, merging a focalising and a narrating agency separated by more than 60 years. The narratee is kept in uncertainty about whether the narrator with his/ her adult perspective and the young protagonist who perceives and reads are meant to belong to the same person at different stages of development: There was a thin child, who was three years old when the world war began. She could remember, though barely, the time before wartime […]. She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school […]. (3) Her mother‟s fate too, was paradoxical. Because there was a war on, it was legally possible for her to live in the mind, to teach bright boys, which before the war had been forbidden to married women. […] Her father was away. […] She remembered him. He had red-gold hair and clear blue eyes, like a god. […] The thin child felt a despair she did not know she felt. (4) Oscillating between different levels of time and divergent states of mind - the abstract versus the imaginative and mythological - the narration intermittently and, as we shall see, irritatingly disrupts a suspension of disbelief with regard to the framing tale as well. To consider the application of this narrative technique in the presentation of the Norse myth will be a challenge for a later part of this essay. 2. The Deconstruction of Illusions In The Fall of Troy, a figural contrast is produced by the opposition of Heinrich Obermann and his antagonist Alexander Thornton. They are incarnations of „the two cultures‟, or poetical myth vs. science. Sophia Chrysanthis, a wealthy Greek from Athens, whom Obermann has lured away from her home to his excavations, soon recognises that her husband is irrational and possessed - “You believe these stories, Heinrich” (Ackroyd 2007: 13) - and eventually changes sides. Obermann regards himself as a scientist and craves a reputation as the discoverer of Troy. However, the introductory scenes depicting his courtship of Sophia show his conviction that the contents of the first epic poem of Western culture is “pure” and in a historical sense represents “the origin” (7) of the Euro- Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 56 pean world. His suppression and destruction of excavated written evidence, which proves that his persuasion of Western ancestry is imaginary and based on fiction, expose him as a swindler and mountebank. Obermann‟s elimination of everyone on his road to fame reveals him to be a criminal instead of a legendary idealist. While the mythologising biography of Heinrich Schliemann celebrates him as an icon of archaeology and empirical research, Ackroyd the historian, who has also variously dealt with mystification and forgery e.g. in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (Puschmann-Nalenz 2001, cf. Evans 2007), deconstructs Schliemann‟s claim to scientific methods and fame. The Fall of Troy exemplifies the subversive irony implied in the double refraction of „the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars‟. Ackroyd‟s slim novel displays the “metafictional paradox” (Hutcheon 1984) or postmodern self-reflexivity of art, which can also instigate reflections on the ethical dimension of fiction. The third-person narrator of The Fall of Troy partly assumes an omniscient, bird‟s-eye perspective dominant in descriptive passages about places and landscapes. The emphasis on visualisation, just like the “strong sense of place in his work” (Unsworth 2006: online), is characteristic of Ackroyd‟s novels and accounts for the strength of the narrative‟s illusionbuilding function, which places the narratee in the ruins of Troy or its surroundings. The narrator evokes the plain in heat or storm and flood, the villages, the dwellings of people in the vicinity, or the coastal town which offers the only possibility of escape from the parallel world of Obermann‟s all-embracing “vision” (Ackroyd 2007: e.g. 93). In other sections, the personalised narrative closely follows the perspective of the characters surrounding Obermann the superman, whose name is insolubly connected with charisma and salient scholarship - a moral illusion soon to be destroyed. Without him, however, Troy would in a material sense be nonexistent for the present, because he alone believed in its preservation below the mounds near Hissarlik in the Ottoman Empire of the 19 th century. Frequently, Obermann is viewed through the eyes of his wife Sophia. Temporarily, several discoverers join the couple: William Brand, a Harvard professor interested in the findings, who enigmatically dies of a fever soon after his arrival, and the Reverend Decimus Harding, an Anglican clergyman from Oxford, whom they met on the boat, who buries Brand; there is Lineau, the blind French art historian, and finally Alexander Thornton from The British Museum, who becomes the German archaeologist‟s fatum. They serve as a foil to Heinrich Obermann‟s charismatic personality and point at his obsession with Homer. A few Turks, who are suspicious of his activities, and Obermann‟s mysterious „family‟ on the fringe underline the shady impression this idealistic searcher, whom the British especially admire, increasingly leaves on the anonymous spectators surrounding the excavations - and on the reader. While the protagonist‟s reported focalisation or introspection generally remains pale compared to outside observations by the narrator or another charac- Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 57 ter, the portrayal shown in scenes of dialogue and action becomes most vivid during represented thunderstorms and fights. The dramatic climax ends in Obermann‟s fatal accident. This also means the terminal Fall of Troy as a vision which he had sustained. The „embedded‟ story which Obermann has absorbed, Homer‟s Iliad, is the omnipresent narrative, which also seems all-powerful, mediated through the hero Obermann. In word and deed he appears invincible because of the might of his conviction that the city Homer described, praised and mourned can be found near Hissarlik, including numerous traces and memorabilia of the war with the united Greek forces. It is Obermann‟s intention to „save‟ the relics from the Turks and instead take them to Athens, which he considers their native place (42; 57; 59). In this manner, the Iliad, quoted and referred to, constantly penetrates the foregrounded „frame story‟ about the excavation and the accompanying disputes, which forms the narrative present. Obermann apparently wins in a sequence of confrontations, though undeniably with obscure methods: Professor Brand mysteriously dies after some kind of allegedly supernatural experience in a cavern, while evidence of the highest importance for Thornton‟s scholarly work is destroyed by fire and his life twice endangered. On the other hand, rising suspicions about the madwoman in the farmhouse and the helper Leonid alias Telemachus - Obermann‟s son - are dissipated. 10 In spite of her husband‟s overbearing, intimidating manner (“Home is here. With me. I am your home”, 11) it is Sophia who comes closest to unmasking him as a bigamist, dubious researcher and criminal. He is eventually killed by his horse Pegasus when he tries to recapture Sophia who escapes together with Thornton. But prior to this totally unforeseen ending the demonic Obermann achieves his nearvictory through his vision of Troy as the Greek “City of Homer” and through his obsessive creation of a discourse, by which the Trojans become Europeans belonging to the same ethnicity as the Greek “Achaeans”, with whom they were at loggerheads. Thus, Obermann establishes the population of Troy as the forefathers of the Occident. “Every day on Troy is a holy day. It is a sacred place. A shrine” (26) he lectures his wife. Obermann‟s speeches assume religious overtones. His belief derives from ancient Greece; his life becomes a sacrifice to the ancient gods (44; 204). Finally he is regarded by his son as Zeus and answers, “We are all gods, Telemachus, when the occasion demands it” (200), confirming his heroism. A place-bound polytheistic religion blends with his overt cultural chauvinism. With the words “Here we are part of the world soul” (201; 207) he claims the excavation place as Homer‟s Ilion for European heritage and European researchers. 10 Heinrich Schlieman had called his son Agamemnon. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 58 Contemporaneous - that is Christian - religious rites are nonetheless performed on a skeleton found on the site (51-52). Its detection and ceremonious burial parallels Sophia‟s discovery of Obermann‟s gloomy past and of his first wife‟s live „burial‟ as an imprisoned madwoman. Even though Sophia excavates her husband‟s secret and reminds him of the fact that Homer‟s epic is poetry (63) Obermann recklessly tries to turn it into reality by living the fictional text (63), irrespective of all arguments which reject his misguided theories and his hubris. His digging went far below the Troy of Homer - if it is that - to an Iron-Age settlement (81), onto which he tries to imprint the details of the Homeric epic poem. The only opponent who is able to adhere to scientific methods and analytical thinking is Thornton. His letter with a report to the British Museum is intercepted; his finding of inscribed tablets and of another skeleton with traces of ritual human sacrifice mysteriously burns or falls to dust, so that Obermann can triumphantly state “we have defeated the enemy” (197). By “enemy” he means everybody who resists his despotic character and his assertiveness. However, Sophia eventually takes her stand against his tyranny when she relocates herself with his rival of the rational, cognitive party: “Your gods do not exist, Heinrich. […] They are a figment of your imagination. Of your pride” (206). Only an „earthquake‟ in the literal and metaphorical sense as deus ex machina can help protect Alexander Thornton‟s new discoveries, which prove that the ancient city of Troy was founded and peopled not by Greeks but by Asians and that the roots of Western civilisation‟s written culture lie still further east. The scientist explains to Sophia the reasons why her husband became a swindler: “He could not endure the thought of Troy [...]. Of his Troy being demolished. He saw an army of Homeric heroes. I saw a tribe of alien people who cultivated human sacrifice” (196). Though diametrically opposed, both Thornton and Obermann “saw” a long-vanished „reality‟. Is one conception superior to the other? Which one will have the more powerful impact? These rising questions are unambiguously answered by the plot development which ends in the sovereign Obermann‟s defeat. Preceding his unexpected, violent death, the Turkish overseer and Leonid-Telemachus discover a chamber in the ruins (210), where more tablets with the hieroglyphic signs that do not belong to Indo-European languages are preserved (135). Before he can realise that he has been beaten, Obermann is trampled to death in a messenger‟s collision with him on horseback. The envoy is Leonid alias Telemachus, who thus involuntarily kills his father and subsequently pays respect to Obermann‟s persuasion that his stories contained “the truth of vision” and gave Troy “its enchantment” (215). The power of fictions has been proven throughout the protagonist‟s life and beyond his grave, as Heinrich Schliemann‟s mythologised biofiction shows. “His vision makes him powerful” (93), Sophia had recognised early about Obermann. Inspiration and imagination (125) are the sources Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 59 which fuel his power and finally lead to a fanaticism also fed by cultural colonialism. 11 As Thornton states, however, no archaeologist can successfully work without illumination by a vision - neither Obermann, who is referred to as “[t]he priest” (152) and regards himself as led by supernatural guidance, nor Thornton, whom he calls a heretic (135). Thornton thinks that knowledge and a sense of geometry are necessary. Yet with the utterance, “I have often observed that the universe seems naturally to adapt to our beliefs and descriptions” (135), Thornton not only gives credit to Obermann‟s endeavours, but - anachronistically informed by post-Newtonian science - also admits to the anthropomorphous nature of all knowledge. Lineau, the blind man, who believes without seeing, takes sides with Obermann by putting the devout amateur above the man of science (137), thereby ending disputes: “This is Homer‟s Troy. Or it is nothing” (136). As a nondescript market town from the Bronze Age it would simply lose all fascination - indeed hardly any tourist would want to travel there today. While the hero Obermann, for whom believing is seeing, must die, Thornton, the sceptic without much confidence in mythology, who only believes what he sees, survives to demonstrate the results of his research to the world. He is able to maintain and demonstrate that the inhabitants of Troy had written in an Oriental language and that the origins of the „Western‟ world and its culture reach much further east than to Homer and the Greek. 12 The „truth‟ of the most celebrated poem in the history of the world (144) contradicts the facts of historical and scientific research as well as the beliefs of the Turks who live on the plain of Hissarlik. They worship their ancestors in the Homeric epic (151) and reclaim their „national heritage‟ - which meets with Obermann‟s outrage, even disgust. In these controversies his speech becomes fervent; he tolerates no objection or doubt but uses the language of a tyrant and religious fanatic. To strengthen the beliefs of his staff he leads his small party on a pilgrimage to Mount Ida, „where Paris met the three goddesses‟ to pronounce an ominous sentence. Not only does Obermann kneel and pray there on “holy ground” (160), 11 Leavitt (2007) points to the roots of the hero‟s opinionated dogmatism which borders on racism, since he is unwilling to admit that the historic Troy was founded by an Eastern people. Gittes for literary history reveals a similar cultural prepossession in several 20 th -century scholars as that discovered by Leavitt in Obermann: in connection with the device of the frame tale she rejects theories that claim Occidental and Christian literary traditions - drama and spiritual journey - as the organising principle for The Canterbury Tales and considers them biased (1983: 237; 249-50). 12 On the metafictional level this statement is corroborated: the formal prototype of the frame story also has its origins in the Orient long before One Thousand and One Nights, which also includes examples of mise en abyme: Wolf (2006: 201) sees the provenance of the literary device in Egypt. K.S. Gittes, like Seager, claims that corresponding examples from Sanskrit literature in India were translated into Arabic (Persian) in the 8 th century (Gittes 1983: 237). Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 60 but a small miracle is worked in this “sacred place” (163), while he drifts into the realm of dreamy imagination - indistinguishable from conscious deception or a theatre performance. The sculpture of a marble head, which previously represented the golden apple in their imitation of the judgment of Paris, disappears overnight. This is interpreted by Obermann as a gift the gods demanded and took away. By contrast, Thornton works on hypotheses, tries to decipher the written signs on the clay tablets (178-9) and speaks with conviction, but cautiously. He is aiming at conciliation rather than hostility or the outbreak of another “war”, which Obermann will wage against all those who do not believe. Sure of his triumph and unknowing of Sophia‟s change of loyalties and imminent flight with his „enemy‟, the hero - in one of the scenes which David Leavitt defines as “just a little kitschy” (2007: online) - chants and prays to the ancient gods (Ackroyd 2007: 203-4) before fate defeats him. His Troy as the original European heritage, imaginary and discursive, falls with him. In Ackroyd‟s novelistic representation the protagonist must die on the spot when his image of Troy „falls‟ - or fails. This contrasts with Schliemann‟s historical biography, according to which he died after an operation in Naples, aged 68 and world-famous. In this fictional portrayal the hero‟s death, in parallel to the war and the doom of the city, has been predicted by the epic poem which was Obermann‟s gospel. 13 The Fall of Troy cannot be called a proper frame story in the usual sense. The Ilias is not presented in coherent textual sections, nor does the reader find the complete traditional biography of Heinrich Schliemann here. Reading the novel requires some knowledge of both the antique epic and the modern biography. Ackroyd‟s text even takes a certain familiarity with them for granted, so that he can play amusingly with them. His novelistic arrangement, however, transcends „mere‟ intertextuality in alluding to or quoting these pre-texts. The author creates a mise en abyme out of the reception of the Iliad and produces a biographical counternarrative that at some point deviates from the historically transmitted facts of Schliemann‟s mythologised life-story, work and personality. Obermann‟s understanding of the Homeric epic, which he divests of its fictionalising qualities, forms an all-encompassing presence. On the other hand, Obermann immerses himself in the details of the poem to a point where he speaks in religious and poetic verbal expression. Thus a continual exchange and fluency characterises thus the relation between the two narratives underlying this text, which exposes storytelling and narrativisation as an unavoidable human activity. 13 Ann Jefferson argues that the end of a frame tale is always revealed in the embedded story (1983: 205). This would apply to the narrative of Obermann‟s fate and the Iliad. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 61 3. Myth and Emplotment As an introduction to my reading of Ragnarok, I will briefly outline the mise en abyme device as used in two of Antonia Byatt‟s earlier works. She chose a complex structure of „mirrors in the text‟ implemented through writer-characters and their work in progress, especially for the last novels of the tetralogy referred to as the „Frederica quartet‟, named after the protagonist of her female Bildungsromane. In Babel Tower (1996), the third novel, three different narrative strands alternate and produce a “braiding” structure (R. Todd). While two of them portray the life and development of Frederica Potter in her social environment and are told in the present tense the third narrative line, titled Babbletower, is an antiutopian novel-within-the-novel placed in France in the historic past of the late 18 th century. Diegetically, this branch differs from the „Potter‟ plot in the novel by the use of the past tense and its immersion in the spatiotemporal setting of gothic fairytales. The fate of this dystopian novel, whose author faces a trial for obscenity but is acquitted on appeal, recalls the historic Chatterley trial of 1960. The near-homonymy of the titles Babel Tower and Babbletower already makes a relation between the „nested‟ fantasy and the framing historical novel apparent. 14 The subtitle of Babbletower, A Tale for the Children of our Time, invites both its reading as fairytale and as mirror of the narrative representation of the world in which its (fictional) author moves. 15 As a second novel-within-the-novel Frederica Potter starts writing Laminations, an experimental text reminiscent of the cut-up and fold-in techniques of William Burroughs. Laminations in Byatt‟s follow-up A Whistling Woman (2002) is well-received by several critics. However, it does not become popular or financially successful. Frederica‟s friend Agatha is the author of yet another novelwithin-the-novel: the bedtime-story Flight North written in a Tolkienesque style for her own little daughter and Frederica‟s son Leo. Like Babbletower, the fantastic story of Flight North is characterised by the remote and indeterminate situation of place and time. None of the embedded narratives is coherently told, all are marked by fragmentation. A Whistling Woman realises „the mirror in the text‟ even literally: the members of a „Therapeutic Community‟ finally convene for meditation and sermons in a „hall of mirrors‟ in an ancient farm house (Byatt 2004: e.g. 404), from which several drugged and disturbed individuals have to be rescued at the final breakdown of the community. The literalisation of the mirror metaphor, which gave Dällenbach‟s book its title, discloses a contemplative self-reflexivity of art and recipients, but also illuminates the dangers of a claustrophobic separation implied in a „spiritual journey‟ with ex- 14 Richard Todd (1997: 71) points at the multiple connection between the framing and the embedded fiction in Babel Tower. 15 For a typology of „mirrors‟ see Dällenbach‟s list (1989: 46-7). Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 62 panding consciousness, by which this group seeks to achieve a supreme level of the mind. My digression about the third and fourth books of Byatt‟s quartet exemplifies the degree of her involvement with the form and meaning of „embedded narratives‟. Her latest novel Ragnarok, however, shows exceptionality in the use of the device and an emphasis on the constructedness of the combined framing and nested stories in a mise en abyme. The result is an unusually organised, predominantly third-person fictional narrative with biographical, meta-narrative and philosophical sections. Thematically not unlike The Fall of Troy, the book Ragnarok: The End of the Gods makes war its central metaphor. War is well-remembered by contemporaries of the internal focaliser, the thin child, whose experience finally leads her to the idea of eternal war. The nested mythology, whose coherent presentation is repeatedly interrupted by the voice of the reading child, not only intervenes in the framing memories from the early 1940s, but suggests an altered world view to the young focaliser. It is prompted by the narration of the Twilight of the Gods, the embedded narrative thus “having an additional, non-chronological function as an illuminator of overall theme and design” (Jefferson 1983: 206). In spite of the prevalence of death and destruction, the opening phrase is fairytale-like: “There was a thin child […]” (Byatt 2011: 3). The child remains nameless, only gender and physical appearance are revealed. She is filled by a strong sense of loss - especially of her soldier-father - and feels a latent danger to her life due to the war. A basic paradox, which the novel realises by “metalepsis at the story level”, to use Cohn‟s terminology (105) - that is moving between two different narratives or between the Norse gods and the thin child as protagonists - is announced in the heading of the first part. 16 The section title “The End of the World” (7), which refers to Asgard and the Gods, but also hints at the child‟s and adults‟ anxieties regarding the Second World War, is immediately followed by the chapter title “The Beginning” - which introduces the child‟s reception experience. The „framing tale‟ about the protagonist‟s reading is identified as a juvenile perception, by the narrator retrieved from her early life. Inside this frame a second narrative - that of the Christian gospel - is absorbed by the child as another “human make-up[s]“ (12) like the benevolent legends or cruel fairytales she already knows - only that she considers it less inspiring. In contrast, she appreciates Asgard and the Gods, which she reads in an English adaptation from the 19 th -century German collection of Northern mythology by Wilhelm Wägner. 17 16 Wolf notes that framing and frames are always “located on another logical and/ or physical level than the framed” (2006: 7). 17 Byatt remarked in an article (2011a: online) on her book that after having read the myth about the creation of the world and the Twilight of the Gods as a child she came “to the conclusion that the Christian story was another myth, the same kind of story about the nature of things, but less interesting and less exciting.” Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 63 Both narratives „embedded‟ here - that of the life of Christ and the Nordic saga reaching from the creation of the world to its end - intermittently undergo an interruption by the tale of the thin child‟s reading and living experience. I am precisely interested in this diegetic „mingling‟ and disruption, by which the concept of mise en abyme is subverted. 18 The way and meaning of the interweaving, by which the narrated experience of the child during the war is periodically drawn attention to only to be broken off again, has provoked pejorative comments. No less a critic than American writer Ursula LeGuin feels irritated by the fragmentation of the (auto)biographical recollection intruding into stories which to the juvenile internal focaliser are indiscriminately mythological tales - Christian or pagan. “[F]or me the autobiographical element would have worked better as a framing device”, LeGuin (2011: online) states about the disorganising effect of the narrative break-up and fusion. The child‟s individual experience interrupts the presentation of the myth, and the reverse, even though the shifts in a metaleptic mode do not immediately destroy the illusion-building seduction of the narrative. 19 By repeated figurally performed narrative metalepsis it (con)fuses two stories in an aesthetic coherence, e.g. when the narrator has the thin child address her father upon his return as one of the gods from her book: “The thin child was woken, and there he was, standing in the doorway, his red-gold hair shining, gold wings on his tunic, his arms out to hold her as she leaped at him.” (Byatt 2011: 148) A recently published definition of metalepsis explains how the effect is brought about, which here takes on the form of a fusion of narrative frame and embedded story: “narrative metalepsis is a text-internal transgression of hierarchically ordered diegetic universes which reveals the internal structure of the text” (Gobyn 2016: 121, emphasis in original). The extradiegetic reading experience mirrors its intradiegetic counterpart: Byatt‟s readers are confronted with a discontinuity similar to that of the child consuming the pre-text. In her English edition of Asgard and the Gods the interspersed translated scholarly comments of the German coauthor Wägner are disturbing to the thin child, especially as she cannot avoid realising that he shares his nationality with those who cause her and her parents‟ distress. This thought further disquiets her (77). Being “a thinking child”, she cannot help asking herself whether the adults are also afraid or “who were the good and wise Germans who had written Asgard and the Gods”? (82) Another interruption of the myth is effected by narratorial metalepsis, when free indirect speech results in the narrator‟s metanarrative reflections: “Whose was the storytelling voice that 18 The designs resembling „text bubbles‟, which Genette uses for narrative levels (1988, 85; 86), illustrate the device of the embedded narrative. 19 Cf. Fludernik‟s further theoretical development on shifting and metalepsis, in which she underlines this ambiguous effect (2003: 392). Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 64 gripped her imagination, and tactfully suggested explanations? ” (82) A German scholar‟s? An anonymous poet‟s? By a rapid change between temporal or story-levels and metanarrative remarks the comment of the omniscient narrator, with a voice constructed as contemporaneous to the implied reader, interweaves with those of the child-focaliser and the Norse myth: Bright Baldur was seized by sleep. […] He dreamed of the wolf with his bloody mouth […]. He dreamed of the Midgard-serpent […]. He dreamed of Hel and her dark halls […]. Most dreams, the thin child knew, are wispy and thin, can be torn away by a determined sleeper […]. But there are gripping dreams of real terror […]. She had dreams of this kind in the war time. (80-81) The child enjoys the almost pre-lapsarian abundance and beauty of nature, of plants and animals in the country and regards the city, to which she returns after the end of the war, as imprisonment. The narrative text told in the third person already hints at an ecological change: “It [the little garden in the city] was a small world, into which she had been exiled or evacuated. It was the earthly paradise that once had been.” (153). Sporadic observations such as this one illustrate how “[the narrator] can no longer enclose the subject within his frame” (Pearce 1975: 56). The framing narrative finally breaks with the “Thoughts on Myth”, obviously presented by an adult well-informed intellectual. The fear of the devastation of the world, which was worrying the little girl back in the early 1940s, is in this final section transformed into the threat of a senseless environmental and ecological ruin of the planet including the selfannihilation of mankind. The analogy of the different imagined or real destructions of the world is enabled by a final metalepsis at the discourse level, where report and political discussion replace biofiction and mythology (see Cohn 2012: 105). 20 The voice of the knowledgeable 21 st century heterodiegetic first-person narrator of these metanarrative “Thoughts on Myth” creates another, incomplete frame with missing opening (see Wolf 2006a: 187-8). It is set on a different temporal, discursive and cognitive level and probes the potential of the myth. Its appraisal of the Norse mythology with „all the brilliant destruction“ (Byatt 2011: 164), which the child found more satisfactory than the contradictory Biblical stories about man‟s fault, salvation through Christ‟s death on the cross, and God‟s love (77-8), endorses the significance of the imaginary. The narrative appendix presents an extradiegetic metalepsis and considers Edda‟s Twilight of the Gods as an allegorical anticipation of the 20 Genette‟s definition of metalepsis would only apply to the transgression realised in the “Thoughts“. According to him it is the overstepping of “a shifting but sacred frontier, between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (1980: 236). Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 65 ongoing destruction of the environment. Additionally, the section of the “Thoughts” is exemplary of a metanarrative that “refers (mostly) - implicitly or explicitly - to the creation of the text the reader is holding in his hand” (Gobyn 2016: 129). In Byatt‟s - as in Ackroyd‟s - novel men are by the protagonist viewed as gods. Ragnarok understands the myth as predicting the end of the „gods‟ either in a world war (the thin child) or on a completely ruined planet (the first-person thinker). In this novel, the mythology as the embedded narrative intradiegetically supplies the interpretive help for the juvenile reader-protagonist of the intrusive „frame‟. The first person of the “Thoughts” leads the extradiegetic recipient to an understanding of The Twilight of the Gods as prophetic of a global crisis. The world where the narrator narrates can in hindsight be defined as equivalent to the world of the “Thoughts on Myth“, which contextualise the universe of the third-person narrator who told us about the thin child‟s experience. I contend that this narrator‟s world is shared by the implied author and implied reader. The world that the narrator narrates is split into the world of the musing child and that of her reading, sometimes amalgamating them. In the imminent doom of the gods, the Norse myth is blending with the World War and the ruin of the earth. The disparity between England in 1940/ 41 and the world of the medieval myth is invalidated for the child, because two modes of seeing the end of the world merge for her. A reader may or may not follow this conflation. To complicate the texture of the novel the perspectives of the focalising child as told by the third-person omniscient narrator and that of the author of the “Thoughts” are not only temporally, but also ontologically separated. A metaleptic transgression, which operates between the real reader and the real author (cf. Fludernik 2003: 392), is achieved by the “Thoughts on Myth”, which break the frame, the ontological plane and also the aesthetic illusion, but belong to the novelistic text. Obviously, the transgression of narrative boundaries in the novel does not appeal to every reader. John Harrison (2011: online) describes Ragnarok in the Guardian as “a clever, lucid, lovely book. But it isn‟t a novel, or even a story in the usual sense. It‟s a discourse on myth”, where discontinuity, eco-political polemics and offenses against fictional storytelling by obvious didactic intentions may irritate the reader. The publication in the Canongate Myth Series, on the other hand, may guide reader expectations contrary to these authorial intentions. Similarly, Peter Conrad states the textual hybridity of Ragnarok in The Observer: „Ragnarok is three books in one, and none of them is anything like a novel.” (2011: online) These critics have their expectations of “a story in the usual sense” disappointed by the ostentatious violation of boundaries, which characterises Ragnarok (cf. Gobyn‟s theoretical discussion, 2016: 123-4). I would like to argue that the reproduction of the ancient Norse myth by Byatt has metamorphosed into a postmodern novel - a novel in which two finely graduated levels of fictional storytelling are created, one of Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 66 which - myth - acts upon the other - the remembered empirical reality of the early 1940s (cf. Cohn 2012: 111). The “Thoughts” are added as a third (exterior) level which contributes to the discourse on myth, principally by stating that - irrespective of the anachronism - the myth tells something about us, the 21 stcentury readers. Ragnarok shares the varying degrees of fictionality with The Fall of Troy, since prior to Ackroyd‟s novel Heinrich Schliemann‟s historical biography and reputation were already narrativised; as are the thin child‟s memories. The dissolution of generic borderlines, the combination of styles and text types with divergent profiles - mythology and biofiction, non-mimetic and mimetic, creative or scholarly - are more intense and deliberate in Ragnarok than even Byatt‟s earlier novels suggest, where critics sometimes claim that the intellectual burden of science or philosophy is too much for the characters. This fusion of the seemingly disparate worlds in Ragnarok is informed by an immersion in fantasy and love of learning, apart from the associative thinking stimulated by the organising consciousness behind the narrators. Although Byatt stated in the Guardian shortly after publication that she had not intended to write an allegory or a sermon, LeGuin also observes that a comparison of “the downward behaviour of the Norse gods with the dire direction of modern civilisation is almost inevitable” (2011: online). As the novel‟s concluding “Thoughts on Myth” proclaim, Ludwig Feuerbach‟s dictum “Homo homini deus est” (Byatt 2011: 22; 169) permeates the novel. The human nature of the gods in the Scandinavian mythology asserts the aphorism. The author persona remarks in the “Thoughts”: “I have said that I did not want to humanise the gods” (169), yet also maintains that the myths about god(s) tell stories about man - a statement, she affirms, that went beyond the scope and comprehension of the child who is deeply concerned with these myths. Painful fundamental human experiences like that epitomised in the mother-godhead Frigg after the death of her son Baldur are equally ascribed to the gods and flow into reflections on loss (96-102). The mind of the third-person narrator has the capacity of an adult and is able to explicitly link them with current issues, which may also trouble the present reader. The quoting of Hobbes‟ “Homo homini lupus est” (42) underlines that catastrophes are man-made. The presumptuously omnipotent behaviour of humans raises them to a godlike position, from which their self-inflicted fall will overthrow them. Ragnarok‟s entangled narratives display fragmentation as well as mutual interpretation. 21 The thin child‟s reality intrudes into wartime night- 21 Cf. Wolf‟s definitions of “direct interpretive help” in the relation of frame and embedded narrative (2006: 27-8). His n. 53 explains the term mise en cadre as the inversion of mise en abyme. This phenomenon is illustrated in Byatt‟s Ragnarok or Babbletower: the embedded legends interpret the „framing‟ stories. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 67 mares and the adult narrator‟s consciousness (80-2). The voice rooted in the 21 st -century writer‟s world, however, controls both the mythology and the juvenile focaliser‟s responses. Confronted with the wartime experience - and subsequently with the impoverishment by urbanisation - the young protagonist‟s „comparison‟ between Christian religious teaching and Ragnarok ends in favour of the ancient Norse mythology, which assumes the impact of prophecy or eternal truth: The gods of Asgard were punished because they and their world were bad. The thin child, thinking of playground cruelty and the Blitz, liked to glance at the idea that gods were bad, that things were bad. That the story had always been there, and the actors had always known it. (122-3) The myth of the gods who irrevocably destroy their world and themselves has here become a powerful and everlasting image, especially when science has made us aware of our exploitative and polluting drive. Thus, Byatt achieves in Ragnarok a straddling of two contrastive „cultures‟ and narratives by introducing in the frame the split into a focalising figure and a narrating voice. The child who is fascinated by the mythologies responds emotionally, while the narrator‟s, and even more the firstperson debater‟s final interpretation of the myth are informed by historical and scientific knowledge. The stylistic and thematic interests displayed in Ragnarok are also not unknown in Byatt‟s work. As Richard Todd foretold in the mid-1990s, a “closure of the „fantastic vein‟ discerned in Julia Corbett‟s fiction represent[s] a path Byatt‟s own fiction has not taken” (1997: 74). The statement‟s accuracy has repeatedly become evident through embedded fantastic narratives by fictional writer figures and Byatt‟s engagement with myth, lately seen in Ragnarok. 22 In the reproduced Ragnarok, which is characterised by the „intrusive frame‟ and oblique mise en abyme, Byatt makes hyperbolic use of textual types and techniques whose beginnings can be traced back to her earlier fictional work. That the thematics of the de-mythologisation of religion and crisis of faith are also addressed reveals itself as another element of continuity extending to her latest novel. 23 22 For Byatt‟s insertion of poetry or invented fiction in other works see Steveker, regarding Possession see also Campbell (2004: esp. 107-11). Annegret Maack gives an interpretation of “The Djinn in the Nightingale‟s Eye”, another frame-tale by Byatt. 23 Cf. Johnson (2012: 81, 85-6, 99-103), who mentions Ragnarok as a culmination point in Byatt‟s development regarding the topic of faith. Even though Johnson considers Ragnarok a “frame story” (100) she pays no further attention to its diegetic and narratorial peculiarities. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 68 4. The Results: Distancing, Disruption, Disillusion Referring to the title of this article and the opening definitions I conclude that the concepts of “frame” and “nested narratives” are being undermined in The Fall of Troy and Ragnarok. Only at first sight does Byatt‟s fictional text display the framing device by chapters entitled “A thin child in wartime” (2011: 3) and “The thin child in peacetime” (147). This structure is, however, contravened by the interaction and mutual interpenetration with The Twilight of the Gods. As a result, the „flaw‟ of a constant interference of one story with the other can be seen as an asset - depending on the unreliable reader (see e.g. the quoted reviews of Ragnarok). Both novels move between two distinct narrative levels, one of which is the representation of an ancient poetical myth, the other its unique reception experience. In Ragnarok the child‟s emotional immersion in an aesthetic illusion through the mythology proves powerful and additionally inspires her ethical and philosophical reflections, while for the 21 st -century reader the illusionary force of the Norse saga is disempowered by the distancing frame story. The latter‟s effect is equally impaired, as LeGuin regretfully intimates, because Ragnarok disappoints the reader expectations of an (auto)biographical framing tale as an entity, which the chapter titles at the beginning and end supported. I have argued that a synergy effect with a keen awareness of the analogy is achieved by this interplay of different narrative levels. Byatt‟s appended “Thoughts on Myth”, placed on the eco-political discourse level, account for the heterogeneity in a narrative text, and equally serve to point at humanity‟s self-inflicted apocalypse. The novel also illustrates the poststructuralist re-conceptualisation of „discourse‟: “History - both private and public - is discourse; so too is fiction.” (Hutcheon 1984: xiv) The blending of myth and life-story is even more complete in The Fall of Troy. Ackroyd has practised a blurring of the borderlines between representations of different kinds of „reality‟ - material or imaginative - since his earliest novels, for instance in The Great Fire of London, 24 and he is also famous for his fictional biographies. He stages the empowerment/ dispowerment paradigm in The Fall of Troy not on the metanarrative, but on the story level, using the synergy of a „framing‟ tale - the history of archaeological excavations - with a „nested‟ narrative - the Iliad - for an ironic effect. He chooses fiction to challenge the degree of verisimilitude in Obermann‟s beliefs. In the hero, the aesthetic illusion manifests itself as a delusion to be recognised by others. Thereby, the quest for the „truth content‟ is rendered parodic by Ackroyd, mocking not least the reader. 25 The “Russian Doll” image applied to The Fall of Troy becomes a simile for 24 Cf. Puschmann-Nalenz 2009. 25 See Hutcheon (1984: 49) for this aspect in the theory of the postmodern novel‟s self-reflexivity. Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 69 fiction itself. Heinrich Obermann had received the mysterious power he exerted from his addiction to the Greek mythologies and became an Olympian hero in his own as well as in posterity‟s eyes, as the authorial voice - playing with the reader‟s knowledge (or ignorance) as a blank space - sardonically insinuates. The central character desperately tries to make reality imitate art and fact fiction, but this paragon of enthusiasts - like Schliemann a victim of aesthetic illusion - is, contrary to historical facts, physically and academically defeated. His downfall occurs in an illusion-building narrative resembling a circular argument. The analogy between the illusion-destroying plot of the story and the temporariness of a fiction reader‟s suspension of disbelief becomes the sting of Ackroyd‟s novel. Like Ragnarok, it ascribes prophetic qualities to the myth. Obermann, who fought for victory over the negation of the Iliad as historiography or guide book, falls in contrast to Schliemann, and with the hero falls his idea of Troy. In Ragnarok, the Norse myth assumes for the child and the narrator the significance of an allegory for catastrophes of the 20 th and 21 st centuries. 26 Byatt‟s peritextual chapter “Thoughts on Myth” represents a third, nonfictional level of discourse, which incompletely frames the fictional „stories‟. For The Fall of Troy, which is the more unified of the two novels, this third layer would be the contextual frame of the extradiegetic, epitextual controversy about Schliemann‟s work, which led to the Battle of Troy of the early 21 st century (see n. 5). Both novels epitomise the rejection of a binary opposition of fact and fiction as well as of frame and enclosure in the literary text. As a result, these novels demand a continual adjustment of the reception process, underlining its performative character. In connection with the term mise en abyme, one has a visual or narrative device in mind and - since the late 20 th century - also the reader‟s often vain groping for „firm ground‟ and „the truth‟ behind unreliable fictions based upon fiction. 27 For the two novels I wish to point to yet another understanding of mise en abyme - looking (or placing) into the „abyss‟, which is also the centre of the whole picture. The term can be interpreted as literally hinting at an apocalyptic end. The shocking invasion of a grim „reality‟ into the imaginary, and the inverse, namely the 26 Cf. Hutcheon: “At a certain point, however, the mise en abyme becomes so extended in size that it is better described as a kind of allegory.“ (1984: 56, emphasis in original) Wolf speaks more generally of the “dominance of the embedded story” (2006: 182, emphasis in original). 27 Cohn comments on the reader‟s anxiety or vertigo, which is caused by interior metalepsis (2012: 110-1). Several of Borges‟ Ficciones employ it to the effect that the flesh-and-blood reader can no longer rule him/ herself out of being part of a fiction or simulacrum. Several Science Fiction novels e.g. by Philip K. Dick or Daniel F. Galouye (Simulacron-3) achieve a result that destabilises the fact/ fiction respectively reality/ illusion binary in a similar way. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 70 core of the supernatural tale imposing itself on modern life, are represented in the novels. In Byatt‟s most recent novel the comprehension of the world out of joint becomes possible through reading the nonmimetic myth. The discourse on the Second World War, so far by many remembered as a first-hand experience, is at present, and independently from official historiography, undergoing the complete metamorphosis into multiple narratives. 28 They have partly existed ever since, but now increasingly become the remembered narratives of our ancestors‟ stories. That narrativisation proves extraordinarily powerful is evident in Heinrich Schliemann‟s popularly transmitted biography, which was mythologised while he was still alive. It has become the legend about a hero who believed in his mission to turn poetry into reality and „succeeded‟ in providing fiction with the status of fact, so that the general public was convinced of his vision‟s truth content. Ackroyd‟s authorial narrator demythologises the biographical glorification - but in The Fall of Troy the media of the exposure is fiction, thereby illustrating the famous paradox. Narrativisation has for me become a central concern in the study of culture and literary analysis. In this article the potential of narrativisation has taken centre stage. The graded fictionalisation of imaginings or empirical and historically documented situations into „stories‟ has required a new look at the concept of frame tales and embedded narratives. With respect to the two novels in hand, an overlapping of these concepts with intertextuality in literature is conspicuous. Regardless of whether the alloy becomes disconcerting or enlightening for our reading experience, the combining of diverse interacting „tales‟ demands the reader‟s renewed attention. It may extend to ethical questions such as „truthfulness‟ in narrative or the variety of representations of global developments. Seen from the angle of reader response, the concurrence of text and paratext initially increases his/ her alertness in receiving „old wine in new wineskins‟. These two rather short novels have experimented with a scale of different textual types and devices to the effect that the question „What is a Novel? ‟ appears more challenging than before. Further study of the varieties of the „narrative discourse‟, to use the wording of Genette‟s book title, is also invited by these two hitherto little regarded volumes. References Ackroyd Peter (2007). The Fall of Troy. London: Vintage. Byatt, A.S. (1997). Babel Tower. London: Vintage. Byatt, A.S. (2004). A Whistling Woman. New York: Vintage. Byatt, A.S. (2011). Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Edinburgh: Canongate. 28 In the novel Waterland by Graham Swift the narrator, a history teacher, calls the immediacy of a real experience “a feeling in the guts” subsequently to be narrativised: “all the stories were once real” (1999: 297). Reconceptualisation of Frame Story and Nested Narrative 71 Byatt, A.S. (2011a). “Ragnarök: the doom of the gods”. [online] (www.theguar dian.com/ books/ 2011/ aug/ 05/ as-byatt-ragnarok-myth) (accessed 12 April 2016). Campbell, Jane (2004). A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP. Cohn, Dorrit (2012). “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme”. Trans. Lewis S. Gleich. Narrative 20.1: 105-14. Conrad, Peter. “Review” (2011). [online] (http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2011/ sep/ 04/ ragnarok-canongate-as-byatt-review) (accessed 12 April 2016). Dällenbach, Lucien (1989 [fr. 1977]). The Mirror in the Text. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley & Emma Hughes. Oxford: Blackwell. Evans, Martin (2007). “The Man of Many Parts”. [online] History Today 57.1 (http: / / web.a.ebscohost.com/ ehost/ detail/ detail? vid=11&sid=926f364ef2da-4bbf-8cff46498be573f5%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4209&bdata=JnNpd GU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=23631973) (accessed 12 April 2016). Fludernik, Monika (2003). “Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode”. Style 37.4: 382-400. Genette, Gérard. (1986). Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell. Genette, Gérard (1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Gittes, Katherine Slater (1983). “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition”. PMLA 98.2: 237-51. Gobyn, Saartje (2016). “Textual Effects of Metalepsis”. [online] Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology 7: 120-37 (http: / / cf.hum. uv a.nl/ narratology/ issue/ 7/ pdf/ 120-137_Gobyn.pdf) (accessed 08 April 2016). Goebel, Eckart (2002). “Vorgespielte und wahre Unendlichkeit: „Mise en abyme‟: Gide, Huxley, Jean Paul“. Die Endlichkeit der Literatur. In: Eckart Goebel & Martin von Koppenfels (eds.). Berlin: Akademie, 85-99. Harrison, John (2011). “Review”. [online} (http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2011/ sep/ 09/ ragnarok-as-byatt-review) (acc. 14 July 2015). Hutcheon, Linda (1984). The Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen. Jefferson, Ann (1983). “Mise en Abyme and the Prophetic in Narrative”. Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, Stylistics, and Literary Criticism 17.2: 196-208. Johnson, Jennifer Anne (2012). „Beyond Belief: The Crisis of Faith in A.S. Byatt‟s Fiction“. Journal of English Studies 10: 81-104. Leavitt, David (2007). “City of Priam”. [online] The New York Times. Sunday Book Review. (http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2007/ 11/ 18/ books/ review/ Leavitt2-t.ht ml? n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FPeople%2FA%2FAckroyd% 2C%20Peter&_r=0) (accessed 12 April 2016). LeGuin, Ursula (2011). “Towards Darkness“. [online] (http: / / www.literaryreview. co.uk/ le_guin_09_11.html) (accessed 14 July 2015). Maack, Annegret (2001). “Wonder-Tales Hiding a Truth: Retelling Tales in „The Djinn in the Nightingale‟s Eye‟”. Essays on the Fiction of A.S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. In: Alexa Alfer & Michael J. Noble (eds.). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 123-34. Nelles, William (1997). Frameworks: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative. New York, NY: Lang. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz 72 Pearce, Richard (1975). “Enter the Frame”. In: Raymond Federman (ed.). Surfiction - Fiction Now and Tomorrow. Chicago: Swallow. 47-57. Pignagnoli, Virginia (2016). “Paratextual Interferences: Patterns and Reconfigurations for Literary Narrative in the Digital Age”. [online] Amsterdam International Electronic Journal for Cultural Narratology 7: 102-19. (http: / / cf.hum.uva.nl/ narratology/ issue/ 7/ pdf/ 102-119_Pignagnoli.pdf) (accessed 08 April 2016). Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara (2001). “The Detective Novel and Recent British Fiction”. In: Raimund Borgmeier & Peter Wenzel (eds.). Spannung: Studien zur englischsprachigen Literatur. Für Ulrich Suerbaum zum 75. Geburtstag. Trier: WVT. 199-212. Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara (2009). “The Disturbed Image: (Re-)Visions of Space and Englishness in Contemporary British Fiction”. In: Rüdiger Ahrens & Klaus Stierstorfer (eds.). Symbolism. An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics. New York: AMS Press. 267-84. Rubik, Margarete (2006). “Frames and Framings in Jasper Fforde‟s The Eyre Affair. In: Werner Wolf & Walter Bernhart (eds.). Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 341-58. Seager, Dennis (1991). Stories within Stories: An Ecosystemic Theory of Metadiegetic Narrative. New York, NY: Lang. Steveker, Lena (2012). “„My Solitude Is My Treasure, the Best Thing I Have‟: A.S. Byatt‟s Female Artists”. In: Anette Pankratz & Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz (eds.). Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction after 1945. Heidelberg: Winter. 155-68. Swift, Graham (1999). Waterland and Last Orders. London: Picador. Todd, Richard (1997). A.S. Byatt. Plymouth: Northcote. Unsworth, Barry (2006). “Digging for Victory”. [online] Review. The Fall of Troy. (http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2006/ oct/ 21/ fiction.peterackroyd) (accessed 12 April 2016). Walter, Uwe (2010). “Homer, der Hügel und die Phantasie. Frank Kolb: Tatort „Troia‟“ [online] http: / / www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuilleton/ buecher/ rezensionen/ sachbuch/ frank-kolb-tatort-troia-homer-der-huegel-und-die-phantasie-11057 368.html? printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2 (accessed 12 April 2016). Wolf, Werner (2006). “Introduction“. In: Werner Wolf & Walter Bernhart (eds.). Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1-40. Wolf, Werner (2006a). “Framing Borders in Frame Stories“. In: Werner Wolf & Walter Bernhart (eds.). Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 179-206. Wolf, Werner (2013). Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany The Lexicographic Treatment of English Negation- Related Phraseological Units Gašper Ilc The paper addresses the treatment of negation-related phraseological units in two specialised monolingual dictionaries (the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms and the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English). The research is based on a database consisting of 595 phraseological units that are listed in the two dictionaries as negative or co-occurring with negation. Following the well-established distinction between inherently negative lexical items (e.g. nobody, nowhere) and non-negative lexical items licensed by negation and other polarity licensers (e.g., anybody, yet), the paper examines the dictionary entries to determine to what extent this dichotomy is presented in the dictionaries‟ introductory sections as well as on the level of concrete dictionary entries. The negative or the polarity-sensitive status of a phraseological unit is established by analysing the corpus data obtained from three British English corpora (the BNC, the enTenTen [2012], the UkWaC), and one American English corpus (the COCA). The data analysis shows that the divide between negative and polarity-sensitive phraseological units is not clearly and consistently presented in the two analysed dictionaries, and this may result in a dictionary user‟s wrong comprehension and usage. The paper puts forth a practical and user-friendly solution in the form of a tripartite model of classification that builds on theoretical considerations as well as real language use and that may be readily adopted by lexicographers. 1. Introduction In linguistic theory, negation is treated as a functional/ semantic operator that changes, i.e., negates, the truth value of a syntactic unit within its scope, be it a word, a phrase or a clause. In his seminal paper on negation in English, Klima (1964) proposes that the negator not, including its enclitic form n‟t, should be analysed as a spelt-out form of the abstract operator, which he refers to as neg. Even though the negative operator neg is AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 2 Gašper Ilc 74 most frequently spelt-out in English as the negator not (cf. Biber et al. 1999: 159ff.), it can alternatively be incorporated into lexical items, rendering them semantically negative. These items have traditionally been labelled as negative items (=NI). For example, the NI nobody can be decomposed into the operator neg and the indefinite pronoun anybody: [neg+anybody]. Similarly, never and impossible can be analysed as [neg+ever] and [neg+possible], respectively. Although the incorporation of the operator neg into nouns, adverbs, and quantifiers has been left undisputed in the literature, its realisation as the negative affixes unand inremains questionable. While it is the case that a lexical item with the negative affixes unand incan trigger negative syntactic environments in the same way as other NIs (cf. Klima 1964: 291-2), it is often the case that (at least) semantically, these items do not necessarily constitute negatives, but form opposites, in terms of Lyons‟ (1977: 279) gradable or complementary antonyms (frequent/ infrequent and born/ unborn, respectively). In addition, Horn (2001: 280) observes that lexical items with the negative prefixes unor inare often understood pejoratively, whereas the same items with the prefix nonare understood as neutrally negated (e.g., irrational and un-Christian vs. nonrational and non-Christian). Hence, it can be claimed that the so-called affixal negation by unor in-, despite its syntactic similarities to proper negation, should be analysed as an antonymic word formation process (cf. Verhagen 2005, Paradis and Willners 2013 among others). For this reason, the affixal negation is excluded from the present investigation. Any account of negation must distinguish between the NIs and the lexical items that are incapable of expressing negation, yet typically occur within the scope of negation. These items have traditionally been referred to as negative polarity items (= NPIs). In English, the difference between NIs and negative polarity items can be observed in pairs such as nobody~anybody and never~ever. In (1a,b), the negator not and the NI nobody syntactically negate the sentence, their negative status being confirmed by the presence of a positive question tag. As (1c,d) show, the negative polarity item anybody 1 can appear in negative sentences but not in their positive counterparts. (1) a. Peter has not seen anybody, has he? b. Nobody has seen him, have they? c. *Peter has seen anybody. d. Peter has not seen anybody. It has to be pointed out that the term negative polarity item may be a misnomer that gives rise to possible misinterpretations. Detailed analyses of 1 A clear distinction must be kept between the negative polarity item anybody, as in (1a), and the free-choice item anybody, as in You can meet anybody you like. For details, see: Chierchia (2006) and Ginnakidou and Quer (2013). English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 75 negative polarity items - items like anybody in (1a,d) - by Fauconnier (1975) and Ladusaw (1979, 1983) have, in fact, shown that they are also found in syntactic contexts that are non-negative. What these contexts have in common - with each other and also with negation - is that they are established by the presence of special licensers that are downward entailing and/ or non-veridical (cf. Zwarts 1995, van den Wouden 1997, Hoeksema 1997, Giannakidou 1998). 2 These studies have also shown that there is cross-linguistic variation as to what qualifies as a polarity licenser. In English, for example, the list of the most typical licensers includes lexical items such as without, lest, before, until, since, few, little, only as well as various syntactic structures including negatives, questions, conditionals, imperative-like conditionals, and comparatives (cf. van den Wouden 1997, Hoeksema et al. 2000, Condoravdi 2010). The described dependencies are exemplified in (2). (2) a. I stumbled but was able to catch myself before anything tragic occurred. 3 b. Few saw anything morally wrong with their crimes. c. By the way, has anybody seen Redmond O'Neill recently? d. If you have seen anything, please tell me. e. The Daedalus ship was far more complex than anything mankind had yet created. f. There are many people who think that it is too difficult to do anything on their own. 2 What detailed investigations into the phenomenon of negative polarity have shown is that it is extremely difficult to identify a sole criterion that can be applied universally for determining negative polarity contexts. Downward-entailment (cf. Fauconnier 1975, Ladusaw 1979, 1983) and non-veridicality (cf. Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998) are the two criteria that have been typically used for detecting negative polarity contexts. Since the focus of the paper is not negative polarity per se, the paper adopts these two criteria for identifying English negative polarity contexts (for alternative approaches, cf. van den Wouden 1997). Downward-entailment: an expression is downward entailing if the meaning of A entails the meaning of the subset of A, e.g. it didn't rain (A) downward entails it didn't rain heavily (subset of A). By contrast, an expression is upward entailing if the meaning of A entails the meaning of the superset of A, e.g. it rained hard (A) upward entails it rained (superset of A). (Non-)veridicality: a propositional operator f is veridical if f entails p, i.e., iff for all propositions p, whenever f(p) is true, p is true, too. A propositional operator f is non-veridical if f does not entail p, i.e., iff for all propositions p, whenever f(p) is true, p may or may not be true (cf. Ginnakidou 1998: 160ff.). For example, the sentence George saw Mary is veridical since it asserts the truthfulness of the claim, whereas George might have seen Mary is non-veridical, because it does not assert the truthfulness of the claim. 3 As pointed out by the anonymous reviewer, this typically occurs in the counterfactual usage of before. Compare, for example, with the factual usage in Before she fell in love with someone really intelligent, she dated all kinds of men. Gašper Ilc 76 Before addressing the question of the lexicographic treatment of negation-related phraseological units, a word on phraseological units themselves is necessary. In phraseology, no agreement has yet been reached about how to properly name lexical units that have been traditionally referred to as idioms (cf. Cowie 1998). In lay terms, idiom has been used as a cover term for prefabricated lexical units or word combinations that consist of two or more lexemes functioning syntactically as well as semantically as inseparable units. Different terminological solutions have been proposed, including phraseological units (Gläser 1988, Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2014), set combinations (Zgusta 1971), phrasemes (Mel‟čuk 1995), and word-combinations (Cowie 1988, Howarth 1996). Since the present investigation is not theoretical in nature, but focusses on the treatment of negation-related phraseological units in specialised dictionaries, the paper simply adopts the terminological limitation as proposed in Vrbinc and Vrbinc (2014: 135ff.): the term phraseological unit (henceforth: PU) is applied to all word combinations that consist of two or more lexemes and display fixed syntactic and semantic properties. It is imperative for the analysis presented hereafter, however, that a distinction be made between PUs with a sentence-like structure and the PUs with a word-like structure. Following Gläser‟s (1988) classification, the terms propositions and nominations are used to label the two categories, respectively. Examples of nominations from my database include the PUs not harm/ hurt a fly; not be half bad; in the middle of nowhere, and instances of propositions include if you can‟t beat them, join ‟em; beggars can‟t be choosers; don‟t count your chickens before they are hatched. The nominations are typically referred to as proverbs and integrated only textually but not structurally. The paper also follows the assumption that PUs are retrieved from the mental lexicon as units (cf. Jackendoff 1995), and that “the selection and processing of an idiom representation is highly similar to the selection and processing of a single word” (Sprenger, Levelt and Kempen 2006: 176). To differentiate between single-word lexical items and multi-word items, the authors propose the term superlemma for the entire multi-word PU, and the term simple lemma for single-word lexical items constituting a superlemma. When a superlemma is retrieved from the mental lexicon, only its syntactic features and not the syntactic features of its constituent simple lemmas are accessible to syntactic operations (Sprenger, Levelt and Kempen 2006: 176-8). In other words, the internal structure of a PU, however similar it may be to a freely composed syntactic structure, is by and large inaccessible to syntactic processes. For example, the transitive verb move, which constitutes the superlemma move a muscle in (3a), is inaccessible to the syntactic process of passivisation (3b). 4 4 It is noteworthy that the notion of fixedness applies to non-compositional and nontransparent phraseological units (cf. Glucksberg 2001). The fixedness of these English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 77 (3) a. Jane didn‟t move a muscle. b. *A muscle wasn‟t moved (by Jane). 2. Aim and objectives Re-examining the PU move a muscle in (3a), a question may arise as to whether negation, spelt out as the negator n‟t, is part of the PU or not. Theoretically, there are at least three possibilities, each resulting in different syntactic patternings of the PU. Thus, we can talk about three distinct syntactic classes: ‣ CLASS A. Negation is an inalienable part of the PU, rendering the PU inherently negative, i.e., an NI (cf. nobody in (1b)). ‣ CLASS B. Negation is not a constituent part of the PU, but is a licenser under whose scope the PU appears, rendering the PU an NPI (cf. anybody in (1a)). ‣ CLASS C. Negation is the operator that freely (i.e., only grammatically) modifies the PU - in the same manner as the tense operator [+ PAST ], for example, modifies the PU in (3a). A quick glance at the treatment of the PU move a muscle in the two specialised idioms dictionaries included in the present investigation - the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (henceforth: CIDI) and the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English (henceforth: OIDLE) - reveals that the entries for the PU are not move a muscle in both dictionaries, which favours CLASS A analysis. A search in the three English corpora, viz. the BNC, the UkWaC, and the enTenTen[2012] displays 24, 103 and 1,093 hits for move__a__muscle respectively. The corpus of contemporary American English COCA displays 97 hits for the same query. On the basis of the collected examples, it can be concluded that most of the examples, indeed, appear in negative contexts. However, as shown in (4) below, a few examples of the PU move a muscle have been identified, which appear in non-negative contexts, but in all of these cases there is a polarity licenser present. Consequently, these examples lead us to the conclusion that the PU move a muscle is not an NI but is an NPI - a CLASS B item. No example of move a muscle was found in non-negative and non-polarity sensitive contexts that would support CLASS C analysis. items is relative, since there is a possible variability in terms of lexical and/ or grammatical modification (cf. Moon 1998, Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2011). Gašper Ilc 78 BNC a. It seemed all over in the 63rd minute when Clough, a few yards outside the penalty area, volleyed a headed clearance instantly into the roof of the net before Hardwick could move a muscle. → licenser: before ukWaC b. Almost before any of the party had time to move a muscle, two sharp cracks were heard, and both swans fell stone dead, with a heavy splash, at the margin of the lake. → licenser: before enTenTen[2012] c. He had me sit on the sitting room‟s floral sofa and told me he‟d forcefeed me jalapeno-chili enchiladas for lunch if I moved a muscle. → licenser: conditional d. Like anybody would do, I hid under my covers too scared to move a muscle. → licenser: adjectival intensification with too COCA e. But before Hunter could move a muscle, Devlin started talking again. → licenser: before f. Move a muscle and you won't have a date for the prom. → licenser: imperative-like conditional (i.e., If you move a muscle, then you…) g. If the Bostonian moved a muscle in retaliation, she would be dead. → licenser: conditional A question may arise at this point as to why there appears to be a discrepancy between the dictionary entries and the real language use. The answer can be sought in Schmidlin (2007: 554), who points out that “[t]he relationship between a dictionary entry and its verifiability in texts is one of the main problems in lexicography,” so to overcome this problem, lexicographers often rely on the frequency distribution criterion (cf. Moon 1998). Treating negation-related phraseological units solely within this approach may have two undesirable side effects. First, since negation is by far the commonest licenser of the NPIs (cf. Hoeksema 1997, Richter, Fritzingher and Weller 2010: 87), the frequency distribution criterion cannot clearly differentiate between NIs and NPIs: an NI always occurs with negation, because negation is its constituent part, an NPI mostly (4) English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 79 occurs with negation, because negation is its commonest licenser. In both cases, the frequency is high. Second, the application of the frequency distribution criterion affects the type of the examples selected to illustrate the usage of NPIs. Once again the negative sentences display the highest frequency, and are thus, by default, selected to illustrate the usage. As a consequence, more PUs may be classified by lexicographers as NIs than there really should be according to their syntactic nature. This is not an insignificant problem and has already been addressed by Stantcheva (2006), who in her analysis of German negation-related PUs and their lexicographic treatment concludes that many German PUs classified as NIs are not inherently negative. Therefore, in subsequent sections, the paper analyses the negationrelated phraseological units as they appear in the CIDI and the OIDLE and addresses the following research questions. ‣ RQ1: To what extent do the dictionary entries reflect the syntactic patterning of PUs as found in corpora? ‣ RQ2: Is there a clear divide between options PUs that are NIs, NPIs or freely occurring with negation (see CLASSES A, B and C above, respectively)? ‣ RQ3: More specifically, how are the NIs and NPIs differentiated? ‣ RQ4: Which information, if any, is provided for the syntactic context of the NPIs? 3. Methodology The methodology used for the present investigation is both quantitative and qualitative in nature. For the purposes of my investigation two specialized monolingual dictionaries of idioms with the highest number of entries - the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms and the Oxford Idioms Dictionary for Learners of English - were consulted. The PUs that are listed in the CIDI and/ or the OIDLE together with negation or labelled as either negative or occurring in negative sentences were manually extracted from the dictionaries. The final data list contains 362 entries from the CIDI and 529 entries from the OIDLE, 296 of which appear in both dictionaries. This list of dictionary entries served as the dataset for the investigation. The PUs from the dataset were then analysed and checked in three British English corpora: the BNC, the enTenTen [2012], and the UkWaC, as well as in one American English corpus, the COCA, to determine whether they are NIs or NPIs or whether they frequently co-occur or collocate with negation. Gašper Ilc 80 4. Results 4.1. The treatment of negation-related PUs in introductory sections and lexical entries The front matter of the CIDI (1998: xiii) explains that the negator not preceding the boldfaced idiom in the dictionary entry indicates that “[t]his idiom is always used in negative sentences.” 5 The dictionary provides no other information for the PUs listed in the macrostructure with regard to their (non)-negative or polarity status. The OIDLE, on the other hand, gives a more detailed treatment of the negation-related PUs on the level of the concrete entries, and shows that these PUs do not form a uniform category. Analysing the entries in detail, we can observe four different treatments of the PUs regarding negation: i. the PU is listed together with the negation (e.g., not care/ give a hoot); ii. the negation is listed together with the PU but appears in parentheses (e.g., (not) breathe a word); iii. the PU is listed either with negation or without negation (e.g., (not) at all, anything like), and special usage information “used with a negative, in a question or in an if-clause” is given in parentheses; iv. the PU is listed as non-negative (e.g., if and/ or but), and special usage information “often used in negative sentences” is given in parentheses. The front matter of the dictionary, however, does not provide a detailed explanation of the four categories, so we can only speculate about their differences. PUs belonging to (i.) are perhaps the most straightforward, since it seems that they are treated as NIs. In category (ii.), the parentheses may either indicate that the PU is licensed by the negation or simply frequently occurs with negation. Since negative, interrogative and conditional clauses constitute by far the most frequent polarity licensing contexts, it can be deduced that PUs belonging to category (iii.) are NPIs. It is unclear how we can classify category (iv.). This category may again involve NPIs or PUs often co-occurring with negation. What is more, there seems to be an overlap between categories (ii.), (iii.) and (iv.): PUs belonging to categories (ii.), (iii.), and (iv.) can include any PU belonging to CLASSES B and C of the theoretically based classification presented in section 2.2 above. 5 That this is a gross oversimplification can be proved simply by analysing examples provided in the entry. For instance, the entry not move a muscle contains a syntactically non-negative example: She sat without moving a muscle as the nurse injected the anaesthetic. English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 81 4.2. The syntactic structure of the PUs With regard to the type of the negative constituent, the PUs from the data list can be classified into the following categories: 6 1. PUs with the negator, e.g. not have a bean, last but not least; 2. PUs with the negative determiner/ quantifier, e.g. spare no expense/ pains/ trouble, reach the point of no return; 3. PUs with the negative pronominals, e.g. be none the wiser, like nobody‟s business; 4. PUs with the negative adverbs, e.g. lightning never strikes twice, nowhere to be found/ seen; 5. PUs with the negative correlative neither … nor, e.g. be neither fish nor fowl; 6. PUs with the negatives of foreign origins, e.g. persona non grata, je ne sais quoi. In the OIDLE, but not in the CIDI, examples can be found in which two or three negative elements are interchangeably listed for the same PU, for example, never/ not darken your door again, on no account/ not on any account, there‟s nothing/ not much, be none of somebody‟s business/ be no business of sb‟s. The analysis of the PUs in Table 1 shows that the negative constituents under investigation are not equally represented. The vast majority of the PUs contains the negator: 66.85% in the CIDI, and 60.49% in the OIDLE. The next most frequently-used negative constituent is the negative determiner, which amounts to approximately 20% of all examples in both dictionaries. None of the other analysed constituents represents more than 10% of the examples from the database. 6 Due to space limitations, only some examples are provided for the category under discussion. This principle is followed throughout the paper. Gašper Ilc 82 negative constituent CIDI (N= 362) OIDLE (N=529) N % N % negator 24 2 66.85 320 60.49 negative determiner 74 20.44 110 20.79 negative pronominals 22 6.08 47 8.88 negative adverbs 16 4.42 19 3.59 semi-negative adverbs 1 0.28 1 0.19 negative correlatives 3 0.83 2 0.38 negatives of foreign origins 4 1.10 4 0.76 interchangeable negative constituents 0 0.00 26 4.92 Table 1: Frequency of the negative constituents 4.3. Corpus data The corpus data analysis reveals that the PUs from my database can be neatly categorised into the three classes introduced in section 2.2 above. Approximately 40% 7 of all the items from my database belong to CLASS A, the inherently negative PUs. Items belonging to this category may either be propositions or nominations, though the former category is far more typical (approx. 80% of the examples). For instance: ‣ Propositions: if you can‟t beat them, join ‟em; beggars can‟t be choosers; better the devil you know than the devil you don‟t; you can‟t make brick without straw; if it ain‟t broke, don‟t fix it; butter wouldn‟t melt in sb‟s mouth; you can‟t teach an old dog new tricks; don‟t sweat it; you can‟t judge a book by its cover. ‣ Nominations: not with a bang but with a whimper; not be half bad; not know if/ whether you are coming or going; not know whether to laugh or cry; not know which way to turn; not have a minute to call. In addition, many of the PUs belonging to this class, contain a simple lemma with the incorporated negative operator neg in terms of Klima (1964, see section 2 above) rather than the negator not, for example: it‟s now or never; a watched pot never boils; it never rains but it pours; dead men tell no lies; better late than never; long time no see; the point of no return. C LASS B items, i.e., the PUs that are NPIs, represent approximately 30% of the items from my database list. Corpus data reveal that these PUs can also be found in affirmative sentences; however, in such cases 7 Only an approximate number can be given for the three classes, due to different labelling of the PUs with regard to negation in the analysed dictionaries; see section 4.1 above. English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 83 their syntactic well-formedness depends on the presence of a polarity licenser as exemplified in the case of the PU move a muscle in section 2.2 above. Some examples of polarity sensitive PUs from the database include: bat an eye/ eyelid/ eyelash; believe your ears; have a care in the world; know the half of it; budge/ give an inch; know the first thing about it; let the grass grow under your feet; a red cent; turn a hair; sleep a wink. Many of the PUs belonging to CLASS B PUs can be labelled minimizers or maximizers as defined and proposed by Israel (2001). A minimizer is a lexical expression that refers to a minimal scalar degree, whereas a maximizer, predictably, is its opposite, and refers to a maximal scalar degree (Israel 2001: 299-300). Thus, in (5) the minimizer lift a finger emphasizes the lowest possible degree. (5) a. And you don't even mention that the fat bugger hasn‟t lifted a finger in the last eight years to help the cause. b. But I knew that if I lifted a finger against him, he‟d have it his way. Additional examples of minimizers include bat an eye/ eyelash/ eyelid; move a muscle; sleep a wink; budge/ give an inch. Maximizers such as with a ten foot pole; all the tea in China; wild horses; for the life of me; for love or money on the other hand express the high degree of emphasis: (6) a. If you change the bottle, will guys even touch it with a ten foot pole? b. I wouldn‟t do this for all the tea in China. c. On the weekends, only wild horses could get me out. The pragmatic value of maximizers can be best observed in cases in which these lexical items are not fully integrated into the clausal structure but rather function as a speaker‟s comments or evaluations of the proposition i.e., when they have a disjunctive role: 8 (7) a. But I cannot, for the life of me, understand our motivations, thousands of years later, still following the conmen of yesteryear into our gory, bloody, violent end. b. The Big „C‟ Compliance cannot be delivered as a service, nor by Santa Claus, not for all the tea in China. c. I could not think of that one perfect word, not for love or money. Approximately 30% of the PUs from my database belong to CLASS C items, which are freely used with negation (i.e., negation is only an operator syntactically modifying the PUs). Even though these PUs are listed as negative or negation-related in either the OIDLE or the CIDI, the corpus 8 In this function, they typically reinforce or strengthen the negative meaning of the linguistic expression. This type of negation has been traditionally referred to as resumptive negation (cf. Jespersen 1917: 72ff.). Gašper Ilc 84 data reveal that they are inherently non-negative and non-polarity sensitive, as shown by (8) and (9). (8) a. I can‟t be arsed to go cut and paste the exact comment. → negation b. Do you want to be arsed with this? → polarity (interrogative) c. And there are a couple of boxes full of random wonderfulness that will find their way to a charity shop as soon as someone can be arsed. → affirmative, non-polarity (9) a. And today hasn't exactly been a barrel of laughs. → negation b. If you are a barrel of laughs, you may consider marking some funny logos like a right-pointing arrow with letters of “I am yours”, or a wedding image with “game over”. → polarity (conditional) c. Eugene is a barrel of laughs and a hard core conservative. → affirmative, non-polarity It is noteworthy that there seem to be two subgroups of the CLASS C items. The first subgroup comprises PUs that are non-negative and non-polarity sensitive, yet they frequently appear in negative context. Here, it seems that the co-occurrence of the negation and the PU is not syntactically motivated as is the case with CLASS B, but the relation between the two can be described in terms of collocation. A good example is the PU (can) be arsed (8), for which the statistics show that it mostly appears in negative sentences (Table 2). Corpus be arsed total N Negation +be arsed % BNC 16 81 UkWaC 624 63 enTenTen[2012] 1456 78 COCA 0 0 Table 2: Frequency of the PU be arsed A pattern similar to the PU be arsed can be observed with the PUs such as bet on it; in the biblical sense; break the bank; have a clue; be caught/ seen dead; have the faintest/ foggiest (idea); to put too fine a point on it; do things English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 85 by halves; room to swing a cat; say boo (to a goose/ a fly); sit well with sb; by any stretch of imagination; have two pennies/ nickels to rub together; hear the end of it; in all my born days. In the second subgroup, there are PUs that freely occur in the negative and non-negative contexts without any noticeable differences between the different syntactic contexts. An instance of an PU with this property is a barrel of laughs exemplified in (9) with its statistics shown in Table 3. Some other PUs belonging to this subcategory are: go a bundle on sth; be the marrying kind; be a bed of roses; be all fun and games; make bricks without straw; be sb‟s cup of tea; be sb‟s department; be the end of the world; hear yourself think; lose sleep over sth; Mr Nice Guy. Corpus a barrel of laughs total N negated % BNC 6 67 ukWaC 51 20 enTenTen[2012] 84 24 COCA 8 63 Table 3: Frequency of the PU a barrel of laughs My analysis has also shown that the occurrences of PUs vary across corpora; therefore, the selection of a particular corpus can influence the lexicographic treatment of (negation-related) PUs. This can be easily demonstrated just by statistically analysing the frequency values of the PUs be arsed and a barrel of laughs presented in Tables 2 and 3. As table 4 below shows, the difference between the frequency values in question are in most cases statistically significant (with at least p<0.05). Gašper Ilc 86 BNC UkWaC enTenTen [2012] Negation +be arsed Negation +a barrel of laughs Negation +be arsed Negation +a barrel of laughs Negation +be arsed Negation +a barrel of laughs UkWaC p<0.001 p>0.05 enTenTen p<0.01 p<0.0001 p<0.001 p<0.0001 COCA n.a. p>0.05 n.a. P<0.01 n.a p<0.01 Table 4: p-values for the occurrences of the PUs negation+be arsed and a barrel of laughs in the analysed corpora 5. Discussion A detailed analysis of the negation-related phraseological units from my database clearly shows that what specialized idioms dictionaries by and large treat as a uniform syntactic category is more complex. I have observed a gradience from inherently negative PUs to PUs frequently cooccurring with negation via an intermediate stage of negative polarity sensitive PUs (RQ1). This conclusion is also in line with Stantcheva (2006: 400), who observes that in the case of German negation-related PUs, dictionaries “reflect a usage of idioms that suggest no variation in the negative component.” In addition, Stantcheva‟s research (2006: 415) also reveals that many of the PUs classified by dictionaries as negative can also appear in affirmative contexts. The problem of a uniform treatment of negation-related PUs is especially noticeable in the CIDI, which offers only two alternatives: a PU is either inherently negative or inherently non-negative. The OIDLE has a more gradient approach, differentiating between PUs that are inherently negative from those that are not inherently negative but frequently occur with negation. In the latter case, the dictionary provides three options in the concrete lexical entries: (i.) negation appears as part of the PU but in parentheses; (ii.) the PU is followed by the special usage information that the PU is either “often used in negative sentences” or “used with a negative, in a question or in an if-clause”. Comparing this lexicographic system of differentiation and the theoretical classification presented in section 2.2 above, we can first observe that both approaches correctly identify PUs that are inherently negative. The problem arises when differentiating PUs that are NPIs from those that only co-occur/ collocate with negation. For example, it is not clearly explained in the OIDLE what the difference between PUs with negation in parentheses and PUs that are “often used in negative sentences” is. It could equally involve an NPI or an PU that collocates with negation. In addition, it appears that this system of differentiation is not implemented consistently. For example, the English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 87 PUs have a clue and a barrel of laughs, which both belong to CLASS C according to my analysis, are listed in the OIDLE as being different with regard to negation as their constituent (not have a clue and a barrel of laughs, respectively). Similarly, two NPIs, sleep a wink and breathe a word, which are both CLASS B items according to my analysis, are listed as not sleep a wink and (not) breathe a word. Therefore, even though the OIDLE makes an attempt at a more detailed treatment of negation-related PUs, it is inconsistent and does not accurately reflect real language use (RQ2, RQ3 and RQ4). While I believe that the system of classifying negation-related PUs laid out by the OIDLE is a step in the right direction, it calls for a more systematic and consistent approach. Combining the theoretical considerations regarding the negative and negative polarity items with the results of my corpus analysis, I propose the following tripartite model for classifying negation-related PUs. 1. Inherently negative PUs should always be listed together with negation - be it the negator not or a lexical item with the incorporated neg operator in terms Klima (1964), for example, not be half bad and better late than never respectively. In addition, to avoid any misunderstanding these items could also be labelled „negative‟ and/ or followed by a special usage information line „always used in negative sentences‟. 2. Negative polarity sensitive PUs should be listed without negation, for example, move a muscle, give an inch, and ideally followed by usage information „used in negatively-oriented polarity-sensitive contexts‟ in parentheses. This would be a theoretically perfect solution but would have, in my opinion, very little practical value for dictionary users, since it would involve a detailed and linguistically complex definition of polarity contexts (see section 1 and problems listed there). To strike a balance between theoretical correctness and user-friendliness, 9 I propose that the original usage information line from the OIDLE “used with a negative, in a question or in an if-clause” be preserved. This slight overgeneralisation still covers more than 90% of all occurrences of NPIs since negatives, interrogatives and conditionals 10 are by far the most typical licensers of NPIs. 3. PUs that frequently co-occur/ collocate with negation should again be listed without the negation, for example, do things by halves, say boo (to a goose/ a fly), followed by a special usage information line 9 The problem of adapting theoretically adequate descriptions for lexicographic purposes is similarly addressed by Hlebec (2015: 42ff.). 10 Strictly speaking, the term if-clause should be replaced with the term conditional since conditionality is not expressed syntactically by if-clauses only. In addition, not each and every if-clause is a conditional clause. Gašper Ilc 88 „often used in negative sentences‟, as can already be found in the OIDLE. PUs which do not fit into any of the three listed categories above should not be linked to negation in any way, because in those cases negation is simply a free syntactic operator modifying the PU. It must be made clear that the statistical analysis of the negationrelated PUs and their frequency values in different corpora (see Table 4) has shown that the selection of a corpus for lexicographic purposes may influence the final dictionary treatment of (negation-related) PUs. This fact may on the one hand explain the observed differences between the two dictionaries under investigation, since each dictionary is based on a different corpus. On the other hand, however, it also calls for a more complex lexicographic approach to (negation-related) PUs, which would involve the selection and the combination of different corpora. It can be claimed with a high degree of certainty that this is a necessary step, if the lexicographers want to give dictionary users a better insight into the actual language use. 6. Conclusion The analysis presented here has shown that the PUs that are listed as negation-related in the two specialised dictionaries of idioms (the CIDI and the OIDLE) do not represent a homogenous class of PUs. Using a syntactic classification, I have assigned negation-related PUs listed in the two dictionaries to three categories: (i) the PUs that are inherently negative, (ii) the PUs that are negatively-oriented polarity-sensitive, and (iii) the PUs that co-occur/ collocate with negation. The corpus data reveal that only 40% of the PUs that the dictionaries treat as negation-related are really inherently negative. The remaining 60% of the PUs are either negatively-oriented polarity-sensitive (30%) or freely co-occurring/ collocating with negation (30%). These data call for a lexicographic reanalysis of the PUs in question. The paper proposes a user-friendly solution in the form of a tripartite model of classification that can be readily adopted by lexicographers. While inherently negative PUs should be listed together with negation, and followed by a special usage information line „always used in negative sentences‟, negatively-oriented polarity-sensitive PUs and PUs cooccurring/ collocating with negation should be listed without negation, but followed by special usage information lines „used with a negative, in a question or in an if-clause‟ and „often used in negative sentences‟ respectively. I strongly believe that this strategy, if followed, will give any dictionary user a more detailed, adequate and realistic insight into the meaning and usage of such PUs. Moreover, the analysis has also shown English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 89 that a deeper insight into the nature and real usage of (negation-related) PUs can be obtained only if several corpora rather than only one serve as the basis for dictionary compilation. References Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward Finegan (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Chierchia, Gennaro (2006). “Broaden your Views. Implications of Domain Widening and the “Logicality” of Language”. Linguistic Inquiry 37: 535-590. Condoravdi, Cleo (2010). “NPI Licensing in Temporal Clauses”. NLLT 28: 877- 910. Cowie, Arthur P. (1998). “Introduction”. In Arthur P. Cowie (ed.). Phraseology: Theory, Analysis, and Applications. Oxford University Press. 1-20. Fauconnier, Gilles (1975). “Polarity and the Scale Principle”. CLS 11: 188-199. Giannakidou, Anastasia (1998). Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)veridical Dependency. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Ginnakidou, Anastasia & Josep Quer (2013). “Exhaustive and Non-exhaustive Variation with Free Choice and Referential Vagueness: Evidence from Greek, Catalan and Spanish”. Lingua 126: 120-149. Gläser, Rosemarie (1988). “The Grading of Idiomaticity as a Presupposition for a Taxonomy of Idioms”. In Werner Hüllen & Rainer Schulze (eds.). Understanding the Lexicon: Meaning, Sense and World Knowledge in Lexical Semantics. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. 264-279. Glucksberg, Sam (2001). Understanding Figurative Language. From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hlebec, Boris (2015). “Lexical Definitions of Some Performative Verbs”. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 50/ 1: 27-44. Hoeksema, Jacob et al. (2000). Perspectives on Negation and Polarity Items. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Hoeksema, Jacob (1997). “Corpus study of negative polarity items.” [online] Html version of a paper which appeared in the IV-V Jornades de corpus linguistics 1996-1997. (http: / / www.let.rug.nl/ hoeksema/ docs/ barcelona.html) (accessed 2 April 2015). Horn, Laurence R. (2001). A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howarth, Peter Andrew (1996). Phraseology in English Academic Writing: Some Implications for Language Learning and Dictionary Making. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Israel, Michael (2001). “Minimizers, Maximizers, and the Rhetoric of Scalar Reasoning”. Journal of Semantics 18(4): 297-331. Jackendoff, Ray (1995). “The boundaries of the lexicon”. In Martin Everaert, Erik- Jan van der Linden, André Schenk & Rob Schreuder (eds.). Idioms: Structural and Psychological Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 133-165. Jespersen, Otto (1917). Negation in English and other Languages. Copenhagen: A.F. Høst. Jespersen, Otto (1924). The Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen&Unwin Ltd. Gašper Ilc 90 Klima, Edward S. (1964). “Negation in English”. In: Jerry A. Fodor & Jerrod J. Katz (eds.). The Structure of Language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice- Hall. 246-323. Ladusaw, William (1979). Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations. New York/ London: Garland Publishing. Ladusaw, William (1983) “Logical Form and Conditions on Grammaticality”. Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 373-392. Lyons, John (1977). Semantics. Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mel‟čuk, Igor A. (1995) “Phrasemes in Languages and Phraseology in Linguistics”. In Martin Everaert, Erik-Jan van der Linden, André Schenk and Rob Schreuder (eds.). Idioms: Structural and Psychological Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 167-232. Moon, Rosamund (1998) Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach. Oxford: Claredon Press. Paradis, Carita & Caroline Willners (2013). “Negation and Approximation of Antonymic Meanings as Configuration Construals in SPACE”. In Carita Paradis, Jean Hudson & Ulf Magnusson (eds.). The Construal of Spatial Meaning: Windows into Conceptual Space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 287-311. Richter, Frank, Fabienne Fritzinger and Marion Weller (2010). “Who Can See the Forest for the Trees? Extracting Multiword Negative Polarity Items from Dependency-Parsed Text”. JLCL 25(1): 83-110. Schmidlin, Regula (2007). “Phraseological Expressions in German Standard Varieties”. In Harald Burger, Dmitrij Dobrovol‟skij, Peter Kühn & Neal R. Norrick (eds.). Phraseology. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research. Volume 1. Berlin/ New York: Walter de Gruyter. 221-562. Sprenger, Simone A., Willem J. M. Levelt & Gerard Kempen (2006). “Lexical Access during the Production of Idiomatic Phrases”. Journal of Memory and Language 54: 161-184. Stantcheva, Diana (2006). “The Many Faces of Negation - German VP Idioms with a Negative Component”. International Journal of Lexicography 19(4): 397- 418. van den Wouden, Ton (1997). Negative Contexts. Collocation, Polarity and Multiple Negation. Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics. London/ New York: Routledge. Verhagen, Arie (2005). Constructions of Intersubjectivity: Discourse, Syntax and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vrbinc, Alenka & Marjeta Vrbinc (2011). “Creative use of idioms in satirical magazines”. Jezikoslovlje 12.1: 75-91. Vrbinc, Alenka & Marjeta Vrbinc (2014). “Phraseological Units with Onomastic Components: the Case of English and Slovene”. RLA 52 (1): 133-153. Zgusta, Ladislav (1971). Manual of Lexicography. The Hague: Mouton. Zwarts, Frans (1995). “Nonveridical Contexts”. Linguistic Analysis 25: 286-310. English Negation-Related Phraseological Units 91 Corpora BNC: The British National corpus. 2010 (https: / / the.sketchengine.co.uk/ ). enTenTen 2012: English web corpus. 2012 (https: / / the.sketchengine.co.uk/ ). UkWak: web-derived (domain .uk) corpus (https: / / the.sketchengine.co.uk/ ). COCA: Corpus of Contemporary American English (http: / / corpus.byu.edu/ coca/ ). Dictionaries CIDI: The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (2002). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OIDLE: Oxford Idioms. Dictionary for Learners of English (2006). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gašper Ilc University of Ljubljana Ljubljana, Slovenia Albrecht Classen, Eva Parra-Membrives (Hrsg.) Bestseller gestern und heute / Bestseller - Yesterday and Today Ein Blick vom Rand zum Zentrum der Literaturwissenschaft / A Look from the Margin to the Center of Literary Studies Popular Fiction Studies 2 1. Auflage 2016 230 Seiten €[D] 68,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6938-7 What is the meaning of a „bestseller“ for the history of literature? How do we define it in the first place, and what consequences does the success on the book market have for the literary evaluation of a text? What is the relationship between quantity and quality? Many literary scholars shy away from doing research on „bestsellers“, but the question regarding the formation of a literary canon is closely connected with this issue. How do we evaluate the quality of a text in the first place? The topic of the „bestseller“ forces us to examine more closely the relationship between the reading public, literary scholarship, and the book market. On the one hand we have to examine the sales strategies for a book, on the other we have to consider what intentions a literary text might pursue first of all, and how we as literary scholars have to engage with the text critically. From this results also the challenge to re-investigate the foundation of literary scholarship and to take note of premodern and modern „bestsellers“ in their social-historical and mental-historical relevance, without ignoring the textual aesthetics. Bestseller - gestern und heute Albrecht Classen / Eva Parra-Membrives (Hrsg./ Eds.) Ein Blick vom Rand zum Zentrum der Literaturwissenschaft Popular Fiction Studies 2 Bestseller - Yesterday and Today A Look from the Margin to the Center of Literary Studies Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de -- Rezensionen Jeff Thoss, When Storyworlds Collide. Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics (Studies in Intermediality 7). Leiden/ Boston: Brill-Rodopi, 2015. Keyvan Sarkhosh In the wake of Genette‟s (2004) return to metalepsis - a term he himself originally introduced to the field of literary narratology in his seminal study Narrative Discourse (1972/ 1993) - and along the broader research on selfreference and metareference, the phenomenon of metalepsis has aroused a substantial amount of interest among literary scholars during the last decade. It is safe to say that the recent wave of involvement with metalepsis is not only due to its multifaceted and ambivalent effects - metalepsis being prone to elicit confusion as much as amusement - but also, and in particular, to the fact that metalepsis is conceived as a genuine transmedial and transgeneric phenomenon (cf. Klimek 2009; Wolf 2005). Moreover, metalepsis as a prototypical anti-illusionist device is by no means solely confined to high-brow literature and other forms of avant-gardist art, but also features prominently in a large variety of works of popular culture (cf. the contributions in Kukkonen & Klimek 2011). Quite unmistakably, Jeff Thoss‟s concise study on Metalepsis in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics is born out of these lines of research. As such, Thoss‟s book not only brings together recent conceptualisations of metalepsis and integrates them into a viable theoretical framework of the phenomenon, but also fills a gap in the existing scholarly literature on metalepsis. As Thoss himself points out, despite the fact that metalepsis has firmly been established as a transmedial phenomenon, prior to his book little effort has been made to examine and test this transmedial nature by means of an in-depth analysis that offers a typology of shared metaleptic features and operations across different (narrative) media. By limiting his focus solely to narrative media, Thoss naturally leaves out of account a vast array of metaleptical - or at least quasi-metaleptical - phe- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 41 (2016) · Heft Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen 2 Rezensionen 94 nomena in other media, in particular the visual arts, a limitation the author acknowledges himself in the conclusion. However, Thoss justifies the choice of media he discusses - popular prose fiction, films and comic - with the fact that, as narrative media, all three enable readers or viewers to construct storyworlds (a premise that later turns out to be essential for Thoss‟s typology of metalepsis). Another argument in favour of the media chosen is their alleged affinity to popular culture. The latter argument is particularly relevant to the author‟s overall intentions: Apart from offering a theoretical model of metalepsis as a genuine transmedial phenomenon, Thoss aims at challenging dominant approaches to metalepsis which conceive it as a device that is intricately bound to notions of high literature. While there is certainly some truth to both arguments, I found none completely satisfactory. First of all, one may wonder why the author did not take into consideration other popular narrative media such TV series/ serials, animation or even - to a certain extent - video games. Second, two of the examples discussed - films and comics - undeniably are visual media. To deal with them only in terms of narrative certainly does not do them justice. Moreover, by means of analogy and extension, further instances of popular visual storytelling, such as series pictures or the fotonovela, could and should have been discussed. I believe this would have allowed to draw much more robust conclusions on the genuinely transmedial nature of metalepsis and its popular operationalisations, even more so as Thoss‟s definition of metalepsis and the typology he develops certainly allow for such extensions. One of the greatest merits of this book is that it provides readers with a convincing and viable definition of metalepsis. Based on a concise review of the dominant theories of metalepsis, starting with Gérard Genette‟s original description of the phenomenon, and drawing on concepts from possible worlds theory, in particular Marie-Laure Ryan and Lubomír Doležel, Thoss defines metalepsis as the paradoxical transgression of the line separating the inside from the outside of a storyworld. Unlike Genette, who conceptualises metalepsis as a hierarchical violation of narrative levels, Thoss makes a strong case for metalepsis as a violation of the border between ontologically separate and autonomous worlds. Such worlds can - but do not necessarily have to - be positioned on different hierarchical levels. This definition allows him to differentiate three metaleptical prototypes: (1) storyworld-imaginary world metalepsis: this type comprises transgressions between a storyworld and another imaginary world; (2) storyworld-reality metalepsis, i.e. transgressions between a storyworld and „reality‟; (3) storyworld-discourse metalepsis which refers to all transgressions between a storyworld and the discourse, which includes, among others, border violations between the text and the paratext. However, Thoss concedes that these three types often intermingle and, more importantly, “may also behave differently across various media, be clearly distinct in some and overlap in others.” (24) In order to illustrate his theoretical assumptions concerning the three metaleptical prototypes, Thoss cites a number of examples from fiction, film and comics, with the result that to a large extent the theoretical chapter is made up of an enumeration of metaleptical transgressions across the three media in Rezensionen 95 question. Perhaps this is the crux with metalepsis: in fact, there is not much to theorise. Rather, one can only talk about metalepsis when describing actual instances of metaleptical transgressions. However, this is not on any account Thoss‟s fault, nor is he to blame for being superficial. On the contrary, the strength of the chapter lies in the concise typology of metaleptical prototypes backed by convincing examples. While this typology is well-founded and undoubtedly will prove highly valuable for future studies dealing with metaleptical phenomena, the subsequent theoretical reflections on different functions of metalepsis in high culture and in popular culture are somewhat less convincing. Thoss argues that one cannot deal with cases of metalepsis in popular culture the same way one treats and interprets metalepsis in high literature. Although he concedes that it is almost impossible to discern formal differences, Thoss insists that they serve different functions in these two cultural traditions - and, more importantly, that it is indeed possible to differentiate between high and popular culture “as to some extent discrete” spheres (40): “Popular and high art provide different experiences, different pleasures”, Thoss writes (41), and suggests distinguishing between five uses of metalepsis in popular culture: (1) it is a powerful tool to address (and reject) allegations that popular culture solely serves escapist tendencies and instead to “celebrate the power and pleasures of immersion and imagination” (43); (2) putting a spotlight on the author as quasi-omnipotent creator, “metalepsis can be employed to tell allegories about (self-)determinism” (43); (3) metalepsis can serve as a means of parody (44); (4) metalepsis may operate as a sort of quasi-philosophical metareference (45); (5) metalepsis offers entertainment, because it creates “fun and exciting narratives” (46). One must doubt that any of these functions are exclusively limited to popular media. Rather, all of them can also be found among works that have gained the status of high art, even more so as popular entertainment and high culture artistry are by no means mutually exclusive. Whether a cultural object is conceived as „high‟ or „popular‟ is perhaps not as much a question of intrinsic qualities, purposes and functions, as of modes of production, distribution and, most importantly, the way specific audiences make use of such works for their own purposes and gratification. The following three chapters are devoted to applying, in greater detail, the typology worked out in the preceding theoretical chapter to selected examples from popular fiction, film and comics. These chapters serve two purposes: On the one hand, they prove the usefulness and applicability of the threefold typology of metalepsis to narratives from different media, thereby confirming the transmedial nature of the phenomenon. On the other hand, they serve as illustrations of the - purportedly genuine - functions of metalepsis in popular culture. The examples Thoss discusses are-well chosen, yet by no means does he try to cover the whole range of genres of contemporary fiction, films and comics featuring metalepsis. Rather, the author offers an exemplary overview. All three chapters follow the same pattern: For each type of metalepsis Thoss presents one or two examples from each medium before presenting one concluding example which exhibits metaleptical transgressions in all its states. For instance, as case studies from popular fiction, Rezensionen 96 Thoss has chosen two short stories - Final Reward (1988) by Terry Pratchett and Umney‟s Last Case (1993) by Stephen King, which both serve as examples of storyworld-imaginary world metalepsis -, two novels - The Land of Laughs (1980) by Jonathan Carroll, serving as another example of storyworldimaginary world metalepsis, and Sprout Mask Replica (1997) by Robert Rankin as an example of storyworld-discourse metalepsis - and two series of novels - Stephen King‟s heptalogy The Dark Tower (1982-2004) as an example of storyworld-reality metalepsis and finally Jasper Fforde‟s ongoing Thursday Next series (2001-), exhibiting metalepsis in all its states. Thoss‟s observations are insightful and his arguments sound. However, one cannot easily get rid of the impression that writing about metalepsis hardly goes beyond retelling the story and counting paradoxical transgressions. Indeed, in all of his examples, Thoss very much sticks to story. This is not very surprising given that the author solely deals with metalepsis in terms of narrative. However, in doing so, he is sometimes blind for the specifics and peculiarities of the media he refers to, also and in particular in terms of terminology. For instance, one thing I stumbled upon was the author‟s use of the notion of the cinematic narrator in his chapter on film. When discussing Marc Forster‟s Stranger than Fiction (2006) as one of two examples of storyworlddiscourse metalepsis in film - the other being Spike Jonze‟s Adaptation (2002) -, Thoss identifies Emma Thompson‟s off-screen voice, i.e. the voice-over narration of fictional author Karen Eifel, with the cinematic narrator, and in doing so emphasises its similarities to a prose narrator (110). This is not merely too simplifying, it is downright wrong. As Chatman (1990: 134) and others argue, the “cinematic narrator” is a composite of all the cinematic devices employed in a film, not just a voice-over narrator (or the camera). Now this would be a very interesting question: What does metalepsis in film mean if the cinematic narrator is the sum of all possible devices? Thoss does not take such complexities into consideration, which is a serious flaw. For sure, the „narration‟ of Karen Eifel cannot be identified with the film‟s discourse. Rather it is itself subject to the film‟s discourse; the relation-ship between the world of Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) and Karen Eifel is not a storyworld-discourse relationship, but rather an intradiegetic-metadiegetic relationship subordinate to the extradiegetic discourse. A similar case could be made in his chapter on comics when Thoss discusses John Byrne‟s The Sensational She-Hulk (1989) as another example of storyworld-discourse metalepsis and states that the central character She- Hulk not only knows that she is a character in a comic book, but is also aware of her readership. Of course, being a fictional entity, the character does not really possess consciousness and thus simply cannot be aware of her readership. This is merely a play with conventions; she is staged to appear to be aware of it. This is just one of many cases were I would have wished for a wording which reflects that we are not dealing with an ontological fact, but a mere fictional device. Such criticism notwithstanding, the author should be thanked for consolidating the use of both the term and the concept of metalepsis outside of literary criticism. Thoss is absolutely right when he points to the fact that the Rezensionen 97 term metalepsis is hardly established in film studies, and even less so in comic studies which themselves are still an emerging field. Consequently, as a major outcome of Thoss‟s in-depth analyses a strong argument could be made for the use of this term in film and comic studies, substituting competing - either narrower or less succinct - notions such as screen passage, reflexivity or selfreference. As a whole, the book is tightly argued, well-written and thus a pleasure to read. Moreover, Thoss‟s threefold typology of metaleptical transgressions is a more than useful addition to the existing literature and theory on metalepsis. While the book contributes somewhat less to ongoing debates on the relationship between high and popular culture, it offers an invaluable resource for anyone working on metalepsis as a genuinely transmedial phenomenon. References Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Genette, Gérard (1972/ 1993). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Genette, Gérard (2004). Métalepse: De la figure à la figuration. Paris: Seuil. Klimek, Sonja (2009). “Metalepsis and Its (Anti-)Illusionist Effects in the Arts, Media and Role-Playing Games”. In: Werner Wolf (ed.). Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Studies in Intermediality 5. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi. 169-187. Kukkonen, Karin & Sonja Klimek (eds.). (2011). Metalepsis in Popular Culture. Narratologia 28. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter. Wolf, Werner (2005). “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenomenon: A Case Study of the Possibilities of „Exporting‟ Narratological Concepts”. In: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.). Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity. Narratologia 6. Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter. 83-107. Keyvan Sarkhosh Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics Frankfurt am Main, Germany Rezensionen AAA Band 41 (2016) Heft 2 98 Johannes Wally, Secular Falls from Grace: Religion and (New) Atheism in the Implied Worldview of Ian McEwan’s Fiction (Studies in English Literary and Cultural History 62). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015. Anne Enderwitz Discussing the work of a living author is never easy. Without death there is not even the illusion of closure - any text written in the future, any comment to be made, will alter the perception of the work as a whole. Yet there are some authors who are particularly „undead‟: Ian McEwan is a public figure whose vocal support of New Atheism poses a challenge to literary critics. Familiarity with the author‟s worldview may enable a better understanding of his oeuvre, but, at the same time, approaching a literary work as the unequivocal expression of a fixed set of beliefs is an unnecessary limitation. In this sense, the legacy of Barthes‟s „death of the author‟ - despite the author‟s resurrection in literature departments all over the world - continues to have a lasting effect. Not even literary critics hostile to „theory‟ would argue that a literary work is unequivocal and should be approached like a philosophical argument designed to make a single „claim‟. With his book on the development of Ian McEwan‟s literary work, Wally discusses the writings of an author who has been called the “New Atheist novelist par excellence” (Bradley and Tate 2010: 16). He tackles the problem of McEwan‟s beliefs and their influence on his work with “an analytic pincer movement”: he departs from the assumption that McEwan‟s novels anticipate, or participate in, “the New Atheist discourse”, but then broadens the scope of his analysis by reading McEwan‟s novels “against the grain”, namely “with a view to their religious subtexts” (40). This is a clever and pragmatic approach to a body of literature which appears over-determined by the author‟s public stance but is, in fact, less unequivocal than one might expect. It is in this way that Wally introduces the dichotomy “atheism vs. religion” as “lens through which to discover the implied worldview of a text” (38). He thereby renders the author‟s beliefs productive without letting them determine his reading. Wally‟s analytic curve as reflected in the chapter titles suggests an increasing attention to atheist concerns in McEwan‟s fiction. He begins with a chapter entitled “On the Way to New Atheism”, moves on to “New Horizons and the Emergence of New Atheist Concerns”, follows this up with “Preparing and Supporting New Atheism”, and ends with “New Atheism reworked or the Rise of New Concerns”. While these captions suggest different stages of a journey towards the increasing preoccupation with atheist ideas, Wally‟s actual readings offer a much more nuanced picture than can be inferred from these titles. Even Saturday, which “constitutes the most obvious discussion of New Atheist ideas in McEwan‟s œuvre so far” (144), maintains in Wally‟s view some distance to its hyper-rational and neo-conservative protagonist Henry Perowne, who advocates shopping as a “cure for religious fundamentalism” (142). Wally‟s discussions of psychoanalytic concerns and religious images, of Rezensionen 99 varying representations of the two-cultures debate, and of postmodern metareferentiality in McEwan‟s work productively muddle the ground between the oppositional poles established by the New-Atheism-debate. His recognition of similarities between New Atheism and Protestantism - “appreciation for heterosexual love and capitalism” (180) - is indebted to Tina Beattie, who labels New Atheism a “puritanical brand of godless Protestantism” (Beattie 2007: 148; qtd. in Wally 180). His identification of conceptual similarities between New Atheist ideas and “poststructuralist views” (180) further complicates the status of New Atheism. Wally‟s laudable resistance to unequivocal readings has the distinctive advantage of refusing simplistic oppositions and of cooling a heated ideological debate. With their rhetoric of superiority - think of Richard Dawkins‟ book title The God Delusion (2006) -, New Atheist books reach sky-rocketing sales numbers but threaten to alienate both believers and non-believers. In a Guardian article from November last year, Jeff Sparrow - himself an atheist - asked pointedly, “Why are the New Atheists such jerks? ” (2015) As the unlikely association of God and cultural relativism in the enemy camp of New Atheism suggests, New Atheists believe not only in a natural origin of the human species but also in the defining power of human nature. Wally skilfully manages the discursive balancing act of rendering New Atheist ideas intelligible without concealing the downsides of this discourse: the alienating force of islamophobic rhetoric; the open hostility towards religious beliefs in general; the potential exclusionary power of a naturalised new humanism; its Neo-Darwinian investment in heterosexual love; the extent to which Darwinian theory acquires a mythical status in this heated debate; and the reluctance to openly discuss the sometimes controversial status of scientific findings. His discussion of the politics of New Atheist authors is illuminating and highlights differences between the individual authors. Wally‟s final explanation of the “complexity” of McEwan‟s fiction (181) combines the New Atheist investment in art as a path to secular transcendence with the Neo-Darwinian understanding of empathy as “human instinct” (McEwan 2001): for McEwan, Wally suggests, the novel is a site “where our evolutionary capacity for empathy can flourish”, “a place where different mindsets or worldviews can meet and co-exist” (181). Also, I am tempted to add, a pinch of ambiguity makes for a much more interesting reading than a simple spelling out and reworking of New Atheist and Neo-Darwinian ideas. Although Wally comes to the conclusion that “McEwan‟s novels have increasingly engaged with New Atheist ideas” (179), the strength of this book derives from his readiness to relativise this claim: to discuss what “prevents McEwan‟s novels from becoming straightforward vehicles of New Atheism” (181) and to respect the peculiarities of each individual work. Wally tracks connections that are easily overlooked in a heated debate. His methodological and theoretical discussions and his highly reflective readings are certainly worth engaging with. An index to the book is, however, sorely missed, precisely because Wally engages with complex scientific and philosophical ideas in the individual chapters and in various passages throughout the book. An even more detailed discussion of Neo-Darwinian ideas, which are quite di- Rezensionen 100 verse and do not always sit easily with the findings of cognitive studies, would have been very welcome. Yet it seems a little unfair to demand this from an author who expressly focuses on McEwan‟s fiction with special regard to New Atheism and who has already made a very good job of opening up the epistemological, ethical, metaphysical, and political implications of this contemporary discourse. It is Wally‟s great merit to have rendered McEwan‟s work both more accessible and more complex by reviewing it through the lens of New Atheism and its relation to religion. References Beattie, Tina (2007). The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Bradley, Arthur & Andrew Tate (2010). The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/ 11. London and New York: Continuum. McEwan, Ian. “Only Love and then Oblivion: Love was all they had to set against their Murderers.” The Guardian, 15 Sep. 2001. [online] (www.theguardi an.com/ world/ 2001/ sep/ 15/ september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2) (accessed 3 May 2016). Sparrow, Jeff. “We can save atheism from the New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.” The Guardian, 29. Nov. 2015. [online] (http: / / www.theguar dian.com/ commentisfree/ 2015/ nov/ 30/ we-can-save-atheism-from-the-newatheists) (accessed 3 May 2016). Anne Enderwitz Peter Szondi-Institut Freie Universität Berlin, Germany periodicals.narr.de Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Klaus Rieser Bruce Gaston Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz Gašper Ilc Keyvan Sarkhosh Anne Enderwitz Band 41 · Heft 2 | 2016 Band 41 · Heft 2 | 2016