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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) Heft 1 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel : Andreas Mahler On the meaningfulness of transgressions ................................................................ 3 Elisabetta Soro Skopos Theory and the Sardic version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea: A Translational and Stylistic Analysis .......................... 21 Yvonne Liebermann The Productivity of Empathy Inhibition: The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child ......................................... 49 Michael Fuchs “Is this really all they had to worry about? ” Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us .......................................... 69 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 40, 2015 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 € 97,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 75,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft € 56,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 2019 · 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 On the meaningfulness of transgressions Andreas Mahler Without the drawing up of borders there would arguably be no meaning; without a neat distinction between what something is and what it is not, we would probably be unable to discriminate, and communicate, stable identities (or at least share the illusion of having them). If borders guarantee meaning, transgressions are apt to modify them, bringing potentially new meaning into the world. This paper first focuses on how man/ woman, as the meaning-generating animal, starts, relies on, and becomes dependent on the meaning-making process, and then goes on to discuss this process as a continuous discursive (and aesthetic) negotiation as well as re-negotiation of shifting identities in what has culturally been called the ‘semiosphere’. I. Referring to a remark by physicist Niels Bohr, according to which “the distinguishing trait of non-trivial truth is that a directly opposite claim is not manifestly absurd”, the Estonian semiotician Jurij Lotman, founder of the so-called Tartu school, once formulated the basic insight that “only that which has an antithesis is meaningful” (1977: 265). I want to take this as my point of departure. 1 Reading it in a strong sense, I understand this as saying that something only appears to us as ‘meaningful’, ‘filled’, ‘endowed’ or ‘invested’ with meaning whenever we see ourselves mentally (or factually) able to construct a border, on the other side of which we imagine to be something different from what we 1 This paper is the revised written version of a keynote lecture delivered at the final TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern England) conference held at Freie Universität Berlin from May 24-26, 2018, under the title “Texts & Events Across Borders”. For its argument, I largely rely on what I have developed in a different context in Mahler (2012). I wish to thank the organizers, above all Sabine Schülting, for the kind invitation and the participants for a lively and stimulating debate. All remaining shortcomings are, of course, my own. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0001 Andreas Mahler 4 think is this side of the border - such as knowing that you are ‘English’ because you are (luckily/ unluckily) not ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Irish’, ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘American’, ‘Indian’, ‘Pakistani’, whatever. 2 This addresses the linguistic principle of ‘difference’, according to which something is ‘something’ because it is not ‘something else’. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure has summed this up as: “Everything we have said so far comes down to this. In the language itself, there are only differences.” (2009: 118; his italics) An evergreen traffic light is meaningless without some kind of border constituting a difference against which its green can be filled with meaning: if it cannnot turn red, the green does not mean anything, and the traffic lights can be switched off, removed, since they do not work as a signal. They are meaningless, not endowed/ not endowable with semantics. This is to say that, without borders, language will never become ‘meaningful’. As a matter of fact, without an arbitrary cut creating two sides, without the creation of a borderline or threshold, it will never become a language, since what we call ‘language’ (as with regard to any semiotic system) is based on relations enabling us to create ‘difference’, and it is through difference that we construct the illusion of ‘identity’. Only through difference are we enabled to turn material into meaningful material (a green light for ‘go’), and it is only difference that enables us to turn ideas into distinct ideas. This is what Saussure addresses as the “somewhat mysterious process” by which language - as what he calls an ‘intermediary’ - produces meaningful signs by correlating (in his words) the two ‘swirly clouds’ of indistinct ideas and indistinct materiality, turning them, through one cut, into a distinct verso and a distinct recto side and thus creating an arbitrary element that can be used for signification (ibid.: 110-111). In other words, this is what turns language into a meaning-making machine. It explains famous cocktail-party phrases such as Wittgenstein’s ‘the borders of my language mean the borders of my world’ (‘Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt’) or Derrida’s ‘there is nothing outside the text’ (‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’): for things to become ‘meaningful’ they have to be within language, pitted against an outside, the borders of which, imagined or real, endow them with a difference that generates meaning. II. This ability of generating meaning through a paradoxical use of borders seems to be grounded in man’s/ woman’s disposition to understand nonanalogical, ‘symbolic’ signs (cf. Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson 2011: 41- 2 One could do this for practically all the regions of the world: people think that they know their ‘identities’ because they think they know what they are not. On the meaningfulness of transgressions 5 48). It emerges in the first human semiotic act of - still analogically, through similitude - detecting ‘oneself’ in the mirror. In the mirror image, I recognize myself (a similitude of myself) as something that I am not; in the representation, I see a sign for/ of myself and become aware of myself as being somewhere where I am not (cf. Lacan 2003). 3 This is indicated by the paradoxical deictics of the sentence ‘this is me’ as pronounced in front of a mirror: pointing away from myself across the border to the mirror, the ‘I’ as ‘subject’ in front of the mirror (literally) ‘objectifies’ him/ herself into a ‘me’ in the mirror, turning the mirror-image into a signifier for the signified self. This is the beginning of any semiotic activity, it is the entry into what Lotman (1990) has called the semiosphere. Similarly, in digital language use, I designate myself by using the deictic ‘I’, by (literally) ‘uttering’ a pronoun that does not ‘belong’ to me but can be used/ uttered by everybody else (for him/ herself) and, in doing so, I represent myself in language with the help of a sign that is, by nature, outside myself, separated from me by a threshold or border that I linguistically transgress to endow my ‘self’ with meaning: ‘this is me’ (cf. Bühler 1982). In both my use of the mirror-image and my use of the deictic ‘I’, I transgress a border between myself and my environment but, at the same time, I have to keep the transgression hidden to make sure it works. If you begin to worry whether what you see is really you, or whether the pronoun ‘I’ truthfully represents your personality, you are lost. This is what has been theorized as the phenomenon of ‘latency’ (cf. Luhmann 1995): we construct ourselves in a way that we have to keep some relevant, if not fundamental, aspects of the construction hidden in order to guarantee their functioning. The transgression at stake thus looks like a step outside: I turn to an outward mirror-image and get an idea of my own self; I turn to an external pronoun and produce insights concerning my own person. This refers to the idea which the anthropologist/ sociologist Helmuth Plessner has described as ‘excentric positionality’ (2003: 360-425). 4 Humans are excentric in the sense that, though they may of course quite simply ‘be’ in the world, they also always experience a need to ‘have themselves’ in order to understand who they are. In other words, in addition to ‘being’ a body in the world, we mentally, in crossing a border or ‘closing’ a gap, attempt to ‘have ourselves’ through the construction, or projection, of an image of ourselves (a ‘mirror-image’ or a ‘language-image’) that gives us an idea - a consciousness - of the ‘identity’ that we may have (cf. Plessner 2003a: 194). 5 3 For this and what follows, I draw on what I have tried to develop, among other things, in Mahler (2012a). 4 For a brief introduction to Plessner’s thinking cf. de Mul (2014), who also announces an English translation of Plessner (2003) which, to my knowledge, has not yet appeared. I prefer the spelling of ’excentricity’ to ‘eccentricity’ to avoid confusion with the everyday English use of the term. 5 For the notion that we as human beings, in contradistinction to animals, are the ones who ‘are’ but do ‘not have ourselves’, cf. Plessner (2003a: 194). The Italian Andreas Mahler 6 Intellectually, I am not simply ‘centric’ but ‘ex-centric’ in the sense that only the turning outside myself endows me with a signifier that simultaneously - in ‘co-emergence’ - also endows me with a signified whose meaning is ‘me’. In a way, this is the first semiotic cut: in taking an obvious detour, I become aware of a concept of ‘myself’. Only in transgressing the gap, the border, do I become ‘meaningful’ to myself. This mechanism, however, is not only observable anthropologically in the identity formation of the human subject (and its simultaneous split into subject and object), but also socially in the emergence of ‘cultures’, i.e. in the production of a culturally more or less unified semiosphere: “Every culture”, Lotman says, “begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space.” (1990: 131) Again, what is important is not so much the question as to who or, as for that, ‘how’ the ‘others’ are. The identity formation also seems to be successful if the ‘other’ is only fantasized or imagined or projected as something that one does not want to ascribe to one’s own culture. 6 One can see this easily in early Christian chronicles, separating their own ‘Christian’ culture from a foreign ‘pagan’ culture fantasized as lying across the border, as does, e.g., the eleventhcentury Kievan chronicler-monk quoted here: The Drevlyans lived like animals, like cattle; ate unclean foods, had no marriage, but abducted girls at the waterside. While the Radmichi, Vyatichi and northern tribes shared the same custom: they lived in the forest like wild beasts, ate unclean food and used foul language in front of fathers and female relatives, and they had no marriages, but held games between villages and gathered at these games for dancing and all kinds of devilish songs. (Qtd. Lotman 1990: 131) If the others are like animals, unclean, know neither morals nor respect, and waste their time in idle pastimes, you can ascribe to yourself that you are ‘human’, ‘clean’, and that you have ‘morals’, ‘respect’, and a ‘work ethic’. The same applies to how, as early as in the eighth century, a Frankish chronicler represented the Saxons: Fierce by nature, worshippers of the devil, enemies of our religion, they respect neither human nor divine rules, and they permit themselves to do what is not permissible. (Ibid.: 132) philosopher Giorgio Agamben has more recently discussed the same phenomenon under the terms ‘closed’ and ‘open’, concluding, “that man [woman] is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human” (2004: 26). 6 This would be what in gender criticism has been described as the ‘death-dealing’ nature of binaries; cf. classically Kristeva (1981). On the meaningfulness of transgressions 7 This is the classical contrast between ‘them’ and ‘us’: a binary-like or, to quote Lotman again, “mirror-like relationship between ‘our’ world and ‘their’ one: what is not allowed with us is allowed with them” (ibid.) - albeit with a little grain of envy. And it brings us back to the category of ‘difference’: apparently, cultures constitute themselves (consciously/ subconsciously) by drawing a borderline between themselves and other cultures, whose features they deny in order to create a positive self-image through that denial. Again, it is only via a (fantasized) border that a culture manages to acquire a ‘meaning’ or ‘meaningfulness’ of its own. Only through the arbitrary establishment of a (separating) border does it become possible for a culture to ascribe to itself what and who they are: their ‘identity’. III. This is where we get to the core of things. Because this explains why we are surrounded by a continuous process of text-making. We seem to be constantly producing texts in order to be able to keep up the illusion of having an identity, of being endowed with meanings that only determine, that only belong to, ‘us’. ‘Texts’ can thus be said to be ‘meaning-generating’, meaning-stabilizing, agencies (cf. Lotman 1990: 11-119) that, in an endless process, make the world appear, again and again, as what a culture would like to see it. 7 They are endlessly renewed contractual formulas of a cultural consensus that determines what ‘a’ culture collectively wants to be. At the same time, however, this poses the question why, in all cultures, there is such an “enormous number of texts relating events which are known not to have taken place” (Lotman 1979-1980: 161). This is the question concerning the existence of the plot-text or the sjuzhet (cf. Lotman 1977: 209-284). What this means is that there are apparently two basic types of texts in cultures. On the one hand, there seem to be texts that back up the consensus, that (quite literally) ‘re-present’, again and again, the communal phantasm, or build up the ‘social imaginary’ (cf. Castoriadis 1987) of a culture - in Lotman’s words its ‘centre’ -, with the intention to affirm it, to classify things, to “bolster up” (Iser 1987: 83) the apparent status quo: these would be the ‘plotless texts’. And on the other hand, there are those texts that explore, question, negotiate this centre: and these would be the ‘plot texts’, the sjuzhets, agencies of alterity, spaces of the imaginary let loose, articulations of the ‘periphery’, probing into, testing out, ‘difference’ - addressing the suspicion that everything could be altogether different (Lotman 1990: 123-214). In a way, texts of the centre act as meaning generators that 7 This also refers to what Foucault has classically described as a ‘will to truth’ with its concomitant systems of exclusion: mechanisms of discursive control such as, among other things, the ‘commentary’ as an instrument which guarantees that meaning across texts largely remains stable (cf. Foucault 1971: 12). Andreas Mahler 8 stabilize a culture, whereas texts of the periphery act as if they were questioning catalysts. The second type is important because it (fictionalizingly) stages events that a culture could normally only interpret as a danger to its order. In other words, what sjuzhets do is explore the world as it is (or rather seems to be) by way of addressing alternatives, other possibilities, alterizing imaginations, and, in doing so, they attribute to the world meaning from outside, through what they are not, i.e. ‘differential’ meaning (again). This is precisely what turns them into catalysts: “By creating plot-texts,” Lotman concludes, “man [woman] learnt to distinguish plots in life and thus to make sense of life.” (1979-1980: 183) In a sense, plot texts are perhaps not so much the periphery but the differential outside stabilizing the internal meaningfulness. Plot texts - others might call them ‘narratives’ - can thus be said to be agencies of balancing out cultural meaning (in a sense they are, as it were, ‘mirrors of mirrors’). As cultural catalysts, they are themselves operating on and with borders. Like the beginning of Shakespeare’s As You Like It: As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, and, as thou sayst, charged my brother on his blessing to breed me well - and there begins my sadness. My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit. For my part, he keeps me rustically at home - or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better, for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manège, and to that end riders dearly hired. But I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I. Besides this nothing that he so plentifully gives me, the something that nature gave me his countenance seems to take from me. He lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as in him lies, mines my gentility with my education. This is it, Adam, that grieves me; and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude. I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it. (AYL, 1.1.1-21) 8 Orlando’s initial monologue is quite visibly constructed around a border: the difference between ‘keeps’ and ‘unkept’. It opposes the norm of appropriate care and education (‘My brother Jaques he keeps at school’) and its violation through neglect (‘but I gain nothing under him but growth’). Between the fatherly command ‘to breed me well’, and its realization through Oliver, there is a gap: ‘He bars me the place of a brother’. In other words, 8 All quotes are, under the usual abbreviations, to the widely accessible edition of Shakespeare (1997) (for King Lear I have used the version of the “Conflated Text”). In what follows, I draw on Mahler (1998) and Mahler (2016) (see there for more detail). On the meaningfulness of transgressions 9 topologically speaking, Orlando is not where he belongs. His natural ‘gentility’ is undermined (‘mines’) by a ‘keeping that differs not from the stalling of an ox’, putting him on the same level with ‘hinds’ and ‘animals on dunghills’. His position is scandalously opposed to that of the horses (‘His horses are bred better, they are taught’): Orlando is too low, he is kept in pure ‘servitude’. The ‘otherworld’ of As You Like It thus begins to constitute itself as vertically organized, with a border in the middle. It presents the idea of order as a vertical hierarchy following the model of the chain of being, separating an ‘above’ from a ‘below’, in this case ‘humans’ from ‘animals’ or, as it were, ‘gentlemen’ from ‘peasants’. And it shows an anomaly in the transference of Orlando by his own brother across the border from the ‘above’ to the ‘below’. This is the play’s ‘event’ (cf. Lotman 1977: 240). This kind of ‘eventness’ finds itself reduplicated in the dukes. The younger Duke Frederick has usurped the throne, and Duke Senior - there is something in a name - has been ousted and has left the court. This kind of topological arrangement is not untypical of early modern plot-making. Early modern plots still follow a medieval phantasm of meaningfulness. This is the feudal logic of a ‘brotherhood of love’, according to which cultural order is won, and held, by the mutual respect governing the relations between a caste, a ‘happy band’ of brothers, with the ruler as their ‘first’ (‘senior’) brother, the primus inter pares. 9 Plots of this type are plots of restitution. Their interest is, after an eventful transgression creating disorder, to bring back feudal order as the only imaginable form of organizing society. This is precisely what happens in As You Like It. As soon as they find out that they are too low, the characters shifted across the border from the ‘above’ to the ‘below’ immediately take themselves out of the game and escape to a kind of carnivalesque ‘enclave’ outside society, the Forest of Arden, a space of suspension neutralizing differences (and cultural meanings), where they remain until things are resolved, and they are allowed to return. This kind of self-eclipsing detour via a neutralizing enclave (cf. Mahler 2016) is the ‘wise remedy’ Orlando is still seeking for at the beginning of the play (but since it is a comedy we already know that he is going to find it). Carnival is, as Mikhail Bakhtin has classically put it, “the festival of allannihilating and all-renewing time” (1984: 124). ‘Time’, cyclical time in particular, and ‘love’, are forces of healing. 10 They are apt to turn the initial ‘sadness’ into ‘mirth’ and to bring about the ‘promised end’: “Then there is mirth in heaven”, says towards the end of act V harmonious Hymen, “When 9 For a discussion of the idea of a feudal ‘Personenverband’ as a union of brotherly ‘love’ ideally acknowledging each member of that union as ‘even’, cf. Mahler (2005: 182-184). 10 Cf. Viola’s desperate sigh in Twelfth Night: “O time, thou must untangle this, not I. / It is too hard a knot for me t’untie.” (TN 2.2.38-39). Andreas Mahler 10 earthly things made even / Atone together.” (AYL 5.4.97-99) ‘Atonement’, being ‘at one’/ ‘even’ again in view of unwanted strife, is a visible sign of restitution: the transgressions are taken back, first through Oliver’s “conversion” (4.3.135) upon his entry into the forest and, then, through Duke Frederick, who, in the enclave, too, is “converted / Both from his enterprise and from the world, / His crown bequeathing to his banished brother, / And all their lands restored to them again / That were with him exiled” (5.4.150-154). This shows the validity of the restitution. “Welcome, young man”, says Duke Senior to Oliver, “Thou offer’st fairly to thy brothers’ wedding: / To one his lands withheld, and to the other / A land itself at large, a potent dukedom.” (155-158) The end of As You Like It thus stages “the good of our returnèd fortune” (163). Its ‘harmony’ and the final “music” with its “measures” (167-168) symbolize that the old ‘meaning’ (as the one and only one existing) has been found again and that the world can start afresh. In Lotmanian terms, the “chance occurrence”, the event, has been done away with, and the general “principle” finds itself successfully, and rightfully, re-established; the “anomaly” (of not respecting one’s own brother as is his due) has been banned and what reigns again is the “law” (Lotman 1979-1980: 163; cf. Lotman 1990: 153). As a plot-text, As You Like It presents itself as a circle of restoring the harmony of the world. It moves its main (feudal) characters - the ones that are shifted across the border: Orlando, Duke Senior, Rosalind and Aliena - from a ‘high’ position to one that is ‘too low’. In the end, however, via a heterotopian enclave that neutralizes the ‘high’-‘low’ distinction, it brings them back to their original ‘high’ position, and in doing so, it fulfills the ‘promise’ of ‘restoring’ everything ‘back to normal’ in the sense that this is precisely what the audience ‘likes’ to see. In a way, this seems to hold true for practically all Shakespearean plots. It is typical of how fictions (‘otherworlds’) negotiate the world around the year 1600. In Julius Caesar (c. 1599), this plot model splits up into either the variant that Caesar aspires to absolute authority shifting all free Romans into the role of ‘slaves’, or the variant that the conspirators, in killing Caesar, turn themselves into usurpers destroying the ‘brotherly’ commonwealth and thus the very basis on which they thrive. This resurges in Hamlet (c. 1601-1602) in the eponymous hero’s predicament (‘born to set it right’) of either taking revenge against Claudius the usurper via the enclave of the ‘antic disposition’, or of risking that he becomes a usurper himself by ‘unlawfully’ killing Claudius on the grounds of having listened to an ‘evil’ ghost. It shows again in King Lear (c. 1605-1606) in Lear stating, after her famous ‘nothing’, that Cordelia’s ‘price has fallen’, with her fleeing to France (the enclave) and then coming back in act IV in order to ‘restore’/ ‘remediate’ what has been broken, only to see that even though things may look as if “[t]he wheel is come full circle” (Lr. 5.3.172), there is no longer any hope for restitution. The sjuzhet of King Lear, it is true, On the meaningfulness of transgressions 11 does bring back order, but it no longer disposes of any living character to represent it: “The weight of this sad time we must obey,” says Kent - or is it Albany? -, articulating the embarrassing final lack of meaning in the play, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” (322-323) That all this is not something specifically English can for example be seen in the plots offered roughly at the same time by the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. As has been shown, a lot of his Exemplary Novellas stage precisely the same cultural trajectory of feudal restitution that one can see at work in the Shakespearean plays (cf. Dürr 2010). IV. So, 1600 seems to be a time literally crying out for new plots. Instead of affirming the ‘principle’ - the conventional ‘meaning’ guaranteeing ‘order’ - they tend to focus the ‘chance occurrence’ - a ‘new’ meaning to be negotiated - and (hopefully) thwarted. This seems to be wrapped up with a new way of seeing ‘the world’ as no longer a (hierarchical, cosmic) ‘reality guaranteed by God’ through his creation but, rather, ‘a world’ ‘realized individually’ through one’s own individual actions and decisions (cf. Blumenberg 1979: 31-33). What this brings with it is on the one hand new actants or ‘heroes’, no longer exclusively representing the feudal class but introducing the (‘bourgeois’) middle classes as potentially new actants worth making stories about. What it entails on the other hand is, topologically speaking, a ‘linearization’ as well as what can be called a ‘horizontalization’ of the plot-making. One of its main representatives is Shakespeare’s eternal ‘rival’ Ben Jonson. Already the titles of Jonson’s early plays indicate that there is a shift in plot-making. His first two comedies of Every Man in His Humour (1598) und Every Man out of His Humour (1599) sketch the modelling of a world that opposes an (inner) field of ‘reason’ and, hence, of sociability, to an (outer) field of ‘madness’ and exclusion from society, with a border between the two. 11 And it imagines ‘order’ as the state when all subscribe to a social contract that reassembles them within the (rational) bounds of society. Whoever is ‘in’ his/ her humour is ‘out of’ society, and as soon as they have (therapeutically) been transported ‘out of’ their humours, they are back ‘in’ society again, and the comedy can stop. This horizontal kind of plot-making with a field of ‘reason’ and a field of ‘unreason’ separated by a border not to be transgressed (unless for the sake of producing comedic laughter), is typical of classical comedy as one can also find it in Molière. What these comedies celebrate is less a ‘cosmic 11 For the discursive disqualification mechanism of considering an utterance as ‘mad’ and casting it outside cf. Foucault (1971: 9-10); for a history of madness in general cf. Foucault (1965). Andreas Mahler 12 harmony’ (as in As You Like It) than ‘social reintegration’ (a modern word would be ‘inclusion’). In a way, what they do, is turn the former ‘enclave’ into a kind of ‘no-go area’ where one is not allowed to be if they want to be part of society. There is hardly a play to demonstrate this better than Molière’s Misanthropist (1666). Not unlike Jaques in As You Like It, Alceste, the eponymous hero who (unreasonably) ‘hates’ people, is continuously trying to escape society, with precisely that society always catching up on him, so that he never truly manages to get ‘away’. Topologically speaking, again, this paves the way for a type of plot-making that seems to be entirely focused on the ‘inner’ field of society. What becomes ‘meaningful’ are indeed now results of some individual ‘realization’: either positively in crossing the border and creating a ‘new’ world, or negatively in annulling the transgression and re-establishing the ‘old’ world again. This new type of plot-making begins to produce stories that show how an individual finally succeeds in ‘making it’ (significantly to the ‘top’) as in Jonson’s Volpone (1606) where inadvertently Mosca, the ‘slave’, at least for a period of time, manages to take over Volpone’s position - or (more classically later) as in the novels of a Balzac or a Dickens. It produces stories that justify how an individual ‘dis-covers’ distant lands and declares them to be his own as in Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) or in Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719). And it produces stories that show an individual who, despite her protestations that she ‘is not going about to create a new world’, is in fact ‘cased up like a holy relic’, and eventually murdered, as is John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. This is the class/ race/ gender triad of the sjuzhets of social rise, of expansion, and of domestication. 12 What they have in common is the ‘realization’, in time, of something ‘new’ - or its avoidance. This ideology of creating something in its own right - this new kind of individual meaningfulness - begins in turn to come under intense negotiation and severe questioning in the second half of the nineteenth century. As from the 1850s onwards, there is a marked increase in plots that stage a kind of ‘thwarted eventfulness’, with characters incessantly crossing ‘borders’ without ever achieving ‘meaning’. 13 In Gustave Flaubert’s Ma-dame Bovary, the eponymous heroine Emma is incessantly dreaming of leaving the ‘inner’ field of provincial boredom in order to reach the ‘meaningful’ life of the Parisian ‘grand monde’ but, no matter how many borders she crosses in her mind, she always remains in the same field of eventlessness and ennui. The plot is no longer unfolding a story of individual achievement but one of paradigmatic failure: instead of reaching romantic happiness, Emma has to put up with the monotonies of humdrum bourgeois routines; instead of experiencing an ‘event’, all she gets is the mere glimpse of an 12 For a discussion of this triad cf. Mahler (1998: 42-45). 13 For further detail in this and in what follows cf. Mahler (2013). On the meaningfulness of transgressions 13 ‘eventuality’. This can be seen in one of her very first fantasies of transgression: Quand sa mère mourut, elle pleura beaucoup les premiers jours. Elle se fit faire un tableau funèbre avec les cheveux de la défunte, et, dans une lettre qu’elle envoyait aux Bertaux, toute pleine de réflexions tristes sur la vie, elle demandait qu’on l’ensevelît plus tard dans le même tombeau. Le bonhomme la crut malade et vint la voir. Emma fut intérieurement satisfaite de se sentir arrivée du premier coup à ce rare idéal des existences pâles, où ne parviennent jamais les cœurs médiocres. Elle se laissa donc glisser dans les méandres lamartiniens, écouta les harpes sur les lacs, tous les chants des cygnes mourants, toutes les chutes des feuilles, les vierges pures qui montent au ciel, et la voix de l’Éternel discourant dans les vallons. Elle s’en ennuya, n’en voulut point convenir, continua par habitude, et fut enfin surprise de se sentir apaisée, et sans plus de tristesse au cœur que de rides sur son front. (MB 98-99) 14 When her mother died she wept much the first few days. She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter sent home full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried later in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill, and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, to the words of the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing through the valleys. Finally she wearied of it, but would not confess it; she continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow. (MB 37- 38) One can see this as the core of all transgressions-to-come. Emma seems to move from the monotonies of her everyday life to an autosuggestive ‘rare ideal’ which, after ‘attaining’ it (‘parviennent’), turns out to be nothing but another part of the same world of boredom and ennui (‘Elle s’en ennuya’). This persistent negation of any kind of ‘eventfulness’ is characteristic of the entire novel. Her return home to her father’s house with the option of ‘commanding the servants’ leads to nothing but ‘disillusionment’. So, notoriously, does her meeting with Charles: “La conversation de Charles était plate comme un trottoir de rue” (“Charles’s conversation was as commonplace as a street pavement”; MB 101/ 40). Finally, even the aristocratic ball at la Vaubyessard, with its promise of leaving the mediocrity of her existence, ends in disillusionment again: Tout ce qui l’entourait immédiatement, campagne ennuyeuse, petit-bourgeois imbéciles, médiocrité de l’existence, lui semblait une exception dans le monde, 14 All quotes are, under the abbreviation MB, to Flaubert (1986) and Flaubert (1919). Andreas Mahler 14 un hasard particulier où elle se trouvait prise, tandis qu’au-delà s’étendait à perte de vue l’immense pays des félicités et des passions. (MB 119) All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to be exceptional, a peculiar chance that had entrapped her, while beyond, as far as eye could see, spread an immense land of joys and passions. (MB 57) This ‘au-delà’ / this ‘beyond’ is never reached. After two love affairs, she is still where she began: “Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage” (“Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage”; MB 364/ 304). Whatever Emma undertakes, she will never get to the ‘outer’ sphere of her dreams: the definitive transcending of the boundary never materializes; the supposed eventfulness of her love for Rodolphe disintegrates, as does later her love for Léon; only in her perspective does the shabby Hirondelle remain the emblem of Romantic longing, only in her perspective does Rouen, that ‘old Norman city’, become a ‘capital huge beyond measure’ [...], in which she is transformed into a Babylonian courtesan. Precisely the repetitive quality of her journey serves to undercut its supposed eventfulness. [...] Actual conflict does not materialize. Emma is the heroine of her dreams. (Warning 1980-1981: 276) Transgressing without end, Emma always remains where she was. To some extent, she is like the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Behind the Looking-Glass: “‘[I]n our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.’/ ‘A slow sort of country! ’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’” (Carroll 1976: 210; original emphases) Just as Shakespeare begins to question cyclical plot-making with regard to its potential ‘meaningfulness’ of affirming a view of the world as having been unquestionably created (and ‘guaranteed’) by God, Flaubert starts to experiment with linear plot-making questioning the myth of ‘realizability’ as view of a ‘man’-made world where everybody is master of his/ her own fate - and only has to reach out in order to make his/ her dreams come true. Flaubert’s Sentimental Education seems to be even more radical in this. Like Madame Bovary, it is paradigmatic in its organization, adding failure after failure, eventlessness after eventlessness. But it ends with a spectacular analepsis that leaps to a moment before the actual start of the novel where the two boys (meaningfully) attempt to cross the border between the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘anti-bourgeois’ in trying to visit a brothel, with one of the boys fleeing in panic and the other having to follow him because the friend has got the money. This looks like the programmatic ‘key’ to all that follows: there is no transgression, everything is and always will be On the meaningfulness of transgressions 15 ‘platitude’, romanticism is always already ‘elsewhere’, the world is condemned to the meaningless. This can be seen as a deconstruction of the linear realization paradigm into mere contingency (cf. Blumenberg 1979: 33-34). Just as King Lear has deconstructed cyclicality in making the wheel ‘come full circle’ without leaving a character still able to ‘represent’ it, the Sentimental Education sends its characters on a syntagmatic trajectory and makes them end up with their first paradigmatic failure. Only the pattern is reversed: if a sjuzhet like Lear stages a syntagmatic ‘chance event’ that denies the paradigmatic (God-guaranteed) ‘principle’ of things always coming back to ‘normal’, a sjuzhet like the Education, 250 years later, begins to stage a whole paradigm of contingent ‘chance events’ that begin to deny the syntagmatic ‘principle’ of being able to realize one’s own way. In other words, the ‘bourgeois’ model established around 1600 now in turn slowly begins to abdicate. Around 1900, one can see this kind of ‘defeatist’, meaningless plot-making directed against a belief in ‘realizability’ all over the place. It shows in a novel such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a consequent denial of a ‘significant’ story; it can be seen in Joyce’s Dubliners (especially in a story such as “Eveline”) in the programmatic staging of failures of ‘breaking out’ and leaving; it reappears in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a kind of negative bildungsroman in a consecutive figural hope of finally being able to get out of the narrowness of the humdrum Dublin world; and even Stephen’s transgressive flight to Paris finds its disillusioned denial in the first chapters of Ulysses. Similar trajectories could be sketched for Proust, Virginia Woolf, Musil, Faulkner, and many others. V. Seeing the world as a world of ‘contingency’ implies a fundamental loss of belief in ‘meaningfulness’. It entails a redefinition of the ‘tellable’. If a story is tellable, i.e. ‘worth telling’ because of its ‘meaning’, its meaning-making is always wrapped up with its negotation of borders. European plot-making begins, as we have seen, by corroborating these borders. It reaches a first ‘crisis of representation’ where these borders are no longer apt to produce the ‘promised’ meaning. This is what has been called ‘secularization’. It opens up the option of producing ‘new’ meaning by transgressing borders and ‘realizing’ a ‘new’ world through the transgression - the possibility to ‘rise’; the appropriation of the ‘foreign’; the self-authorization of ‘female action’. This kind of plot-making reaches a second ‘crisis of representation’ with the suspicion that these transgressions are nothing but expansions of one’s own. This annuls their ‘eventfulness’. It also takes away their ‘meaning’. If the first crisis of representation is a deconstruction of cyclical Andreas Mahler 16 meaningfulness, this second crisis is a deconstruction of linear meaningfulness. Instead of negotiating internal borders, the telling of tales is now reaching a border itself. This is what the Flaubertian project of a ‘livre sur rien’, of writing a ‘book on nothing’, is about: the annulment of the plot and, with it, the eradication of any meaningfulness of its borders. It is also characteristic of the Joycean project of producing nothing but prose by programmatically undermining the semantics of the text. The sjuzhet becomes secondary: it no longer endows the world with meaning but only functions as the basis for the production of textual art, of ‘aesthetics’. In other words, where there are no borders, there is no meaning. One of the consequences of this is the annulment of the act of telling itself as the eradication of an act of (‘realizingly’ in turn) bringing ‘meaningfulness’ into the world. This can be seen in Flaubert’s notorious dictum: “L’auteur, dans son œuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, visible nulle part” (‘The author, in his work, should be like God in the universe, present everywhere but visible nowhere’; Flaubert 1963: 95), as well as in its Joycean replica: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (Joyce 1993: 207). It can be interpreted as a shift from a modelling with borders to the modelling of borders itself. In hiding itself, the act of telling paradoxically begins to come to the fore. Such a shift can be described as a move from the mimetic to the performative: from telling events along the syntagmatic axis to repetitively producing text. This is what has been called ‘paradigmatic narration’ (cf. Warning 2001): a means of textual production in which the author shows his/ her mastery in treating the same differently, again and again and again, as in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, or Joyce’s Ulysses or his Finnegans Wake, all instances of a ‘writing without end’. All this is apt to show that the text itself is now approaching a border. Its textuality becomes cyclical, its principle is that of ‘seriality’. What we now get are textual experiments foregrounding language games, signifiers, explorations of the text’s mediality. From a medial point of view, this is an attempt to unveil the ‘latency’ governing our language use - an attempt to look behind the mechanism that is apt to ‘endow with meaning’ in the first place, as in Beckett’s prose or in the nouveau nouveau roman of a Jean Ricardou oder in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru, to name but a few. It is an attempt to discover the conditions of our own transgression-based ‘excentricity’. 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Andreas Mahler Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin Freie Universität Berli Skopos Theory and the Sardic version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea A Translational and Stylistic Analysis Elisabetta Soro The article aims to highlight how a text can change in translation if the translator’s (or publisher’s/ editor’s) main concern is to give prominence to the target culture and prestige to the target language. Drawing on Vermeer’s Skopos theory (1989/ 2004: 221) and addressing the question of the translators’ voice, I will analyse the Sardinian version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway 1952), reflecting especially on the style of this translation and its importance in Sardinian literature. A comparative analysis of the two texts will show how the final product can differ from the original and serve a new cause that is different from the author’s, but no less effective. Given that Hemingway’s style is highly distinctive and precisely built, the question arises if the translator manages to maintain the same unique style or, if not, whether this new text can still be considered authentic, faithful to the source text and relevant. 1. Introduction In the late 1970s the German linguist and translation scholar Hans Josef Vermeer developed what is nowadays considered the best known among the functionalist approaches to the field of translation studies, Skopos theory. Christiane Nord’s recent translation into English of Katharina Reiß and Hans J. Vermeer’s 1984 book Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie has given easy access to one of the most interesting theories of translation which can well serve the specific case of translations into minority languages. Starting from the idea that translating means performing an action and that every action has a purpose, he borrowed a term from Greek to refer to the aim or goal of a translation: skopos. The skopos can vary and AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0002 Elisabetta Soro 20 be redefined from time to time according to the translator’s decision regarding the “role a source text plays in his translational action” (Vermeer 2000: 222). Indeed, not only does the translator as an expert mediate between two cultures but, by freely interpreting the message given in a text, he/ she can also choose to follow one idea rather than another. This depends on how he/ she first approaches the Source Text (ST) and his/ her skopos in giving birth to a new one, the translatum, i.e. “the resulting translated text” (Vermeer 2000: 221). This is the reason why different translations of the same book exist and why some of these appear to be quite different from each other, even though they share the same starting point. We can only speak of “intertextual coherence” (Vermeer 2000: 223) between the ST and the Target Text (TT) when the translator judges that the form and function of the ST conform to the skopos he/ she had decided upon in advance (Vermeer 2000). In this case, a faithful translation of the source text is mandatory, even though the former cannot be equivalent to the latter since the target text both reflects the personal interpretation of the translator and considers the encyclopedic knowledge of the recipient reader (Eco 2003). This means that the translation process can be conceptualised as involving three parties: the author with his/ her source text and his/ her source culture; the reader with his/ her target text and culture; and the translator, who plays a central role in the process, mediating between the two worlds through choices based on his/ her own sensitivity. The theory of translational action pays much attention to the translator’s task in terms of ethics and responsibility (Vermeer 2000). However, Vermeer’s ideas have failed to convince some scholars. Let us consider the three types of objections that were raised against Skopos theory, taking for granted that nowadays it is commonly accepted that translating is performing an action: Vermeer himself states that one of the arguments against Skopos theory was that “literature has no purpose” (Vermeer 2000: 224), and hence, neither does translating. Scholars criticised Skopos theory by claiming that: a) the translator does not have any specific intention when translating, he just translates “what is in the source text”, b) a specific goal limits the range of interpretation of the TT compared to that of the ST, c) the translator has no specific addressee in mind (Vermeer 2000: 226). It is Vermeer himself who responds to each of these objections. He claims, for instance, that advertising texts are supposed to advertise, instructions to describe, newspaper reports to inform and so on. There is no doubt, then, that such “pragmatic texts” (Vermeer 2000: 226) are goal-oriented, and so are their translations. In response to the second objection, he replies that although it is true that a given skopos may exclude certain Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 21 interpretations because they are not part of the translation goal, “one possible goal would certain be precisely to preserve the breadth of interpretation of the source text.” He adds that a translation realises something that is completely different, i.e. nothing “more” and nothing “less” (Vermeer 2000: 227). Finally, his reply to the last objection is that even though the text-producer and hence also the translator are not thinking of a specific addressee, they unconsciously orient their choices towards the various levels of intelligence and education they associate with a certain restricted group (Vermeer 2000: 226-7). The above objections will be reconsidered at the end of this article, following a comparison of the two texts in question to find out whether Skopos theory can help better understand diversities in translation into minority languages. The present article will examine several aspects of the ST previously analysed by researchers and academics from all over the world. It will investigate Hemingway’s style to find out whether the Sardinian version maintains the same features or if, how, and why they have been changed. In fact, the article aims to highlight how a text can change in translation if the translator’s (or publisher’s or editor’s) main concern is to give prominence to the target culture and prestige to the target language. This is particularly true when minority languages are involved. In Hearing voices, Millán-Varela analyses the translation into Galician of James Joyce’s Dubliners and states that translating international authors into minority, or, as she puts it, minoritized languages goes far beyond the mere mediation between two cultures, but “constitutes a political act where the socio-cultural and political context much more than the ST or the author, determines and shapes both translating process and the final product” (Millán-Varela 2004: 37). Thus, going back to Skopos theory, we can assume that the goal of the translator in the case of minority languages is to give prominence and prestige to the minority language itself. Indeed, translating an international masterpiece into a minority language gives new life to the target culture and offers the translator, who is in a way the second author, the chance to put the minority language to the test. “The translation into a minoritized language becomes an exploration of the Self, rather than an encounter with an Other” (Millán-Varela 2004: 37). This begs the following questions: is it possible to know in advance whether the translator has a different goal with respect to the ST? And if so, is it ethically correct to denounce it? How can we know the translator’s skopos? To find answers, we have three possibilities: 1. look for a direct manifestation of the translator’s intent in the book; 2. interview both the translator and the publisher and ask them directly; 3. compare the ST and the TT to find out similarities and discrepancies. Elisabetta Soro 22 Given the fact that in our case we did not have the chance to meet either translator or publisher, other instruments must be used to learn about the translator’s aim. As for point 1., the translator’s intention is evident from the very beginning of the book, where we find this parenthetical on the inside front cover of the Sardinian version: “Paberiles” est una colletzione chi cheret ajudare sa limba nostra a intrare in su terzu millenniu, “Paberiles” is a collection that wishes to help our language to enter the third millennium. Accordingly, the objective of the Sardinian translation is to help the Sardinian language enter the third millennium. This means that this translation represents an opportunity, and even a pretext, to test the language and to show that it can well serve literature. The translation was commissioned to Mario Vargiu, who graduated in Pedagogy in the 1960s and who is passionate about the Sardinian language. The newspaper Nazione Sarda (“Sardinian Nation”) allowed him to give voice to the protest which demanded that bilingualism be put to a popular referendum. He translated several books from Italian to Sardinian before tackling foreign authors: a new challenge for the language. When reading the book in translation it immediately becomes noticeable how he plays with the language, to the effect that Hemingway becomes a mere means to discover and recognise the great expressive and descriptive powers of the Sardinian language. His meticulous work of lexical research is still valuable for the Sardinian language. At this point it should be mentione that Sardinian has only recently been recognised as a language (it was previously considered an Italian dialect). Indeed, with the provisions of Law No. 482/ 1999, the Regione Autonoma della Sardegna (Sardinia Autonomous Region) began to promote Sardinian as the Island’s official language, at the same level as Italian. Several initiatives have been enacted ever since to promote a new use of the language not only in private, but also in the official context of institutions and public administration. Translations were part of this important project. Official documents and laws, projects for schools, but also books started to be translated into Sardinian. Condaghes is one of the publishing houses which, since 1999, has offered Sardinians translations of several important works by internationally known authors including, for example, Joseph Conrad, George Orwell, Richard Bach, Gabriel García Márquez and, obviously, Ernest Hemingway. This was because, as Natalino Pira stated during his lecture on the Sardinian translation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes, “Sardinian has its raison d’être because of its need to be used in literature” (Asproni 2004). More than just a meeting between cultures, the translation in this case assumes a connotation of tribute to the importance of a finally codified Sardinian language. Vargiu’s study is primarily text-oriented, or dare I say, Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 23 language-oriented, since it focuses mainly on the form, the structure and the language of the target text without paying attention to the historical or social context of the writer and the message of the text itself. The third way of understanding whether the translator’s aim differs from that of the author is to employ the methodology of translational stylistics, which compares the translated text and its source text (Malmkjær 2004: 16). This method allows the researcher to take into consideration the relationship between the two texts through gloss marks which, word by word, highlight both the similarities and the differences between ST and TT. This relationship is fundamental and helps shed light on aspects of major interest for the translator and on the textual features of potential interest for the analyst. A comparative analysis of the two texts will show how the final product can differ and serve a new cause which may be different from that of the author, but not necessarily less effective. As Hemingway’s style is highly distinctive and precisely built, the question arises whether the translator manages to maintain the same unique style and, if not, if this new text can still be considered authentic - in other words, does the translation respect the author’s original intent? If not, is it still a relevant literary contribution? 2. Hemingway’s style Most students have read The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway 1952) at least once in their life and have probably been taught that Hemingway’s style is journalistic, sober, dry, direct, flat - a “tough guy” way of writing, so to speak (Simpson 2014: 53). As Paul Simpson stated in his book, this perception is, among other things, due to the scarce use of adjectives. For most of the novella, “the tuna” is merely referred to as such, rarely it is described as “small” or “big”. This tendency to omit adjectives, perceived as a deviation from the norm, has come to be known as a distinguishing feature of Hemingway’s style, namely foregrounding. Paraphrasing Paul Simpson, foregrounding refers to a form of textual patterning motivated by literary and aesthetic purposes. Foregrounding, Simpson remarks, “is essentially a technique for 'making strange' in language” (Simpson 2014: 52). The following quantitative analysis will briefly highlight the most distinctive aspects of the text that come to the fore by using this technique, i.e. constitute a deviation from a linguistic norm. The following features will be taken into consideration: the mentioned scarce use of adjectives, the use of short words, the recurrence of the verb said, the use of coordinating conjunctions to start a sentence, the abundance of figurative speech, the preference for simple sentences and constructions, the repetition of the most common subordinating conjunctions and the creative use of punctuation. Elisabetta Soro 24 2.1. A quantitative analysis The book contains 27,133 words. The title of six one-syllable words is itself the first example of the pattern of brevity which is rarely broken throughout the whole text. Indeed, no words contain more than four syllables and the greater lengths (six maximum) are rarely achieved by affixation, verbs included. Furthermore, not only are the verbs short, but they are mainly in the active voice, with long verbs and passives only being used when really necessary. The simplicity of the individual word is, then, the second stylistic aspect taken into examination (Heaton 1970: 11-12). Among these short words the most frequently used in the text is the verb said, which appears 189 times and holds the 26 th position on the list of the most frequent 100 words, soon after articles, conjunctions, prepositions, personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, adverbs, auxiliary verbs (be and have) and the lexical words fish, man, old, which appear in the text 285, 266 and 248 times respectively. Moreover, the word said appears 170 times to introduce or end a dialogue. Among hundreds of possibilities, as Heaton noticed, Hemingway always uses the word said in dialogue situations between the old man and the boy. They could have mumbled, whispered, stated, answered, claimed, but according to Hemingway they just said. This can be ascribed to his “typical refusal to draw conclusions for his reader” (Heaton, 1970: 13) and, again, to his predilection for simple, wellknown words. He mainly tells facts without commenting. Comments and conclusions are left to the reader. Another distinctive characteristic of Hemingway’s style is the frequent use of coordinating conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence. This choice could be attributed to a question of rhythm or better, to his desire to make the story sound natural in speech. Indeed, Hemingway’s prose mainly consists of physical descriptions and dialogues between the old man and the boy, and monologues. In any case, this choice stands out, because it is contrary to grammar rules. As Heaton noticed, Hemingway uses the coordinator but for this purpose 178 times out of the 236 examples in the text, for instance: But you are your father’s and your mother’s and you are in a lucky boat. (Hemingway 1952: 36) Another recurrent feature is the marked preference for simple sentences instead of complex ones with “an excessive” (Simpson 2014: 142) use of simple markers of coordination like and, as several literary critics have pointed out (Simpson 2014). As Heaton remarked in his research on Hemingway’s style, The Old Man and the Sea consists of 1,735 sentences and 77 sentence fragments. Of these 1,735 sentences, 890 (51%) are simple sentences, 231 (13%) are compound sentences, 440 (25%) are complex sentences and 174 (11%) are Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 25 compound-complex sentences. This means that nearly two-thirds of the sentences in the novel are simple or compound (Heaton 1970: 14). Let us take the following as an example: After a while the fish stopped beating at the wire and started circling slowly again. The old man was gaining line steadily now. But he felt faint again. He lifted some sea water with his left hand and put it on his head. Then he put more on and rubbed the back of his neck. (Hemingway 1952: 48) Situations are presented simply from the point of view of both grammar and meaning. The Subject Verb Object or Subject Verb Complement pattern is the most common in the book, although the use of compound predicates is quite frequent. Similarly, the structure of the compound sentences is equally simple, since the sentences linked by coordinating conjunctions maintain the same structure, allowing the reader to move from one action to the next without interrupting the rhythm (Heaton 1970: 15): He swung at him and hit only the head and the shark looked at him and wrenched the meat loose. (Hemingway 1952: 52) Even when Hemingway chooses to make dramatic use of compound sentences as in the following passage, the flow of his narration is always smooth and direct with a fundamental point always in mind, i.e. simplifying the readers’ task and evoking connections and conclusions: The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out. (Hemingway 1952: 44) Here the author uses the conjunction and 13 times to link the sentences in a short portion of text. As Heaton states, this choice is justified by the fact that at this point Hemingway must include a great deal of material in a short space allowing the reader to keep the sequences in mind. The use of punctuation, as well as the use of subordinating conjunctions, would interrupt the fluency of the discourse. He needs a structure where considerable material can be inserted also at a distance, but which keeps the action moving. For this purpose, “the compound sentence is the most suitable vehicle” (Heaton 1970: 16). As already said, Hemingway tries to simplify the reader’s task by also avoiding the use of relative pronouns or conjunctions in noun and adjective Elisabetta Soro 26 phrases, thus leaving pronouns, nouns and verbs side by side as in “I wish the boy were here” or by repeatedly using the same subordinating conjunctions. In particular when, as and while are used to coordinate events or ideas in time (Heaton 1970: 18): He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by himself. He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats. He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone, when the boy had left. But he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather (Hemingway 1952: 40). Apparently in contrast with Hemingway’s preference for directness and simplicity there is a massive use of figurative language (Heaton 1970: 13). As Heaton points out “there come times when the simple, direct statement will not achieve the effect that Hemingway wants.” (Heaton 1970: 14). Among the 70 different figures of speech present in the book, “50 of them are used to evoke an image of something in nature” (Heaton 1970: 13). “Hemingway seems to feel,” Heaton continues, “that a simple description of color, shape and size will hardly do to describe the marlin, for example” (Heaton 1970: 14). Remembering the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlins, he thought of the male fish’s tail… …which was sharp as a scythe…When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge … (Hemingway 1952: 41) The shark’s teeth were: … not the ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man’s fingers when they are crisped like claws. (Hemingway 1952: 50) And their stripes were: … wider than a man’s hand with his fingers spread and the fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession. (Hemingway 1952: 49) As Sandamali points out, in American literature we frequently find authors who use figurative language and symbols to “give an artistic beauty and a depth for their creations and for any other purposes”. Among these writers, Ernest Hemingway stands out “for his mastery of using symbols,” (Sandamali 2015: 125). As already said, he developed a style that was utterly simple, built on basic American speech, and used it to convey complex Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 27 situations and depths of emotion through subtle nuances and suggestion rather than by explicit statements. His prose largely consists only of physical descriptions and realistic details. In this way Hemingway could create 'natural metaphors' which became charged with an expressive significance. Although the surface of Hemingway’s novels and short stories presents us with what looks like bare realism, his use of these 'natural' symbols and metaphors greatly extends and enriches their significance (Belarbi 2016). Lastly, there is the question of punctuation. Once again Hemingway does not follow preconceived rules, but uses punctuation marks for his own needs, namely to imitate the pauses of spoken interaction (Heaton 1970: 22). It is worth noting that the book contains many passages which would normally be terminated by an exclamation mark and which Hemingway decides to end in another way: “What a fish, he said,” is the example offered by Heaton (1970: 22). Indeed, the whole novella contains just one exclamation mark, which is used in the scene describing the old man’s struggle with the fish, the most significant moment in the story. Eat it so that the point of the hook goes into your heart and kills you, he thought. Come up easy and let me put the harpoon into you. All right. Are you ready? Have you been long enough at table? “Now! ” he said aloud and struck hard with both hands, gained a yard of line and then struck again and again, swinging with each arm alternately on the cord with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body. (Hemingway 1952: 41) In conclusion, it can be said that Hemingway’s main concern in this novella is to tell his story in a simple and direct way without influencing the reader with his personal point of view. This manifests in his use of language, giving birth to his personal 'sober', 'dry' style whose main characteristics can be roughly summarised as follows: a) Scarce use of adjectives; b) Short words; c) Recurrence of the verb said; d) Coordinating conjunctions to start a sentence; e) Simple sentences and simple constructions; f) Repetition of the most common subordinating conjunctions; g) Massive use of figurative speech; h) Creative use of punctuation. 3. The target text The Sardinian version of the novella The Old Man and the Sea was translated for the first time by Mario Vargiu in 2001 for the Condaghes publishing house as part of the Paberiles series. S’Omini Becciu e su Mari is written in the Campidanese variety of Sardinian, primarily spoken in the Province of Elisabetta Soro 28 Cagliari, the capital city located in the south of the Island. Indeed, the first choice a translator into Sardinian has to make is between the existing varieties of the same language. The present structures of Sardinian are mainly the result of internal evolutions within the language itself, which have become permanent because of its geographic isolation (Grimaldi-Mensching 2004). Of course, the translator chooses the variety he knows and uses, since Sardinians rarely know more than one sublanguage (Bolognesi 1999). Then the translator must decide how to write the chosen variety. Indeed, another big problem is that Sardinian lacks any shared orthographic rules (1999 saw the first official attempt to elaborate an orthographic spelling hypothesis for Sardinian). This aim was reached, but never accepted by those who wished to maintain their individuality regarding their sublanguage (Grimaldi-Mensching 2004). After this, the translator must be sure that the text is translatable, i.e. that the topic of the ST has something in common with the target culture and therefore shares at least part of the existing vocabulary with the target language (Eco 2003). Before starting our detailed comparative study, let us just briefly describe the Sardinian language with some references to its history and modern situation. 3.1. Sardinian multilingualism through the centuries In the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Sardinia’s linguistic evolution has been deeply and repeatedly modified by different historical events which have greatly influenced the stratification of the lexicon and its spatial distribution over the years. Moreover, its geographic isolation has contributed to the conservation throughout history of forms that refer to different periods and bear the mark of contacts with other cultures. The proto-Sardinians, who stably inhabited the island from the Neolithic onwards, were replaced over time by various peoples who brought with them their traditions and languages. The Paleosardi, the Phoenician- Punic civilisation who conquered the plains and coastal areas, the Vandals who, according to the linguist M. L. Wagner (Wagner 1997), influenced the vocabulary of the Sardinian Campidanese variety of Sulcis, the Byzantines, the Pisans and Genoans, who left their traces in legal and administrative vocabulary as well as in the field of fashion, especially around the province of Cagliari. The Roman domination and use of Latin left much evidence especially among the populations of the inland mountainous areas whose contacts with the external world were rare or non-existent at all. Even today, we find still visible conservative traces of the Latin language and culture. The four hundred year-long Catalan-Aragonese occupation first and Castilian domination later left deep traces in many aspects of Sardinian life and culture. Some greetings, polite expressions of respect and T-V distinctions derive from Castilian words. When Sardinia was annexed to Piedmont (circa 1718) some Gallicisms entered Sardinian, especially in the field of furnishings, fashion and food culture (Puddu 2003). Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 29 The situation described above gave birth to a great variety of idioms that have only recently been recognised as languages. However, this has done nothing to help the stability of the language since, according to the online edition of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger last updated on Feb 7, 2016, the Sardinian Campidanese variety (one of the two main languages on the island) appears to be endangered (UNESCO 2017). One of the factors that has certainly put the language at risk is that in the generational transition Italian has almost completely replaced Sardinian in public contexts as well as in familiar ones and young people today do not speak Sardinian. Secondly, Sardinian still presents a great variety of idioms which differ in many aspects, especially in the lexicon. Probably due to the different linguistic influences over the centuries, as mentioned above, Sardinian is currently subdivided into the two main languages of Campidanese and Logudorese, and additionally into Tabarchino, Algherese, Sassarese and Gallurese (Virdis 2018). 4. A comparative study Those who have read The Old Man and The Sea probably still remember the direct, overwhelming opening for both its simplicity and, at the same time, its enormous potential. In just a few words, it manages to introduce the whole story and allow the reader to become immediately absorbed in the narrative. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. The narrator sets the scene in 23 words giving us a great deal of fundamental information about the whole plot and the author’s style. We immediately learn that the main character is a man; he is old, he works as a fisherman and he is alone on a small sailing boat somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. We also know that he is unlucky, because 84 days have passed since he last caught a fish. Hemingway does not make any judgements, he just describes the scene, leaving readers, as previously stated, to draw their own conclusions. Let us analyse the opening of the Sardinian version now. Applying the technique of translational stylistics, I shall use a gloss marking to compare the two openings: G stands for gloss and V for Vargiu’s translation. V: Mancai fessit un' omini becciu piscàt a solu cun G: Although (he) was a man old (he) fished alone with V: d'una barca a vela in su grandumari biu G: a sailing boat in the big sea open Elisabetta Soro 30 The original pattern S + V + SC of the main sentence (He was an old man) is replaced in the Sardinian version by a complex sentence introduced by a subordinating conjunction with the meaning of concession. In this introductory sentence we can also notice other differences concerning the vocabulary. The noun skiff, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, denotes a small light boat for rowing or sailing, usually used by only one person. The translator’s use of barca a vela simply translates sailing boat, thereby losing the denotation of being small, an important detail especially when the old man leaves for the open sea and starts fighting against the big fish. Moreover, Hemingway mentions the Gulf Stream, which offers an important geographic clue: The Gulf Stream is defined as “an Atlantic Ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico…crossing the Atlantic Ocean” (Science Daily, online). Some pieces of information are completely lost in translation. Hence, from the very first lines, Hemingway's desire for clarity, force and directness seems to be lost. This deserves further investigation. I shall retrace the main points of Hemingway’s style listed in 2.1. to find out the common grounds and the diversities between the two texts. a) The scarce use of adjectives As already stated, Hemingway became famous, among other things, for his scarce use of adjectives. This aspect was investigated by Paul Simpson, taking the following passage as an example: He knelt down and found the tuna under the stern with the gaff and drew it toward him keeping it clear of the coiled lines. Holding the line with his left shoulder again, and bracing on his left hand and arm, he took the tuna off the gaff hook and put the gaff back in place. He put one knee on the fish and cut strips of dark red meat longitudinally from the back of the head to the tail (Hemingway 1952: 43). Simpson stresses the fact that “almost all of the nouns receive no adjectival modification at all: the tuna, the stern, the gaff, the line and the fish are referred to as they are, which deviates his style from the 'norm' used by the authors of 20 th century prose fiction and then gives prominence to this 'unconventional' characteristic. Simpson adds that this non-adjectival pattern is in contrast with another passage of the same text: But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating dose beside the boat. (Hemingway 1952: 39) Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 31 Here, the author even uses four adjectives together (purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous) to describe a jellyfish, generating a hyperbole which clashes with the 'conquered norm' and gives birth to another phenomenon called internal foregrounding, namely a “deviation within a deviation”. (Simpson 2014: 53). It goes without saying that these are important features to be considered when speaking about the style of an author and that, when translating, they should be taken into consideration to convey the same message and make the translated text as authentic as possible. However, if we read the same passage in Sardinian, we immediately notice that this only partly happens there: Si fiat ingenugau e cun su ganciu iat agatau sa tuninèdda a puppa e ndi dd'iat tirada accantu cle issu senza de dda fai arresci in is lenzas pinnigadas. Poderendu imoi puru sa lenza cun sa pala de manca e poderendisì derettu in sa manu e in su brazzu de manca, ndi iat bogau sa tuninèdda de su ganciu e dd'iat torrau a ponni in su logu su'. Iat postu unu genugu asuba de su pisci e iat segau tiras longas de pezza arrubia e asula, de parti de sa conca a sa coa (Vargiu 2001: 50). In Sardinian, the tuna becomes a small tuna through the addition of the derivational suffix -edda which, joined to the root tunina, adds a ‘hidden’ adjective to the noun. Indeed, although the new insertion does not modify the rhythm of the sentence (in both languages we have 13 words to describe the same scene), it changes its meaning. Hemingway does not qualify the size of the fish. The same phenomenon can be observed throughout the text when referring to Manolin, “the boy” who looks after Santiago and helps him with fishing. In Sardinian he becomes unu piccioccheddu, where, again, the use of the suffix -eddu implies his being under ten. Indeed, several historical, literal and journalistic sources fix a precise gap for the word piccioccu/ a, i.e. boy/ girl, in Sardinian. We find reference to this in a book by an anthropologist investigating the social and criminal condition of children and youths in Cagliari at the turn of the 20 th century. These children and young men, known at the time as ‘piccioccus de crobi’, (‘boys carrying baskets’) were aged between 10 and 17 (Tiragallo 2014: 135). Piccioccus is the plural form of piccioccu, obtained by adding the inflection -s to the base form of the noun. Instead, by adding -eddu to the root, we refer to the fact that he is younger than 10. Now, how old is Manolin? Hemingway never mentions his age explicitly. This fact has been the subject of lengthy debates and researchers have conflicting points of view as to whether Manolin is a boy or a teenager. As P.G. Rama Rao states in his book, “Santiago always refers to him as the boy even though he calls him 'a man' in banter: “You bought me a beer,” the old man said. “You are already a man.”” (Rao 2007: 105). However, Donaldson is quite sure he is “a young man of twenty-two” (Donaldson 1996: 254), while others say he Elisabetta Soro 32 is 12. These speculations come from the individual interpretation given to the personal pronoun he in the sentence pronounced by Manolin at some point in the text: “The great Sisler’s father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the Big Leagues when he was my age.” Whatever the case, it is a common idea that Manolin is no younger than 12. Hence, if we take it for granted that Manolin is between 10 and 22, why does the translator decide to make him younger than he really is? The answer can be found flicking through the pages of Umberto Eco’s Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Eco 2003). Starting from the awareness that translating is “saying almost the same thing,” he points out that the extension of the word almost depends on some criteria that should be met and negotiated preliminarily (Eco 2003). Eco states that translating is not producing a copy of the original, but being able to recover the intention of the original text, without forgetting the sensitivity and the culture of the target reader (Eco 2003). And this is the point. For the word boy the translator has probably thought of the sensitivity of the target reader who knows that nowadays piccioccu/ a is also used to refer to adults when they look particularly young, while piccioccheddu/ a is used for teenagers (under the age of 10 we use the word pippiu/ pippieddu, i.e. baby). So, what appears to be an inaccuracy is, in fact, an act of fidelity and attention to both the source and the target culture. It also happens that the translator even reinforces the already existing adjective by adding a hidden adjective as in the example below: A small bird came toward the skiff from the north (Hemingway 1952: 42; Vargiu 2001: 47) Unu pilloneddu pitticcu si fiat accostau a sa barca de parti de tramuntana A small bird small came toward the skiff from the north Some lines below Vargiu writes: The bird made the stern of the boat and rested there. (Hemingway 1952: 42) Su pilloni fiat lompiu in sa puppa de sa barca. (Vargiu 2001: 47) Thus, the fully respects the original, as also happens in: “Take a good rest, small bird,” he said (Hemingway 1952: 42) - Pasiadì beni, pilloneddu iat nau (Vargiu 2001: 48) Let us take another example of Sardinian suffixation with -eddu, which interferes with the denotative meaning of the word in English. Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 33 They played like young cats in the dusk (Hemingway 1952: 38) Giogànt comenti pisittus a mericeddu (Vargiu 2001: 23) The equivalent for dusk in Sardinian is merì, while mericeddu means ‘soon after lunch, in the early afternoon’. The word mericeddu changes the denotative meaning of the original word and its connotation. In the original version, the reader visualises that part of the day when the light is diminishing after sunset, while in Sardinian it is the early afternoon. The Sardinian translation ignores the connotation of the 'unknown' represented by the dark light and shifts the scene to an earlier part of the day. b) Short words The phenomenon of affixation analysed above has its obvious consequences in the length of the words. Indeed, the number of words with more than 4 syllables in the Sardinian version is higher than those with less than 4. The following short paragraph serves as an example: In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. (Hemingway 1952: 35) This paragraph counts a total of 76 syllables. No word has more than 4 syllables. In is primus coranta dis dd'iat accumpangiau unu piccioccheddu, ma a pustis de coranta dis senza de pigai nimancu unu pisci, su babbu ei sa mama de su piccioccheddu ddi iant nau chi su becciu oramai fiat diaderu e senza de perùnu arremediu possidìu de su sali, su peus frastimu chi pozzat sezzi a un'omini, e su piccioccheddu ddus iat obbedius accordendisì in d'una atra barca chi iat pigau tres piscis mannus in sa prima cida. (Vargiu 2001: 9) The Sardinian translation of the above paragraph counts 149 syllables in total, with 5 five-syllable words. c) Recurrence of the word said As stated above, Hemingway uses the verb said in almost all the dialogue passages between the old man and the boy, from the first (“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank…) to the last (“I didn’t either,” her male companion said), using other words only when forced to explain the situation better (Heaton, 1970). Elisabetta Soro 34 If we compare the two previous examples in brackets we immediately notice that the former is perfectly equivalent to the ST, while the latter changes in translation: “I didn’t either,” her male companion said. (Hemingway 1952: 54) V: Nimancu deu iat arrespustu s'amigu su’. (Vargiu 2001: 108) G: Didn’t either I answered male companion her Where Hemingway uses the verb said, Mario Vargiu uses the verb arrespundi, i.e. ‘to answer'. This tendency to deviate from the original text is confirmed by figures. Indeed, the verb phrase iat nau, which corresponds to the English said, is present in dialogue situations only 35 times out of the 170 in the English version. Where Hemingway repeats the verb said, Vargiu looks for new solutions, synonyms or equivalent expressions. d) Coordinating conjunction but Even though the frequency of the coordinating conjunction in Sardinian and in English is almost the same (but appears 236 times in English and 237 times in Sardinian), its use at the beginning of the sentence to reproduce the spontaneity of speech changes somewhat. Indeed, in the Sardinian version, ma with this purpose appears just 53 times against the 178 times of the English text. This happens because the Sardinian version alternates the use of ma with other, similarly used expressions (tandu meaning 'so/ then', tocca similar in meaning to the informal 'c’mon', etc.). In the following example Vargiu respects the English version faithfully: But then I think of Dick Sisler. (Hemingway 1952: 37) Ma a pustis torru a penzai a Dick Sisler. (Vargiu 2001: 19) In this other example he prefers to change it: But she can be so cruel… (Hemingway 1952: 39) Eppùru  podit essi malu meda… (Vargiu 2001: 26) e) Simple sentences and simple constructions What changes substantially in translation is the use of complex sentences instead of simple ones. I shall restate here some of the figures pertaining to The Old Man and the Sea and compare the data obtained by means of the quantitative analyses carried out on S’Omini Becciu e su Mari. Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 35 The ST consists of 1,735 sentences and 77 sentence fragments. Of these 1,735 sentences, 890 (51%) are simple sentences, 231 (13%) are compound sentences, 440 (25%) are complex sentences and 174 (11%) are compound-complex (Comp.-Cx) sentences. Conversely, in the TT we have 1,827 sentences and 47 sentence fragments. Of these 1,827 sentences, 446 (24%) are simple sentences, 249 (14%) are compound sentences, 706 (39%) are complex sentences and 426 (23%) are compound-complex sentences. Let us summarise these data as follows: English (/ 1735) Sardinian (/ 1827) Difference rate Complex 25% 39% +14% Simple 51% 24% - 27% Complexcompound 11% 23% +12% Compound 13% 14% +1% Therefore, Vargiu’s interpretation significantly modifies what has become a syntactic stylistic feature in Hemingway where we find consistent repetition of the same type of short simple sentences. On the one hand, as mentioned above, Hemingway’s limited vocabulary is expanded, on the other, short simple sentences become long complex ones. Let us represent these figures in a graph that easily shows the differences: The English version The Sardinian version 0 20 40 60 Simple Complex Compound Comp.-Cx 0 20 40 60 Simple Complex Compound Comp.-Cx Elisabetta Soro 36 The number of complex sentences is higher in Sardinian than in English, this also applies to the complex-compound ones. On the contrary, there is only a small gap between the use of compound sentences in the two versions, with a difference ratio of 1%. f) Repetition of subordinating conjunctions A comparison between the passage used to describe the phenomenon of the repetition of the coordinating conjunction when in English and its Sardinian translation might lead us to think that the translator respected the author’s stylistic choice of repetition. Indeed, he uses the word candu to translate 'when' exactly in the same position and for the same number of times as in the ST. However, if we turn to the figures again, we realise that the word when appears 105 times in the ST, compared to the 146 occurrences in the TT. This discrepancy deserves extra investigation. Let us take the following sentence as an example: The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. (Hemingway 1952: 35) Mario Vargiu translates it as follows: Sa vela fiat acconciàda cun saccus de farra e candu fiat pinnigàda pariat sa bandera de una gherra perdia po sempri. (Vargiu 2001: 9) V: Sa vela fiat acconciada cun saccus de farra G: The sail was patched with sacks of flour As can be seen from the gloss, the translation of the main sentence is accurate both in form and in meaning. But if we look at the complex-compound sentence, we immediately notice that something differs from the original: V: e candu fiat pinnigàda  pariat sa bandera G: and furled it looked like the flag V: of defeat permanent. G: de una gherra perdia po sempri. Could Mario Vargiu have translated this in a different way? The answer is yes. He could have used a past participle as in the original, for instance as follows: Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 37 and furled it looked like the flag e pinnigàda pariat sa bandera The same construction can be found in this second example: It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty. (Hemingway 1952: 35) S'attristàt su piccioccheddu candu biat arribai dònnia dì su becciu cun sa barca sbuida … (Vargiu 2001: 9) where the -to-clause of the English version is substituted with a subordinate clause introduced by candu ('when') in the Sardinian one. In this case, too, he could have translated more faithfully. Apparently in contrast with the translator’s preferences, there is this third example: Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green… (Hemingway 1952: 36) V: Cincu e fiast accanta di essi boccìu poita nd’appu arziau su pisci. (Vargiu 2001: 12) G: Five and you nearly were killed because I brought the fish Again, the translator ignores the original text, which uses the coordinating conjunction when and this time decides to use poita, which means 'because'. So, the question is always the same. Even when the translator has the chance to translate the ST more faithfully, thereby respecting the author’s stylistic choices, why does he decide to change the original text, sometimes interfering deeply with the meaning? g) Figurative speech The use of figurative speech is fully respected in the translation. Hemingway and Vargiu use the same figures of speech and it is interesting to see how they work perfectly in both languages. 'The fish’s tail is “sharp as a scythe” (Hemingway, 1952, p. 41) both in English and in Sardinian, where it has a “coa (‘tail’) accuzza (‘sharp’) comenti (‘as’) una (‘a’) fraci (‘scythe’)” (Vargiu 2001: 43). The shark’s teeth are “shaped like a man’s fingers when they are crisped like claws” (Hemingway 1952: 50) in both versions: Elisabetta Soro 38 V: Teniant sa forma de didus di omini furriaus comenti G: (they had) (the) (shape)(of) (fingers) (of) (man) (crisped) (like) V: farruncas (Vargiu 2001: 86) G: (claws) It is important to remember that the translator is mainly interested in showing how Sardinian can perfectly compete with any other language; how it can easily reproduce even the most difficult thoughts and the extent of its descriptive powers. It is not rare that where Mario Vargiu finds simple sentences to be translated, he prefers to transform them into complex ones, as we will see in detail in paragraph f), or that he sometimes chooses to look for a different expression when a perfect synonym exists in the target language to translate an English word. Figures of speech in the ST gave the translator the chance to model the language according to the new meanings. As mentioned in paragraph 2.1., 50 out of 70 figures of speech present in the book “are used to evoke an image of something in nature” (Heaton 1970: 13) and all of these pertain to physical descriptions and realistic details. This certainly works in the translator’s favour since Sardinian has always preferred the use of concrete words rather than abstract ones. As the linguist Eduardo Blasco Ferrer noticed, ever since the Romans brought Latin to Sardinia, Sardinian has documented shifts in meaning from abstract to concrete referents (Ferrer 2017). This is probably why the 'natural figures of speech' in translation fully respect the original ones. The same thing happens for the technique of speech and thought presentation (Simpson 2014) whose strands are perfectly recreated in the translation. Starting from the categorisation of the modes of speech and thought presentation, Simpson studied an extract from The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway 1952: 43) which well serves the present research. Following Paul Simpson’s analyses and template (Simpson 2014: 141- 3) referring to a portion of text taken from the novel, one can observe that the source text and the target text blend perfectly except for one strand. As can be seen in the graph below (pic. 1), in 31-33 Vargiu uses the Free Direct Thought (FDT) mode (with just the reporting clause and no inverted commas), whereas Hemingway prefers the Direct Thought (DT) mode (both the reporting clause and the inverted commas) for the following passage: “It is a strong full-blooded fish,” he thought. “I was lucky to get him instead of dolphin. Dolphin is too sweet. This is hardly sweet at all and all the strength is still in it.” (Hemingway 1952: 43) Est unu bellu pisci ttu sangunosu, iat penzau. Appu tentu fortuna a piscai custu prus de unu delfinu. Su delfinu est troppu durci. Custu non est durci po nudda e tenit finzas totu sa sustanzia. (Vargiu 2001: 51) Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 39 Fig. 1 1 The analysis of other randomly chosen portions of text corroborates what was said before. Apart from rare exceptions the strands are perfectly blended in the two languages. h) Creative use of punctuation The eighth and last of the stylistic devices Hemingway uses to write his novella is punctuation. In this case too, Hemingway shows great creativity and originality because, as already stated, he does not follow preconceived rules, but tries to imitate the pauses of spoken interaction in writing. And once again the Sardinian version differs from the original. Let us analyse one of the several examples in the text using a vertical gloss to leave the punctuation intact: Sometimes someone would speak in a boat. But most of the boats were silent except for the dip of the oars. (Hemingway 1952: 38) A bortas, in d'una barca, calincunu fueddàt, ma giai in totus is barcas non s'intendiat nudda foras chi su sciumbullu de is remus. (Vargiu 2001: 25) 1 The numbers in the bottom line of figure 1 refer to sentences; the following abbreviations are used: Free Direct Speech: FDS, Direct Speech: DS, Narrator’s Representation of Action: NRA, Free Indirect Thought: FIT, Direct Thought: DT, Free Direct Thought: FDT. Elisabetta Soro 40 Sardinian version English gloss A bortas, Sometimes in d’una barca, in a boat Calincunu someone Fueddàt, would speak ma But giai in totus is barcas… most of the boats… As we can notice, Vargiu ignores Hemingway’s choices and prefers to follow the given punctuation rules, for example using a comma instead of a full stop in front of the conjunction but. Heaton points out that if Hemingway “wants the flow interrupted, he breaks it; if he does not want the flow broken, he continues on, even though traditional punctuation practice calls for a punctuation mark” (Heaton 1970: 21). Hemingway also commonly omits the comma in direct address, while Vargiu prefers to change the construction or totally omit the passage, as is clear in the following short dialogue between the boy and the old man: “Good luck old man.” “Good luck,” the old man said. (Hemingway 1952: 38) In the Sardinian translation the boy’s wish is totally ignored and only the old man’s reply is translated. At this point it is interesting to compare other translations of the same passage (French, Spanish and Italian) and to notice that not only do the translators translate the whole short dialogue, but they all also change the punctuation as per given rules (i.e. a comma before the direct address): French (26) Spanish (13) Italian (35) Sardinian (25) Bonne chance, le vieux. Bonne chance, répondit le vieil homme. Buena suerte, viejo. Buena suerte - dijo el viejo “Buona fortuna, vecchio.” “Buona fortuna” disse il vecchio. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxx “Bona fortuna - iat nau su Becciu” Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 41 Moreover, while in Hemingway’s version only one exclamation mark highlights the most important scene in the text, namely that of the fight between the old man and the fish, in Sardinian, apart from this scene, we have another exclamation mark that substitutes Hemingway’s question mark: “No? ” the old man said and… (Hemingway 1952: 52) No dda lassas! iat nau su becciu e… (Vargiu 2001: 93) Another feature which I did not analyse before, but which grasped my attention while reading S’Omini Becciu e Su Mari, is that of the foreignness which I shall discuss before concluding. 4.1. Foreignness “Foreignness refers to the treatment of 'otherness' in translation” (Millán- Varela 2004: 44). The final effect we have in the TT depends on the translator’s decision. This problem mainly regards proper names and place names. If we examine our target text we discover that most of the characters’ names have been adapted to the Sardinian context: so we have Santiagu instead of Santiago, Piricu instead of Perico, Martinu instead of Martin and Manolinu instead of Manolin. The need to emphasise Sardinian identity in the text becomes obvious with this persistent use of the typical -u ending of the Sardinian language. “This strategy creates an illusion of familiarity” (Millán-Varela 2004: 44). One exception to this foreignising tendency is when Santiago speaks about sports. In this case, the names of the famous baseball champions, Jo di Maggio, Dick Sisler, John J. McGraw, but also the great teams like the Yankees, Brooklyn and Philadelphia, are in the original language. As Millán- Varela points out in her article, such hybrid structures could be an attempt at a dialogue between the two cultures, looking for points of contact (Millán-Varela 2004: 44). However, in some cases the translator decides to completely ignore some difficult points in the ST and fails to include them in the TT, such as the reference to the “American League”, for instance, which is totally lost in translation (Vargiu 2001: 19), or the following expression: “Tell me about the great John J. McGraw.” He said Jota for J. (Hemingway 1952: 37) V: Naramì tandu de John J. McGrav, su grandu campioni (Vargiu 2001: 20). G: Tell me  about John J. McGrav, the great champion. Elisabetta Soro 42 Here there is a double phenomenon. On the one hand, there is a case of 'half-foreignisation' with the great champion John J. McGraw changed into John J. McGrav, preferring the more common v to the foreign w of his surname. Then there is a case of 'absolute' loss with the omission of the simple sentence, “He said Jota for J”. As Eco states, we have 'absolute losses' when it is not possible to translate a word, since that term does not exist in the target language and its forced translation produces an alienating effect (Eco 2003). The translator has two options in such cases: a) he/ she can introduce a footnote to explain what he/ she considers to be necessary for the comprehension of the next portion of text, or b) he/ she can ignore the reference and explain it later (in a postscript, for example). Theorists are divided on this point because many of them see translator's notes as something to be avoided, the translator’s moment of surrender. Others justify their use according to necessity. In any case, the translator who decides not to include something in the TT must be aware that it could result in the reader missing its relevance to the story. 5. Conclusion Finally, for the sake of convenience, I shall repeat the three objections to Skopos theory listed in Section 1. a. The translator does not have any specific intention in mind, he just translates “what is in the source text”. b. A specific goal would restrict the translation possibilities, and hence limit the range of interpretation of the TT in comparison to that of the ST. c. The translator has no specific addressee in mind. (Vermeer 2000: 232) As mentioned before, this text clearly reflects the translator’s specific intention, causing him to significantly change the ST and resulting in a translatum highly affected by his intentions. Thus, the translator’s skopos is that of giving prominence to the target culture and prestige to the target language, substantially changing language and style in his translation. I guess Mario Vargiu, or the publisher, chose this novella because it has much in common with the socio-linguistic situation of the target language and the peculiarities of the target context. Particularly interesting is the fact that the evident and high presence of the translator’s voice perfectly interacts with all the other voices already present in the ST, creating a new text that is well shaped, though quite different from the original one. As Millán-Varela states (Millán-Varela 2004: 38), this comparative analysis shows how texts translated into a minority language become self-reflecting Skopos Theory and the Sardic Version of The Old Man and the Sea 43 texts. The translations represent a way of raising the language status, “an effort to promote the national language and to (re)construct a lost or forgotten identity” (Millán-Varela 2004: 37). The importance of the target language in this context comes before everything else. The voice we hear when we read S’Omini Becciu e su Mari is certainly that of Mario Vargiu, who is providing his personal interpretation of the work. Translational stylistics have clearly allowed us to find out that what was of great importance for Hemingway is not so important for Vargiu. However, more than a limitation, this seems to be a change in point of view. Lastly, according to Vermeer (2000: 233), every kind of text is intended for specific addressee(s). These are clearly specified in some cases, while on other occasions, the author might unconsciously orient him/ herself towards a certain group, using language according to this group’s (perceived) level of intelligence and education and modifying items so that as many recipients as possible will be able to understand. In most texts the addressee or set of addressees is vague, i.e. not clearly defined, but certainly present. In our translation the addressee is clearly determined. On the one hand, it is the Sardinian people to whom the translator turns to speak about their language. As previously stated, Vargiu wants to show these people the greatness of their language and its vast potential. The instability of the code given by the absence of shared orthographic rules is replaced by a linear, fluent, well-written text. Then, the translatum in this case becomes a trophy to be shown to both common people and politicians, representing the second addressee. In fact, whilst translations are part of a great politically desired project to safeguard the language, scholars and researchers are constantly urging politicians to do something more and to do it quickly to save the language which is at risk. Translations in this case represent an example for politicians of how the minority language can be used in all contexts, even in literature. The path is certainly long, but undoubtedly fascinating and worth continuing. The last question I would like address regards authenticity. We have already said that in Vermeer’s Skopos theory, translation is seen as an action, something carried out by the second author, namely the translator. Robinson’s studies recall this theory when he states that “in translation studies, it is the translator’s job to do new things” (Robinson 2003). These “new things” are the result of what the original author did and what the translator intends to do through translating. Hence, if on the one hand, the skopos deeply affects the final product, and, on the other, the translator has done whatever he/ she can to keep the target text as close as possible to the source text, the final work will always be at least “slightly new” (Robinson 2003). This is particularly true when speaking about style, since “stylistic criteria that guide translators are themselves subjective…” and depend on the translator’s personal choices and “poetic taste” (Munday 2008: 227). As Baker states, style is “a kind of thumb-print” (Baker 2001: 245) and as such, it cannot be copied, imitated or reproduced. Nevertheless, it can be Elisabetta Soro 44 traced through translational stylistics, “which takes into consideration the relationship between the translated text and its source text” (Malmkjær 2004: 16). This comparison will lead the analyst to unveil the translator’s voice and will consequently open the way to extra investigation on the TT. The new text, then, can be considered authentic but new. The most important point, however, is that Sardinian has certainly passed the test. It can be used in literature, it can express deep thoughts and evoke heartfelt emotions. Its vocabulary offers a wide range of choices to express the most diverse ideas, be they abstract or concrete. Mario Vargiu, with his creative translation, showed that Sardinian can well serve literature, and that this minority language is ready to enter the third millennium and live up to any other language. References Angelelli, Claudia V. (2009). Testing and assessment in translation and interpreting studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Asproni, Bernardo (2004). “Libri stranieri tradotti in Sardo”. La nuova Sardegna - Sassari (5) 4. p. 5 sez. Nuoro. http: / / ricerca.gelocal.it/ lanuovasardegna/ achi vio/ lanuovasardegna/ 2004/ 05/ 04/ SN4SN_SN405.html. (Accessed: 20.10. 2017). Baker, Mona (2001). “Towards a Methodology for Investigating the Style of a Literary Translator”. Target International Journal of Translation Studies, 12 (2). 241- 266. Belarbi, Radjaa (2016). Symbolism in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. http: / / dspace.univ-tlemcen.dz/ bitstream/ 112/ 8934/ 1/ belarbi-radjaa.pdf. (Accessed: 15.02.2018). Bolognesi, Roberto/ Karijn Helslooth (1999). La lingua sarda, L’identità socioculturale della Sardegna nel prossimo millennio. Cagliari: Condaghes. Donaldson, Scott (1996). Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eco, Umberto (2003). Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione. Milano: Bompiani. Ferrer, Eduardo Blasco et alii (2017). Manuale di Linguistica Sarda. Berlin: De Gruyter. Grimaldi Lucia and Menshing Guido (2004). Su sardu. Limba de Sardigna e limba de Europa. Atti del Congresso. Cagliari: CUEC Editrice. Heaton, C. P. (1970). “Style in the Old Man and the Sea”. Style 4 (1). [online]. www.jstor.org/ stable/ 42945039? seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. 11-27. Hemingway, Ernest (1952). “The Old man and the Sea”. Life 9 (1). 35-54. Hemingway, Ernest. (2001). S’Omini Becciu e su Mari. Trans. Mario Vargiu. Cagliari: Condaghes. Hemingway, Ernest (1981). Il vecchio e il mare. Milano: Mondadori. Hemingway, Ernest (2012). Le Vieil Homme et la Mer. Publie.net Hemingway Ernest (1989). 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(2000). “Skopos and commission in translational action”. In: L. Venuti (ed.). The translation studies reader. 1st ed. [online]. London: Routledge. 221- 232. Virdis, Maurizio (2018). Presnaghe's Blog di Maurizio Virdis. [online]. https: / / presnaghe.wordpress.com/ linguistica/ cartina-isoglosse-principali/ . (Accessed 24.11.2017). Wagner, Max Leopold (1997). La lingua sarda. Storia, spirito e forma, a cura di Giulio Paulis. Nuoro: Ilisso. Elisabetta Soro University of Cagliari Freie Universität Berli The Productivity of Empathy Inhibition The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child Yvonne Liebermann This essay analyses the politics of narrative framing in Caryl Phillips’ penultimate novel The Lost Child (2015). It argues that The Lost Child frames the main story through allusions to Emily Brontë’s canonical text Wuthering Heights and the life of its author to shed light on the universal restriction of socio-cultural, ideological frames which influence readerly empathy, instead of furnishing an alternative version of the past as is the aim of the ‘writing back’ paradigm. Ideological frames manipulate our perception and guide how we distribute value and empathy. In The Lost Child, the framing technique emphasises the working of frames by juxtaposing two stories; whereas one story triggers empathy in the reader through a clear construction of causality and sequentiality, the other story lacks cohesion and consequently which inhibits the reader’s empathy for the main protagonist. However, the narrative framing by being visible and destabilising also challenges the reader’s evaluation of the main protagonist Monica and more broadly asks the reader to reconsider how ideological frames distribute value and control empathy. Therefore, the framing makes readers consider framing mechanisms on a meta-level and reconsider how they distribute empathy in the first place. Contrasting instances of ‘easy empathy’ in the novel with more complex forms of empathy invited by the framing of the novel, this essay argues that mechanisms of empathy inhibition can constitute a specific form of readerly engagement. 1. Introduction: Beyond ‘Rewriting’ The field labelled ‘postcolonial literature’ is often not primarily analysed regarding its aesthetics and capacity to ‘world’, but rather with focus on its capacity to ‘write back’ and challenge “the manifold legacies of Eurocentrism” (Helgesson 2014: 484; cf. Gikandi 2011: 164, 166). Scholars AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0003 Yvonne Liebermann 48 analysing literature from the former colonies, therefore, according to Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, often show a “lack of interest in seeing post-colonial literature as part of the same system as the literature of the West” (2008: 25). Texts from the former colonies are often seen as “representative cultural artefacts” (Ponzanesi 2014: 13) rather than as literature in its own right. Similarly, Graham Huggan in his influential study The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001) cogently argues that while “postcolonial literatures may be simply defined as those English-language writings which have emerged from the former colonies of the British Empire, the term ‘postcolonial’ clearly has a wider valency” which he links to a “perceived imperative to rewrite the social text of continuing imperial dominance” (2001: ix). Approaching literature from authors that could be considered ‘post-colonial’ primarily focusing on this ‘perceived imperative’ thereby runs the risk of reducing this literature to a counter-movement to Eurocentrism and understanding it “exclusively in terms of political power and domination” (Helgesson 2014: 484). A development away from this too simple equation of literature from diasporic authors with a mandate to address colonialism or its consequences is highly desirable as it allows for creative variety and multi-layered narratives whose affective capacities are not limited in one direction and do not solely follow one predestined political mission. Along these lines Derek Attridge demands that analyses of literature should abandon a “utilitarian model that reflects a primary interest somewhere other than in literature” (2017/ 2004: 17) and instead pay more “attention to the specificity and singularity of literary writing as it manifests itself through the deployment of form […] as well as to the unpredictability of literary accomplishment” (2017/ 2004: 17). Caryl Phillips’ penultimate novel The Lost Child (2015) is one such multi-layered narrative whose singularity is closely connected to its form. The Lost Child interacts with an English classical text, but it cannot be reduced to this relationship to the English canon: The novel makes different places on the globe and different moments in time resonate with each other and establishes multi-perspectivity 1 , bringing together different stories in an undirected, open way. The interplay of these story lines is thereby not limited to a superimposed political agenda but rather works through productive gaps that the readers have to fill in themselves to make sense of the novel’s implicit socio-political inferences. Though The Lost Child is not an instrumentalised novel and does not equip its readers with an overtly moral message, it is still implicitly concerned with moral questions. However, these moral questions are negotiated on the level of form and not on the level of content, because as Wolfgang Müller emphasises, “narrative technique and point-of-view” can also have “profound ethical implications” (qtd. in Erll et al. 2008: 6) without 1 As Bénédicte Ledent rightly notes, this technique is frequent in Caryl Phillips’ fictional work (cf. Ledent 2017: 9). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 49 being effusively polarising. This paper sets out to examine the narrative technique of framing and its ethical implications in Phillips’ penultimate novel. The literary frame is a concept that, although long established in literary studies, remains under-researched regarding its ethical and affective implications. Frames have long been regarded as guides for interpretation that facilitate the reading process and stabilise the text’s meaning. In this paper, however, I want to scrutinise a destabilising potential of frames 2 and their capacity to draw attention to the normative nature of framing processes - both literary and non-literary - and their effect on our interpretation of literary texts. As Judith Butler illustrates in her study Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2010), frames are not innocent guides for interpretation but rather coercive tools to make visible some life while excluding other forms of life from our perception. Frames are culturally and politically saturated and modulate a society’s values and norms by perpetuating some values while making others impossible. This forestalled regulation of value has a huge effect on what is considered as a good, successful ‘life’ in a society and what is not even considered to be ‘life’ at all. The Lost Child participates in this ideological discourse by having a main protagonist whose life is often read as a ‘failure’ and as inexplicable within the story realm. 3 At the core of this paper lies the question why the reader might perceive Monica Johnson - the protagonist of the story set in the twentieth century - as a ‘failure’ and why her story is framed by stories related to Emily Brontë and her ground-breaking novel Wuthering Heights. What does the framing do to possible readings of the story and the lives of its main protagonists? How does it relate to established norms and values of what a valuable or successful life is? The juxtaposition with not only Wuthering Heights but also a chapter on the life of the Brontë sisters highlights how the ideological frame constructed around questions of ‘failure’ and ‘value’ breaks through its application to new contexts and thus foregrounds its constructedness. The Lost Child challenges hegemonic social framings of a successful life through its literary framing strategy. The novel’s formal composition initiates frame breaking as it shifts the idea of personal responsibility and the ideological frames of ‘success’, ‘value’, and ‘failure’ from one context to another. Like many other novels by authors who are predominantly labelled ‘diasporic’ (cf. Ledent 2017: 3), The Lost Child at first glance offers itself as an instance of rewriting, as it apparently takes a canonical English classic as its point of departure. In this paper, I want to outline other effects that the intertextual relationship between a postcolonial text and a canonical classic can have - effects that are grounded more in the present than 2 See Werner Wolf’s concept of defamiliarising frames (2006). 3 Not every reader might perceive the character this way, of course, but many reviewers read her this way (cf. Miller 2015: online; Woodward 2015: online). Yvonne Liebermann 50 the past -, because, as Ankhi Mukherjee critically notices, “not only is all writing doomed to be rewriting, the function of criticism too seems to be defined by its dialectical relationship with a hyperbolic literary past” (2014: 20, my emphasis). Mukherjee convincingly criticises the writing back paradigm, asserting that the “‘empire writes back’ formulation is fundamentally flawed in the way it relates all contestations of modernity in the non-western world to what is perceived as the primal trauma of colonization” (2014: 116). In the words of Phillips himself, “[a] novel is not a sociological pamphlet”, it should not be reduced to narrowly confined political purposes, as “it has other aesthetic concerns” (Ward 2012: 644). However, putting more focus on aesthetic or, more generally, narrative concerns hardly means that fiction does not exercise a critical potential, for it also, Phillips emphasises “should have a structure that at least bears the introduction” of the “many things that are swept under the carpet” (Ward 2012: 644). The novel as a literary genre has a special relationship to frames and empathy, because it has a “moral form” 4 in that it is centred on questions of “sequence and consequence” (Ali Smith qtd. in Lea 2017: 62). Many novels are still centred on ‘eventness’ which is reliant on this understanding of sequence and consequence, as “the novel is conventionally a model of individual and social dynamism, in which initial situations are pushed into eventual action and change” (Sayeau 2013: 183). The literary text, however, has further potential: It is not only driven by the events of its plot, but it also constitutes the ‘event of literature’. As Ilai Rowner rightly outlines, “[n]arrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself” (2015: 13). Negotiating and putting to the test contemporary societal norms that work through ideological frames can be at the core of a ‘narrative event’ 5 and manifest itself through the literary composition and a work’s literary frames. These literary frames can generate ‘events’ that are removed from the plot and hegemonic societal discourses and that pursue a politics of their own. It is thus that a “work’s moral outlook, in short, may be as much a question of form as of content - a parallel between plots, for example, a way of handling a storyline or a two-dimensional mode of depicting character” (Eagleton 2012: 65). In this sense, paying attention to the form of the novel might shed light on “the historical workings of political power” and allow to investigate the “relations between politics and aesthetics” (Levine 2017: xiii). As the novel “traditionally promises its readers meaningful events as well as serious depictions of social and/ or psychological life” (Vermeulen 2015: 6-7), what happens when neither ‘meaningful events’ nor the 4 Of course, this assumption is debatable. 5 However, it is not the only or foremost task of the narrative event, as the literary event to a certain degree “must retain its enigmatic force” (Rowner 2015: 25). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 51 depiction of a psychological life manage to enter a literary work’s centre stage? One possible effect is that the ‘event of literature’ which asks for a “different kind of attention and emphasis” (Rowner 2015: 12) enters the spotlight. It is therefore the structure and the concomitant literary event of The Lost Child that is at the core of this paper. Instead of using the canonical text as a point of departure to articulate a postcolonial position, The Lost Child uses Wuthering Heights as a frame story to shed light on the ideological frames of value in the present rather than furnish alternative versions of the past. The novel thereby fosters an understanding of interconnectivity and relation between the canonical text and the subsequent text that goes beyond a hierarchical understanding of ‘original’ and ‘rewriting’ and positions The Lost Child in a wider frame of critical thinking. 2. The Literary Frame and the Construction of a Valuable Life The Lost Child makes use of a frame story, which is a very common literary device that can have different functions. Monika Fludernik emphasises that there are different relations that a frame narrative can have with the main text. “If the tale is conceptualized as subsidiary to the primary story frame,” she explains “a relationship of embedding obtains; if the primary story level serves as a mere introduction to the narrative proper, it will be perceived as a framing device.” (Fludernik 1996: 343) The framing technique in The Lost Child is not one of embedding, “serving to render the more ample inset or inner tale (Binnenerzählung) accessible and/ or to authenticate it” (Pier 2014), but rather one of “introduction”. The novel according to its blurb deals “[a]t its heart” with the story of “Monica, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors” (Phillips 2015: online). Monica’s story is framed by the story of a slave woman and her young son at the beginning, a chapter about the Brontë sisters in the middle, and an ambiguous chapter that might deal with Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff at the end. However, apparently being unconnected with the main story, the frame story remains enigmatic for the reader: What purpose does this kind of ‘introduction’ serve? What is the connection between the stories and how does this framing of the main text by a different story completely removed in terms of time and space influence its reception? The framing policy in The Lost Child, however, due to the inscrutable connection between ‘the narrative proper’ and its many framings, has to be analysed not only from a strictly narratological perspective, but also with regard to the wider ideological implications of framing processes. Literary frames are not only hermeneutic devices but are also connected to ideological political framings, as they are “cultural constructs” that depend “on a period’s épistémè, norms, conventions and the totality of the Yvonne Liebermann 52 ‘frames of reference’” (Wolf and Bernhart 2006: 4). Given this entanglement of frames, culture, and norms, Butler is right in noting that [i]nterpretation does not emerge as the spontaneous act of a single mind, but as a consequence of a certain field of intelligibility that helps to form and frame our responsiveness to the impinging world […] Because such affective responses are invariably mediated, they call upon and enact certain interpretive frames. (2010: 34-35) Literary frames can make these ‘interpretive frames’, that is ideological frames, of a society visible and deconstructible. As framing is not solely a literary phenomenon, an unconventional use of framing mechanisms in a novel can stage how interpretation is always manipulated or at least guided by different framing mechanisms and thus can operate as a meta-commentary of meaning-making processes in more general terms. The framing mechanism in The Lost Child forces the reader to think stories alongside each other which without the framing would not be considered as sharing crucial similarities. Thereby the framing makes the reader realise that sometimes what is missing is the lens through which to see otherwise invisibilised similarities. While categories and pre-given lenses through which to read a literary text are inevitable to a certain degree, Butler emphasises the importance of questioning our assumptions, stressing the general power that normalised categories have, “preced[ing] and mak[ing] possible the act of recognition itself” (2010: 5). As Martha Nussbaum also underlines with regard to literature and ethics, literature, because of its connection to norms and cultural discourses, “cultivate[s] sympathy unevenly, directing our attention to some types of human beings and not to other” (2000: 101). This does of course not mean that literature is simply a mimetic representation of hegemonic discourses. Without a doubt, literature itself already points its finger at the “blind spots of knowledge formations” and helps “impeding social power formations and processes” (Neumann 2006: 33). While literary texts themselves can act disruptively, they, however, resulting from their involvement in the ever-ongoing production of new knowledge, always run the risk of becoming just another discourse among many (cf. Neumann 2006: 34). Frames, however, as a formal element of literature, can counteract hegemonic societal discourses without being considered a typical ‘counter-discourse’ as they do not form part of the textual body. Therefore, engaging with literary frames is an act of questioning the way society regulates recognisability - the central feature of our perception and our capacity to act ethically (cf. Butler 2010: 77). In other words, frames determine our capacity to react with empathy 6 to other peoples’ stories and 6 Empathy in this paper is dealt with as an affective form of perspective-taking, not necessarily of identification. Literary empathy, in this paper, describes the capacity The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 53 whether or not we can be pulled out of “the confines of our own world” (Ritivoi 2016: 52). The norms that are central to and negotiated in The Lost Child evolve around the question of societal circumstances and the fulfilment of one’s potential. 7 The framing of The Lost Child draws attention to societal expectations related to a discourse of accomplishment connected to personal responsibility and attitude as the main factors for ‘success’. The Lost Child’s framing results in a juxtaposition of a Victorian classical text which is canonised throughout the Anglophone world, a chapter on its author’s life, and finally a post-war British family and thereby creates a “field of intelligibility” (Butler 2010: 34) that sheds light on our contemporary ideological framing of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ and ultimately puts centre stage “the relationship between empathy and conformity” (Roszak 2014: 151). 8 By making these different stories resonate with each other, the text portrays the breaking of the ideological frame that makes the main protagonist of one of the stories - Monica Johnson - appear as a societal ‘failure’. 3. “As a Family We Had Nothing”: The Lost Children The Lost Child is made up of various ‘events’. However, these events do not manage to take centre stage and develop into ‘meaningful events’ that propel the narrative forward or provide the plot with a ‘meaningful’ structure. It might be said that the plotline which centres around Monica Johnson and her two sons revolves around the ‘event’ of Tommy’s abduction and subsequent death. But what makes The Lost Child such an intriguing narrative is that the event lacks ‘meaningfulness’ in that it does not trigger change 9 or psychological insight. The novel portrays the development of Ben Johnson, it features the abduction of Tommy Johnson and it depicts the not quite explicable development of their mother. These, of course, are events in that they induce ‘change’: The family moves houses, the children are taken into foster care, Monica gets ill and so on. These ‘events’ happen but they do not generate meaning, they do not lead to “an intensification that leads from a quantitative augmentation to a tipping point” (Sayeau 2013: 19) and are therefore not ‘events’ as classically understood in narratology. The events occur, but they do not seem to matter. Instead, The Lost Child’s driving force seems to be “an interest that exceeds the event’s sense” of novels to trigger readers into making an “effort in feeling toward the positions and decisions of another” (Leake 2014: 176) and in the process revisit their own parameters of empathy in the first place. 7 For a discussion of other works by Caryl Phillips that negotiate concepts of achievement, see Pirker (2017). 8 For a connection between empathy and Caryl Phillips’ works, see also Gunning 2012. 9 For instance, the psychological decline of Monica precedes Tommy’s abduction and is thus not a consequence of this event. Yvonne Liebermann 54 (Rowner 2015: 11) and this interest is emphasised by the novel’s structure that makes stories resonate with each other which are plot-wise not connected at all; in other words, the framing politics of the novel becomes its ‘event’. Prefixing the main narrative with another story completely unrelated to the main text establishes a dialogue between the different storylines without subordinating one to the other. This dialogue not only makes the different stories interact but also invites the reader to establish links and find similarities between what at first sight seems to be unconnected. While the framing of the main text by a different story strives for entanglement and connectivity, the text’s title - being a paratext and thus similarly a frame - seemingly counters this mission. With regard to the text’s overall dialogic structure, The Lost Child’s title is at first sight misleading. The direct article conveys the impression of a unified subject at the centre of the story. Initially, the novel seems to work against its title, as it does not deal with the lost child, but with lost children. The allegedly lost child of the title, Tommy, is juxtaposed to an equally, though differently, lost child: Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. Although the novel might invite a comparison between these two children of different times and different backgrounds, it does not fulfil the classical function of a postcolonial furnishing of a voice for a subaltern character. The Lost Child clearly distances itself from the postcolonial writing back paradigm as its representation strategies are characterised by their opaqueness rather than a desire to counter a hegemonic western discourse. The Lost Child does not grant Heathcliff further voice but only alludes to this figure of canonised fiction. Whom the reader later identifies as this character enters the narrative as an unnamed seven-year-old son of a former slave. Although he is still so young, the responsibility for his mother “sits surely on his young shoulders” (LC 4) and he is described to have a “strong and tenacious heart” (LC 6). The connection to Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff is never made entirely explicit. Rather, it is the result of The Lost Child’s montage-like form which establishes this link. Only the combination of Liverpool as the setting of the first scene, the later chapter on the Brontë sisters, and finally the penultimate chapter that features a man named Earnshaw who travels to Liverpool and returns home with his illicit son (cf. LC 246) make it probable that the young boy from the opening scene is indeed young Heathcliff. What then is the function of this opaque intertextuality, if it seems neither to aim at “restructuring European ‘realities’ in post-colonial terms” (Mukherjee 2014: 116) nor sets out to “contest […] the authority of the canon of English literature” (Thieme 2001: 1)? Though the novel reimagines Heathcliff as Mr Earnshaw’s illegitimate son with a slave woman and thus reimagines his story and background, this extension of the canonical text is hardly the main focus of the novel. Instead of providing an extensive backstory for Brontë’s character, the young boy of the frame story serves as a mirror figure for Tommy, Monica’s The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 55 youngest son. Although the novel at first glance seems to betray its title, its composition might exactly aim at reading the two children as one, thereby making the lost child metonymically stand in for the lost children as a trope, stressing their common fate rather than their manifold differences. Still, Tommy is not Heathcliff and vice versa, and this is an important assessment. The two children who get lost in different ways do not seem to share many characteristics. The novel is composed in a way that mirrors these two children - though in a very distorted way. What they share is a connection to the diaspora: Tommy’s father is from the Caribbean and Heathcliff is described “as dark almost as if [he] came from the devil” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 36). However, while Heathcliff’s physical appearance plays a huge role in Wuthering Heights in making him the ‘other’, that is an outcast who is associated with uncivilisation, which makes him wish for “light hair and fair skin” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 57), Tommy’s skin colour is hardly ever mentioned. 10 What Tommy and Heathcliff share is their victimisation: Both are subject to psychological as well as physical abuse. However, they differ regarding their dealing with this victimisation. Though both children express a wish to belong and to be accepted, Heathcliff’s being continuously rejected makes him fight for himself whereas Tommy seems to embrace the role of the victim. Whereas Heathcliff right from the beginning appears independent and fearless, Tommy relies on his elder brother for comfort and companionship. While Heathcliff is more resilient and anxious to stand his ground - “I shall not stand to be laughed at, I shall not bear it” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 54) - Tommy cannot stand up against being bullied and after summer camp, “where he’d had a particularly tough time” (LC 137), he shuts down and becomes even more reclusive than before. While Heathcliff is described as “a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to illtreatment” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 38), Tommy is also a quiet child though for different reasons. He has not hardened to ill treatment nor patiently waits for things to change. Rather, he seems to have surrendered to his desolate situation as statements such as “he wished he was an orphan” (LC 159) or his general lack of enthusiasm for anything other than football demonstrate. It is particularly interesting that despite the two characters having utterly different character traits, the framing technique makes them merge in the end and literally appear as one lost child. The very last chapter 10 While I agree that racial discourses are latently present in The Lost Child, I do not read Tommy or Ben as the ‘racial other’ (cf. Ledent and O’Callaghan 2017: 236). The only time that the reader might deduce that Tommy is bullied because of his skin colour is when his school comrades laugh at him claiming to be English: “‘And where are you from, Thomas? ’ ‘I’m from England.’ His fellow pupils release a volley of scornful cackling that threatens to swell into hysteria” (LC 117). However, it is not explicit whether they laugh because they do not consider him to be truly English or whether they only laugh because Tommy might have misunderstood the teacher’s question. Yvonne Liebermann 56 ambiguously hovers between these two children: titled ‘Going Home’, it seems to be the extension of the previous chapter and might describe Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw returning to Wuthering Heights. However, the ending scene could just as well depict Tommy’s abduction by Derek Evans, which is underlined by the remark that “[t]he boy stares […] at the man in whose company he has suffered his long ordeal” (LC 260). Given the fact that Derek Evans probably abused Tommy for some time before abducting him (cf. LC 159), this narrative commentary would better fit their relationship than that of young Heathcliff and Mr Earnshaw whom - at least in Wuthering Heights - Heathcliff comes to see as a father figure. The ending scene could fit both characters: Either it describes the last moments of Tommy’s life, who until then had lived under a shadow for quite some time, or it describes the moment Heathcliff’s life changes when he gets introduced into the Earnshaw family as the “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 36) that Mr Earnshaw found “starving, and houseless” (Brontë 2003/ 1847: 36) in the streets of Liverpool. What this juxtaposition produced by the narrative framing does is not primarily rewrite a character of canonised fiction but compare two children whose lives are very different but who still - for partly different reasons - both end up miserable. From different times and different backgrounds, both boys feel abandoned by their respective families who could not care for them. What is emphasised is the common experience of neglect that can be as much a part of children’s lives in the 21 st century as it used to be for children in Heathcliff’s Victorian England. As Tommy’s brother Ben reminds the reader towards the end of the narrative, “[a]s a family we had nothing, so of course it was straightforward enough for somebody to turn our Tommy’s head” (LC 189). 11 The novel’s framing stresses the widespread and ever-present abuse of children and the importance of family ties - thereby avoiding a differentiation between orphans and outcasts on the one hand and children growing up with their own mother and therefore seemingly more sheltered on the other hand. Although the two boys differ regarding their attitude towards their victimisation, the reader presumably does not have difficulties to feel empathy for either, because “who would not want to empathize with those who are the victims of abuse by others, social circumstances, illness, or fate? ” (Leake 2014: 175) This form of “easy empathy” (Leake 2014: 175) - feeling with victims - is challenged by the more complicated juxtaposition of the two boys’ mothers. The focaliser of the last chapter - who could either be Derek Evans or Mr Earnshaw - says about the boy’s mother: “Despite her headstrong nature, it was evident to him that the woman was ill-suited to be a mother. It wasn’t her fault, but life had ushered her down a perilous course and 11 Bénédicte Ledent and Evelyn O’Callaghan offer an intriguing reading of the family trope in The Lost Child connecting it to the dysfunctional ‘family’ of Empire (cf. 2017: 236). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 57 delivered her into a place of vulnerability” (LC 257). Eerily, this description fits both, the vulnerable slave woman of the frame story and the headstrong Monica, who both - for very different reasons - have been ‘ushered down a perilous course’. 4. “All Tarted up, and a Mother too”: Framing the Failed Mother The comment at the end about the boy’s mother - regardless of which boy is meant - opens up a field of comparison between the slave woman of the frame story and Monica Johnson in the main story. The gap that the final framing creates activates readerly engagement and invites them to see this comment in relation to both women. But are these two women really comparable? Have they really both been ‘ushered down a perilous course’ to the same extent? Starting in medias res on the docks of Liverpool, The Lost Child’s frame story introduces an undefined ‘she’ who “likes to sit down by the docks where sunlight can discover her face” (LC 3). On the docks, this woman “leans back and listens to the monotony of seawater lapping against the quayside, and she has no concept of the hour” (LC 3). Without further context, this passage might read as an idyllic, lazy afternoon spent by the water. However, this initial impression turns out to be deceptive. The woman that the reader is introduced to on the first pages has a hard destiny: A woman from the Congo, enslaved and sold to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations, she ended up in England, got pregnant, and now lives her life as a prostitute by the docks, troubled to find work as nobody is “willing to employ her at the loom; she is a diminished woman who, before her time, has yielded reluctantly to age and infirmity” (LC 3). Only slowly does the reader learn that this woman’s story is set in another time, the time of slavery and its aftermath; the first few lines do not give her circumstances away, but the narrative step by step provides a backstory for this ‘diminished woman’. This woman wants to tell her story: “She wants to tell the man that it hasn’t always been like this, truly it hasn’t” (LC 3), and although the woman never addresses that man, the reader still gets to know her story. The first chapter, which deals exclusively with this woman and her seven-year-old son, switches between past and present, juxtaposing the woman’s desolate situation with memories of her harrowing past (cf. LC 5). The backstory being directly juxtaposed to the narrative present furnishes a cause-and-effect frame for the slave woman’s story. Her story constitutes a typical story of retrospective teleology, stressing a development “in which the present emerges from the past” (Brockmeier 2001: 253) as its inevitable consequence. After having endured years of hardship on a plantation in the Caribbean and on the slave ship, the woman meets a ‘gentleman’ who woos her. She gets pregnant and slowly the man abandons her. Left with child, the woman then has problems to find employment and succumbs to illness. The narrative framing induces the reader to feel Yvonne Liebermann 58 sympathy for this woman, even if she seems to neglect her son and mistreat him, at least verbally: “He reaches down and takes her hand, which she snatches away from him. (I will kill you.) […] The unblinking child stares back at her in a manner that suggests that the requirement that he bear responsibility for her well-being sits surely on his young shoulders” (LC 4). The woman is incapable of providing and caring for her seven-year-old child, but the text invites sympathy rather than contempt for her, because the reader can retrace her experience and thus relate to her development. The flashbacks to her past frame her present situation as a consequence of her hard life and thus portray the present as an inevitability. In other words, the construction of her story allows the reader to engage with the woman’s story and thus feel compassion for her and her story, because she - like Tommy and Heathcliff - is depicted as a victim. 12 It is therefore interesting to see the slave woman’s story, which induces compassion and sympathy in the reader, framing a very different woman where background and social position are concerned and whose story might not initially ignite sympathy. The former slave woman’s story constitutes the initial framing for a very different story which starts in the second chapter: The story of Monica Johnson, a British woman of a bourgeois family who grows up in Leeds and later moves to Oxford to study. Just as Tommy is juxtaposed to Heathcliff, Monica becomes a distorted mirror image of the slave woman. Even though it seems as if Monica had - contrary to the slave woman - the best preconditions to lead a ‘successful’ life, she, too, loses control of her life and ultimately loses a child, succumbs to illness and dies. Because of Monica’s upbringing and her general circumstances, Lucasta Miller is inclined to draw the following conclusion: Her strange passivity and emptiness cannot be fully explained by her difficult relationship with her parents, who are presented as conservative and unimaginative but not wicked; nor is it illuminated by the communication failures in her marriage; nor is it related to wider social factors arising from her impoverished and liminal situation as a single mother on a council estate. Depressingly, the message seems to be that some people are born outcasts, regardless of circumstances. (2015) Monica’s circumstances, so Miller’s assumption, should have resulted in a ‘better’ life. Monica’s development is clearly contrary to her father’s expectations who perceives Monica as a failure and wishes that her education 12 The presentation of her story allows for readerly engagement through a creation of sequentiality: “Stories can achieve the effect of consolidating situations - making them seem well defined to outsiders, people who are not in them - by grounding the plot in sequences of events that appear both chronologically and causally connected” (Ritivoi 2016: 69). The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 59 would have withdrawn her from her mother’s influence for whom he does not have any respect: “And now what was she trying to do to their daughter, whose education should have placed her beyond Ruth’s influence? Was this to be his legacy, two gossiping women and two misfit children? ” (LC 60). Of course, this statement is as much a judgement of Monica as it is an indirect characterisation of her patriarchal and xenophobic father. Still, the reader similarly might wonder how the woman, initially described by her husband as an “oddly intense northern girl” with “the right resources of strength and courage” (LC 25) to face society’s snobbish reaction to her Caribbean husband, could lose control of her life so unexpectedly. Indeed, it remains a mystery how the “remarkable young woman” (LC 26) defying her family and societal expectations alike ended up being described by her own son Ben in the following fashion: “At the end of the day Mam was always tired, and sometimes she didn’t even have the energy to talk to us, so to my way of thinking, she needn’t have bothered making the effort” (LC 159). While the story of the slave woman induces sympathy, Monica’s enigmatic development inhibits the reader’s sympathy and empathy as it does not frame the present as an inevitable consequence of the past. The reader might be more inclined to sympathise with Monica’s son who wonders: “Why couldn’t she just go somewhere and get better instead of all this? ” (LC 179). Indeed, Monica’s behaviour is enigmatic and not anticipated within the logic of the narrative, which does not offer an easy actio-reactio situation that would culminate in her self-inflicted death and thus lacks narrative motivation. 13 The narrative structure deviates from what Ian Watt calls the “importance which the novel allots the time dimension” (Watt 2006: 22), which is “its use of past experience as the cause of present action” (Watt 2006: 22). In this vein, Anna Lindhé rightly points out that “while rhetorical strategies elicit readerly empathy, they also serve to inhibit it” (2016: 20): As the framing invites the reader to read Monica’s story alongside the sad fate of the slave woman in the opening chapter, the sympathy that the reader feels with the slave woman might “trigger, or even be contingent on, the reader’s antipathies or indifference” (Lindhé 2016: 20) towards Monica. Indeed, the reader, who is also made to sympathise with Tommy and Ben, might be inclined to not fully disagree with Mrs Swinson, the temporary foster mother of Tommy and Ben, who remarks: I can’t abide women who are all over the shop when it comes to their responsibilities. On behalf of the blessed council, I seem to spend half my life mopping up the mess people like you make. I mean, look at how you’re all tarted up, and a mother too. (LC 154) 13 Ritivoi defines narrative motivation as follows: “Motivation prompts us to understand the coherence of a sequence of events as they unfold from the perspective of those implicated in them” (2016: 70). Yvonne Liebermann 60 Sympathy with the two boys, who try to get along as best as possible, might induce antipathy for their mother and inhibit a perception of her which would frame her as a victim, too. Although Monica is perceived as irresponsible, detached from reality, and even mad (cf. LC 170) by her father, husband, and son Ben, the chapters told from her perspective tell a different story. The shift in perspective introduces a different angle that highlights a divergence between perception from the outside and self-perception. Talking to her husband Julius, whom she describes as “this sad dreamer of a man she had married” (LC 51), Monica bursts out: What’s the matter with me? Nothing, Julius, except I’m tired, poor, and worried that because I don’t know how to be myself, I don’t know how to be a mother to these two boys, who deserve a damn sight more than we’ve been able to give them. I’ve lost myself, you buffoon, which is pathetic (LC 52) While the narrative parts that are told from other peoples’ perspectives - her father, her son - depict Monica as a woman who does not reflect on her actions and who in general does not seem to be concerned with the people surrounding her, her self-perception paints a different picture. However, her voice is not given sufficient space in the novel to really engage the reader in her perspective and investigate the latently present factors that might contribute to her development: the “dysfunctional relationship” with her father, who might even have abused her (cf. Ledent and O’Callaghan 2017: 246) and the racial stereotypes that Monica will have had to face because of her Caribbean husband and mixed-raced children in Great Britain in the 1960s. 14 Together, this might lead to a lack of sympathy, understanding, and empathy on the side of the reader. Still, the novel’s structure frames Monica’s situation within the horizon of the slave woman’s story and eventually highlights that different paths can lead to the same result in the end. Just as with Tommy and Heathcliff, Monica’s and the slave woman’s stories meet regarding their misery in the end. The framing of these stories, which makes the reader “reflect on what it is that unites them” (Craps 2008: 193) 15 , might induce a different morality than is typically connected with literary studies. Suzanne Keen claims that literature creates empathy through “the creation of commonality, even 14 Of course, these latent factors play an important role in The Lost Child. My point is precisely that these factors stay in the background, because the reader needs to become aware of them on their own account by questioning their initial reaction to the character. This questioning of pre-determined judgment is facilitated by the novel’s framing. 15 In his essay “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood”, Stef Craps analyses Phillips’ technique of fragmented narratives to generate empathy. The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 61 mutuality, between the reader and the protagonists of the story” (qtd. in Ritivoi 2016: 54). Ritivoi, however, rightly claims that this understanding of literary empathy is limited. According to her, “[b]esides being shallow, an understanding derived from the assumption of similarity is ethnocentric […] it is an understanding centered on our own point of view and shaped by only those realities that it reveals, while inevitably being closed to others.” (2016: 62-63) The framing of The Lost Child does not strive to create commonality. Resulting from a missing cause-and-effect relation between Monica’s circumstances and her development, readers might have a hard time to relate to her development. However, the fact that both women and both boys end up in a similar way might induce an ‘understanding’ in the reader that has nothing to do with commonality or empathy in the traditional sense - that is empathy through retracing a character’s experiences. Rather, in The Lost Child, “[u]nderstanding involves the adjustment of our familiar frame of reference - assumptions and expectations - to the frame of reference proposed by or contained in the object of interpretation.” (Ritivoi 2016: 60) Although both women are separated in time, family background, and position in society, the narrative structure still invites the reader to read the stories of both women alongside each other. After all, both women feel that they are invisible and neglected by the society they live in: Similar to the slave woman, who remarks that “[t]he sailors don’t see me; they never see me” (LC 6), Monica also feels excluded and on the margins of society: “I could see the people, but they couldn’t see me, and I can’t say it was a happy time” (LC 215). Despite their similarities - they both feel at the brim of society, they are both single mothers, and they both have to abandon their children due to illness - why might readers still judge Monica’s life as a failure while they might feel sympathy for the slave woman? The framing, so my claim, does induce readers to pose exactly this question and consequently re-evaluate their predispositions. Not only is Monica juxtaposed with the slave woman, but her life also resonates with that of another woman whose behaviour and manners were not entirely understood by society and her family: Emily Brontë, the author of the classical text Wuthering Heights with which The Lost Child interacts. Roughly in the middle of The Lost Child, the chapter ‘The Family’ starts in medias res with Emily Brontë observing her sister Charlotte from her sickbed. Although the chapter at first seems to be unconnected to Monica’s story, a closer look brings several similarities between the fictional character Monica and the fictionalised historical persona of Emily Brontë to the fore. Most of the chapter retells Emily’s illness shortly before her death, but the narrative also portrays Emily as “dwelling in another place” (LC 110) already four years before her illness. Descriptions of Emily, such as: “Emily retreated into an implacable silence that hinted at shyness, although her lustreless eyes invariably betrayed boredom, and her general demeanour indicated that she cared little for anyone else’s opinion” (LC 101-102) resonate with comments about Monica, who “had a lethargic, Yvonne Liebermann 62 expressionless gaze that was a little off-putting” (LC 25). Both Emily and Monica start out getting an education and both then “find contentment in cooking and cleaning” (LC 105, cf. 26), much to the astonishment of their surroundings, and they both devote their time to Julius and Branwell respectively without claiming recognition (cf. LC 27, 107). Both women, “secretive and inscrutable” (LC 29), share one more characteristic: They are both writers. The reader is aware that Emily’s “dreaming of the boy who came from the moors” (LC 105) later resulted in one of the best-known English novels. Contrarily, Monica’s writing activities are only mentioned in passing by her son Ben who comments that she “scribbled a bit at her stories” (LC 159) after work. The similarities of the two women are not made markedly explicit, but their implicit juxtaposition highlights that two similar lives can be judged differently, depending on socio-ideological framings of their time and the lenses through which they are scrutinised. While Emily Brontë’s novel today is widely-known and her personality is accepted as part and parcel of her artistic persona, Monica’s artistic endeavours hardly surface in the novel and remain unaccounted. The different framings of the main narrative therefore highlight that ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are socio-political constructs and are not mainly connected to individuals. In this vein, Anna Lindhé is right when claiming that “[b]uilt into the form of the novel, there is a tension that reminds us that we are not innocent” (Lindhé 2016: 37). The text comes into being only through the practice of reading and it is the reader who “brings the work into being, differently each time, in a singular performance of the work” (Attridge 2004: 9). The perception of a fictional person as either a societal success or a failure is, of course, dependent on the literary framing, but also on the ideological frames that the reader brings to the text. While the empathy that the reader feels for Tommy, Heathcliff, and the slave woman is a “non-threatening form of empathy” in that it “does not much challenge our view of ourselves” (Leake 2014: 175), the troubled feeling that the juxtapositional framing of Monica, the slave woman, and Emily Brontë might create is indeed threatening to preformed understandings that western readers might have. Typical rewritings of canonical texts address historical ideological frames that lead to the perception of colonial subjects as inferior or less valuable, or even ‘mad’, caused by ideologies of race or ethnicity. The Lost Child turns this process around: Through its juxtaposition of a classical text with the story of an ordinary British woman, The Lost Child highlights that ideological framings as they were at work in colonial genres are still at work, only differently, adapted to contemporary discourses of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, that is of the value of a life which more often than not is judged according to these parameters. The Lost Child challenges contemporary ideological frames that equate success with possibility - e.g. that if you are given possibilities they must result in success or you, personally, have failed - and highlights the reader’s role in bringing this meaning to the The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 63 text. As “certain formulations of self (as active, voluntaristic, choosing, propulsive) dominate the political sphere” (Halberstam 2011: 140), a particular framing strategy can bring to the fore the constructedness of these formulations. Even though not overtly concerned with ethics, the novel still challenges frames of perception that are guided by societal discourses: After all, Monica’s behaviour could very well be interpreted as the symptoms of clinical depression - which might have been triggered by patriarchal and racial discourses which are only latently present in the novel -, a disease that does not follow a simple cause-and-effect logic and that is still not entirely acknowledged by society. Ultimately, Monica’s framing in The Lost Child destabilises the widely spread delusion that “success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions” (Halberstam 2011: 3). 5. The Productivity of Empathy Inhibition: Destabilising Hegemonic Fields of Intelligibility The framing strategy of The Lost Child can be described as a destabilising framing strategy in that it does not support notions of stability, closure, and a smooth, reliable guidance through the text (cf. Frow 1982: 27). Destabilising frames rely on a certain out-of-place-ness in order to achieve a degree of visibility which allows them to actively challenge heteronormative values. When they are out-of-place, literary frames can stop being stabilising additions to the text and instead become places of negotiation where the very norms and values that have attained a certain uncritical stability in society are critically scrutinised. The Lost Child’s juxtaposition of three unrelated stories in a manner that still suggests common ground between them leads to a questioning of ideological frames of what ‘failure’, ‘success’, and ‘value’ are. By re-negotiating the distribution of value, literary frames can therefore operate as much more than minor discursive devices in literature. As Peter Boxall rightly demands, [i]f we are to understand the value of the novel, its capacity to make the worlds in which we live, then we have also to understand its resistance to value as presently understood or constituted, its right to be judged not by the terms that we have available, but by those futural forms which it alone is able to summon into existence. (2015: 11) Resisting notions of value as formulated in contemporary discourses, the ‘literary event’ that The Lost Child creates can thus be described as challenging the correlation between empathy and societal conformity. In this vein, literary frames not only guide our interpretation of a text but can also make us question very basic assumptions about human life, subjectivity, and the norms that came to stabilise these concepts. Yvonne Liebermann 64 Destabilising frames use their heightened visibility to make the reader aware of the norms that unconsciously determine their meaning making processes and the discourses that unconsciously regulate cultural knowledge. In this vein, The Lost Child’s experimenting with traditional framing mechanisms can indeed be considered what Derek Attridge calls “ethical testing” (2004: 10): The destabilising framing of The Lost Child raises awareness of how empathy is generated and how cultural values influence the reader’s distribution of empathy. The limitations of being able to feel with Monica Johnson disrupt the reading process. The paradoxical juxtaposition of three women’s lives - or glimpses of their lives - that either start off similarly but end differently or start differently but end in a similar way “may increase readers’ awareness of their own role and responsibility in the activity of reading” (Lindhé 2016: 35), that is their own role in distributing empathy. Better circumstances do not automatically lead to better lives and The Lost Child’s framing makes us aware of the “fields of intelligibility that helps to form and frame our responsiveness to the impinging world” (Butler 2010: 34-35). Phillips’ text shows that a novel from a ‘diasporic author’ can offer various interpretations and become operable in different discourses without being explicitly instrumentalised for socio-political agendas. His novel implicitly deals with socio-political concerns through its form and thereby highlights the singularity of literary texts to engage readers in critical thought without being effusively didactic. References Attridge, Derek (2004). Coetzee & the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Attridge, Derek (2017). The Singularity of Literature. [2004]. Oxon/ New York: Routledge. Boxall, Peter (2015). The Value of the Novel. New York, NY: Cambridge U.P. Brontë, Emily (2003). Wuthering Heights. [1847]. London: Penguin Books. Brockmeier, Jens (2001). “From the End to the Beginning: Retrospective Teleology in Autobiography”. In: Jens Brockmeier/ Donal Carbaugh (Eds.). Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co. 247-280. Butler, Judith (2010). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Craps, Stef (2008). “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood”. Studies in the Novel 40/ 1-2. 191-202. Eagleton, Terry (2012). The Event of Literature. New Haven: Yale U.P. Erll, Astrid/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning (2008). Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Fludernik, Monika (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/ New York: Routledge. Frow, John (1982). “The Literary Frame”. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 16/ 2. 25-30. The Ethics of Framing in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child 65 Gikandi, Simon (2011). “Theory after Postcolonial Theory: Rethinking the Work of Mimesis.” In: Derek Attridge/ Jane Elliott (Eds.) Theory after ‘Theory’. Florence: Routledge. 163-178. Gunning, Dave (2012). “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Empathy in the Realist Novel and Its Alternatives”. Contemporary Literature 53/ 4. 779-813. Halberstam, Judith (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke U.P. Helgesson, Stefan (2014). “Postcolonialism and World Literature”. Interventions 16/ 4. 438-500. Huggan, Graham (2001). The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Lea, Daniel (2017). Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices. Manchester: Manchester U.P. Leake, Eric (2014). “Humanizing the Inhumane: The Value of Difficult Empathy”. In: Meghan Marie Hammond/ Sue J. Kim (Eds.) Rethinking Empathy through Literature. London/ New York: Routledge. 175-185. Ledent, Bénédicte (2017). “Introduction: Thinking Caryl Phillips Out of the Box”. ariel: a review of international english literature 48. 1-11. Ledent, Bénedicte/ Evelyn O’Callaghan (2017). “Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child: A Story of Loss and Connection”. ariel: a review of international english literature 48. 229-247. Levine, Caroline (2015). Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton U.P. Lindhé, Anna (2016). “Paradox of Narrative Empathy and the Form of the Novel, or What George Eliot Knew”. Studies in the Novel 48/ 1. 19-42. MacLachlan, Gale/ Ian Reid (1994). Framing and Interpretation. Carlton: Melbourne Univ. Press. Miller, Lucasta (2015). “The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips Review - from Heathcliff to the 1960s”. The Guardian 18 April 2015. https: / / www.theguar dian.com/ books/ 2015/ apr/ 18/ the-lost-child-caryl-phillips-review-wutheringheights-emily-bronte. (Accessed: 20.04.2018). Mukherjee, Ankhi (2014). What Is a Classic? : Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon. Stanford, CA: Stanford U.P. Neumann, Birgit (2006). “Kulturelles Wissen und Literatur”. In: Marion Gymnich/ Birgit Neumann/ Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Kulturelles Wissen und Intertextualität: Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien zur Kontextualisierung von Literatur. Trier: WVT. 29-51. Nussbaum, Martha (2000). Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. Phillips, Caryl (2015). The Lost Child. Oxford: Oneword. Pier, John (2014). “Narrative Levels (rev. version; uploaded 23 April 2014), Paragraph 11.” In: Peter Hühn et al. (Eds.). The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. [online]. www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ article/ narrative-levels-revised-version-uploaded-23-april-2014. Pirker, Eva Ulrike (2017). “Affected Men: Agency, Masculinity and the Race Episteme in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark and Foreigners”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies. Ponzanesi, Sandra (2014). The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ritivoi, Andrea Deciu (2016). “Reading Stories, Reading (Others’) Lives”. Storyworlds 8/ 1. 51-75. Yvonne Liebermann 66 Roszak, Suzanne (2014). “Conformist Culture and the Failures of Empathy: Reading James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith”. In: Meghan Marie Hammond/ Sue J. Kim (Eds.) Rethinking Empathy through Literature. London/ New York: Routledge. 150-161. Rowner, Ilai (2015). The Event: Literature and Theory. Lincoln, Neb: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Sayeau, Michael D. (2013). Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Thieme, John (2001). Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London: Continuum. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl (2008). Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum. Vermeulen, Pieter (2015). Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ward, Abigail (2012). “An Interview with Caryl Phillips”. Contemporary Literature 53/ 4. 628-645. Watt, Ian P. (2006). The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley, California: Univ. of California Press. Wolf, Werner/ Walter Bernhart (2006). “Introduction”. In: Werner Wolf/ Walter Bernhart (Eds.) Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1-43. Wolf, Werner (2006). “Defamiliarized Initial Framings in Fiction.” In: Werner Wolf/ Walter Bernhart (Eds.) Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 295-329. Woodward, Gerard (2015). “The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips, book review: Wuthering Heights relived in post-war Britain”. Independent 26 March 2015. https: / / www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/ books/ reviews/ the-lostchild-by-caryl-phillips-book-review-wuthering-heights-relived-in-post-war-britain-10135393.html. (Accessed: 12.07.2018). Yvonne Liebermann Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf Freie Universität Berli “Is this really all they had to worry about? ” Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us Michael Fuchs Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic survival horror game The Last of Us (2013) is mainly set twenty years after the outbreak of a mutant fungus which transforms human beings into zombie-like creatures. The game focuses on the story of Joel, who lost his daughter the day of the outbreak, and Ellie, a fourteen-year-old who embodies hope for humankind’s survival, as she seems to be the only human being immune to the infection. In the narrative’s concluding moments, Joel is unwilling to sacrifice the girl to distil a cure from her brain tissue. When she inquires whether the doctors were successful, Joel lies, telling her that she is not the only one immune to the infection, after all. In this way, he consciously re-constructs the past and tries to define its future meaning. Joel’s lie highlights the significance of spectral hauntings to the game text, as the suppressed knowledge of him killing dozens of people in order to save Ellie will inevitably come back to haunt them. Accordingly, the past and future are entangled in intricate ways, as (re-)collections of the past shape both individuals’ and the nation’s present and future. These influences of both the past and the present on the future-to-come are particularly relevant in the context of the future orientation of the American nation. Indeed, The Last of Us, this article argues, suggests that a future irrevocably altered by anthropogenic actions haunts this key American narrative. 1. Playing with Futures Past In his book After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999), James Berger argues that the apocalypse “must in its destructive moment clarify and illuminate the true nature of what has been brought to an end” (1999: 5). In order to reflect on the changes the apocalyptic moment introduced AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0004 Michael Fuchs 68 “something” must “remain […] after the end” (Berger 1999: 6; italics in original). Apocalyptic tales, Berger observes here, do not simply end, but require the anticipation of the ‘after-end’ for the apocalypse to become meaningful. Accordingly, Berger distils a clear chronology characteristic of post-apocalyptic narratives - there is a time before the apocalyptic moment (often just remembered and/ or commemorated), there is the apocalyptic moment, and there is the post-apocalyptic world. Crucially, Berger suggests that apocalyptic events annihilate the known world and erase cultural memory. The apocalypse thus introduces both a new historical chronology and establishes a new kind of temporality, as the post-apocalyptic world removes itself from the pre-apocalyptic world; the post-apocalyptic reality is disentangled from the past. However, this past may still “be reconstructed by means of […] traces, remains, survivors, and ghosts” (1999: 19), as Berger remarks. These “traces, remains, survivors, and ghosts” collapse the strict boundaries between temporal dimensions. Indeed, as Gayatari Spivak notes in the introduction to her translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (1967), the trace “is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present” (1997: xvii). Similarly, in Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida himself explains that specters are “neither […] present nor absent” (2006: 63), but always present without really being present. These ghostly presences disrupt “both oppositional thinking and the linearity of historical chronology” (Weinstock 2004: 5). Berger acknowledges as much when he remarks, “Everything after the end, in order to gain, or borrow, meaning, must point back, lead back to that time” (1999: xi). The end (and the afterend) accordingly reveals its intricate ties to its prior and exposes the ways in which the past has caused the apocalyptic moment and/ or the ways in which the ‘after’ differs from what came before. In either case, whereas the temporal categories of past, present, and future may appear to be easily distinguishable, below the surface, these temporal layers are entangled in intricate ways. Video games simultaneously contribute to and expose the complex entanglements between temporal dimensions in very specific ways, as the medium “offers a very different temporal experience than our other media” (Atkins 2007: 251). In particular, video game scholar Jesper Juul has diagnosed “an inherent conflict between the now of the interaction and the past or ‘prior’ of the narrative” in video games (2001). “Video games,” Christopher Hanson has explained more recently, “enable players to experience […] time in ways that transcend other media” (2018: 2). The opening sequence of Naughty Dog’s triple-A title The Last of Us (2013) makes explicit video games’ particular ways of engaging with time. Originally published in July 2013, the game’s narrative opens in the fall of 2013, near Austin, Texas. Accordingly, for players who started the game right upon the original release date, the game was set in the future. Yet when playing the game a few weeks after its release or when simply Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 69 thinking of the year of 2013 as the ‘now,’ the game was set in the present. Alternatively, from today’s perspective, 2013 is, of course, located in the past. Significantly, when considering a setting in the future or in the past, video games’ particular relationship to time adds to the complexities, as playing “has a basic sense of happening […] now,” since “[p]ressing a key [instantaneously] influences the game world, which then logically (and intuitively) has to be happening in the same now” (Juul 2004: 134; italics in original), thereby collapsing the artificial differentiations between these temporal dimensions. In the game text’s opening minutes, single dad Joel and his daughter Sarah witness the outbreak of a mutant fungus which transforms human beings into zombie-like creatures. Sarah dies that same night, killed by an American soldier whose task is to contain the threat and protect civilians. After about twenty minutes of playing time, the narrative jumps to the year 2033, as the present moment of gameplay converges with the future and the present of narration. In the twenty years since the outbreak, the mutant fungus has practically eradicated the population of the United States. The remaining survivors live in military quarantine zones located in (former) urban centers, in nomad groups roaming the country, or in isolated settlements in the countryside. In Boston, Joel meets Ellie, a fourteen-year-old girl who becomes the physical manifestation of the loss which has been haunting him since the day of the outbreak. In addition, Ellie emerges as the only hope for humankind, as she is immune to infection caused by the fungal attack on the human brain. A group known as the Fireflies, which has ties to both Ellie and Joel, hopes to distil a cure from Ellie’s body and thus save humankind. As the group’s doctors and scientists are not close by, Joel and Ellie embark on a journey which leads them farther and farther westward. As I will demonstrate in this article, both the constant presence of Sarah’s absence and the sheer omnipresence of cultural artifacts from the 1980s and 2013 in 2033 underscore the significance of the past to the future imagined in The Last of Us. Indeed, from Joel’s attempts to work through his traumatic loss to the ways in which the narrative draws on distinctly American myths, traces of the past constantly appear and re-appear in the course of the narrative. The Last of Us thus underlines the undeniable interrelations between the past and the present, which provide templates for, and thus shape, the future. However, this future, which plays such a fundamental role in the American imagination, is haunted by the effects of past and present (and future) ecologically unsustainable anthropogenic actions. In this way, The Last of Us exposes a considerable tension between the construction of a future based on past ideals which ignore the realities of life in the Anthropocene. Michael Fuchs 70 2. Stepping into the Museum, Going West, and the Archive of Popular Culture: Collective Hauntings in The Last of Us Collective memory, as Astrid Erll has explained, is the stock of cultural artifacts that “a society preserves” and the associated cultural narratives it seeks to circulate (2006: 181). Jan Assmann has elaborated on this idea, remarking that collective memory “is maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, practice, observance)” (1995: 129). Thus, all cultural practices reflect and feed off collective memory; cultural products are necessarily haunted by traces of the past. At the same time, collective memory incorporates these cultural artifacts and performances, which come to haunt the future by providing particular narrative templates and behavioral as well as performative scripts. As Susanne Hamscha has noted, “As an archive of images, affects, and desires that stimulate imaginings of ‘America,’ the cultural imaginary depends on constant reiteration” (2013: 15). Accordingly, images which conjure up ghosts of the past are projected into the future. In the American context, these images often evoke a limited set of “‘foundational scenarios’ that have come to define a distinctly American culture” (Hamscha 2013: 16; italics in original). For example, in The Last of Us, Joel, Ellie, and Joel’s friend Tess reach an abandoned museum. As they traverse a floor devoted to the Revolutionary War, they come face to face with the founding of the American nation (see Illustration 1). This museum provides a textbook example of what Pierre Nora has referred to as a ‘lieu de mémoire,’ which is “[c]reated by a play of memory and history” (1989: 19). The French historian considers this dialog between memory and history as playful, for rather than being contained in the past, sites of memory demonstrate how past moments become commemorated, thereby transcending their temporal compartmentalization in the past by being visible in the present moment and potentially preserved for eternity. The museum’s level of decay literalizes sociocultural cracks, which come to the fore in the post-apocalyptic world. The facts that the museum has evidently long been deserted and that Joel and company quickly pass through the building - rather than worship past leaders and show reverence for past events - suggest that the society in place after the outbreak has decided to devalue these past moments and tries to leave the related myths behind. The brief scene set in the museum characterizes post-apocalyptic America as a decidedly anti-heroic society. America has forsaken the idealization of the Founding Fathers and the nation’s foundational myths - which begs the question as to whether this post-apocalyptic America may still be considered America. Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 71 Illustration 1: Walking through memories (and memorials) of the Revolutionary War in The Last of Us. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). Moreover, this abandoning of cultural narratives central to American selffashioning conveys a critique of (pre-apocalypse) America and the myths - and the attendant ideas - the nation (largely) still clings to. This critical stance also manifests in the symbolism of Joel and Ellie’s journey. After all, their route across America could hardly be more mythical in scope, since they tread on paths similar to the pioneers of the nineteenth century. However, Joel and Ellie’s westward journey re-configures the myth of American progress, as they start in the Cradle of Liberty, pass the steel mills of Pittsburgh, travel through the Centennial State, and then move farther west, toward the future - only to return back east, as their story concludes in Wyoming. Significantly, the goal of Joel and Ellie’s voyage is repeatedly re-defined, thereby echoing the notion of America as a nation which incessantly moves forward and thus remains perpetually “unfinished” (Lerner 1959). As Joel and Ellie travel farther west, Salt Lake City seems to emerge as their final destination. To be sure, while Salt Lake City’s role in the American imagination pales in comparison with New York City, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles, for the Mormons, the Crossroads of the West was the place from whence they meant to conquer the entire continent (Olsen 2002). Similar to the City upon a Hill, Utah’s capital is a utopian space symbolically charged with hopes, dreams, and possibilities. The city functions as a point of departure, another beginning, geographically located far in the west of the continent. The Mormon city accordingly draws on the cultural meaning invested into the West. After all, the conquest of the West Coast might have marked the closing of the frontier, but it simultaneously Michael Fuchs 72 molded the Frontier into mythical shape, a symbol which may be projected onto ever new objects, places, and ideas, “extending” the “frontier into new regions” (Turner 1920) - first toward the sky, later into cyberspace, which made possible America’s “perennial rebirth” (Turner 1920: 2). Technological progress and Americans’ need to control nature has driven the nation’s westward progress. In this context, Salt Lake City’s significance becomes particularly pertinent. The city is home to the ‘Mormon Grid’ - a rigid urban planning pattern which, arguably, presents the climax of America’s conceptualization of the city as built environment. However, when Joel and Ellie first encounter giraffes in a space which traditionally emblematizes Americans’ desire “to control the wilderness into a contained and disciplined environment” (Campbell/ Kean 1997: 160), and Joel then decides not to entrust the future of humanity to science but rather to believe in the restorative power of nature (in the form of a mutated fungus) to rid itself of humankind in order to constrain the anthropogenic destruction of the planet, these moments underline that Joel and Ellie repeatedly stray off well-trodden paths which epitomize the American experience. Similar to their mythic predecessors, Joel and Ellie erase and re-write history, but with a different goal in mind - the improvement of the planet rather than the betterment of humankind. Illustration 2: Giraffes roam the streets of the abandoned human environment. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). To be sure, the game text’s conscious challenging of cultural narratives deeply engrained in the American psyche creates a paradox. After all, The Last of Us also evokes America’s pastoralist tradition through the merging of nature and the city in its depiction of Salt Lake City and other urban environments. For example, James L. Machor has noted that “a more Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 73 meaningful life is possible closer to nature” (1987: 3) but still within the limits of the city if nature is simply given sufficient freedom to develop. This is echoed in the characters’ relation to the period directly preceding the apocalyptic event. When Ellie, for example, notices one of the numerous Dawn of the Wolf posters which are plastered across the gameworld (see Illustration 3), she remarks, “These posters are everywhere” (Naughty Dog 2014). Joel admits that he “saw this right before the outbreak” and explains, “It’s a dumb teen movie” (Naughty Dog 2014). Obviously, the grumpy father figure feels that life before the outbreak of the mutation was rather insignificant, a notion Ellie supports when she flips through a teenage girl’s diary and wonders, “Is this really all they had to worry about? Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt? It’s bizarre” (Naughty Dog 2014). Illustration 3: The omnipresent Dawn of the Wolf expose the vacuity of the time predating the outbreak of the mutant fungus. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). Joel and Ellie’s comments serve as thinly veiled paternalistic assessments of the commercial juggernaut that is Twilight and its (primarily) teenage female fan base. Yet beyond parodying Twilight, Dawn of the Wolf represents the nation’s state of mind during the pre-outbreak era. The critique The Last of Us levels against this period is rooted in its perceived depthlessness, which threatened “to sink” everything “to the level of sheer decoration” (Jameson 1991: 7) - ideas encapsulated by Dawn of the Wolf. The superficiality of the immediate past contrasts with the gory and gritty reality of life in 2033. Crucially, players experience this harsh and uncompromising reality in the form of a simulated environment. In an add-on to The Last of Us, titled Michael Fuchs 74 Left Behind (2014), the game text touches on this paradox of trying to access reality though a simulation. In an abandoned arcade hall, Ellie discovers a game called The Turning. Unfortunately, “it’s busted” (Naughty Dog 2014). But this does not stop Ellie from ‘playing’ the game, as her friend Riley suggests that she closed her eyes and gave herself in to the illusion created by Riley’s words (see Illustration 4). Players follow Ellie’s lead and play the Street Fighter-esque game without being able to see the gamewithin-the-game on their screens. The metatextual (and metaludic) moment, which draws on players’ knowledge of fighting games, “welcome[s]” players “to the desert of the Real” (Žižek 2002), as the game-within-thegame confronts players with processes “of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 1994b: 2). Here, The Last of Us exposes reality’s artificial character by way of an arcade game that is only accessible through words, sounds, health bars, and the pushing of buttons. In this way, The Last of Us not only sketches a micro-history of its medium but also, more importantly, taps into the nostalgia for the 1980s, which has pervaded popular culture in the 2010s. Revealingly, Ellie repeatedly highlights the affects and emotions arcade games produce. In particular, they represent a past era in which “kids […] were so fucking lucky,” as she puts it in the prequel comic (Druckmann/ Hicks 2013). By exposing the disconnect between Ellie and the 1980s (represented by the arcade game), The Last of Us suggests that nostalgia can only reach its full potential “[w]hen the real is no longer what it was” (Baudrillard 1994b: 6) and, thus, transforms into a “nostalgia for the lost referential” (Baudrillard 1994a: 44). Significantly, the game text communicates this idea through the use of a simulated, post-apocalyptic environment that retrogressed to an earlier stage in the development of the semiosphere (before signs engulfed and replaced reality) and exposes the irreferentiality of the previous age (i.e., the 2010s). Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 75 Illustration 4: Ellie imagines playing an arcade game; and the game asks players to do the same. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). The Last of Us diagnoses nostalgia as a general condition, not restricted to Ellie. Indeed, post-apocalyptic America at large suffers from collective nostalgia in some shape or form. For example, Winston, a soldier stationed at a Boston mall, notes, “I miss the holiday lights. Everyone was all stressed out trying to buy gifts, but you felt this sort of magic cheer in the air” (Druckmann & Hicks 2013). On the other hand, Sam, a thirteen-year-old boy who - together with his older brother Henry - accompanies Joel and Ellie for some time, never makes his appreciation for the past explicit, but the ways in which he talks about ice cream trucks when seeing one and the ways in which he cherishes a robot that looks incredibly like the Transformer Snowflake speak volumes about the feelings he has invested in these objects. The fact that one of these objects is a Transformer action figure not only connects Sam’s longing for simpler times to a feeling of having been robbed of his childhood and a yearning for change, but also draws on the real-world nostalgia of players who grew up in the 1980s and “the string of 1980s blockbuster nostalgia pervading modern Hollywood” (Sperb 2016: 128). As much as the characters express disdain for the past and its ignorance, they also cannot help but idealize the same ignorance - nostalgia constructs a past moment in time when life was, irrespective of the ‘complications’ and ‘complexities’ a life defined by abundance and affluence holds, easier than the daily struggle for survival faced in the postapocalyptic world Joel and Ellie inhabit. Notably, the post-apocalyptic world is a world implicitly altered by the effects of climate change - since climate change is irreversible and will Michael Fuchs 76 affect the future. Even though scientists explicitly warned of the long-term effects of carbon dioxide emissions as early as 1938 (Callendar 1938), it was not until the 1980s that the ‘greenhouse effect’ became sufficiently prominent to be publicly discussed. However, Americans, in particular, were (and many still are) ignorant of the causes of global warming. Accordingly, the decade of the 1980s also functions as a more innocent era when it comes to ecological questions - a time when anthropogenic pollution purportedly had not really been a problem yet. 3. Watches and Photographs: Personal Hauntings in The Last of Us Despite Joel’s no-nonsense attitude, he also struggles with his past. Its powerful grip on Joel’s present comes to the fore when he spends some time alone with Ellie for the first time. When leaving Boston, they wait for night to come, bunkered up in a building close to the quarantine zone’s border. As Joel tries to catch a nap, Ellie notes that his “watch is broken” (Naughty Dog 2014). This innocent remark not only acknowledges that in the postapocalyptic world depicted in The Last of Us, people’s daily routines no longer adhere to the artificial rhythm of clock time, but also stresses the significance of the broken object, which his daughter gave him as a birthday present the night she died. The watch is a constant reminder of that night. However, Joel does not really need the watch in order to remember the night, as he has constant nightmares about it. Sigmund Freud argued that dreams return the traumatized individual to the traumatic event, “from which he wakes up in another fright” (2001: 13). “These dreams […] are endeavouring to master” the traumatic experience (Freud 2001: 32), but they cannot do so and are thus doomed to repeat and return Joel to his site and moment of loss. Since the traumatic experience is bound to recur, “the future promises not unknown possibilities for fulfilling desire, but new occasions for the repetition of the fundamental loss that defines the subject” (McGowan 2011: xi). The conceptualization of time thus implied is different from traditional notions of cause and effect as well as progress. After all, traumatic experiences “are not ordered temporally” and “time does not change them in any way” (Freud 2001: 28). In this way, the past not merely predetermines the future, but effectively becomes the future. Although the traumatic event causes its repetition, it is also the effect of its re-experience. Accordingly, causes are, somewhat paradoxically, both causes of effects and their effects. As a result, trauma produces temporal chaos - or an entirely new temporality. This emergence of a new temporality caused by trauma shares certain features with the Anthropocene condition. “[S]udden event[s] of extreme violence” (Rothberg 2014: xiv) and the “slow violence” of environmental Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 77 catastrophe, which is “typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011: 2), result in the entanglement of singular moments of human experience and the vast scale of Earth history. Human beings are “implicated subject[s]” in both of these temporal dimensions - “neither simply perpetrator nor victim” (Rothberg 2014: xv); they are rather always-already simultaneously “perpetrator and victim” (Beck 1992: 38; italics in original). Either of these roles may, of course, entail traumatic experiences; more importantly, the constant friction between anthropocentric thinking and geological timescales permanently disrupts the human subject. The trauma thus repeatedly experienced is located in the past and in the present, but also just as much in the future, as future environmental and personal catastrophe seems unavoidable. Whereas Joel subconsciously constantly revisits his traumatic experience, his conscious self seeks to banish Sarah’s loss to the past and contain (and control) his daughter’s memory. “Things happen… and we move on” (Naughty Dog 2014; pause in original), he tells Ellie after burying their companions Sam and Henry. This desire explains his first, rather indifferent, if not hostile, reactions toward Ellie. Even if Ellie might not be Sarah’s spitting image, the two girls are similar enough in their looks, their behaviors, and their age that Ellie becomes a manifestation of Sarah’s physical absence. Following Derrida, Ellie thus performs “a paradoxical incorporation” (2006: 6); through the symbolical equation of the two girls, Ellie effectively disappears in the becoming-present memory of Sarah, who is symbolically resurrected. Yet Sarah also transcends death through the medium of photography (see Illustration 5). Photographs, Roland Barthes has argued, do “not call up the past” (1981: 82). Marguerite Duras has taken this argument a step further, noting that “photographs promote forgetting” (1990: 89), which is why “the Photograph never, in essence, [is] a memory,” but, in fact, rather “blocks memory” (Barthes 1981: 91). This blockage results from the simulacral, seemingly eternal present photographs construct. Since the present always remains present, the past can never be past. Rather, the past serves as a gateway to the now. For Sarah, the photograph of a past moment, which captured her while still being alive, offers her access to the sphere of mortals. Similarly, while the post-apocalyptic society seeks to erase past wrongs, it simultaneously lives in a world that has resulted from these past errors. On another level, photographs are defined by an aura of authenticity unlike any other medium. Barthes has concluded that (analog) photography requires a “real thing which has been placed before the lens,” since without the material object, “there would be no photograph” (1981: 76). This argument does, however, not promote an overly simplistic understanding of photographs as “‘copies’ of reality” (Barthes 1981: 88). Instead, photographs “emanat[e a] past reality” (Barthes 1981: 89). They are Michael Fuchs 78 assumed to capture physical reality and are thus endowed with “an evidential force” (Barthes 1981: 89), which creates the illusion of indexical reference. Illustration 5: The photograph effectively resurrects Sarah. Screenshot from The Last of Us Remastered (Naughty Dog 2014). Even if photographs connote ‘reality,’ Barthes acknowledged that they are cultural constructs in so far as they are produced by socio-historical and aesthetic contexts. Significantly, the photograph featuring Sarah also depicts her father, Joel. The two seem to be having a fun time together after a soccer game; it is a family photo. Marianne Hirsch has noted that family photos “immobilize[] the flow of family life” and “perpetuate[] familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history” (1997: 7). Photography’s selective memory “reduce[s] the strains of family life by sustaining an imaginary cohesion, even as it exacerbates them by creating images that real families cannot uphold” (Hirsch 1997: 7). Indeed, the image of Joel and Sarah, united in their enjoyment of life, constructs the illusion of familial harmony despite the looming absence of Sarah’s mother. At the same time, the photograph displaces any negative feelings associated with the family by presenting an image of cohesion. A photograph of Joel, Tommy, and Sarah seen in earlier in the game supports this notion. There are no signs of the discord between Joel and Tommy, and Sarah is still alive in the photograph. Likewise, the realities of environmental destruction (very much present in the 2010s, of course) are also glossed over. As Hirsch elaborates, the family is “a last vestige of protection against war, racism, exile, and cultural displacement” (1997: 13). Therefore, she continues, the family “becomes particularly vulnerable to […] violent ruptures, and so a measure of their devastation” (1997: 13). Sarah’s death and Past, Present, and Future Hauntings in The Last of Us 79 the brothers’ various disagreements provide illustrative examples of these processes at work, as Joel’s family functions as a microcosm of life in the post-apocalyptic world. In addition, reflecting on Barthes’s elaborations on his dead mother’s photos, Hirsch argues that photographs have the power “to wound, repel and exclude” (1997: 2). When Ellie finally hands over the photo depicting Joel and Sarah, Joel takes a few deep breaths, apparently overwhelmed by the unexpected emotional effect the image has on him, by the old wounds that are re-opened. At the same time, he can see the chasm separating him from his beloved daughter. The photograph thus “provokes a moment of self-recognition” (Hirsch 1997: 2), as Joel begins to understand that he has been trying to escape his own past for the past twenty years. Beyond working through his daughter’s loss, the confrontation with the past and the attendant encounter with death also holds self-knowledge, since photographs of people are haunted by “the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction” (Sontag 2005: 55). When Joel looks at Sarah’s photograph, he not only confronts her death, but also his own mortality, which harbingers the impending vanishing of humankind. Indeed, this moment of confronting death and - at least in some way - finally making peace with the past proves key to Joel’s acceptance of humanity’s (potential) demise, which leads to him sparing Ellie’s life and accepting the annihilation of Homo sapiens in the game’s concluding moments. 4. After the End: Memory in the Post-Apocalyptic World of The Last of Us Post-apocalyptic tales suggest a reset that often projects the recovery of an idealized past into the future-to-come. In other words, the apocalyptic moment returns a people to its mythic beginnings. Thus, it seems only appropriate to evoke this rhetorical gesture typical of post-apocalyptic narratives by returning to James Berger’s elaborations on the post-apocalypse (which opened this article). In his book’s introduction, Berger writes that “nearly every apocalyptic text presents the same paradox[: ] The end is never the end” (1999: 5). Not surprisingly, in The Last of Us, the outbreak of the fungus which transforms human beings into zombie-like creatures is not the end of civilization, but the end of life as spoiled First-Worlders know it. Likewise, the game’s conclusion did not signify the tale’s ending. The add-on, released about half a year after the core game, simultaneously functions as a prequel to the main game (temporally located after the prequel comic series) and bridges the time between chapters eight (at the conclusion of which Joel suffers a serious injury) and nine (at the beginning of which Joel is - quite literally - not out of the woods yet), as the narrative constantly alternates between events before Ellie and Joel met and Ellie’s struggle to ensure Joel’s survival. Michael Fuchs 80 More importantly, however, the game’s final moments emphasize the significance of the (construction of the) past. When Ellie asks Joel what happened when she was supposed to have her operation, he tells her that it turned out she is not the only one immune to the infection. Joel lies, for once he came to understand that Ellie should be sacrificed, he not only killed Ellie’s mother figure Marlene and dozens of other people, but also denied humanity the hope to re-claim its dominion over the planet. By lying, Joel effectively re-writes the past, whose impact on the present is made explicit by showing a flashback of Marlene’s murder just before he answers Ellie’s question. Ellie’s reaction to Joel’s words indicates that she is well aware of the lie, but she accepts it. Her acceptance implies that Joel and Ellie will live with the lie and (try to) forget the truth of what really happened. 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