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narr.digital 6 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Werner Wolf Peter Freese Justyna Fruzińska Daniel Becker Günter Sigott Melanie Fleischhacker Stephanie Sihler Jennifer Steiner Heinz Tschachler Band 44 · Heft 2 | 2019 Band 44 · Heft 2 | 2019 AAA_2019_2.indd 1-3 AAA_2019_2.indd 1-3 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Narr Francke A�empto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97-0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de \ periodicals.narr.de No�ce to Contributors All ar�cles for submission should be sent to the editor, Bernhard Kettemann, as a WORD document as mail attachment: bernhard.kettemann@uni-graz.at Manuscripts should conform to the AAA style sheet or follow either MHRA or MLA style. (Copies of the MLA Style Sheet may be obtained from the Treasurer of the Modern Language Associa�on of America, 62 Fi�h Ave, New York, N. Y., 10011; copies of the MHRA Style Book from W.S. Maney & Son Ltd., Hudson Rd., Leeds LS9 7DL, England.) Documenta�on can be embodied either in footnotes or in an appended bibliography, with name and date reference enclosed in brackets in the text. Footnotes should be numbered consecu�vely and listed on a separate sheet of paper. The footnotes will appear on the bottom of the page where they are men�oned. They should be limited to a minimum. Languages of publica�on are German and English. Authors are requested to provide an English abstract of their contribu�on of about 15 lines on a separate sheet of paper. In the normal procedure first proofs will be sent to the authors and should be returned to the editor within one week. Authors receive one free copy of the issue containing their contribu�on. It is our policy to publish accepted contribu�ons without delay. Gründer, Eigentümer, Herausgeber und für den Inhalt verantwortlich / founder, owner, editor and responsibility for content: Bernhard Kettemann, Ins�tut für Anglis�k, Universität Graz, Heinrichstraße 36, A-8010 Graz. Web: http: / / narr.digital/ journal/ aaa, Tel.: +43 / 316 / 380-2488, 2474, Fax: +43 / 316 / 380-9765 Herausgeber / editor Bernhard Kettemann Redak�on / editorial assistants Georg Marko Eva Triebl Mitherausgeber / editorial board Alwin Fill Walter Grünzweig Walter Hölbling Allan James Andreas Mahler Chris�an Mair Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf Werner Wolf Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky, Benjamin Pickford (eds.) The Genres of Genre: Forms, Formats, and Cultural Formations Swiss Papers in English Language And Literature (SPELL), Vol. 38 2019, 175 Seiten €[D] 49,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-8327-7 e ISBN 978-3-8233-9327-6 The 38th volume of SPELL is dedicated to the discussion and analysis of the concept of genre. Terms such as “the political unconscious” (Jameson), “cultural work” (Tompkins), “narrative mode” (Williams) and “performative” (Austin, Turner) have been centrally determining, over the years, to help us understand how genres work and what they do. This collection seeks to further explore what roles genre plays in past and contemporary American national narratives and counter-narratives. While the first three essays of the volume attempt to tackle the difficult task of defining genre and its affordances, the following three essays discuss specific genres, namely, the office novel, the political TV show, and science-fiction. Finally, the last three essays explore how genre can be a valuable concept for the analysis of larger issues, such as the representation of race in American cultural productions. This collection of essays therefore offers a variety of approaches to the literary device of genre, reflecting ongoing research in the Swiss community of American studies, in order to underline the productive potential of genre analysis. ANGLISTIK \ LITERATURWISSENSCHAFT Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de AAA_2019_2.indd 4-6 AAA_2019_2.indd 4-6 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) Heft 2 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Werner Wolf A Castle as “Hell” and “Heaven” Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.......................85 Peter Freese “The Irresistible Fantasy of Sex under Glass” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts .............................................................. 119 Justyna Fruzińska ‘I grieve that grief can teach me nothing’ Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History .............................................. 159 Daniel Becker The Digital Citizen 2.0. Reconsidering Issues of Digital Citizenship Education ...................................... 167 Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts A Pilot Study .................................................................................................. 195 Rezensionen: Heinz Tschachler Erhan Şimşek, Creating Realities: Business as a Motif in American Fiction, 1865-1929...................................................................................................... 217 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 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). 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Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 A Castle as “Hell” and “Heaven” Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 1 Werner Wolf In memoriam Hugo Keiper One of the most graphic ways in which the world-modelling function of literary texts comes to the fore is the use of spaces, owing to the various meanings which are attributed to them in the process of ‘semanticization’. Although Jurij Lotman’s theory concerning literary space, which is arguably one of most illuminating discussions in the field, was developed mainly with reference to fiction, drama and the theatre are no less important in this respect, including, of course, Shakespeare’s plays. In the past few years, Macbeth in particular has come under scrutiny in this context, albeit space in this tragedy has mostly been analysed in an unsystematic and partial way (with special emphasis on the castles). The present essay, while drawing on previous research, purports to complement it by systematizing the spaces and their forms of semanticization in Macbeth, extending the spaces under discussion so that imagery and ‘transcendental’ spaces (heaven and hell) are also included; above all, it 1 My special thanks go to my late colleague and friend Hugo Keiper, whose paper on “‘The pit of Acheron’: Zur Dramaturgie der Hölle in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth” (‘[…] On the Dramaturgy of Hell […]’) as part of an interdisciplinary workshop on the use of borders in classical and modern theatre (Graz, June 8, 2017) was the inspiration for the present essay and whose pertinent and well-informed comments helped me considerably in developing and sharpening my ideas. I therefore dedicate this paper to him; he left us and the world of early modern literature studies all too suddenly and much too soon without being able to complete a planned essay on Macbeth and hell. I am also grateful to Jutta Klobasek-Ladler and Cecilia Servatius for their editorial help and thought-provoking remarks. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0005 Werner Wolf 86 highlights the remarkably ambiguous, ‘equivocal’ and unstable use of spaces in this play as indicative of a profoundly ambivalent worldview. 1. Introduction: The Use of Space as Part of the Modelling Function of Literary Texts Literary texts not only create ‘worlds’, as Nelson Goodman’s influential study has shown (1978, cf. also Nünning/ Nünning/ Neumann, eds. 2016), but they also form world models by means of these worlds and other devices. Jurij Lotman, in The Structure of the Artistic Text (1970/ 1977), already insisted on literature’s function to use its linguistic material (the primary modelling system) to create “secondary modelling system[s]” (ibid.: 21). Like all models, literary models use complexity reduction in order to make us see something in the (real) world; yet they themselves are nonetheless more or less complex systems involving several layers of signification. On the highest level of abstraction of a given literary work are the implied worldview and the implied norms, which can respond to cultural contexts in various ways (e.g. by addressing issues excluded by the dominant systems of meaning of a given epoch, cf. Iser 1975). On a lower level of abstraction, one of the most graphic ways in which the world-modelling function of literary texts comes to the fore is the use of semanticized spaces. Long before the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities (cf. Frank 2009) as part of the many current ‘turns’ (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2006/ 2009), it was again Lotman who developed arguably one of the most illuminating theories when it comes to the use of space in literature. According to him, the relationship between characters and space - an important general means by which literary texts create world models - allows us to differentiate between eventful and eventless texts (cf. 1970/ 1977: 231-239). This world-modelling use of space and the differentiation between text types is applicable wherever literature represents worlds in which characters are allocated to individual, e.g., morally loaded sub-spaces (the realm of evil vs. the realm of goodness). These subspaces are separated by an in principle impermeable border, the crossing of which is forbidden, and which is frequently manifested physically (such as a door or a wall). In eventful texts, the border between adjunct spaces is transgressed by a ‘hero-character’, a move which constitutes an event; in eventless texts, the border remains inviolate. However, in this description of literary uses of space, Lotman mostly concentrated on fiction (and, to some extent, poetry). Of course, drama and the theatre, including Shakespeare’s plays, are no less important in this context; this not only with reference to the contribution of space to plot and event structure but also - in the present context predominantly - as a contribution to the world-modelling function of literary texts. Indeed, drama (no less than poetry) is a neglected field in the current ‘spatial turn’, which con- Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 87 tinues to focus on fiction 2 . The present essay aims to contribute to filling parts of the lacunae left by current research in this respect. It is partial to the extent that it focuses on space and its meaning as a product of dramatic text in the recipients’ minds rather than as a concrete theatrical space as viewed by spectators of the Elizabethan/ Jacobean period 3 . Reading as one general way of receiving dramatic art and the particular focus on English early modern theatre - and Shakespeare’s Macbeth in particular - may justify this restriction: although typical drama, is, of course, meant to create multi-modally performed worlds on stage, drama text (like the text of fiction and poetry) also elicits ‘worlds in the mind’ (which are regularly the most important basis for producers). The relatively bare stage of Shakespeare’s public theatres gives the verbal dimension of ‘space building’ (including ‘word scenery’) and thus this ‘theatre in the mind’ a certain predominance over the concrete visual dimension. In the past few years, Macbeth in particular has come under scrutiny with reference to space, although interpretations have largely remained unsystematic and partial (with special emphasis on the story-level locales, above all the castles 4 or the opposition Scotland vs. England 5 ). In the present essay, while drawing on previous research and being aware of the methodological difficulties of ascertaining settings in Shakespeare’s plays, I purport to complement existing investigations by systematizing the spaces in Macbeth as well as their forms of semanticization, extending the spaces under discussion to include imagery and ‘transcendental’ spaces (heaven and hell). In addition, I will attempt to explain how the use of space in this play is remarkable in the sense that it is permeated by an extraordinary tendency to give spaces ambiguous, ‘equivocal’ and unstable meanings (cf. de Sousa 2010, Kallay 2013/ 2017 and Markidou 2016). 2 Cf., to mention but a few publications, Bieger/ Maruo-Schröder 2016 (and the special issue of ZAA to which this essay is an introduction), Ryan 2009, Hallett/ Neumann, eds. 2009, and Tally, ed. 2017. 3 Cf., to name but a few authors among the many studies in this field, Beckerman 1962, Dessen 1984, Kiernan 1999, Weimann 2002, Ichikawa 2013, and Fitzpatrick 2016. 4 Cf. Markidou 2016, who discusses space and the castles in particular as “venues that challenge set values, orders, and codes” (63), but refrains from linking his perhaps altogether too deconstructive reading (in which even the partial restitution of order at the end is questioned) to cultural-historical contexts; cf. also Kallay 2013/ 2017 (an essay which links the representation of space to the use of time in a world where distinctions are blurred); de Sousa (2010), who focusses on the precarious boundaries between castles and surrounding open spaces, and Wiles (1993), who concentrates on the relationship between spaces and the representation of evil. None of these authors attempts a systematic inventory of spaces including ‘transcendental’ ones (hell and heaven in particular) and the devices used for giving them meaning. 5 Cf. the introduction to the new, third (2015) Arden Macbeth edition by Clark and Mason (2015: 28-35, 121-124), which does not otherwise consider space. Werner Wolf 88 This tendency is, among other examples, manifest in the fact that the perhaps most salient location of the play next to the heath and the castle at Dunsinane, namely Macbeth’s castle at Inverness (where the play’s central crime, regicide, is committed), is qualified with noteworthy ambivalence: it is called, on the one hand, a “mansionry” smelling of “heaven’s breath” (1.6.5 6 ) by Banquo, confirming with this positive evaluation King Duncan’s praise of the castle as having a “pleasant seat” (1.6.1); on the other hand, one of its gates also appears to be “Hell Gate” (2.3.2) in the drunk porter’s ravings, and thus (in one reading, focussing on the castle rather than on the world beyond the gate) the building itself becomes hell. Even if the evocation of hell may seem to be nearer the goal as a designation of a world full of “equivocation” (5.5.42, cf. also 2.3.8) and contrasts between deceptive appearance and unstable being, the fact that one and the same castle is likened to both hell and heaven is significant for a profound ambiguity informing the tragedy as a whole. As will be seen, spaces and their ambiguity are indicators of a particular worldview. 2. Typology of Space Construction and Modes of Spatial Semanticization in Macbeth As Alan C. Dessen points out, place is a problematic phenomenon in Shakespeare’s plays and generally in early modern drama; since the focus of early modern drama was on characters and action rather than on space, which often remained indeterminate on a stage that could be “neutral as to place until indicated otherwise” (1984: 86). As we will see, there are in fact a number of such unclear localizations in Macbeth. However, if one disregards the question of how settings were or were not physically realized or realizable on stage and concentrates on the aforementioned ‘theatre of the mind’, the play contains sufficient indications for the recipients’ imagination to create a rich spatial structure. Its exploration, as undertaken in this essay, is not merely a consequence of a modern “obsession with place” (ibid. 185) in the wake of the spatial turn, but a legitimate enterprise, which illuminates an important facet of the play’s implied worldview. A closer look at the spaces in Macbeth reveals that they are constructed in ways so various that their typological description must go beyond existing differentiations. Notably, neither Beckerman’s distinction - and simultaneous doubt about its applicability - between ‘localized’, ‘generally localized’ (i.e. referring to an ascertainable microor at least macro- 6 Quotations from Macbeth here and in the following are taken from the new (2015) Arden Edition, Third Series; all other Shakespearean quotations are from the Norton Shakespeare unless otherwise marked. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 89 setting) and ‘unlocalized’ spaces (where this is not possible) (1962: 64- 67) 7 nor Weimann’s (2002) differentiation between locus and platea (i.e. “the imaginary space in dramatic representations” vs. “the material site of these representations” [ibid.: 204]) suffice to fully describe the use of space in Macbeth. In what follows, while trying to integrate established categories as much as possible, I propose a typology which pays special attention to the modes of semanticization according to representational levels. Inverness, for example, is part of the play’s manifold clearly ‘localized’ settings on the story-level (in Weimann’s terminology a locus) and, as such, an example of the most important spatial category, namely (1) the concrete, ‘innerworldly’ spaces (theoretically) represented on stage (and, for the reader, to be imagined as part of the story-world). This category (story-level settings, ‘ss-spaces’) is complemented by (2) concrete ‘innerworldly’ story-level spaces only referred to (‘sr-spaces’), as in the play’s last word, the mention of Scone (5.9.41), where Malcolm is to be crowned. There are also (3) transcendental spaces such as heaven and hell, or “the pit of Acheron” (3.5.15) where Hecate commands the witches to meet, which are also only referred to but which, at least for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, may be said to also be part of the topological structure of the represented storyworld (‘st-spaces’). As opposed to these three types of story-level space there are the various forms of spatial references on, and as part of, the discourse level. These come in two subcategories: (4) heteroreferential imagery referring to ‘innerworldly’ or transcendental spaces, and spatial metareferences, which in turn may appear as (5) mere theatrical imagery or (6) actual (direct or indirect, implicit or explicit) references to the theatrical space. As for heteroreferential imagery (notably metaphors) on the discourse level 8 (‘dh-spaces’), this category can be exemplified with the Porter’s reflection “if a man were porter of Hell Gate” (2.3.2.), as a merely imaginary, hypothetical evocation of a transcendental space. As opposed to all space types enumerated so far, which in the performance practice of Shakespeare’s public theatres are exclusively imagined spaces even for the audience (except, e.g., when the trapdoor ‘hell’ or upper spaces in the gallery become in addition partial realizations of imaginary ‘ss-spaces’ 9 ), the only fully concrete and perceptible space in a contemporary public 7 In Macbeth, a number of settings are in fact not clearly localized, see the list of (assumed) settings below, in section 4, and Fitzpatrick 1995: 215, 218-230. 8 Since drama is a form of narrative, as recent transmedial and transgeneric narratology has reminded us (cf., e.g. Fludernik 2008), it makes sense to apply the narratological categories ‘story vs. discourse’, although they originally were developed with fiction in mind. 9 In non-historical, notably illusionist productions of Shakespearean plays, the setting may, of course, be at least partially perceptible, if concretized by wings and other visual devices. Werner Wolf 90 performance is the theatre building itself with its stage, pit, and galleries. In a theatrical discourse, mentions of this space are metareferences. In Macbeth, the few explicit references to this kind of space, as we will see, are not direct metadramatic (potentially illusion-breaking) references to the given stage and theatre but rather indirect, metaphorical evocations of matters generally theatrical. As discursive metareferences in the indirect mode (‘dmi-spaces’), they thus still appeal, at least to a large extent, to the audience’s imagination. This is not true of the last form to be introduced here: direct (explicit or implicit) references, e.g., to the “the two-hours’ traffic of our stage”, that is, to the real stage at hand, which the audience - although, of course, not the reader of the drama text - can really perceive. An example of this type is the first prologue-like Chorus of Romeo and Juliet (v. 12) (i.e. discursive metareferences in the direct mode. ‘dmd-spaces’, in Weimann’s terminology: platea) 10 . Space construction in Macbeth story-level spaces discourse-level spaces setting ‘innerworldy’ spaces transcendental spaces hetero-referential metareferential referred to referred to imagery spaces (‘innerwordly’ & transcendental) (‘ss-spaces’) (‘sr-spaces’) (‘st-spaces’) (‘dh-spaces’) (1) (2) (3) (4) indirect direct metareference metareference (imagery) to performance location (‘dmi spaces’) (‘dmd spaces’) (5) (6) Figure 1: Typology of space construction in Macbeth based on representational levels (story vs. discourse) It should be noted that the categories just discussed allow for multiple classifications of individual phenomena and thus permit a ‘stacking’ of space constructs to which Weimann (2002), within his reduced typology, has also drawn attention. In addition, they form only one possible way of systematising spaces in Macbeth (see Figure 1). It is even debatable whether this categorization should be the only one in the present context 10 For a possibility of identifying an implicit direct metareference to the theatrical situation in Macbeth, see below, the comments on the porter scene. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 91 and if it ought to occupy top priority in a potential plurality of classifications. As adumbrated above, the problem with the aforementioned matrix is that - at least for the audience of performances that try to approach the condition of Shakespeare’s wingless stage - the theoretical distinction between these categories is not very obvious in practice, since almost all of them (including the metadramatic imagery) rely on language only (this is, of course, also the case for readers of the drama script 11 ). This is, why even ‘ss-spaces’ can only be said to be ‘theoretically’ represented on stage, since Shakespeare’s wingless theatre could hardly visualize individual settings in detail and therefore had to rely mostly on word scenery. It is therefore advisable, in the present context, to use the aforementioned classification based on representational levels only as a subclassification for another, more obvious classification according to more directly accessible, structural criteria which yield - on the surface - clear binary oppositions and are thus particularly useful for the description of the spatial structure underlying the tragedy as well as for the question of spatial meaning-attribution. In Macbeth, the following oppositions appear to be important: a) political ‘horizontal’ space: Scotland vs. England (mostly ‘ssspaces’); b) a second type of ‘horizontal space’ (also ‘ss-spaces’) in combination with the opposition nature vs. culture, which yields closed spaces (castles and their subspaces) vs. open spaces (the heath and battle fields); c) finally, a vertical opposition between above vs. below (which comprises various natural, concrete spaces, but also includes supernatural, transcendental spaces; both occurring as ‘st-’ or ‘dh-spaces’). This structure will inform the sequence of sections in the following. Yet before we can engage in a detailed discussion of these spaces, some reflections on modes of attributing meaning to spaces are requisite. The most obvious mode is explicit (verbal) semanticization, as in King Duncan’s praising the “pleasant seat” (1.6.1) of Inverness castle. This is clearly a positive qualification, which may be said, in this case, to harmonize with a first form of implicit semanticization, connotations derived from world knowledge and cultural history which characterize castles not only as defensive military architecture 12 but also (and in scene 1.6 predominantly) as spaces of security and hospitality. A second implicit mode of attributing meaning to spaces is the imagery as used by the Porter, when he reflects on a hypothetical man being the porter of “Hell Gate” (2.3.2), a discursive image which clearly reflects on the concrete location: Macbeth’s castle, in which King Duncan has just been murdered. A third 11 For rare exceptions with reference to the characterization of spaces see below, the section on implicit non-verbal modes of semanticization. 12 There is, however, also a negative connotation of castles as oppressive, dominating structures in a power-related semiosphere; this, of course, (except for prisoners in castle dungeons) mainly refers to the inhabitants of the space surrounding the castles. Werner Wolf 92 implicit mode can also be seen to operate in the qualification of this castle, namely the dramatic irony which the audience cannot help but feel when King Duncan praises a locale in which we have just seen a murder plot forged by (mostly) evil characters. This association of spaces with semanticized characters is part of Lotman’s aforementioned theory of spatial semantics in literature and therefore, together with the link between spaces and action elements (a fourth implicit mode, which becomes relevant after the murder), merits special attention. While the modes presented so far are all based on (literary) language (and are therefore important for literature as verbal art and for Shakespeare’s theatre in particular), when it comes to drama as a text intended for theatrical performance, non-verbal modes of semanticization should at least be mentioned for the sake of completeness of the typology, even though they are of reduced importance in Macbeth owing to the aforementioned theatrical performance conventions of the day. Yet the link of the heath with thunder and lightning (1.1, stage directions) is both a visual and acoustic qualification which in contemporary theatre was usually associated with “supernatural events” (Jones 2013: 39). Thanks to the creation of this soundscape and the visual effect heralding the appearance of witches (including, possibly, their strange costumes and, as mentioned by Banquo, a disturbing blurring of gender markers in the combination of general female appearance and male beards [cf. 1.3.45- 46]) the heath acquires an implicit, decidedly uncanny, negative qualification (in addition to the negative cultural connotations of wild nature in pre-Romantic times 13 ). Modes of semanticizing space in Macbeth verbal non-verbal (implicit) explicit implicit cultural imagery link to link to connocations attributed semanticized semanticized characters action elements Figure 2: Typology of modes of attributing meaning to space in drama 13 For the evaluation of (green) nature as “defective” if not “integrated into […] human civilization” cf. Knights 1956: 210-211; for “the dangerous natural world” outside civilization in Macbeth see also Rasmussen/ DeJong 2016 online. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 93 A last theoretical remark must be made: inherently, all of the meaning attributions adduced in the above typology (figure 2) - like other forms of semanticization (in the theatre, this applies above all to the characterization of characters 14 ) - are open to the problem of unreliability. This is a theoretical potential, which Shakespeare makes ample use of in Macbeth - with specific world-modelling functions or consequences, as we shall presently see. 3. Political Spaces and their Meaning Attribution: Scotland vs. England Most of the play’s micro-locations are in Scotland, which therefore shall be discussed first. Scotland as a macro-location appears from the outset as a political space. This is in harmony with the tragedy conventions of Shakespeare’s day, in which the central characters (aristocratic or at least upper-class heroes) tend to deal, among other things, with political matters more readily than is the case, e.g., in comedies such as The Taming of the Shrew or in comedies of humour such as Ben Jonson’s Volpone. As a political space, Scotland is characterized in Macbeth (mostly implicitly through semanticized characters and action elements) by a pervading instability, an ‘uncivilized’ aspect corroborated by the wild connotations given to this country through the frequent heath settings (in an implicit non-verbal mode), which will be discussed in the next section. However, in the beginning of the play, Scotland appears as the realm of, as Macduff says, the “most sainted king” (4.3.109) Duncan, and this king himself, in the few scenes in which we see him, corroborates this positive evaluation by his justice (1.2 and 1.4) and his jovial behaviour towards his hosts (1.6). Yet, from the outset, this country is also beset by internal and external foes: on the one hand rebels (Macdonald and the old Thane of Cawdor) and, on the other, soldiers from “the Western Isles”, including Irish “kerns” (1.2.12-13) and the Norwegian King Sweno, who has invaded Scotland at Fife (1.2.49). Scotland thus appears in a state of international and civil war (the latter being one of the traumas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras). After these political and military threats to the security and integrity of the territory are overcome, Scotland still does not find peace and prosperity but instead falls prey to yet another rebel, a regicide who turns into a cruel tyrant, the “[d]evilish Macbeth” (4.3.117), as Malcolm explicitly characterizes him. Owing to Macbeth, Scotland becomes a ‘fallen’ space under the sway of evil and terror and is thus opposed to - as is made clear in the mode of explicit verbal semanticization - “gracious England” (4.3.43). In this 14 For the various forms of characterising dramatic characters see Pfister 1977: ch. 5.4.2.7. Werner Wolf 94 country, a “holy king” reigns (3.6.30), namely the “pious Edward” (the Confessor, 3.6.27) who is put into stark contrast with devilish Macbeth. As a reliable index of Edward’s “sanctity” (“Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand […]”) (144), this monarch, as a Doctor (arguably of the medical profession) emphasises in 4.3.140-145 15 , is able to heal the [King’s] “Evil” (146) in “strangely-visited people, / All swol’n and ulcerous” (4.3.146-151) by “solicit[ing] heaven” (149). England, in this opposition with unstable Scotland, appears in a highly positive light as an almost utopian country of stability and security, where Christian holiness reigns 16 and where exiles from Scotland (Macduff and Malcolm) find both asylum and military help. And it is from this positive, helpful England that the invasions of Scotland and the battle against evil Macbeth are launched. This invasion goes along with a typical eventful (sensu Lotman) crossing of a political border and, at the end, brings about the restitution of dynastic order by helping Malcolm, the designated heir to King Duncan, to the throne. The simple opposition, at least during Macbeth’s tyranny, of evil Scotland vs. good England is, however, somewhat complicated in the course of the play. As for England, it is a space where Malcolm still does not feel entirely secure and therefore, when meeting Macduff, characterizes himself as a wanton and greedy ruler-to-be, who lacks all “king-becoming graces” (4.3.91). While it eventually becomes clear that this is roleplaying in order to test Macduff’s loyalty (role-playing which, however, leaves a strange after-taste with its evocation of the possibility of yet another evil ruler over “Scotland […] nation miserable” [Macduff, 4.3.100, 103]), it has been remarked that Macduff, the other important Scottish refugee in England and Malcolm’s interlocutor in the scene under discussion, is a less clearly positive character. True, he is the one who eventually defeats and kills Macbeth and thus appears to be on the side of the forces of good, but beforehand it is known that he has abandoned his wife and children to Macbeth’s murderous intents (and is confronted with the moral questionability of this opportunistic [? ] act by Malcolm’s reproach: “Why in that rawness left you wife and child […] Without leavetaking? ” 4.3.26,28). In addition, while tested by Malcolm, he reveals himself a remarkably “Macchiavellian” (Markidou 2016: 63) excuser of the future king’s (alleged) vices. If space, then, is semanticized in the opposition Scotland vs. England under discussion here, by the characters and acts linked with it, it is remarkable that good Edward never appears 15 The explicit semanticization of space through this character appears to be trustworthy, all the more so as he is an episodic character whose main function is to inform the audience about England and King Edward; his brief appearance does not give the audience any occasion to doubt his veracity. 16 For England being “contrasted [to Scotland] in terms of a country strengthened and civilized by Christianity” see Clark/ Mason 2015: 32. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 95 on stage (we only hear about his deeds 17 ), that England appears to harbour ambivalent characters such as Macduff, while one must not forget that Scotland is also the realm of good King Duncan 18 and thus not entirely negative. If England is therefore not entirely positive, Scotland, even while a ‘fallen’ “space that’s in the tyrant’s grasp” (4.3.36), cannot wholeheartedly be classified as the ‘devil’s space’ either (something which would have been problematic in a play staged during the reign of James I, formerly James VI of Scotland). Rather, Scotland also appears (in reliable, explicit verbal semanticization) as an object of profound pity. Ross, a Thane of Scotland, for instance, sighs “Alas, poor country” and bemoans that Scotland cannot “[be] called our mother, but our grave” (4.3.164, 166). As a country in which “new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds / As if it felt with Scotland” (Macduff, 4.3. 5-7) it is also apt to elicit the audience’s pity. This is arguably still true of today’s audiences and may have been true all the more so for the original audience of the first performances, given the dynastic affiliations of the reigning monarch James I. And it is a country which eventually, at least so it seems at the play’s ending, is restored to political order - to the relief of the audience. All in all, the political map in Macbeth shows noteworthy ambivalences in the semanticization of individual territories. This applies to some extent to the representation of England, but first and foremost to how Scotland appears to the audience, even if one does not subscribe to the hypothesis that this country will remain the territory of rebellion beyond the confines of the tragedy - with Macduff as the next rebel and Malcolm as the next victim (cf. Markidou 2016: 62-64, drawing on a remark by Ross 1997: 120 19 and intensifying implications from Berry 1989). These ambivalences come even more clearly to the fore when one considers Scotland not only from the perspective of a political territory that is opposed to England but as the space which is most important for the worldmodelling function of the play and comprises, as stated at the beginning of this section, most of the micro-locations of the play represented or referred to on the story-level. These micro-locations will be the concern of the following sections. 17 This dramaturgical device may, to some extent, be classified as an implicit, non verbal way of somewhat relativizing the overwhelmingly positive connotations of England. 18 Even Macbeth himself acknowledges Duncan’s merits in his soliloquy: “[…] this Duncan/ Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been/ So clear in his great office, that his virtues/ Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against/ The deep damnation of his taking-off” (1.7.16-20). 19 “If the play closes by raising the possibility that Macduff may become Malcolm’s Macbeth […]”; however, this possibility is not endorsed by Ross (1997), who rather considers the tragedy’s conclusion a restitution of order. Werner Wolf 96 4. Cultural vs. Natural Locations: Castles/ Closed Spaces and Natural Settings/ Open Spaces Among the story-level micro-spaces, the first few scenes introduce a clear opposition: open country as a natural space (e. g. 1.1 and 1.3.) vs. closed spaces, that is, in conformity with the warlike character of the tragedy: castles and their sub-spaces (mostly ‘ss-spaces’) 20 . From a culturalhistorical point of view, this is the age-old opposition of natural vs. cultural locations which, before Romanticism, tends to be evaluated in a traditional way that attributes tendentially positive connotations to cultural locations vs. (except for the locus amoenus) tendentially negative ones to natural locations, in particular when it comes to ‘wild’, uncultivated, and uncivilized nature. The first act with its sequence of open spaces (1.1, 1.2.,1.3) versus castles (Forres and Inverness) confirms the importance of this opposition. More in detail, spaces of nature appear throughout the tragedy predominantly as either heath (1.1, 1.3, 4.1) or as (unspecified) battlefields outside castles (as, e.g., mentioned in the bleeding captain’s report in 1.2, an ‘sr-space’), while cultural spaces as represented story-locations (‘ssspaces’) appear exclusively as castles (except for the uncertain location of the scene in England 4.3). As for the former, the heath(s) does (do) not get clear geographical specifications 21 , and the same is true of most battlefields (the last being, however, specified due to the vicinity of Macbeth’s castle at Dunsinane). As for the latter, they are King Duncan’s castle at Forres (cf. 1.3.39), then the same location as now Macbeth’s royal seat (3.1-4, 3.6), moreover Macbeth’s ancestral seat at Inverness (1.5., 1.6 arguably on the battlements, 1.7, 2.1 and 2.2 with 2.3. at the gate [‘Porter-scene’], 2.4 in or near the castle), Macduff’s “mansion” (4.2.7) in 4.2., and, finally, Dunsinane (5.1, 5.3, 5.5. 5.9? ). The last word in the play refers to “Scone” (5.9.41, an ‘sr-space’), which is a (fortified) city and thus not actually a castle but functionally analogous to one. The connotations of castles as military fortifications and aristocratic habitations are clear enough: they are spaces of dominance concerning the people living outside and, as already mentioned, with reference to those inside, they are places of (in principle) safe habitation and combine private functions (e.g. sleeping chambers, explicitly linked with the idea of safety by Malcolm 5.4.2) with public ones (representational rooms, banqueting halls, military rooms, etc.). 20 Cf. the “doubleness of closed and open types of space in Shakespeare’s theatre” (Weimann 2002: 209). 21 Owing to Banquo’s question, “How far is’t called to Forres? ” (1.3.39), one only knows that the location (namely the heath which was designated as the meeting place between Macbeth and the witches in 1.1.6) must be somewhere on Banquo’s and Macbeth’s way to Forres. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 97 An inventory of all story-level locations of Macbeth arguably results in the following list (with some uncertainties owing to lack of stage directions and word scenery, so that some locales can only be inferred from the respective scenes): Act 1 1. Open space: heath (like 1.3), linked to the witches (the stage direction “thunder and lightning” and the witches’ remark on their future meeting, which will arguably be similar to their present one, “In thunder, lightning, or in rain” [1.1.2], point to a space, where such weather can directly be experienced, namely an open space) 2. (? ) Open space: battle camp (cf. the New Variorum Edition [NVE 14], which, however also notes “The Palace at Foris”) 3. Open space: heath (cf. 1.1.6), linked to witches (as 1.1) 4. (? ) Closed space: Forres (cf. 1.3.39, Banquo’s enquiry concerning the distance to Forres; cf. NVE 58: “Foris. A Room in the Palace”, but also “A Camp near Forres”) 5. Closed space: Inverness (where Lady Macbeth receives her husband’s letter and where then Macbeth himself arrives) 6. Open space, if “Before the castle” is correct (1972 Arden Shakespeare, p. 33, cf. also NVE 86: “outside Macbeth’s castle”), or (semi-)closed space/ related to: on the battlements, or near a window, of Inverness (where one can assess the “pleasant seat” (1.6.1) and see the birds haunting the castle 7. Closed space: Inverness (cf. 1.4.42) Act 2 1. Closed space: Inverness (NVE 113: “Court within the Castle”) 2. Closed space: Inverness 3. Closed space: Inverness, “south entry” (cf. 2.2.67): ‘Porter scene’ Werner Wolf 98 4. (? ) Closed space in or near Inverness (NVE 167: “Outside of Macbeth’s Castle”) 22 Act 3 1. Closed space: Forres (Macbeth’s “court” 3.2.1) 2. Closed space: Forres 3. Open space: outside Forres (cf. the mention of the sky “The west yet glimmers [..]” 3.3.5 and “from here to the palace gate” 3.3.13) 23 4. Closed space: Forres, banquet hall 5. (? ) Open space: heath (the Folio stage direction “thunder” (p. 750) is unclear; it may be heard from inside a witches’ hovel, but also, and this seems more in line with the previous association of the witches with the outside world of wild ‘nature’, again on “the heath” (1972 Arden Shakespeare, p. 99) 6. (? ) Closed space: Forres (NVE 236 ”Foris. A Room in the Palace”) 24 Act 4 1. (? ) Closed space: witches’ hovel or, according to the NVE 243, a “cavern”, where a “cauldron” boils 4.1.4 25 2. Closed space: Macduff’s “mansion” (4.2.7) 3. (? ) particularly unclear classification: open space in England (near a royal castle? ); a “desolate shade” is mentioned at the beginning of the scene (4.3.1), and further down Malcolm asks whether the King “[c]omes […] forth” (4.3.140) and hears that “a crew of wretched souls” waits for him (141), which is more 22 Beckerman (1962: 65) considers this an ‘unlocalized’ scene serving a “choral function”. 23 Cf. Fitzpatrick 1995: 224: “In the woods” and NVE 200: “A Park: Gate leading to the Palace”. 24 As with 2.4., Beckerman (1962: 65) considers 3.6. an ‘unlocalized’ scene serving a “choral function”. 25 The 1972 Arden edition opts for a “house” located in “Forres” (p. 105), but the text does not clearly endorse this. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 99 probable for an open space in nature but could also take place in a city or a large castle hall 26 Act 5 1. Closed space: Dunsinane Castle 2. Open space: English camp near Dunsinane 3. Closed space: Dunsinane 4. Open space: English camp near Dunsinane 5. Closed space: Dunsinane 6. Open space: English camp near Dunsinane (NVE: 338 “Before Macbeth’s Castle”) 7. Open space: battle field near Dunsinane 8. Open space: battle field near Dunsinane 9. (En)Closed space: (courtyard at) Dunsinane (? ) 27 As can be seen in this list, some uncertainties as to the exact location of ss-spaces remain. Yet, when it comes to the semanticization of the opposition ‘open vs. closed’, to the extent as it can be ascertained, the wild open spaces (traditionally carrying mostly negative cultural connotations) appear at first to confirm the opposition between bad vs. good spaces. This is certainly the case right from the start in 1.1, where the locale, with its acoustic accompaniment (thunder) and its link with the “weïrd sisters” (1.3.32), is decidedly not only an uncivilized but also an uncanny open space (a link between bad weather and evil supernatural powers which has become conventional and extends to modern day horror films). The same negative connotation applies to all further open spaces in which the witches appear: spaces where the disorder produced by the weïrd sisters in the rational world (by their use of paradoxes), in the moral world (through their deceptive prophetic temptations) and the gender order (by their aforementioned blurring of femininity and masculinity in their outer appearance) harmonizes with the “blasted heath” (explicit semanticization in the form of word scenery by Macbeth, 1.3.77). The heath thus appears as an uncivilized, wild, and disordered stretch of uncultivated land. In this and in its exclusive link with Scotland, the connotation of this country as less civilized is confirmed, a connotation already apparent 26 Fitzpatrick (1995: 227) opts for a closed space “King is within”; the NVE (276) records divided interpretations of the setting: “A Wood in England” and “The King of England’s Palace”. 27 Cf. Fitzpatrick (1995: 230): “Macbeth’s castle”. NVE does not differentiate between 5.8. and 5.9., and the First Folio even combines 5.7. to 5.9. into one scene. Werner Wolf 100 in the representation of the political situation with its various rebellions, as discussed in the previous section 28 . However, the battlefields in Macbeth, the second big subclass of open spaces, somewhat reduce the one-sided negativity apparent in the heathlocations since, in spite of their link with bloodshed and death, they eventually become the stage of the victory of legitimate rulers. The first battlefield we are confronted with (1.2) is only a reported space (an ‘srspace’, referred to in the bloody captain’s account of the battle in which Macbeth excelled), but it is vividly described as the location where the rebels are defeated and where thus order is restored to the kingdom (a similar restoration takes place in the final battle spaces in act 5). Yet, at least in one battlefield the aforementioned link with bloodshed is not suppressed but foregrounded, and we thus reencounter the ambivalence which - according to the hypothesis underlying the present essay - is typical of most, if not all, of the spaces in this tragedy: while the outcome of the military event reported in 1.2 renders the battlefield a space where action in the service of royal legitimacy takes place and therefore, in contemporary mentality, where justice is done, the description of the battle also makes this space acquire negative connotations. It is a gruesome place of butchery, notably owing to Macbeth’s ruthless fighting, which seems to transform it into “another Golgotha” (1.2.40). The images used by the bleeding captain are also remarkable in that they again encapsulate noteworthy ambivalences. This applies, first, to the link between the space, the battle, and notoriously fickle “Fortune”, who acts “like a rebel’s whore”, (1.2.14-15), is then “[d]isdain[ed]” by Macbeth (17) and turns to his favour. An even more clearly ambivalent spatial image (a ‘dhspace’, semanticized implicitly through cultural connotations) is the reference to Golgatha for, in a Christian context, it is both the place where the innocent ‘Lamb of God’ is immolated and hence a space of utter injustice, from which cosmic turmoil starts (an earthquake [Mt 27.51], an eclipse of the sun [Lk 23.44]), but is at the same time the location where the salvation of the world through Jesus Christ is accomplished. Last, but not least, the open spaces, which seem to be entirely negative when one only focusses on the witch/ heath-scenes but lose some of their clear negativity when it comes to the battlefields under the aspect of the victory of the good characters, may even be said to occasionally receive some additional positive connotations which somewhat counterbalance the negativity of the heath. This would be the case if the scene in England (4.3) is to be imagined as set in an open space as well - for then the positive connotations derived from the link between territory (England) and an eminently good character ruling over it (holy King Edward) 28 Cf. Clark/ Mason 2015: 30, although the authors also emphasise that, in Macbeth, Shakespeare refrains from “any stereotyped anti-Scottish sentiments” (ibid.: 28). Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 101 would prevail (although, as said above, there is some ambivalence here, too). As the nature and classification of the England scene is not clear in the text, this positive addition to the connotations of open spaces in Macbeth must remain a mere possibility. Be that as it may, what can be confirmed with some assurance concerning the semanticization of open spaces in Macbeth is the impression of ambivalence (with varying degrees, but generally tending towards the negative ‘pole’). This is also true of further open spaces only referred to (“sr-spaces’), as can be seen in the mention of the uncanny happenings in the night of Duncan’s death, in which it is reported that “chimneys” were “blown down” and the “obscure bird/ Clamoured the livelong night” (2.3. 55, 59-60) 29 . Ambivalence also informs the closed spaces, even if there are some cases of doubt as to the classification closed vs. open. Their traditional positivity (in opposition to open spaces and wild nature in particular) is arguably already impaired by the (unspecified) setting of 4.1 if it is some kind of house (the cauldron mentioned in verse 3 may be indicative of such a locale 30 ), since here the potentially closed space would be associated with the evil witches. The content of 1.4 allows one to identify the setting as a closed space with perhaps more certainty 31 . Here, in King Duncan’s royal castle at Forres, the traditional connotations of a castle as a space of safety and order (as opposed to the wild, chaotic nature of the heath) seem to be confirmed by what happens: Malcolm reports to his royal father that justice has been done (the execution of the rebel, the old Thane of Cawdor), the king then confers the title to Macbeth (thus confirming one of the witches’ prophecies), declares his eldest son Malcolm heir to his “estate” and gives him the title of “Prince of Cumberland” (1.4.37,39), thus indicating him as the next king. Yet the connotation of security - in particular for the owner of the castle - is marred by the dramaturgy, which gives Macbeth a tell-tale aside: in this, he thematises his “black and deep desires”, invoking at the same time the “[s]tars” to “hide” their “fires”, so that no “light” may illuminate these desires (1.4.50-51). The castle’s safety is thus revealed to be an at least partial 29 Cf. also the old man’s report in 2.4 about “unnatural” (2.4.10) happenings: a falcon killed by an owl and Duncan’s horses breaking out of their stables and eating each other. 30 4.1. may indeed be imagined as set in a (perhaps dilapidated) hovel (like 3.5), or in a cavern, both ‘porous’ locales with a partial openness to wild nature and thus extensions of uncivilized outer spaces (an additional spatial ambiguity), but th e cauldron could also boil on some sort of camp fire in open nature. Most editions, including the Norton Critical Edition (cf. p. 51), the Norton Shakespeare (cf. p. 2596) and the 2015 third-series Arden edition (cf. p. 234), do not give a spatial concretization but restrict setting indications to the Folio secondary text “Thunder” (p. 750). 31 The 1972 Arden edition indicates “[Forres. A room in the palace]” (p. 22); Fitzpatrick (1995: 220), however, locates the scene at “Duncan’s camp, as in I.ii”. Werner Wolf 102 illusion, while in reality it is already beset (and indeed inhabited) by the forces of evil 32 . The deceptive security of Forres for King Duncan is a momentous exposition of a typically Shakespearean theme running through the entire tragedy, namely the opposition between appearance and being, here in the negative version of “deceitful appearance” (Knights: 1947/ 1968: 191), in which positive appearances are shown to be as deceptive as the witches’ promises and prophecies. This theme creates an additional, even uncanny, ambivalence in the play and is foreshadowed in the ambivalence of the first battlefield mentioned in 1.2, in which Macbeth achieves the victory for good King Duncan: what seems - in the immediate outcome - to be a positive space of victory of the ‘good characters’ paves the way for the ascent of evil Macbeth and, what is more, is tinged by the blood (visible in the reporting captain’s wounds) and the colour red, which becomes a leitmotif of the play and here is indicative of Macbeth’s cruelty and ruthlessness. A further instance of the deceptiveness of positive spatial connotations is already adumbrated in the title of the present essay and was mentioned in the introduction as a particularly typical case of spatial ambivalence, but requires further discussion. It occurs in 1.6., the short scene (arguably set either outside Macbeth’s castle at or near Inverness, where the approaching King Duncan is ceremoniously met by his hostess, Lady Macbeth, or on its battlements or at some window, but definitely at the beginning of the night 33 in which he will be murdered). To unsuspecting Duncan, the castle “hath a pleasant seat”, and “the air” he breathes, “[n]imbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses” (1.6.1-3). In addition, Banquo comments on auspicious birds in a way that gives Macbeth’s castle an almost religious aura: […] This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath Smells wooingly here […] The air is delicate. (1.6.3-10) Due to the preceding scene, in which Macbeth, incited (and excited) by his wife, started to plan the murder of the king, all of this is tinged by tragic dramatic irony: the audience knows how erroneous the king’s feeling of secure hospitality in relation to Inverness castle and Banquo’s likening of the building to something heavenly are, and we will learn that even one of its innermost and most private rooms, namely the chamber in 32 If one opts for the camp-version as the setting of 1.4, the same ambivalence would apply to an open space. 33 See the stage directions “Hautboys and Torches” before 1.6. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 103 which the king sleeps, cannot be protected by guards. Rather, it is open to the penetration of regicidal Macbeth with his murderous dagger, thus violating the norms which Macbeth himself thematises in a soliloquy: […] He’s [i.e. Duncan] here in double trust: First, as I am his kinsman, and his subject, […] Then, as his host, Who should against his murderer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. (1.7, 12-16) The double borders of the castle gate and the door of the royal chamber which, according to Lotman, should in principle be inviolate, are in fact transgressed in a highly eventful way 34 . The heinous nature of the regicide committed in this chamber belies the castle’s initially positive appearance as a “pleasant seat” and gives it the aspect of a hell-castle, as thematised by the drunk but nevertheless remarkably clear-sighted porter shortly afterwards (2.3.2) 35 . The other castles in the play are hardly less ambiguous. Forres, which becomes Macbeth’s royal seat after King Duncan’s murder, also turns out to be of treacherous security - now for Macbeth himself, since its walls are unable to keep out frightening intrusions from the supernatural sphere (Banquo’s ghost in 3.4). Nor is Macduff’s mansion (4.2) a safe place for its inhabitants, for the murderers in Macbeth’s service have no difficulties with intruding and killing Macduff’s wife and children. The same lack of security offered by a castle for its (principal) inhabitants is true of Dunsinane. It is not a trustworthy guard against unwanted intrusions for either Lady Macbeth or her husband: it cannot prevent the 34 On the discursive level of the imagery, this eventful transgression of a spatial border is continued by metaphors used by Macduff and Macbeth himself: as for Macduff, in his report of the king’s death he likens the king’s body to a desecrated building: “Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope/ The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence/ The life o’th’ building.” (2.3.67-69); as for Macbeth, he also refers to Duncan’s body as if it was a special space, in which the alleged murderers’ daggers made a “wasteful entrance” and thus created a “breach in nature” (2.3.114 - 115). Generally, doors are mentioned repeatedly in Macbeth in a quasi Lotmanian context, cf. also Lady Macbeth’s remark, referring to Duncan’s chamber “The doors are open” (2.2.5), or the knockings to which the porter reluctantly responds in 2.3 and which is eerily echoed by the “knocking at the gate” which sleepwalking Lady Macbeth mentions in the last speech we hear of her before her (likely) suicide (5.1.66). 35 In principle, the Porter’s gate could also be conceived of as opening to the outside world as ‘hell’ (as Weimann 2002 implies in a metadramatic reading of the scene; see below, section 6). While this could appear at first sight as a possible, if perhaps too bleak characterization of the story space and the implied worldview as a whole, both the immediate context (the preceding regicide) and the cultural connotation drawing on the hell-castle of medieval mystery plays render the association of the castle itself with hell more likely. Werner Wolf 104 emergence of haunting, sleep-walking thoughts in Lady Macbeth, nor does it offer efficient protection in spite of its military strength as perceived by Macbeth (“Our castle’s strength / Will laugh a siege to scorn” [5.5.2-3]). This lack of protection, for Macbeth, is mainly psychological, for when he learns about his wife’s death and, shortly afterwards, that the English are approaching under the guise of camouflage, which produces the effect that “Great Birnam Wood” moving up “to high Dunsinane Hill” (4.1.93), thus fulfilling one of the witches’ prophecies in an unanticipated way, he realizes “There is nor flying hence, nor tarrying here” (5.5.47) and becomes “aweary of the sun” (5.5.48). He leaves the fortress, not “inexplicably”, nor as a ”form of exorcism”, as has been claimed (Ross 1997: 118), but arguably because he has lost all hope in the future 36 . For a time, after he has left the castle, the fortress is as emptied of its owner as his soul is emptied of all hope 37 . The outcome of his leaving the castle and meeting the enemy in the field is his death, and the result of the English attack is the fall of the castle (which is “gently rendered” 5.7.25) and the entry of Malcolm and his men (cf. 5.7.25). Dunsinane is thus a last instance of the opposition between seeming positivity and real negativity (from Macbeth’s position 38 ) attached to the closed spaces in particular. The ambivalence permeating the play thus obtains a particularly ‘tragic’ tinge by a noteworthy tendency towards negativity: open spaces are tendentially negative in the first place (in spite of some indications to the contrary) and closed spaces, while seemingly protective, are constantly shown to be vulnerable to transgressions with negative consequences for those dwelling inside their walls. 5. ‘Vertical’ Spaces: Above vs. Below as Innerworldly and Transcendental Spaces Besides political spaces and open vs. closed spaces, which could be aligned on a horizontal axis, the vertical axis also plays an important role in Macbeth. It is the axis along which ‘earthly’ or ‘innerworldly’ spaces (level ground/ above/ below) can be arranged but also an axis which 36 An alternative or parallel motivation may be his feeling of security triggered by the belief in the witches’ prophecy that he will not be harmed by anyone “of woman born” (4.1.79), but his dawning awareness of “th’equivocation of the fiend” (5.5.42) which is apparent in the prophecy referring to Birnam Wood (cf. 4.1.89 - 93) makes this less likely. 37 For the metaphorical relationship between castle and soul (or psychic and moral state, as in The Castle of Perseverance) see Ross 1997: 188. 38 An additional ambivalence is created in the evaluation of Malcolm’s entering Dunsinane castle: while this is certainly negative from Macbeth’s point of view, the direction of audience sympathies and the entire plot structure tinges this border crossing with the positivity of the restitution of order (cf. also Ross 1997: 118, 128-129). Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 105 opens the represented story-level space up to a transcendental sphere 39 comprising heaven and hell (and, as a third place, if one adopts a Catholic perspective, purgatory as the space where Banquo’s ghost comes from; however this space will not be discussed further, as - unlike in Hamlet 40 - there are no references to it in the play). The vertical axis has a timehallowed tradition of semanticization (perhaps linked with human body- ‘geography’ and a conception of man as homo erectus in whom reason and the head get a better evaluation than the ‘nether regions’ of the emotions and ‘animal’ urges). This semanticization has left countless traces in language with ‘low’ and ‘base’ etc. being negative vs. ‘high’, ‘lofty’ etc. being positive. The alleged location and evaluation of transcendental spaces follows suit with heaven being (also etymologically 41 ) linked with the positive uppermost sphere as opposed to hell, the ‘infernal’ space, a word in which again the etymology 42 , but also Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical conventions (in designating the trapdoor set in the stage through which, e.g., ghosts appear, as ‘hell’) point to a lower sphere. That this traditional meaning attribution to the poles of the vertical axis is also present in Macbeth is unsurprising. The “powers above“ (4.3.241) or “God above” (4.3.120) are, for instance, referred to, e.g., by good Malcolm in a clearly positive context; and conversely the lower regions are repeatedly linked with negativity (even in a transcendental sense), when Macbeth, for instance, is conscious of the “deep damnation” of his planned regicide (1.7.20), or when Hecate summons the witches to “the pit of Acheron” (3.5.15) 43 ; possibly also when (or if) the witches are made to enter the stage from below via the aforementioned trapdoor. Outside transcendental spheres, the same semanticization can be tracked down, e.g., in the political sphere, when Malcolm bemoans that “our 39 As opposed to Egan’s (206: 82-91) attempt to reduce what he considers the seeming supernatural in Macbeth to actually natural causes, the existence of such a supernatural, transcendental sphere is never questioned in the play, not even by Macbeth himself, who speaks of “both the worlds” which suffer, when “the frame of things [becomes] disjoint” (3.2.17) and mentions heaven as frequently as positive characters. 40 The ghost explains himself to Hamlet in ways clearly referring to purgatory, although the term itself appears only as a verb (“purged”): “I am thy father’s spirit, / Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confined to fast in fires / Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.” (Hamlet 1.5.9-13); for an in-depth discussion of this topic see Greenblatt 2001; cf. also, for the role ghosts play in Protestant England, Thomas 1971: 701 - 724. 41 According to Kluge 1963: 308 ‘heaven’, like the German Himmel, is derived from a Germanic root “*hemina”, ‘ceiling, vault’. 42 Cf. Latin infernus, inferus: ‘situated in a low position’, inferni/ inferna: the underworld. 43 A curious metaphor, which combines classical connotations (Acheron as one of the rivers of Hades) with the more modern, Christian idea of hell as a pit. Werner Wolf 106 country sinks beneath the yoke” of Macbeth and sees comfort in the fact that there are “hands uplifted in my right” (4.3.39, 42). What may come as surprise, however, is the fact that when taking a closer look at the evaluation of ‘above’ vs. ‘below’, the ambivalences which we have encountered elsewhere in the use of space reoccur, even with respect to an upper region as a transcendental sphere. For this region, in Macbeth, is not only the seat of God and heaven in a Christian sense and hence the location of the ‘highest’ goodness, it can also be affected by man’s “unnatural” (2.4.10) ill-doings as part of the Great Chain of Being when Ross tries to explain the prolongation of darkness in the night of Kind Duncan’s murder to an Old Man: “Thou seest the heavens […] troubled with man’s act” (2.4.5). The goodness of the upper regions and what they stand for in Christian folk-belief is questioned at least once in a covert reference to the theodicy problem, when Macduff, who has just heard that his wife and all of his children were murdered at Macbeth’s instigation, exclaims: “Did heaven look on, / And would not take their part? ” (4.3.226-227). What is even more disturbing is the circumstance that the transcendental, supernatural upper regions are not reserved to the Christian God and his ministers alone, but are also shown to be inhabited by evil forces (following an old ambivalence of celestial bodies with the sun as day-connoting and the moon as night-connoting element): Hecate, the “mistress” of the witches’ “charms” and “contriver of all harms” (3.5.6-7) is, after all, also a moon goddess (her relationship to the moon is explicitly mentioned in 3.5.23). And as for natural upper regions, the witches are repeatedly linked to air, where they themselves say they “[h]over” (1.1.10 44 ), into which they vanish in 1.3.80 and about which Macbeth exclaims, when they fail to give him the explanations he desires: “Infected be the air whereon they ride” (4.1.137) 45 . As far as the lower regions are concerned, they are certainly negative, where they are associated with hell. However, surprisingly, this association is not frequently made, although hell itself is repeatedly mentioned 46 ; rare examples of this spatial link are the aforementioned “pit of Acheron” and Malcolm’s feigned self-incrimination (4.3.97-98) “[…] had I power, I should/ Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell” (and thus into something beneath him). Yet ambivalence reoccurs once again, when it comes to (imaginary) lower spaces in general: while “high-placed Macbeth[’s]” (4.1.97) castles at Inverness (which is linked to hell in the ravings of the porter) and Dunsinane (the stage of the “fiend-like queen[‘s]” [5.9.35] 44 I am here opting for the, in my view, more obvious reading of “hover” as a verb, rather than, as mentioned as an alternative by Blake 2002: 11-12, as a noun. 45 Cf. also Hecate herself, who does not only visit “the pit of Acheron” but who also announces, in 3.5.: “I am for th’air” (v. 15, 20). 46 E.g. in 1.5.51, 2.1.64, 2.3.2, 2.3.16, 5.1.36. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 107 likely suicide) are to be imagined situated on a hill (and thus combine height with negativity), Scotland’s redemption comes from below, from the English forces, who move up the hill (which creates an affiliation between positivity and lower regions). The earth itself, the actual space of the action, is - in the contemporary worldview - located in between heaven and hell and thus is, in principle, open to influences from both sides. In Macbeth, it appears as a treacherous place, in which ambivalences, more often than not, incline towards the negative pole and, at any rate, are frequently implicated in the opposition ‘appearance vs. being’. The earth is, for instance, addressed by Lady Macbeth as “sure and firm-set” in her wish that it may not “[h]ear” her murderous “steps” (2.1.56-57), yet appears to her husband to have “bubbles” and to form an uncannily unstable surface, which seems to produce monstrous beings such as the witches (“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them” [1.3.79-80], an indication that the witches in fact rise through the trapdoor). Later, after the regicide, the seemingly “sure and firm-set” (2.1.56) earth turns out to “shake” (2.3.61) in an earthquake, and, as repeatedly mentioned, Macbeth’s castle is likened to hell by the porter (implying that Macbeth - but also the other persons in the castle - are already in a place of damnation). As the play shows, there are no secure spaces (at least as long as Macbeth lives), and this tendential negativity of earthly matters is also mirrored in the frequent evocations of ‘falls’, unhappy to disastrous downward movements (mostly in the play’s hetero-referential imagery, that is, in ‘dh-spaces’). An early example is Macbeth’s almost prophetic reflection on his motivations: “Vaulting ambition, which o’er-leaps itself, / And falls on th’other” (1.7.27-28 47 ), and his later wilful evocation of chaos by referring to sundry falls or downward movements when conjuring the witches to answer his questions in 4.1: […] answer me; […] Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down, Though castles topple on their warders’ heads, Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations, though the treasure Of Nature’s germen tumble altogether […]. (4.1.50, 54-58, my emphasis) 47 Cf. also, shortly before, Macbeth’s comment on Malcolm being named Prince of Cumberland: “that is a step / On which I must fall down, or else o’er leap, / For in my way it lies” (1.4.48-50); ironically, he will do both, fall down and overleap, only in an inverse sequence. For some further thematisations of ‘falls’, cf. 2.3.55 (“chimneys were blown down”), Scotland as “downfall birthdom” (4.3.4), a reference to the fall of the angels (4.3.22), the sinking of Scotland (4.3.39); Macduff’s reflection on “tyranny” as the reason for the “fall of many kings” (4.3.67, 69), and Macbeth’s awareness that his “life/ Is fallen into the sere” (5.3.22-23). Werner Wolf 108 All in all, the “earthly world” appears throughout the play as a fallen world in a state of confusion, which Macduff’s wife, shortly before the arrival of her and her children’s murderers, describes as being a place “where to do harm / Is often laudable, to do good sometime / Accounted dangerous folly” (4.2.77-79). The result is a general feeling of insecurity, as if walking on shifting quicksand, as is implied in Macbeth’s image “here, upon this bank and shoal of time” (1.7.6). The emblem of this insecurity are the witches with their treacherous lures and temptations; these evil, ambiguous beings defy binary categorizations not only in their outer appearance with reference to gender (or sex) but also with regard to space: by “look[ing] not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth, / And yet [being] on’t” (1.3.41-42). It is remarkable to what extent they predominate, when it comes to earthly intrusions of beings associated with supernatural (or preternatural) 48 spheres. The witches transgress the border between the natural and the supernatural world four times at length (in 1.1., 1.3, 3.5 and 4.1 49 ) and are represented - and perceived by several characters - as clearly liminal figures. They are strange beings who arguably rise from ‘hell’ like “bubbles”, are “on” the earth (1.3.42), but can dissolve in air. By transgressing the spatial boundaries between the nether world, the earth, and the upper world, they destabilize the ontological border between the natural and the supernatural just as they defy the human perception of time, which is limited by the border between present and future, through their prophetic faculties 50 . As opposed to the witches as ministers of temptation and evil, supernatural intrusions, which may - with some liberty - be subsumed under the rubric ‘warning in the service of goodness’, are less conspicuous, appear only twice, and are given a curiously subjective quality. There is, first, the dagger before the regicide. Its very meaning is ambivalent: it may be a warning, but Lady Macbeth later refers to it as a tempting, “airdrawn dagger which you said / Led you to Duncan” (3.4.59-60). In addition, its ontology is doubtful, for Macbeth himself is not sure whether it is a genuinely supernatural apparition or rather “a dagger of the mind” (2.1.38). And then there is Banquo’s ghost in 3.4., which only Macbeth appears to see while Lady Macbeth explicitly compares it to the “airdrawn dagger” and disqualifies it as an effect of “folly” (3.4.71). In a world which thus appears to be much more open to the “instruments of darkness” (1.3.126) than to good influences, it is small wonder that appearances deceive and ambivalences tend towards the negative. 48 In the following, the differentiation between ‘supernatural’ and ‘preternatural’ will not be made, as it is immaterial to the present argument. 49 I am bracketing off the question of the authenticity of the possibly interpolated scenes (3.5. and parts of 4.1., cf. Greenblatt 1997: 2560). 50 In contrast to this liminality Hecate appears to unambiguously belong to the supernatural sphere. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 109 6. The Theatrical Space The only real spaces which the audience of Macbeth - or of any other theatrical production - perceives is the theatre and the stage in particular. Similar to many of Shakespeare’s other plays, Macbeth not only creates and evaluates fictional spaces as part of heteroreferential worldmaking but also refers to the theatrical space, directly or indirectly, and thus opens up a metareferential dimension. Interestingly, the few metadramatic allusions to, or mentions of, these spaces and their connotations together with what one may assume to be an implicit evaluation of Shakespeare’s ‘workplace’ amount to the last, but not least, realization of the theme of ambivalence which permeates the fictional spaces in this play. There are two explicit references to the theatre in the form of metaphors (the theatre thus appears as a ‘dmi’ space), both with extremely negative connotations, at least at first sight. In addition, drawing on Weimann (2002), one may argue that Inverness castle, in 2.3., also acquires an implicitly metareferential quality, owing to the “anachronisms” (Weimann 2002: 210 51 ) in the Porter scene. According to Weimann, the two space types already discernible with reference to this castle (as a setting, a ‘ss-space’, and, through the porter’s imagery, also metaphorically as ‘hell’, a ‘dh-space’) would be complemented by a third dimension: an implicit direct metareference to the theatre in which the audience is located and in which the tiring house doors “open[…] towards the audience” (210) so that the stage becomes a place “waiting to engulf the sins of Jacobean London” (212) 52 . If one accepts this as a possibility, this could, however, hardly mean that - even in imagination - the stage here becomes a genuine place of punishment for the audience (Weimann is not explicit on the functions of what he perceives as metareference to the actual theatre space or platea) but rather one in which punishment is represented - an apt connotation for Macbeth, and one which adds a positive tinge of salubrious warning to the negativity of the hellish implication, thus creating ambivalence even in this detail. But let us come back to the aforementioned less questionable explicit metareferences to the theatre: the first is Ross’s equation between the earth and a “bloody stage”. It occurs after King Duncan’s murder in a 51 I.e. allusions to contemporary occurrences, e.g., in the mention of the “equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale” (2.3.8-9), referring to the “Gunpowder plotter” (Weimann 2002: 21). 52 Weimann sees in the doubling of heteroreferential setting and metareference to the theatre/ audience space a simultaneous “engagement between two types of poetics - one inspired by […] Renaissance […] poetics of verisimilitude”, the other” as a “memor[y] of the platea” of medieval drama (2002: 212, 214). Werner Wolf 110 comment on the “sore night”, which an old man says “trifle[s] his “former knowings” (2.4.3-4): Ha, good father, Thou seest the heavens, as troubled with man’s act, Threatens his bloody stage. (2.4. 4-6) The second reference is part of Macbeth’s ‘tomorrow-soliloquy’, which is triggered by his just having been told that “The Queen […] is dead” and contains, in its first part, not only the arguably cynical remark “She should have died hereafter” but also a devastatingly negative meditation on a hopeless future in which an eternal string of tomorrows are seen to lead only to “dusty death” (5.5.16, 22). The second, metadramatic part, continues in the same vein: Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. (5.5.23-27) While in the former speech, given to Ross, the world-stage is still implicated in a greater system of meaning in which there is a heaven and a Great Chain of Being, the latter example empties all meaning from the (altered) Baroque world-stage-metaphor and amounts to an almost nihilistic representation of both the world and the theatre. The theatre is here seen in a one-sided negative light as bad theatre and reduced to the acting space of a “poor player”. On this stage, theatrical discourse is mere babbling “full of sound and fury”, the player’s role a mere “walking shadow” of fictionality, the actor a pitiful “player”, who performs for a short time and then is “heard no more” and arguably forgotten. The same is implied about life as short, full of pointless commotion and angercreating suffering, ending in death, all of which “signif[ies] nothing”. The denial of meaning apparent here on the content (or story) level is enhanced and acquires an uncanny experiential quality on the formal (or discourse) level both by the alliterations (as an iconic illustration of the allegedly empty sound quality of theatrical discourse) and the “iconicity of absence” (cf. Wolf 2005) created in the last two missing feet of the catalectic blank verse (5.5.27). Yet another facet of theatrical negativity could be derived from an interpretation by Kallay (2013/ 2017: online), who sees a link between the space of the witches (arguably a circle) and the charms and illusions performed by them there, and the (public) theatre of Shakespeare’s day (a “wooden O” Henry V, prol. 13). If that were so, and if the other metadramatic references were interpreted at face value, all of this would indeed result in a very poor evaluation of the Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 111 theatre at large (including the dramatic illusion produced by it): the theatre would appear as the deceptive devil’s work, as emblem of nihilism or of man’s murderous instincts. It is, however, unlikely that Shakespeare would cast such a negative light on his own art and workplace. The focus on bad theatre contained in Macbeth’s afore-quoted soliloquy implies the possibility of good theatre (as a successful actor of Macbeth’s role, in this very denigration of theatre, would palpably make clear in ironic opposition to the text), and the meaningless tales performed on what Macbeth considers “the” stage do not rule out good stories devised by different authors and performed by expert players on other stages 53 . Moreover, while witches’ charms and the role play performed by Macbeth (who plays the shocked host after Duncan’s murder), can indeed deceive and are shown to do so, there is also (relatively) ‘good’ role play in Macbeth: Malcolm’s assuming the role of a depraved future king is, dramaturgically speaking, after all a means of bringing truth to light, namely Macduff’s loyalty 54 . This use of roleplay is similar to the way the play within the play in Hamlet is performed with an eye to testing the truth about the murder of Hamlet’s father and his uncle’s guilt. While, in Hamlet, there is a residue of doubt as to whether this function of the play within the play is really achieved (the king, after all, could rise for various reasons), in Macbeth, Malcolm’s role play achieves its end without doubt. And it may be no coincidence that the last speech in the play contains a potentially metadramatic verb, when Malcolm announces that he will “perform” 55 “[w]hat’s more to do” at Scone (5.9.39, 30). The content of this ‘performance’ is no less than part of the restitution of order in Scotland (such as “calling home our exiled friends abroad” [5.9.32]), and the result is that henceforth private closed spaces will again be spaces of safety, as announced before the battle by Malcolm: “I hope the days are near at hand / That chambers will be safe” (5.4.1-2). As it appears, in spite of the negativity which the theatrical space may contain in the fictional world represented on stage, it is not necessarily altogether a negative space, let alone a space of evil magic when we access the highest level of meaning, the implied (aesthetic) norms. From this perspective, the negative evaluations of the theatrical space by Ross and Macbeth appear to be relativized through the characters’ subjectivity and concomitant distortions owing to the respective 53 My special thanks to lay-actress Cecilia Servatius for having insisted on this. 54 This positivity may be overshadowed by what has been said above, in section 3, about the readability of Malcolm’s problematic self-characterization as possibly foreshadowing a future with him as another evil ruler over Scotland, but, for the time being, the positive dramaturgical function of his role-playing may be assumed to be dominant. 55 This is strangely misread by Kallay (2013/ 2017, online) as Malcolm’s intention “to gain control over the theatre”; more accurately, “perform” likens the performative quality of royal decisions to the performativity of theatrical representations. Werner Wolf 112 speech situation: in the former case, the situation (the regicide just discovered) justifies drastic metaphors, in the latter case, the nihilism uttered by Macbeth may be seen as part of the punishment of his sins: losing all confidence in the meaning of life is a sign of his (self-)damnation. And as for the equation ‘stage equals witches’ circle’, this is a mere possibility, which is not supported by any explicit metadramatic utterances in the play, nor is it anywhere implied or shown that all characters are in the grip of the witches’ power. So, while the theatrical space, as we have seen, takes part in the ambivalent evaluations of space in Macbeth, the ambivalence here seems to incline towards a view of the theatre as a space of, albeit unstable, signification, rather than of the lack thereof (“signifying nothing”). Whether this view of the theatre as a location of meaning production is positive, depends on the kind of meaning attributable to the play, in particular to the meaning the world represented appears to have and the nature of the worldview implied in it. 7. The ‘Equivocal’ Destabilization of Spatial Meaningattribution and its Modelling Function: The World as a “Bloody Stage” between Heaven and Hell And “there’s the rub” (Hamlet 3.1.67). Macbeth, perhaps even more so than Shakespeare’s other notoriously ambivalent or even polyvalent plays 56 , presents major difficulties for anyone trying to decide whether the world represented here is only temporarily ‘out of joint’ (owing to an evil tyrant who yields to diabolic temptations, judges himself through his nihilistic despair (in a spiritual variation of his wife’s self-condemning sleepnessness and possible suicide) and meets his well-deserved punishment in the fight with Macduff, after which the rightful king and order are restored to Scotland), or whether Scotland (with its descent into tyranny and atrocious crimes) is to be understood as a model of a world of disorder in which only a meaningless, absurd, and nightmarish ‘great mechanism’ (Kott 1965/ 1970: 92, 105) prevails. Indeed, there are indications for both views: on the one hand, the play ends with the restitution of political order, on the other hand, the indications which critics have seen for a possible continuation of troubles in Scotland (a historical reality, corroborated, according to Clark/ Mason 2015: 34, by Holinshed’s Chronicles 57 , although whether it is permissible to thus go beyond the confines of a represented fictional world is debatable). What is certain is the fact that Macbeth focusses on the dire, negative aspects of existence. This may partly be due to generic conventions of 56 Cf. Jan Kott 1965/ 1970: 96: “Shakespeare ist niemals eindeutig” (‘Shakespeare is never unambiguous’). 57 Cf. also Kallay (2013/ 2017), as discussed above. Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 113 tragedy, but the depiction of the main character as a “tragic villain” (Booth: 1951/ 1968: 180) and criminal (an intrepid and brave one, who admittedly dies “like a man” [5.9.9] but is still no less a criminal) characteristically exceeds the balanced representation of other Shakespearean’ tragic heroes, such as King Lear or Othello, and makes the balance tip decidedly to the negative side. Quasi as an extension of the negativity of the tragic hero, the world in which he is shown to live is one in which evil (natural and supernatural) forces beset reality and elicit “breach[es] in nature” (2.3.114) and “unnatural […] deed[s]” (2.4.10-11). It is a world where female witches have beards and a woman asks dark “spirits” to “unsex” her, thus blurring gender differences (1.5.40-41), in which appearances and prophecies turn out to be deceptive 58 , where “equivocator[s]” (2.3.8) such as the witches are influential and where “illusion” rhymes with “confusion” in Hecate’s plan to lead Macbeth astray (3.5.28- 29) 59 . In short, it is a fallen world, deplorably open to the influence of hell and its ministers. Macbeth is, moreover, in Greenblatt’s memorable (but perhaps too radical) formulation, a “tragedy of […] category confusions” (1997: 2560). As research in the wake of deconstruction in particular has emphasised 60 , it represents a world in which, at least to some extent, seemingly clear borders between oppositions threaten to become blurred: the border between the natural and the supernatural, between appearance and being, between the sexes (most notably in the witches, but to some extent also in Lady Macbeth), between good and evil (if one thinks of the partly problematic characterization of Macduff and Malcolm in the testing scene as well as of what Schülting [2009: 557] has called the circularity of the play, in which the final scenes echo the opening scenes 61 ), and last, but not least, between spaces with positive and spaces 58 Paradoxes and double meanings belong to this deceptiveness; interestingly, even Macduff uses such a double meaning, when he exclaims in his fight with Macbeth: “let the angel whom thou still hast served / Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (5.8. 14-16): what here appears, on the verbal surface (a possibly ironic one, if the reference is not to Lucifer in the first place), as an “angel” is in reality a reference to the witches, the devil’s servants. 59 While “illusion”, from the perspective of later aesthetic terminology, may here already have a latent ring of ‘aesthetic illusion’ (which, in the form of dramatic illusion, is in fact applicable to Shakespeare’s plays, cf. Wolf 1993b) and thus may be adduced for a potential likening of the witches’ circle with the theatre, what is in the foreground here is still the old, medieval-Christian idea of the illusiones diaboli, of deception as a way for Satan to lead man into temptation (cf. for the history of the term ‘illusion’ Wolf [1993a: ch. 1.1.2]). 60 Cf. Fawkner (1990), Greenblatt (1997), Schülting (2009). 61 According to Schülting (2009: 557), the rebel Macdonald’s beheading at the outset of the play mirrors Macbeth’s beheading at its closure; in the opening scenes, the victor Macbeth is given a title by King Duncan (the dignity of a Thane) in a similar way in which King Malcolm confers titles on those who have fought with him at the end, which, in a way, acknowledges the fact that the rule of both kings is based not on their own deeds but rather on those of their thanes. All of this, for Schült- Werner Wolf 114 with negative connotations. And it is a world in which the temporal counterpart to the spatial setting favours night, the dominant temporal setting in Macbeth, which gives this tragedy a particularly brooding atmosphere, as already noticed by A. C. Bradley (1904/ 1974: 279). What is more, this darkness is not totally lifted at the end, since the evil witches are not subject to poetic justice and may be supposed to live on, continuing with their temptations and equivocations (cf. Greenblatt 1997: 2561). Yet, one cannot stop on this sombre note. For Macbeth constructs a world model in which admittedly the world may (temporarily) be a “bloody stage”, but one which is also open towards heaven and positive influences. After all, the represented world does not only consist of Scotland under Macbeth’s rule, but there is Scotland before and after Macbeth (in which chambers are again safe [cf. 5.4.2.]) and, above all, there is “gracious England” (4.3.43) with her saintly king. Furthermore, the devil’s illusions are finally revealed as such, even to their victim Macbeth, and some kind of “restoration of order and justice” is not even denied by Greenblatt (1997: 2561), which also relativizes his description of the play as a tragedy of “category confusions”. Indeed, some categories remain unconfused, in particular the idea of the natural: the very unnaturalness of Macbeth’s and his wife’s crimes, already in the term used, point to a naturalness, an order of nature and the world in which they are the exception rather than the rule, and this positive background is what gives them tragic narrative ‘tellability’. Moreover, the blurring of oppositions, so stressed by some scholars, is by far not absolute: there is no doubt about the goodness of the English King Edward, nor about the “fiendlike” evilness of Lady Macbeth (5.9.35) and devilish Macbeth (with concomitant direction of audience sympathies against these characters), nor can it be denied that some sort of political order is restored at the end of the play, nor argued that all language in the play is deceptive like the witches’ prophecies. And, finally, the worldview implied in Macbeth may be bleak but is certainly not as nihilistic as Macbeth’s own in his ‘tomorrow soliloquy’ 62 , nor is it void of the suggestion of the existence of a transcendental, metaphysical sphere (in which the existence of God is taken for granted even by the evil characters), and consequently it is far-fetched to suggest that “Shakespeare situates himself close to the twentiethcentury world[view]” by “obscurely anticipat[ing] the perfect emptiness ing, renders the seeming stability of Malcolm’s rule at the end more than questionable (“[…] wird die scheinbare Stabilität der Herrschaft Malcolms mehr als fragwürdig”). 62 Schülting herself here strangely blurs the border between a character’s explicit worldview (always open to unreliable perspectival distortions ) and the implied worldview of the play at large when she formulates “[…] in V.v […] enthüllt sich Macbeth die Sinn- und Ziellosigkeit menschlichen Strebens” (2009: 560; ‘in 5.5, the meaningand purposelessness of human endeavour is revealed to Macbeth’). Spaces and Their ‘Equivocal’ Meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth 115 of [...] metaphysical presence”, as Fawkner (1990: 45-46), in his programmatic but largely unhistorically deconstructive reading, claims. Yet, in spite of some ‘signposts’ of certainty, what is also undeniable is the impression of a represented world between heaven and hell in which an unsettling amount of irreducible ambivalence and border-blurring remains, an ambivalence and questioning of oppositions which not only permeates the implied worldview but also the semanticization of spaces as part of the concrete model-building and realization of this worldview. If one wants to describe this ambivalence in metaphorical terms it is not so much a ‘palimpsestic’ plurality of superimposed meanings, as Markidou (2016) has it, but rather a disturbing opalescence, a strange changing and uncertainty of (some) visual tonalities. This ambivalence may be indebted to the Christian idea of a fallen and yet God-created and redeemed world, in the same way as Shakespeare makes Friar Laurence, in Romeo and Juliet, 2.2, meditate on the ambivalent virtues of herbs 63 , but it may also be the consequence of Renaissance doubt with reference to the medieval view of a stable, ordered cosmos. In any case, this ambivalence is certainly linked to the ‘equivocal’ destabilization of spatial meaning-attribution which we have observed in the foregoing discussion, a destabilization which is a tell-tale expression and facet of the modelling function which the use of space has in literature at large and Macbeth in particular. What is, however, rather less certain is the tendency of this ambivalence with reference to the implied worldview. As pointed out above, one may say with some confidence that the destabilization of oppositions discernible in the multiple ambivalences does not amount to a totally deconstructive nihilism in which all order and structure of the world is denied or appears as mere fiction. Yet this still leaves ample room for ‘fine-tuned’ interpretation. I therefore would like to refrain from a final decision in this respect, thus continuing the ambivalence which operates in the play as a whole also to a certain extent in its interpretation. Indeed, whether this ambivalence is one in which the power of negativity is only temporary and must eventually yield to the forces of order and goodness, or whether it favours the impression of “night’s predominance” (2.4.8), an impression which I have repeatedly mentioned in the foregoing interpretation, or whether the ambivalence amounts to an equal distribution of light and darkness as adumbrated in Lady Macbeth’s evocation of “one half-world” in which “Nature seems dead” (2.1.49-50, i.e. where it is night), must perhaps ultimately remain open to individual realizations of the play both on the theatrical stage and on the inner stage of each reader. Without any doubt, the representation of space (with at- 63 There is, however, also the view that tragedy in general, including Shakespeare’s, is “incompatible with the Christian faith” (Leech 1950/ 1968: 297). Werner Wolf 116 tendant connotations) plays a vital role in this but leaves room for interpretation thanks to its ambivalent semanticization. As we could see in this case study of Macbeth, the structure and meaning attributed to space contributes to, and is largely indicative of, the implied worldview of a literary text. This also applies to ambivalences and instabilities: ambivalent and instable semanticizations of space go hand in hand with a similarly questionable stability and meaning in the implied worldview. The usage of space thus appears to be a vital element of the world modelling function of literature - not only in fiction and poetry, but also in drama. Bibliography Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2006/ 2009). Cultural Turns: Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften. Rowohlts Enzyklopädie. Hamburg: Rowohlt. Beckerman, Bernard (1962). Shakespeare at the Globe. New York: Macmillan. Berry, Philippa (1989). Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies. 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(2016). Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratology: Berlin: de Gruyter. Pfister, Manfred (1977). Das Drama: Theorie und Analyse: UBT 580. Munich: Fink. Rasmussen, Eric & Jan DeJong (2016). “Depiction of countryside in Shakepeare” [online] https: / / www.bl.uk/ shakespeare/ articles/ depiction-of-countryside-inshakespeare [2019, August 1] Ross, Charles (1997). The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth. Berkeley, CA; U of California P. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2009). “Space”. Peter Hühn et al., Eds. Handbook of Narratology. Narratologia 19. Berlin: de Gruyter. 420-433. Schülting, Sabine (2009). “Die späten Tragödien”. Ina Schabert, Ed. Shakespearehandbuch: Die Zeit - Der Mensch - Das Werk - Die Nachwelt. 5 th edition. Stuttgart: Kröner. 523-567. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies: A Facsimile of the First Folio, 1623. Ed. Doug Moston. London: Routledge, 1998. 739-759. Shakespeare, William (1915). 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Religion and the Decline of Magic in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century England. London: Penguin. Weimann, Robert (2002). “Theatrical Space in Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Revisiting locus and platea in Timon and Macbeth“. John M. Mucciolo & William R. Elton, Eds. The Shakespeare International Yearbook : Where Are We Now in Shakespeare Studies? London: Routledge: 203-217. Wiles, David (1993). “Place et espace du mal dans Macbeth”. Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle 11 : 55-70. [online] https: / / / www.jstor.org/ stable/ 25598764. [2018, August 16] Wolf, Werner (1993a). Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen. Buchreihe der Anglia 32. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wolf, Werner (1993b). “Shakespeare und die Entstehung ästhetischer Illusion im englischen Drama”. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. New series 43: 279- 301. Wolf, Werner (2005). “Non-supplemented blanks in works of literature as forms of ‘iconicity of absence’”. Costantino Maeder et al., Eds. Outside-In and Inside- Out. Iconicity in Language and Literature 4. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 115-132. Werner Wolf English Department Karl-Franzens University Graz Austria “The Irresistible Fantasy of Sex under Glass” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts Peter Freese Since the original Biosphere 2 experiment was designed to last for a hundred years (fifty two-year closures) and made it only six months into the second closure before it was abandoned, it seemed irresistible to imagine a second and third fictional closure of this astonishing glassed-in greenhouse of 3.15 acres that housed four men and four women and a suite of 3,800 species of plants and animals. I had the factual material from Biosphere 2 (including a host of press articles, as well as accounts by the Biospherians themselves) for authenticity; all I had to do was create fictional characters and set the wheels in motion for Closure II in order to see what might happen. The biggest problem for the Terranauts/ Biospherians? Growing enough food to keep from starving while at the same time balancing out the oxygen/ carbon dioxide levels. The second biggest? Getting along with one another. (Qtd. in Brady 2016) I’ve written book after book now, not really consciously, but I can see how they’re all allied, about our place on this planet and what it means in terms of the environment. So this is a natural for me. Nature is dying, and so we try to insulate ourselves from it. I write a book like this without any ax to grind or even a point to make. That is all discovered as I go along. It’s like their experiment, to put people, plants and animals under glass and see what happens. ( Qtd. in Swedlund 2016) When, in the fall of 2016, T. C. Boyle published his sixteenth novel, The Terranauts, he presented not only another proof of his unique ability to merge historical facts and fictional inventions into ‘historiographical metafictions,’ but he also revisited some of the topics that had fascinated him from the start of his career. Boyle has often been concerned with closed communities, he has shown an abiding interest in ecological and environmental questions in almost all of his books, and he has always AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0006 Peter Freese 120 been fascinated by such charismatic leaders and egomaniacal gurus as John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville, Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle or Frank Lloyd Wright in The Women and dealt with the - usually dire - effects which their utopian tenets had for their disciples. He confirmed these interests when he recently told an interviewer that he is “quite fascinated by this idea of a small community, especially of a guru telling you what to do and how that might sort itself out.” (Qtd. In Bisely 2016) And he pointed to similarities between The Terranauts and his 2003 fiction finalist for the National Book Award when he explained that his newest novel was “a kind of a return to Drop City. But it’s Drop City under glass.” (Qut. in Spencer 2017) 1. The Critical Reception The critical responses to The Terranauts were mixed, and an unusual share of the many reviewers found faults with the book or even considered it a total failure. In The Washington Post, a disappointed Ron Charles (2016) stated that “how a writer as exciting as Boyle could produce such a dull novel remains a mystery” and complained that “as it drags on for more than 500 pages, The Terranauts inspires a sense of tedium that could only be matched by being trapped in a giant piece of Tupperware.” With regard to the novel’s characters, he criticized that “the adolescent souls in these adult bodies are numbingly petty - and the novel offers no relief from their flat voices, their obvious confessions, their poisonous jealousy.” He regretted that the three narrators “are just as gossipy and small-minded at the beginning as they are at the very distant end of the novel,” and with a reference to the plays which the Terranauts are ordered to perform, he scathingly concluded that “Sartre claimed that ‘Hell is other people,’ but sometimes, Hell is another chapter.” In The Harvard Crimson, Andrew J. Jiang (2016) observed that “while the format has potential to be captivating, its delivery falls short” and found that one reason for that was “that the characters are generally contemptible.” To him, “what we get is a disappointing soap opera, only in the setting of an abstractly different environment,” and he concluded that “The Terranauts disappoints” because its readers are not informed “about captivating biological and natural disasters that the E2 [= ecosphere2] cast must overcome,” but “instead faced with a pregnancy scare and a public image crisis. The book provides an intriguing psychological outlook at the world but it is ultimately not a message worth trudging more than 500 pages to receive.” In the Scottish The National, an anonymous reviewer (Anonymous 2016) found that Boyle’s “satire is surprisingly limp,” that unfortunately he does not “bother to differentiate the voices of the narrators, which is odd, because usually he’s very agile,” and that therefore “after a while T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 121 you start to feel you’re as low on oxygen as the Terranauts.” For him, therefore, “reading The Terranauts is something like being sealed in a ‘biome’: it feels like a big responsibility, nothing much happens, and it is no fun at all. In reality, it would be impossible for these people, such as they are, to care for each other, or for us to care about them. And the novel is exactly the same. As Linda says: ‘They’re fools. Careless, petty, banal people.’” In the Financial Times, Henry Hitchings (2016) granted that “Boyle is a smart observer of human flaws, and there are moments when The Terranauts is a striking portrait of vanity and weakness. Yet while he’s a fluent, often exuberant writer, he’s certainly not an economical one.” And he concluded that “despite all Boyle’s efforts to make the novel seem a spiritually charged experience and a religious allegory, it feels like an upmarket soap opera. There’s too relentless a concern with which of the Terranauts will pair off — and too much sprawling evocation of how and where they might do so.” And in The Times, Melissa Katsoulis (2016) warned that “it is not a good sign when you start […] losing track of characters,” which she took to be the result of “Boyle himself seem[ing] uninterested in half of his cast.” She ironically stated that “in a way, then, this imperfect novel perfectly conveys the human story at the heart of Biosphere 2: get me out of here! ” Although she conceded that “the image of humans enclosed in a glass dome, where anyone can observe their private lives, could be a timely critique of the internet age and reality TV,” she found that “in this surprisingly quotidian telling, the metaphysical plane does not get off the runway. This is not Boyle’s finest hour, but when an author publishes as much as he does, there will be a few duds. As duds go, this could be worse.” In Germany, where Boyle has an enthusiastic audience, the reviews were extremely negative. On the Büchertreff page, a reviewer described The Terranauts as “primitives Big-Brother-Dschungelcamp in Buchform” (primitive Big Brother-Jungle Camp in book form) mostly dealing with “Gemütsschwankungen und den daraus resultierenden Streitereien, welche jedoch eher Kindergartenniveau erreichen. Aja, und Sex. Sex ist das Hauptthema in diesem Roman” (mood swings and the resulting quarrels which, however, rather reach kindergarten level. Yes, and sex. Sex is the main theme in this novel). He or she then described the characters as “von Anfang an Unsympathler und auf einem Niveau pubertierender Teenies” (from the start disagreeable people and on the level of teenies at puberty), called the language “sehr einfach” (very simple) and asked in amazement “wo war hier die hochgepriesene sprachliche Qualität” (where was the much-heralded linguistic quality)? Adding that “die Spannung hält sich mehr als nur in Grenzen, sie ist nämlich gleich gar nicht vorhanden” (the suspense is more than kept in limits, it is namely non-existing), s/ he then once more rejected the book as “eine Mischung aus Big-Brother und Dschungelcamp und auch genauso primitiv und seicht” (a mixture of Big Brother and Jungle Camp and exactly as simple- Peter Freese 122 minded and shallow) (Ambermoon 2014). And in Literatenfunk, Aleks Scholz (2017) began his review with the statement “T. C. Boyle hat eine Seifenoper geschrieben” (T. C. Boyle has written a soap opera). He found all the Terranauts “unsympathisch” (unlikeable), stated that “T. C. Boyle schreibt unfassbar gern über Sex” (T. C. Boyle incredibly likes to write about sex), and ended his damning review by saying about the ecosphere: Das gesamte Buch hindurch atmet sie wie eine große schlafende Schildkröte. Einmal erstickt sie fast und muss reanimiert werden. Aber am Ende erwacht sie und schlägt die Augen auf, ein neuer erdiger Charakter, der die ganzen selbstsüchtigen Idioten in sich trägt. Das ist ein schöner Moment. Und dann könnte das Buch eigentlich endlich anfangen. (Scholz 2017) (Throughout the whole book it breathes like a big sleeping tortoise. In the end it awakes and casts up its eyes, a new earthen character that carries all the selfish idiots in it. That is a beautiful moment. And now the book could finally begin). At the other end of the spectrum, there were also positive voices. Thus, in The New York Times, Jonathan Miles (2016) had reservations with regard to the centrality of sex in the novel, but granted that “Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism […] to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission.” He stated that “humanity, for Boyle, never suffered a fall; we’ve always been this petty and cutthroat and grubby and absurd. And as The Terranauts makes clear, wherever we go - so long as we’re trapped together, in this atmosphere or any other - we always will be.” In Electric Literature, Jake Zucker (2016) found that The Terranauts is “less a closed-room gimmick of narrative limitation and more an absurdist drama that never forgets the reader’s lived experience, either” and that it “makes a delightfully old-fashioned commentary about the soul of men and women: that their tragedies can’t be avoided by changing their environment alone.” He praised Boyle’s “pitch-perfect detail work” and lauded the novel as “a page-turner, and a strong one.” Josh Bryson (2016), the Sleepless Editor, found that “Boyle has created three great characters to drive his story” and concluded that “The Terranauts uses every bit of the novel to draw you in. Boyle’s prose fleshes out every bit of the biosphere and its inhabitants with ease - his three narrators are given just the right amount of space to develop and draw you in. If you’re interested in his work, this is a good jumping-on point, and I can easily recommend you give this book a read.” On National Public Radio, Jason Heller granted that “The Terranauts is eerily timely, despite being set over 20 years ago. Even more resonant is Boyle’s witty yet poignant exploration of our attachment to the chunk of rock we call home - not to mention the walls we let others build around us, and the walls we build around ourselves.” (Heller 2016) In the Star T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 123 Tribune, Jackie Thomas Kennedy (2016) read the novel as an examination of “the limitations of human empathy,” saw the three narrators placed at “the crossroads of megalomania and self-pity,” found Boyle’s prose “gleefully perceptive,” and stated that “the Terranauts challenge themselves to transcend their human appetites, and the struggle is worth our full attention.” And on star2.com, Marc De Faoite found The Terranauts to be “much more than a meditation on ecology and anthropology; it is an entertaining novel with a page-turning storyline that never lets up in pace,” which is “told with a dark humour that balances cynicism and empathy” and “further cements Boyle’s reputation, not only as an extremely prolific writer but also as one of North America’s finest storytellers.” (De Faoite 2017) 2. From John Allen’s Biosphere to T. C. Boyle’s Ecosphere From his first novel onwards, Boyle has located the actions of many of his novels in the interstices of history and fiction and therefore had to make up his mind about how to cope with the relation between the alleged truth of historiography and the freedom of poetic invention. He prefaced his brilliant first novel, Water Music (1982), which deals with the Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s expeditions to Africa, with an ‘Apologia,’ in which he declared that “I have invented language and terminology, I have strayed from and expanded upon my original sources. Where historical fact proved a barrier to the exigencies of invention, I have, with full knowledge and clear conscience, reshaped it to fit my purposes.” (Boyle 1983) And with regard to his fifth novel, The Road to Wellville (1993), which deals with the career of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, he said in an interview that “my interest is to use history to explore how I feel about things and to communicate that to others - hopefully in an entertaining and edifying and satisfactory way. Where the facts stand in the way of what I’m trying to accomplish, well, the facts will have to be altered.” (Qtd. in Smiley 1993) Since The Terranauts is also built on historical source material, it is necessary to briefly reconstruct the relevant aspects of the ‘real’ story in order to assess the extent of Boyle’s poetic license. Between 1987 and 1991, a company named Space Biosphere Ventures (SBV), with John Allen as inventor and executive chairman, Margret Augustine as CEO, and Marie Harding, Allen’s wife, as vice-president of finance, constructed a huge and daringly innovative building made of steel frames and high-performance glass designed by a former associate of Buckminster Fuller on an area of 40 acres in the high-elevation desert near the small town of Oracle, an hour’s drive north of Tucson, Arizona. This building eventually cost the enormous sum of $150 million, which was provided by SBV’s financial partner, Decisions Investment, owned by Peter Freese 124 the elusive Texas billionaire Ed Bass. The building was meant to be a “biosphere” as conceived of by the Russian mineralogist and biochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1926) 1 , that is, a scaled-down copy of the earth as an ecological system integrating living beings and their relationships as well as their interaction with the elements. It was christened “Biosphere 2” because it was the second self-sufficient biosphere after the earth itself, and it was meant to test whether one could create an artificial ecosystem that would sustain life in the event of irreparable damage to the earth or make it possible to establish an off-earth colony. During the lengthy planning period, the team constructed seven ‘biomes,’ that is, distinct biological communities of plants and animals that have come into being in response to a shared physical climate, to be located in B2, namely, a rainforest, a savannah grassland, a fog desert, a mangrove wetland and an ocean with a coral reef, as well as an agricultural area and a human habitat. Prospective candidates for B2 were sent on training cruises on the group’s sailing ship Heraclitus, on which they learned about other cultures and how to live in a closed space and did deep sea diving as preparation. Counseled by leading representatives of different disciplines, SBV carefully selected more than 3,800 plant, animal, and insect species from all over the world and put them into B2. Engineers constructed intricate means of heating and cooling the biosphere, which consisted of over fifty miles of pipes and hundreds of motors, pumps, and fans. A complex nerve center was built which would “sound alarms automatically if carbon monoxide, for example, rises to threatening levels. It will turn on fans and air coolers or heaters to prevent the rain forest from ever going above-ninety-five degrees or below fifty-five.” (Allen 1991: 102) Since a power failure would quickly raise the temperature in B2 to uninhabitable extremes and force the inmates to get out as fast as possible, SBV built an Energy Center with three separate generators and also connected it to the local town’s power grid. These facts show that the allegedly self-sufficient wilderness of B2 could not exist without a basement full of machines, and they reveal the major distinction between B1 and B2, namely “just how much support humans unthinkingly receive from the rest of nature on a daily basis.” (Reider 2009: 129) In September 1988, John Allen stayed in a small test module for a first enclosure of three days, a year later Linda Leigh spent twenty-one days in it, while her colleagues watched and analyzed the data, and on September 25, 1991, after a sacred ceremony enacted by Lakota Indian elders, the first team of four men and four women entered B2 with extensive media coverage and a large crowd watching, Timothy Leary, the controversial advocate of psychedelic drugs, among the spectators, and John 1 Reider (2009: 199) reports that “Vernadsky was a patron saint of Biosphere 2; drawings of his white-bearded, studious face graced the office walls at the building site.” - See also the reference in Boyle (2017: 16). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 125 Allen’s friend William Burroughs, the leading figure of the Beat Generation, sending his best wishes. In the first six months almost 160,000 tourists visited B2 and observed the terranauts through its windows or as monitored by live cameras installed in many places inside. Although the eight biospherians stayed in B2 for the two planned years till September 26, 1993, only two weeks after they had moved in, Jane Poynter, the Domestic Animals Manager, cut her finger while threshing rice and was taken out and brought to a hospital to be operated upon. Only five hours later, she re-entered the biosphere, but since she carried a duffel bag, journalists and spectators started speculating about what might have been in that bag. Boyle himself commented: “It’s a kind of magic, people locked away, life and death. All of that stuff was so fascinating to me as a reader of these accounts. And when they did open it up for the Biospherian who cut her finger, it kind of spoiled it. If they were on Mars, they would have died.” (Qtd. in Swedlund 2016) After this first violation of the complete closure idea, a second, and much more serious one, was caused by the steady rise of the CO 2 level which, as discovered only later, was due to the soil bacteria that sucked oxygen out of the atmosphere and produced carbon dioxide, thus changing the overall chemistry of B2. When after sixteen months the terranauts developed increasing respiratory problems because the oxygen had dropped to 14.5%, which is the equivalent of its availability at an elevation of over 4000 meters, Mission Control decided to break closure and boost the oxygen level with injections from outside, thus once more abandoning the concept of a totally closed system. Another problem was food. The biospherians worked very hard and burned many calories. Although they had numerous plants and several domestic animals in B2 (African pygmy goats, hens, dwarf pigs and tilapia fish which they grew in a rice and azolla pond after an ancient Chinese model), there was never enough to eat. They steadily lost weight, and whereas some wanted extra food to be brought in, others insisted on keeping closure. By the end of the first year, the team was desperate enough to eat the dry grains and beans which they had brought in as seeds for the following mission. With Mission Control insisting on selfsufficiency, the terranauts’ growing hunger caused increasing friction, and soon the results of previous studies in confined environment psychology were confirmed. Before the mission was half over, the team had split into two hostile factions, each including a male-female couple, and they quarreled, among other things, about the interventions of Mission Control. Surprisingly, all members continued to work together because they felt obliged to help achieve the mission’s goals, but otherwise former intimate friends turned into committed enemies, who were barely on speaking terms. On March 6, 1994, a second team, this time with seven members, entered B2, but when suddenly N 2 O, that is, laughing gas, developed, they Peter Freese 126 had to leave only six months after their mission’s start, and the human inhabitation of B2, which had been planned for fifty missions and one hundred years, ended inconspicuously. Meanwhile, running costs had mushroomed and infighting had started between the increasingly nervous heads of the project. John Allen became more and more difficult to deal with, and Margret Augustine’s changed behavior frightened everybody, but Ed Bass, who paid for everything, still remained quiet. By 1993, however, his patience had worn thin and he hired a consulting firm to check on the exploding costs. This firm was led by Steve Bannon, then a Los Angeles investment banker specializing in corporate takeovers, and he tried without success to make the project profitable. Thus, in April 1994, Ed Bass called for an audit. Steve Bannon was made CEO and, with the second team still inside B2, the members of SBV signed an agreement which resulted in the dissolving of their company, with Ed Bass keeping the biosphere and most of the other assets. In November 1995, Columbia University, New York, took over B2 until 2003 as a laboratory for their Earth Institute, an interdisciplinary center for environmental research. After that, for some time the biosphere was in danger of being demolished, but in 2007 the University of Arizona acquired it for research and teaching purposes. The ongoing change in the public assessment of the B2 experiment is most clearly illustrated by the fact that in 1987, when work began, the popular science magazine Discover enthusiastically praised Biosphere 2 as “the most exciting venture to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon,” but that in 1999, five years after SBV was dissolved, Time retrospectively discounted Biosphere 2 as one of the “50 Worst Ideas of the Twentieth Century.” (Both qtd. in Reider 2009: 3) 3. Science and the Human Experiment Boyle says on his homepage that “in [his] telling, [he] project[s] a full two-year second closure, in which the characters who inhabit the fictional Ecosphere II are determined at all costs - even to the point of death - to avoid the mistakes of the first crew, most particularly the breaking of closure.” He asks “Is it possible to replicate the environment of Ecosphere I, i.e., the earth we all inhabit? Maybe so. But what of the emotions, interactions, loves and hates and jealousies of the people locked inside? ” And he adds that he has “chosen two epigraphs by way of reflecting on that question.” 2 These epigraphs are Margaret Mead’s optimistic observation “Never doubt that a small group of committed, thoughtful people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” and Jean Paul Sartre’s skeptical statement that “L’enfer, c’est les autres” (Hell is 2 See T. C. Boyle’s homepage; https: / / www.tcboyle.com/ page2.html? 2. T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 127 other people). Together these quotations delimit the range of results which the E2 experiment could have. The Terranauts, then, is a fictitious continuation of the Biosphere project that makes use of the authentic material. Boyle himself confirms his procedure by stating in his ‘Author’s Note’ that he studied John Allen’s illustrated book Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment, the accounts which the biospherians Abigail Ailing and Mark Nelson published in Life Under Glass and Jane Poynter delivered in The Human Experiment, and the excellent documentation of the project’s complicated history which Rebecca Reider presented in her Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities. Even a cursory collation of these books with the novel shows that Boyle took over most of the major facts as well as several smaller details, but that he allowed himself full poetic license with certain other aspects such as, for example, his depiction of Jeremiah Reed, Judy Forester, and Darren Iverson as his fictional equivalents of the historical figures of John Allen, Margret Augustine, and Ed Bass respectively. The Biosphere project was a scientific venture that daringly attempted to make ecologists and engineers cooperate despite their different aims and methods and that faced a host of new, highly complex, and hitherto untackled problems. To fully understand these problems one needs to be familiar with the concerns of disciplines ranging from eco-biology and climatology through botanics and bacteriology to machine and electrical engineering, and it is obvious that such crucial problems as the medical effects of what Roy Walford, the first team’s Medical Officer, sarcastically dubbed the biospherians’ “healthy starvation diet” (qtd. in Reider 2009: 157) which troubled them throughout their mission, or the unexpected production of carbon dioxide by soil bacteria, which almost killed them through lack of oxygen, are hardly appropriate material for a novel or, as Melissa Katsoulis (2016) put it, “you can’t make a cracking adventure story out of blood-oxygen levels and soil acidity regulation.” It is no accident that John Allen’s book Biosphere 2 is subtitled The Human Experiment and that Jane Poynter also titled the account of her experience as the first mission’s Domestic Animals Manager The Human Experiment. When Allen and Poynter talk about the ‘human experiment’ they mean experiments both by and with humans, and the fact that Boyle is fully aware of this double meaning becomes clear when he has Dawn, one of his narrators, muse about the motley content of the seven biomes in E2. She points out that “purists criticized us for creating an artificial environment stocked with species of plants and animals that normally wouldn’t come into contact with one another, but outside the glass we’re all living in what scientists have begun calling the Anthropocene Age, dominated by man, which has defined itself by doing just that.” (322) Here she uses - somewhat anachronistically - a term which the Dutch Nobel-Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined as late as 2000 and which suggests a Peter Freese 128 name for a new and distinct geological age during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the earth. 3 Dawn then says: What people didn’t realize was that the special gift of E2 was in presenting a possible world with an eye toward tweaking it over the course of a century to create an ideal one. The whole idea behind species packing is to see which ones will find that niche and survive and how they’ll contribute to the whole - at the end of a century we’ll see genetic variation that makes E2’s biota unique from anything else on earth. And, of course, beyond earth - because from the outset, in G.C.’s vision, the big question was could we create an independent self-generating ecosphere to take us into space (or in the worst-case scenario, sustain life on this planet in the face of a systemic worldwide collapse). (323) In this context, the term ‘human experiment’ refers primarily to manmade scientific experiments, and Boyle has Dawn use the term in that sense when she says that eventually most of the crew members came to understand her child’s “value to the mission. In a sense, she was the human experiment.” (415). But the generic conventions of fiction unfortunately motivated Boyle to foreground the ‘human interest’ aspect in his novel, and consequently his tale deals mostly with those aspects which average readers find alluring because they provide the ‘human’ details about the persons involved. It was these very details in which also the thousands of tourists that flocked to B2 showed the greatest interest. This was confirmed by an Arizona newspaper writer who observed in 1992 that “visitors seem most interested in finding out why anybody would volunteer to be sealed away for 24 months, and what exactly are the sleeping arrangements.” (Ropp 1992) And in his book on the scientific implications of B2 John Allen himself unwillingly pointed to what stood in the center of public attention when he said that the hottest topic of interest for the news media, and a subject for amused conjecture for the Biosphere 2 watchers, are the love lives of the crew once the doors have closed. Four men, four women. None of them married to one another. Scientific inquiry may be their primary objective here, but it’s hard to imagine that eight healthy adults will put romance and sex on hold for the entire two years. Curt Suplee of the Washington Post put it thus: “Will there be sex in the Biosphere? Of course, but who cares … those bidding for a berth in Biosphere 2 are in it for the love of the idea, not the colleague down the hall.” (Allen (1991: 130) It was Boyle’s focus on the salacious topic of “sex in the Biosphere” that earned him some reviewers’ unfriendly comparison of his novel with a disreputable television show. Janice Pariat spoke about the readers’ “dis- 3 For details see Steffen/ Grinevald/ Crutzen/ McNeill (2011). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 129 concerting sense that the project resembles a cheap thrills, drama-ridden reality-TV show. An ecologically driven ‘Big Brother’ watched hungrily by the media and the public (the question topmost on everyone’s mind being, when are they going to have sex? And with whom? ).” (Pariat 2017) A reviewer of bookmunch observed that “sex is the stuff of life and if life is to prosper under glass it has to embrace pretty much every aspect of it. And that is what The Terranauts does. Imagine this as a primitive Big Brother […] and like in Big Brother, the inmates have their ups and their downs.” (Anonymous 2017) And a German reviewer indignantly rejected the novel as ‘a mixture of Big Brother and Jungle Camp and exactly as primitive and shallow.’ (Ambermoon 2017) In the TV show Big Brother, which was first broadcast in 1999 by a commercial channel in the Netherlands and soon became an international franchise, several contestants are made to live together in an isolated house, and their interaction is continually monitored by live cameras and personal audio microphones. One after the other is voted out until only one remains and wins the prize. This show, whose name refers to the oppressive surveillance described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, provides television viewers with the voyeuristic pleasure of observing the group-dynamic processes going on among locked-up people, and since it exploits a constellation similar to that of the biospherians with regard to both Mission Control and the visitors at the windows, the critics’ analogy is not surprising. However, there exists not only a parallel between Big Brother and the Biosphere but also a historical influence. Marc De Faoite (2017) pointed out that B2 “was a huge media sensation at the time, and apparently the inspiration for Big Brother, allegedly the very first reality TV show.” And Jonathan Miles (2016) confirmed that since the Biosphere project was “the acknowledged inspiration for the original Dutch version of ‘Big Brother,’ which triggered a seismic shift in television programming following its 1999 debut, it’s fair to call it the genesis of reality TV.” Boyle certainly did not like the transfer of the comparison between the Biosphere project and the Big Brother show to his novel, and when Amy Brady asked him: “I couldn’t help but think of reality T.V. culture as I read The Terranauts. The media’s obsession with the Terranauts’ hook ups, the gossip, the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ - Ecosphere 2 is practically the new Big Brother house! Did you watch reality T.V. while writing this book? ” he answered: The original experiment was from 1991-1993 and my fictional second closure is from 1993-1995, long before reality TV became a (sad) reality in our depleted culture, and yet here were my Terranauts, on camera 24/ 7 and overseen by a Mission Control that was in fact so controlling it presented me with haunting echoes of Orwell’s Big Brother. However, I did not take my inspiration from TV (I have zero interest in reality TV; I have great inner resources Peter Freese 130 with regard to free time - for instance, I know how to read). (Qtd. Brady 2016) 4. The Structure of the Novel and the Narrative Perspective The novel’s overall structure mirrors the unfolding of its action by being divided into four main parts: “Pre-Closure” (1-77) deals with the Terranauts’ preparations up to the moment they enter the ecosphere and it is closed; “Closure: Year One” (78-268) and “Closure: Year Two” (269-455) deal with the two years the Terranauts spend in their artificial sphere; and “Reentry” (456-508) deals with their return to the world. This symmetrical structure, in which the two-year closure is framed by the preparation for and the outcome of the experiment, signals that the novel presents a complete action that unfolds mostly chronologically from its beginning to its end. But readers have to learn that the outcome is not only rather unexpected but that the novel’s ending also remains irritatingly open. As far as the narrative perspective is concerned, Boyle departs from his usual procedure, namely, the employment of an effaced and omniscient narrator who alternately looks at the world through the eyes of different characters. Instead, he makes use of three protagonist-narrators who take turns telling about how they have experienced their participation in “the ecology of closed systems” (28). Since two of them are members of the crew, whereas the third is not selected and has to stay behind, Boyle’s choice of narrators allows him to alternate between inside and outside points of view. He himself commented on the advantages of such a constellation by saying: These people passionately believe in this project and want more than anything to get into it. But what happens when you’re not chosen? That’s something that struck me right from the beginning. Once we have Linda excluded, we also have a way of getting out of this hermetic world. So we have an outside point of view from Mission Control, Big Brother, and we have also the internal conflicts and joys of living communally under glass. (Qtd. in Swedlund 2016) The three protagonist-narrators are Dawn Chapman, Ramsay Roothoorp, and Linda Ryu. Dawn Chapman is a good-looking woman of twenty-nine years with a degree in “environmental studies” (9). Her crew nickname is E. which is short for Eos, the goddess of dawn, and in E2 she holds the position of “MDA, Manager of Domestic Animals” (7). Ramsay Roothoorp is an inveterate womanizer of thirty-six years and a “lit major” (111). His nickname is Vodge, which is short for “Vajra, the thunderbolt that Indra, Indian god of rain and thunderstorms, hurls down at the earth” (48), and in E2 he holds the positions of Communications Officer and Water Sys- T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 131 tems Manager. To understand why Boyle gave Ramsay this uncommon nickname, one needs to know that in the years before B2 the real biospherians built a brick hotel in Kathmandu, which they called the Hotel Vajra, taking the name from “the Sanskrit word for ‘thunderbolt,’ the Tibetan Buddhist symbol of the power of the enlightened mind.” (Reider 2009: 50) The third protagonist-narrator is the Korean-American Linda Ryu, a disgruntled woman of thirty-two years who has “only a B.S. in animal sciences” (7) and whose name might well refer to the verb ‘to rue.’ She is “not really all that pretty” (7), and her nickname, which she hates, is Dragon Lady, later shortened to Dragon and then changed into Komodo. 4 She feels she has been rejected because she is “Asian” (8), and she serves throughout as the voice of disappointment, jealousy and even hatred. In the first part of the novel, Dawn, Ramsay and Linda present one chapter each, in the second part, their sequence is unaltered but now each has his or her say three times. In the third part, each gets even four chances to present their views of the events, and in the last and shortest part each is again limited to one chapter. Altogether, then, each narrator is in charge of nine of the novel’s twenty-seven chapters. From Huckleberry Finn’s “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter” (Clemens 1962: 17) to Holden Caulfield’s “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born” (Salinger 1951: 3), confessional I-narration in vernacular language and with direct addresses that create immediacy and transform the readers of a written into the listeners of an oral text, has served as a genuinely American form of presentation. In The Terranauts, Boyle uses this strategy to enhance his narrators’ reliability and make them establish close contact with their readers. Thus, Dawn punctuates her narration with phrases like “you probably don’t know this” (4), “forgive me for saying this” (7), “just think about it” (8), or “but let me explain” (12). Ramsay addresses his audience even more frequently with statements like “and you know what? ” (33), “believe me” (39), “as you might expect” (44), “but let me back up here a minute” (46), “at the risk of trying your patience” (55), “forgive me” (55), or “but you know what I mean” (55). And Linda uses the same strategy when she says “I want to tell you” (58), “let me tell you” (58, 73), “just let me say” (59), “I don’t have to tell you” (60), “do I sound bitter? ” (64) or “believe me” (66). All of these and dozens of other questions, interpolations, exclamations and affirmations create the atmosphere of an ongoing conversation, and it 4 The “Dragon Lady” was introduced in 1935 by Milton Caniff in his comic strip Terry and the Pirates, embodying the stereotype of Asian women as strong and mysterious. - Ramsay explains that the Terranauts realized that this was “faintly racist” and therefore they “settled on Komodo, as in Komodo dragon, the big deadly lizard of the Indonesian archipelago” (48). Peter Freese 132 comes as an irritating surprise when later statements like Dawn’s “it doesn’t go beyond this page” (212) or Ramsay’s “there probably aren’t many people reading this who don’t know what came next” (476) and this is “why I’ve written this account in the first place” (476) correct the illusion that the three narrators’ stories are immediate oral reports and imply instead that, despite their colloquial language, they are written and, one has to infer, well-considered reports. The decisive narratological aspect of a story told by an I-asprotagonist is the temporal distance between the experiencing I and the narrating I, because it is this distance which signals the narrator’s development and his or her maturation as brought about by the quasi autotherapeutic act of giving order and meaning to an experience by telling about it. Boyle inserts passing remarks which signal that all three narrators tell their stories retrospectively, and sometimes these signals are rather difficult to recognize. Thus, Dawn mentions that during her trip with Linda to Tucson, “the radio was playing a tune by a singer who would kill himself a month after closure” (23), she says that “the lyric” (23) of his song was “Here we are now, entertain us” (23), and she adds that “the singer droned, soon to be dead, though he didn’t know it yet - or maybe he did.” (23) Since closure takes place in March 1994, the singer referred to must have died in April of that year. If one can identify the line quoted by Dawn as coming from “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana with Kurt Cobain as lead singer, and if one remembers that he committed suicide on April 5, 1994, then her cryptic reference proves that she tells retrospectively. But when she adds that what her best friend Linda wanted, “she wasn’t going to get. Not now - and I think I knew it even then - and not years from now either” (24), her “I think I knew” irritatingly relativizes the time of her telling. Later, however, Dawn’s several remarks about the limitations of her memory - “If I remember rightly” (216) or “I don’t really remember” (217) - and her passing references to “a kind of bitterness none of us could have imagined at the outset” (86) or to the fact that a particular hoot “was to become our team anthem” (89) clearly show that she tells from a point in time which allows her to look back upon her two years in E2. She confirms that when she says about her marriage in the ecosphere that Ramsay looked “as if this was all a big joke, which, in retrospect, I suppose it was” (379). And her remark that “in the aftermath, people said I was too hard-core” (469) with regard to her decision to stay in E2 for another mission implies that her telling must even take place after March 1996. Ramsay also punctuates his story with hints like “of course I didn’t know then what I know now” (35) or that thoughts about what he had done to Dawn “really didn’t cross my mind, or not yet anyway” (290), and he, too, uses the revealing term when he says that the sudden rise in temperature did not bother him “except in retrospect” (186). The only narrator who does not emphasize the retrospective nature of her narration is Linda, who uses T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 133 the phrase “as best I remember” (195) only once when she tries to date a specific event. One problem with Boyle’s protagonist-narrators is that their equally colloquial, sometimes even slangy and, with regard to sexual matters, rather blunt voices sound very much alike. The artistic wordplay that distinguishes other Boyle novels is greatly reduced and, if it occurs at all, not reserved to one narrator. Thus, Dawn puns that Diana Kesselring’s nickname is Meadowlark or just Lark but that her job as crew captain is “anything but a lark” (83). When Linda talks to a reporter hoping for an affair, but then realizes that he only wants to sound her out on Dawn, she equivocates: “and it dawns on me - Dawns - just what’s going on here” (395). When she buys a Canon Eos camera to make photos of Ramsay and Judy, she points out that this camera is especially appropriate because it has “Dawn’s crew moniker stamped right on the face of it” (500). And when she arranges for Dawn to meet her at the window, she waits for her far into the night, and ends the novel by ambiguously stating: “The night deepens, deepens again, but Dawn never comes.” (508) Unusual comparisons can also be found in the reports of all three narrators. Thus, Linda compares the wildly dancing G.C. to “ouroboros swallowing his own tail over and over again” (199), observes that putting one’s faith in Judy is “like trusting a rattlesnake not to bite you the second time you swing open the door to toss a rat in its cage” (445), and compares clouds to “whipped cream on top of a root beer float” (447) and a stand of saguaro cacti to “a troop of people getting held up by a gunman” (500). Ramsay says about his team-mate Gyro’s uncoordinated dancing that “he looked like a pole vaulter coming down hard over and over again” (347). When he oversees Dawn’s striptease for her boyfriend at the window, he sees the latter’s figure “looming in and out of the weak sepia light like a big fluttering vampire bat in one of the Dracula movies” (108). And when he talks to Mission Control on the phone, he hears the operator’s voice at the other end as “thin and slippery, Vaseline on a wet branch” (339) and Judy’s voice “like the blade of a stiletto extracted from a block of ice” (339). When Dawn speaks about Ramsay’s shocked reaction to her telling him that her birth is due, she describes him as with “one hand snatching at the air as if he were on a crowded bus and fumbling for a strap to hang on to” (410), and an early reaction of hers to Linda she calls “no more than a fluctuation in the flight I was on, the first stage of the rocket falling away while the payload hurtles higher and ever higher” (17). All three narrators are also, if only rarely, capable of lyrical intensity. Thus, Ramsay describes his team-mate Gretchen’s soft crying as “a sound like rain in the gutters on a night when you never suspected a storm was brewing.” (244) or says about his barefoot walk through the ocean biome that his “toes read the soft trucked-in earth like braille” (124). Dawn describes “a February morning in the high desert, everything in bloom with the winter rains and the light spread like a soft film over the spine Peter Freese 134 of the mountains” (4) or talks about “the black vacancy of the desert and the star-strewn sky that drew down like a curtain to meet it” (171). And Linda refers to somebody’s eyes as “hazel, with the minute hand of a tiny golden clock in the iris of the one nearest me” (395). With certain exceptions, then, as for example Ramsay’s preposterous macho references to “the bachelor king’s erotic fantasy obliterated by a dramatic display of prosimian territoriality” (183) or his “shallow go-straight-for-the-target brand of inveterate male obliviousness” (247), the three narrators’ voices are widely interchangeable, and the reviewer of The National was right when he deplored that Boyle does not “bother to differentiate the voices of the narrators, which is odd, because usually he’s very agile.” (Anonymous 2016) This, however, is not the only problem, and Ron Charles (2016) correctly pointed out that all three of Boyle’s protagonist-narrators do not seem to have really matured during the two-year course of the mission and deplored that “Dawn, Linda and Ramsay are just as gossipy and small-minded at the beginning as they are at the very distant end of the novel.” Obviously, this weakness has to do with the fact that Boyle puts the Terranauts’ sex life in the center of his novel. 5. “The Irresistible Fantasy of Sex under Glass” In her opening chapter in the “Pre-Closure” section, Dawn tells about how in her final interview she is asked whether she is on the pill and has a love affair, and that alerts readers at the very beginning to the fact that Mission Control foresees sexual activities in E2 and tries to prevent pregnancies. In his initial chapter, Ramsay muses about his constant interest in sex, admits that he has “always been quick to arousal” (54), describes his secret affair with Judy, refers to his relationship with Rhonda Ronson, imagines that once inside E2 he “could fuck” (41) all four women on the team, and tells about his last intercourse with Judy in the public restroom a few hours before closure, thus devoting practically all of his opening statement to his sexual needs and exploits. And in her first chapter, Linda talks about her desperation about being rejected, her drinking habit, and her disappointing affair with Dennis who was only “going for a random fuck or two,” but was “pretty much a zero in bed” (63) so that she “would have been better off masturbating” (64), and then speaks about her hatred of Ramsay and her view of Dawn’s lover Johnny as “a jerk” (68). Thus, sexual activities constitute the center of all three protagonistnarrators’ lives, and this does not change at all after they have entered the ecosphere. In the “Closure: Year One” section, right after having entered E2, Dawn recalls in great detail her last lovemaking with Johnny and then muses about the “primitive” way in which a woman like her “responded T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 135 reflexively to a deep male voice, as if it were a rutting call” (93). By the end of the first week, she performs a striptease for Johnny at the visitors’ window. Ramsay tells that he was sexually aroused by observing Dawn’s performance, talks at length about “the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass” (109), relates his urges to Adam and Eve procreating and grants them ‘scientific’ dignity by claiming that “in the worlds we were projecting, sex and genetic diversity were key, for our species and all the others too” (109). When the jealous Judy criticizes him for playing in the mud with Dawn, he admits that he acted “like some hormone-challenged teenager” (114). Being constantly aroused, he experiences E2 as “a hormonal accelerator […] a kind of perpetual steamy night of the adolescent soul” (123), and in a sleepless night he helps Gretchen Frost, the Manager of Wilderness Biomes, who is four years older than he and “unstylish, unhip, frumpy” (119), to rescue a wounded galago and then sleeps with her. The next day he talks to Judy on the phone about sex and declares that he is “more a doer than a talker when it came to sex” (130). Meanwhile, Linda overhears a phone conversation between Ramsay and Judy, learns about their secret affair, and decides to use her knowledge “to [her] advantage” (133). Dawn’s lover Johnny visits Linda and they sleep with each other. Talking to Dawn, who confesses that she still loves Johnny, Linda lies to her and muses: “On some level I’ve slept with him for her, though I couldn’t tell her that, because on another level I’d done it because of her, to spite her, to get some of my own back in a relationship that was all one-way now.” (147) Later, Tom Cook aka Gyro, the Technosphere Supervisor, walks out into the rain forest where he lies down and masturbates. This is monitored by one of the omnipresent cameras, and the people at Mission Control argue about whether it is what Judy calls “anomalous behavior” (147) or just a reaction to a normal need. In June, Dawn confesses that she does not take the pill and insists that also scientists have sexual needs. She talks about her physical by Richard Lack, the Medical Officer, and his praise of her as “a perfect physical specimen. A paragon” (159). She finds Gyro’s masturbation natural - “He had his urges, just like anybody else” (166) - and is aroused by thinking about it. Ramsay is aware that he should “never have started in with Gretchen” (177) since the affair has turned into “a full-on disaster” (178). On the Fourth of July, the Terranauts have a beach party and swim naked. Ramsay is lusting after Dawn and, while he tries to hide his erection, he is pursued by lovelorn Gretchen. Linda is relieved that Johnny has not told Dawn about their intercourse and learns from Gretchen about her aborted affair with Ramsay. She promises Gretchen to keep it a secret but then tells Johnny about it. Dawn is asked by G.C. to be kind to Gyro. When she is, Gyro prompty falls in love with her, but she rejects him and insists that “I wasn’t going to sleep with anybody for any reason other than mutual desire and love” (215). Thus, when he comes to her room and presents her with “a package of peanut M&M’s” (217) which he has Peter Freese 136 smuggled into E2, he only gets some French kissing. Dawn tells Linda about it, who states that “you’ve got to have something more than just, what, playing with yourself? I mean, for your own sanity.” (219) Dawn tells Linda that even Richard made a pass at her, touching her breasts and telling her “how important, how vital, an active sex life is to good health” (221). Gretchen gets slowly back to normal, but Dawn cannot “help defending” (223) Ramsay, who flirts with her and as a Christmas present gives her a piece of sugarcane with a note that she should come to his room to get more. He recalls his tryst with Gretchen, the embarrassing way she pursued him and even wanted to marry him, and how brutally he rejected her, and he reflects about “the detours with Judy, which [Dawn] didn’t know about, and Gretchen, which she did” (248). When he says “I’m a temporizer, a diplomat, a talker - above all, a talker” (251), he contradicts his earlier statement that he is “more a doer than a talker when it came to sex” (130) and thus again confirms that he has no principles. When the drunken Dawn comes to his room, he presents her with a spliff of cannabis indica, they kiss, and - his tale ends. But then Linda reports that Dawn told her “she had sex with Ramsay” (256), the man whom Linda considers “the one shitheel any woman with any sense would have steered clear of” (256). She is “jealous” (257) and reveals that in their talk Dawn has defended Ramsay and argued that she needed sex. By February, Linda goes to a bar every night to get drunk and, two days before the celebration of the first year of closure, finds out that Johnny, Dawn’s former lover, is now together with Rhonda Ronson, who once dated Ramsay. Dawn no longer cares about either and confides to Linda that she has been missing her period for two months. In the “Closure: Year Two” section, Dawn consults medical handbooks and explains her missing periods as “hypothalamic amenorrhea” (272), lack of menstruation due to malnourishment. She and Ramsay try to hide their affair, although they rightly assume that meanwhile all the others know about it. Gyro again visits Dawn to profess his love and calls Ramsay “a cheat” (276). Dawn, who now knows for sure that she is “in love” (282) with Ramsay, realizes that “getting pregnant, knocked up, would be the end of everything we’d worked for” (280). When she feels certain that she is pregnant, she informs Ramsay, who is “infuriating, hurtful, acting like a shit” (284) and puts the blame solely on her. Richard notes that something is wrong and asks Dawn to see him. Ramsay feels that Dawn betrayed him by not taking the pill and refuses to bring another child into an overpopulated world. But he still loves her and soon regrets his behavior. They meet for a secret talk, in which Dawn tells him that Richard has confirmed her pregnancy. Ramsay admits his lack of “empathy” (294) and demands an abortion. When he says that to Richard, the latter tells him that he is “not even human. Untermensch -” (298). In another talk with Dawn, Ramsay apologizes and promises to stand by her, but then he talks to Judy and is aroused by her high heels. When Linda hears from T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 137 Dawn that she missed her period, she expects that Dawn will have to break closure and she will get the chance to replace her. She drinks too much and her attempts to begin an affair with Gavin Helgeland fail. When Dawn rejects her advice to accept an abortion, Linda reveals her friend’s pregnancy to Judy. In mid-April, Judy tells Dawn that she knows about her pregnancy, that they will not break closure, and that it has to be either an abortion or a birth inside E2. Dawn realizes that Linda must have betrayed her to Judy, informs her teammates about her pregnancy, and receives nasty reactions (328). When Johnny comes to the window and asks Dawn about meeting again after leaving E2, she says no. Mission control sends in a pamphlet about abortion, but Dawn knows she will not allow it: “This was my baby. This was my body. And nobody was going to tell me what to do with it.” (335) Observing how nastily Dawn is treated by the others, Ramsay stands up for her but insists on “the mission über alles” (336). He talks to G.C. himself, who says that an abortion done by Richard is the only solution. Ramsay hesitates, and thus “nothing’s settled” (344). Then Ramsay has “the first inkling of the notion that would redeem the whole mission” (349), which hits him when Dawn says “You’re the father, aren’t you? - Well, act like it.” (349) Linda is furious with Dawn, because her chances of taking her place are dwindling. Coming back from a failed vacation in Mexico, she learns from Gavin that Dawn is “going to have the baby” (357) and “she’s having it inside” (359). Judy informs her that Ramsay “schemed all this up” (359) and asks her to talk Dawn out of it. Linda talks with Dawn, who accuses her of having disclosed her secret to Judy and informs her that she is “getting married” (365) and that G.C. has suggested to Ramsay that he propose to her. He does, and it is “romantic” (366). She tells about the ceremony and that G.C. himself came to the window to talk to them about Ramsay’s plan to “milk the whole thing for its PR value” (368). Linda, speaking for Judy, still tries to talk Dawn out of it, but finally they tell each other the truth. Dawn realizes that Linda only wants her out in order to replace her and tells her to “screw yourself” (374). Dawn and Ramsay are married in a ceremony that is broadcast nationwide. Ramsay reports that the wedding “precipitated a whole shitstorm of intramural friction” (381) and that “the rest of the crew was almost hysterically resentful” (381). His erotic excitement is gone and he is not “prepared to be a father” (382). A talk at the window with Judy, who wears no panties and spreads her legs for him, makes him confess that “I was an incarcerated sex fiend” (384). Afterwards he has disappointing sex with his wife. In mid-June, Dawn’s pregnancy is officially announced, and the news about “the first child born off-earth in the history of humankind” (386) is a big success. Ramsay’s main aim is still to keep closure. In E2, resentment grows because “we were no longer selling team solidarity so much as the miracle of generation under glass” (389), and it comes to a bitter confrontation between Dawn and Gretchen. Linda Peter Freese 138 now knows that she will not replace Dawn and is “pissed” (393). Since also her failed attempt to get closer to Gavin makes her drink too much, she is on the verge of badmouthing Dawn when Johnny appears and saves her from making that mistake. Gavin, who is closer to Dawn than to Linda, takes Dawn to the window to talk to Linda, and they become somewhat reconciled. Meanwhile, in E2 “the food thefts begin in earnest” (403) because pregnant Dawn needs more calories and all team members are constantly hungry. Dawn reports that “the ninth month was probably the worst” (407) but will not let her crewmates down. “On September 20, 1995” (412), her daughter is born and christened Eve. Ramsay cannot stand to attend the birth. When the child is shown at the window, Dawn feels that “we were pioneers of a new world and a new way of thinking” (413), and Ramsay says in an interview that if the child had been a boy it would have been called Adam. Most of the crewmates eventually come to see Eve’s value to the mission. Dawn carries her around in a papoose, and “within a week” is “back to [her] normal duties” (416). With food becoming scarcer and Dawn needing an extra portion, the others are increasingly disgruntled. At a meal Gretchen attacks Dawn, a row starts, and Ramsay is beaten up by his team-mate Troy. He cannot establish empathy with his daughter, who to him is “an excrescence, an irritation” (423). He reports that by November “nobody was getting enough to eat and everybody was getting on everybody’s nerves” (426). After the team barely survives a dangerous decline of the O 2 -level, Ramsay, “a celebrity now, a kind of eco-saint” (440), thinks about how to earn money for his family in the future. When he broaches that subject to Dawn, she coolly states: “I’m not going anywhere” (443). Linda reports that she has been selected for the next mission and is certain to become “a model Terranaut” (446). When she talks to Dawn at the window, the latter says “I’ve got something to tell you.” (455) In the “Reentry” section, Dawn reports that she is met with disbelief when she announces that she will stay in E2. Even Ramsay is against it, and the Terranauts take a vote which comes out 7: 1 against her. She realizes that “if I stayed inside, Linda was the odd one out” (465). She talks to G.C. about the “practicality, continuity and, most of all, publicity” (467) of her decision, and he asks her to bring in Ramsay, who needs time to think about it. They decide that she will stay inside, Ramsay will come out for two hours and then go back in, and they will announce their plan at the time of reentry. Dawn will “break the record for the most consecutive days anyone had ever spent in an enclosed self-sustaining system” (470), and she knows “what a sacrifice [Ramsay] was making” (470). Stepping out of E2, Ramsay is enchanted by the open world, especially the women in heels. G.C. publicly announces their plan, and Ramsay explains that “we were going to have generational continuity between the missions” (475). For him this is “the single defining moment of all of T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 139 our lives” (477), but “did I give even a glancing thought to my wife and daughter? No, I didn’t.” (477) He eats and drinks too much, has a charged talk with Judy, whom he still finds attractive, and is suddenly certain that he will not go back in. Shucking his team overalls and looking “like somebody who had no principles, who had never had any principles, who was driven by the raw impulses of the id” (480), he runs in his underwear out into the desert where he falls asleep in “the greatest crisis of [his] adult life” (481). Linda and two of the new crew members find him outside the airlock and bring him to G.C., whom he tells that it is all Dawn’s fault. Since, not to endanger the project, his failure must be hushed up, and they pretend he had an accident and make him hobble around in a cast. Because he knows enough to blackmail the organization, he is promised a job and a salary. He piously talks about Dawn and “what I’d done to her, the guilt of it that tore me awake in the morning and wouldn’t let me sleep at night” (487), and about his growing love for his daughter. After two weeks he goes to the window to talk to his wife, who now is “the shining star of the whole enterprise” (490), but they have nothing to say to each other. Once more rejected, Linda goes through “the worst humiliation of [her] life” (495) and refuses to speak to Dawn. She is given a check, a contract as Executive Vice President, and a guarantee to be MDA for the next mission. She accepts and, “heartbroken” and “defeated” (497), starts “plotting [her] revenge” (496). Her only aim is “to bring them all down, one by one, and climb right up on the ladder to occupy the space they vacate” (499). She buys a camera, and in early April waits at a motel to catch Ramsay and Judy after she has detected some suspicious emails. She secretly photographs them and now possesses incriminating pictures. She arranges a meeting with Dawn at the window, wanting to show her proof of Ramsay’s betrayal, but Dawn never comes. Of course, Boyle carefully researched novel contains a number of passages that deal with such specific E2-topics as the detailed and knowledgeable description of the ecosphere and the daily work of the Terranauts with the domestic animals, the numerous plants in the five biomes, and the complicated machinery, the importance of their shared meals and the consequences of their steadily growing hunger, the enmity between individual members and the gradual disintegration of the team into two hostile factions, the problems caused by Mission Control’s unceasing surveillance and interference, the unexpected drama of the fight between the galagos, 5 a threatening electricity shortage, the near fatal decline of the 5 Here, too, Boyle closely follows his sources. Reider (2019: 162) reports that B2 contained “playful little African primates called galagos, commonly known as ‘bush babies’” (78), that there were four of them, namely “Topaz, Opal, Oxide, and William Kim, the Biosphere’s little tree-dwelling primates, who became like the biospherians’ pets” (146), and that they “did not fare much better than their fellow primates, the humans; two baby galagos were born inside Biosphere 2, but two of Peter Freese 140 O 2 -level, and many others. But the preceding summary clearly shows that Boyle focusses on the complicated love life of his three protagonistnarrators and that about half of the eight Terranauts do not acquire an individual status and remain shadowy figures in the background. Dawn’s, Ramsay’s and Linda’s foibles and shortcomings, their impulsive actions and petty squabbles, their rather immature bondings and separations, their disappointments and delusions, their veiled resentments and poisonous jealousy dominate the novel and make it into a sequence of silly intrigues or, in the eyes of several critics, an “ecological soap opera.” 6 Michelle (2016) and Andrew J. Jiang (2016) might have been too harsh when they respectively decreed that “the three narrators are thoroughly unlikable. Each expresses a sense of self-righteousness that is meant to be a defense of their actions but turns out to be an indication of the egos at work” and that “the characters are generally contemptible [and] share something in common: unlikeability.” But it is true that all three protagonist-narrators possess a high degree of self-righteousness that borders on narcissism and often display an adolescent pettiness. The driving force behind their actions is sex, and Clark Spencer (2017) rightly observed that “though the experiment is scientific in nature, the crew members in Boyle’s book come off more like college freshmen than serious-minded graduate students.” Dawn, the all-American cheerleader-type, is an affable and telegenic naïf who coolly acts out her sexual wants. Ramsay, the always randy Lothario figure, is fixated on his fantasy of ‘sex under glass.’ And Linda, the backstabbing Korean-American who considers herself a victim of racism and sexism, not only plans revenge but also searches for sexual satisfaction. Jonathan Miles confirmed such an estimate when he said: Ramsay, for instance, is fixated on mostly one thing: “the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass.” From the novel’s opening scenes, when Dawn’s final interview with the project’s management begins and ends with questions about her sex life, this is Boyle’s fixation too - the erotic potential of men and women thrown together in a locked environment, utopia as a wet dream. Even Linda, the disgruntled outcast, falls prey to this pelvic tingle: “But they’re stuck,” she says to Dawn’s boyfriend on the outside, after she’s slept with him. “I mean, don’t you find that fascinating? Or sexy? Or whatever? ” (Miles 2016) the others fought with each other, sometimes violently, and one died of electrocution while exploring the Biosphere’s machinery”. 6 Both Zucker (2016) and Harrison (2016) call the novel an “ecological soap opera.” Michelle (2016) speaks of “a soap opera under a bubble” and “a soap opera in book form.” Jiang (2016) refers to it as “a disappointing soap opera.” Hitchings (2016) calls it “an upmarket soap opera.” And Scholz (2017) dubs it “eine Seifenoper.” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 141 It is Linda who offers the most appropriate comment on the novel’s ongoing circle of sexual encounters when she sarcastically comments: “G.C. should stage La Ronde next, because that’s what it’s been like lately” (307) and thus links the tedious sequence of short-term affairs in The Terranauts to Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial play Reigen (1897), her familiarity with which is highly improbable and yet another example of Boyle’s tendency to intrude. 6. Religion versus Science When John Allen and his team started to build their Biosphere 2 in 1987, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative of 1984 had fueled widespread interest in the new frontier of space, and the construction of a scaled-down and self-sufficient replica of the earth made people think of the creation of a new paradise. Reider characterizes the public reaction to the fascinating venture by saying that “to America, Biosphere 2 seemed simultaneously a potential utopia in space and an escape vehicle from the distressed Planet Earth - both a remade Garden of Eden and a Noah’s Ark fleeing toward the stars,” and she comments that “it might appear surprising, on first glance, that the stories of genesis should resonate so strongly during the creation of Biosphere 2, among a group of people who were hardly Bible readers. But the decidedly secular builders were not the only ecologists of their time to find meaning in biblical myths.” (Reider 2009: 77, 92) Boyle adopts such biblical parallels for his novel, in which the relation between science and religion is frequently, and often ironically, thematized. Thus, when in reaction to a life-threatening drop of the O 2 -level the Terranauts quarrel about whether they should break closure, Gretchen wants to get out because she is afraid of lasting brain damage and says that she plans to go on writing papers and “use all the brain power God gave me” (431). When Ramsay, the aggressive atheist, skeptically asks “God who? ” (431), she exasperatedly retorts “I believe in science! ” (431) and thus revealingly mixes religion and science. Gretchen’s muddled argument illustrates what Boyle observed in a 2016 interview with Amy Brady: We have forsaken religion as a kind of voodoo in favor of the rationalist’s religion, science. But, of course, as we have decoded the human genome and mapped out our neurological and endocrine functions, we see that free will is very much a mixed bag - more and more we understand that we are driven by biological necessity, which only makes sense, given that we are walking aggregates of cells. Needless to say, science doesn’t give us the ultimate answers any more than religion does - somewhere out there, distantly, the two converge and we are left, sadly, with a big dense expanding cloud of voodoo. (Qtd. in Brady 2016) Peter Freese 142 The Terranauts generally consider religion an outdated superstition, and Ramsay expressly rejects Christmas as “beyond irrelevant” and as “a coercive brainless holdover from primitive times” (237). But they nevertheless find the analogies between God’s creation of paradise and their construction of a new and self-sufficient man-made world so compelling that they cannot but think of their project in terms of Christian history. Thus, when Richard refers to the ecosphere as “the Garden of Eden set down on the deck of an aircraft carrier” (83), Boyle has him borrow this phrase from Roy Walford, the medical officer of the first biospherian team, who used it to express the innovative fusion of religion and science. 7 Tricia Berner, one of the new project members, calls E2 a “New Eden and all” (140), and Ramsay relates it to “the peaceable kingdom” (171), conjuring up both the eschatological state inferred from the Books of Isaiah and Hosea and the Sermon on the Mount, and the famous picture by Edward Hicks. The Terranauts think of Jeremiah Reed, “the visionary who’d dreamed up the project” (12), as “G.C., short for God the Creator” (12), and they call Darren Iverson, the millionaire who finances the project, “G.F., short for God the Financier” (14). Judy Forester, the chief aide and mistress of G.C., is called Judas “because she was a betrayer, or at least that was her potential” (12), and Dennis Roper, who is in charge of Mission Control, is called “Little Jesus” (12). Therefore, after Ramsay has betrayed his ‘God’ by sleeping with Judy and the freshly cuckolded but unsuspecting G.C. lovingly escorts him to the ecosphere, he extends the analogy by musing: “If God evicted Adam from the Garden of Eden for the sin of disobedience - or, as some people maintain, for getting down and dirty with Eve - my own deity, G.C., put an arm around me and walked me out the door […] to the airlock of the New Eden” (57). It is in this context that both Richard and Linda ironically refer to the festive pre-closure dinner as “The Last Supper” (51, 58) and that Linda’s characterization of Ramsay as “the serpent, the seducer, the liar and cheat and rotten core of the whole crew” (62) and “the true snake of the crew” (64; see 49) assumes an additional meaning. Biblical parallels are also evoked when Ramsay talks about the harmless snakes they brought into E2 and says that “ours was the kind of paradise in which the serpent was represented by two species only” (123) and therefore is “an innoxious paradise” (123). Later, he uses another biblical analogy when he defends his “irresistible fantasy of sex under glass” (109) by arguing that no space colony could survive without procreation: […] if the humans don’t mate, don’t reproduce, what good is it? The Bible might be sketchy on all this, Adam and Eve hunkering down to generate two 7 See Reider (2009: 102): “the entire ecosystem would be unable to survive without a basement full of machines. Biospherian Roy Walford would later call it ‘the Garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier.’” T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 143 sons and then another son to replace the murdered one, two more sons after that and a pair of daughters as well, leaving open the question of where the sons’ wives had come from (unless God approved of incest or they found some other bright-eyed scampering hominid to trade genes with), but in the world we were projecting, sex and genetic diversity were key, for our species and all the others too. If E2’s raft of creatures failed to reproduce, then the whole thing was a bust. (109) The analogy between E2 and paradise is also called up when in a heated debate Gyro says about Dawn that “she’s pregnant for Christ’s sake! ” and Ramsay cryptically comments “Christ had nothing to do with it. He came way after.” When the irritated Gyro asks “after what? ” a smiling Ramsay says “Adam” (330). When an enraged Judy explains to Linda what has been decided in her absence, she says it was all Ramsay’s doing: “Spin it this way, he says, first child born off earth in the history of mankind, E2 the New Eden, make it biblical” (360). This is taken up when Ramsay and Dawn’s child is christened Eve and when Ramsay drives home the biblical associations by saying in an interview that if the child had been a boy it would have been called Adam. Later, Ramsay refers once more to the Bible when he says: “We might need our heroes and mad saints to live for us, but we certainly don’t want to exchange places with them and all the while we’re yearning for the sick thrill of their temptation and fall. Read Genesis. They got that right, at least.” (479) And since E2 is meant to be a clone of the endangered earth in which life might go on when E1 is destroyed, there is of course always an implied parallel to another biblical story, namely that of Noah’s Ark. But the Christian parallels and references are too fragmentary and dispersed to create a coherent subtext, and Jonathan Miles (2016) rightly observed that “Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism […] to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission. But Boyle is too agile and feisty a thinker to hew to this line.” It is in the context of the tension between religion and science, belief and knowledge that both Ramsay and Linda make comments which remain incomprehensible to readers unfamiliar with the history of B2. Ramsay begins his story by saying “They can call me a corporation man all they want, yet what’s a corporation really but a group of people getting together to advance mankind,” and then continues with the sudden disclaimer “and no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru, or not anymore, or he won’t be once we’re inside” (28). Later, however, he thinks about his need for a well-paying job after his time in E2 and speculates about leaving the ecosphere team because there he can only expect “minimum wage - cultists really didn’t get paid” (440). Linda, in direct contrast to Ramsay, says that “Mission Control worked us hard and got what they wanted out of us, the way any cult will. And we Peter Freese 144 were a cult, no different from any hippie-dippy commune except that we had science on our side, or thought we did.” (58) And later she deplores that she has never been to Mexico, although it is so close, and adds that “that just goes to show what giving yourself up to a cult can do for your travel horizons” (351). All these statements refer to the fact that critics who doubted the scientific dignity of the B2 project used to concentrate on the suspicious prehistory of John Allen and his play-acting friends and their ‘unscientific’ approach and began to write them off as just another of the many hippie communes of the sixties. John Allen angrily rejected his team being called a ‘commune’ or a ‘utopia’ and, as Ramsay does in the novel, insisted that it was an “organization.” (Reider 2009: 17) This, however, did not prevent the press from insinuating that B2 was not a scientific venture, and the worst attack came in April 1991 when Marc Cooper published his article “Take This Terrarium and Shove It” in the Village Voice. There he expostulated “The Media Loves It, Yale Loves It, Phil Donahue Thinks It’s Neat, the Smithsonian Lends Its Name, Scientists Take Its Money - So What if the Biosphere 2 Is Really Run by a Wacko Cult? Don’t You Want to Go to Mars? ” and condemned the project as a pseudoscientific sham that was run by a cult. (Cooper 1991: 24; Reider 2009: 168) Allen and other members of the project tried to defend themselves, but the press increasingly switched from discussing the scientific implications of the project to viewing it as a theatrical survival stunt. More important than the novel’s scattered religious implications is the fact that Boyle makes several of its actors clearly express his Darwinist convictions. Thus, at its beginning, Ramsay reports that every precaution has been taken to prevent medical problems in the closed ecosphere but that a serious illness of any of the eight Terranauts would nevertheless mean death, and he states: “Death was as much a part of natural processes as life, and in strictly Darwinian terms, practical terms, that is, it would be a boon for the other seven.” (30) In another context, he reflects that “there are winners and losers in this life” and adds: “Go ask Darwin. Or Spencer. Or Steven Jay Gould” (47), referring to the English naturalist who introduced the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, to the English philosopher who applied the notion of ‘the survival of the fittest’ to the realms of sociology and ethics, and to the American evolutionary biologist who showed that most evolution is characterized by periods of evolutionary stability infrequently punctuated by periods of branching speciation. Later, Ramsay observes that the growth and decay of different plants in the ecosphere happens “by way of natural selection” (299), and when the shocked Terranauts observe a wild fight between the galagos Lola and Luna, two of the small nocturnal primates from continental Africa which are on E2’s list of species, he comments that now they have become “spectators to the violence that was as elemental as life itself” (121). When Judy asks him on the phone what happened with the galagos, he looks out into the rain forest biome and says “It’s a jungle out T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 145 there” (131). And when Gavin says to Linda that his parents have told him they are praying for his success, Linda answers “what’s the use of praying in a Darwinian universe? ” (451). Dawn reports that at the climactic moment of closure, one of the Terranauts starts “hooting in imitation of the galagos” (82). The others join him, and “in the next moment we all took it up, filling the place with the ecstatic full-throated cries of another kind of primate, the apex predator of E2, its nurturer and winnower, its gods under glass, going ape” (82). Later, she says that “the ape hoot […] was to become our team anthem as the weeks drifted by” (89). This detail implies that humans are just “another kind of primate” who can all too easily “go ape,” with the idiom that means ‘to become very excited or uncontrollably angry’ now taken literally as meaning ‘to revert to being an ape.’ The notion of man as ape is again taken up in the context of Gyro’s masturbation. When the controllers debate whether this is “anomalous behavior” (151), Dennis says “apes do it, monkeys” (151), and when Judy interposes “we’re not apes” (152), Linda, who knows about Judy’s sexual transgressions, answers “I’m sorry, but that’s exactly what we are” (152). When Dawn observes about the pigs in her care that one could talk to them and “see the interest in their eyes when they recognized you as the tall ape with the bare feet and the bucket of slops in hand” (227), she once more uses the man-ape analogy. And when at the novel’s end the inebriated Ramsay suddenly realizes that he will not go back inside and runs away into the desert “like somebody who had no principles, who had never had any principles, who was driven by the raw impulses of the id” (480), he also ‘goes ape’ in the sense of giving up rational thought and reverting to his basic urges. The concept of man as a predatory primate lurking behind what on the surface is just an enthusiastic utterance, Dawn’s characterization of man as “the tall ape,” and Ramsay’s regression to “the raw impulses of the id” display Boyle’s Darwinian conviction, which also lies behind the novel’s bleak ending. Dawn decides against all odds to stay with her daughter in E2 for another two years. Ramsay, once the glowing defender of “the mission über alles” (336), puts his comfort and freedom above his duties and deserts his wife and daughter. Telling about his last talk with Dawn at the window, he rationalizes his behavior by speculating on how hard it is “to be married to an icon” (490), shifts the guilt for their separation to his wife by insinuating that there is “a point at which duty and determination become just another kind of fanaticism” (490), and then concentrates on his secret affair with Judy. And the humiliated and “heartbroken” (497) Linda single-mindedly devotes her whole life to “settling scores” (504) and achieving her personal revenge. Consequently, Boyle’s readers learn little to nothing about the results of the mission but have to recognize that one may take the greatest care and spend $150 million on an unheard-of ecological experiment, but that what will make it fail is not scientific miscalculations or technical mistakes but the incontrovertible Peter Freese 146 fact that human beings, as totally dedicated as they may be to a shared aim, will ultimately give in to their basic urges and ‘go ape.’ It is this view which Boyle also expressed in no uncertain terms in a 2017 interview: “On the surface, you’ve got these bickering characters who purport to be scientists. But, really, what it is about is an animal species. We are an animal species. We can’t separate ourselves from that whether we build a glass dome around it or not.” (Qtd. in Spencer 2017) 7. Plays and Novels, Films and Songs For the charismatic John Allen and his group, theater was a crucial means of relating their ideas and projects to real life. In the sixties, they started staging plays in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood in which the hippie counterculture originated. Then they went to New York where they rented a theater studio in Manhattan, and in 1969 they moved to New Mexico and used the family inheritance of John Allen’s wife Marie Harding to buy an estate near Santa Fe which they named the Synergia Ranch. There they lived together, dreamed of a better world, and combined their studies of philosophy, ecology and art with exercises in meditation, the study of group dynamics and strenuous work on the land. Every member of the group had to read an informal canon of texts thought necessary for what they considered a synergetic civilization, and their schedule consisted of “weekend theater practices, Sunday night speeches, intensive group self-examination work using Bion’s theories of group dynamics 8 and John Allen’s complicated thought-structuring exercises, and of course, nightly dinners together.” (Reider 2009: 93) Acting was mandatory because “on stage and in theater practices, the ranch residents were learning to toy with their identities and relationships, to work through historical patterns, and to experiment with future possibilities. Indeed, that became the name of their troupe: the Theater of All Possibilities.” (Reider 2009: 31) They not only performed on the ranch where they built a geodesic-domed theater, but also - later calling themselves the “Caravan of Dreams” - traveled around the world putting on “plays by every great theater tradition, jumping from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Goethe and Moliere to Bertolt Brecht; from Japanese Kabuki to Hindu kathakali dance theater to colorful European expressionism.” (Reider 2009: 32) The versatile John Allen, who had a bachelor’s 8 Wilfred Ruprecht Bion (1897-1979) was a British psychologist who studied group behavior. Allen got to know his work during his time at Harvard and it would become increasingly important in his life. At the Synergia Ranch, the members studied Bion’s Experiences in Groups: Human Relations (1948-51) in order to analyze their own interpersonal dynamics. - In Boyle’s novel, Ramsay says that there was a library in E2, containing among other books “Bion’s Experiences in Groups; Mumford’s Technics and Civilization” (52). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 147 degree in engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, was not only a gifted actor, but he also wrote poems and plays, and for him and his followers science and art needed to be combined. Reider observes that the performance they put on together as the Theater of All Possibilities, on stage and in life, was not merely an off-the-wall farce. It was a microcosm of a grander drama about humans and ecology at the end of the twentieth century. I discovered that the story was not just about one group of dreamers, but of a culture’s desperate quest to transform the destructive relationship between humans and the rest of nature; a quest to create a more beautiful and perfect world, and to create the human social forms up to the task. (Reider 2009: 10) When they started to build B2, which, as Allen insisted, was “a work of art as much as a work of engineering or a scientific experiment,” (Allen 1991: 3). Linda Leigh, who would become the Terrestrial Wilderness Manager of the first team, said: “The idea was that … everything is an illusion, everything is theater; the Biosphere is some of the most amazing theater that there is, so we’d better be good at being good actors.” (Reider 2009: 108) Before they began to build, the actors had performed Allen’s adaptations of Faust and of Gilgamesh, and played with parables about the exercise of power and the conquest of nature, and when they moved to the construction site, with Margret Augustine as director, in a ranch house built on a hilltop across from the rising Biosphere, they put on The Threepenny Opera, Deconstruction of the Countdown (a montage work adapted from the writings of William Burroughs), and Prometheus Bound, featuring Augustine herself as a silverpainted, glowing Prometheus. Even amid the rush of construction, the builders used theater exercises to work on their emotional responses and try to become more effective people. (Reider 2009: 131) When the first team entered B2, they kept up the tradition of “putting on skits and practicing theatrical exercises, but eventually these dissolved as some biospherians stopped coming to theater sessions.” (Reider 2009: 197) It was the tradition of the Theater of All Possibilities together with the fact that only few of the first team of biospherians had advanced scientific degrees that led to speculations about the project’s lack of scientific dignity, and journalist who adhered to the widespread notion that art and science are incompatible began to describe the group as just another commune with utopian ideas and Allen as their guru. Readers of Boyle’s novel need to know about this background not only to make sense of Ramsay’s insistence at the beginning of his tale that “no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru” (28), but also to understand Peter Freese 148 G.C.’s puzzling insistence that the Terranauts perform several plays and the importance which these plays acquire in the course of the novel. Before closure, Dawn says rather cryptically that “the project was as much about theater as it was science […]. But more on that later” (11), and concerning the Terranauts’ moving in and out of E2 during the months of preparation she comments “no matter: this was theater” (85). Ramsay admits that the attention-claiming marketing of the project includes a lot of theatrics and comments: “Call it science-theater. Call it a dramatization of ecological principles, under the guiding cosmology of Gaia” (41), thereby referring to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ ‘Gaia theory,’ which replaces Darwin’s notion of individualistic evolution with the concept that the earth as a whole functions as a self-regulating dynamic system. These general observations which use the concept of ‘theater’ in a metaphoric way become concrete when on the first day in E2, Dawn mentions in passing that she has “a paperback copy of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth” (96) with her, “which was the first play we’d be rehearsing inside - G.C.’s choice” (96). And a month after closure, Linda tells about an evening in a bar on which Tricia Berner talks about “The Skin of Our Teeth, which G.C. decreed was to be performed both inside and out” (139). Linda finds the play “corny, endless and outdated” (139), but Tricia argues that “G.C. is Mr. Antrobus. He did invent the wheel. And fire. And everything else.” (140) Gavin Helgeland chimes in with “plus there’s the whole environmental thing -,” Linda adds “and Biblical,” and Tricia observes that “E2 has all that going for it, New Eden and all, so it just seems natural -” (140). When Johnny skeptically asks about the play, “Isn’t that the sort of thing you only see in high school? ” (140), Gavin answers: “That’s not the point. The point is it’s got relevance for us, for E2 - Wilder was way ahead of his time there. I mean, global warming. Glaciers. The flood.” (141) In late May, Linda and Dawn spend “a whole two weeks of [their] evening free-time […] standing at the visitors’ window feeding each other lines” (144) from the play, with Dawn having been assigned the role of Mrs. Antrobus by G.C., who “is directing both productions, inside and out” (144), and Linda playing different minor roles. Apart from Tricia’s and Gavin’s rather vague hints at certain parallels between Wilder’s play and the Terranauts’ mission, so far it remains unexplained why a group of scientists embarking upon an unheardof experiment should engage in amateur theater and why they should produce a 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning allegory about the life of humankind, which gets its title from Job 19: 20 - “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” - and breaks almost every established theatrical convention. But then, a first tentative explanation is offered as to what G.C. might want to achieve with having his people perform this particular play, and it is Linda who states that The Skin of Our Teeth “is comedy and firmly tongue-in-cheek absurdist, the way G.C. (and to tell the truth, most of us) likes it and after T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 149 the earnestness of what we’re doing day in, day out, a few laughs are just what the doctor ordered” (144). By the end of June, Dawn mentions in passing that Richard uses “the mock-pompous delivery he brought to bear when he assumed the voice of the narrator during rehearsals of the Wilder play” (160), in February of the second year Linda says with regard to a new play that “the plan is to perform two consecutive performances, inside and out, as with The Skin of Our Teeth” (264) and thus confirms that Wilder’s play has been staged by both the E2-team and the outside crew: and in November Ramsay remembers that the crew had “been hard-pressed to find the relevance” (426) of Wilder’s play. The second play the puzzled Terranauts are ordered to perform is Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), a seminal work of the Theater of the Absurd. It is Linda who reports that the outside crew has “staged a public production of Rhinoceros as part of the buildup for the final selection, just to remind everybody of our commitment to theater and its foundational function” (264), but when shortly before the first-year anniversary G.C. announces that now they will have to produce The Bald Soprano, everybody is baffled. Malcolm disgustedly asks “what’s the obsession with the Theater of the Absurd? ” (265), and Linda rejects the play as “just stupid, that’s all, amateurish, like something you’d see in a TV sitcom if sitcoms allowed for long strings of non sequiturs” (265), but then she comes up with the rather cryptic explanation “Because we’re living it, that’s why” (265). As they did with the Wilder play, Linda and Dawn spend at lot of time at the window learning their lines, and now Linda describes Ionesco’s play as “a satiric thrust at middle-class banality and the meaninglessness of polite chitchat” (266). She adds that she cannot imagine what it has to do “with us, with the environment, with closure,” but “that’s part of G.C.’s mystique - he’s forever laying the unexpected on you, playing with the conventions, and when you think about it, that’s liberating, it really is, and no irony intended” (266f.) Later, Ramsay says to Dawn that they “could be doing Mr. and Mrs. Smith here” (289; see 439) and thereby refers to the London couple of the Smiths who in Ionesco’s play talk in non sequiturs and thus express the futility of communication in modern society. About the third and last play the Terranauts are asked to perform, Ramsay says: “What [G.C.] wanted was for us to give two performances, with an alternating cast, of Sartre’s No Exit, a play in which a man and two women are locked in a hellish afterlife in a single room, during which their only amusement is tearing each other to pieces” (427). At first he cannot make sense of that choice and comments: “If we’d been hard-pressed to find the relevance in The Skin of Our Teeth and The Bald Soprano, we were entirely clueless this time around.” (426) But then he recognizes the appropriateness of G.C.’s choice and understands that it is G.C.’s purpose “to defuse things. To make us act out our aggressions, even our hopelessness, and let us wallow in Aristotelian catharsis until we saw Peter Freese 150 our way to freedom, because we had an exit” (427). He also realizes the wisdom behind’s G.C.’s decision to have this play performed twice on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. By then, conditions in E2 have worsened and the performances are meant “to distract us as best he could” (437), and Ramsay describes in detail how “the zingers the characters threw at each other resonated inside us like bomb blasts” (438). The fact that Boyle uses a meanwhile proverbial sentence from Sartre’s play - “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” - as one of the mottoes of his novel once more confirms its central importance, because by the time the Terranauts perform this play they have come to a point where “everybody was getting on everybody’s nerves” (426) and all of them have learned the hard way what Sartre formulated as ‘hell is other people.’ It is with regard to the surprising role which theatrical performances played in the Biosphere project that Boyle’s artistic combination of historical facts and literary fictions becomes especially obvious. He adopts both the crucial role of the theater and the growing rejection of its ‘unscientific’ nature by the critics in the history of B2, but then he selects three plays which played no role in the real project but which he considers to be sufficiently familiar to his readers to make sense within the fictional world of the Terranauts. With regard to further literary references, here as in his previous novels Boyle shows himself as an extremely well-read writer who loves to intersperse his tales with erudite references to a wide range of books, films and songs. If he employs, as he usually does, an effaced omniscient narrator, his readers are impressed by that person’s knowledge, but if he has his protagonists tell their own stories, as he does in The Terranauts, he needs to make sure that their references are compatible with their presentation as characters. Since Dawn and Linda have degrees in environmental studies and animal sciences respectively, it is Ramsay from whom one most likely expects literary allusions, because he is the crew member about whom Dawn says that “you were the lit major, not me” (111) and who later reveals that he gave up his idea to become a biologist when he “discovered the power of the written word” (342). When Ramsay describes G.C. as “Vonnegut-tall, sixty and looking ten years younger” (56), Boyle lets him refer in passing to one of his own favorites. But when he reports that “William Burroughs” (51; see 53), whom also Linda mentions (see 265), is among the guests of honor at the closure celebration, Boyle once more uses the history of B2, because it was Burroughs who not only suggested that galagos should be included in the biosphere’s fauna, 9 but who also visited B2 under construction and faxed a note at the first closure in which he 9 “Before moving into the biosphere, eight crew members (four men and four women) traveled the world to collect thirty-eight hundred species of plants and animals to inhabit the experiment, including a small lemur-like creature called a galagos, T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 151 salut[ed] the eight brave Biospherians who embark today on this noble experiment. The Closing of Biosphere II is a turning point in human history, and a step in the right direction towards the development of mankind’s potential. The hopes of the Planet go with you into inner space, for the sake of the dream of outer space. And to those who ask you “Quo vadis? ” tell them: “Ad Astra per aspera! ” ( Gray 2018) And when Ramsay explains that “we were trying to emphasize the way our new technics melded art and ecology in a synergistic flow” and that “Burroughs’ books - especially Naked Lunch and the cut-up texts like The Soft Machine and Nova Express - helped push our thinking in new directions” (51f.), he refers to Burroughs’ speculative ideas about an impending merging of science and art which greatly influenced Allen. When a jealous Judy, infuriated by Ramsay and Dawn playing in the muck of the pig sty, takes her lover to task about his undignified behavior, Ramsay retorts that it “would be bootless” to tell her that he is not unfaithful. She does not understand the archaic term and asks “Bootless? What the hell is that supposed to mean? ” whereupon he explains: “Useless. You know, as in Shakespeare? ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.’” (114). What Ramsay quotes here are the second and third lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, and although it would be far-fetched to try to establish parallels between the speaker of the sonnet and Ramsay, it is quite appropriate that a literature major has such a quotation up his sleeve. When later Ramsay is fishing for tilapia and Dawn, who has just had a difficult talk with G.C. about what to do about her pregnancy, joins him, she is disgusted about the leeches stuck to his thigh. He tells her that they entered E2 as intruders and then explains to the readers that if you want leeches you must stand still, “like the old leech gatherer in the Wordsworth poem. Who baited them with his own blood.” (344) Here, Ramsay’s reference to Wordsworth’s 1807 poem “Resolution and Independence” seems to be hardly more than a proof of his wide reading, but when one considers that the leeches got into E2 as “stowaways” (344) just like the baby which Dawn is going to have, and that later Ramsay confesses that he cannot bond with his newborn daughter, whom he harshly considers “an excrescence, an irritation” (423), and states that he had “an easier time bonding with the leeches in the fish ponds (pun intended)” (423), this turns out to be one of Boyle’s characteristic erudite allusions. The most unusual literary reference, however, occurs when Troy, the emergency dentist who has just beaten up Ramsay, sets out to repair the latter’s aching molar, and Ramsay thinks about “a Browning poem I hadn’t thought of in years” (426). All he can remember are the two lines “If hate killed me, Brother suggested by Mr. Allen’s friend, William S. Burroughs; ” http: / / www.artic.edu/ aic/ collections/ artwork/ 186153. Peter Freese 152 Lawrence, / God’s blood, would not mine kill you! ” (426), which come from the unidentified poem “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” In this 1842 anticlerical outburst, Browning has one brother express his hatred for a fellow monk who fails in his Christianity, and Ramsay uses this little-known poem to describe the relation between himself and Troy which is also characterized by discord bordering on hatred. Some other references are more obvious. When the Terranauts go for a swim in their artificial ocean, Ramsay is aroused by Dawn in a bikini and, jumping into the water, thinks of “John Cheever, one of [his] favorite writers” and his story “The World of Apples” (182) “in which the old poet is purged of his lust in a mountain pool” (182). When he cleans the stables with Dawn, whose most important job as “MDA, Manager of Domestic Animals” (7) is milking the goats, Ramsay thinks of Thomas Hardy and more especially of “the pivotal scene in Jude the Obscure in which Arabella Donn, the lusty farmer’s daughter, attracts Jude Fawley’s attention by flinging a pig’s genitalia at him” (111). He tells Dawn about it, who says that she does not know that novel but remembers “the movie Tess, though” (111), that is, Roman Polanski’s 1979 film version of Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). The rather obvious comparison of Dawn with Tess is later taken up by Dawn herself when she thinks of “Tess. The knocked-up milkmaid” (284). But when Boyle has Dawn tell Ramsay that she does not know Jude the Obscure, he obviously makes a mistake because earlier she reports that she and Linda have taken to call Judy “Jude the Obscure, given some of her counterintuitive pronouncements from on high” (12). Dawn rather surprisingly reports that she has taken “a shelf of books I always wanted to read” into E2, namely, “the Russians mostly - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn” (96). And later Ramsay will tell that during a staff meeting “E., who’d been plowing through the Russians in her spare time, gave a reading from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which seemed grimly appropriate” (179; see 181). When she remembers that during their training off the coast of Belize the Terranauts “read Dickens aloud round a campfire” (225) and tells about a rule they adopted “from Lord of the Flies that only the person in possession of the conch had the floor” (188), she refers to generally known writers. But her special favorite is E. B. White, the author of children’s books and a lifelong contributor to The New Yorker, because, in connection with her love for the pigs she is looking after, she talks at length about White’s essay “Death of a Pig” and his children’s book Charlotte’s Web (228), which deals with the livestock pig Wilbur, who is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, and his friendship with the spider Charlotte. Linda prefers to read “sci-fi (Clarke, Bradbury, Salmón and especially Clayton Unger’s Bigger Bang series, about terraforming distant planets)” (148). The British writer Arthur C. Clarke, who is best known for having co-written the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 153 the American writer Ray Bradbury, whose Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a classic, are established science-fiction authors, whereas Salmón and Clayton Unger’s Bigger Bang series, to which also Ramsay refers as Linda’s preferred reading (see 292), could not be identified and might have been made up by Boyle. When Linda talks to an emaciated Dawn at the E2 window, she says that she feels like “talking to the Tin Man - or the Tin Woman” (317). On the surface this is a reference to a character from Lyman Frank Baum’s famous children’s book The Wizard of Oz (1900), but it would not be beyond Boyle to insert a tongue-in-cheek allusions to another and widely unknown text. While they were erecting B2, the biospherians, who shared Gurdjieff’s views about man’s role in the development of the world, performed a play titled Tin Can Man, in which a group of people determine to take charge of evolution. (Reider 2009: 122) It is quite plausible that Linda is interested in science fiction, but when she comments on Dawn entering the ecosphere and her having to stand back by stating that “Samuel Beckett […] said it best: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’” (76), quoting a sentence from the end of Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953), when she says about people in a bar that they are “staring at the TV screen as if it’s the Book of Revelation” (65), and when she comments on the changing couples around her by saying that “G.C. should stage La Ronde next” (307), one can hardly help feeling that here Boyle intrudes. As far as films are concerned, Ramsay refers to Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still (42), a 1951 black-and-white sci-fi film about a humanoid alien visiting the earth; to Alien (129), a 1979 sci-fi horror film about an aggressive extraterrestrial creature that stalks the crew of a spaceship; to The Godfather, Part II (127), a 1974 crime film based on Mario Puzo’s novel about the Mafia; and to the 1971 musical Grease (485). Dawn alludes to both Star Trek (14, 155) and Star Wars (106); to Sigourney Weaver in Alien (273); to Silent Running (14), a 1972 postapocalyptic sci-fi film which depicts a future in which all plant life on earth has become extinct; to Eraserhead (412), David Lynch’s 1977 horror film about a man left to care for his grossly deformed child in a desolate industrial landscape; and to the musicals Hair (16), Man of La Mancha (16), and The Phantom of the Opera (169). And Linda refers to Ice Station Zebra (151), a 1968 Cold War era espionage film based upon a novel by Alistair MacLean; to Buckeroo Banzai (315), a 1984 sci-fi comedy film about a polymath who tries to save the world by defeating a band of inter-dimensional aliens; to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (312), a 1967 prison drama film starring Newman as an inmate in a Florida prison camp who refuses to submit to the system; to Stranger than Paradise (195), a 1984 absurdist comedy film; to The Sound of Music (151), a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and film about the Trapp family; and to “the live-action remake of The Jungle Book” (256). Most of these references are triggered by similarities, as when Dawn is afraid that her daughter might be born “all twisted and deformed like the little monster Peter Freese 154 in Eraserhead” (412) or as when Linda, on a hot day, observes that the greenhouses are “scorching, like the hole they put Paul Newman in in Cool Hand Luke” (312), but they do not evoke additional subtexts. Given the situation of the Terranauts, it is no surprise that the majority of the films referred to belong to the science-fiction genre, and Dawn makes that point when she says: “Star Trek was one of our touchstones, as was Silent Running, for obvious reasons.” (14) Apart from literary texts and films, Boyle also likes to use popular music to sketch in the cultural background and help to characterize his actors by their preferences, but in contrast to other novels, as for example Budding Prospects, 10 here these references sound no deeper metaphorical notes. Ramsay has brought his guitar into E2 and performs “a couple Nirvana songs” and “some early Dylan” (179), he loathes Nat King Cole’s “Silent Night” as “dripping treacle” but employs it in his attempt to seduce Dawn (253), and he loves the American blues singer Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, especially his 1974 Dreamer album (254). Dawn knows Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” sung by Kurt Cobain (23), and in her story about Linda’s trauma she refers to “Baba O’Riley” (214) and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (214) by The Who. She once attended “a Talking Heads concert at Bard” (223), knows that T. T. likes to listen to “industrial rock, Ministry or maybe Nine Inch Nails” (278), and is aware that Wayne Newton (375) is one of the best-known singer-entertainers in Las Vegas. And Linda reports that at the boarding ceremony “Fletwood Mac’s ‘Tusk’ - Just tell me that you want me! ” (73) - is played, compares Gavin’s eyes and haircut to “that singer in The Cure” (138), disgustedly reports that the jazz trio at Alfano’s “lurches from ‘Night and Day’ into ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ as if they’re doing a medley for schizophrenics” (315) and says that on another occasion Tricia sings “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha (449). 8. Conclusion Boyle’s carefully researched novel The Terranauts makes competent use of the actual history of an outstanding scientific experiment, translates the authentic Biosphere 2 into the fictional Ecosphere 2, and mixes historical facts and figures with invented ones. Boyle uses three protagonistnarrators, two of whom report from inside E2, whereas the third, who is not chosen for the team, tells about the events from outside. This strategy makes it possible to combine two initially positive versions with a critical and resentful one, but the three colloquial, sometimes slangy, and often sexually outspoken voices are insufficiently distinguished and sound too much alike. Half of the members of the E2 team remain shadowy figures 10 See Freese (2019). T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 155 in the background, and the three main characters are depicted as rather immature and superficial. Despite several carefully researched passages about the ‘scientific’ aspects of the E2 experiment, the novel focuses too much on the sex life of the characters with their impulsive bondings and separations and their petty squabbles and poisonous jealousy, and several reviewers have rightly criticized it as an ecological soap opera. Boyle’s attempts to construe a subtext referring to the biblical parallels between E2 and both the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark remain fragmentary, but his Darwinian convictions are convincingly expressed through numerous analogies and images. Due to the relegation of the narrative voice to the three protagonist-narrators, a major strength of Boyle’s previous novels, namely their abundance of cultural and literary references, is greatly reduced. But the authentic aspect of the function of theater for the Terranauts is well integrated, and with his choice of the plays they perform Boyle adds an intriguing aspect. With regard to certain literary allusions, however, one cannot help feeling that often they do not fit the characters expressing them but come from an interfering authorial voice. With its depiction of a group of humans under glass with their private lives under unceasing surveillance, The Terranauts might be read as an appropriate critique of reality TV and the Internet, but the novel can only partly convince because it is too limited to “the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass” to sufficiently unfold the promising implications of its theme. References Ambermoon (2014). “T.C.Boyle - Die Terranauten/ The Terranauts.” Büchertreff (March 14). [online] http: / / www.buechertreff.de/ forum/ thread/ 96027-t-cboyle-die-terranauten-the-terranauts/ . Anonymous (2016). “Book Review: Speculative fiction tale The Terranauts is satirically limp and dramatically dull.” The National (Scotland) (October 17). [online] http: / / www.thenational.scot/ culture/ 14872252. Book_Review__Specu lative_fiction_tale_The_Terranauts_is_satirically_limp_and_dramatically_dull/ . Anonymous (2017). “Another winner from TC - The Terranauts by TC Boyle.” bookmunch (October 8). 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[online] http: / / www.thatswhatsheread.net/ 2016/ 10/ book-review-terranauts-t-c-boyle/ . T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Terranauts 157 Miles, Jonathan (2016). “The Terranauts by T. Coraghessan Boyle.” The New York Times (November 11). [online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2016/ 11/ 13/ books/ review/ t-c-boyle-terranauts.html. Pariat, Janice (2017). “Book Review: The Terranauts.” livemint (February 17). [online] http: / / www.livemint.com/ Leisure/ vEFDrKyGXNIrfhYnAW00TJ/ Book-Review-The-Terranauts.html. Reider, Rebecca (2009). Dreaming the Biosphere. The Theater of All Possibilities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ropp, Thomas (1992). “Eco-Tourism.” Arizona Republic (May 17). Salinger J.D. (1951). The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Scholz, Aleks (2017). “Mein Leben mit TC Boyle: Terranauts.” Literatenfunk (January 9). [online] http: / / www.piqd.de/ literatenfunk/ mein-leben-mit-tc-boyleterranauts. Smiley, Jane (1993). “Snap, Crackle, Pop in Battle Creek.” The New York Times (April 25). [online] http: / / www.nytimes.com/ books/ 98/ 02/ 08/ home/ boylewellville.html. Steffen, Will/ Jaques Grinevald/ Paul Crutzen/ John McNeill (2011). “Review: The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369. 842-867. Swedlund, Eric (2016). “T.C. Boyle Revisits a Real-Life, Failed Futuristic Experiment in His Novel The Terranauts.” Paste (October 26). [online] http: / / www.pastemagazine.com/ articles/ 2016/ 10/ tc-boyle-terranauts-tk.html. Zucker, Jake (2016). “I Relate It to You.” Electric Literature (December 8). [online] http: / / electricliterature.com/ i-relate-it-to-you-fcec4537420d. Zucker, Jake (2016). “I Relate It to You.” The Observer (October 21). [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2016/ oct/ 21/ the-terranauts-tc-boylereview. Peter Freese Department of English and American Studies Paderborn University Germany ‘I grieve that grief can teach me nothing’ Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History Justyna Fruzińska The paper analyzes two essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Experience” and “History.” Taking as its point of departure a discussion of Emersonian idealism and its consequences for the writer’s experience of losing his son Waldo addressed in the former text, the paper argues that Emersonian idealism, instead of questioning the reality of the external world, tends to incorporate it within the subject. This can be most clearly seen in “History,” an essay in which history is perceived in a way that eradicates its otherness, turning the past into present. The article explores two tendencies coexisting in Emerson’s writings: one of integration and separation, and, referring to the Freudian category of melancholia, shows that grief as described in “Experience” may be read as related to either of them. “Experience” and “History” are two essays which perfectly illustrate two points Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing is suspended between: his idealism and his need for a recognition of the world’s reality, its tangibility. Looking at it from another angle, both essays discuss idealism, but while “History” may be seen as an epitome of Emersonian enthusiasm for the dissolution of the real, “Experience” gives voice to despair born out of this very “unhandsome” (as he puts it) character of things. This article investigates Emersonian idealism and examines whether indeed the views expressed in these two essays constitute absolute polarities of Emerson’s thought. As many critics have pointed out, the central emotional problem of “Experience” - the writer’s inability to fully acknowledge his son’s death - seems to be a direct consequence of his idealistic philosophy. If the outside world, external to the self, is at least unimportant (and there are AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0007 Justyna Fruzińska 160 many passages in Emerson’s essays which would suggest that it may even be non-existent), then this belief should hold true also for the traumatic experience of Waldo’s death. One must note that it is difficult to identify in Emerson’s texts a coherent system of ideas, since his writing takes him in different and often contradictory directions. He tends to use the same words in different ways depending on the context (a famous example being “Nature,” with the eponymous term taken in what he calls its common and its philosophical sense). Having said that, at least in the part of “Experience” dealing specifically with grief, Emerson’s idealism seems at first glance closer to Kant’s than to, for example, Berkeley’s. That is, what he disbelieves when speaking of Waldo’s death is not the existence of the external world, nor even its importance when compared to the world of ideas, but the human possibility of knowing the world as it is. Emerson is not discrediting the material world; he is mourning its unattainability, the fact that all we can ever know are ideas. In this essay, Emerson wishes not to be an idealist, but rather to believe in the external world, and, what is more, to experience it directly. He hopes that pain is what can make the world become more approachable: “There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth” (“Experience” 230). This, unfortunately, does not happen; the grief he feels after Waldo’s death is in a sense philosophically useless: “it never introduces me into reality” (“Experience” 230). There is always an “innavigable sea” between us and the world, meaning that we can never experience things as they are and even less become one with them. Still, we try to grasp the world, which breeds only frustration: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” Emerson says (“Experience” 231). The world is evasive, dissolving almost into a liquid under human touch, and yet at the same time solid, resistant to cognition, fenced off. In Stanley Cavell’s words, “The feeling as if we have to penetrate phenomena is evidently produced by a feeling of some barrier to or resistance in phenomena” (118). In any case, whether too liquid or too solid, the world of facts is, as is America in the same essay, “unapproachable” (244). It is like Kant’s thing-in-itself, always unknowable to the knower, and Emerson would like to transcend this natural limitation of human perception. Paraphrasing the famous passage in Nature, one might say that in the fragments of “Experience” dealing with how we see the world, there is nothing but the opaque eye-ball: our perception always tints its objects. Emerson speaks of the “many-coloured lenses” through which we look at things (231) - an optical term just like Nature’s “transparent eyeball.” However, while the famous reference to the eye-ball in Nature uses organic metaphors, the “lenses” in “Experience” could be seen as technological, that is - artificial. This choice of vocabulary adds to the overall sadness of Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History 161 the constatation about man being limited by his own faculties. It is as if we no longer see the world through our eyes - only through “lenses.” Of course, the suffering present in “Experience” is connected not only to the fact that Emerson wishes for a direct, unmediated contact with the world, but also because of the specific experience of a son’s loss - an experience especially troubling if it seems unreal. “Something which I fancied was a part of me, - which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar,” Emerson states (“Experience” 230). While the child seemed to be organically connected with the father, his death is only a mere idea. Cavell points to the fact that (as many critics have stressed before) Emerson never pronounces his son’s name in the essay, adding that Waldo was Emerson’s preferred name for himself (125). Thus, one might say his unwillingness or inability to admit that he has lost “Waldo” is a textual expression of the limitation he speaks of: he thought such death would mutilate him while it “leaves no scar”; he feels precisely that he did not lose any part of himself - that is, not a “Waldo.” 1 One may find here an interesting connection with Freud’s understanding of melancholia as opposed to mourning: Emerson cannot grieve as he would like to because, like a melancholic patient, he has identified with the lost object (both of them are Waldos, after all) and entombed it within himself. That is, while the essay suggests the problem is that Waldo’s death is too external (Emerson famously complaining “I cannot get it nearer to me” (230)), psychoanalytically speaking, one may see just the reverse being the case: Waldo is in fact too near to be properly mourned. This ties in with another remark made by Stanley Cavell, that the phrase “I cannot get it nearer to me” means in fact “there is no nearer for him to get since he is already there; somehow that itself is what is disappointing, that this is what there is” (133). Perhaps this is exactly why Waldo’s death seems to Emerson so underwhelming: already “being there” is precisely the problem; experiencing a loss requires a distance he does not have. This reading, obviously far from taking Emerson at face value, would suggest that the source of the whole trouble is not a Kantian idealism, in which reality is unapproachable, but a different, Emersonian idealism - one might say, consuming or incorporating experience to the extent that it dissolves. This particular brand of Emersonian individualism, and what it does to the external world in his writings, is especially visible in his essay “History.” Emerson’s philosophy, postulating the existence of one universal being underlying all its specific manifestations, when applied to history turns out to yield notably interesting results. One may see Emerson’s unifying impulse in a passage in which he speaks of the development of 1 Striking a more literal note, Ryan White suggests Emerson’s refusal to name Waldo stems from Puritanism’s distrust of excessive mourning (296). Justyna Fruzińska 162 human cultures, stating: “We are all rovers and all fixtures by turns, and pretty rapid turns” (“History” 18). Nineteenth-century thought, when dealing with human societies, was obsessed with classification, having inherited from the Enlightenment the conception of the stadial theory, and wishing to see in human history a linear, progressive development. Emerson, on the other hand, believes that nomadic and agricultural lifestyles are not antagonistic, since his vision of history is rather one of a cyclical game than a teleological progression. The differences science focuses on are mere appearance, hiding the true, unified nature of the world. History is for Emerson an unfolding of a single entity, the Oversoul, which permeates all of humanity. In his desire for unity, the writer claims that while from up close history may look chaotic and accidental, a pattern emerges from a distance. This is a statement similar to the one found in “Self-Reliance,” in which Emerson argues against consistency, stating that in any case, “These varieties [of one’s life] are lost sight of when seen at a little distance, at a little height of thought” (38). What is true of the individual life is also true of history, because history is to Emerson a larger version of the same universal current. This parallel between history and a single human life allows Emerson to undertake a peculiar treatment of the past. Since for Emerson genius is universal and representative, and since all men have a common source, one can easily see oneself in the great men of the past: “I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline” (“History” 8). This identification with historical figures suggests not only our equality to men of genius - it also brings us on a par, importantly, with men of the past. This, for Emerson, is what accounts for our interest in history: it seems to us relevant because we can easily identify with people from the past, knowing we would have behaved and felt the same; their lives can be appealing only insofar as they remind us of ourselves (which actually is a deeply egotistic motivation). Such a view leaves no room for reading about history because of empathy or curiosity about the other, since both empathy and curiosity rely upon a presupposition that other people are not us. Assuming that the difference between the self and the other is merely apparent, Emerson urges his reader to “transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself” (“History” 10). This has of course also profoundly political consequences, because if life is not about London and Athens, then it is suddenly about Boston, Massachusetts: not about the tradition of Europe but the present of America. This precept is a reiteration of the famous complaint from “The American Scholar”: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (70). On the social level, both essays suggest America does not need to look up to Europe anymore; on the level of the individual, both warn against too much veneration for the past. As in Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History 163 “The American Scholar,” in “History” Emerson urges his readers not to be intimidated by the past’s authority and to approach history “actively and not passively” (10). But in “History” he goes even further: he declares that man can “live all history in his own person” (10). Those other people to whom things happened in the past become part of one’s present self. It creates a space apart from time, in which the individual may commune with past thinkers, getting to exist contemporaneously with them. History, therefore, gets sucked into the individual, losing its separateness, its external character. Emerson believes that “All inquiry into antiquity … is the desire to do away this wild, savage and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now.… to abolish difference, and restore unity” (“History” 12). This is an extremely poignant statement: what he dreams of is effectively destroying history by eradicating its otherness, its difference from the present. People of the past can be of any interest only inasmuch as they resemble ourselves - and when they are discovered to do so, “the Here and the Now” may safely replace the “There or Then,” without our paying much attention to whatever may get lost in this substitution. Difference is according to this view only “surface” and “circumstance” - not the essence of history (12-13). This happens through a sort of conflation of the past and the present; history becomes compressed into the present moment through a recognition of the universal level Emerson is interested in: “when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more” (“History” 21). One may notice that such a conception of history has much in common with the Hindu treatment of the material world - and it is not an accidental similarity, since Emerson was fascinated by Eastern philosophy. Just as in Hinduism the world we know is only an illusion, Maya, and a result of the Atman’s play, a universal being masquerading as separate entities, so is history for Emerson only an externalization of the Oversoul, a disguise of the real and ultimate unity of all things. As Frederick Carpenter points out, at the age of eighteen Emerson was already an “orientalist,” having at least some acquaintance with the Far Eastern philosophies, which could account for the similarity described above (“Immortality” 211). However, one may find other sources of Emerson’s treatment of history, and closer to home. Carpenter speaks of the mystical tradition of seeing time and space as unreal, which can clearly be seen in “History” too (Emerson Handbook 185). At the same time, this is another point Emerson has in common with Kant, and his treatment of time and space not as properties of reality but structures imposed by the mind upon experience. Another possible influence, studied in depth by A. Robert Caponigri, is that of Protestantism. In his article “Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History,” Caponigri states that Protestantism’s overarching goal was to rectify history by going back in time to a true and original Christianity. In Justyna Fruzińska 164 order to do that, “the irreversibility of history demands that one have recourse to an ahistorical principle, such as Protestantism did possess in the principle of private judgment” (369). However, the result of applying this “ahistorical principle” was “not to rectify, but to abolish history. Any ahistorical principle so applied must end by ultimately questioning the reality of history” (369). That, for Caponigri, corresponds to the first phase of Protestantism, while the second one “reaches its logical terminus in the assertion that the spiritual life of man is intrinsically independent of history because it is orientated not toward history, but directly toward the absolute spiritual principles of the universe, which are above and beyond history” (369). He believes this orientation towards the absolute is the essence of Emerson’s philosophy too: “American Transcendentalism, viewed in historical perspective, is a moment in this second phase of the historical career of Protestantism,” as its “preoccupation is the reorientation of the spiritual life of man away from history toward absolute principles” (370). It is worth having a closer look at how Caponigri thinks Emerson makes this move away from the historical and towards the absolute. This, according to the critic, happens on three levels: Truth, Good, and Being. On the level of Truth, one directs oneself towards the absolute through intuition, famously valued by Emerson more than its opposite, called by him “tuition” (Caponigri 374). On the level of morality, the turn towards the absolute consists in directing oneself towards “the spiritual laws” which “are transhistorical in their very nature” (374). This means that “In his quest for the Good, [man] must look neither backward nor forward, but above; the spiritual laws directly define and constitute his moral state, so that through them he becomes identical with the absolute moral being of the universe” (375). What Caponigri speaks of is in fact the vertical morality Emerson inherited from Puritan thinkers. We might think for example of the writings of Jonathan Edwards, in which morality applies to the relationship between man and God, not man and his brethren - a way of thinking which will allow Emerson to ask about giving alms to the poor: “Are they my poor? ” (“Self-Reliance” 34). Finally, on the level of Being, Caponigri postulates that Emerson is troubled by the common philosophical belief that history happens through the progression of secondary causes. Instead, the Transcendentalist does away with such an understanding of causality by believing that “Every individual is the object of the causative force of the first cause,” being directly linked to the Absolute (377). What seems evident in Emerson’s writings, however, is more than just a search for the absolute to replace the particular, or the historical. Emerson’s wish to conflate the “There or Then” with the “Here and the Now” results in history becoming incorporated into the present; not merely becoming unimportant or unreal, but “eaten up” by virtue of the same impulse which permeates Emerson’s Nature or “Self-Reliance” with re- Emerson, Grief, and the Annihilation of History 165 gards to the real. It is an impulse of a self that consumes the external world, cannibalizes it. And this is what brings us back to “Experience” and its melancholia - a condition connected in psychoanalysis with cannibalism. As Perez writes, “In both anthropological and psychoanalytic literature, cannibalism is the desire to make what is other same, to annihilate or assimilate the other by incorporation” (10). Both cannibalism and melancholia mean that the outside object is internalized through “pathological hunger” (21). Cannibalism serves as a metaphor for the melancholiac’s “’impossibility’ of mourning, in that the desire to incorporate the other within the self fundamentally destroys its alterity or otherness, while at the same time the ingested other remains elusive even from within the self” (29). This is exactly what may be said to happen to Waldo in “Experience”: as the object of loss, he gets internalized or “entombed” so much that true grief seems impossible. This is also what happens to history in the second essay discussed here, robbed of its status as external to the subject. Let us not be fooled by Emerson’s enthusiastic tone in “History”: viewed from this angle, his celebration of the self which devours the world’s past may be perceived as deeply melancholic. As one may see from the analysis presented above, it is possible to read the relationship between grief and idealism in Emerson’s texts in two, quite different, ways. If we choose to believe Emerson’s declarations in “Experience,” what is troubling about Waldo’s death is the impossibility of interiorizing and truly feeling his loss. Thus, a writer obsessed with the unity of all things discovers that he cannot become one even with himself, looking as if from the outside at his own grief, separate from his own emotion, becoming other to himself. The “innavigable sea” between himself and his feeling, the separateness of his thinking self and his grieving self, is disturbing not only on the human level of a father reflecting upon his mourning over a child, but also on the philosophical one, contradicting the all-encompassing, all-incorporating impulse present in Emerson’s work. On the other hand, following Cavell’s interpretive leap used in his discussion of the confession “I cannot get it nearer to me,” one may say that the problem described in “Experience” is precisely the opposite: it is because of this cannibalizing, incorporating impulse visible among others in “History” that mourning Waldo becomes impossible: the experience is already so “near” that it cannot be brought any nearer since, as in melancholia, the child has been absorbed into the speaking subject - one might say, following Cavell, into the body of the essay itself. Works Cited Caponigri, A. Robert (1945). “Brownson and Emerson: Nature and History.” The New England Quarterly 18.3: 368-390. Carpenter, Frederick I (1953). Emerson Handbook. New York: Hendricks House. Justyna Fruzińska 166 Carpenter, Frederick I (1929). “Immortality from India.” American Literature 1.3: 233-242. Cavell, Stanley (2003). Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Stanford: Stanford UP. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983). “The American Scholar.” Essays and Lectures. New York: The Library of America. 51-72. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1955). “Experience.” Emerson’s Essays. New York: J.M. Dent. 228-252. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1955). “History.” Emerson’s Essays. New York: J.M. Dent. 7-29. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1955). “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s Essays. New York: J.M. Dent. 29-56. Perez, Emily (2016). Eat Me: Cannibalism and Melancholia. PhD Dissertation U of Southern California. [online] http: / / digitallibrary.usc.edu/ cdm/ ref/ collection/ p15799coll40/ id/ 220535 [2018, Nov 25] White, Ryan (2009). “Neither Here nor There: On Grief and Absence in Emerson’s ‘Experience’” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23.4: 285-306. Justyna Fruzińska Department of North American Literature and Culture University of Lodz Poland The Digital Citizen 2.0 Reconsidering Issues of Digital Citizenship Education Daniel Becker Recently, ‘digital citizenship’ has become a dominant umbrella term for describing a dynamic set of competences and skills children and young adults need to acquire in order to successfully participate in today’s digital world. So far many current definitions of the concept have applied a purely instrumental perspective on the relationship between an individual and his/ her digital environment: the ideal digital subject (i.e. the ‘digital citizen’) is prominently seen as an autonomous user with a stable personal identity who acquires certain competences that allow him/ her to actively control the digital environment as a merely passive tool for self-enactment. Yet, this instrumental perspective falls short on explaining some of the more versatile interactions taking place in an increasingly complex digital sphere. For that reason, the present paper suggests a critical reconsideration of the digital citizenship concept. More specifically, the paper argues for a more integrative approach to digital citizenship that combines the already existing instrumental aspects with a more interactional perspective. In order to underline the proposed reconceptualisation, the paper will make exemplary didactic suggestions on how future digital citizens can develop an awareness of this new interactional dimension in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom with the help of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle. 1. Introduction In recent years, digital citizenship has gained momentum as a prominent concept in educational discourse. Faced with the challenges and opportunities generated by new digital media and technologies, academics and educators alike have established digital citizenship as a “catch-all phrase to describe an ideal” (Ohler 2010: 40) for how children and young adults are supposed to act and behave in relation to an increasingly complex AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0008 Daniel Becker 168 digital world. As such, digital citizenship represents an umbrella term for a dynamic set of competences and skills that young ‘citizens-in-themaking’ (Owen quoted in McCosker 2016: 24) must acquire to become digital citizens with “the ability to participate in society online” (Mossberger, Tolbert & McNeal 2007: 1) in a reasonable and respectful manner. The present paper will critically reconsider this set of competences and skills used by current approaches to digital citizenship. More to the point, it will be argued that definitions of digital citizenship so far have dominantly relied upon a strictly instrumental perspective on the relationship between an individual and his/ her digital environment: the digital citizen appears in the shape of the active and autonomous user, with a stable and singular identity, who acquires competences and skills to control digital media and technologies as merely passive tools for his/ her own purposes. Yet, as more recent sociological and cultural studies on digital identity show, this instrumental perspective disregards the complex interactions taking place when an individual encounters digital technology. In today’s digital age, individuals do not only shape their digital environment but are, in turn, also shaped and influenced by this very environment. As such, one might argue, a concept of digital citizenship exclusively relying on an instrumental point of view cannot adequately prepare young citizens for the complex digital world they experience daily. Given this conceptual deficit, the present paper is a first attempt to reconceptualise the concept of digital citizenship by shifting from an exclusively instrumental vision to a more integrative approach that combines instrumental aspects with a more interactional understanding of today’s digital society. Since “knowing how to use ICTs in an effective, efficient and safe way […] is no longer sufficient to be an effective citizen in a technology-rich society” (Council of Europe 2017: 39), the current instrumental ideal of the digital citizen needs to be enhanced by a more reflective component: it will be argued that next to being a competent user of technologies, the digital citizen also needs to develop a critical awareness of the interdependence between an individual’s personal identity formation and his/ her digital environment. In fact, this essential awareness of one’s own dynamic self in a digital environment becomes the very foundation for productively and responsibly engaging with others in the online world. With this goal in mind, the paper proceeds in three steps: first, current definitions of digital citizenship will be presented to show the dominance of the instrumental perspective and the ideal of the autonomous user. Then, in the second part, this narrow instrumental perspective will be challenged by discussing aspects of an alternative, interactional perspective and by addressing the question how this interactional paradigm can be used to revise current conceptualisations of digital citizenship in the form of a critical awareness of interdependence. Finally, the third part The Digital Citizen 2.0 169 makes more concrete suggestions on how this new critical awareness can be practically developed and fostered in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom by working with Dave Eggers’ best-selling novel The Circle (2013). 2. The Digital Citizen 1.0: The Instrumental Perspective and the Digital Citizen as Autonomous User As pointed out above, many current definitions of digital citizenship cater to the image of the digital citizen as a self-reliant subject who is independent from an environment of digital objects, merely serving as tools for self-expression. This section will take a closer look at this very notion of the digital citizen as an autonomous user and the idea of an instrumental relationship upon which it relies. For that purpose, first the historical development of digital citizenship as a concept will be sketched, especially in relation to the role the autonomous user played in this development. Then, on that basis, examples of current definitions of digital citizenship will be discussed to examine the forms in which this ideal becomes visible today. 2.1. Looking Back: The Pessimistic Discourse on Cyberspace In order to properly contextualize the current prominence of the autonomous user, one first needs to understand the social and educational contexts from which the concept of digital citizenship first originated. More concretely, the firm establishment of the autonomous user in current debates can be seen as the continuation of a long-lasting tradition that developed out of both a pessimistic and an optimistic discourse on digital technologies entering society during the mid-1990s to early 2000s: the figure of the autonomous user is both a reaction against the dangers of cyberspace and an expression of a new-found emancipation in cyberspace. From a pessimistic perspective, in its early days the internet and its technologies were seen as a potential threat that negatively affected children and young adults in various ways. Thus, as digital technologies gained a broader public attention, complaints about misuses of cyberspace started to rise in popular debates: The popular press is increasingly reporting a pattern of misuse and abuse related to technology in our schools, homes, and society in general […]. Some examples include using text messages or social networking sites to intimidate or threaten students (cyberbullying) […], downloading music illegally from the Internet […], using blogs or social networking sites such as Facebook to complain about teachers, or using cellular phones to text or play games during class time […]. (Ribble 2015: 14) Daniel Becker 170 At the beginning, the emergence of cyberspace was perceived as a step towards cultural ‘degeneration’ as it misguided and manipulated young people into practising irresponsible, anti-social behaviour. Especially in an educational context, this highly sceptical perception of the internet quickly led to a collective call for more rules and regulations to promote ‘cybersafety’ as a key concept against the dangers of the digital world. The advent of digital citizenship as a concept is closely linked to this call for cybersafety; or, as Third and Collins put it, “the emergence of digital citizenship in policy and popular discourse has been profoundly shaped by the risk and safety paradigm that has dominated mainstream debate about emergent technology practices since the mid-1990s” (Third & Collins 2016: 41-42). Digital citizenship started out as one possible response to the dangers of the new digital realm. As such, at its conceptual core, it harboured the same negative connotation of cyberspace that already informed the development of other initiatives at the time 1 : Vivienne, McCosker and Johns argue that “the notion of digital citizenship is invoked negatively to address problems” as a concept that relies on a negative basis, since it is “frequently anchored in anxieties about users’ vulnerability online” (Vivienne, McCosker & Johns 2016: 1); these are anxieties, which still somehow echo in definitions of digital citizenship today. It can be argued that it is out of this negative basis that the ideal of the digital citizen as an autonomous user first derived. Simply put, the establishment of the digital citizen as an autonomous user figure can be understood as a reaction against the negative implications associated with cyberspace: it becomes the conceptual ‘stronghold’ against the inherent dangers and pitfalls of the digital environment. From the perspective of the pessimistic discourse, the relationship between an individual and his/ her digital environment is not perceived as a relationship of mutual exchange but rather as one of conflict and friction, since, in this environment, the individual is in constant danger of being ‘tempted’ and misled into irresponsible behaviour. By (directly or indirectly) placing the individual in the role of the autonomous user, the concept of digital citizenship relies on a subject position from which the power dynamics of this uneasy relationship can be reversed: seen from this position, the relationship of conflict, in which an individual rather resembles a passive entity being manipulated, is transformed into a hierarchical relationship in which the individual becomes the active subject that controls and uses 1 The call for cybersafety was soon met internationally by a plethora of responses on different levels of education, including the introduction of various acceptable use policies (AUP) at individual schools, the development of the National Education Technology Standards (NETS), or the inception of official laws such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act (2000). The Digital Citizen 2.0 171 the digital environment, which is ultimately diminished to the status of a mere tool. 2.2. Looking Back: The Optimistic Discourse on Cyberspace Yet, this pessimistic discourse only describes one side of the autonomoususer-coin. Next to this negative perspective a more optimistic and positive discourse on the digital gradually developed around the same time. This discourse replaced the fears associated with cyberspace with the vision of the digital turn as a turn towards innovation, openness and individual emancipation. From this perspective, which is most famously expressed in John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (1996), cyberspace is a realm of seemingly endless potentiality and “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth” (Barlow 1996: par. 7). According to this more libertarian discourse, cyberspace offers a more open alternative to the social, ethnic and even physical restrictions of ‘real life’ by creating a space in which individuals can express themselves freely and thus find a voice of their own “without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” (Barlow 1996: par. 8). In that sense, the digital is no longer a matter of danger but associated with personal empowerment, participation and a strong belief in individual agency; it becomes “a new ‘agora’ of free and democratic discussion” (Hintz, Dencik & Wahl- Jorgensen 2019: 28). This positive discourse on the digital also helped to shape the concept of digital citizenship at its beginning. Thus, digital citizenship not only developed as a response to a potential threat (see above) but also originated as an expression of a more positive outlook on the digital. Only one year after Barlow’s declaration, for instance, Katz was among the first to incorporate some aspects of a more optimistic agenda into his definition of the concept. For him, the digital citizen represents the values of openness and liberty who genuinely perceives cyberspace as “a force for good” (Katz 1997: n.p.), rather than a source of evil. In Katz’s account, digital citizenship becomes a synonym for individual self-realisation online. From this perspective, the ultimate goal of digital citizenship education is to train the digital citizen in how to use his/ her digital environment as a “tool for individual expression” (Katz 1997: n.p.) and as a device for online participation. Most importantly, although this perspective follows a different credo on the digital, these more optimistic conceptualisations of digital citizenship would also promote the autonomous user as a central ingredient in their agenda: here, the idea of an active and independent subject who enters a merely instrumental relationship with his/ her digital environment becomes the epitomic expression and conceptual manifestation of the empowered self in an open and benign digital sphere. The notion of Daniel Becker 172 the autonomous user who can act solely on his/ her own volition ideally mirrors the newly found sense of personal liberty in cyberspace: in this reading, the creation of a merely instrumental relationship between the individual as the user and the digital environment as the used advocates an individual’s agency and power to control his/ her digital surroundings for self-fulfilment and thus becomes a harbinger of a new form of emancipated individual that comes into being in the digital age. Seen from this historical perspective then, one can state that the ideal of the autonomous user is not a new phenomenon. Rather, the current prominence is the continuation of a historical development since the mid- 1990s, when, from the very beginning, the notion of the autonomous user gained a most important position in the conceptual genesis of digital citizenship. Historically, the dominant position of the autonomous user rests on the fact that it derived out of a dual tradition, with a firm foothold in two discursive spheres at once: at its foundation, the autonomous user is a hybrid figure that reflects both a negative and a positive stance towards the digital. As such, the autonomous user becomes the most central common denominator in which the two opposing discourses at the concept’s foundation meet and are united in the shared vision of an empowered subject in cyberspace. 2.3. The Autonomous User in Current Definitions of Digital Citizenship Current definitions of digital citizenship in the educational sector perpetuate this historical ‘legacy’: in their take on what it means to be a digital citizen, they also heavily rely on the existence of a self-reliant, independent subject and a purely instrumental understanding of the relationship between an individual and his/ her digital environment. More concretely, in more recent definitions of digital citizenship this prominent position of the autonomous user becomes visible on two different levels: first, on the level of how digital citizenship is defined in general, and second, on the level of the specific features that are usually ascribed to the figure of the digital citizen. First and foremost, the idea of the autonomous user actively using the digital environment as a tool permeates the very fabric of how the concept is described nowadays. Thus, in many current definitions an instrumental perspective on the digital becomes apparent in the fact that the notion of ‘use’ obtains a most central position when it comes to explaining what the concept of digital citizenship represents. In his monograph Digital Citizenship in Schools, Ribble, for instance, generally defines digital citizenship in terms of an individual’s “appropriate use of technology” and as an umbrella term for “the norms of appropriate, responsible behaviour with regard to technology use” (Ribble 2015: 15). For Bennet, Aguayo and Field digital citizenship is concerned with teaching children how to actively and successfully engage with the world The Digital Citizen 2.0 173 via “technological tools” (Bennet, Aguayo & Field 2016: 191). For that purpose, it is the educators’ task “to be good role models while using technologies” (Bennet, Aguayo & Field 2016: 191). Teachers become model users who serve as “diligent monitors of technology use and teach students the skills to use technology responsibly” (Bennet, Aguayo & Field: 2016: 192). As in Ribble’s study, here the digital environment is mostly reduced to the status of a neutral tool that one actively selects as a means to further a child’s knowledge of the world: “Educators can select technology to help students find a specific answer or let the child discover the world more broadly” (Bennet, Aguayo & Field 2016: 192). In summarizing many current definitions of digital citizenship, Hintz, Dencik and Wahl-Jorgensen also notice the trend towards a useorientation. As they point out, “digital citizenship is typically defined as the (self-)enactment of people’s role in society through the use of digital technologies” (Hintz, Dencik & Wahl-Jorgensen 2017: 731). This definition not only stresses the common use-theme but also highlights the fundamentally hierarchical active/ passive-binary structure underlying the instrumental relationship between the individual and the digital environment: from this perspective, digital citizenship is concerned with the citizen’s “empowerment derived from the use of digital tools” (Hintz, Dencik & Wahl-Jorgensen 2019: 15), where the digital environment is merely the passive foundation for the self-realisation of an active and autonomous subject. In the same vein, Furman defines digital citizenship as follows: “digital citizenship is a concept that involves the importance of teaching students about the responsible use of technology” (Furman 2015: 38). Once more, the definitional focus lies on the notion of use, with the teacher again being perceived in the position of the user role model: “teachers have a duty to talk to their students about the responsible use of technology, particularly if they are involved in using any type of technology with their students” (Furman 2015: 38). Students, as the soon-to-be digital citizens, are meant to follow this example of a technology-savvy user, as Furman underlines by additionally referring to the Standards for Students - devised by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) - which follow a similarly instrumental credo: ultimately, digital citizenship is about “advocat[ing] and practic[ing] the safe, legal and responsible use of information and technology” as well as developing “a positive attitude toward using technology” (Furman 2015: 38). As the ISTE student standards already imply, the dominance of the use aspect in general definitions of digital citizenship is not solely restricted to the academic realm. Rather, the instrumental perspective on the digital world also presents an essential factor in more popular and public approaches to digital citizenship. Thus, next to official statements such as Microsoft’s white paper on Fostering Digital Citizenship (2011), well-known public initiatives such as digitalcitizenship.net or Common Sense Media, to Daniel Becker 174 briefly name two examples here, likewise rely on the notion of use to explain their overall goal of educating digital citizens. In that sense, digitalcitizenship.net generally describes digital citizenship as “a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents to understand what students/ children/ technology users should know to use technology appropriately” (digitalcitizenship.net 2017: par. 1). Common Sense Media particularly stresses the active nature of the user: digital citizenship is about “making safe, responsible, respectful choices online” (quoted in Jones & Mitchell 2016: 2064). The digital citizen is the one to make choices via technological tools, not the one who has also made choices for him/ her in interaction with the digital environment. 2.4. The Autonomous User and the Specific Features of the Digital Citizen Leaving the level of general definitions behind, the prominent idea of the autonomous user is furthermore reflected in the figure of the digital citizen him/ herself. More concretely, by taking a closer look at the specific features that usually characterize this ideal, it can be argued that the digital citizen is commonly perceived as a user-figure in two ways, as the following section will show. Although there is no unified, singular definition of the digital citizen in current debates, many recent approaches to digital citizenship nevertheless essentially share the conviction that the digital citizen’s overall “ability to participate in society online” rests upon two pillars: they define the digital citizen as an individual trained in 1) digital literacy and 2) digital etiquette. These two basic pillars correlate with two different facets of the user ideal: the digital citizen is both a competent user (related to digital literacy) and a responsible user (related to digital etiquette). Thus, on the one hand, the digital citizen must “develop[] the knowledge, skills, competencies, confidence and capabilities needed to use, interact with, communicate through, learn with, work with, and create with digital technologies” (White 2015: 10). These competencies and skills for “managing information and communication in the rapidly changing and increasingly digital world” (Summey 2013: 3) include the ability of “finding and identifying resources” online, using “social bookmarking, online document platforms, wikis, blogs, social networks” (Summey 2013: 5), or knowing how to “mashup and remix content from multiple online sources” (Summey 2013: 6). The digital citizen, in other words, first of all becomes a user of digital technology in the most functionalist and technical sense of the word: the digital citizen is someone who is able to understand and critically reflect upon how to operate digital media and devices on a technological and pragmatic level and who, on that basis, can safely and skilfully handle digital media as tools for individual and cooperative purposes. To that end, several publications (e.g. Gould 2018, The Digital Citizen 2.0 175 Ribble 2009) and public initiatives (e.g. digitalcitizenship.net, see above), concerned with digital citizenship in an educational context, focus on providing practical guidelines for developing specific technical skills, including the knowledge of how to work with internet browsers and search engines, the competencies necessary to select and filter information, or the skills to adjust security settings on social media profiles. On the other hand, since operating digital technologies is often an inherently social act, the digital citizen additionally needs to become a responsible user who is concerned with “suitable and accountable conducts in cyberspace” (Atif & Chou 2018: 152). In this context, ‘use’ gains a different connotation: it does not describe technical proficiency but rather the socially valuable and context-sensitive application of digital technologies. As such, the digital citizen becomes a user of digital technology in the sense of applying digital devices in alignment with specific norms and rules of online behaviour, which, according to Watanabe- Crockett and Churches (2018: 38), include respect for the self (i.e. not providing personal information that might harm one’s reputation), respect for others (i.e. actively challenging cyber-bullying and being respectful and tolerant in online interactions with others) and respect for property (i.e. respecting copyright restrictions and knowing about online plagiarism). Generally speaking then, on the level of defining the digital citizen, the dominant ideal of the autonomous user becomes a complex ideal incorporating two different facets of use: speaking about the autonomous user means speaking about a competent user and a responsible user at the same time and thus seeing the digital citizen as a complex figure using digital technologies on both an individual and collective level, as well as in a technical and social sense. 2.5. The Autonomous User and Personal Identity in Current Definitions Before moving towards a critical reconsideration of this currently dominant autonomous user ideal, a survey of the ‘state of the art’ in current approaches to digital citizenship must not end without mentioning that the idea of the digital citizen as a user correlates with a particular perception of the user’s personal sense of identity. More to the point, in recent instrumental approaches to digital citizenship, personal identity is (directly or indirectly) perceived as a stable, singular and consistent entity that just needs to be expressed through the digital environment. In that sense, White, for example, discusses the notion of identity in terms of “identity management”, which is concerned with “us[ing] data to your advantage” (White 2015: 90). An individual has to learn how to adjust personal information, connections to other people and group memberships on social media profiles in order to ‘transfer’ one’s fixed identity to the digital realm in the best and most advantageous way possible. In a similar vein, Daniel Becker 176 Ohler discusses online identities in relation to how ‘true’ they are to one’s offline identity. While Ohler admits that cyberspace indeed provides the opportunity to actively construct identities, as a playground for “try[ing] on new selves to see how they fit” (Ohler 2010: 49), in his study these online identities merely remain more or less accurate reflections of a stable offline self. In cyberspace, “we can outright lie or be more honest than we have ever been” in regards to who we ‘actually’ are. Online identities can “hide our RL (real life) identities” (Ohler 2010: 49), yet, in the end, they do not influence or shape them. Personal identity remains a stable entity with which one can ‘play around’ online, yet which is never actually altered through these online interactions. 3. The Digital Citizen 2.0: Reconsidering the Autonomous User and the Instrumental Perspective And yet, this instrumental perspective and its conceptual figurehead of the autonomous user face some serious limitations, as they present a rather narrow and restrictive view on the interconnected digital world that many digital natives experience daily. In the context of a digitalized society, in which digital devices and media platforms increasingly permeate every nook and cranny of private and public life, and in which social media influencers, professional youtubers and subscriber numbers become signposts of a young generation’s lifestyle, the question arises if a concept of digital citizenship based on a purely instrumental perspective can adequately reflect and grasp the life many people live today or if this perspective of the autonomous user rather neglects some of the complexities of what it means to exist in a digital world. In their theory on the digital subject, Allert, Asmussen and Richter describe this problem of the autonomous user ideal as follows: Die Idee des autonomen Subjekts […] stilisiert das Individuum zu einem Heroen, der Kraft seiner Vernunft und Kreativität, die Bedingungen der digitalen Technologien erkennen, diese für sich nutzen oder sich von ihnen abgrenzen kann. Die Perspektive verkennt jedoch das Ausmaß, indem die gesellschaftlichen und technologischen Bedingungen unser Denken und Handeln mitbestimmen. (Allert, Asmussen & Richter 2017: 14) 2 The problem of the autonomous user ideal lies in the fact that it embodies a one-dimensional perspective on the digital, which utterly disregards the 2 “The idea of the autonomous subject […] defines the individual as a hero, who, through the power of his reason and creativity, recognizes the conditions of digital technologies, in order to use them for his/ her own purposes or to become independent from them. Yet, this perspective fails to recognize the extent to which social and technological paradigms influence our thoughts and actions.” The Digital Citizen 2.0 177 active nature and influence of the digital environment. It thus disregards the complex interrelations between individual and environment that characterize the contemporary digital climate and presents a simplified version of a world in which active and passive elements cannot always be clearly separated. Consequently, Allert, Asmussen and Richter argue that in increasingly complex digital settings, a simple active/ passive dichotomy of an independent user in a passive environment can no longer be maintained and needs to be challenged. They suggest that this notion of a solely instrumental relationship needs to be replaced by a relationship of entanglement (“Verstrickung”; Allert, Asmussen & Richter 2017: 9), meaning that the individual and his/ her digital environment are in constant and mutual interaction, where one constitutes the other and where definite distinctions between the controlling and the controlled become inevitably blurred. The present paper follows this conviction of entanglement and suggests that an interactional perspective on the digital world can become the foundation for reconsidering the concept of digital citizenship. For that purpose, first this interactional perspective on the relationship between the individual and his/ her digital environment will be described in general, before then turning to its specific implications for the concept of digital citizenship. 3.1. From Instrumental to Interactional Paradigm When taking a closer look at this alternative perspective, as it is prominently promoted in recent sociological and cultural studies on the digital, it is most important to notice that with a shift from an instrumental to an interactional paradigm both the role of the digital environment and the position of the individual and his/ her personal identity need to be radically reconsidered. Thus, first, in this new framework the digital environment can no longer be perceived in the role of a passive tool for selfexpression. As Hörning points out, while for a long time digital technologies were perceived as “Objekte, Instrumente, über die wir als aktive Handelnde verfügen” 3 , the current focus lies more on the question “was die Dinge mit uns tun, wie sie unser Denken und Handeln mitprägen” (Hörning 2017: 70) 4 . Representatives of an interactional perspective paint a more nuanced picture of the digital environment and define it as an active force in its own right, which possesses the potential to make individuals act (cf. Carstensen, Schachtner, Schelhowe & Beer 2014: 10). Digital technologies and media are perceived in the light of complex systems of signification, which play an integral role in the way an individual 3 “objects, instruments, that we control as active agents” 4 “what these things do with us, how they influence our thoughts and actions” Daniel Becker 178 constructs a meaningful relationship to the self and the world. Thus, far from being neutral transport vehicles (“neutrale Transportbehältnisse”; Fröhlich 2015: 100) for communication and self-representation, digital artefacts “materialisieren eine bestimmte Logik, bestimmte Normen, die wir als Botschaften empfangen und die in der Wechselwirkung mit dem menschlichen Subjekt Wirkkraft entfalten” (Carstensen, Schachtner, Schelhowe & Beer 2014: 12) 5 . The digital environment, in other words, is not the medium for expressing an already existing self but serves as a dynamic component for constructing the self in the first place. As such, Schachtner and Duller argue, digital technologies “greifen auch in die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung ein; ja sie werden oft zum Teil einer Persönlichkeit” (Schachtner & Duller 2014: 90) 6 . Secondly, this reconsideration of digital environments in a more active position correlates with a reconsideration of the hegemonic status of the individual. In an interactional framework, the individual must no longer be seen as a controlling and independent figure with a stable and singular personal identity but needs to be redefined in a more indeterminate position, which, according to Alkemeyer, is characterized by “Unvollständigkeit” (incompleteness) and liminality (Alkemeyer 2013: 34). In the relationship between the individual and his/ her digital surroundings, the individual is neither completely active, nor completely passive, but both at the same time: “Das Subjekt ist aber nicht nur Untertan, genauso wenig wie es nur souverän ist” (Schachtner & Duller 2014: 142) 7 . The relationship between individual and environment, therefore, is one of mutual interdependence, where the former hierarchy of the autonomous user and an instrumental relationship is replaced by a more balanced perspective on both sides, since digital practices and individual subjects constitute each other (cf. Alkemeyer 2013: 34). In this scenario of “Verstrickung”, the notion of the individual’s personal identity also changes accordingly. In contrast to the instrumental perspective, which shows personal identity to be a stable ‘offline’ entity that just needs to be expressed online, the interactional perspective follows a more dynamic understanding: since the individual is seen in constant negotiation with the digital environment, personal identity is no longer defined as an already existing state of being but as a continuous process of becoming (cf. Schneider & Friesinger 2017). Instead of a clear offline/ online distinction, the interactional perspective promotes the conviction that in the contemporary digital age, identity simply does not exist prior to and outside of the digital realm but is constructed and con- 5 “digital artefacts materialise a certain logic [and] certain norms that we receive as messages and that work in interaction with the human subject” 6 “intervene in the development of one’s personality; in fact, they often become part of our personality” 7 “the subject neither exclusively the servant nor the sovereign” The Digital Citizen 2.0 179 stantly negotiated in interaction with the digital environment; or, put differently, identity is a matter of “Interaktionsspiele […] die sich zwischen dem einzelnen Subjekt und seinem medial-technischen sowie seinem menschlichen Gegenüber entfalten” (Schachtner & Duller 2014: 134) 8 . In the end then, the notion of stability and of a genuine ‘real life’ identity as an autarkic entity is replaced by the paradigm of a transitory identity (cf. Schneider & Friesinger 2017), stressing the idea of a constantly evolving self in a constantly changing digital environment. 3.2. Direct and Indirect Forms of Digital Interaction In the contemporary digital world, this interplay between the individual, environment and identity more concretely manifests in two forms: on the one hand, it becomes directly visible in online contexts in which identity formation and self-presentation are at the very centre of attention (e.g. social media platforms) and, on the other hand, it can be traced more indirectly in online settings in which individuals merely look for information and commerce (e.g. search engines, online retailers). Both forms will be briefly sketched below. By now it is a common place argument that new digital technologies and devices for communication have created new opportunities for individuals to connect with others. Social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook have quickly become an essential part in the lives of many children and young adults (cf. JIM-study 2018) and have created thus far unprecedented possibilities for self-representations to a larger public (cf. Page 2012). Most importantly for the present context, these self-presentations on social media platforms rely on an intricate and complex interplay between an individual subject and the digital environment, which can be depicted as follows: 8 “interaction games […] that take place between the individual subject and his/ her digital as well as human counterparts” Daniel Becker 180 Figure 1: Interactional Dynamics on Social Media Platforms The interaction between the individual and his/ her digital environment is a twofold one. First, the individual interacts with the digital medium which is not just a passive tool, but an active part in the individual’s identity formation, as it allows some forms of self-representation while inhibiting others. Thus, in recent years, new media formats and genres to address biographical content have majorly contributed to the establishment of new identity discourses in youth culture: popular formats such as the Real Talk video and the Follow Me Around (FMA) vlog on YouTube or the Insta-Story on Instagram, for example, have helped to shape the image of the vulnerable and open self as an identity ideal, in the sense of individuals openly presenting their personal fears, emotions, inadequacies and desires to their audience/ followers. In this context, the medium is an important component in creating the cultural semiotics for expressing vulnerability, as when in Real Talk videos, many YouTubers show themselves in the intimate space of their bedroom to talk about personal matters. Linked to this first interaction, individuals on social media furthermore interact with other people on the platform. This happens in two ways: on the one hand, other people also represent themselves through particular media formats and thus serve as the social norm for an individual’s own identity formation. Many trending Instagram profiles, for example, feature pictures depicting full-body shots, fitness and workout sessions or close-ups of healthy food and thus advocate body positivity (cf. Wuri & Tambunan 2018) and physical attractiveness as central aspects of personal identity to which others should ‘live up’. On the other hand, other people directly or indirectly react to an individual’s selfpresentation via posts and comment sections, like/ dislike ratios or the number of subscribers/ followers, through which they can let an individu- The Digital Citizen 2.0 181 al know if the presented self is appealing and meets peer-group and societal expectations. Yet, this is only the tip of the interactional iceberg. Next to these more obvious dynamics on social media outlets, an interaction between the individual, digital environment and personal identity also becomes apparent in more indirect forms. Interactions, for examples, also take place when an individual simply searches for specific information on Google, or looks for new movies to watch on Netflix. In all these contexts, individuals encounter complex algorithms, which defy the label of a passive tool, as they actively and dynamically help to shape an individual’s view on self and society by selecting information and possible interests for the individual. The most mundane activity in the contemporary digital age, searching for information online, therefore, becomes a matter of constant interaction with the digital environment and its algorithms, as individuals are constantly faced with and react to an ‘algorithmic identity’ (cf. Cheney-Lippold 2011), which dynamically changes with the information they enter, accept or reject online. Seyfert and Roberge point out that nowadays algorithms are in fact so omnipresent in the digital sphere that there is hardly any realm of experience which is not somehow influenced by algorithms (cf. Roberge & Seifert 2017: 7), which has a long-lasting effect on how people perceive themselves and others around them. Algorithms often become normative ‘gatekeepers’ of culture and identity, as they might suggest some forms of culture and self-construction more often than others and thus actively contribute to shaping an individual’s sense of an ‘appropriate’ and acceptable personal identity (cf. Roberge & Seifert 2017: 22). In this overall environment, individuals live an ‘algorithmic life’ (Amoor & Piotukh 2016), in which, one can finally remark, a stable ‘offline’ identity does indeed not/ no longer exist. 3.3. Implications for the Concept of Digital Citizenship After discussing central aspects of an interactional perspective on the relationship between an individual and his/ her environment, one question remains: how are these considerations linked to the concept of digital citizenship? Simply put, as the brief analyses of social media and algorithms have shown, constant interactions with the digital environment - and, associated with it, a dynamic negotiation of personal identity - have become a quasi-omnipresent, daily phenomenon in the digital world many ‘digital-citizens-in-the-making’ experience today. Yet, current approaches to digital citizenship, with their instrumental hierarchies and dichotomies, have been utterly ill-equipped to capture and explain these complex entanglements. Consequently, the concept of digital citizenship needs to be reconsidered and the interactional perspective can become a good foundation for doing so. If digital citizenship education wants to teach children and Daniel Becker 182 teenagers how to responsibly and successfully move and participate in the present-day digital realm, it needs to be based on a firm understanding of that realm, especially its fundamentally interactional nature. This is necessary because it is no longer enough to only speak about the digital citizen in terms of a competent and responsible user. Responsible participation does not start with an individual’s knowledge of how to technically use digital devices or the knowledge of communicative rules and norms, but with the consideration of a more basic and existential aspect: it starts with an understanding of the individual subject itself in the digital framework. Only if digital citizens learn to understand the complexities and dynamics of how the self works in interaction with the digital environment, can they even begin to understand how to successfully interact with others within this environment. At its very core, therefore, a reconsidered concept of digital citizenship needs to be able to describe and reflect upon these basic individualenvironment dynamics and, for this matter, needs to incorporate aspects of an interactional paradigm in its conceptual design. This can be achieved by revisiting the foundations of the digital citizen figure. More concretely, the digital citizen’s two existing pillars (digital literacy and digital etiquette; see above) need to be complemented by a third one: while it is undoubtedly still important to know how to operate technologies and be tolerant and respectful in online communications, these pillars are not sufficient to adequately prepare children and young adults for a complex digital world, without a critical awareness of this digital world as a place of interdependence and entanglement. Based on the descriptions of the interactional perspective above, this awareness more specifically encompasses the following three interrelated dimensions: 1) Environmental Dimension This dimension refers to the digital citizen’s ability to understand the digital environment (with all its technologies and media formats) as an active component that can influence an individual’s thoughts and actions. In this context, and related to this ability, the digital citizen also needs to be able to perceive him/ herself in a passive position. 2) Identity-Related Dimension This second dimension is directly related to the first and refers to the digital citizen’s ability to perceive personal identity as a dynamic and transitory construct that is negotiated in interaction with the digital environment. For this ability, the digital citizen needs to be sensitized to the link between different technologies and media formats and the different self-conceptions they foster. In short, the digital citizen needs to be able The Digital Citizen 2.0 183 to differentiate between different digital genres and their implications for personal identity. 3) Affective Dimension The understanding of personal identity and the environment as dynamic and constantly changing can correlate with a feeling of ‘fluidity’: in today’s complex digital world, there appear to be no more fixed and stable foundations to rest upon; instead the default mode of being is one of repeated negotiation. In this context, the last dimension refers to the digital citizen’s emotional capacity to cope with the personal uncertainties resulting from a state of fluidity. Generally speaking, the digital citizen needs to tolerate and be open towards the unknown and, especially in the context of social media, needs to develop strategies to deal with negative personal experiences occasionally made in the process of negotiation. With this new pillar and its dimensions in mind, the revised model of the digital citizen can be summarized as follows: Figure 2: A Revised Model of the Digital Citizen In sum, the reconsidered composition of the digital citizen no longer exclusively relies on an instrumental basis but shifts towards a more integrative approach combining instrumental and interactional points of view on the digital. The ‘digital citizen 2.0’ rests upon a foundation of three pillars which constitute a perpetual interaction between a pragmatic component on the one, and a reflective component on the other hand. More specifically, the new conceptualisation no longer exclusively shows the figure of the digital citizen as an autonomous user but resets him/ her in the role of a more dynamic and reflective figure, whose actions in the Daniel Becker 184 digital realm entail five dimensions in total: the digital citizen 2.0 combines the knowledge how to technically operate digital technologies and how to adequately interact with others online (i.e. pragmatic component) with the ability to reflect upon the digital environment as an active influence, the ability to understand identity as a dynamic construct and the ability to cope with uncertainties (i.e. reflective component). 4. Practical Considerations: Developing Critical Awareness in the EFL Classroom with The Circle As with the other two pillars of the digital citizen, the third pillar (critical awareness) does not come naturally. Rather, children and young adults need to actively develop and foster it and, for doing so, they need didactic and pedagogical assistance. However, while there already exist some practical guidelines and frameworks for the development of a child’s more pragmatic user-skills and competences, practical considerations on how a more reflective component of digital citizenship can be fostered have been sparse so far. The last part of this paper can be regarded as a first attempt to change this practical imbalance by providing some didactic suggestions on how higher-level learners of English (Oberstufe) can develop a critical awareness in the EFL classroom with the help of Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle. 4.1. The Didactic Potential of The Circle Given the on-going debates in foreign language research about the sorts of literary texts and topics that should be discussed in contemporary language classrooms (cf. Fehrmann & Klein 2001, Fäcke 2009, Surkamp 2017), the first and most pressing question that arises in relation to The Circle is why this particular novel should be selected to foster EFL students’ critical awareness in a digital world. It will be argued that there are four reasons why this novel might be particularly relevant for that purpose: 1) Plot To begin with, the interaction between the individual and the digital environment is at the very centre of the novel’s plot: The Circle focuses on Mae Holland and her journey into the highly digitalized world of the Circle, the most influential software company in the near future. During this journey, Mae, as a new employee at the prestigious Circle campus, encounters many different digital technologies (e.g. the ‘SeeChange’ cameras), social media formats (e.g. the TruYou account) and algorithms (e.g. algorithms for calculating physical and mental health), which have a The Digital Citizen 2.0 185 long-lasting effect on her self-perception, thoughts and actions. As such, the novel provides a wide variety of examples of both direct and indirect forms of digital interactions (see section 3) that can be analysed with learners regarding their underlying structures and identity-related aspects. 2) Dramatization These various interactions are shown in a ‘dramatized’ fashion (cf. Bredella 2008): as many literary texts, The Circle addresses a mundane and familiar aspect of the reader’s everyday life (here: the daily interactions on social media and the omnipresence of digital technologies) and presents it in a slightly exaggerated and unfamiliar way. The novel takes the all-toofamiliar digital world “out of its ordinary context so that we as spectators can watch it, respond to it and comment on it” (Bredella 2008: 14). Eggers’ text puts today’s digital realm on a literary stage to foreground and make visible all the structures and dynamisms of the digital that are otherwise quickly overlooked in daily routines (including the active nature of the environment). Reading The Circle, therefore, becomes an experience of estrangement that ‘forces’ the reader to become aware anew of the digital world he/ she experiences daily, by considering it from a fresh perspective. This offers a perfect setting for the development of critical awareness: as banal as it may sound, in order to be able to reflect on the interactional nature of the contemporary digital society, soon-to-be digital citizens first need to learn to see these interactions and The Circle, by way of literary dramatization, can provide a fruitful starting point to foster this ability. 3) Narrative Perspective Next to being presented in a dramatized manner, the numerous interactions and their consequences are furthermore portrayed from a single narrative point of view, namely the figural perspective of Mae. The narrator grants the reader a detailed glance into Mae’s thoughts, emotions and fears and thus establishes the protagonist as a highly relatable and accessible figure. Regarding the development of critical awareness, this is important for three reasons: first, in contrast to a constantly changing narrative situation with multiple perspectives, the use of a stable perspective portraying the subjective impressions of only one of the characters can facilitate the reader’s “sympathy for and empathy with the protagonist” (Habermas 2019: 153), which, in turn, can generate a deeper immersion into the story world and a deeper understanding of the interactions Mae witnesses. Second, and related to the first aspect, the detailed internal perspective on Mae allows the reader to witness the affective dimension of interacting in a digital world, as the novel shows Mae’s changing sense Daniel Becker 186 of self, but also doubts and uncertainties upon being faced with complex and active digital environments. Finally, being confronted with such a fully-fledged, relatable individual and her subjective experiences in the digital world, the reader can perceive Mae as an exemplary point of comparison for his/ her own subjective experiences in the digital realm. Thus, an analysis of Mae’s transformation in the digital world can be used as a ‘stepping stone’ to discuss the transformative component in the learner’s own life. 4) Adaptation Another aspect of the novel’s didactic potential lies in the fact that the discussion of the novel can be combined with and enhanced by a discussion of the film version of The Circle (2017). The addition of audio-visual stimuli in the form of film not only broadens the spectrum of learning opportunities for different learner types (cf. Chilla & Vogt 2017) and helps to develop learners’ visual and media literacies (cf. Viebrock 2016); the film can also be more specifically used to deepen the learners’ understanding of the digital interactions portrayed in the novel by discussing similarities and differences of their representation in the film version. This comparison may range from using the film poster as a point of comparison (cf. Fisch & Viebrock 2013), which shows the symbol of the Circle with its interconnected lines - as a metaphor for the constant interrelations taking place in the digital world - to more complex comparisons of Mae’s identity formation in the digital framework of the campus. In any way, learners are required to once more deal with certain aspects of the novel in greater detail and, ultimately, must acquire a general understanding that different media formats (here: novel vs. film) can present the same content in different ways; the latter, as pointed out above, is an essential way of thinking in the digital age to understand how different digital formats can allow different forms of personal identity representation. 4.2. Approaches to Developing Critical Awareness with The Circle After generally sketching the didactic potential of The Circle as a learning material for digital citizens, this paper ends with some more concrete suggestions on how to approach the novel in the EFL classroom in order to foster higher-level students’ critical awareness of interdependence. To begin with, a teaching unit that aims at the development of critical awareness through The Circle must deal with all three dimensions of this awareness (i.e. environmental, identity-related, affective) to fully nurture a reflective stance in young digital citizens. While these dimensions constantly interact throughout the novel, The Circle offers particular passages in which one dimension becomes more prevalent and visible, and there- The Digital Citizen 2.0 187 fore easier to analyse, than the other two. With this in mind, the development of critical awareness through The Circle can best be implemented in the classroom by using what Thaler labels a ‘sandwich approach’ to the novel (cf. Thaler 2008: 105): after students have read the novel in their own pace at home, to gain a global understanding of the novel’s plot and characters, concrete tasks and activities in the classroom only focus on these specific passages of the text in which one of the three dimensions is clearly foregrounded, while other parts are merely presented in the form of summaries, provided by either the teacher or the students. In that way all three dimensions can be analysed in detail separately - though this separation must remain artificial - while still maintaining an awareness of their interrelation in the overall context of the novel as a whole. Furthermore, this fragmented approach generates opportunities for more open and cooperative learning arrangements. Thus, individual passages can either be discussed by different groups, who present the results of their task-based discussion to each other, or students can get the chance to individualize their learning process by working on pre-selected passages in their own terms and order (e.g. in the form of learning stations or week-plan activities). Below, three exemplary passages from the novel will be mentioned, with each stressing a different dimension. 4.3. Discussing the Environmental Dimension A student’s understanding of the active nature of the digital environment can be nurtured with a passage right at the beginning of the novel (cf. Eggers 2013: 1-15). When Mae first enters the Circle-campus, she quickly notices that most buildings are made of glass. She is especially fascinated by the on-campus glass cafeteria (cf. 15), where she can watch people eat from every possible angle, since even the floors and ceilings are glass constructions. This description of the cafeteria provides a metaphorical image foreshadowing a dominant theme in the novel: in the digital world of the Circle, every detail of life, even the most private and mundane aspects, becomes visible and can be seen by other people at all times, as if the self existed in a glass house. As such, the spectators in the cafeteria, looking at other customers, can easily be perceived as a representation of an anonymous mass watching someone’s self-presentation on social media profiles, which makes this metaphorical image ideal for sensitizing learners for the constant presence of the social other in the digital realm. Thus, before talking about genuinely digital elements in the novel in more detail, this initial passage can be used to discuss the general basis of a self-other interaction on social media and how this interaction with the social other influences an individual’s behaviour. In that sense, students may for example work on the following production-oriented task: Imagine you have the chance to eat at the Glass Cafeteria, where people can watch you eat from each side of the building, even from above and below. Create a daily Daniel Becker 188 vlog about your experience in which you describe your feelings in this situation. Was your behaviour different in comparison to a normal cafeteria? If yes, in what way? 4.4. Discussing the Identity-Related Dimension In order to discuss the process nature of personal identity in interaction with digital environments, it is best to focus on the protagonist Mae and the development of her self-perception in the course of the novel. Didactically, this development can best be shown when asking students to compare two scenes, one taken from the first half, the other from the second half of the text. More specifically, as a first scene, one can use her first day in customer service (cf. 48-54), when she is first introduced to the digital technologies of the company, while the second scene depicts her as one of the most popular live streamers towards the end of the novel (e.g. the passage when she visits her parents with a SeeChange camera, cf. 361-366). Students may first work in small groups, with each group only analysing one of the scenes individually, according to how digital technologies and Mae’s character are depicted. For that purpose, and in order to bring the interdependence between self-perception and digital environment into focus, the teacher can provide each group with a poster showing a silhouette of Mae’s head. The students’ task is to collect key words from the text that describe the digital environment (which are written around Mae’s head on the poster) and words describing Mae’s feelings and thoughts in this situation (which are noted down inside her silhouette head). In that way, students are able to visualize the fact that one’s self-perception is always embedded in a particular contextual surrounding. After the small groups have thus completed their poster, new groups can be formed, consisting of ‘experts’ for each of the two scenes who can present their results to each other. In this comparison students can ultimately trace Mae’s development over time (from an insecure person with seemingly nothing to tell, to a confident person often defining herself through her digital followers) and can recognize that her increasing involvement in digital interactions has a clear effect on her own identity formation. 4.5. Discussing the Affective Dimension As a dystopian novel, The Circle offers a broad variety of passages in which the feeling of uncertainty and fluidity, as well as the pressure of being constantly present in digital interactions become most visible. Just to name one example, these aspects can be seen in a passage when Mae is caught by the idea of improving her on-campus social ranking by becoming more active on different social media apps (cf. 190-195). In comparison to the other chapters, in this passage a change of narrative style The Digital Citizen 2.0 189 quickly becomes apparent: the narrator focuses more on numerical values by repeatedly referring to statistics and rank numbers, thus imitating Mae’s increasingly algorithmic perception of her own identity. This ‘algorithmic identity’ can be interpreted as something highly unstable, as Mae constantly feels the need to become ‘better’ and to be ranked higher by posting different facets of her own personality in different online contexts. The scene can be used as a stepping stone to make learners reflect on their own unstable self in digital interactions. Especially the need to be constantly present in order to generate more followers and subscribers is a phenomenon many digital natives might relate to in the context of their own Instagram or YouTube accounts. Raising students’ awareness of their own contextualized performance online, and thus of the inherent instability of the self, can be achieved by the following task: first, in a plenary discussion, students can brainstorm different contexts in which one usually posts personal information (e.g. personal profile, interest groups, job-related/ professional etc.). On that basis, and with the help of an Instagram post-generator - which allows students to write quasi-posts without actually posting them online - students are then requested to create appropriate posts about themselves for these different online contexts 9 . The most important aspect in this process is the students’ reflection on how their own ‘performance’ of the self changes from context to context, which can be achieved with a writing diary, in which students can capture their posting experiences, if necessary guided by simple wh-questions such as What sort of information do you provide in context x? Why do you provide this information in this context and not in context y? etc. In that way, students track their own changing personality online and can be made conscious of their own contextsensitive choices that establish their self-presentation in different situations. The results of their reflection can be presented in class (e.g. in the form of a slide show of their various posts), or, if students consent, can be published collectively on the school homepage as a class project on digital identities. 5. Conclusion and Further Considerations This paper attempted to showed that current conceptualisations of digital citizenship rely on an exclusively instrumental perspective on the digital world and thus need to be reconsidered. More to the point, it was argued that the prominent interpretation of the digital citizen as an autonomous 9 Here one might additionally discuss the specific narrative strategies being used by the writer/ narrator to get the relevant information across in a persuasive way in the different contexts. In other words, the textual properties of the individual posts can be analysed, thus sensitizing students’ awareness of how different texts allow different forms of identity representation even more. Daniel Becker 190 user fails to capture and explain some of the complexities of today’s digital realm, since living in the current digital sphere is a matter of complex interactions, in which both the individual and the digital environment are equally active and passive and in which personal identity must be perceived as a dynamic and transitory process. Based on these considerations, a new model of the digital citizen was suggested which combines instrumental and interactional approaches to the digital with each other: the digital citizen is not just a user figure, but also needs to develop a critical awareness of the interdependence between the individual subject and the digital environment. This awareness entails an environmental, an identity-related and an affective dimension. The contemporary digital realm is dynamic and constantly changing. If digital citizenship education wants to prepare children and young adults for this digital world, the concept of digital citizenship needs to adapt to these changes accordingly. The present paper merely suggested one possible adaption. Yet, this suggestion is far from being a holistic solution to a larger issue. Especially when considering the practical implications of digital citizenship in different educational settings and institutions, much more research needs to be conducted. The German Dagstuhl Agreement (2016) states that preparing children and young adults for a complex digital world is a shared duty of all school subjects and educational institutions. As such, all subjects and their underlying academic disciplines are requested to consider and analyse their own practical contributions to digital citizenship education. However, so far not many practical suggestions on how to implement a more dynamic and versatile understanding of digital citizenship in schools have been presented, and although the present paper ended with a reflection on potential learning opportunities in the EFL classroom, it is only a very first step in bringing a more complex digital world into the digital natives’ classrooms. Works Cited Alkemeyer, Thomas (2013). “Subjektivierung in sozialen Praktiken: Umrisse einer praxeologischen Analytik”. In: Selbst-Bildungen: Soziale und kulturelle Praktiken der Subjektivierung. Eds. Thomas Alkemeyer, Gunilla Budde and Dagmar Freist. Bielefeld: Transcript. 33-68. Allert, Heidrun, Michael Asmussen & Christoph Richter (2017). “Digitalität und Selbst: Einleitung”. In: Digitalität und Selbst: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Subjektivierungs- und Bildungsprozesse. Ed. Heidrun Allert, Michael Asmussen & Christoph Richter. Bielefeld: Transcript. 9-26. Amoore, Louise & Volha Piothuk (2006). 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In: Feature Films in English Language Teaching. Ed. Britta Viebrock. Tübingen: Narr Francke. 13-30. Vivienne, Sonja, Anthony McCosker & Amelia Johns (2016). “Digital Citizenship as Fluid Interface: Between Control, Contest and Culture”. In: Negotiating Digital Citizenship: Control, Contest and Culture. Ed. Anthony McCosker, Sonja Vivienne & Amelia Johns. London: Rowman & Littlefield. 1-18. Daniel Becker English Department WWU Münster Germany The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts A Pilot Study Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner The aim of this pilot study is to examine how feedback type and error type influence the revision process of undergraduate writers. For the purpose of this study, text feedback was provided for eight essays, which were produced in a writing class for students who study English as a foreign language. Directive and non-directive feedback, differentiated by either providing or not providing students with suggestions for improvement, was distributed to approximately equal extents. The revised texts were then compared to the draft versions in order to analyse the students’ reactions to the feedback instances. Errors which triggered feedback were described in terms of the Scope - Substance taxonomy (Sigott, Cesnik, & Dobrić 2016). In this study, the focus was on Error Substance, i.e. the units of text that need to be modified, namely, text, paragraph, sentence, or word. The quantitative analysis of the feedback instances (n=90) has shown that written text feedback is generally highly effective, and that non-directive feedback leads to a more positive effect than directive feedback, particularly as far as lowerlevel errors (sentence or word) are concerned. The reasons for non-responses to feedback cannot be attributed to feedback type or error substance, which shows a distinct need for further qualitative analysis. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0009 Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 196 1. Introduction Teachers, lecturers, and writing tutors are often confronted with the challenges of giving constructive and encouraging text feedback on students' texts. Especially written text feedback is often neglected in writing instruction, even though it is a useful tool to engage with pupil and student writing. From an instructor’s perspective the practice of giving feedback itself frequently remains undefined and evasive. Most research in this area between 2010 and 2019 predominantly focused on hierarchy aspects between teachers and students or learners in general, perceptions of feedback practices (by teachers and students in the school and higher education context) as well as various forms of peer feedback and the benefits of developing peer feedback strategies (Ferris & al. 2011; Harran 2011; Young & Kwangsu 2011; Knorr 2012; Berggren 2013; Busse 2013; von Gunten 2015; Saliu-Abdulahi 2019). The contexts concerned are varied: Native English Speakers (NES), English as a Second Language (ESL), and English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In Germanspeaking contexts (especially Austria) research is missing regarding writers’ motivation to incorporate feedback during the revision process as well as on the factors that determine the effectiveness and pedagogical value of text feedback. This concerns native speaker contexts (school and higher education) as well as EFL contexts (school and higher education). Recent studies have neither focussed on giving examples of feedback instances (see Beyer 2018) nor provided comparison between drafts and revised text versions. Especially research on how writing tutors, who are neither teachers nor simply peers, give written text feedback with the aim of encouraging, supporting, and challenging feedback takers is still missing.Consequently, this pilot study explores the effects of written feedback types provided by professional writing tutors on academic papers written by EFL students at the University of Klagenfurt (Carinthia, Austria). The focus is on the effectiveness of directive versus non-directive feedback instances in the form of text commentaries. In this study, giving directive feedback has been defined as identifying the error in the text and providing suggestions for improvement, while non-directive feedback does the same without giving suggestions. Section 2 provides an overview of research concerning feedback giving and taking in various contexts. Section 3 contains the research questions addressed in this study. In Section 4, the participants, the data sample, and the research design are introduced. In Section 5, the most relevant results are presented and discussed. Finally, the conclusion focuses on implications and further research possibilities. The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 197 2. Background Research in this area has been carried out in different geographical contexts (United States, Europe, Asia), educational institutions (different school forms and higher education), educational contexts (NES, ESL, and EFL contexts), and has observed feedback practices of different groups of individuals (teacher-student, or student-pupil feedback vs. peer feedback). Furthermore, different forms of feedback (i.e. marginal comments, shorthand corrections, end comments) have been investigated. US researchers started being interested in feedback practices (mainly teacher response in higher education) as early as in the 1970s (Jamalinesari & al. 2015: 116). Notable first articles concerning NES student writing include Sommers’s (1982) and Brannon and Knoblauch’s (1982). Sommers’s observations are among the first concrete engagements with teacher commentary in the US context. Her study is concerned with the effectiveness of teacher comments, but also tries to trace teachers’ motives in commenting on student texts. She points out that teachers’ pedagogical aims might interfere with the effectiveness of their feedback. They may inadvertently deprive writers of their own voices, urging them to alter their texts to fit the teachers’ ideas rather than upholding their own purpose. Also, teacher comments are often overgeneralised and vague. In addition, Sommers observes that teachers tend to adopt a product rather than a process-oriented approach, focussing on low-level errors first, or conflating comments concerning both higherorder and lower-order concerns. Feedback might even be contradictory. Text revision is therefore not experienced as a process, but as a single, little rewarding activity (151) and students tend to change only what is asked of them (152). Sommers suggests that teachers should adapt their comments to the respective draft (155), rather than treating drafts as final text versions (145). Comments should not remain “disembodied” (155), but teachers need to come back to them in different classroom situations, thus “framing revision as a learning process” (ibid.). Brannon and Knoblauch (1982), who share their data set with Sommers, also warn against the danger of feedback givers appropriating students’ texts rather than letting them define goals for their own writing. Straub (1996) is particularly interested in varying degrees of control that teachers (may) exert over student writing via feedback. In a subsequent study (Straub 1997), he investigates the reactions of students to teacher commentary using a questionnaire, asking students to comment on focus, specificity, and the mode of the individual comments. He found that students prefer elaborate and specific comments, but dislike criticism of their ideas. Connors and Lunsford (1993) looked at a combination of marginal, interlinear, initial and end comments by teachers, with end responses being the most commonly used form of written response in the 3000 papers that were analysed. They initially wanted to limit their anal- Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 198 ysis to “global com-ments”, which they defined as comments that focus on large-scale issues like text structure, use of genre conventions and content rather than mere error correction (205). But they soon discovered that comments referring to grammatical errors were frequent, so they expanded their focus to these as well (206). Their aim was to analyse how teachers “judge the rhetorical effectiveness” (206) of student texts and what kind of teacher-student relationships could be derived from the comments (ibid.). Connors and Lunsford tried to identify “tropes” (210) (i.e. patterns) within the commentaries and to relate their rhetorical form to their purpose (ibid.). They identified four tropes: positive comments (rare but when given very personal), admonition comments (responses which first criticise mechanical aspects of a text and then move into a more positive comment on the effectiveness of certain text aspects), comments that start positively and end on a negative note and exclusively negative comments (ibid.). The most commonly used responses were of the positive-negative variety, usually starting out with positive feedback on a rhetorical element of the text (higher order concern) and leading towards negative feedback on a mechanical issue (lower order concern) (211). The authors refer to the length and form of the comments briefly (211), but they do not provide actual examples of specific comments and how the feedback interacted with the student texts. The length of the comments however, seems to be associated with the kind of problems addressed. Shorter comments are used to address lower-level errors and longer comments to address higher-level errors. Longer comments are rare, however, and teachers do not seem to be concerned with students’ further development. Initial and end comments are used primarily to explain the grade (211-213). Additionally, some teachers assume an overly authoritarian position, formulating ill-fitting, because insensitive and directive, comments (215). Overall, Connors and Lunsford judge the comments as grade-driven (217), meaning that teachers tend to ignore the rhetorical contexts of their interventions, choosing to follow a product-oriented approach to engage with their students’ texts (219). Research into the ESL context in the US remained scarce for a long time. Zamel’s (1985) study is one of the earliest engagements within this context. Her article challenges notions of product-oriented writing instruction and explores differences between L1 and ESL settings. She finds that teacher feedback tends to be unspecific, contradictory and difficult to decipher for ESL students. Furthermore, ESL teachers tend to regard themselves as language teachers rather than writing instructors (86). Therefore, they focus on surface-level errors even more severely than L1 teachers. This limits students’ understanding of writing and revising and hardly leads to any text improvement (79). Zamel analyses short text passages, which include the teachers’ comments and the resulting revised text, and isolated text passages. Her text data shows that the teachers’ generic approaches to feedback giving may stifle the students’ develop- The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 199 ment and that teachers often misinterpret students’ intentions (86-93). Reid (1994) looks at the difference between intervention and appropriation expressed in teacher comments. While appropriation, i.e. the feedback giver taking control of the text, should not be the goal, constructive intervention, i.e. feedback that preserves and respects the writer’s voice, might be important to prepare students for effectively communicating in new discourse communities. Hyland and Hyland (2001) focus on the ESL context and teacher feedback in the form of praise, criticism, and suggestions. They mainly look at end comments. Ferris (1997) is one of the few researchers who are concerned with the linguistic features of teacher comments as well as with the linguistic aims expressed by them. Her study examines marginal and end comments given on the texts of advanced ESL learners, focussing on the linguistic features and the pragmatic goals of the comments as well as the revisions made based on these comments. Ferris focuses on various comment features, “including their length (in number of words), their type (pragmatic intent and syntactic form), the use of hedges (e.g., please, maybe), and whether the comment was text based or general” (320). Comments led to either positive revisions or to no change at all. Questions and statements that provided information were overall not helpful for students. Ferris does not give possible reasons for students ignoring feedback, however. Ferris et al. (2011) focus not on “the quality or effect of teacher feedback but rather [on providing] an objective and consistent quantitative description across a range of teachers of their general approaches to written feedback” (217). Similarly, Ferris (2014) deals with teacher’s philosophies underlying their feedback and their feedback practices. Conrad and Goldstein (1999) look at comments, revisions and individual and situational characteristics that may have influenced the revision process of ESL students. They examined comments by one teacher given on texts that do not all qualify as academic writing. The feedback was separated from the texts and given on a separate sheet of paper. The researchers observed that students found comments related to text development (adding examples, facts and details but also developing an argument, expanding on explanations, making analyses more explicit) difficult to react to. The characteristics of the comments did not influence revisions consistently, while individual factors did quite strikingly. Individual factors were determined in teacherstudent conferences that were recorded and analysed. Further research is concerned with teacher-student conferences, revision practices, peer feedback practices, or corrective feedback. Patthey- Chavez and Ferris (1997) explore writing conferences and how students’ proficiency levels and their cultural and personal backgrounds (status differences) may shape them. They compare ESL and NES conferences. Fitzgerald (1987) summarises research in revision studies. Tschudi, Estrem, and Hanlon (1997) are equally concerned with helping students develop effective revision strategies. Nelson and Shunn (2009) focus on Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 200 peer feedback in a native speaker context. Kwangsu, Schunn, and Wilson (2006) compare strategies used in peer feedback with those used by teachers. Young and Kwangsu (2011) present what they refer to as the “learning-writing-by-reviewing hypothesis” (630). Their aim was to determine what effects giving comments might have on the peer reviewers’ writing skills. However, they did not explicitly focus on how writers use comments to actually revise their texts. Leki (1990), Liu and Hansen (2002), and Connor and Asenavage (1994) observe peer feedback strategies among ESL writers at university level. Leki (1991) is also concerned with corrective feedback (foremost concerning grammar issues) in US ESL classrooms, while Brown (2012) focuses on native speakers. Jamalinesari et al. (2015) researched written corrective feedback in an EFL context (English learners in Iran) and differentiate between direct (errors are corrected) and indirect (errors are pointed out and the students are expected to self-correct) feedback. The school context seems to be widely underresearched. Freedman (1987) is a well-known exception. Another aspect which attracts researchers’ interests is the perception of feedback. Saliu-Abdulahi (2019) focuses on how teachers and students perceive formative feedback practices in the EFL classroom. Furthermore, teachers were questioned on which feedback practices they employ in different didactic contexts. The research was conducted in Norway and concerns writing instruction in English in upper secondary school. Results show that written comments and endnotes (in Norwegian) were the most commonly used feedback forms. Teachers did not use peer feedback and oral conferencing regularly. Self-assessment was used more frequently. Teachers seem to be aware that feedback is beneficial, and some want to use more process-oriented approaches to writing instruction, including the use of portfolios and returning papers without grading them (53). However, it seems that their workload prevents them from integrating feedback more intensely in their teaching (55). Students highly appreciate feedback, but perceptions and preferences as far as feedback form is concerned vary. They confirmed that oral conferencing and peer feedback are not regularly used, but would help them to improve their writing if used regularly. They also voiced their desire to develop multiple drafts of a piece of writing and to receive feedback on the drafts before the grading process (54). In German-speaking countries, relevant research is comparatively rare. There is a growing amount of isolated research on written text feedback either in the school or teacher context (e.g. Esterl & Saxalber 2010; von Gunten 2015). Esterl and Saxalber (2010) investigated how teacher commentaries can shape pupils’ writing development and motivation to make revisions, while von Gunten (2015) tries to find out how the peer feedback strategies of teachers in training evolve over a period of three years. Knorr (2012) examined text commentaries by academics made in the context of the review process for the publication of an anthology. The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 201 Busse (2013) touches on some aspects that are also addressed in the present pilot study. Hers is one of the few studies that deal with feedback at university level and with the question of how students perceive it. The results of her mixed-methods study focus on writers’ motivation. She investigated how German EFL students of English perceive feedback practices. Busse identifies four factors that resulted in a negative perception: students’ unfamiliarity with the grading system; insufficiently specific and thus unhelpful feedback; comprehensive rather than selective error correction; insufficient positive reinforcement (410). She highlights the need “for future investigations to take the interactive relationship between motivation, feedback, and the educational environment into account and outline pedagogical suggestions for how to gear feedback practices towards specific needs of first year students” (406). Additionally, there is growing research in the area of revision studies (Revisionsforschung) in the German-speaking context as well (see Höltmann 2012, Jantzen 2012a, Jantzen 2012b). There is very little research in German-speaking contexts on text feedback in higher education that takes the revision process into account, particularly regarding the question of how students tend to incorporate text feedback, either in native speaker contexts or in EFL contexts. Recently, von Gunten and Beyer (2018) have tried to summarise reasons for the lack of a working definition of feedback (“Textkommentierung”) within the German-speaking context. They argue that because feedback situations are extremely diverse, it is difficult to agree on what determines ‘good’ feedback. Therefore, measuring the effectiveness of feedback is equally complex. The only thing that can be agreed upon is that feedback has an effect and therefore an enormous potential within writing pedagogy (23). Although not suggesting a generally valid definition, von Gunten and Beyer list five aspects which they suggest should always be on the feedback givers’ minds, as they seem to influence any feedback situation: the purpose of the feedback (within the respective feedback situation), the relationship between feedback giver and feedback taker, the feedback giver’s attitude, the language phenomenon that triggers the feedback and how feedback is realised linguistically (13). Beyer (2018) has also developed a tool (InliAnTe) for analysing (peer) feedback instances within the context of a project aimed at developing feedback behaviour and feedback strategies of teachers in training. The tool consists of two grids, one of which focuses on the feedback trigger in the text and the other on how the feedback is linguistically realised. 3. Research Questions Written text commentary has not only become an essential instrument to help improve writing skills per se, but it also has a role in foreign lan- Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 202 guage instruction. This is particularly important when it comes to languages which differ in terms of conventions of text organisation, as German and English do in terms of paragraph structure. Undergraduate students at university are novice writers who are unfamiliar with the conventions and norms of academic writing, but who need to adapt rapidly to this new context. They are often pressured by teachers and curricula to improve their writing skills as quickly as possible even though they receive limited feedback on their texts and have little time for revisions. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the effects of two types of written feedback provided by professional writing tutors on EFL students’ academic writing. In particular, we investigate the effect of directive and non-directive written feedback instances given by writing tutors on the revised versions of the students’ texts. Additionally, this study will open a tentative dialogue about students’ motivation for revision in a foreign language. The research questions are thus concerned with the effectiveness of the feedback in general and whether the effect depends on the type of feedback given as well as on the error that the feedback focuses on. In addition, the study addresses the question of whether the reasons for students ignoring the feedback might be related to error or feedback type. The study thus addresses the following research questions: RQ1: Does the feedback have any effect? RQ2: Does the effect of feedback depend on the kind of error that it focuses on? RQ3: Do the two feedback types (directive, non-directive) differ in their effect? RQ4: What are reasons for feedback takers not reacting to feedback? This pilot study is couched in a supportive, process-oriented approach that puts the dialogue between the feedback givers and the writers at its centre. By doing so, we hope to make the feedback process more transparent for feedback givers and feedback takers. A long-term goal is to develop pedagogical guidelines for feedback givers on the basis of the findings of a more substantial follow-up study. 4. Method 4.1. Participants Feedback Givers The three feedback givers are currently working at the writing centre of Klagenfurt University, Austria. They underwent a minimum of two years’ The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 203 training as writing tutors based on contents such as writing didactics, writing research, linguistics, pedagogical approaches, and genre knowledge. They all have different specialisations but share the focus on writing in a foreign or second language. They had to undergo a practical training of at least 200 hours during this time, which mainly consisted of holding individual or group consultations with students, conceptualising and conducting workshops for students, and the participation in supervisions. In addition to their occupation at the writing centre, they continue to expand their knowledge of writing didactics and writing research through further education. Additionally, all of them are studying at the English Department of Klagenfurt University. Feedback Takers The study was conducted in the winter semester 2016/ 2017. At that time, the voluntary participants were studying English as a foreign language at the English Department of Klagenfurt University. Initially, the group consisted of nine undergraduates, but one student failed to provide their revised text version and was therefore excluded from the study. Six female and two male students remained. The students were between 22 and 47 years old. 4.2. Context and Materials The eight texts used in this study were written as a task for a Professional Writing Skills course. This mandatory class is part of the Bachelor’s degree programme English and American Studies and can typically not be taken any earlier than in the third semester as it has two other classes (Language Productive and Receptive Skills as well as Advanced Language Productive and Receptive Skills) as prerequisites. It is important to note that these three classes are part of a module aimed at familiarising students with academic writing standards as well as English text and language structures. The assignment for this particular course was to produce a small-scale academic paper of 800 words (+/ - 10%) serving as an exercise for future research-based writing projects. Students were supposed to generate a research question related to either the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) by Ursula K. Le Guin or one related to the concept of Carnism introduced by Melanie Joy in her article “From Carnivore to Carnist: Liberating the Language of Meat” (2001). Apart from their primary source, students had to include at least one secondary source and cite it according to the author-date system of the Chicago Manual of Style (16 th edition). Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 204 4.3. Coding of the Data Since “[e]rror identification and error explanation with reference to the concept of norm […] plays an important role in formulating feedback to students,” (Sigott, Cesnik & Dobrić 2016: 79) the feedback instances in the eight texts were formulated following the Scope-Substance taxonomy for error identification. Scope “refers to the amount of context that is necessary in order for an error to become perceptible,” while substance “refers to the amount of text that needs to be changed so that the error will disappear” (ibid.: 80). Error identification always involves a combination of scope and substance. In our study, we focus on substance rather than scope, since this is what has to be changed by the feedback takers. All the errors that received feedback have repercussions beyond the sentence level and thus influence text cohesion and coherence. We decided to specifically focus on these error types, since it seems important to make writers aware of the effects of their errors on the entire fabric of the text. While for scope only text and paragraph were distinguished, four levels were distinguished for substance: text, paragraph, sentence, and word. This results in seven possible error types: text-text, text-paragraph, textsentence, text-word, paragraph-paragraph, paragraph-sentence, and paragraph-word. For purposes of analysis, the substance categories text and paragraph, as well as sentence and word are conflated to yield only two categories for the analysis. By doing this, we classify text and paragraph as higher-level errors while word and sentence are considered lower-level errors. The Feedback Type itself is classified as either non-directive or directive. We define a non-directive approach as identifying the error substance in the text without providing further suggestions for improvement, while the directive approach is defined as identifying the error substance in the text as well as providing suggestions for improvement. Feedback Effect is operationalised as either improvement or no improvement, and improvement is categorised as successful change while no improvement is subdivided into wrong change and unchanged. 4.4. Process For this pilot study, written text feedback, using the text commentary function in Microsoft Word, was provided on each students’ first draft by one of the three writing tutors one week prior to submission. Although peer feedback was encouraged by the writing instructor, no draft version that incorporates peer feedback was required before the students had to hand in their final versions. Non-directive and directive feedback types were used to approximately equal extents in this process. The eight revised text versions were then compared to the eight drafts. The written text commentary given to the students first identified the scope of the The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 205 error type (text or paragraph) and then provided the writers with feedback on the substance level (word, sentence, paragraph, or text). These comments either did provide suggestions for improvement in terms of lexis, grammar, coherence and style (directive feedback) or did not provide any suggestions for improvement, thus being limited to identifying the part of the text that needed to be modified (non-directive feedback). The draft and revised versions of the texts were compared by all three writing tutors to arrive at a decision of improvement or nonimprovement. In addition, all three writing tutors examined each feedback instance to decide whether the feedback was directive or nondirective. In cases of initial disagreement, consensus was sought by negotiation. In rare cases in which this was not successful, a decision was made by majority vote. The same procedure was adopted to categorise errors as lower-level (sentence or word) or higher-level (text or paragraph) on the basis of their substance. Table 1 shows three examples in order to illustrate this process. Example 1 concerns the stylistic aspect of repetition, as pointed out by the tutor comment in the margin. This error has paragraph scope, since it does not affect the text as a whole, but rather the paragraph itself. As substance we identified word as the student merely needs to change a word in order to make the repetition less prominent. The feedback type is non-directive due to the fact that even though the repetition is pointed out by the tutor, no further suggestions for improvement are provided. As can be seen in the revised version, the error remained unchanged. Example 2 refers to the title of the student’s paper, which does not connect logically to the text that follows. Since this error affects the whole text, it has text scope. The substance is identified as sentence because reformulation of the title is required. In this case, the tutor comment is classified as directive because suggestions for improvement are given. Although the revised version shows a change in the title, it is still a wrong change as the error persists. The error in Example 3 revolves around the wrong use of a connector (linking word) between two ideas, which actually build on each other instead of one resulting from the other. The scope of this error is paragraph, since the error only becomes perceptible when one reads beyond the sentence level to paragraph level. The substance is categorised as word, because this is what has to be changed by the student. The tutor comment is classified as non-directive as the error is only indicated, but the suggestions for improvement are missing. As can be seen in the revised version, the feedback is successful, since the student used a more appropriate linking word instead. Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 206 Ex. #1 #2 #3 Origin al Text P assag e The consumption of meat is also influenced by social constructs and the failing of the media has supported carnistic behaviours. Research has found that there are social structural influences for the consumption of animals. Firstly, the factor of social class appears to have a considerable influen ce on meat consumption. [emphasis added] Decisive Shapers in Aid of Carnism [title] In Islam, on the other side, the meat has to be Halal in order to be allowed to eat. Therefor e, also the Muslim belief forbids the consumption of pork … [emphasis added] Error Scope: paragraph Substance: word Scope: text Substance: sentence Scope: paragraph Substance: word Tutor Comment (in margin) (paragraph): repetition (text): This doesn't make sense in connection with the text that follows. Also, you could check up on collocations in order to improve clarity here. (paragraph): Incorrect use of linking word. F eedback Type non-directive directive non-directive Revis ed V ersion The consumption of meat is also influenced by social constructs and also the media has supported carnistic behaviours. Research has found that there are socially constructed influences for the consumption of animals. Firstly, the factor of social class appears to have a considerable influence on meat consumption. [emphasis add- Decisive Factors Working in Aid of Carnism In Islam, on the other hand, meat has to be Halal in order to be allowed to be eaten. A dditionally, the Muslim belief forbids the consumption of pork … [emphasis added] The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 207 ed] Effect unchanged wrong change successful change Table 1: Examples of feedback instances and feedback effect 4.5. Methods of Data Analysis 1 In a first step, frequency statistics for the variable Feedback Effect were calculated and presented graphically. In a second step, Decision Tree Analysis as implemented in SPSS Version 24 was performed on the three variables Feedback Effect, Error Substance, and Feedback Type. In this design, Feedback Effect constitutes the dependent variable. The aim of the Decision Tree Analysis is to test whether groups of cases, i.e., feedback instances, differ significantly from each other in terms of their frequency distribution in the dependent variable. The purpose of the analysis is to determine which groups differ significantly from each other in terms of the ratio of feedback instances leading to successful change versus unchanged or wrong change. If two groups differ from each other with regard to this ratio, a node in the tree is formed. Groups whose ratios do not differ will not form a node. Differences in cell frequencies are tested for statistical significance by means of Chi-Square analysis with subsequent Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. In an entirely exploratory spirit, in order for even weak tendencies to become visible, the significance level was deliberately set to p = 0.6. Finally, reasons for failure to react to the feedback instances (Feedback Effect = ‘unchanged’) were investigated with regard to the variables Error Substance and Feedback Type in a separate analysis. Additionally, qualitative semi-structured trial interviews were carried out with some of the participant writers. In these short (up to ten minutes) interviews, the students were asked about one of the instances they did not react to in an attempt to begin to explore reasons for feedback rejection. Orthographic transcriptions, which only recorded longer breaks, overlaps in turns, and emotional responses such as laughter, were made. These were entered into Atlas.ti for a basic content analysis. The focus was on writers’ thought processes and motivation during the feedback and revision process. Only six out of eight students were asked about one particular feedback instance they did not respond to, since two of the writers had reacted to every feedback instance. 1 We would like to thank Dr. Hermann Cesnik, ZID, Klagenfurt University, for his invaluable advice on methodological aspects of this study. Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 208 5. Results and Discussion To answer the four research questions, the relationships among the following three variables were examined: Feedback Effect (‘unchanged’, ‘wrong change’, ‘successful change’), Error Substance (‘sentence or word’, ‘text or paragraph’) and Feedback Type (‘directive’, ‘non-directive’). Figure 1: Frequencies for Feedback Effect As can be seen in Figure 1, most feedback instances (53.33%) have led to successful changes in the student texts. Considerably fewer feedback instances, namely 28.89 percent, did bring about changes in the text, but these either still contained an error or introduced a new error. Feedback instances leading to no change at all are by far the least frequent with 17.78 percent. This is clear evidence of a strong positive effect of feedback in general and suggests a strong positive answer to RQ1. The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 209 Figure 2: Decision Tree for Feedback Effect (recoded) Figure 2 shows the result of the exploratory Decision Tree Analysis. For the purposes of this analysis, no changes (unchanged) and wrong changes were conflated by recoding the original variable Feedback Effect into a new binary variable Effect_rec with the two categories ‘unchanged or wrong change’ and ‘successful change’. Similarly, the original variable Error Substance was recoded into a new binary variable Substance_rec with the two categories ‘sentence or word’ and ‘text or paragraph’. Since both independent variables are binary after recoding, the feedback instances fall into one of four groups: ‘sentence or word’ - ‘non-directive’, ‘sentence or word’ - ‘directive’, ‘text or paragraph’ - ‘non-directive’, ‘text or paragraph’ - ‘directive’. Figure 2 shows that 46.7 percent of feedback instances led to no improvement (‘unchanged or wrong change’) while 53.3 percent led to improvement (‘successful change’). If the feedback instances are divided into two groups according to the error they focus on, namely low-level (‘sentence or word’) or high-level (‘text or paragraph’), the ratio of improvement to no improvement is markedly different in the two groups. In the low-level group, the percentage of feedback instances leading to improvement (‘successful change’) is 60.7, while the Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 210 percentage of feedback instances that led to no improvement (‘unchanged or wrong change’) is only 39.3. This is different for the high-level group. There, the percentage of feedback instances leading to improvement is lower (37.9%) than that leading to no improvement (62.1%). Obviously, feedback is more effective for low-level errors than for high-level errors. Therefore, the effect of feedback is determined significantly (Adj. P-value = 0.043) by Error Substance. This suggests a clear positive answer to RQ2. At the second level of the tree diagram, an effect of Feedback Type (‘directive’ vs ‘non-directive’) becomes visible as well. In the low-level group, non-directive feedback leads to considerably more improvement (69.7%) than to no improvement (30.3%), while directive feedback brings about as much improvement as non-improvement (50%). By contrast, in the high-level group of feedback instances, both feedback types lead to more non-improvement than to improvement. This is more pronounced for directive feedback, where 66.7 percent of feedback instances lead to no improvement while only 33.3 percent lead to improvement. Altogether this effect is weaker than that of Error Substance. It is stronger in the low-level group (Adj. P-value = 0.117) than in the high-level group (Adj. P-value = 0.514). However, it needs to be pointed out that the error probability for both nodes are p = 0.117 and p = 0.514 respectively, indicating that there may not be a meaningful difference at all. Altogether, this indicates that after Error Substance, Feedback Type may also influence Feedback Effect. Non-directive feedback seems to be more effective than directive feedback. This is more pronounced at low Error Substance levels than at high Error Substance levels. This suggests a tentative positive answer to RQ3. In a different Decision Tree Analysis, neither Error Substance nor Feedback Type were found to have a significant effect on feedback takers’ failure to react to feedback at all. Thus, the reasons for this have to be sought for elsewhere. This provides only a partial answer to RQ4, but clearly shows a need for more research of a qualitative type to shed further light on this issue. As a tentative first step, six students were questioned in trial interviews about one of the instances they had not reacted to in any way. From those interviewed, only two overtly disagreed with the feedback given to them, while only one of them still rejected the commentary after discussing it with the feedback giver. In one case, the rejection resulted from a failure to reconcile the feedback with the input on linking words and phrases from the writing class. Two students had simply failed to see the problem, namely repetition of words and missing information, in their respective texts. Highlighting the lexical items in question, so one of the students, would have made the repetition more obvious in his case. In another text, the feedback had not been given in response to the first occurrence of the problem, which led to confusion for the feedback taker. Due to the amount of feedback that had been giv- The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 211 en for the purpose of this study, one student had simply overlooked the particular feedback instance in question. Most of the students who had been interviewed suggested that they would have integrated even more of the feedback if they had received a more thorough explanation with regard to the problem(s) in their texts. It seems that there may be a type of error where directive feedback might be more helpful after all. 6. Conclusion Overall, then, feedback is effective, but more so at word and sentence level than at paragraph and text level. In addition, non-directive feedback is more effective than directive feedback, more so at word and sentence level than at text and paragraph level. Reasons for non-responses, however, are not associated with Feedback Type or Error Substance. Some reasons for feedback having more effect at word and sentence level could be related to students’ language proficiency, knowledge about discourse structure, and personal agency. Lower level errors are easier to correct and do not require changing the structure or the argument of the entire text. Also, undergraduate students are trained to look at lowerorder concerns rather than higher-order concerns since this is often the focus in schools (Grieshammer, Liebetanz, & Peters 2012). By contrast, paragraph and text level present a greater and relatively new challenge for EFL writers of English at university level because German discourse structures deviate considerably from English ones. Such problems, however, might be resolved as future students will have acquired knowledge about Anglophone discourse structures in order to pass the recently introduced Austrian standardised school-leaving exam (BMBWF, n.d.). Even though it might seem surprising that non-directive feedback is more effective, it is conceivable that pre-formulated suggestions made by the tutors in their own writing style tend to be rejected by the student writers. This might be due to a wish for personal agency (Reid 1994, Straub 1997), and the development of an individual voice (see Elbow 1973, Tardy 2006, Girgensohn 2007, Mertlitsch 2013). According to Elbow (1973), the individual voice of a writer is created as a result of an interaction between the author and what has been said. Rather than simply implementing something ready-made, students prefer to choose freely when and how they take on suggestions. The concept of appropriation, appropriating another person’s words for one’s own argument, is also closely linked to questions of voice and power. Power relations are often involved in feedback situations as teachers have more authority and students might feel pressured to take on their suggestions (Tardy 2006: 61-63). This is not the case in a peer-tutor context, however, where feedback givers never take over ownership of the text. Also, according to Vygotsky’s (1978) principle of scaffolding, learners will take on guidance Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 212 as long as they need it but will resort to personal choices as soon as they are able to manage on their own. Again, this tendency is accentuated at lower levels, and less prominent at text and paragraph levels. Writers, it seems, feel more confident in tackling sentence and word problems, but are still unfamiliar with English academic discourse structures. Generally, text development problems are much more difficult to resolve for inexperienced writers. With the limited data available, there is no visible association between non-responses and either Feedback Type or Error Substance. The reasons, however, could be the subject of a future study involving qualitative introspective methods such as stimulated recall and revise-and-resubmit letters especially designed for the purpose of investigating non-responses to feedback instances. In a replication of the study, it might be worthwhile to provide feedback for lower-level and higher-level substance in two separate phases or by using a colour-coding system in order to make the revision process less strenuous for the novice writers. In the future, the results of this pilot study, and a more extensive follow-up study, which is currently in progress, might help feedback takers to improve their revision skills and feedback givers (writing instructors, writing tutors, and teachers in general) to refine and expand their skill sets. Feedback and writing processes could be made more transparent and successful by developing in feedback givers a heightened awareness of the effects feedback (both in its form and content) can have on writers’ texts and editing behaviour. Feedback givers should benefit from knowing which areas tend to be more resistant to feedback and therefore need particular attention. The preliminary results already point to a need for further research with a higher number of feedback instances in order to determine why feedback at higher substance levels is less effective and why non-directive feedback tends to be more effective. Additionally, it would be interesting to determine the role that error scope plays in the effectiveness of feedback or whether the effectiveness of non-directive feedback is related to the question of personal agency. References Berggren, Jessica (2013). Learning from giving feedback: Insights from EFL writing classrooms in a Swedish lower secondary school. 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Connor, Ulla & Karen Asenavage (1994). “Peer response Groups in ESL writing classes: How much impact on revision? ” Journal of Second Language Writing 3: 257-176. Connors, Robert J. & Andrea A. Lunsford (1993). “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers”. College Composition and Communication 44.2: 200-223. Conrad, Susan & Louis M. Goldstein (1999). “ESL Student Revision after Teacher- Written Comments: Texts, Contexts, and Individuals”. Journal of Second Language Writing 8.2: 147-179. Elbow, Peter (1973). Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press. Esterl, Ursula & Annemarie Saxalber (2010). “‘Inhaltlich hast du sehr gut gearbeitet...’: Funktionen und Qualität eines förderorientierten LehrerInnenkommentars”. In: Schreibprozesse begleiten: Vom schulischen zum universitären Schreiben, 181-214. Eds. Ursula Esterl & Annemarie Saxalber. Innsbruck/ Wien/ Bozen: StudienVerlag. Ferris, Dana R. (1997). “The influence of teacher commentary on student writing”. TESOL Quarterly 31.2: 315-339. Ferris, Dana R. (2014). “Responding to student writing: Teachers’ philosophies and practices”. Assessing Writing 19: 6-23. Ferris, Dana R., Jeffrey Brown, Hsiang Liu, Maria Eugenia & Arnaudo Stine (2011). “Responding to L3 students in college writing classes: Teacher perspectives”. TESOL Quarterly 45.2: 207-234. Fitzgerald, Jill (1987). “Research on revision in writing”. Review of Educational Research 57.4: 481-506. Freedman, Sarah W. (1987). Response to Student Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Girgensohn, Katrin (2007). Neue Wege zur Schlüsselqualifikation Schreiben. Autonome Schreibgruppen an der Hochschule. Wiesbaden: VS Research. Grieshammer, Ella, Franziska Liebetanz & Nora Peters (2012). Zukunftsmodell Schreibberatung: Eine Anleitung zur Begleitung von Schreibenden im Studium. Hohengehren: Schneider Verlag. Harran, Marcelle (2011). “What higher education students do with teacher feedback: Feedback-practice implications”. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 29.4: 419-434. Höltmann, Melina (2012). “Lernchancen durch das Überarbeiten mit der Methode ‘Tipps am Rande’ - eine empirische Untersuchung”. In: Überarbeiten lernen - Überarbeiten als Lernen, 179-203. Eds. Petra Hüttis-Graff & Christoph Jantzen. Stuttgart: Fillibach bei Klett. Hyland, Fiona & Ken Hyland (2001). “Sugaring the pill: Praise and criticism in written feedback”. Journal of Second Language Writing 10: 185-212. Jamalinesari, Ali, Farahnaz Rahimi, Hsbib Gowhary & Akbar Azizifar (2015). “The effect of teacher-written direct vs. indirect feedback on students’ writing”. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 192: 116-123. Jantzen, Christoph (2012a). “Was Überarbeitungskompetenz ist”. In: Überarbeiten lernen - Überarbeiten als Lernen, 343-346. Eds. Petra Hüttis-Graff & Christoph Jantzen. Stuttgart: Fillibach bei Klett. Jantzen, Christoph (2012b). “Woher wir meinen zu wissen wie Lernende ihre Texte überarbeiten: Zur Methodologie der Datenerhebung in einer didaktisch Günther Sigott, Melanie Fleischhacker, Stephanie Sihler, Jennifer Steiner 214 ausgerichteten Überarbeitungsforschung”. In: Überarbeiten lernen - Überarbeiten als Lernen, 11-36. Eds. Petra Hüttis-Graff & Christoph Jantzen. Stuttgart: Fillibach bei Klett. Knorr, Dagmar (2012). “Textkommentierungen: Formen und Funktionen”. In: Schreiben unter Bedingungen von Mehrsprachigkeit, 75-98. Eds. Dagmar Knorr & Annette Verhein-Jarren. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Peter Lang. Kwangsu, Cho, Christian D. Schunn, Roy W. Wilson (2006). “Validity and reliability of scaffolded peer assessment of writing from instructor and student perspectives”. Journal of Educational Psychology 4: 891-901. Leki, Ilona (1990). “Potential problems with peer responding in ESL writing classes”. CATESOL Journal 3: 5-19. Leki, Ilona (1991). “The preferences of ESL students for error correction in college-level writing classes”. Foreign Language Annals 24: 203-218. Liu, Jun & Jette G. Hansen (2002). Peer Response in Second Language Writing Classrooms. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Mertlitsch, Carmen (2013). “Die eigene Stimme finden”. Ide Zeitschrift für den Deutschunterricht in Wissenschaft und Schule 3: 80-87. Nelson, Melissa M., & Christian D. Shunn (2009). “The nature of feedback: how different types of peer feedback affect writing performance”. Instructional Science 37.4: 375-401. Patthey-Chavez, Genevieve & Dana R. Ferris (1997). “Writing conferences and the weaving of multi-voiced texts in college composition”. Research in the Teaching of English 31.1: 51-90. Reid, Joy (1994). “Responding to ESL student’s texts: The myths of appropriation”. TESOL Quarterly 28.2: 273-292. Saliu-Abdulahi, Drita. (2019). Teacher and Student Perceptions of Current Feedback Practices in English Writing Instruction. Norway: University of Oslo. Sigott, Günther, Hermann Cesnik & Nikola Dobrić (2016). “Refining the Scope- Substance Error Taxonomy: A closer look at substance”. In: Corpora in Applied Linguistics - Current Approaches, 79-94. Eds. Nikola Dobrić, Eva-Maria Graf & Alexander Onysko. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Sommers, Nancy (1982). “Responding to student writing”. College Composition and Communication 33.2: 148-156. Straub, Richard (1996). “The concept of Control in teacher response: Defining the varieties of ‘directive’ and ‘facilitative’ commentary”. College Composition and Communication 47.2: 223-251. Straub, Richard (1997). “Students’ reactions to teacher comments: An exploratory study”. Research in the Teaching of English 31.1: 91-119. Tardy, Christine (2006). “Appropriation, ownership, and agency: Negotiating teacher feedback in academic settings”. In: Feedback in Second Language Writing: Contexts and Issues, 60-79. Eds. Ken Hyland & Fiona Hyland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tschudi, Susan, Heidi Estrem & Patti-A. Hanlon (1997). “Unsettling drafts: Helping students see new possibilities in their writing”. The English Journal 86.6: 27-33. von Gunten, Anne. (2015). “Wie und wozu angehende Lehrpersonen Texte kommentieren: Forschungsdesign und Analyse-Instrumente eines Projektes”. Zeitschrift Schreiben: Schreiben in Schule, Hochschule und Beruf 1: 1-7. von Gunten, Anne & Anke Beyer (2018). “Schriftliche Textkommentierungen. Versuch einer Begriffsklärung aus schreibdidaktischer Sicht”. JoSch - Journal der Schreibberatung 16.18: 11-26. The Effect of Written Feedback Types on Students' Academic Texts 215 Vygotsky, Lev S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Young Huan, Cho & Cho Kwangsu (2011). “Peer reviewers learn from giving comments”. Instructional Science 39: 629-643. Zamel, Vivian (1985). “Responding to student writing”. TESOL Quaterly 19.1: 79- 101. Texts used as prompts for class assignment Le Guin, Ursula K. (2004). “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. In: The Contemporary American Short Story, 314-320. Eds. Bich Minh Nguyen & Porter Shrev. New York: Pearson Education. Joy, Melanie (2001). “From Carnivore to Carnist: Liberating the Language of Meat”. [online] http: / / www.satyamag.com/ sept01/ joy.html [2019, January 20] Günther Sigott Melanie Fleischhacker Stephanie Sihler Jennifer Steiner Department of English University of Klagenfurt Austria Rezensionen Erhan Şimşek, Creating Realities: Business as a M otif in American F iction, 1865-1929. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2019. Heinz Tschachler Creating Realities succeeds because of the strengths of its author, as a story teller as well as a meticulous researcher, who at one and the same time uses broad strokes and takes a deep dive. As a storyteller, Erhan Şimşek attempts an “evolutionary” history of American fiction, which, following the break with the romantic tradition, is made to appear as a succession of “organic continuations” (208) from realism to naturalism to modernism and, to an extent, to postmodernism. Successive steps are played out, both on an epistemological and a technical level. Asking, importantly, why a text is constructed in the way it is, the author provides four chapters of historical description, analysis, and discussion, fleshed out by an introduction, a literature review, a socio-historical chapter, a conclusion, and a bibliography (though, sadly, no index). What holds these divergent sections together is the motif of business. Of the two dozen or so different meanings of the word business, Şimşek settles on a simple one, “commercial activity” (12). Business fictions therefore are “works that have commercial activity or institutions and people who deal with commercial activities such as companies and businessmen as dominant themes in their plots” (12). In order to demonstrate that “the evolution of the motif of business coincides with the evolution of American literature” (11), Şimşek focuses on three works of fiction, each representative of a distinct period in American literary history, and each chosen because each has left what the author calls a longlasting “afterimage” (21), Şimşek’s felicitous term for “canonical”: William Dean Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), that quintessential realist novel, uses the motif to provide moral and social orientation; in contrast, Theodore Dreiser in The Financier (1912) uses the world of finance to create the naturalistic effect of intensity and shock; as for the modernist agenda, in AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 44 (2019) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2019-0010 Rezensionen 218 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) business helps reveal the impossibility of accessing reality, which must remain purely subjective. Şimşek appears to owe much of his view to Wolfgang Iser and, especially, Winfried Fluck, in whose Funktionsgeschichte approach he sees “new possibilities for the study of American literature,” in this instance a better understanding of “the aesthetic and thus affective grid inscribed in the literature of the period from a continental perspective” (29). What is “inscribed” is, however, only an aesthetic potential, which can be “concretized” or “realized” by readers (13-14). Readers’ actual concretizations or realizations, their aesthetic experiences, are next to impossible to grasp. Hence critics can only hypothesize what a literary text does to its readers, what its potential functions are (14). Given Şimşek’s overarching theme, his study therefore comes to us as “a Funktionsgeschichte of the motif of business and how the motif creates the potential aesthetic functions of these works of fiction” (16). How, then, are the functions of the business motif revealed? Şimşek here sets up the familiar triangulation of text, reader, and author. The motif, he postulates, “makes the plot possible in the first place” (18). Silas Lapham’s paint business, for instance, enables his financial ruin and moral rise, thus orienting readers towards Howells’s social and ethical ideals. In The Financier, Frank Cowperwood’s financial activities are inseparable from his rise, failure, and final triumph, which comes to readers as a shock. And in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses his protagonist’s doubtful business activities to convince readers that there are only subjective realities. For all their differences, realist, naturalist, and modernist writers were responding to the needs of readers. Those needs, Şimşek elaborates in Chapter 1, were triggered by a profound “loss of reality” (33). Felt by writers and readers alike, loss of reality was caused by broad social changes—industrialization, urbanization, and centralization. These changes unmoored individuals from traditional communities and institutions, pushing them to the peripheries of the social world where they would live on what the market offered and mostly experience impersonal relationships. As a result, “Americans from all walks of life felt disoriented, dislocated, and fragmented—a sense that revealed itself primarily in the way people defined reality: reality was an ‘absent’ category for enlightened middle classes” (36). American writers of the post-Civil War era vastly diverged of how they perceived and defined “reality,” yet in their offering reality to readers they all differed from writers in the antebellum period. American Romanticism, Şimşek argues in Chapter 2, lacked social texture, as writers were primarily interested in mystery, melodrama, or any other larger-thanlife subject matter (47-53). To the extent that the business motif was used at all in this era, it was used either to juxtapose the profane against the sacred, thus offering spiritual comfort, or else, as in the writings by Edgar Allan Poe, to demonstrate human universals such as greed (53-55). 1 Once traditional institutions such as family and church had lost their power of cohesiveness, 1 In my The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe I argue that Poe goes well beyond a romantic or transcendentalist agenda, exploring the vicissitudes of American banking and finance in the antebellum period. Rezensionen 219 however, people were in dire need of explicit knowledge, of experience—in short, of reality, which became writers’ premier strategy for coming to terms with “the threats of social change” (Amy Kaplan, qtd. 59). Yet writers, Şimşek is careful to point out, do not simply reflect reality but rather constitute realities, thus making their works feel real (62-63). One way to create the reality effect was to drastically shorten the distance between signifier and signified. Thus, “business” is simply a word, not what it may signify, with the plot acted out by particular people in particular circumstances (65). If characters, not plot, are central to realist fiction, it is easy for writers to represent the social, psychological, and moral growth of their protagonists, thus offering social and ethical orientation to their readers. The endeavor, among American realist writers, culminated in William Dean Howells’s quintessentially realist novel and national bestseller, The Rise of Silas Lapham, the subject of Chapter 3. Fiction, Howells said, “has to tell a tale as well as evolve a moral” (qtd. 104). Accordingly, Lapham’s social and moral growth is inseparable from his business organization. The business motif allowed readers to connect the reality represented with the reality experienced (109) at the same time as it allowed the author to unite diverse social groups in American society, in this instance the middle classes and the leisure class (110). While The Rise of Silas Lapham, in contrast to earlier realist fiction, describes the organizations and activities of business in great detail, it is predicated on its author’s firm belief in the “perfectibility of humanity” (qtd. 101). Thus, the novel does not reflect economic givens so much as it orients readers socially and ethically (128). If Howells has little to say about the harsh realities of the underclasses or the nefarious practices of the robber barons, this is entirely in sync with the realist agenda: confined within Victorian morality, Howells’s purpose was to imagine the “true potential” of business (71), by which he meant that economic self-interest was to play itself out within ethical limits. But “business” is “a versatile tool” (75), which equally lent itself to the “scandalous” intensity of naturalism. Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier, Şimşek demonstrates in Chapter 4, paradigmatically reveals the naturalists’ attempts to offer intense and shocking realities to the reading public. In order to achieve this, the normality of everyday life had to be bracketed, replaced by unleashed passions and other “scandalous” things, which more often than not are mediated, not through a stable and reassuring narrator but through an utterly unreliable narratorcharacter. Dreiser’s protagonist, the successful businessman Frank Cowperwood—based at the same time on the financier and railway tycoon Charles Yerkes and Dreiser’s own dreams of wish fulfillment (174-76)—is immune to moral growth. While he “learns” from past mistakes, his “growth” climaxes only with his shocking success in the financial world of Philadelphia. Frank’s triumph—the result of his “bearish” investment strategies during the crisis of 1873 (192-95)—is also his liberation from all social constraints, a resolution that is indirectly and figuratively anticipated in the beginning. In The Financier, the protagonist learns that society is a hostile environment and that the only way to beat the system is to become ruthlessly individualistic. Rezensionen 220 This individualization goes hand in hand with the subjectivization of readers, an objective that modernist writers would perfect. For modernists, there was no stable, external reality at all; reality was personal, private, purely subjective, and fluid (203). It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who in The Great Gatsby combined the subjectivization of readers with the business motif. Business, Şimşek shows in Chapter 5, renders Nick’s narration utterly unreliable, thus buttressing the novel’s dominant themes, miscommunication and misunderstanding (199-200). Paradoxically, however, there is also trust in the narrator, which comes through the motif of business, as it enables Nick to meet Gatsby in a plausible way (217). But The Great Gatsby essentially is a love story, and so the business motif plays itself out rather more subliminally—in untimely phone calls, secret meetings and rumors, and through hints at Gatsby’s shady dealings (219-23). However, appreciation of Şimşek’s work, which is methodically sound in terms of discursively correlating business and fiction, is compromised by the way it ends. The end sets in with the Gatsby chapter, which is noticeably shorter than the preceding ones. There is little biographical information, nothing on the publishing history (the year of the novel’s first publication, 1925, is cited only in the introduction), and no other frameworks, psychological or otherwise. Has material been edited out? Or did the author somehow run out of steam? In contrast, Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, though left unfinished, does have a protagonist who is inextricably involved with business, in this instance, the motion picture business in America, with Monroe Stahr being, indeed, a heroic businessman, “a marker in industry.” 2 Strangely also, Şimşek’s section on “The Business Motif After the Great Depression” stops in the mid-1970s. True, in the second half of the twentieth century, business fictions appeared only occasionally (11), but why is there nothing after Joseph Heller’s Something Happened (1974) and William Gaddis’s JR: A Novel (1975)? Works like Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, together with its 2010 sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, or Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) might have provoked a different view of business and businessmen, which Şimşek looks at, not in terms of the “Scrooge syndrome” (27, the term is Emily Watts’s) but “unencumbered by older anxieties” (28). Equally “unencumbered” seems Şimşek’s bashing of the Hegelian tradition in criticism, most notably of left liberals like Amy Kaplan or Walter Benn Michaels (29-31), whose works he dismisses as “literary-economic philosophizing” because for them literary motifs such as business are merely “tools to reach the spirit of the age,” and the literariness of literary texts a mere “nuisance [and an] undesired distraction” (30, 31). While such outpourings against “ideological” approaches are perhaps understandable as a typical “rebellion against the fathers” (Fliegelman 1982: 210), they are followed up by a polemics for a revival of “literary aesthetics” at English departments. Yet students of English, it should be remembered, are not just training as literary scholars, but also to learn to re- 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald (1986). The Last Tycoon: an unfinished novel. Ed. Edmund Wilson [1941]. New York: Collier Macmillan. 28. Rezensionen 221 sponsibly contribute toward solving humanity’s problems and, as well, to the beneficial development of society and the natural environment. 3 Such an understanding of university education is hardly “simplistic” (29), nor does it justify playing off “the autonomy of literary works” against historical consciousness and historical content, least of all under the mantle of “transnational” American Studies (28). Despite the polemics in the introductory chapter, however, the “reading” sections of Creating Realities are not a throwback to the bygone days of New Criticism. Şimşek provides quite a number of extraliterary frameworks, from biography to social history to literary history to psychoanalysis. In fact, the sections devoted to analyses of the key texts are considerably short— altogether some 35 pages (The Rise of Silas Lapham: 20; The Financier: 17; The Great Gatsby: 7) out of a total of 236 pages of text. As Şimşek himself concedes in the conclusion, “mere close-reading is insufficient for literary research” (233). One can only agree with that. On the other hand, it is hard to understand why Şimşek consistently refers to America’s middle classes (itself a most elusive concept) as “enlightened.” Just as consistently, and unnecessarily, he construes the reader as masculine. It helps little that in a footnote to chapter 1 he asserts that “[all] gender-specific pronouns in this study are to be considered to refer to both the feminine and the masculine form, except when referring to a particular person” (35n2). Construing readers as masculine is especially disturbing since elsewhere (105) he notes, correctly, that especially in the years leading up to the turn of century the primary consumers of fiction were women. Still, Şimşek has achieved much in his study, convincing readers of the importance of the business motif in the evolution of American literature. The way writers (and readers, too) defined reality, he concludes, “was the engine of literary evolution: while realists defined it through the ‘middle path,’ naturalists and modernists defined reality as intensity an subjectivity, respectively” (235). The business motif, because of the predominance of business in American culture and society (9-12), provided writers with an important tool, helping them to get their works read and accepted, thus constituting an important communicative function. This function goes beyond dishing up commonplaces such as Calvin Coolidge’s remark that “the chief business of the American people is business” (9). As Şimşek concludes, rightly I think, writers also used the motif of business to “define America in relation to Europe” (233). Creating Realities, which is based on a doctoral dissertation accepted by Heidelberg University in 2016, provides a learned and inspiring study of American fiction from the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression. 3 Austrian university law is quite explicit about this, including, in the first paragraph, the following provision: “Die Universitäten sind berufen, der wissenschaftlichen Forschung und Lehre, der Entwicklung und der Erschließung der Künste sowie der Lehre der Kunst zu dienen und hiedurch auch verantwortlich zur Lösung der Probleme des Menschen sowie zur gedeihlichen Entwicklung der Gesellschaft und der natürlichen Umwelt beizutragen.” § 1 Universitätsgesetz 2002, emphases added. Rezensionen 222 References Fliegelman, Jay (1982). Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press. Tschachler, Heinz (2013). The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe: Banking, Currency and Politics in the Writings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Universitätsgesetz 2002. Bundesgesetz über die Organisation der Universitäten und ihre Studien. BGBl. I Nr. 120/ 2002. [online] https: / / www.ris. bka. gv.at/ GeltendeFassung.wxe? Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=200 02128&FassungVom=2019-05-14. Heinz Tschachler University of Klagenfurt Austria Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Narr Francke A�empto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 97 97-0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de \ periodicals.narr.de No�ce to Contributors All ar�cles for submission should be sent to the editor, Bernhard Kettemann, as a WORD document as mail attachment: bernhard.kettemann@uni-graz.at Manuscripts should conform to the AAA style sheet or follow either MHRA or MLA style. 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It is our policy to publish accepted contribu�ons without delay. Gründer, Eigentümer, Herausgeber und für den Inhalt verantwortlich / founder, owner, editor and responsibility for content: Bernhard Kettemann, Ins�tut für Anglis�k, Universität Graz, Heinrichstraße 36, A-8010 Graz. Web: http: / / narr.digital/ journal/ aaa, Tel.: +43 / 316 / 380-2488, 2474, Fax: +43 / 316 / 380-9765 Herausgeber / editor Bernhard Kettemann Redak�on / editorial assistants Georg Marko Eva Triebl Mitherausgeber / editorial board Alwin Fill Walter Grünzweig Walter Hölbling Allan James Andreas Mahler Chris�an Mair Annemarie Peltzer-Karpf Werner Wolf Cécile Heim, Boris Vejdovsky, Benjamin Pickford (eds.) The Genres of Genre: Forms, Formats, and Cultural Formations Swiss Papers in English Language And Literature (SPELL), Vol. 38 2019, 175 Seiten €[D] 49,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-8327-7 e ISBN 978-3-8233-9327-6 The 38th volume of SPELL is dedicated to the discussion and analysis of the concept of genre. Terms such as “the political unconscious” (Jameson), “cultural work” (Tompkins), “narrative mode” (Williams) and “performative” (Austin, Turner) have been centrally determining, over the years, to help us understand how genres work and what they do. This collection seeks to further explore what roles genre plays in past and contemporary American national narratives and counter-narratives. While the first three essays of the volume attempt to tackle the difficult task of defining genre and its affordances, the following three essays discuss specific genres, namely, the office novel, the political TV show, and science-fiction. Finally, the last three essays explore how genre can be a valuable concept for the analysis of larger issues, such as the representation of race in American cultural productions. This collection of essays therefore offers a variety of approaches to the literary device of genre, reflecting ongoing research in the Swiss community of American studies, in order to underline the productive potential of genre analysis. ANGLISTIK \ LITERATURWISSENSCHAFT Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (0)7071 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (0)7071 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de AAA_2019_2.indd 4-6 AAA_2019_2.indd 4-6 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 narr.digital 6 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik ISSN 0171 - 5410 Mit Beiträgen von: Werner Wolf Peter Freese Justyna Fruzińska Daniel Becker Günter Sigott Melanie Fleischhacker Stephanie Sihler Jennifer Steiner Heinz Tschachler Band 44 · Heft 2 | 2019 Band 44 · Heft 2 | 2019 AAA_2019_2.indd 1-3 AAA_2019_2.indd 1-3 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58 13.02.2020 11: 21: 58