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Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 · Heft 1 | 2020 Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) Heft 1 Inhaltsverzeichnis Artikel: Hans H. Hiebel Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said: Eine Annäherung .................................................................................................... 5 Emma Tornborg Repetition in Transmediation: From Painting to Poem and GIF............................................................................ 29 Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary ................ 45 Roman Trušník Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing: The Case of Jim Grimsley’s “Wendy”.................................................................... 67 Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung Semiotic Fitness: The Chinese Written Character and its Metamorphosis in Modern American Poetry.................................................................................. 83 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). Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. Bezugspreis jährlich € 97,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 75,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft € 56,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 2020 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5, 72070 Tübingen E-mail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 Editor’s Foreword The editor in his home office. Photo by Ilse Kettemann (2020). Dear readers, I am proud to present the 45 th volume of our journal “Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik”, founded by me at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1976 and published by Gunter Narr in Tübingen since then. We started off as a forum for Austrian research in English and American studies and are still the only Austrian journal in this field of research in Austria. Now, after four and a half decades, we have reached the whole world: as authors of our articles and reviews and as their readers. From the beginning we have tried to present state-of-the-art research in literary criticism, linguistics and cultural studies with an innovative approach and inspiring contents. We work hard to constantly keep up and even enhance the quality of our journal by a strict peer review and additional experts if required. It has been a pleasure (and hard work) to keep this scientific endeavour running over all these years and I would like to express my thanks to my peer reviewers on the editorial board and to my editorial staff, who have always been extremely supportive and loyal. Without them the “Arbeiten Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik” would not have survived and prospered over so many years. And I am thankful to all our readers for their unfailing support over such a long period of time. I am also grateful to my publisher, Gunter Narr, for holding on for such a long time. We have been moving the field forward for the last 45 years and I sincerely hope that we will continue doing so in the future. Ad multos annos. Bernhard Kettemann Editor, AAA Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said Eine Annäherung Hans H. Hiebel Die weitgehend deskriptive Interpretation von ill seen ill said geht eng dem Text entlang und wählt die wichtigsten Stationen des Ablaufs zur näheren Betrachtung aus; sie ist dem "close reading" verpflichtet. Das Optische hat den Vorrang; es ergibt sich eine Sukzession von durchaus poetischen Gemälden: Zentrum ist eine alte Frau und ihre kleine Klause, die von Steingeröll und Wiesen umgeben ist. Als erdichtete, erschriebene Fantasie erweist sich die Sukzession durch surreale Einfälle: Die Steine häufen sich, die Frau im schwarzen Kleid bleibt von fallenden Schneeflocken unberührt usw. Ihr Besuch bei einem Grab hat die Frage aufgeworfen, ob es sich um eine Reinkarnation der Maria oder der Maria Magdalena handeln könnte. Aber ein Beckett-Text lässt sich nicht auf bestimmte Signifikate festlegen. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said von 1981 1 ist einer der dunkelsten und dichtesten Texte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Alain Badiou hält Schlecht gesehen schlecht gesagt zusammen mit Wie es ist „zweifellos“ für die „größte[] Prosa Becketts“. 2 Da der folgende Versuch einer Erhellung der 61 halbseitigen oder ganzseitigen Kapitelchen vieles im Dunkel belassen wird, kann er nur als eine „Annäherung“ begriffen werden. Die Dichte ergibt sich aus einer eigentümlichen Beckett-Grammatik, die mit Verkürzungen arbeitet: “It it is draws her.” (11) “When not night evening.” (46) Die Dunkelheit resultiert aus mysteriösen Anspielungen: “The others are there. All about. The twelve. Afar. Still or receding.” (15) Auch ist es oft schwierig, festzustellen, worauf sich ein Satz bezieht: “Now the moment or never. But something forbids.” (15) 1 Samuel Beckett, ill seen ill said. (London: John Calder 1981) 2 Alain Badiou: Beckett. Das Begehren ist nicht totzukriegen. (Zürich, Berlin: diaphanes, 2006), S. 46. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0011 Hans H. Hiebel 6 Im ersten Kapitelchen werden uns in einer Art Exposition der Hauptschauplatz und die Hauptperson vorgestellt: ein Innenraum und eine alte Frau. “From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun.” “At evening when the skies are clear she savours its star’s revenge. At the other window. Rigid upright on her old chair she watches for the radiant one. […] She sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom. […] Heading on foot for a particular point often she freezes on the way. Unable till long after to move on not knowing whither or for what purpose. Down on her knees especially she finds it hard not to remain so forever. Hand resting on hand on some convenient support. Such as the foot of her bed. And on them her head. There then she sits as though turned to stone face to the night. Save for the white of her hair und faintly bluish white of face and hands all is black.” (7) 3 Mit den zitierten Worten könnte eine Erzählung beginnen. Wir haben jedoch einige Indizien ausgelassen, die den Text tiefgreifend verändern und den Eindruck, dass wir es mit einer erzählten Geschichte zu tun haben, wieder aufheben. So fällt bereits ein “On” (im Sinne von „Weiter! “) nach dem ersten Satz des ersten Abschnitts: “From where she lies she sees Venus rise. On. From where she lies when the skies are clear she sees Venus rise followed by the sun. Then she rails at the source of all life. On. At evening […].” Die Frau zürnt der Quelle allen Lebens. Das erklärt ihre zeitweilige Erstarrung und macht von Anfang an klar, dass wir es - wie könnte es bei Beckett anders sein - mit dem Unglück, dem menschlichen Leid zu tun haben. Das “On” ist ein metafiktionales Bruchstück, mit dem sich der Sprecher oder Schreiber zum Weitermachen ermuntert, das heißt, es ist ein Indiz einer selbstreferentiellen bzw. selbstbezüglichen Haltung, in der der Sprecher oder Schreiber sich zu seinem eigenen Text verhält. Im französischen Original steht „Encore“, der Übersetzer, Elmar Tophoven, gibt es als „Weiter“ wieder, was der englischen Version eigentlich nähersteht. 4 Der erste Abschnitt endet mit dem Satz: “All this in the present as had she the misfortune to be still of this world.” (8) Noch einmal äußert sich der sich selbstreferentiell auf seinen eigenen Text beziehende Schreiber: Der ganze erste Abschnitt ist im Präsens gehalten. „Als hätte sie das Unglück, noch von dieser Welt zu sein.“ Also geht es um eine Tote, eine Tote, deren - leises und ersterbendes - Leben gleichwohl und paradoxerweise geschildert wird. Sie ‚lebt‘ in einem Jenseits, das freilich nichts mit dem christlichen Jenseits zu tun hat. Auch geht es nicht um eine ‚Untote‘, wie sie in einem fantastischen Genre wie The Walking Dead, sich unter Lebende mischend, erscheinen könnte. Mit dieser ‚sterbenden Toten‘ sind wir im 3 Im fortlaufenden Text werden unter Angabe der Seitenzahl in runder Klammer die Zitate nachgewiesen. 4 Samuel Beckett, Mal vu mal dit. Schlecht gesehen schlecht gesagt. Französisch/ Deutsch. Aus dem Französischen von Elmar Tophoven. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983) (= edition suhrkamp 1119), S. 8 u. 9. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 7 „Niemandsland zwischen Leben und Tod“. 5 Wir haben es also mit einer Imagination zu tun, einer Vision. Sie wird sozusagen ‚erschrieben‘, Situationen und Ereignisse erscheinen so in statu nascendi, das heißt, die Phänomene erscheinen in der Schreibgegenwart, und zwar in dem Moment, in dem sie benannt werden. Beckett schildert nicht mehr - wie noch in Malone Dies - Sterbende, sondern Gestorbene, er schildert, genau gesagt, die paradoxe Erscheinung einer sterbenden Gestorbenen. Solche Paradoxien stören den Autor aber nicht, denn sie entsprechen quasi essentiellen Erfahrungen, Erinnerungen. Der zweite Abschnitt beginnt folgendermaßen: “The cabin. Its situation. Careful. On. At the inexistent centre of a formless place.” (8) Die Kamera begibt sich vom Innen ins Außen. Das Bild ist jetzt in der Totalen aufgenommen. Die Klause oder Hütte liegt in einem flachen, kreisförmigen Gelände. “Stones increasingly abound.” (8) Steine häufen sich in einem stetigen Prozess. Dieses unrealistische Faktum macht die Situation (logisch) irreal oder (literarisch) surreal und erweist sie dadurch als imaginiert. Dennoch haben wir ein Bild vor uns, als würde eine - wenn auch fiktive - Welt erzählt. “Ever scanter even the rankest weed. Meagre pastures hem it round on which it slowly gains.” In der fernen Vergangenheit, zur Zeit der Errichtung der Hütte, soll Luzerne bis an die Mauern gereicht haben. Aber dennoch erweisen das “Careful” und “On”, dass hier eine Landschaft erschrieben wird, imaginiert wird. Mit „Attention“ und „Aller“, „Vorsicht“ und „Nur zu! “ 6 ermahnt sich der Schreiber zum vorsichtigen Weitermachen. Das Bild der herabregnenden Steine führt die Mimesis (bzw. Repräsentation) über in das Gebiet des Fiktiven (im an sich schon fiktionalen Diskurs). Wolfgang Iser hat der binären Logik des Gegensatzes von Realem und Erfundenem die Triade „des Realen, Fiktiven und Imaginären“ entgegengesetzt. 7 Das literarische Spiel, das sich durch Selektion und Kombination von Einzelelementen konstituiert 8 , führt in der fiktionalen Literatur zur Modifikation sowohl von Realitätspartikeln wie auch zur Umwandlung des - an sich formlosen - Imaginären: Es kommt zu einer „Irrealisierung von Realem“ und zu einem „Realwerden von Imaginärem“. 9 In seinem Abschnitt zu Samuel Becketts Imagination Dead Imagine 10 konstatiert Iser, dass „das Phantastische die Differenz zwischen dem Mimetischen und dem Wunderbaren besetzt […].“ 11 Im 18. Jahrhundert umfasste der Begriff des „Wunderbaren“ sowohl das Unwahrscheinliche als auch das die Naturgesetze Überschreitende. Im Bild von der wachsenden Anzahl der Steine bei 5 Badiou, Beckett, S. 43. 6 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 10 u. 11. 7 Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt a. M. : Suhrkamp, 1991), S. 20 f. 8 Vgl. ebd., S. 24 ff. 9 Ebd., S. 23. 10 Ebd., S. 412-425. 11 Ebd., S. 414. Hans H. Hiebel 8 Beckett wird das Letztere imaginiert (im Sinne des „Realwerdens“ des an sich gestaltlosen Imaginären). Dieses Changieren zwischen dem Mimetischen und dem Fiktiven, dieses Spiel mit zwei Modi der Darstellung, zeigt sich immer wieder in Becketts Text, z. B. wenn das schwarze Kleid der Alten vom Schneefall unberührt bleibt (vgl. 33) oder der Schuhknöpfer vibriert (vgl. 18). Damit zeigt sich, dass wir es nicht nur mit einer fiktiven Welt zu tun haben, sondern dass ein Spiel mit dem Fiktiven inszeniert wird, dass das Kreieren selbst anschaulich wird. Nicht Wahrnehmungen werden mimetisch festgehalten, vielmehr werden „Wahrnehmungsbedingungen“ nachgeahmt, wie es Iser für eine offene Welt in nacharistotelischer Zeit für passend hält. 12 “And from it [the cabin] an evil core the what is the wrong word the evil spread.” (9) “And none to urge - none to have urged its demolition. As if doomed to endure. Question answered.” (9) Mit der Frage nach dem “falschen Wort” wird das Thema des Textes - „ill seen ill said“ - aufgenommen. Die radikale Sprachskepsis lässt nicht einmal die Frage nach dem „richtigen Wort“ aufkommen, da es nur falsche Worte und falsche Antworten gibt. Ein Stück ‚Erzählung‘ folgt dem Kommentar: “Chalkstones of striking effect in the light of the moon. Let it be in opposition when the skies are clear.” (9) „Kalksteine von eindrucksvoller Wirkung im Mondschein.“ 13 Venus sinkt im Westen, der Mond steigt auf vor dem Ostfenster. “Let it be in opposition when the skies are clear. Quick then still under the spell of Venus quick to the other window to see the other marvell rise.” (9) Das “Let it be” macht deutlich, dass wir es hier wieder mit Erfindung zu tun haben, mit einer Imagination. Das Erschriebene wird in statu nascendi präsentiert. Es wird Fingieren selbst, Kreation selbst vorgeführt. So erweist sich der Text immer wieder als „Spiel“; Iser spricht in seinem Abschnitt über Beckett von den „letzte[n] Spuren eines Spiels“. 14 Der Begriff „Spiel“ wird vor allem in Isers Kapitel „Mimesis und Performanz“ des Öfteren gebraucht. 15 „Spiel“ gilt als „Infrastruktur der Darstellung“ und ist weitgehend von der „Performanz“ eines Textes abhängig. 16 Der Mond steht in Opposition zur Sonne bzw. zur Venus. „How whiter and whiter as it climbs it whitens more and more the stones.” (9) Je höher er steigt, desto heller leuchtet er und macht die Kalksteine weißer und weißer. Das Bild, das hier evoziert wird, ist von eindringlicher und zugleich sublimer Poesie. Es wird entfaltet wie ein Gemälde. Aber diese Poesie ist kein Indiz von Lebensglück, sie ist vom Unglück umhüllt. Bestenfalls ist der visuelle Eindruck ein Trost. 12 Ebd., S. 488. 13 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 13. 14 Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre, S. 425. 15 Ebd., S. 481-515. 16 Ebd., S. 507. Vgl. auch die Ausführungen zum „Spiel“ in Becketts Romantrilogie in: Wolfgang Iser: Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1972). S. 259 f. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 9 Der dritte Abschnitt spricht von zwei Zonen, offenbar der Zone der Steinhalde und der Zone der “pastures”, der Triften; sie formen einen runden Bezirk. “Diameter. Careful. Say one furlong.” (9) Also, vorsichtig geschätzt, vorsichtig gesagt, vorsichtig erschrieben: eine Achtelmeile. “Beyond the unknown.” (9) Jenseits das Unbekannte. Dieses „Unbekannte“ macht den Schauplatz zu einem nicht-empirischen Ort, einem visionär geschauten Platz. Die Triften sind grasbewachsen. “Save where it has receded from the chalky soil. Innumerable white scabs all shapes and sizes. Of striking effect in the light of the moon. In the way of animals ovines only. After long hesitation.” (10) Spricht hier wieder der Imaginierer, der lange zögerte, Schafe ins Bild zu bringen? “They are white and make do with little.” (10) Ohne Schäfer streifen sie umher. Die weißen Flecken und die weißen Schafe im Mondlicht formen noch einmal ein poetisches Bild. Blumen? Nur vereinzelt Krokusse. Der Mensch? “Shut of at last? Alas no.” (10) “How many? A figure come what may. Twelve. Wherewith to furnish the horizon’s narrow round.” (10) Irgendeine Zahl möge erscheinen. Wieder erschreibt sich der Imaginierer eine Zahl: Zwölf. Die Zwölf werden später „guardians“ (42), „Wächter“ 17 , genannt. Sie erscheinen in der Ferne, erstarrt oder zurückweichend. Noch nie ging einer von ihnen auf die Frau zu. (Vgl. 10) Abrupt schließt der Abschnitt: “Do they see her? Enough.” (10) In einer selbstbezüglichen Selbstanrede beschließt der Imaginierer: „Enough“. 18 Im vierten Abschnitt ist von Lämmern die Rede. “There had to be lambs.” (11) Aber es bleibt ungewiss, ob sie - innerhalb der Fiktion - tatsächlich vorhanden sind: “A moor would have allowed of them.” (11) Aber ein “moor”, eine Heidelandschaft, wird nicht imaginiert, also dürften sie eigentlich nicht vorhanden sein. Dennoch heißt es: “Lambs for their whiteness”. (11) Ihrer Weißheit wegen. Sind sie also nur in der Form einer Negation vorhanden? Das Bild bleibt in der Schwebe. Vielleicht werden die Lämmer nur gedacht: “Aloof from the unheeding ewes. Still. Then a moment straying. Then still again.” Also nur imaginiert - innerhalb einer bloßen Imagination nur imaginiert? Auch im Hinblick auf „Leben“ ergibt sich eine grundlegende Ambivalenz: “To think there is still life in this age.” (11) Die Protagonistin ist eine lebende Tote. Das „Leben“ in diesem „Jahrhundert“ kann also auch nur ein Leben von Schatten sein. Eine ähnliche Paradoxie ergibt sich in What Where: Dort heißt es: „We are the last five./ In the present as were we still.“ 19 Auch dies ist eine Geister- oder Gespenstergeschichte. Der Abschnitt schließt wieder mit einer Selbstanrede des Imaginierers: “Gently gently.” (11) 17 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 75. 18 Zum Begriff der „Selbstbezüglichkeit“ und dem Phänomen als solchem in Becketts Gesamtwerk vgl. Hans H. Hiebel: Samuel Beckett. Das Spiel mit der Selbstbezüglichkeit (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016). 19 Samuel Beckett, What Where. In: S. B., Collected Shorter Plays. (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), S. 307-316. Zit. S. 310. What Where ist von 1983. Hans H. Hiebel 10 Der fünfte Abschnitt beginnt folgendermaßen: “She is drawn to a certain spot. At times. There stands a stone. It it is draws her. Rounded rectangular block three times as high as wide. Four. Her stature now. Her lowly stature.” (11) Es scheint ein Grabstein zu sein. Ist es der Grabstein, der später erwähnt werden wird? (Vgl. 28, 30) Mit geschlossenen Augen fände sie zu ihm. (Vgl. 12) “With herself she has no more converse.. Never had much. Now none. As had she the misfortune to be still of this world.” (12) “But when the stone draws then to her feet the prayer, Take her. […] They take her and halt her before it. There she too as if of stone. But black. Sometimes in the light of the moon. Mostly of the stars alone” (12) Die Frau erscheint immer in Schwarz. Das heißt, die Malerei in Schwarz-Weiß, das poetische Setting wird fortgesetzt; nun ist die Frau außerhalb ihrer Klause zu sehen. Es entwickelt sich ein einziges großes Gemälde; man könnte jedoch auch von einem Bilderzyklus sprechen, da mit jedem neuen Abschnitt ein weiterer Bildaspekt hinzugefügt wird. Das Ganze ist eine elegische Meditation in Form einer Entfaltung dieses Gemäldezyklus. “To the imaginary stranger the dwelling appears deserted.” (12) Kein Zeichen von Leben ist für einen imaginierten Fremden zu sehen. Hinter den zwei Fenstern (im Osten eines und im Westen eines) sind nur schwarze Vorhänge zu erspähen. “She shows herself only to her own. But she has no own. Yes yes she has one.” (13) Wer kann dieser „Angehörige“ sein? Es ist zu vermuten, da kein anderer außer den „Zwölf“ je erscheint, dass es um einen Toten geht, einen Toten unter dem Stein, zu dem es die alte Frau immer wieder hinzieht. Da es nicht klar ist, ob es sich bei dem Steinblock um einen Grabstein handelt, und offen bleibt, um welchen „Angehörigen“ es geht, ergibt sich eine Dunkelheit, die den gesamten Text als aus bloßen Andeutungen konstituiert erscheinen lässt. Diese Dunkelheit korrespondiert mit der wörtlichen Dunkelheit - an Abenden, in Nächten, in Wintern. Fast alle Situationen erscheinen im Zwielicht eines Abends oder in einem Morgendämmer. Wie durch Zauber (“enchantment” (13)) erscheint sie in den Triften und verschwindet wieder. Lange ist sie nicht in der Zone der Steine zu sehen. “But little by little she began to appear. In the zone of stones. First darkly. Then more and more plain. Till in detail she could be seen crossing the threshold both ways and closing the door behind her.” (13) Wie in einem filmischen Fade-in erscheint das Bild der Frau, von Mal zu Mal deutlicher. Dann lange Abwesenheit innerhalb ihrer vier Wände, bis sie dort wieder erscheint. “Then a time when within her walls she did not appear. A long time. But little by little she began to appear. Within her walls. Darkly.” (13) Erneutes Fade-in. “Time truth to tell still current. Though she within them no more.” (13 f.) Wieder begegnet uns ein Widerspruch, eine Paradoxie. Erscheint sie noch - oder nicht mehr? “Time still current” - “no Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 11 more”. Auf Grund der Widersprüche oder „Aufhebungen“ verstärkt sich der Eindruck der Dunkelheit des Textes. 20 Im Abschnitt 8 kommt es zur Aufhebung der Aufhebung: “Yes within her walls so far at the window only. At one or the other window. Rapt before the sky. And only half seen so far a pallet and a ghostly chair.” (14) Das Thema “ill seen ill said” wird durch das “half seen” vorsichtig angesprochen, dann deutlicher artikuliert: “Ill half seen.” (14) Sie erstarrt bei ihrem Hin und Her: “suddenly stops dead”. Sie hält ein dunkles Album auf ihren Knien. “See the old fingers fumble through the pages.” (14) Vielleicht nur vertrocknete Blumen: “In the meantime who knows no more than withered flowers. No more! ” (14 f.) Who knows? Im nächsten Segment ist Winter, die Frau geht quer über den Schnee. “It is evening. Yet again. On the snow her long shadow keeps her company.” (15) Man erhascht den Rand eines schwarzen Schleiers. (Vgl. 15) Die Malerei in Schwarz-Weiß wird fortgesetzt: Abend, Schnee, schwarzer Schatten, schwarzer Schleier. Es gibt keine Farben. Aber sie ist nicht allein: “The others are there. All about. The twelve. Afar. Still or receding.” (15) Sie erstarrt wieder. “Now the moment or never. But something forbids.” (15) Aber um was für einen Augenblick handelt es sich? Was wird verhindert? Der Text lässt es offen; seine Dunkelheit wird verstärkt, vermehrt durch die vielen Auslassungen und Unbestimmtheitsstellen. Handelt es sich dabei um „Unbestimmtheitsgrade“ und „Leerstellen“, wie sie Wolfgang Iser beschrieben hat? 21 „Nun aber zeigt die Diskussion um Beckett, wie wenig sich die Beckett-Leser mit diesem Ausgesperrtsein zufriedengeben. Dem hohen Unbestimmtheitsgrad wird mit einer massiven Bedeutungsprojektion geantwortet […].“ 22 (Das Gleiche könnte von Franz Kafkas Werken gesagt werden.) Die Texte Becketts „mobilisieren unsere Vorstellungswelt total, allerdings nicht, um in einer gefundenen Bedeutung Beruhigung zu gewähren, sondern eher, um den Eindruck zu vermitteln, daß sich ihre Eigenart erst dann entfaltet, wenn sich unsere Vorstellungswelt als überschritten erfährt.“ 23 Es hat nun den Anschein, als habe Beckett in ill seen ill said sein Konzept der Leerstellen, das spätestens mit der Figur des Herrn „Godot“ beginnt, radikalisiert. Hier hat unsere Vorstellungwelt, so scheint es, überhaupt keinen Ansatzpunkt mehr zum Projizieren. Ist der Steinblock ein Grab? Wer liegt in ihm? Wer ist der Angehörige? Wer sind die „Zwölf“? Was ist dies für ein Augenblick? Was wird verhindert? Die Dunkelheit des Textes nimmt überhand. 20 Vgl. das Kapitel „Subjektivität als Selbstaufhebung ihrer Manifestationen“ zu Becketts Romantrilogie in: Wolfgang Iser: Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett. (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), S. 252-275. 21 Vgl. Wolfgang Iser, „Die Appellstruktur der Texte“. In: Rezeptionsästhetik. Theorie und Praxis, hrsg. von Rainer Warning. (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1975). S. 228-252. 22 Ebd., S. 247. 23 Ebd. Hans H. Hiebel 12 Es ist schließlich nichts zu sehen außer dem Schnee im Sonnenlicht: “Where nothing to be seen in the grazing rays but snow. And how all about little by little her footprints are effaced.” (16) Sogar die Fußspuren verschwinden. Aber der Schnee ist gewissermaßen sichtbar. Das Gemälde wird erweitert. Der Bilderzyklus wird fortgesetzt. Aber sowohl im Schwarz der Nacht als auch im blendenden Schnee ist nichts zu sehen. Die Unbestimmtheit erweitert sich in Abschnitt 10: “What but life ending. Hers. The other’s. But so otherwise. She needs nothing. Nothing utterable. Whereas the other.” (16) Wer ist dieser Andere? Kein Anderer wird im Text je auftauchen. Ist der Andere identisch mit dem Imaginierer? Der hier in der dritten Person erscheint? Schließlich gibt es lange Zeiträume, in denen sie verschwunden ist. “Times when she is gone. Long lapses of time. At crocus time it would be making for the distant tomb. To have that on the imagination! ” (16 f.) Nur im Konjunktiv wird der Weg zum „fernen Grab“ evoziert. Aber er scheint zur Vision, der Imagination des Ganzen zu gehören. Die Frau wird mit einem Kreuz und einem Kranz ausgestattet. (Vgl. 17) Aber sie kann urplötzlich verschwunden sein. “No longer anywhere to be seen. Not by the eye of flesh nor by the other.” (17) Weder mit dem fleischlichen Auge noch mit dem inneren. Der Text scheint hier ins Spielerische zu wechseln, als gäbe es überhaupt ein anderes Auge als das innere, als die Imagination. Es gibt keinen Erzähler mit einem fleischlichen Auge, das auf eine erzählte Wirklichkeit blicken würde; es gibt nur die Vision. Reales (innerhalb der Fiktion) und Imaginäres stehen gleichberechtigt nebeneinander; beide verweisen auf echte Erfahrung, etwas Essentielles. 24 John Pilling zufolge „wird das Reale und das Imaginäre als zu verschiedenen Arten der Erfahrung gehörig begriffen“. 25 Daher ist berechtigtermaßen auch die „Verwirrung“ möglich, die “confusion”: “Such the confusion now between real and - how to say its contrary? ” (40) 26 „In jeder Erscheinung scheint das Objekt die Macht zu besitzen, nach Belieben zu erscheinen und zu verschwinden […].“ 27 Das erinnert an harte Schnitte im Film. Im Segment 38 heißt es: “On resumption the head is covered. No matter. No matter now. Such the confusion now between real and - how say its contrary? No matter. The old tandem. Such now the confusion of them once so twain. For it to make what sense of it may. No matter now. Such equal liars both. Real and - how ill say its contrary? The counter-poison.” 24 Nach Alfred Simon ist Beckett der „Schriftsteller des Essentiellen“. Alfred Simon, Beckett. Aus dem Französischen von Michel Bischoff. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), S. 96. 25 John Pilling, „Eine Kritik der Armut. Schlecht gesehen schlecht gesagt“. In: Samuel Beckett. Hrsg. von Hartmut Engelhardt, (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984), S. 302- 314, Zit. S. 306. 26 Vgl. dazu ebd. 27 Ebd. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 13 (40) Lügner sind das Reale wie das Imaginäre (bzw. Fiktive). Gift und Gegengift. Aber scheint nicht eine Wahrheit durch die Doppelbelichtung hindurch? Durch die Mischung aus Realem und Fiktivem hindurch? Becketts Erzählung wird zu einem Diskurs über das Verhältnis von Realem und Fiktivem. Auf ihr, der Frau, Wiedererscheinen wartet der Andere. “Any other than this other. In wait for her to reappear. In order to resume. Resume the - what is the word? What the wrong word? ” Es gibt nur falsche Worte, also wird gleich nach dem falschen gefragt. Das Thema von “ill seen ill said” wird wieder aufgenommen. „Comment mal dire? “, gibt das französische Original. 28 Es scheint, als würde wieder ein Stück ‚Erzählung‘ folgen. “Riveted to some detail of the desert the eye fills with tears. Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.” (17) Ist die Imagination ans Ende gekommen, ans Ende der Weisheit? Statt einem langsamen Fading-in werden wir mit einem Filmschnitt wieder der Frau ansichtig, der Tränen. Sie rafft den langen Rock und entdeckt ihre Stiefel und Strümpfe. Da hängt ein Schuhknöpfer, ein “buttonhook” (18) an einem Nagel. Die Kamera folgt dem Blick der Frau. “Of tarnished silver pisciform it hangs by its hook from a nail. It trembles faintly without cease.” (18) Das Zittern, grundlos, führt das Stück ‚Erzählung‘ wieder über in Imagination, Fiktion, Vision. Nach langer Pause erscheint im Text wieder ein “Careful”. (18) Einst konnte die Frau noch die Griffe einer Zange zusammendrücken, um den Schuhknöpfer geradezubiegen; dann nicht mehr. “Oh not for weakness. Since when it hangs useless from the nail.” (18) “Close-up then […]. Long this image till suddenly it blurs.” (19) Nicht körperliche Schwäche hindert die Frau am Zusammendrücken der Zange, es muss sich um eine Art Lebensmüdigkeit handeln. Der Imaginierer sieht wie in einer Nahaufnahme den Schuhknöpfer, bis er vor dem Auge, dem inneren Auge, verschwimmt. Wie mit dem Mittel des Films („close-up“) wird das Bild näher herangeholt, dann folgt ein Fadeout. Der 14. Abschnitt beginnt wieder mit einem Filmschnitt: “She is there. Again.” (19) In der Morgendämmerung oder im Abendschummer. Die Vorhänge sind - vielleicht - geöffnet, damit sie den Himmel sehen kann. Im nächsten Abschnitt heißt es: “If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else.” (20) Die Paradoxie von der sterbenden Toten wiederholt sich. Dass es sich um eine Vision handelt, bestätigt die Formulierung vom „madhouse of the scull“. Es wird nicht gesagt, um wessen “scull” es sich handelt. Aber die Vision beruht offenbar auf einer durchaus existentiellen Erfahrung, sie ist nicht reine Schimäre: “If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be.” Aber es gibt kein “pure figment”. 28 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 28. Der französische Text kann zuweilen den englischen erhellen. Aber er ist keineswegs deckungsgleich mit dem englischen. Hans H. Hiebel 14 Zwar wird, wie Iser meint, das Reale irrealisiert und das Imaginäre realisiert, aber ganz verschwindet das Wirkliche nicht im Spiel der Fiktion. Handelt es sich um ein Requiem für die Mutter? Offenbar geht es um einen realen Verlust in der realen Welt, eine elegische Klage, in der die reale Welt verschwimmt. Frederik N. Smith spricht von einer „Pastoral Elegy“. 29 Aber natürlich bleibt offen, um wen es sich handelt. Im Abschnitt 16 werden zwei Luken im steilen Dach erwähnt, durch die - bei geschlossenen Vorhängen - ein trübes Licht fällt. Ohne diese Luken läge alles Tag und Nacht im Dunkel. “All in black she comes and goes. The hem of her long black skirt brushes the floor. But most often she is still. Standing or sitting. Lying or on her knees.” (21) Die Kamera leuchtet das Innere der Hütte aus. Ein schwaches Licht also, noch kein vollständiges Dunkel, noch kein Ende. Ein Licht, in dem man schlecht sieht. Eine Mauer entsteht, löst sich auf und bildet sich erneut. “East the bed. West the chair.” (21) “The buttonhook glimmers in the last rays. The pallet scarce to be seen.” (22) Im 18. Abschnitt kehrt das Auge zu den „Zwölf“ zurück. “Out of her sight as she of theirs.” (22) Also muss es um das innere Auge gehen. “To the twelve then for want of better the widowed eye.” (22) Ein Mann in langem dunklen Mantel wird wahrgenommen, es ist ein Winterabend: “Finally the face caught full in the last rays.” (22) Spricht im Folgenden der Imaginierer - oder geht es um das Auge der Frau? „Quick enlarge and devour before night falls.“ (23) Wieder wird ein optisches Mittel bzw. ein filmisches Mittel eingesetzt: die Vergrößerung. Der Eindruck wird rasch verschlungen wie Nahrung, bevor die Nacht kommt. Im Abschnitt 19 ist - wie des Öfteren in den folgenden Segmenten - wieder vom „Auge“ die Rede, als solle alle Spur eines Erzählers getilgt werden: “Having no need of light to see the eye makes haste. Before night falls.” (23) Das Auge beeilt sich, obwohl es auch ohne jedes Licht sieht. Es ist nicht deutlich, ob es um das Auge eines niemals sichtbar werdenden Erzählsubjekts oder um das Auge der Frau geht. Auf jeden Fall ist es das Auge des Lesers/ Betrachters. “[T]orpid under its lid [it] makes way for unreason”. (23) Im Bereich des Wahns, des “unreason”, tauchen wieder sie auf, die „Zwölf“, so muss man annehmen, die sie einkreisen.“What if not her do they ring around? ” (23) “As hope expires of her ever reappearing she reappears. At first sight little changed. It is evening. It will always be evening.” So beginnt Kapitel 20. Wessen Hoffnung erstirbt beinahe? Es ergibt sich eine Leerstelle, die - wie das „Auge“ - einen Erzähler ersetzt. Es gibt kein „Ich“. Offenbar geht es um den Imaginierer, dem die Hoffnung ausgeht. Aber mit schwebendem Schritt erscheint „sie“ auf den Triften; plötzlich erstarrt und plötzlich wieder unterwegs; im Zwielicht. Sie gelangt zur Tür ihrer Klause, einen großen 29 Frederik N. Smith, Ill seen ill said: Beckett’s Pastoral Elegy. (Rock Hill. S.C.: Philological Association of the Carolinas, Winthrop College, Department of English, 1992.) Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 15 Schlüssel haltend. “[S]he casts to the moon to come her long black shadow.” (24) Sie erstarrt wieder. “All dead still. All save hanging from a finger the old key polished by use. Trembling it faintly shimmers in the light of the moon.” (25) Das Poetische, ja Romantische der Vision kommt noch einmal in einer Art Gemälde zum Ausdruck - im schwachen Schimmer des Mondlichts auf dem pendelnden Schlüssel. Er pendelt oder zittert, “trembling”, wie der Schuhknöpfer. Die Poesie setzt sich - in Abschnitt 21 - fort im Schimmern der Steinplatte vor der Tür. Das Gesicht gibt sich endlich hin. “Wooed from below the face consents at last. In the dim light reflected by the flag. Calm slab worn und polished by agelong comings and goings. Livid pallor. Not a wrinkle. How serene it seems this ancient mask.” (25) “The lids occult the longed-for eyes. Time will tell them washen blue. Where tears perhaps not for nothing. Unimaginable tears of old. Lashes jet black remains of the brunette she was.” (25) Die einzige Farbe in diesem schwarz-weißen Gemälde ist das verwaschene Blau der Augen. Wird hier vielleicht doch eine Geschichte erzählt? Von einer einst Brunetten, von Tränen, von Jettschwarzen Wimpern … Die Steinplatte wird dunkel: “The slab having darkened with the darkening sky. Black night henceforward.” (26) Dem “dim light” folgt die Nacht. Aber immer wieder ist es Abend, Zwielicht, ein schwaches Licht lässt eine Leere sehen, einen schwach erleuchteten Kosmos. “In the dim void” ist der Titel von Gregory Johns‘ Buch über die späte Trilogie Becketts. 30 Gabriele Hartel hat in ihr Buch „… the eyes take over …“ Samuel Becketts Weg zum „gesagten Bild“ ein Kapitel über ill seen ill said aufgenommen. 31 Sie schreibt dort: „Wie mit den ‚Texts For Nothing‘ in die Wege geleitet und in ‚The Lost Ones‘ konkretisiert sind es wieder die künstlerischen Mittel von Malerei und Film, die Beckett in ‚Ill Seen Ill Said’ als Bedeutungsträger einsetzt: Licht und Schatten, die Farbe Blau, Schattierungen von Grau und vor allem die spannungsreichen visuellen Kontraste zwischen Schwarz und Weiß. Die Leinwand (ob nun die Filmleinwand oder die der Malerei) ist wieder ‚inside the scull‘ des Lesers/ Betrachters angesiedelt.“ 32 Obwohl Hartel ihr Augenmerk stark auf das Kamera-Auge richtet und wiederholt den Rezipienten (Leser/ Betrachter) in den Mittelpunkt setzt, geht sie von einem „Erzähler“ aus. 33 Aber gerade die Filmtechnik erlaubt das Verschwinden - oder doch Verbergen - des Erzählers. (Auch in The Lost Ones ist die Verborgenheit des Erzählers auffallend.) 30 Gregory Johns, In the dim void: Samuel Beckett’s Late Trilogy. (Kidderminster: Crescent Moon, 1993) Besprochen werden “Company”, “ill seen ill said” und “Worstward ho.” 31 Gabriele Hartel, „… the eyes take over …” Samuel Becketts Weg zum “gesagten Bild“. (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004), S. 146-169. (Filmtechnik als Erzähltechnik in „Ill Seen Ill Said“) 32 Ebd., S. 149. Über Nahaufnahme, Totale, Überblendung, Doppelbelichtung, Verwischung usw. ist dann im Folgenden die Rede. 33 Ebd., S. 149 u. passim. Hans H. Hiebel 16 Gabriele Hartel zieht auch die „Dopppelbelichtung“ in Betracht, also Übermalungen, die den „Leser/ Betrachter mit verschiedenen ‘stages of an image’ konfrontieren.“ „So gelingt Beckett eine Form der Realitäts-Schreibung, nicht Be-Schreibung, die ihren Gegenstand nicht kommentiert, sondern vielmehr zeigt, wie es ist.“ 34 Gabriele Hartel variiert hier praktisch einen Satz Becketts über Joyce: “His [Joyce’s] great work is not about something, it is that something itself.” 35 Abschnitt 22: “White stones more plentiful every year. As well say every instant.” (26) Bald wird alles begraben sein. “First zone rather more extensive than at first sight ill seen and every year rather more. Of striking effect in the light of the moon these millions of little sepulchres.” (26) Die Steine vermehren sich: die Vision wird erweitert. Die poetische Malerei wird fortgesetzt: durch die Millionen winziger Grabsteine im Mondlicht. Mit der Fügung “at first sight ill seen” wird das Hauptthema “ill seen ill said”, das den Titel liefert, wieder aufgegriffen. In verschiedenen Variationen erscheint dieses Thema, das wie die Leitmotive “On”, “Careful” und “Gently gently” als metafiktionales Element gesehen werden kann, mit dem der Schreiber über seinen eigenen Text urteilt. Von weißen Narben ist die Rede, wo das Gras sich von der kalkigen Erde zurückgezogen hat. “In contemplation of this erosion the eye finds solace. Everywhere stone is gaining. Whiteness.” (26) Durch das Bild vom subjektlosen „Auge“ wird erneut ein Auftreten eines Erzählers verhindert. Es ist nicht eindeutig sicher, dass es um das Auge des Imaginierers geht; es könnte auch das Auge der Frau sein, die in den optischen Wahrnehmungen Trost findet. Die Steine werden sich aufeinanderhäufen, bis zum Himmel, zum Mond, zur Venus. (Vgl. 27, Abschnitt 23) Die Irrealität der Vorstellung erklärt das Bild zur erfundenen Vision. “From the stones she steps down into the pastures.” (27, Abschnitt 24) “This great silence evening and night.” (27) Dennoch hört man das dumpfe Geräusch von Steinen, die auf Steine fallen. (Vgl. 28) Das stört nicht das eigentliche Schweigen. Die Frau sitzt in den Triften, vielleicht auf dem Weg „who knows to the tomb“. (28) Vielleicht auch zurück vom Grab. “Face to the further confines the eye closes in vain to see.” (28) Nur mit dem geschlossenen Auge kann man sehen, imaginieren; aber das ist im Augenblick nicht möglich. Das Gemälde schließt mit einer leuchtenden Nebelschwade: “Shroud of radiant haze”. (28) Dort, wo keine Einzelheit mehr auszumachen ist, liegt, offenbar, das Paradies: “Where to melt into paradise.” (28) Das Segment 28 beginnt mit einer Nahaufnahme: “The long white hair stares in a fan.” (28) Das Haar sträubt sich auf Grund eines alten Schreckens. “which say? Ill say.” (29) Welchen Schreckens? Man kann es bestenfalls nur „schlecht sagen“. Im nächsten Kapitel sitzt die Frau, in 34 Ebd., S. 149. 35 Samuel Beckett, Disjecta. Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. Ed. Ruby Cohn. (London: John Calder, 1983). S. 27. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 17 Schwarz, auf den Steinen; den Nacken bedeckt ein schwarzer Spitzenkragen. Die Kamera erfasst nur den Rücken der Frau. “Facing to the north. The tomb. Eyes on the horizon perhaps. Or closed to see the headstone.” (29) Nur mit geschlossenen Augen sieht sie, sieht den Grabstein. Endloser Abend. “She lit aslant by the last rays.” (29) “Let her but go and stand still by the other stone. The white from afar in the pastures. And the eye go from one to the other.” (30) Offenbar gibt es zwei Steine; den oben abgerundeten (vgl. 11), ein Grabstein? Und den definitiven “tombstone” in den Triften, weiß, in der Ferne. Soll er Schluss machen mit seiner Vision? “Nothing for it but to close the eye for good and see her. Her and the rest. Close it for good and all and see her to death.” (30) Soll er sie zutodesehen? Ein für alle Mal, “for good”? Aber dann kommt die Aufhebung: “On to the next. Next figment.” Solange der Autor am Leben ist, gibt es kein endgültiges Enden: weiter zur nächsten Schimäre. „Das Begehren ist nicht totzukriegen“. Beckett „hat das Gedicht des Begehrens zu denken bereitgestellt - jenes Begehrens, das nicht totzukriegen ist.“ 36 Im nächsten Abschnitt, 28, aber wiederholt sich die Frage bzw. Erwägung: “Let her vanish. And the rest. For good. And the sun. Last rays. And the moon. And Venus. Nothing left but black sky. White earth. Or inversely. No more sky or earth. Finished high and low. Nothing but black and white. Everywhere no matter where. But black. Void. Nothing else. Contemplate that. Not another word. Home at last.” (31) Der Schwarz-Weiß-Kontrast ist vollkommen: Schwarzer Himmel. Weiße Erde. Aber - in dieser Panik - wird schon das Ende anvisiert: “But black.” Mit Abschnitt 29 folgt indessen die Fortsetzung der weitgehend schon etablierten Vision: “Panic past pass on. The hands. Seen from above They rest on the pubis intertwined. Strident white.” (31) Wessen Panik ist vorüber? Offenbar die des Text-Subjekts. An den Handgelenken die Andeutung schwarzer Spitze. “Suspicion of lace at the wrists. To go with the frill.” (31) Wie der Spitzenkragen. Die Hände verklammern sich und lösen sich wieder. “Slow systole diastole.” (31) “Rhythm of a labouring heart.” (32) Es ist keine Leichtigkeit in diesem Rhythmus. “It is now the left hand lacks its third finger.” (32) Eine Schwellung am Fingerglied verrät die frühere Unmöglichkeit, den Ehering abzustreifen. (Vgl. 32) Der Ring werde “keeper” genannt. (32) Ein Geschehnisrest spricht von einer dramatischen Handlung, die einem Ehedrama folgte. Dies erinnert an die ewige Wiederholung, wie sie in Play in Szene gesetzt wird. (Auch dieses Stück mit den drei Urnen ist ein Gespensterstück.) Doch wir wissen, alles ‚Erzählte‘ ist imaginär. Im Abschnitt 30 kommt ein neues Element ins sukzessiv entfaltete poetische Gemälde: der weiße Schnee. “Winter evening in the pastures. The snow has ceased. Her steps so light they barely leave a trace.” (33) Dass 36 Badiou, Beckett, S. 67. Hans H. Hiebel 18 dies alles imaginär ist, bestätigt die folgende Bilderfindung: “Obliterated by the snow the twelve are there. Invisible were she to raise her eyes. She on the contrary immaculately black. Not having received a single flake.” (33) Das Auge tritt wieder in Aktion, es muss das Auge des schreibenden Subjekts sein; das Auge ist das Subjekt, damit kein Erzähler erscheine: “The eye discerns afar a kind of stain. Finally the steep roof whence part of the fresh fall has slid.” (33) Die Flocken fallen wieder, die Imagination schreitet fort: “Nothing needed now but for them to start falling again which therefore they do. First one by one here and there. Then thicker and thicker plumb through the still air.” (33 f.) Das Fallen der Schneeflocken wird sozusagen hervorgezaubert, nur des Bildes wegen erfunden. „Es scheint, als beginne der Schnee nur aus optischen Gründen zu fallen […].“ 37 Die Imagination will, dass die Frau wieder verschwindet. “Slowly she disappears.” Das Fade-out macht sie unsichtbar. Dass die Frau mitten im Schnee als makellos schwarz geschildert wird, während die „Zwölf“ vom Schnee ausgelöscht sind, ist einerseits eine poetische Bilderfindung (der mit Kontrasten arbeitenden Schwarz-Weiß-Malerei), andererseits handelt es sich wieder um eine Irrealität oder Surrealität, die die Vision als imaginär - in Iserschen Begriffen: als fiktiv - ausweist. Das Changieren zwischen Mimesis und Fiktivem ist an dieser Stelle offensichtlich; das Spiel mit Selektion und Kombination erreicht eine Präsenz, die den performativen Charakter des Textes deutlich macht. In Isers Kapitel über „Mimesis und Performanz“ wird die Dominanz des Performativen in der Moderne ersichtlich. Zwar heißt es, „daß Repräsentation ohne Performanz undenkbar ist“ 38 , aber in der nacharistotelischen Theorie gewinne die Performanz zunehmend an Bedeutung. Es rücken die „Verfahren der Mimesis“ nun in den Blick: „die aristotelische techne wird selbst Gegenstand der Erörterung“. 39 Mit Gumbrich weist Iser darauf hin, dass das Nachahmungskonzept „vorwiegend als performativer Akt zu denken ist“. 40 „Je mehr Mimesis als Verfahren analysiert wird, desto unabweisbarer drängt sich der performative Charakter der Darstellung auf.“ 41 Wenn nun „Spiel“ als die „Infrastruktur der Darstellung“ gesehen wird, dann wird auch deutlich, dass „Spiel“ und „Performanz“ Hand in Hand gehen. Genau dies ist in Becketts ill seen ill said ersichtlich; immer wieder tritt das Spiel mit den zwei Ebenen des Mimetischen und des Fiktiven (das der Imaginierer Sprache werden lässt) in den Vordergrund und wird das Performative der miteinander verketteten Aussagen unübersehbar. 37 Hartel, … the eyes take over …, S. 155. 38 Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre, S. 481. 39 Ebd., S. 487. 40 Ebd., S. 489. 41 Ebd., S. 495. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 19 “All dark in the cabin while she whitens afar. Silence but for the imaginary murmur of flakes beating on the roof.” (34) Wir befinden uns im 31. Abschnitt. Der Maler verbindet wieder die Schwärze in der Hütte mit dem Weißwerden der Frau. “Here without having to close the eye sees her afar. Motionless in the snow under the snow.” (34) Es erstaunt, gemessen an der inneren Logik der Vision, dass nun das offene Auge sieht, die Frau in der weiten Ferne wahrnimmt, und zwar nun als unter Schnee begraben und nicht mehr makellos schwarz. Schließlich gibt es ja im Grunde nichts anderes als ein „inneres Auge“, das alles imaginiert. Wir haben es also mit einem Spiel mit den zwei Modi des Sehens zu tun, mit einem - auch Surreales sehenden - offenen Auge und einem imaginierenden geschlossenen Auge. Die Kamera sucht nun den Innenraum ab, Stück für Stück. Wie im Fernsehspiel Ghost Trio, in dem Schritt für Schritt das Fenster, die Liege und die Tür aufgenommen werden. Der Schuhknöpfer kommt ins Bild, die schwarzen Vorhänge, der Stuhl - und eine antike Truhe. (Vgl. 34) “And in its depth who knows the key.” (34) Im französischen Text steht: „Et dans ses profondeurs qui sait le fin mot enfin. Le mot fin.“ 42 „Und in ihren Tiefen, wer weiß, endlich das Schlußwort. Das Wort Schluß.“ 43 Deutlich unterscheidet sich hier der englische Text (“key”) vom französischen (“fin mot”). Zurück zum Stuhl: “Here if she eats here she sits to eat. The eye closes in the dark and sees her in the end.” (35) Wir befinden uns wieder - als Leser/ Betrachter - im Modus des offenkundigen Imaginierens: Das Auge, geschlossen, sieht sie einen Napf auf ihren Knien halten. Vergeblich versucht sie aus dem Napf zu löffeln und zu trinken. Penibel werden die anmutigen, aber von Erschöpfung gezeichneten Bewegungen geschildert: “a movement full of grace.” (35) Immer wieder wird die plötzliche Erstarrung der Frau dargestellt: “Now again the rigid Memnon pose.” (35) Die zwei altägyptischen Memnonkolosse aus dem 14. Jahrhundert v. Chr. in Luxor bzw. Theben - sie sitzen aufrecht und steif auf einem Thron - geben das Bild für die erstarrte Frau ab. Noch einmal werden Belesenheit und Kenntnis der Kulturgeschichte demonstriert (ein Rest aus den frühen Werken Becketts). Ein neuer Abschnitt beginnt; wieder mit einer neuen Bilderfindung. “One evening she was followed by a lamb. Reared for slaughter like the others it left them to follow her. In the present to conclude.” (36) Es gibt also doch Lämmer, obwohl eine Heide als deren Ermöglichung fehlt. (Vgl. 11: “A moor would have allowed of them.”) Der Autor wäre nicht Beckett, wenn die Schlachtung der Lämmer - und damit der allgegenwärtige Tod - nicht ins Bewusstsein gerückt würde. Die Zeile könnte in den ersten Erzählungen, den Nouvelles, stehen. Noch einmal macht sich der - selbstreflexive - Schreiber bemerkbar: „Im Präsens, um zu enden.“ Will er schon Schluss machen? Mit der Markierung der Imagination als Imagination schließt der 42 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 60. 43 Ebd., S. 61. Hans H. Hiebel 20 Abschnitt: “Alone night fallen she makes for home. Home! As straight as were it to be seen.” (37) Es geschieht, aber es ist nicht zu sehen. Im Film gibt es keinen Konjunktiv; was imaginiert wird, erscheint als sichtbares Bild. In der Truhe wird ein Zettel gefunden: “Tu 17. Or Th 17.” (38) Der Unbestimmtheitsgrad dieser Stelle ist enorm. Die Hieroglyphen könnten ein Symbol für die Machart des ganzen Textes sein. Oder ein Zeichen dafür, dass ein Datum, das für ein Individuum von Belang ist, für einen Leser von absoluter Beliebigkeit ist. “She reemerges on her back. Dead still. Evening and night.” (38) Unter schwarzer Decke verhüllt, zeigt sie nur ihr Gesicht. “Quick the eyes. The moment they open.” (39) “Gaping pupil thinly nimbed with washen blue. No trace of humour. None any more. Unseeing. As if dazed by what seen behind the lids.” (39) Die einzige Farbe im sukzessiven Gemälde der schattenhaften Dinge und Schwarz-Weiß-Gegensätze ist das verwaschene Blau der Iris. Was hat die Frau gesehen hinter den Lidern? Der Humor der frühen Werke Becketts ist verschwunden. Im Segment 37 erscheint wieder die Paradoxie der Gleichzeitigkeit von Leben und Tod: “Death again of deathless day. On the one hand embers. On the other ashes.” (40) Im Abschnitt 40 heißt es: “No shock were she already dead. As of course she is.” (41) Sie ist tot, natürlich. Dennoch lebt sie, jetzt den Kopf unter der Decke. “Winter night. No snow. For the sake of variety. To vary the monotony.” (41 f.) Es wird deutlich, dass der Schreiber sich den Schnee oder die Schneelosigkeit sozusagen willkürlich erschreibt. Er erhebt sich auf eine Metaebene und blickt auf seine Erfindungen hinab, selbstreflexiv. „Um Abwechslung in die Monotonie zu bringen.“ So urteilt er. Die Winternacht liefert ein neues Bild für das sich weiterentwickelnde Gemälde. Es ergibt sich eine Bilderfolge, ein Bilderzyklus: “Moonless star-studded sky reflected in the erosions filmed with ice. The silence merges into music infinitely far and as unbroken as silence. […] The stones gleam faintly afar and the cabin walls seen white at last. Said white.” (42) “Said white” deutet an, dass die Weiße nur behauptet wird. Die unendlich ferne Musik ist identisch mit dem Schweigen. Und nun werden die „Zwölf“ näher bestimmt: “The guardians - the twelve are there but not at full muster.” (42) Die „Wächter“. 44 “Well! Above all not understand.” (42) „Nur ja nicht verstehen.“ Hier gibt es nichts zu verstehen, nur die Wahrnehmung ist gefragt. Ähnlich heißt es in dem Geister-Stück What Where: “Make sense who may.” 45 Und Watt schließt mit dem Satz: “No symbols where none intended” 46 - “Weh dem, der Symbole sieht! ” 47 “Such ill seen that night in the 44 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 75. 45 Beckett, What Where, S. 316. 46 Samuel Beckett, Watt. (London: John Calder, 1963) (= A Jupiter Book) (1. Aufl. 1953), S. 255. Man beachte das “h” in “where”! 47 Samuel Beckett, Watt. Roman. In: S. B., Werke. Band II. Romane. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976) S. 209-475, Zit. S. 475. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 21 pastures.” (42) Die schwarze Decke erweist sich als Mantel. (Vgl. 42) Zur Klause heißt es in Abschnitt 41: “White walls. High time. White as new.” (42) Die Tür schwarz. Das Dach gedeckt mit Schieferplatten. “Small slates black too from a ruined mansion. What tales had they tongues to tell.” (43) Aber es wird keine Geschichte erzählt werden. “Such dwelling ill seen ill said.” (43) Hier fällt das erste Mal der Titel des Buches, die zentrale Formel über das insgesamt „schlecht Gesehene“ und „schecht Gesagte“, die metafiktionale Auskunft des selbstbezüglichen Schreibers bzw. Imaginierers. Alain Badiou hat nach jahrzehntelangem Studium Becketts dem Dichter der „Schwärze“ und „Leere“ den Dichter der Harmonie und „Schönheit“ entgegengesetzt. 48 So habe er eine Harmonie zwischen Schlecht-Gesehenem und Schlecht-Gesagtem angestrebt. Das „gute Sehen“ ist das übliche Sehen und Mustern des Gegebenen, das „gute Sagen“ das Sich-der-üblichen-Sprache-Bedienen. „Das ‚gut gesehen‘ verweist uns auf die Indifferenz des Orts, aufs Grauschwarz des Seins.“ Das „Ereignis“ aber wirkt durch Überraschung: „Durch die Überraschung, die er mit sich bringt, vereitelt der formale Glanz des Zwischenfalls, dessen, ‚was passiert‘, das Sehen und das ‚gut Sehen‘.“ „Aber das Ereignis wird auch ‚schlecht gesagt‘, denn das ‚gut Sagen‘ ist bloß die Wiederholung der etablierten Bedeutungen.“ „Dem ‚schlecht gesehen‘ des Ereignisses muß eine verbale Erfindung entsprechen, eine unbekannte Benennung, und ergo, gemessen an den üblichen Gesetzen der Sprache, ein ‚schlecht gesagt‘.“ 49 Es muss ein poetischer Name gefunden werden. „Kurz, dieser Name ist eine poetische Komposition (ein schlecht Gesagtes), eine Überraschung in der Sprache, in Einklang gebracht mit der Überraschung, mit dem ‚plötzlich‘ des Ereignisses (ein schlecht Gesehenes).“ 50 Mit diesem „Einklang“ konstituiert sich „Harmonie“ und Schönheit, ein „‘Hoffnungsschimmer‘“, ja „Glück“. 51 „Alles dreht sich um die Harmonie zwischen einem Ereignis und dem poetischen Auftreten seines Namens.“ 52 Im Abschnitt 42 heißt es: “Winter evenings on her doorstep she imagines she can see it glitter afar.” / 44) “Such ill seen the stone alone where it stands at the far fringe of the pastures.” (44) Mit Blumen wandert die Frau hin zu ihm, dem Grab, ohne Blumen kehrt sie zurück. Dann aber, in Abschnitt 43, gibt es keine Blumen mehr. (Vgl. 45) “Empty-handed she shall go to the tomb. Until she go no more, Or no more return.” (45) Über die Triften und die Steine gleitet ihr Schatten: “the still living shadow slowly glides. […] Under the hovering eye.” (45) Kein Erzähler zeigt sich; das Augen-Subjekt, das Subjekt Auge nimmt den langsam länger werdenden und schwindenden Schatten wahr. 48 Badiou, Beckett, S. 10 und 12f. 49 Ebd., S. 38. 50 Ebd., S. 40. 51 Ebd. 52 Ebd., S. 39. Hans H. Hiebel 22 Es folgt die Nahaufnahme (“close-up”) eines Zifferblatts mit einem einzelnen Zeiger, mit 60 schwarzen Punkten, keinen Ziffern. Auch dies erscheint wie ein Gemälde. Der Zeiger bewegt sich von Punkt zu Punkt. (Vgl. 45 f.) Diese ‚Uhr‘ ist die Allegorie der Zeitlosigkeit, in die die ganze Vision getaucht ist. Die Kreisform der Zeit verbildlicht die ewige Wiederholung. Zwar gibt es Zeitpunkte und kurze Zeitstrecken, die sozusagen absolut gesetzt sind, aber es ist keine Kontinuität vorhanden. Das Bild spiegelt auch die 61 diskreten Abschnitte, die alle in sich geschlossen sind. Sie zeigen fast immer Abende, letzte Sonnenstrahlen, Dämmer. Der nächste Abschnitt, 45, beginnt mit dem Satz: “She reappears at evening at her window. When not night evening. If she will see Venus again she must open it.” (46) Dann heller Nebel: “Haze sole certitude.” (48) “Dazzling haze. Light in its might at last. Where no more to be seen. To be said.” (48) Dennoch bringt Abschnitt 47 wieder ein neues Bild: “The face yet again in the light of the last rays.” (48) Der Mund im Licht, ein Lächeln? “Ghost of an ancient smile smiled finally once and for all. Such ill half seen the mouth in the light of the last rays. […] Off again to the dark. There to smile on. If smile is what it is.” (49) Spur alter Küsse? “Unlikely site of olden kisses given and received.” (49) Aber vielleicht ist es gar kein Lächeln, letztes Lächeln. “Enough. Away.” (50) Nach vielen Wintern geht es weiter: “Back after many winters. Long after in this endless winter. […] She as when fled. Still or again. Eyes closed in the dark.” (50) Schwaches Licht durch die Luken. Draußen überall Steine. “Day no sooner risen fallen. Scrappped all the ill seen ill said. The eye has changed. And its drivelling scribe.” (51) In der ewigen Nacht ist alles schlecht Gesehene und schlecht Gesagte vergebens verschleudert. Das Subjekt Auge hat sich geändert und zugleich der dazugehörige Körper, der sarkastisch verhöhnt wird. Immer wieder von vorn anfangen, das ist die Devise. “Till fit to finish with it all at last. All the trash. In unbroken night.” (51) Offenbar strebt der Imginierer nun auf ein Ende zu, einer Beendigung der Vision. Dennoch heißt es. “But first see her again. […] Just one parting look.” (51) Nur noch ein Abschiednehmen - vor der unendlichen Nacht. Abschnitt 50 beginnt dann mit der prompten Überraschung: “But see she suddenly no longer there.” (52) Es gilt, schnell den Stuhl zu betrachten, bevor sie wiedererscheint. Der Stuhl ist sich gleich, aber „geringer“: “careful. Less. Ah the sweet one word. Less. It is less. The same but less. […] It will end by being no more. By never having been. Devine prospect.” (52) Der Weg geht vom Geringerwerden zur Nichtexistenz. Becketts Utopie scheint auf: das reine Nichts, das Nichts ohne das Leben, das Leid. Göttliche Aussicht auf etwas, das am endgültigen Ende eintreten wird. Zuvor, im Abschnitt 51, wird aber noch einmal alles erinnert: “Suddenly enough and way for remembrance.” (52) Zunächst die zwei Mäntel, die als Vorhänge dienen. “Alone the eye has changed. Alone can cause to change.” (53) Schuhknöpfer und Nagel sind noch da. “Ope eye and at them to begin. But first the partition. It rid they too would be. It less they by as much.” Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 23 (53) Das Subjekt Auge bestimmt also offenbar alle quasi-realen und alle imaginären Phänomene der Vision. Die Abschnitte werden jetzt sehr kryptisch. Die grammatischen Beziehungen sind kaum erklärbar. Die Dunkelheit ist kaum zu erhellen. Im Abschnitt 52 heißt es von der “partition”, der Wand im Raum: “It of all the properties doubtless the least obdurate. See the instant see it again when unaided it dissolved. So to say of itself.” (53) Zwei Fragen schließen sich an: “Analogy of the heart? The scull? Hear from here the howls of laughter of the damned.” (53 f.) Hat das Herz oder der Verstand die Mauer verschwinden lassen? Es sind offenbar Fragen, über die die Verdammten in der Hölle der Divina Commedia Dantes lachen. Offen bleibt, ob Herz und Schädel zum Text-Subjekt, das sich scheut, als Erzähler aufzutreten, oder zum Leser/ Betrachter gehören. Solche Ambiguitäten tragen weiter zur Dunkelheit des Textes bei. Ein kurzer Abschnitt, 53, macht deutlich, dass jetzt, da es dem Ende zugeht, alles schwächer, „geringer“ wird. Weiß und Schwarz haben einander bekämpft. 53 In einem Grau verschwimmt alles. Oder im völligen Schwarz. “Enough. Quicker. Quick see how all in keeping with the chair. Minimally less. No more. Well on the way to inexistence. As to zero the infinite. Quick say. And of her? As much. Quick find her again. In that black heart. That mock brain.” (54) Im übernächsten Abschnitt, 55, wird von „ihr“ nur das Gesicht übrig bleiben. “Alone the face remains. Of the rest beneath its covering no trace.” (55) Ein filmisches Einkreisen des Gesichts und ein Fade-out der Umgebung scheint stattzufinden. Dafür kommt ein Geräusch auf. “A slumberous collapsion.” (55) Ein schlaffer Zusammenfall. Geht es dem Ende zu? “the shack in ruins” (55) Die Hütte in Trümmern. “To scrute together with the inscrutable face. All curiosity spent.” (55) „Ohne die geringste Wißbegierde mehr.“ 54 Diese Selbstdefinition des Text-Subjekts erinnert an ein Giacomo-Leopoardi-Zitat in Becketts Proust: In noi di cari inganni Non que la speme, il desiderio è spento. 55 Im vorangegangenen Abschnitt, 54, ist von einem Blatt Papier die Rede. “Finish with the knife. Hack into shreds. Down the plughole.” (54) Also wird das Geschriebene annulliert. Dennoch ist dies noch immer nicht das Ende des Endens: “On to the next. White. Quick blacken.” (54) Die Hoffnung ist noch nicht gestorben, das Textbegehren ist noch wach; noch kann man schwarz auf weiß malen oder schreiben. Aber man musss jetzt eilen. Ein weiteres Geräusch lässt die Illusion eines allgemeinen Zusammenbruchs aufkommen. “Hightening the fond illusion of general havoc in train. 53 Vgl. dazu Hartel, … the eyes take over …, S. 156. Hartel spricht von einem “Kampf zwischen Schwarz und Weiß“. 54 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 101. 55 Samuel Beckett, Proust. (Zürich: Arche, 1960), S.15. („In uns ist nicht nur die Hoffnung auf süße Täuschungen, sondern auch das Verlangen danach ausgelöscht.“) Hans H. Hiebel 24 Here a great leap into what brief future remains and summary puncture of that puny balloon.” (55 f.) Ein Sprung in das Wenige der Zukunft und ein schließliches Schrumpfen des winzigen Ballons. Schon gibt es letzte Seufzer. “Last sighs. Of relief.” (56) Nun, im Segment 57, verschwinden auch die Vorhänge und der Schuhknöpfer. (Vgl. 56) “First the curtains gone without loss of dark. Sweet foretaste of the joy at journey’s end.” (56) Offenbar steht am Ende der Reise die Freude; aber wie weit ist das Enden schon gediehen? “At the place of the scull. One April afternoon.. Deposition done.” (57) Kreuzabnahme erledigt. Vielleicht an einem 13. April, dem Geburtstag des Autors. Und alles geschieht an der Schädelstätte, dem Ort, an den die Schädel schließlich gelangen. Wie ja überhaupt die ganze Vision im Schädel stattfindet, im Schädel des Schreibers oder des Lesers/ Betrachters. Wie ja auch Endgame in einem Schädel spielt. Das „Auge“ ist sozusagen das Auge des Lesers/ Betrachters und zugleich das des Schreibers. “Full glare now on the face present throughout the recent future. As seen ill seen throughout the past neither more nor less. Less! Collated with its cast it lives beyond a doubt.” (57) Das Gesicht der früher als „tot“ bezeichneten Frau ist lebendig. Die Augen sind geschlossen. “Suddenly the look. Nothing having stirred. Look? Too weak a word. Too wrong.” (57) Die Iris fehlt. Die Pupille scheint sie verschlungen zu haben. (Vgl. 57 f.) Es bleiben “two black blanks. Fit ventholes of the soul that jakes.” (58) „Sehr bald […] zwei schwarze Abgründe vorherzusehen als einzige Seelen-Luftlöcher.“ 56 Pure Schwärze steht am Ende. “Blackness at its might at last”. (58) “Where no more to be seen”. (58) Ist dies nun das Ende? Obwohl Abwesenheit das höchste Gut ist, geht es eventuell noch immer weiter - mit Abschnitt 60: “Absence supreme good and yet. Illumination then go again and on return no more trace. On earth’s face. Of what was never.” (58) Wenn aber ein Rest bleibt, dann “go again. For good again. So on. Till no more trace. On earth’s face.” (58) Aber was ist, wenn das Auge es nicht kann? “And what if the eye could not? ” (58) “Quick say it suddenly can and farewell say say farewell.” (59) Schnell behaupten, es könne. Also Adieu und Aus. Aber es folgen noch zwei Sätze: “If only to the face. Of her tenacious trace.” (59) Von ihr bleibt eine untilgbare Spur. Das heißt, es gibt kein Enden, kein “till no more trace”. Für das Bewusstsein gibt es kein Ende, solange der Körper lebt und nicht stirbt. Keine Spurenlosigkeit “Of what was never”. Gab es das Gezeigte gar nicht? Oder verschwindet am Ende jede Spur, als hätte es die Phänomene nie gegeben? Als wäre nichts gewesen. So ist es. Bevor die gesamte serielle Bildersequenz „widerrufen“ 57 wird, stellt sich die Frage, welcher Gehalt - durchscheinend durch das Spiel mit Mimetischem und Fiktivem - mit den Mitteln der Malerei und des Films in Szene 56 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 105. 57 Ebd., S. 108. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 25 gesetzt wurde. Es geht darum, eine alte Frau nochmals ins Leben zurückzubringen, die letzten Tage ihres Leidens zu vergegenwärtigen und ihren Tod zu reproduzieren. 58 “And is this woman a ghostly shade of Beckett’s own mother? ”, so fragt James Knowlson in seiner Beckett-Biographie - und verweist auf Melanie Kleins Theorie, derzufolge der kreative Schriftsteller motiviert ist durch den Wunsch “‘to rediscover the mother of the early days.’” 59 Knowlson schreibt auch über die “visits to the tomb by this ‘old so dying woman’ recalling the dedicated care that his [Beckett’s] mother lavished on his father’s grave”. 60 In der Tat erhält man in ill seen ill said den Eindruck, es handle sich um eine Art Requiem für die Mutter, eine Elegie über Verlorenes. Aber selbstverständlich bestätigt ein Beckett-Text niemals eine so krude Assoziation. Beckett verwischt - mit den Mitteln des Malens und des Films sowie seinen sprachlichen Mitteln - sämtliche Spuren, die zu einer wie immer gearteten Eindeutigkeit führen würden. Das hat er schon mit Herrn „Godot“ getan. Dennoch gibt es bei ihm als dem „Schriftsteller des Essentiellen“ den Schimmer einer aus mehreren Elementen zusammengesetzten Erfahrung. “The woman herself may be a ghost, a memory or a fiction, or a mixture of all three.” 61 Knowlson erwähnt auch, dass die „Zwölf” an die Apostel erinnern, und schreibt: “Most obviously, the figure of the woman recalls either the mother of Christ or Mary Magdalene visiting his tomb.” Auch John Calder, Freund und Verleger Becketts, geht davon aus, dass die alte Frau, “full of grace”, auf die “Virgin Mary” verweise, die „Zwölf“ auf die Apostel und das Grab auf Jesu Ruhestätte. 62 Aber der Text wäre nicht von Beckett, wenn diese Dinge „gemeint“ wären. Die „Leerstellen“, die diese Phänomene umgeben, lassen eine Eindeutigkeit nicht zu. Allerdings dringt durch die verwischten Oberflächen ein Schimmer einer Erfahrung bzw. der Schimmer mehrerer verdichteter Erfahrungen, die der Leser nur erahnen kann. Beckett hat mit Schauder und Horror auf das Leid des Lebens geschaut; er wollte keine Unterhaltungsliteratur schreiben. Sein Impuls war es, auf dieses Leid, besonders das des menschlichen Bewusstseins, hinzuschauen, in das Gott oder welche Ursächlichkeit immer uns hineingeführt haben. Es sei nochmals in Erinnerung gerufen, dass auch die quasi ‚realen‘ Objekte, wie sie das „offene Auge“ wahrnimmt, imaginär sind. Dieser Befund ergibt sich vor allem dadurch, dass diese Objekte (eine lebende Tote, ein 58 Vgl. diese These bei Lawrence Graver, wie sie James Knowlson zitiert: James Knowlson, Damned to Fame. The Life of Samuel Beckett. (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). S. 670. 59 Ebd. 60 Ebd., S. 669. 61 Ebd. 62 John Calder, The Theology of Samuel Beckett. (London: Calder, 2012), S. 73. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. (London: Calder Publications; New Jersey: Riverrun Press, 2001), S. 124. Hans H. Hiebel 26 ewig zitternder Schuhknöpfer, ein unter Schneefall schwarz bleibendes Kleid usw.) irreal bzw. surreal sind. Gleichwohl sind die fiktionsimmanent „imaginär“ genannten oder erscheinenden Objekte, mit „geschlossenen Augen“ gesehenen Phänomene, eben unterschieden von den quasi ‚realen‘. Das Kapitel 61 bringt das absolute Ende, in dem alles „widerrufen“ wird, alles „annulliert“ wird. 63 Nämlich die literarische Schöpfung, aber vielleicht auch die gesamte Schöpfung. Das Kapitel beginnt mit einem kryptischen Satz: “Decision no sooner reached or rather long after than what is the wrong word? For the last time at last for to end yet again what the wrong word? Than revoked.” (59) “Than revoked” gehört grammatisch zum ersten Teil des ersten Satzes: “Decision no sooner reached or rather long after than revoked.” Elmar Tophoven übersetzt das französische Original folgendermaßen: „Entscheidung, nicht eher getroffen, oder vielmehr viel später als, wie es sagen? Wie, um hiermit endlich zu enden, es ein letztes Mal schlecht sagen? Als widerrufen.“ 64 Im Französischen heißt es: „Parti pas plus tȏt ou plutȏt bien plus tard que comment dire? Comment pour en finir enfin une dernière fois mal dire ? Qu’annulé.“ 65 Aber es soll kein abrupter Schluss werden, dieses letzte Mal Enden. “No but slowly dispelled a little very little like the last wisps of day when the curtain closes. Of itself by slow millimetres or drawn by a phantom hand. Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.” (59) Der Vorhang schließt sich langsam wie von einer Phantomhand. Adieu den Adieus. „Dann vollkommenes Dunkel, Vor-Grabgeläut, ganz leise, süßer Klang, los, Anfang des Endes. Erste letzte Sekunde.“ 66 In den letzten Sekunden wird alles verschlungen, Himmel, Erde und aller Kram. Dann die allerletzte Sekunde: „Lang genug, diese Leere zu atmen. Es kennenzulernen, das Glück.“ Das Glück liegt im Enden, dem Enden des Bewusstseins. Oder wird das Ende allen Lebens imaginiert? Nach John Calder wird hier die gesamte Schöpfung „widerrufen“, „annulé“, wie das französische Original sagt. Beckett “has in a sense become the same author as that of Genesis”. 67 “What Beckett has done is finish Genesis and also the New Testament”. 68 Die ganze Schöpfung ist ein Scheitern. Der Tod, die Sterblichkeit, ist das Schlimmste; “death is the final failure that makes nonsense of being born and living”. 69 63 Vgl. dazu: Hans H. Hiebel, Samuel Beckett: Das Spiel mit der Selbstbezüglichkeit. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016), S. 298-301. 64 Beckett, Mal vu mal dit, S. 107 u. 109. 65 Ebd., S. 106. 66 Ebd., S. 109. 67 Calder, Theology, S. 71. 68 Ebd., S. 66. 69 Ebd., S. 69. Samuel Becketts ill seen ill said 27 “God is the enemy of happiness and well-being”. 70 Die Schöpfung ist nach Calder die Geschichte “of a blind, creation-hungry God, heedless and unstoppable, creating into eternity”. 71 Calders gewagte und extrem subjektive Interpretation von ill seen ill said geht ganz und gar von dem Wort „revoke“ aus, das Beckett ihm zufolge aus John Milton zitiert. 72 “Beckett at the end has God making the great effort needed to destroy the world and its unsatisfactory inhabitants. In doing so he has to go back in time so that all history and all creation is wiped out […].” 73 Becketts Ideal ist eine Erde ohne Leben, ganz weiß oder ganz schwarz. Aber dem Wunsch nach “Oblivion” steht zumindest der Wunsch gegenüber, so lange zu leben, bis der Wunsch nach Auslöschung literarisch zum Ausdruck gekommen ist. Auf diese Ambivalenz weist das Buch von Christopher Ricks: Beckett’s Dying Words. 74 Nach Calder ist der Sprecher in ill seen ill said Gott, “a conscious God, bored with his creations”. “He created the world, a great mistake, but can he now revoke that decision? Can he wipe out all of history […]? ” 75 “Only when God has accomplished his great task of wiping out the earth and all his creation, including to his obvious regret the Virgin Mary, probably his most favoured person as she is totally without sin, and probably also the last survivor, does God ‘know happiness’.” 76 Die ganze Tragödie aber schließt mit einem Happy End: “One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.” (59) Das aber ist nicht ohne tragische Ironie. Es erinnert an Franz Kafkas „Mann vom Lande“, der sein Leben lang „vor dem Gesetz“ wartet, um eingelassen zu werden. Kurz bevor er stirbt, bricht aus dem Gesetz ein strahlender Glanz. “Wohl aber erkennt er jetzt im Dunkel einen Glanz, der unverlöschlich aus der Türe des Gesetzes bricht.“ 77 Das Glück, es überstanden zu haben, ist ein Echo des Lächelns am Ende von That Time. In diesem Stück, das drei ein wenig voneinander geschiedene Stimmen, A, B und C, auf die Bühne bringt, ist ein “Listener’s face” “about 10 feet above stage level” zu sehen. Vom Ende des Stücks kann man sagen: “the eyes take over”. Die Stimmen verstummen. “Silence 10 seconds. Breath audible. After 3 seconds eyes open. After 5 seconds smile, toothless for preference. Hold five seconds till fade out and curtain.” 78 Offenbar ist 70 Ebd., S. 63. 71 Calder, Philosophy, S. 105. 72 Calder, Theology, S. 64. 73 Ebd. 74 Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 75 Calder, Philosophy, S. 124. 76 Ebd., S. 65 f. 77 Franz Kafka, Der Proceß. Hrsg. von Malcolm Pasley. Schriften Tagebücher Briefe. Kritische Ausgabe. (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1990). S. 294. 78 Samuel Beckett, That Time. In: S. B., Collected Shorter Plays. (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984). S. 225-235, Zit. S. 235. Hans H. Hiebel 28 das Ende des nicht totzukriegenden Begehrens erreicht; ein Nirvana, im Sterben. Hans H. Hiebel Institut für Germanistik Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz Repetition in Transmediation From Painting to Poem and GIF Emma Tornborg 1 This article studies the transmedial process from the painting Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper (the source medium) to the poem “Nighthawks” (2000) by Anne Carson and to two art GIFs created using the painting as a source (the target media). GIF is a file format that allows movement and an art GIF is a GIF which, in different ways, relates to an existing painting. The investigation is focused on repetition, which manifests in all three media products, and its effect on subjective time. Repetition can have different temporal effects in different media and can therefore be affected by transmediation. In literature, for example, repetition is often a way of slowing or stopping the temporal flow whereas, in painting, it can function both as a time stopper and as an index of movement and thereby temporal flow. Repetition in art GIFs is complex. Even though it represents the desire to add movement (and thus temporality) to a static image, it also halts time by not moving beyond the reiterated sequence it represents. 1. Introduction In the present article, my aim is to investigate the transmediation of repetition (in a broad sense: including various kinds of similarities and variations) from one medium to two others - from painting to poem and GIF (Graphic Interchange Format). Repetition, as Werner Wolf (2002) notes, is a phenomenon that appears in all kinds of media, such as commercials, visual art, poetry, prose, theatre, opera, film, music videos, and it can also 1 I would like to thank Mieke Bal, Werner Wolf, and Katarina Tornborg for their generous guidance. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0012 Emma Tornborg 30 be transmediated between media (18, see also Wolf 2018 for an illuminating discussion on the aesthetic functions of repetition in various media types). Repetition is closely related to the concept of time and I will focus here on its temporal aspect. There are several perspectives from which to consider the connection between temporality and repetition, the most famous probably being Gilles Deleuze’s in his work Difference and Repetition from 1968. My take on repetition will be less philosophic and more practical: I will investigate the temporal effect that repetition can have on readers and viewers in the three analysed media products. For this purpose, I selected the painting Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper, the poem “Nighthawks” (2001) by Anne Carson and two GIFs. The order in which I discuss the target media is chronological but, in essence, is arbitrary; the GIFs are not transmediations of the poem. The concept of transmediation, understood as the transferral of meaning from one medium to another, is crucial to intermedial studies, which investigate relationships within and between media. However, what transmediation is or how it can be defined, is a matter of debate among scholars. What properties of media can be transmediated? How does the process affect the transmediated phenomenon as well as the media involved in the process? Are there mediaunspecific phenomena? Before I begin my analysis, I will briefly describe the field and one of its main concerns: the notion of media specificity. 2. The Concept of Transmediation Transmediation, both as a term and as a concept, is used in many divergent ways in the theoretical literature and different meanings and functions are attributed to it. However, there appears to be a basic consensus that transmediation involves a transfer of meaning/ form/ content from one medium (the source medium) to another (the target medium). A well-known type of transmediation is adaptation from novel to film, even though traditionally the term transmediation has not been used to denote this process. Nevertheless, Adaptation Studies; New Challenges, New Directions in which scholars from film, literature and intermedial studies contribute, is an attempt to cross the disciplinary boundaries and encourages a broader understanding of both adaptation and transmediation (Bruhn, Gjelsvik and Hanssen, eds, 2013). There is a tendency in the theoretical literature on transmediation, both within and without the intermedial field, to focus on the narratological aspects. Here, Mieke Bal’s seminal work on narrative strategies in different media must be mentioned (Bal 2009), as well as the widely used and popular term transmedia(l) storytelling, often attributed to Henry Jenkins (2006; 2013), but also used by narratological scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan (2013) and Jan-Noël Thon (2016). Repetition in Transmediation 31 One early study of transfer between media, seminal to the conceptualisation of transmediation within the intermedial research field, is Jay David Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s Remediation; Understanding New Media (1999). They focus mainly on digital media and investigate how new media refashion older media by means of remediation: “Our culture conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media.” This remediation process is reciprocal: older media can also remediate newer media: “Television can and does refashion itself to resemble the World Wide Web ( . . . ), and film can and does incorporate and attempt to contain computer graphics within its own linear form” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 55). Bolter and Grusin draw the conclusion: “No medium, it seems, can now function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 55). In Lars Elleström’s Media Transformation (2014), transmediation is understood as a process in which form and/ or content is transferred from one medium or media product (the source medium or media product) to another (the target medium or media product). The other part of media transformation is media representation, in which one medium or media product is represented in another medium or media product. Both transmediation and media representation entail transformation of some kind. According to Elleström, “[t]ransmediation is not only re-mediation - repeated mediation - but also trans-mediation: repeated mediation of equivalent sensory configurations by another technical medium” (Elleström 2104: 14). Some media phenomena are easier to transmediate than others, and this depends on the specificities of the technical media involved (Elleström 2104: 49). Phenomena transmediated from a painting to a photograph will not be as thoroughly transformed as phenomena transmediated from a painting to a recited poem. The former example includes two-dimensional media with static and iconic modes, whereas the latter example describes a cross modal transfer: from a source medium with static and iconic modes to a target medium with temporal and symbolic modes. Naturally, the transmediated phenomena must become significantly transformed. Nevertheless, they must be recognizable after having been transferred. 3. Media Specific and Non-Media Specific Properties of Media An early effort to define transmediality within the boundaries of the intermedial field was carried out by Irina Rajewsky, who ascribes transmediality to phenomena that can appear in different media and that are nonmedia specific by nature: An example for this is the aesthetic of futurism, which was realized in different media (text, painting, sculpture, etc.) with the formal means specific to each Emma Tornborg 32 medium. The concrete realization of this aesthetic is in each case necessarily media-specific, but per se it is nevertheless not bound to a specific medium. Rather, it is transmedially available and realizable, i.e., available and realizable across media borders. In a similar way, one can speak of a transmedial narratology, referring to those narratological approaches that may be applied to different media, rather than to a single medium only (Rajewsky 2005: 46). This theory, first presented in 2000, is further developed by Wolf who describes transmedial phenomena as “phenomena that are not specific to individual media. As non-media specific these phenomena appear in more than one medium and can therefore form points of contact or bridges between different media” (Wolf 2002: 18). Thus, there are two different approaches to transmediality and transmediation: it can either be regarded as a process of transfer from one medium to another, or it can be regarded as a phenomenon that can manifest itself in many different types of media. Wolf uses the term intermedial transposition to denote the transfer between media. However, he emphasizes that this term only applies if the transferred characteristic has a clear origin in one distinct medium, for example, when a narrator is transmediated from novel to film and is transformed into a voice-over: “In these cases a transfer between two media can be shown to have taken place” (Wolf 2002: 19). Whereas Jens Schröter (2012) agrees that transmedial phenomena (or “procedures” as he calls it) cannot be media-specific, and that the term “transmedial” should be reserved for phenomena without a specific medial origin, Regina Schober (2013) is critical towards the notion of non-media-specific phenomena. In her understanding, no phenomena exist independently from the media in which they appear. Her idea is that we cannot disregard cultural, historical and other contextual aspects of a medium and treat media phenomena as isolated entities, transferred between media in a closed system: “adaptation must be regarded as a much more complex assemblage of cross-influences rather than a seemingly unidirectional procedure between two media” (Schober 2013: 92). In my understanding, there are phenomena that are transmedial in Rajewsky’s and Wolf’s use of the term, which can be observed in many different media with no clear origin in one specific medium. I also believe that one can observe such a phenomenon being transferred from one medium or media product to another. This does not, however, exclude either reciprocity or the complex involvement of cultural and social contexts. Nor does it mean that these phenomena are not bound to the media in which they appear (I cannot imagine how this would be possible). For example, repetition, which is the device I will investigate in more detail later in this article, occurs, as Wolf points out, in many different types of media. However, depending on how the modalities of media (Elleström 2010) are combined, its features, forms and effects will vary: repetition in static, twodimensional, graphic media products such as paintings can appear in the Repetition in Transmediation 33 form of fields of colour, recurring patterns or graphic shapes, while examples of repetition in verbal, printed text are anaphors, recurring words or sentences, and rhymes. They use different semiotic modes and have different material and spatio-temporal properties. Because of this, and because of the specific conventions and contexts associated with each medium - their qualified properties (Elleström 2010) - they are in fact shaped by the medium in which they appear. 4. Nighthawks Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks (1942) is often interpreted as representing urban loneliness and the isolation that can be experienced in a large city. Slater (2002) notes: “The only light for the empty streets comes from inside the restaurant, amplifying the motif of darkness outside and intensifying the painting’s communication of loneliness” (Tom Slater, 2002: 145). This interpretation has much to do with its subject matter: a group of people in a diner late at night; even though they are in the same place - two of them even sit together - they do not seem to interact in any way, each of them trapped in their own world, immobile: The nonexpressive faces of the four people bespeak their isolation: the bar man gazes past the two men at a dark wall outside; the man smoking a cigarette seems absorbed in his thoughts, while the woman next to him eats a sandwich in silence. Significantly, their hands, though close together, do not touch. (Gerd Gemünden 1998: 154) Gemünden discusses the sense of immobility that pervades the painting and I think that this perceived stasis is one of the things that highlights the characters’ isolation and loneliness: “The precise geometric formations of the illuminated spaces contribute to a sense of abstraction that also pervades the relations of the four characters. They seem to be arranged, immobile, static” (Gemünden 1998: 2). But what is it about the painting that evokes this sense of immobility? One thing, I would say, is repetition. In paintings and other two-dimensional, static and graphic media, repetition often suggests movement. Simultaneous succession, for example, is “a sequence of images, most often of a figure, depicting moments that are disjunctive in time but perceived as belonging together, in an unequivocal order. The change occurring in each subsequent image is supposed to indicate the flow of time between it and the preceding one” (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006: 140). However, repetition can also create a sense of stillness in an image. One painting that has a lot in common with Nighthawks is Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning (1930), of which Tom Lubbock writes: “Nothing happening. That’s the visual message of the image, with its parallel horizontals, its repetitive sequence of units, its long stretch. It’s also Emma Tornborg 34 the narrative message” (Lubbock, 2006: n.p.) Mark Strand points to the same thing: “We can be pretty sure that if the painting were spread out it would offer only a repetition of the features we are already familiar with. There is no actual or implied progression in the shaded or open windows, none in the doorways and storefronts” (Strand 2011: 349). Thus, repetition in painting can work as a means of inhibiting narrative progression, among other things, because it unifies the painting: “Unity is created by repetition of shapes, textures, patterns, or colors” (Lewis and Lewis 2009: 62). There are several elements that are repeated in Nighthawks: content elements such as the bar stools, the windows in the opposite building with identical green roller blinds (even though they are not rolled up evenly), the male guests’ hats and the metal tanks; colours: several nuances of green, grey and red, and shapes: rectangular and triangular. These repetitions structure the composition and hold it together. In his analysis of Nighthawks, Gordon Thiesen notes “the precise geometry of the painting’s composition” and continues: “With precision we have uniformity, repetition. Every toaster from the same given design is identical. The row of identical circular stool seats in the diner complements the row of same size, same shape windows in the building across the street” (Thiesen 2006: 62f.). The painting’s stillness affects its narrative potential. Scholars talk about “the withheld narration of the image” (Filip Lipiński 2014: 169, my emphasis) or “the staging of unresolved dramatic actions” (Joseph Stanton 1994: 25, my emphasis). I would say that it is almost impossible to look at an artefact that depicts people without thinking about their background and wondering what led up to the specific moment depicted, but in Nighthawks there is no suggested movement, no hints of past or future events: whatever drama that put them there will never be resolved. 5. “Nighthawks” Anne Carson’s book Men in the Off Hours contains a section called “Hopper: Confessions”, in which a selection of Hopper’s paintings is represented in and transmediated into ekphrastic poems. Each of them is followed by a quote from Augustine’s Confessions (which I will return to later). Let us have a look at the poem “Nighthawks”: I wanted to run away with you tonight but you are a difficult woman The rules of you— Past and future circle around us now we know more now less in the institute of shadows. On a street black as widows with nothing to confess Repetition in Transmediation 35 our distances found us the rules of you— so difficult a woman I wanted to run away with you tonight (Carson 2001: 50). In Elleström’s terms, the poem “Nighthawks” makes a simple representation of the painting Nighthawks: They share the title, which is the only obvious connection between the two media products. Without the title, most people would not associate with the painting. Furthermore, the poem is not very descriptive; the only part that visually anchors the poem in the painting is the line “On a street black as widows”, which appears almost precisely in the middle of the poem. However, the transmediation is much more extensive; it falls under what Elleström calls a complex transmediation of a media product: Complex transmediation of media products is a process of change that leaves a distinct core intact: vital characteristics of a specific media product are transmediated into (as a rule) another media product. This new media product is markedly different, but is also based on, previously existing traits of another media product (Elleström 2014: 24). Carson’s poem is the transmediation of a specific media product, but to a certain extent it also transmediates the qualified medium painting in general. I will return to this discussion later. As we have seen, in Nighthawks, the much-discussed alienation is represented in the distance between the characters and the darkness and desolation that surround them. This alienation is transmediated into the poem in various ways. Thus, it is a transmediation of the context and connotations of the source medium, as well as of the media product in itself, and I argue that these connotations should be seen as parts of the characteristics of the source media product. One could assert that the themes of loneliness and isolation are so apparent in the painting that they could not have been excluded from any transmediation or representation. However, since the beginning, Nighthawks has been described in such terms, including by the artist himself, and the painting has become a symbol of (American) urban isolation. This is to some extent a self-generating process, in which new transmediations and interpretations are influenced by older ones. Since each transmediation is an interpretation of the source medium, the transmedial process is complex and multifaceted, and it affects all media involved in the process (see e.g. Bruhn 2013). Carson’s poem represents someone’s thoughts or words, possibly the smoking man’s: “I wanted to run away with you tonight/ but you are a difficult woman/ The rules of you—”. This suggests that he never did. The line “Our distances found us” also refers to the sense of loneliness that might be the reason for their being in that diner on that night: a search for Emma Tornborg 36 human connection. And even if they didn’t find it, they are at least lonely together. The darkness outside the diner - in the poem represented by the lines “in the institute of shadows” and “On a street black as widows” - binds them together. The distance between them which in the painting is expressed by the characters’ gaze - she looks down at something in her hand and he seems to be staring at nothing, lost in his thoughts - is thus transformed into a written, verbal representation of one character’s thoughts or speech, expressing that distance. The stasis of the motive is transmediated into verbal form in the past tense in the line “I wanted to run away with you tonight”, since it is a wish that can never be fulfilled: they will never leave the diner. The stillness of the painting - and here I refer both to the static nature of the technical medium of painting in general and to the stillness that Nighthawks represents - is also transmediated into the poem by means of structure, composition and layout. One keyword here is repetition. In Western literature, repetition is often described as a device that can stop or slow down the temporal flux of literature which, in turn, has to do with its sequential character: Reading a printed poem is to perceive a medium with a clearly spatial material interface, but as soon as the conventional semiotic aspect of language is considered, the perception also incorporates temporality and fixed sequentiality (for most standard poems) or at least partly fixed sequentiality (for poems lacking distinguishable lines) (Elleström 1010: 19). The vast majority of verbal texts, including poems that are solely descriptive, have a fixed sequentiality, and thereby the temporality that comes with it: beginning - middle - end. However, repetition can suspend this inherent sequentiality, and thereby the perceived temporality, of written text (see, for example, Wendy Steiner 1982, Jennifer Clarvoe 2009 and Steven Paton 2009). As Roman Jakobson concludes about poetry: “This capacity for reiteration whether immediate or delayed, this reification of a poetic message and its constituents, this conversion of a message into an enduring thing, indeed all this represents an inherent and effective property of poetry” (Jakobson 1960: 371). Nighthawk’s geometric, reiterative and clean composition in which shapes, objects and colours are repeated within the painting can also be found in Carson’s poem. It has a circular structure in which the last three lines mirror the first three in reverse order: ABC-CBA, which gives it an axial symmetry. The geometry and repetitiveness of the source medium is thus transmediated into the target medium. Connected to the composition is the formal layout of the poem, which has the form of a geometric figure - the spiral. Its form imitates its content by means of iconicity illustrating the lines: “Past and future circle around us/ now we know more now less”, but also the overall composition of the poem with mirroring and recurring Repetition in Transmediation 37 words, lines and phrasing. Furthermore, the layout bears some resemblance to the geometric forms in the painting. Compare it, for example, with the curved street outside the diner or the protruding edge of the diner itself. As previously mentioned, Carson’s poem transmediates the medium painting in itself. This happens in several ways. First of all, the poem is framed by means of repetition; the first and the last lines are identical. Furthermore, the two lines after the first line are almost identical to the two lines before the last line, only reversed, and that underscores the framing effect. When a poem is framed it emphasizes its spatial nature and pictorial potential (see Steiner 1982: 85f. for a discussion on framing). The line “Past and future circle around us” addresses the frozen moment of the painting: the past and the future cannot interfere with the everlasting moment that is depicted. The scene is a static moment in time, incapable of change or development. The simultaneity, or rather non-sequentiality, of painting as a medium is also transmediated to some extent because of the repetition and the reversal of the first and last lines. Instead of creating a sequence with a beginning, middle and end, it closes the poem and makes it circular. It could be read the other way around, beginning with the third stanza and, in this regard, it imitates the way we look at paintings. Finally, the spiral-shaped layout emphasizes the spatiality and visuality of the poem as printed text, giving it iconic properties. In Chapter 11 of Augustine’s Confessions he discusses time, memory and expectation. Before moving on to the next target medium, a few words need to be said about how the quote from Augustine connects to the painting: Yet I say boldly that I know that if nothing passed away, time past were not. And if nothing were coming, time future were not. And if nothing were, time present were not. (Augustine, Confessions XI) (Carson 2001: 50) Here we find the famous section in which he explains how when he prays, he remembers the part he has already recited, at the same time that he is aware of the part he has yet to recite, while all the time being focused on the part that he is currently reciting. Steiner (1982) uses his reasoning to explain the spatiality and simultaneity of language: it is never completely sequential; we never focus solely on the exact words we are reading, but our attention is always directed backwards and forwards as well. The quote underscores the spatiality and simultaneity of both painting and poem. Likewise, the line “Past and future circle around us” is closely connected to Augustine’s words about time and our perception of time. Emma Tornborg 38 6. The GIFs Before analysing the final two transmediations (from painting to GIFs), let me begin by giving a brief overview of the GIF as a medium, of its repetitive nature, and of its relationship to the source medium. GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) is a relatively new way of communicating and creating. The animated GIF is a file format that loops a sequence almost seamlessly, giving the viewer the impression of an endless repetition. Created in 1987, it is only in recent years that the animated GIF has gained increased popularity and attention. As Richard Yao phrases it: “GIFs are now an essential part of the digital lexicon that younger consumers use frequently to communicate and express themselves” (Yao 2018: n.p.). When used as a way of communicating reactions to events or propositions in chats or in social media, GIFs typically consist of a short sequence from a film, a TV show, an interview, a political speech, etc., depicting someone making a funny face or a particular kind of gesture, for example, face palm or pointing. GIFs are also used as a way of modifying existing paintings or creating new artworks. There are internet sites and apps that are entirely dedicated to GIFs, such as Giphy, Tenor and Imgur. GIFs are not only used by internet consumers; they are also created by them. It is a grass roots culture in which everyone can participate. GIFs are often funny, and even when classical art is transmediated into GIFs, it is often done with a humorous twist, for example, the Mona Lisa rolling her eyes. But it can also be done in other ways, for instance, by adding subtle movements that expand the universe of the painting. Regarding movement, Camelia Gradinaru (2016: 81) points to the fact that GIFs represent the dream of adding actual movement to an image, after having used various conventions in order to create virtual motion in paintings. As Bolton and Grusin note: “Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfils the unkept promise of an older medium” (Bolton and Grusin 1999: 60). It could be said that the art GIF does exactly this by replacing the implied movement of a painting with actual movement. The movement in GIFs consists of repetition. Gradinaru writes: The meaning of the repeated image is evacuated from the large meaning of the whole, and the temporal narrative can’t be accomplished. The viewer is magnetized by the repetition in itself and not by the goal of making sense. The animated GIFs transform movement into a strange repetitive moment, into a metamorphosis of a singularity. They don’t have a closure and, as suspended elements, they describe a perfect loop (Gradinaru 2016: 84). Hampus Hagman notes that the purpose of the GIF is not to tell a story; in fact, it is the opposite, to remain in the moment (Hagman 2012: n.p.). Thus, even when what is transmediated into a GIF is part of a larger narrative, Repetition in Transmediation 39 the result of the transmediation is anti-narrative; the transfer has totally changed the spatiotemporal characteristics of the source medium. Hagman refers mainly to GIFs that consist of a short excerpt from a film. When it comes to art GIFs, the situation is somewhat reversed: Whereas a cinematic GIF suspends the motion and narrative progress of the source medium by repeating the same moment over and over, the source medium of the art GIF is materially static and if motion occurs at all, it is only by means of suggestion. However, this does not necessarily mean that the GIF adds narrative or temporal progress to the painting. Instead, because the movement in a GIF is repeatedly looped, it has rather the opposite effect: it underscores the stasis of the source medium by remaining in the same moment and not allowing progress, as Katherine Brown (2012) has observed: “By removing their original context and adding perpetual repetition of a single action, they also become atemporal” (8). This is in line with how repetition in literature can function: it prevents narration and halts temporal progress. Alessandra Chiarini describes the GIF’s ambivalent relationship to temporality as follows: Made up of individual stills repeated to generate a short cyclical animation, often intermittent and potentially inexhaustible, GIF images tend to reveal, via a series of small shocks, the paradoxical nature of the moving image which turns out to be connected on many levels to stillness. (Chiarini 2016: 88) Another important aspect is that there is seldom movement in the entire GIF. Often, the movement takes place against a still background, which emphasizes both motion and stillness. This is perhaps the most prominent feature of the art GIF: the synthesis of motion and stillness, which focuses and comments on the spatiotemporal character of the source medium. The art GIF both represents and transmediates its source medium. Elleström stresses that a medium can both represent and transmediate another medium: “whereas a photograph representing a drawing of two garden gnomes is obviously a medium representing another medium, it also clearly includes repeated mediation of equivalent and actually very similar (visual) sensory configurations by another technical medium” (Elleström 2014: 17). In general, the representation is complex, since the GIF represents the complete painting, or at least a prominent part of it. It is also a complex transmediation, since most of the vital characteristics of the source medium are immediately recognizable after the transmediation process. The transformation mainly consists of what it adds to the source medium. Sometimes the only thing added is motion, but there can be other additions as well. Since every transmediation is an interpretation, the additions that are made depend on how the creator of the GIF image has interpreted the source medium. There are several GIFs that transmediate Hopper’s Nighthawks. They tend to focus on different things in their animations. The painting’s themes Emma Tornborg 40 of loneliness and isolation are transmediated with a humorous touch in the following GIF image: http: / / blog.useum.org/ post/ 142231645538/ nighthawks-by-edward-hopper-detail-gif-to. The GIF zooms in on the woman and the man sitting together, arguably the painting’s focal point. Slightly above the head of the man, a chat symbol appears (two square speech bubbles and a red square containing the digit 1 to signal a new message). Closer to the woman, two buttons appear: confirm and ignore. A mouse pointer then clicks on the ignore button and the procedure starts over. GIF images can represent both iconic and symbolic signs, although they tend to focus on iconic representations. In this case, the iconic signs dominate the GIF, but the addition includes two symbolic signs, the digit 1 and the words “confirm” and “ignore” (one could argue, however, that the dialogue boxes are conventionalized iconic signs, since they have gained a specific meaning in the age of social media). Just like the poem, this GIF image focuses on the unfulfilled relationship between the smoking man and the woman. Here (as in Carson’s poem, I would say), the man tries to reach out but is rejected. This GIF image places the scene in a modern context: the man tries to start chatting with the woman, who repeatedly declines to participate. The humorous aspect aside, it is actually a very subtle way of staging the perceived core meaning of the source media product in a context that allows a new audience to connect with it. It also reveals that the GIF maker is familiar with the painting, as well as with how it is generally interpreted and understood. As with Carson’s poem, the GIF is the result of a transmedial process in which not only content and form, but also earlier interpretations of the painting become integrated into the target media product. The second GIF image focuses on the formal aspects of the source medium: https: / / media.giphy.com/ media/ ZxLEIDDeGVNRI9xQje/ giphy.gif. In this GIF, the transformation is more profound. Although they are both digital, the previous GIF is static except for the addition, and still has its original “painterly” qualities with visible brushstrokes and colour nuances, whereas the latter has a lot of movement and is manipulated using image editing software to look more artificial and schematized. The diner scene is repeatedly constructed and deconstructed. Virtual panning shots give us an opportunity to view the diner from all sides in 3D, giving depth to the flat surface of the painting. The general features of the painting, including its repetitive patterns, remain intact in the transmediation process from source medium to target medium. Because of the iconic nature of their shared sign system, we recognize Hopper’s work immediately even though it appears in another medium with a different material interface. The painting’s repetition of shapes and forms, for example, the row of identical barstools, the windows in the opposite building and the triangular shape of the desk inside the diner that follows the shape of the building itself, is reinforced by the GIF: As the GIF recreates the painting, starting with its Repetition in Transmediation 41 shapes, forms and lines, emphasis is placed on the geometrical and repetitive composition of the source medium. Its structure therefore becomes more visible to us, almost like an x-ray. The constructing and deconstructing of the diner scene, even though this gives us an opportunity to look a little further down the street outside the diner, highlights the spatial nature of graphic images, their artificiality and status as objects: any drama that we want to read into it that is not there in front of our eyes is necessarily virtual. After all, the street ends in nothing and everything turns black. Both GIFs reform the source medium in Bolter’s and Grusin’s understanding in different ways: “We have adopted the word to express the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another. This belief in reform is particularly strong for those who are today repurposing earlier media into digital forms” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 59). In the present case, the transmediations have accomplished something that is technically impossible for the older medium, painting, since it involves actual movement. Whether or not the lack of motion in painting is a deficiency is, of course, debatable. As Gradinaru claims, the GIF can represent a desire to add actual movement to a painting, and it can be argued that implied movement in painting suggests such a desire. However, in Nighthawks, there is no implied movement, and stillness is one of its main features. Since repetition is inherent in all GIF images, repetition in itself can hardly be said to be the result of a transmedial process from source medium to target medium in the same way as the repetitive elements of Carson’s poem. However, when a media product such as Nighthawks is transmediated into a GIF, the repetition emphasizes many of its characteristics regarding both form and content. One example of this is found in the first GIF when the chat symbol appears repeatedly, only to be ignored. This underscores the lack of communication and reciprocality between the characters, a lack of communication that is widely attributed to the source medium, as we have seen. Another example has to do with temporality: Just like poetry, repetition can function as a time stopper in GIFs, as Hagman (2012), Brown (2012), Gradinaru (2016) and Chiarini (2016) have pointed out. By endlessly repeating the same moment, the materially static nature of painting and the represented stillness of Nighthawks are emphasized. Thus, vital characteristics of the source image are accentuated, underscored by means of the affordances of the new medium. 7. Conclusion Studies of transmediation in an intermedial context tend to focus on the theoretical aspects of this process: which mediated phenomena can be transferred and which modes are involved in the process? How do the af- Emma Tornborg 42 fordances and specificities of various media affect the transmediation process? In the present investigation of the transmedial process from one medium to two others, we have seen how formal aspects, as well as content and earlier interpretations of the painting, are transferred to poetry and to GIFs. Even though the transmediation process always entails change, I think it is safe to say that many traits of the source media product remain recognizable. One of them is repetition, a device that Wolf (2002) rightly describes as a transmedial phenomenon, in the sense that it can manifest in many different kinds of media. All phenomena that appear in media become tinged by the medium in question. The history and conventions of filmic repetition are not the same as the history and conventions of poetic repetition, for example. Repetition in a painting or in a photograph is different - materially, spatiotemporally, contextually and semiotically - from repetition in a poem or in a film. However, the spatiotemporal effect of repetition is to some extent a different issue. I argue that repetition can have equal spatiotemporal effects regardless of medium. Even though repetition in painting is often used as an indication of movement, it can also function the opposite way. In Nighthawks, I argue that the often-mentioned sense of stillness is created, among other things, by means of repetition. As we have seen, repetition often functions as a time-halting device in literature. The GIF has an ambivalent relationship to temporality: even though it consists of moving images, it often creates a sense of stillness and halted narration. Thus, within its own framework and affordances, the GIF can create a sense of stillness by means of repetition, just like the painting and the poem. As Elleström (2010) explains, the sense-data of a medium can be temporal, but the sensations it evokes might be static, vice versa: “virtual space and virtual time can be said to be manifest in the perception and interpretation of a medium when what is taken to be the represented spatiotemporal state is not the same as the spatiotemporal state of the representing material modality considered through the spatiotemporal modality” (Elleström 2010: 21). Thus, a materially temporal medium can express stillness by means of repetition in the same way as a materially static medium. In order to understand the function and effect of a device such as repetition, it must be regarded as one feature among several of a media product. The characteristics of Nighthawks that I have discerned in the target media are the themes of loneliness and isolation, repetition, as well as the geometric composition. All these characteristics together evoke a sense of timelessness, as they interact and accentuate each other. Repetition in Transmediation 43 References Bal, Mieke (2009). Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Brown, Katherine (2012). Everyday I’m Tumblin’: Performing Online Identity through Reaction GIFs. Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago (diss.). Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (Eds.) (2013). Adaptation Studies; New Challenges, New Directions. London & New York: Bloomsbury. Carson, Anne (2001). Men in the Off Hours. New York: Vintage Contemporaries. Chiarini, Alessandra (2016). “The Multiplicity of the Loop: The Dialectics of Stillness and Movement in the Cinemagraph”. Theme issue, “Snapshop Culture. The Photographic Experience in the Post-Medium Age,” Comunicazioni Sociali 1. 87- 92. Clarvoe, Jennifer (2009). “Poetry and Repetition”. The Antioch Review. 67(1). 30- 41. Elleström, Lars (2010). “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations”. In: Elleström, Lars (Ed.). Media Borders, Mulimodality And Intermediality. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 11-48. Elleström, Lars (2014). Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gemünden, Gerd (1998). Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gradinaru, Camelia (2016). “The Painting That Moves: The Internet Aesthetics and the Reception of GIFs.” Hermeneia: Journal of Hermeneutics, Art Theory & Criticism 16. 81-91. Hagman, Hampus. “The Digital Gesture: Rediscovering Cinematic Movement through GIFs.” Refractory. Journal of Entertainment Media. 29 Dec. 2012. [online] http: / / refractory.unimelb.edu.au/ 2012/ 12/ 29/ hagman/ (Accessed 24 Jan. 2019). Jakobson, Roman (1960): “Linguistics and Poetics”. In: Sebeok, Thomas A. (Ed.). Style in Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 350-377. Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Media: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York/ London: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Lewis, Richard L. and Susan I. Lewis (2009). The Power of Art. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Lipiński, Filip (2014). “The Virtual Hopper: Painting Between Dissemination and Desire.” Oxford Art Journal 37(2). 157-171. Lubbock, Tom. “Hopper, Edward Early Sunday Morning.” The Independent. 8 Sept. 2006. [online] https: / / www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/ art/ greatworks/ hopper-edward-early-sunday-morning-1930-744415.html (Accessed 14 January 2019). Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott (2006). How Picturebooks Work. New York: Garland Publishing. Paton, Steven (2009). “Time-Lessness, simultaneity and successivity: Repetition in Beckett’s Short Prose”. Language and Literature 18(4). 357-366. Emma Tornborg 44 Rajewsky, Irina (2005). “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6. 43-64. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2013). “Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality.” Poetics Today 34(3). 361-388. Schober, Regina (2013). “Adaptation as Connection - Transmediality Reconsidered.” In: Bruhn, Jørgen, Anne Gjelsvik and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen (Eds.). Adaptation Studies; New Challenges, New Directions. London/ New York: Bloomsbury. 89-112. Schröter, Jens (2012). “Four Models of Intermediality.” In: Herzogenrath, Bernd (Ed.). Travels in Intermedia[lity]: Reblurring the Boundaries. Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press. 15-36. Slater, Tom (2002). “Fear of the city 1882-1967: Edward Hopper and the Discourse of Anti-Urbanism.” Social & Cultural Geography 3(2). 135-154. Stanton, Joseph (1994). “On Edge: Edward Hopper’s Narrative Stillness.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 77(½). 21-40. Steiner, Wendy (1982). The Colors of Rhetoric. Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press. Strand, Mark (2011). Hopper. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Theisen, Gordon (2006). Staying Up Much Too Late, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Thon, Jan-Noël (2016). Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. Lincoln/ London: Nebraska University Press. Wolf, Werner (2002). “Intermediality Revisited. Reflections on Word and Music Relations in the Context of a General Typology of Intermediality”. Essays in Honour of Steven Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage. Lodato, Suzanne M., Suzanne Aspden and Walter Bernhart (Eds.). Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi. 13-34. Wolf, Werner (2018). “Wiederholung/ Ähnlichkeit in der (Sprach)kunst als sinnstiftende formale Selbstreferenz”. Selected Essays on Intermediality by Werner Wolf (1992-2014): Theory and Typology, Literature-Music-Relations, Transmedial Narratology, Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena. Bernhart, Walter (Ed.). Leiden/ Boston: Brill Rodopi. 631-659. Richard Yao, “The Surging Popularity of GIFs in Digital Culture and How Marketers Can Learn to Speak GIFs.” IPG Media Lab. 5 April 2018. [online] https: / / medium.com/ ipg-media-lab/ the-enduring-popularity-of-gifs-in-digital-culture- 54763d7754aa (Accessed 18 April, 2019). GIFs: http: / / blog.useum.org/ post/ 142231645538/ nighthawks-by-edward-hopper-detail-gif-to https: / / media.giphy.com/ media/ ZxLEIDDeGVNRI9xQje/ giphy.gif. Emma Tornborg Department of Film and Literature Linnaeus University, Småland Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc The article discusses the possible uses of innovations in the treatment of various types of zero equivalence in an online bilingual English-Slovene dictionary, whose primary target audience is native speakers of Slovene who use the bilingual dictionary mostly for decoding. The use of special symbols that indicate either the absence of equivalents (slashed zero, hash) or an approximate equivalent (double tilde) is commented on, and suggestions are made for including these in an online dictionary in a more user-friendly way, since online dictionaries can offer much more than printed dictionaries not only in terms of the nature and extent of linguistic data but also in terms of new access options. Since not all information is shown on screen, additional information found in a number of locations can be retrieved - if needed or wanted - by clicking on data-identifying buttons. These buttons can be regarded as search routes leading the user to the required information category. They accommodate various types of clearly demarcated information, which contributes to the more personalized approach adopted by an online dictionary. Sample dictionary entries are used to show what kinds of buttons (notes on the usage of the lemma; more illustrative examples; expansion of truncated examples; notes on cultural specificity of culture-bound lemmata) can be included in an online bilingual English- Slovene dictionary. The suggestions presented in the article do not apply only to an English-Slovene online dictionary but can also be applied to other bilingual online dictionaries with modifications and adaptations resulting from the particular language pair treated in a given dictionary. 1. Introduction Research into dictionary use and users’ reference needs has shown that finding the meanings of lexical items occupies the first place among the reasons for consulting a dictionary. In monolingual dictionaries, the semantic part of the dictionary entry is represented by a definition, while in AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 1 Gunther Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0013 Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 46 bilingual dictionaries, the dictionary equivalent is provided. Monolingual dictionaries, especially learner’s dictionaries, are considered to be “superior to bilingual dictionaries in terms of their usefulness as language learning tools” (Nesi 2014: 38); nevertheless, quite a few language learners still prefer to use bilingual dictionaries. This is why special attention should be given to equivalence in bilingual dictionaries to make the semantic component as useful as possible for the dictionary user, i.e., the learner of one of the languages of the dictionary. Lexicographers working on a bilingual dictionary should strive to find the most suitable equivalents in the target language (TL) for all senses of the lemmata in the source language (SL) and to present these in the dictionary as clearly as possible. Since not all lemmata in a monolingual dictionary have the same degree of definability (Hausmann 1997: 172), they also lack the same degree of translatability in a bilingual dictionary, where dictionary users expect to find equivalents of the SL items that are real lexical units of the TL and which produce a smooth translation when inserted into the context (Zgusta 1984: 147). In other words, the equivalents should be as near as possible to the SL items with regard to meaning and usage. However, as Gouws (2002: 195) rightly establishes, dictionary users should be aware that a specific equivalent offered by a dictionary might only arbitrarily be regarded as the meaning of the lemma, since an equivalent is a TL item which can substitute for the SL item in a specific occurrence, depending on specific contextual and cotextual restrictions 1 . It should, however, be stressed that the perfect translation of an SL word is rare in general language and, as Atkins and Rundell (2008: 467-468) state, the equivalence relationship between an SL word and a TL word varies from exact to very approximate or from perfect to barely adequate. The reason for partial or relative rather than full or exact equivalence can be sought in three properties of natural languages: i.e., vagueness of meaning, polysemy and anisomorphism (Adamska-Sałaciak 2013: 222). In his discussion of cross-linguistic lexical anisomorphism, Šipka (2015: 51) makes a distinction between multiple equivalence (the part of the semantic scope in one language is covered by an additional equivalent), zero equivalence (the word is a culture-bound word and the additional equivalent does not exist, cf. Svensén 2009: 261), and partial equivalence (there is some other difference in the features of the two contrasted words). Zero or surrogate equivalence is the equivalence relationship that poses the greatest challenge to any bilingual lexicographer. There are various cases of zero equivalence, which can be illustrated by Baker’s (2011: 18- 23) detailed classification of non-equivalence at word level: culture-specific concepts; the SL concept is not lexicalized in the TL; the SL word is 1 Bilingual dictionaries also offer their users contextual equivalents that fill translation gaps and are used in a restricted set of contexts (Héja 2017). Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 47 semantically complex; the SL and TL make different distinctions in meaning; the TL lacks a superordinate; the TL lacks a specific term (hyponym); differences in physical or interpersonal perspective; differences in expressive meaning; differences in form; differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms; or the use of loan words in the source text. Gouws (2002: 200) expresses an opinion similar to that of Baker, saying that “[s]urrogate equivalents belong to different categories and their choice is determined by the nature of the lexical gap”. Well-established, printed bilingual dictionaries use acknowledged methods for overcoming the problem of zero equivalence, such as new coinage, loan translation, direct borrowing, encyclopaedic explanations and explanatory glosses combined with adoption of an SL word (Šipka 2015: 52-53; Svensén 2009: 261, 274- 275). Although loan words are a good solution to the absence of equivalents, lexicographers usually provide brief paraphrases of their meaning if a loan word is not well established (cf. Zgusta 1971: 319; Gouws 2002: 200). The question can be posed whether online bilingual dictionaries, which are consulted by an increasing number of users, could take a different new approach to the treatment of zero equivalence. Without a shadow of a doubt, the emergence of online lexicography has heralded a new culture in dictionary use, and lexicographers need to take cognisance of this new culture (Gouws 2018a: 233). Lexicographers have always used all the technology available; however, there are only a few existing online dictionaries that use the technical capacity of the electronic medium to full potential, whether in the conception and preparation of dictionaries, or in access to and presentation of the data therein (Fuertes-Olivera and Bergenholtz 2011: 1). This can be attributed to the fact that most lexicographers simply continue the tradition of planning and compiling polyfunctional online dictionaries, which are taken directly from or made similar to printed dictionaries, but ignore the development of the computer and information sciences, which have created a completely new technological environment in which lexicography is now developing (Tarp 2011: 56). Similarly, Gouws (2014: 156-157) points out that the main problem is that many lexicographic e-products were developed without taking account of innovative theoretical suggestions, since all the prevailing models, proposals and discussions in lexicographic theory have been primarily directed at printed dictionaries. In comparison with printed dictionaries, online dictionaries offer significant advantages, e.g., limitations of space are less pressing 2 , which means 2 Lew (2011) makes a distinction between storage space, i.e., the capacity to hold the total content of the dictionary, which is relatively unrestricted in electronic dictionaries, and presentation space (called screen space restraints by Gouws and Tarp 2017: 409), i.e., the display of lexicographic information at a given time to the dictionary user, which is restricted because of the size of the screen of a computer or Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 48 that additional content can be provided, and multimedia content can be included, such as audio and video clips or audio pronunciation. Another feature of online dictionaries involves what is called customizability and personalizability by Atkins and Rundell (2008: 239); examples can be found in offline monolingual learner’s dictionaries (CD-ROMs/ DVD- ROMs): recording your own speech and comparing your pronunciation with the dictionary pronunciation, creating your own dictionary by typing in a new entry together with a definition and examples of use, or adding your own note or translation(s) to each dictionary entry (cf. Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2016a). However, offline dictionaries have already been left behind, and lexicography has moved to the Internet, which is now the most important platform for dictionaries (Gouws and Tarp 2017: 391). In online dictionaries, the default presentation of data can be supplemented by outer texts or outer features 3 whose aim is to accommodate additional information. If these data are located outside the dictionary entries, users may need additional assistance for two reasons: to make them aware of these locations and to determine a search route to these locations (Gouws 2018b: 47). Nowadays, when online dictionaries, whether mono-, bior multilingual, are increasingly used, innovations are necessary to be competitive (Fuertes-Olivera et al. 2018: 174). Apart from that, it is important to develop theoretical models that can be used in the compilation of online dictionaries to enhance accessibility and ensure faster consultation procedures. Special attention should be paid to the following (Gouws 2014: 157): the data included; the structures to present and accommodate the data; the functions of online dictionaries; and the way they meet the needs of the target users. Technological innovations are necessary in the production, presentation, usage and financing of lexicographic products; however, adaptation to the new technological environment is not always easy (Fuertes-Olivera et al. 2018: 155). Similar to printed dictionaries, it is of great importance prior to the compilation of online dictionaries to clearly identify the data distribution structure and to devise a default entry structure (i.e., an entry structure accommodating an obligatory microstructure), as well as to consider the need for an extended obligatory microstructure (Klosa and Gouws 2015: 146-147). Finally, it should be taken into consideration that today’s users, especially the members of Generation Z, who have grown up with the Internet and who access dictionaries mostly on their smartphones, have a totally different attitude and approach to reference works than the previous generations of users (Gouws 2018a: 233; Gouws and Tarp 2017: 393). any other device; the amount of data presented to the user during a look-up operation depends on the presentation space. 3 When talking about online dictionaries, the term ‘outer features’ is preferred to ‘outer texts’, since the elements presented in the outer domain of online dictionaries are not part of the broad category of texts (Klosa and Gouws 2015: 148). Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 49 For the user of any dictionary, quick and easy access to looked-up information is of the utmost importance, which calls for careful arrangement of the various components in a dictionary entry. The ordering of components is a feature typical of the access structure as one of the core dictionary structures; dictionary as well as access structures were investigated in great detail by Wiegand (1984, 1989, 1996, 2005). The access structure is closely connected with the entry structure, the latter being crucial in the accessibility of lexicographic data (Gouws 2014: 158; Gouws 2018b: 52). Given the importance of the entry structure, we should briefly describe the constituent elements of entries as identified by Wiegand (1989: 427-428). Entries contain text segments that are divided into items and structural indicators. Items belong to the microstructure and are data-carrying entry components presented in various search zones within the dictionary entry as a search area (Wiegand, Beer and Gouws 2013: 63). Structural indicators, both typographical and non-typographical, are elements of the entry structure; these identify certain items and are not data-carrying entry components (Gouws 2014: 160-161; Gouws 2018b: 52-53). Printed dictionaries have a long tradition and consequently a clearly identified access structure: a linear order starting from the lemma and proceeding to a specific information category in the dictionary entry, which enables the user to employ a combination of the outer and inner access structures 4 to follow the search route (Gouws 2018b: 44). In online dictionaries, the access structure may be regarded as the most important structure (Svensén 2009: 441). In fact, many features characteristic of printed dictionaries are also retained in online dictionaries, even though the presentation of information categories may differ. Thus, it can be claimed that a certain arrangement of various components can determine the access route a user can follow to arrive at the required information category in the online dictionary. However, the users of online dictionaries should and could be given a choice to use all components of the dictionary entries, some of them, or only a minimum number of components (Gouws 2018b: 45). A variety of innovations can be found in online dictionaries, such as improved access routes; less compact entry formats (items representing different information categories are placed in separate lines); metatexts used to introduce sections with specific information categories; hidden data that are not on display but can be called up if needed; pop-up windows and hypermedia, which are used to present additional data (Gouws and Tarp 2017: 391). In this article, the focus is on the innovations in the treatment of zero equivalence in an online bilingual English-Slovene dictionary, 4 According to Hausmann and Wiegand (1989: 329), the inner access structure is used in reference to the access structure of the microstructure (e.g., numbered senses, distinct typography, boxes), whereas other access structures, especially those of the A-Z section, are referred to as outer access structures (e.g., running heads, thumb index). Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 50 whose primary target audience is native speakers of Slovene who are learning English as a second or foreign language and use the bilingual dictionary mostly, but not exclusively, for decoding. A comparative perspective is provided by drawing parallels with lemmata lacking equivalents in three online English-German dictionaries: Cambridge dictionary English-German, Collins dictionary English-German and Langenscheidt dictionary English-German. Since online dictionaries can offer much more than printed dictionaries in terms of the nature and extent of linguistic data (Gouws 2018a: 234), and since there are new access options in online dictionaries, the emphasis is on the retrieval of various information categories that could help the users to better comprehend the lemmata without any equivalents in the TL. In order to avoid the inclusion of too much data or the inclusion of data the user may consider superfluous in the concrete look-up operation, not all information is shown on screen when the user opens a dictionary entry. In online dictionaries, providing as much lexicographic data as possible (i.e., data overload) may cause problems because the users get more data than needed and can become confused and consequently fail to retrieve the necessary information from the dictionary entry (Gouws and Tarp 2017: 397). One solution to the problem of data overload, which will be discussed in more detail in the article, is to access additional information by clicking on buttons that function as data-identifying entry components. These buttons accommodate various types of clearly demarcated information, which contributes to the more personalized approach adopted by an online dictionary. The users can get additional information on request only and can thus avoid reading a huge amount of lexicographic data that might not be relevant to each and every look-up operation. 2. Special Symbols Indicating Different Types of Absence of Equivalents Symbols are used in dictionaries as non-typographical indicators. If lexicographers decide to use a symbol, they should bear in mind that the use of a symbol may not be completely obvious and clear to dictionary users. Most importantly, users need to be familiar with the value of a range of symbols that appears in a given dictionary (Gouws 2014: 171) to be able to interpret a symbol rightly. The use of special symbols, such as 0 or slashed zero Ø (Wiegand 2002: 248-249; Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2017), can be considered a very easy, direct and quick way of making the user aware of the fact that no TL equivalents exist for the SL item. In this contribution, the sample dictionary entries are taken from an online English-Slovene dictionary that is still being compiled. This dictionary will contain approximately 53,000 lemmata and around 16,000 secondary lemmata (i.e., phraseological units included in the idioms section and multi-word verbs included in the phrasal verbs section). As such, it is Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 51 considered to be a more comprehensive bilingual English-Slovene dictionary. What is more important is that it is the only bilingual dictionary compiled so far in Slovenia with a strong pedagogical and didactic orientation. Its publication is planned for the second half of 2020. In this dictionary, a slashed zero Ø is used to mark the complete absence of any equivalent, whereas the hash symbol # indicates cases of no equivalence at word level. In the latter case, the untranslatable SL lexical item used in an example illustrating its use can be rendered into the TL, which means that equivalence is reached at the level of the entire message (Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2017). Another symbol employed in the sample dictionary entries for culture-bound lemmata with no true equivalent in the TL is the double tilde (≈) indicating an approximate equivalent (see 3.3 below). One reason that the use of the symbols Ø and # may be especially confusing for users is that they follow the sense number and precede the section with illustrative examples; in other words, they occupy the place where the user expects to find equivalents. The user may even think that dictionary equivalents are missing by accident rather than by design. If the use of an agreed symbol is a consistent practice adopted by the lexicographers of a certain bilingual dictionary, then the user should have access to information about its meaning. There are several options for including the explanation of the symbol:  the user can hold the cursor over the symbol and read the explication of the symbol;  the user can click on the symbol and open a window with the explication of the symbol;  some type of guiding material can be included to the left or right of the main column; in it, the use of the special symbol could be explained. Below, we discuss some data-identifying buttons that could be employed in an English-Slovene online dictionary in cases of zero equivalence to provide additional information. However, the use of the buttons described is not limited only to this language pair, but could also be used in other bilingual online dictionaries with modifications and adaptations resulting from the specific language pair treated in a given dictionary. 3. Data-Identifying Buttons The most significant differences between printed and online dictionaries can be found in the dictionary structure rather than in lexicographic functions (e.g., text reception, text production and translation) and linguistic content (Gouws 2018a: 235). As opposed to printed dictionaries which are characterized by a static structure for dictionary entries, online dictionaries Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 52 have a more dynamic, multi-layered structure (Gouws 2014: 165), enabling quick access to various types of information. In printed dictionaries, where structural indicators are used, dictionary users do not have to read the whole entry, since the indicators help them to skip certain sections and to quickly reach the desired search zone (Gouws 2018b: 53). With some medium-specific adaptations, structural indicators can also be employed in online dictionaries to facilitate and expedite the look-up process. In online dictionaries, (rapid) access to different information categories in the entry is possible by means of data-identifying entry components which have the same function as structural indicators in printed dictionaries (Gouws 2014: 171). There is no need to provide a view of the full entry in an online dictionary, since there is no traditional search area in which all the different search zones can be seen (Gouws 2018a: 241). However, the users of online dictionaries have the option of moving from one layer to another by simply clicking on various data-identifying buttons leading to specific search zones, such as collocations, related words or grammatical constructions (Gouws 2014: 170). It should be stressed that not all users are interested in a particular type of information, no matter how useful it may seem to the lexicographers. Therefore, in order to move from a printed dictionary to an online dictionary that better meets the user’s needs, the inclusion of specific information should follow the principle of having information available a click away but not forcing it on users who do not want it. The text obtained by clicking on the buttons can often be compared to the text provided in special boxes in printed monolingual dictionaries (e.g., usage notes), and this text is a result of the awareness of lexicographers that users may need additional information about the lemmata. In monolingual dictionaries, especially learner’s dictionaries, which generally give advice to language learners as to what is correct or preferred in a foreign language, usage notes are aimed at helping users with various aspects of grammar, semantics, pragmatics, stylistics and collocational patterns (Jackson 2002: 180-181; Cowie 1999: 170). In bilingual dictionaries, additional information is included to guide the user not only by contrasting related words, focusing on crucial differences and avoiding incorrect use (Gouws and Prinsloo 2010: 506, 507), but also by concentrating on a comparison of items in the two languages in terms of meaning, syntax, style, register, collocational patterns, etc. (Atkins 1996: 528). Even though a bilingual dictionary is mostly used only for decoding or encoding, in practice, we do not have a set of four bilingual dictionaries to cover the vocabulary of two languages, while serving for both decoding and encoding for native speakers of either language. Consequently, bilingual dictionaries often combine the features typical of both encoding and decoding dictionaries, which means that they can be referred to as combined encoding and decoding dictionaries (Jacobsen et al. 1991: 2786); this holds true not only for printed but also for online bilingual dictionaries. Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 53 The decisions made by lexicographers working on a bilingual dictionary on what type of additional information to include should be based on a precise contrastive analysis of both languages, which should yield the relevant material that needs to be explained to help the users to a better understanding of the lemma, its function(s) and use. In a bilingual dictionary, many contrastive issues are resolved by appropriate dictionary equivalents or translated illustrative examples, without any further need to additionally explain the differences. If this is not the case, the differences have to be explained and exemplified, and this is where additional information can be provided in online dictionaries by means of data-identifying buttons, whose selection and use should be determined in the process of designing and compiling an online dictionary (Gouws 2014: 161). Additional information would not necessarily be information on contrastive differences between the two languages; it could concentrate on features typical of the SL only, without drawing parallels between the SL and the TL. Data-identifying buttons can be used to provide various very specific pieces of information and should therefore be termed differently. Using ‘Read more’ or ‘Read less’ can be considered far too general, since it does not tell the user anything about the type of information retrieved by clicking on it. The buttons should bear specific names explicitly identifying the type of information accommodated in the relevant search zone and should enable explicit and rapid access to the relevant data (Gouws 2014: 161, 167), since in online dictionaries, the dictionary entries should be structured to take into account various aspects not only of access but also of accessibility to serve the needs of potential users as efficiently as possible and to enable optimal information retrieval. 3.1 Short Descriptions of the Function(s) of the SL Lemma A theoretical explanation is sometimes essential to help the user to more fully understand the SL lemma in question. In a bilingual English-Slovene dictionary, English auxiliary verbs, among other things (cf. also Ilc 2014), prove difficult to render into Slovene, since they perform functions peculiar to English and thus remain untranslated in Slovene. As indicated in Figure 1, no equivalent exists in Slovene for have used as an auxiliary. have aux v ØUSAGE He’s finished his work. Končal je delo. He had left before I got there. Odšel je, preden sem prišla tja. Figure 1: Lack of equivalents in the entry for the auxiliary verb have. Such a treatment may be sufficient for some - or perhaps even the majority of - dictionary users, but more demanding users may want to learn about the reasons for the lack of equivalents. The user of an online dictionary can Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 54 be offered an explanation of the function(s) of the auxiliary verb in the SL, i.e., tense formation in English, which should be available at the click on a data-identifying button called USAGE (see Figure 2). The explanation should be written in the metalanguage of the dictionary, i.e., Slovene in our case 5 . Special attention should be paid to the formulation of such explanations: they should be written in a simple language; they should be brief, concise and clear; technical terms with which average users are likely to be unfamiliar should be avoided. USAGE With the past participle to form either the present perfect or the past perfect Figure 2: Usage note in the entry for the auxiliary verb have. The role of additional explanations of the usage of the lemma in question becomes even more important in polysemous entries, especially if there are several senses with no equivalents in the TL. An example presented in Figure 3 is the entry for the auxiliary verb do, which lacks a Slovene equivalent in eight out of ten senses. do aux v 1. ØUSAGE He did not (= didn’t) manage to visit the Louvre. Ni mu uspelo obiskati Louvra. 2. ØUSAGE What does he want? Kaj želi? 3. ali ne, kajne I know you from somewhere, don’t I? Od nekod vas poznam, ali ne? 4. ØUSAGE “You went to Paris, didn’t you? ” - “Yes, I did.” / “No, I didn’t.” “Šel si v Pariz, ali ne? ” - “Ja, sem.” / “Ne, nisem.” 5. ØUSAGE Do not (= Don’t) be so foolish! Ne bodi tako neumen! 6. infml ØUSAGE Do be quiet, children. Bodite že tiho, otroci. 7. res, resnično Do shut up! Utihni že! 8. ØUSAGE You mustn’t act as he does. Ne smeš ravnati tako kot on. 9. ØUSAGE “I don’t know John.” - “Neither/ Nor do I.” “Johna ne poznam.” - “Jaz tudi ne.” “I knew John.” - “So did I.” “Poznal sem Johna.” - “Jaz tudi.” 10. ØUSAGE Never did I say a thing like that! Nikoli nisem rekel česa takega! Figure 3: Lack of equivalents in the entry for the auxiliary verb do. Users could become totally confused by finding so many senses with a slashed zero if they are not given information on the distinction between 5 The metalanguage of an English-Slovene dictionary intended for native speakers of Slovene is Slovene, but for the purpose of this article, English is used as a metalanguage. Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 55 the senses marked in such a way, since examples illustrating the use of do in various senses may not be sufficiently informative for an average user. As far as the entry for do is concerned, all the senses - including those with equivalents - require an additional piece of information regarding usage (see Figure 4). USAGE (sense 1) In negative sentences USAGE (sense 2) In questions USAGE (sense 3) In question tags USAGE (sense 4) In short answers USAGE (sense 5) In negative imperative sentences USAGE (sense 6) In imperative sentences for emphasis USAGE (sense 7) For emphasis USAGE (sense 8) To replace the verb USAGE (sense 9) With so, neither, nor USAGE (sense 10) In inverted word order Figure 4: Usage notes in the entry for the auxiliary verb do. Were all these data to be displayed on screen, users could be faced with functional data overload 6 . As was established in the Introduction, this English-Slovene dictionary is intended primarily to help the native speakers of Slovene when decoding. In dictionaries for decoding, specific types of lexicographic data are required which differ from lexicographic data needed in dictionaries for encoding. The inclusion of data necessary while performing various activities, e.g., reading, writing and translating, can be considered relevant if included in a dictionary covering both decoding and encoding functions. However, some of this information is superfluous to the user who consults the dictionary only for decoding or only for encoding, since the data are not selected and presented in accordance with the function of the dictionary (Gouws and Tarp 2017: 406, 412). In the case of the English-Slovene dictionary, such data may be of little help when the user looks up a lemma only to find out what it means. However, information 6 A good example of functional data overload is the entry for do in the online Cambridge dictionary English-German ( https: / / dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/ englishgerman/ do ), where the explanations of the functions of the auxiliary verb do are provided in English and translated into German. A much better solution can be found in the Collins dictionary English-German (https: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/ english-german/ do), where the function of the auxiliary verb is briefly described in English only and the equivalent is provided in red if it exists; otherwise, no equivalent but also no other symbol indicating lack of equivalence is given. Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 56 that tells the user something about grammatical features of the lemma is available by a click of the button if needed or wanted by the user. In this particular case, the user learns that the auxiliary verb do lacks an equivalent in Slovene when it functions as operator or first auxiliary. This approach uses - at least to a certain extent - the method adopted by monolingual English learner’s dictionaries, whose primary aim is to help learners of English in encoding activities. Consequently, a bilingual dictionary if compiled in such a way can be used not only for decoding but also for encoding, which is in line with Gouws and Tarp (2017: 412), who claim that multifunctional online dictionaries can be useful reference sources - as long as users have access to the precise data relevant to their needs in a specific look-up operation. 3.2 The Inclusion of Illustrative Examples If there is no equivalent in the TL, no dictionary equivalents can be offered and consequently, the meaning of a lemma can be conveyed only by means of examples illustrating its use. Untranslated examples are often not very helpful to the users of bilingual dictionaries, which is even more so in the case of no equivalence when users are unfamiliar with the meaning of the lemma in question; the translation of examples is therefore a necessity (Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2016b: 308). It should be emphasized that balance in the amount of context in illustrative examples is something to strive for (Atkins and Rundell 2008: 460), and examples should be carefully selected by the lexicographers to enable the users to become familiar with the different coand contexts in which the lemma or one of its senses is used. The examples can be incorporated in the form of a full or partial sentence. The choice of the form of examples depends greatly on the peculiarities of the TL (Slovene in our case). Lexicographers should resort to full sentences if the translation into the TL is heavily context dependent, thus requiring a wider context. Partial sentences can be used if they adequately illustrate how the SL lemma is rendered in a certain TL context. This can be exemplified by means of the examples illustrating the use of the verb bear in the sense with no equivalent at word level (see Figure 5); the translated examples clearly show a semantic connection between the verb used in the Slovene translation of the English examples and the noun used in the English example: Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 57 bear v … # bear a grudge against sbEXPAND zameriti komu bear no ill willEXPAND ne zameriti bear resentment towards sbEXPAND zameriti komu Figure 5: Partial examples illustrating the sense of the verb bear without equivalents at word level. All three examples are of the same type, i.e., bear + noun, and all of them are translated into Slovene by the verb zameriti, whose meaning is related to that of the English noun grudge ‘zamera’. The use of truncated examples can be regarded as an appropriate choice, since the examples clearly show how bear followed by a specific noun is rendered into Slovene. Dictionary users often express a preference for short, concise information, which also applies to the choice of sentence form; in many cases, they may find short examples sufficiently informative and thus more user-friendly than long ones. However, some users may want full-sentence examples even in those cases where lexicographers might deem just a phrase or a brief word combination as perfectly adequate (cf. Farina, Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2019). In an online dictionary, the option of expanding truncated illustrative examples by clicking on a special button (i.e., EXPAND) should be given to users who prefer full-sentence examples or even short paragraphs in which the lemma is used in a wider context. In the three examples illustrating the use of bear, we can observe a certain degree of fixedness, which clearly indicates the (at least partially idiomatic) nature of the verb (cf. Ilc 2016). Therefore, it seems sensible to mark this particular part in the full-sentence example by distinct typography (bold and italics in the examples in Figure 6), which also holds true of its translation into the TL. EXPAND Is that not merely a last act of spite by a Government who still bear a grudge against London? Ali ni to samo zadnje zlobno dejanje vlade, ki še vedno zameri Londonu? EXPAND He seemed to bear no ill will toward the country, which had denied him citizenship. Zdelo se je, da ni zameril državi, ki mu ni odobrila državljanstva. EXPAND They find it very difficult to parent children who are virtual strangers and who often bear resentment towards them for having been abandoned at a young age. Zdelo se jim je zelo težko, da so starši otrokom, ki so jim praktično tujci in ki jim pogosto zamerijo, da so jih v zgodnjem otroštvu zapustili. Figure 6: Expanded examples illustrating the senses of the verb bear without equivalents at word level. Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 58 In selecting examples, it is of the utmost importance to offer the users various types of coand context in which a lemma can be used, so that they can get a clear idea of the variety of possible uses of the lemma and its translations into the TL. If more illustrative examples are included, there is a greater chance for the user to find the example they need to more fully understand and/ or translate the looked-up lexical item in the context. However, it is difficult to answer the question about the “right” number of examples that should be included to best illustrate the use of a lexical item in various coor contexts or to contextualize the (meaning of the) lemma in different (translation) situations, and especially in situations in which no equivalent can be offered in the TL. The number of examples also depends on the user: some users need just one example, while other users prefer quite a few examples, but there are also users who do not even notice the examples and consequently do not make use of them at all. A personalized approach is advisable in such cases, since users nowadays increasingly expect “the provision of the exact amount and types of data required to meet the user’s needs in each concrete consultation, neither more nor less” (Fuertes-Olivera and Tarp 2014: 64). In an online environment, which allows much greater flexibility than printed dictionaries, the mode of delivery can be employed which can already be found in a number of online monolingual English learner’s dictionaries: by clicking on the button MORE EXAMPLES, the user can find additional examples together with their translations into the TL (see Fig. 7). should v 1. morati, moral bi You shouldn’t do it. Tega ne smeš narediti. MORE EXAMPLES 2. naj Should I come back in the afternoon? Ali naj se vrnem popoldne? 3. bi I should be grateful … Bila bi hvaležna … 4. bom, bova, bomoUSAGE 7 I said (that) I should be glad to help her. Rekel sem, da ji bom z veseljem pomagal. 5. ØUSAGE 8 7 Usage note in sense 4: USAGE The past form of shall in the reported speech 8 Usage note in sense 5 (based on OALD9): USAGE should used after that after many adjectives that describe feeling: I find it strange that they should be so rude to me. Zdi se mi čudno, da so do mene tako nevljudni. should used for expressing strong agreement: “She would never break her promise.” “I should hope not.” “Nikoli ne bi prelomila obljube.” “Upam, da ne.” should used with I and we to give opinions that you are not certain about: I should imagine that they are really happy. Predstavljam si, da so res veseli; “Will he be at the party? ” “I should think so.” “Ali bo na zabavi? ” “Mislim, da bo.” should used to refuse something or to show that you are annoyed at a request; should used to express surprise about an event or a situation: Just at that moment who should walk in but John himself. Ravno v tem trenutku je vstopil kdo drug kot John. Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 59 I find it strange that they should be so rude to me. Zdi se mi čudno, da so do mene tako nevljudni. MORE EXAMPLES Figure 7: Examples included in the entry for the verb should. Additional examples retrieved by means of the MORE EXAMPLES button are shown in Figure 8. MORE EXAMPLES (sense 1) We shouldn’t have trusted them. Ne bi jim bili smeli zaupati. MORE EXAMPLES (sense 5) I find it strange that they should be so rude to me. Zdi se mi čudno, da so do mene tako nevljudni. “She would never break her promise.” “I should hope not.” “Nikoli ne bi prelomila obljube.” “Upam, da ne.” I should imagine that they are really happy. Predstavljam si, da so res veseli. “Will he be at the party? ” “I should think so.” “Ali bo na zabavi? ” “Mislim, da bo.” It is essential that we should protect databases. Nujno je, da zaščitimo baze podatkov. Just at that moment who should walk in but John himself. Ravno v tem trenutku je vstopil kdo drug kot John. Figure 8: Additional examples included in the entry for the verb should. The options EXPAND and MORE EXAMPLES exist neither in the Collins dictionary English-German nor in the Cambridge dictionary English-German. What is clearly noticeable is that the Collins dictionary English-German includes many, from the user perspective probably too many, illustrative examples, which offer repetitive content if you compare the English sentences and their translations into German (cf. https: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/ english-german/ do). This could be resolved by using the option MORE EXAMPLES, which could be used only by users really interested in a greater number of illustrative examples. 3.3 Cultural Notes in Culture-Bound Lemmata In English monolingual dictionaries, dictionary entries treating culturebound lemmata often combine linguistic and cultural information, which results in encyclopaedic entries. Originally, encyclopaedic information was typically found in dictionaries intended for native speakers. It has traditionally been part of this type of dictionary because users who did not have many other sources of knowledge to consult needed this type of information (Algeo 1990: 2004). Later, it was included in CD-ROMs/ DVD-ROMs of monolingual learner’s dictionaries to provide additional information to the user (Vrbinc and Vrbinc 2016a). In monolingual dictionaries, cultural or encyclopaedic information can be either integrated into the definition Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 60 of the lemma in question (i.e., integrated encyclopaedic content) or separated from the definition (e.g., appearing in a special section or a special box, i.e., unintegrated encyclopaedic content) (cf. Stark 1999: 78). Culture-bound lemmata are often characterized by the absence of an appropriate equivalent in the TL and as already mentioned, the problem is usually resolved in bilingual dictionaries in the following ways: 1) by providing explanatory glosses or encyclopaedic explanations haggis v ovčji želodec, nadevan z drobovino CULTURE Figure 9: The entry for the noun haggis. 2) by offering the user an approximate equivalent preceded by a double tilde (≈) A level n BrE. ≈ matura CULTURE Figure 10: The entry for the noun A level. 3) by explanatory glosses combined with adopting an SL word John Bull n old-fashioned (vzdevek za Angleže in angleški narod) 9 John BullCULTURE Figure 11: The entry for the noun John Bull. In bilingual dictionaries, only unintegrated encyclopaedic content can be provided in the form of the cultural notes that can be retrieved in online dictionaries by clicking on the CULTURE button. The aim of cultural notes is to familiarize the user (the speaker of the TL) not only with a foreign language but also with the culture of the community speaking this language, which is of great importance, since language and culture are often inextricably intertwined. The cultural information is not essential if someone looks up a certain lemma only to find its meaning(s), nor does it help in encoding activities, but it can definitely contribute to a better understanding of the lemma in question. Cultural notes in an English-Slovene dictionary primarily intended for native speakers of Slovene should be written in Slovene, the metalanguage of the dictionary (in Figures 12-14, English is used for practical reasons). 9 a nickname for the English and the English nation Data-Identifying Entry Components in an Online Bilingual Dictionary 61 CULTURE (haggis) It is a large sausage made from the inner organs of a sheep, minced with suet and oatmeal, seasoned, and boiled inside a skin made from the sheep’s stomach. It is typical Scottish food. Figure 12: The cultural note in the entry for haggis. CULTURE (A level) In England and Wales, students take this exam, which requires advanced knowledge in a subject, at the age of 18 when they are in their final year at school or college. They must pass at least two A levels to go to a university, and usually they need to pass three. Figure 13: The cultural note in the entry for A level. CULTURE (John Bull) John Bull is shown as a stout red-faced man wearing a top hat, high leather boots and a waistcoat with the pattern of the national flag of the UK on it, and there is often a bulldog beside him. He is thought of as being very proud of England, and as disliking foreigners. Figure 14: The cultural note in the entry for John Bull. To draw some parallels with the treatment of the above-mentioned cultural entries in the English-German dictionaries, the most important conclusion is that the only cultural note (written in German) can be found in the Collins dictionary English-German in the entry for A level (https: / / www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/ english-german/ a-level). The cultural note is preceded by an equivalent and several translated examples and there is a double tilde (≈) between the example in English and its translation in German indicating an approximate translation. In the Cambridge dictionary English-German, a brief explanation is provided in English and followed by an equivalent (das Abitur). The treatment in the Langenscheidt dictionary English-German is comparable to that in the Collins dictionary English-German, the only difference being that it lacks a cultural note. The entry for haggis is not included in the Cambridge dictionary English-German, whereas in the Collins dictionary English-German, the explanation is in German and includes important information that it is a dish from Scotland. The explanation is followed by an image of haggis, which produces a visual representation of what haggis actually is and what it looks like. In the Langenscheidt dictionary English-German, the lemma is followed by a very misleading label SCHOTT, which is a label implying a dialectal expression rather than a culture-specific entry. The explanation is in German and does not include any piece of information on where the dish is typically prepared and served. The lemma John Bull is not included in the Cambridge dictionary English-German, but is treated in a similar way in the Collins dictionary English-German and in the Langenscheidt dictionary English- German. Both dictionaries simply provide an equivalent in German. Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc 62 4. Conclusion Dictionaries are not static but are prone to constant innovation as a consequence of research and development in the field of (meta)lexicography, the innovations often being the result of changes observed in needs, reference skills and expectations of the users, as well as technological progress. The distribution and presentation of various types of information in printed dictionaries differ from those in online dictionaries. In online dictionaries, various types of information can be retrieved from separate search zones forming part of a multi-layered entry structure, allowing a more flexible and dynamic display of information (Gouws 2014: 164, 175). The focus is thus on ease and speed of access to individual items within a dictionary entry (Gouws 2018b: 55). Since the reason for consulting a dictionary is first and foremost to find the meaning(s) of a given lemma (in monolingual dictionaries) or the dictionary equivalent(s) (in bilingual dictionaries), some users of online dictionaries may be perfectly satisfied with a rudimentary dictionary entry in which the lemma is followed by definitions or equivalents and should therefore not be forced to read the comprehensive version of the dictionary entry. Despite the availability of all dictionary entry components, they should be given the choice to look up only the type of information they need or are interested in. Other users may want more information and should therefore have the means to go deeper into the dictionary information. In online dictionaries, whose advantage is freedom from the space constraints of the printed book and where there is a variety of access possibilities, lexicographers can provide more information and discuss any aspect they deem necessary. Data-identifying buttons, which are not to be found in any of the online English-German dictionaries we investigated, are undoubtedly a useful component that enables the inclusion of information that fits no other information category or that should be regarded as value added by the users. This information is not found in a single location - a number of locations are needed to accommodate all the information that users may find useful (Klosa and Gouws 2015: 148). 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Wiegand, Herbert Ernst (2002). “Equivalence in Bilingual Lexicography: Criticism and Suggestions”. Lexikos 12. 239-255. Wiegand, Herbert Ernst (2005). “Angaben, funktionale Angabezusätze, Angabetexte, Angabestrukturen, Strukturanzeiger, Kommentare und mehr. Ein Betrag zur Theorie der Wörterbuchform”. Lexicographica. International Annual for Lexicography 21. 202-379. Wiegand, Herbert Ernst, Sandra Beer and Rufus H. Gouws (2013). “Textual Structures in Printed Dictionaries: An Overview.” In: Gouws, Rufus H., Ulrich Heid, Wolfgang Schweickard and Herbert Ernst Wiegand (Eds.). Dictionaries: An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. Supplementary Volume: Recent Developments with Focus on Electronic and Computational Lexicography. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. 31-73. Zgusta, Ladislav (1971). Manual of Lexicography. Prague: Academia; The Hague, Paris: Mouton. Zgusta, Ladislav (1984). “Translational Equivalence in the Bilingual Dictionary.” In: Hartmann, Reinhard Rudolf Karl (Ed.). LEXeter '83 Proceedings. Papers from the International Conference on Lexicography at Exeter, 9-12 September 1983. Lexicographica. Series Maior 1. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. 147-154. Alenka Vrbinc and Marjeta Vrbinc Faculty of Economics University of Ljubljana Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing The Case of Jim Grimsley’s “Wendy” Roman Trušník For southern writer Jim Grimsley, child abuse in all its forms has always been an important theme, though he sometimes ran into difficulties selling his work to publishers. His science-fiction short story “Wendy,” a story of a sadistic pedophile who assembles a girl out of body parts grown for transplantation, but then tries to prove that she is not human so that he can continue to abuse her, was accepted for publication by the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2006 but it was “killed” by the publisher only a few weeks later, apparently for fear of public reaction. The present article explores the reasons for the publisher’s decision, which was made shortly after the magazine was accused of containing “strong adult content” and “explicit tales about sex, drugs, and molestation.” Methodologically, the article demonstrates how literary scholarship can make use of tools for preserving historical versions of online material, namely the tracked history of Wikipedia pages and Internet discussion forums archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. On June 8, 2006, the American writer Jim Grimsley announced on Asimov’s Message Board that the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sheila Williams, had called him an hour before and told him that “she’d been directed by the magazine’s owner to kill [his] upcoming story ‘Wendy,’” even though she had accepted the story two months earlier and the contract had been signed two weeks before. Although Grimsley did not want to reveal too much detail about the story in the hope that he would sell it elsewhere, he noted that the “story’s protagonist is a person with known genetic tendencies toward child abuse, at a time when these can be firmly predicted. The story is being killed due to the child abuse content.” “Wendy” was one of his works warning that the “wonderful technolo[g]ies we are developing will inevitably be used in depraved ways.” Even though AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0014 Roman Trušník 68 Grimsley was taken aback by the situation, he did not blame Williams herself: “Sheila did offer to pay for the story but I declined. This was not her decision and I don’t bear anyone any ill will over this since I knew I was pushing boundaries with this story - apparently a bit too hard, in fact” (Asimov’s Message Board 2006). While it is not unusual for a literary work to be rejected by an editor or a publisher, this case is rather unique in several aspects. First, it is uncommon that the decision to publish a story is reversed at such an advanced stage of preparation, i.e., after the contract has been signed and the author has been sent the final page proofs. Moreover, this decision was made by the publisher rather than the editor responsible for the magazine’s content and quality. Even though Grimsley admits he was “pushing boundaries … apparently a bit too hard,” it is rather paradoxical that the whole incident happened in the context of a genre that prides itself in doing just that, namely pushing boundaries. The reasons for the publisher’s decision thus demand a closer examination in terms of the economic and cultural forces behind it. Jim Grimsley certainly was no newcomer in the field. By 2006, he had already become an author of considerable renown, not only in the areas of southern literature and gay literature, but also in the realm of literature of the fantastic. He had published five literary novels, Winter Birds (1992 in German, 1994 in English), Comfort & Joy (1993 in German, 1999 in English), Dream Boy (1995), My Drowning (1997), and Boulevard (2002). He also had published two works located somewhere between fantasy and science fiction, Kirith Kirin (2000) and The Ordinary (2004), as well as numerous short stories, including several in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Moreover, with the two fantastic novels, to which he later added a third one, The Last Green Tree (2006), Grimsley had successfully challenged established genre categories in fantastic literature (cf. Trušník 2018). Still, rejection of his work was not new to him. In the beginnings of his career, Grimsley had considerable difficulty getting published in the United States, partly because of the theme of child abuse, for which American publishers were not ready. Just as it took several years for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published in 1955 in Paris, to be released by an American publisher, it was not until ten years after Grimsley finished his first novel Winter Birds in 1984 that he was able to get it published in the United States. Grimsley’s dark story of a violent family, in which an eight-year-old boy is forced by his drunk father to have sex with his own mother, was probably too much for American publishers at the time. Book editors commented on the beauty and strength of the novel but rejected it nevertheless. Shannon Ravenel, editor of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, wrote to Grimsley in 1985 in a now-famous rejection letter: “It is a beautifully written novel and you are a gifted writer. But this is not a book that Algonquin Books could publish successfully for you. The misery is too stark, the tragedy and sadness too unrelieved” (Ravenel 1985). Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 69 It was the German translator Frank Heibert who recognized the artistic value and importance of the novel and was willing to put out the previously unpublished work in Germany, where it was released as Wintervögel in 1992. In the end, Winter Birds was issued in Grimsley’s native United States by the publisher that had once rejected it, Algonquin, but only after the literary landscape had been made ready for child-abuse novels by works such as Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1987) or Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992). Many of the later novels by Grimsley feature the theme of child abuse in all its forms as well. According to Günther Deegener (2001), child abuse includes not only sexual abuse, but also physical abuse, emotional abuse, and abuse by neglect. In Comfort & Joy, Dan, also the protagonist of Winter Birds, struggles to cope with the trauma of his childhood experiences decades later. In My Drowning, Dan’s mother revisits the landscape of her poverty-stricken childhood, when all possible forms of child abuse were all too common. In Dream Boy, the teenage protagonist not only suffers from sexual assaults by his father but is eventually raped and murdered by a fellow student. The story of “Wendy” takes the theme of child abuse in fiction to another level: it is narrated by a sadistic pedophile, Mr. Desai, who creates a young girl out of body parts grown for transplantation - “a body grown in a tank, a brain bought on the open market, and the best software money can buy.” For Desai, Wendy is an “organic construct, inhabited by the most advanced of artificial intelligences, alive in every sense of the word except for the actuality that she is an artifact, something [he has] fashioned, a doll of living tissue and artificial sensibility, an object” (Grimsley 2006c: 93). The protagonist regularly abuses his “daughter,” and then wipes her hardware brain and resets it after each use. In order to continue with these activities, he needs to spend a great deal of time in lawsuits trying to prove that “the object Wendy” is not human and thus may be exploited by him in order to protect society from his urges. However, during the legal procedures Desai takes a liking to the judge’s young daughter, and once he wins the case, he decides to take hold of the girl. He leaves all his property to Wendy (or rather, her nurse, as Wendy has been proven not be human in the meantime and thus cannot own property) and goes after the judge’s daughter. The cynical pedophile protagonist, though affected by an inherited condition, offers little to no space for compassion, as he is perfectly aware of Wendy’s inability to be reset completely: during one meeting the narrator observes that she “must sense that tonight is different” (Grimsley 2006c: 96) so she obviously preserves the knowledge of what is done to her even between restarts. Moreover, Grimsley mocks the utilitarian nature of legal battles in the United States, as in his struggle to prove that Wendy is “a machine” (Grimsley 2006c: 95) the protagonist is helped by extremely diverse groups of supporters, ranging from “creators of artificial intelligences Roman Trušník 70 and smart machines [whose] corporate owners [have] no desire to see their products granted legal status as people” to “a legion of churches and conservative groups determined to help [him] prove that nothing manufactured by humans should be called human. Only God can make a soul. These co-litigants include the Conservative Christian Coalition, the Sally Randall Foundation, the Muslim Liberty Council, the Jewish Anti-Cloning League, the Anti-Homosexual Ecumenical Opposition, and a host of others” (Grimsley 2006c: 95). And of course, the protagonist relinquishes the possibility of protecting society from his urges using a human-made creation by abandoning his “organic doll” (Grimsley 2006c: 93) and preparing to attack a real child. The motif of a man and his creation places “Wendy” near the very roots of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a novel which Brian Stableford (1995: 48) in agreement with Brian Aldiss considers to be “the foundation-stone of the modern genre of science fiction.” Another scholar, George Slusser, would trace back the beginnings of science fiction in various national literatures well before Shelley’s novel, but even he rather reluctantly admits that Frankenstein is “the work consensually seen as the ‘first’ SF novel” (Slusser 2005: 27). Moreover, Grimsley’s exploration of the “wonderful technolo[g]ies we’re developing” (Asimov’s Message Board 2006) comes very close to Isaac Asimov’s understanding of science fiction, which in his view explores “an impact of scientific or technological advancement on human beings” (Slusser 2005: 28). “Wendy” appears to be even more relevant today than it was at the time of its publication because, as a story informed by contemporary technologies, it discusses the question of the boundaries of humanity that has been raised in connection with embryonic as well as stem cell research and is likely to continue with an even greater urgency with the advancement of biotechnologies. Grimsley sending his short story to Asimov’s actually fits into another tradition in science fiction, namely that of publishing short stories in magazines rather than other formats. Mike Ashley points out that the “science fiction magazine has been the primary driving force in the generation of science fiction” since the 1920s, with its “heyday” in the 1940s and 1950s. The first magazine publishing “scientifiction” exclusively, Amazing Stories, appeared in 1926 (Ashley 2005: 60, 62). The area of science fiction magazines, most of which were significantly shaped by their editors, has gone through a turbulent development, with many ups and downs. One of the many differences between various science fiction magazines across decades was their willingness to publish daring stories. Ashley points out that perhaps the most important magazine since the 1950s, Galaxy, was not very good in this respect: “One thing that Galaxy claimed it would do, but never really did, was challenge taboos” (Ashley 2005: 68). Asimov’s, founded as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1977, has been much more daring Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 71 than Galaxy, even though it did not publish “Wendy,” for reasons discussed in the present article. Yet, in spite of the rejection by Asimov’s, the short story found its way to the press, as it was printed the very same year in issue 5 of Subterranean, a more daring science-fiction magazine edited by William Schafer. Grimsley even optioned the film rights to the story in 2008 for the symbolic sum of one dollar (Option 2008). Although no film has been made based on the story, this interest nevertheless serves as proof that the timeliness of the themes as well as the story’s commercial potential has been recognized. Last but not least, Grimsley included “Wendy” in his only published collection of short stories, Jesus Is Sending You This Message (2008). The extraordinary history of the journey of “Wendy” into print would have been lost for both science-fiction fans as well as literary historians without Grimsley’s announcement on Asimov’s Message Board. The message itself spurred a lively discussion on the Internet forum, ranging from a number of readers expressing indignation, certain participants siding with the author and giving him suggestions where to publish the story, contributors voicing support for Sheila Williams, who had been put into an awkward position by the publisher, along with some comments expressing general disappointment over the state of science fiction at the time. One interesting aspect of this series of posts is that Asimov’s allowed the discussion on their website for several weeks, with the last contribution dated June 16, 2006. The message forum finally taken down from the website sometime between June 21 (the date of the printout of the complete discussion preserved in the Jim Grimsley Papers at Duke University) and October 18, 2006 (the date when it could no longer be accessed). Moreover, the debate soon extended far beyond the original message board postings, as several bloggers responded to the discussion outside the forum: editor John Scalzi posted a reaction to the situation on his own blog on June 9, 2006, pointing out that cases in which publishers for various reasons decide not to publish previously accepted texts do happen and that in this case Grimsley should have accepted the generous “kill fee” offered by Sheila Williams following the reversal of the decision to publish (Scalzi 2006). Swedish writer and graphic artist A. R. Yngve posted a comment on his blog four days later, on June 13, 2006, making several observations on the whole exchange of opinions on Asimov’s Message Board. According to Yngve, the “reactions are more interesting than the event that started the debate,” as the decision of the publisher could be discussed in a public forum. Yngve also noted that some contributors to the discussion “responded that the critics of the decision were harming the magazine,” as science fiction publications had “suffered a steadily sinking readership for the past few decades.” The third line of discussion identified by Yngve was the question as to whether printed magazines for short fiction had a future at all. Overall, he sees one positive thing in the debate, as “it shows readers are passionate about what they get to read; they care, and they will be Roman Trušník 72 active participants in the future of publishing” (Yngve 2006). A contributor to Asimov’s Message Board, S. F. Murphy, also announced that he “took the extreme liberty of posting this information at Nightshades,” another forum for which registration was needed; Murphy expressed surprise that the information had not been posted there yet. Another reader reported that Harlan Ellison “mentioned this thread on his message board at Ellison Webderland,” and yet another reader actually provided a link to Ellison’s thread. Fandom has always been important in science fiction, yet the availability of fan discussions on the Internet for research is a relatively new phenomenon, nevertheless one that deserves its place within digital humanities. The term “digital humanities” has become an umbrella term for all the uses of computer technologies in areas ranging from analyses of all kinds of material, through scholarly tools in editing and publishing, building and exploring media collections, or their use in teaching. A volume edited by Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth (2004) provides a comprehensive overview of the extent of the field at the time when the concept started to become commonplace. The study of fan discussions, as demonstrated in the present article, depends on the preservation and availability of the material once freely available on the Internet. The issue of archiving was addressed in the cited volume by Abby Smith, who noted that the “purpose of preserving cultural and intellectual resources is to make their use possible at some unknown future time.” Smith made it clear that for “the humanities ... access to the recorded information and knowledge of the past is absolutely crucial, as both its many subjects of inquiry and its methodologies rely heavily on retrospective as well as current resources” (Smith 2004: 577). Smith believed sixteen years ago that the major actor in preservation was a group of private visionaries, with the “outstanding exemplar of the digital collector” in the person of Brewster Kahle. Kahle built the Internet Archive, a project that started to gather web pages in 1996 (2004: 587). The Internet Archive has since become a non-profit organization and one of its components, the Wayback Machine, at present allows searches of “the history of over 406 billion web pages on the Internet” (Internet Archive Wayback Machine 2020). In this way researchers can access many web pages which have disappeared from the Internet. In this particular case, this means that they are not relegated to using the single copy of Grimsley’s own printout of the whole discussion (which is now preserved in the collection of his papers at David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University) but can access the source in electronic form. In this sense, Scalzi’s and Yngve’s blog entries on the authors’ personal websites are unique in that they are still online, almost fourteen years after the events took place, with both postings preserving the link to the original message board, which may have otherwise been lost. Even though the links Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 73 are no longer working now, the discussion can be excavated thanks to the Internet Archive. Many debates that emerged on Asimov’s Message Board are certainly interesting, as Yngve pointed out, but as an explanation of the reasons for the publisher’s rejection they frequently miss the point since “Wendy” was not turned down by the editor but by the publisher. Grimsley comments on Williams’s role in his second post on the board: “The real damage is to Sheila, who accepted ‘Wendy’ and was undercut by her own boss. She worked very hard with me on this story. She has been very concerned about its message and rejected an early draft because it went much further toward shock and violence than the present version. ‘Wendy,’ wherever it is published, will reflect Sheila’s work as well as mine.” (Unfortunately, it seems that Grimsley’s original draft has not been preserved: the collection of his papers at Duke University includes at least seven different versions of the story, including two printouts of Asimov’s galleys, but their development indicates stylistic polishing rather than a major rewrite. Cf. Grimsley 2006b.) In trying to discover the reasons the publisher decided in the end not to run the story, one must realize that the magazine was published by a profitoriented company. Gordon Van Gelder, at the time the editor and owner of the competing Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and thus an insider in the science fiction market, offered a balanced view of the whole event: “Based on Mr. Grimsley’s post and on the fact that ASIMOV’S has allowed this thread to go up on the message board, it sounds like the decision was made responsibly and professionally. I doubt it was made lightly.” Van Gelder pointed to the economic and cultural forces behind such a decision by asking a rhetorical question on the message forum: “[D]oes anyone think that the people who might have cancelled their subscriptions over this story or done worse (remember the incident with the Grand Rapids TV station a couple of years ago? ) are likely to be the same people who are here on this message board discussing this subject? ” Indeed, the threat of cancelled subscriptions was highly pertinent. As Ashley points out, the circulation of science fiction magazines “had been dwindling since 1988 ... and all of the surviving professional magazines, Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy, survive primarily on direct subscription” (Ashley 2005: 72). The “Grand Rapids incident” thus offers an explanation why the publisher suddenly became reluctant to publish a story like “Wendy.” In February 2004, Grand Rapids-based Wood TV brought a story of a mother of a thirteen-year-old girl who had subscribed to Asimov’s Science Fiction through a school fundraising drive. The mother accused the magazine of intentionally bringing adult themes to children when she reportedly found “strong adult content” on its pages, with the magazine containing “explicit tales about sex, drugs, and molestation” which included “[y]oung girls with no panties, young girls in white socks, young girls looking at his wank-mags with him, young girls doing it with Roman Trušník 74 one another while he watched.” The fundraising company, QSP, told the TV station in their defense that “[a] lot of care goes into choosing the magazine titles [they] offer. This magazine’s content would no longer meet [their] standards” and the company reportedly “permanently severed its relationship with this science fiction magazine” (Wood TV 2004). Asimov’s Science Fiction responded to the accusations on February 18, 2004, confirming that their editorial offices had been contacted by the parent of a child who had ordered the magazine through QSP. However, Asimov’s showed how inaccurate and misleading the reporting of Wood TV 24 Hour News 8 had been. First of all, the principle of the fundraising drive was that “students sell magazines to their family, their neighbors, and their parents’ coworkers.” While the QSP catalog had a section geared to children, Asimov’s was listed in the catalog in the appropriate section “Science/ Technology/ Environment.” Moreover, even though News 8 gave the impression that Asimov’s was dropped from QSP’s list as a result of this case, the magazine pointed out that their “relationship with QSP ended several months earlier over remit rates (the amount of money the publisher receives from the agent for each subscription the agent sells), not as a result of this incident.” Based on the distortions, Asimov’s claimed that the reporter “Ms. Andersen and the News 8 channel are not practicing journalism, but sensationalism. They know, better than most, that ‘sex sells’” (Asimov’s Science Fiction 2004). While the magazine refuted the TV station’s accusations, the case took on a life of its own. Current databases do not show any further media coverage of the case in the contemporary press but, due to the open and largely anonymous editing of Wikipedia articles, the encyclopedia and its article “Asimov’s Science Fiction” can serve as evidence for the controversy. The first, one-paragraph summary of the cause, with a link to the Wood TV news report, appeared in the Wikipedia entry on May 23, 2005. According to its author, the “event became a minor cause celebre [sic] among many Internet sf fans.” Two days later, another editor added a link to the magazine’s response. On April 20, 2007, the coverage was expanded and converted into a section of its own called “2004 controversy,” which quoted extensively from Asimov’s response to the accusations. On August 1, 2010, a bot (i.e., a computer program) marked the section as one that “contains information of unclear or questionable importance or relevance to the article’s subject matter,” though the article made it clear which sources were cited. Finally, on April 3, 2012, an editor, self-identified as Student7, removed the whole section with a comment that “controversies can be nice, but this one just too localized. [sic] Parochial. Nationwide, another matter” (Wikipedia.org 2020b). 1 In other words, the coverage of the incident was 1 The changes in the Wikipedia pages can be traced through the Internet Archive as well, though in much less detail: the one-paragraph addition was captured for the first time on December 15, 2005, in a somewhat ill-formatted version. The expansion Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 75 removed by a self-appointed Wikipedia editor due to his personal views, much to the detriment of literary scholarship. Nevertheless, the two links to the TV station’s coverage of the story as well as Asimov’s response have survived at the bottom of the Wikipedia webpage to the present day (Wikipedia.org 2020a), even though they are not contextualized in any way in the current version of the article. While the memories of this cause célèbre have waned in the meantime, two years after the event in 2006 it was certainly still painfully remembered by the publisher. In this context it comes as no surprise that a story featuring a sadistic pedophile was killed by the publishers, as it might attract more negative publicity than was desirable. Once again, Van Gelder commented on such situations from a publisher’s perspective on Asimov’s board: “[A] publisher has to ask him/ herself, ‘How many readers am I willing to lose over this particular story? ’ At least, that’s what I ask myself over edgy stories, and sometimes I decide that I don’t like a story enough to risk losing readers over it. Every organism has boundaries.” Van Gelder spoke based on the experience of someone who was at the same time the editor and publisher - the role of the publisher would thus prevent him as the editor to buy a story he would not publish. In the case of Asimov’s, the two roles were divided and it was the disagreement between the two parties that was at the root of the case. Sheila Williams, as the magazine’s editor, bought the story, as she believed it was a good story for the magazine. The publisher, trying to protect its financial interests in the wake of a recent attack at the magazine, thought otherwise and prevented the story from appearing on the magazine’s pages. Locating the cause of rejection in the then-recent Grand Rapids incident appears to be logical, yet this argument seems to be challenged by another of Grimsley’s short stories, “The 120 Hours of Sodom,” which was published in the February 2005 issue of Asimov’s, i.e., between the Grand Rapids incident and the acceptance and subsequent rejection of “Wendy.” In this short story, a man dubbed as Sade prepares a birthday party for Figg, the oldest male member of the ruling family. The party is supposed to be a re-enactment of Marquis de Sade’s novel, The 120 Days of Sodom. The highlight of the party is to be the licensed public suicide of a girl, Cherry, who will be dying on stage for five days. Coming from the poorest social conditions, Cherry has agreed to commit public suicide for the amusement of the guests at Figg’s party because she hopes to secure a better future for her younger brother, Keely. Figg himself discusses Cherry’s motivation with of the “2004 controversy” section was first recorded by the archive as late as January 6, 2008, and the removal of the section was recorded in the version of June 17, 2012. This shift in the timing of evidence is not significant in this particular case, yet it demonstrates the possible limitations of using the Internet Archive as a research tool. Roman Trušník 76 her, but he does not dissuade her from the suicide. Sade could have prepared any kind of death for her, yet she is given a seemingly merciful numbing poison. She hardly suspects what kind of agony Sade has prepared for her - she realizes that only shortly before her death when Sade brings in her little brother so that he can see her die, which will traumatize him for his whole life. Figg, who was originally nonplussed by the suicide itself but, as a whim, has promised to help Keely, is immediately offended by Cherry’s contempt towards him, as she believes it is Figg who has betrayed her. Figg lets his artificial toy spider combined with a bodyguard kill Sade on the spot, much to the shock of the party guests who, “expecting only a suicide, received the murder of their host as an added bonus” (Grimsley 2005: 38). It might seem illogical that Asimov’s would publish “The 120 Hours of Sodom” one year after the Grand Rapids case, and would reject “Wendy” two years later, yet the two stories, even though portraying various forms of abuse and perversion, are fundamentally different in their literary technique, which can be seen in how they make use of the concept of poetic justice and how they work with point of view. Poetic justice is a term coined by Thomas Rymer in the late seventeenth century “to signify the distribution, at the end of a literary work, of earthly rewards and punishments in proportion to the virtue or vice of the various characters” (Abrams and Harpham 2012: 299-300). Neither of the two stories offers real virtue to be rewarded (the only virtuous character, Cherry, dies for the amusement and excitement of perverts), but they do differ in the degree in which vice is punished. Indeed, in “The 120 Hours of Sodom” poetic justice, however imperfect, can be found in the fact that Sade, the orchestrator of Cherry’s death and the whole party, is in the end killed by Figg’s bodyguard. Figg himself is no angel either, as he has committed many deplorable deeds in the past and, after all, agreed with the party and the public suicide. His killing of Sade would thus hardly qualify as an act of virtue, yet it has to be admitted that at least Sade’s vice was punished, and this event started the transformation of Figg’s character, who decided to take care of Keely after the party, when “Figg realized what he was feeling was a change in himself, welcome because it meant he was still, truly, alive” (Grimsley 2005: 38). On the other hand, the protagonist of “Wendy” remains a reprehensible character from the beginning to the end. He consciously and ruthlessly acts upon his desires, obviously aware of the pain he causes to Wendy, regardless of whether she is legally declared a machine or a human. The narrator’s selfishness is palpable throughout the whole story. Trying to prove Wendy is not human, he insists on calling her “she” and treating her like a little girl, “not because of any right she has to be treated in this way but because her therapeutic value to [him] is increased by the pretense” (Grimsley 2006c: 93). After a session with Wendy, the nurse taking care of her, asks the protagonist: “Do you need me to call one of the doctors? For you, I Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 77 mean? ” (Grimsley 2006c: 94). At court, he presents Wendy as “essentially, an elaborate toy” (Grimsley 2006c: 95). Moreover, his final act, providing for her future, suggests that he considers her more human than he publicly admits. But his decision to get hold of the judge’s daughter undermines his claim that the way he used Wendy as well as “her predecessors” (Grimsley 2006c: 94) would protect society. With the sadistic pedophile protagonist at large following the judge’s daughter, readers would thus hardly find poetic justice in this short story. The different levels of poetic justice in the stories are further complemented by the difference in point of view. While “The 120 Hours of Sodom” is narrated from a neutral omniscient point of view, “Wendy” has a first-person narrator. Indeed, a contributor to the discussion on Scalzi’s blog identified as G. Jules points out that while works dealing in some way with child abuse are not that rare, it is the point of view that makes the difference in the perception of such stories: “Telling about a child surviving those experiences, growing up, and working through their past to become a stronger person is ... ‘empowering’ .... The child-overcoming-abuse trope is one we’re uncomfortable but ultimately okay with. A story told from the POV of the child molester, though? It’s dealing with the same subject matter, yeah, but it’s a totally different sort of a story which gets entirely different reactions” (Qtd. in Scalzi 2006). Yet the use of a molester’s point of view has some tradition in literature: generations of literary scholars as well as students will readily remember Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita again, a work which famously uses the molester’s perspective in the portrayal of his illicit relationship with an underage stepdaughter. Though the genre as well as the kind of molestation are different in “Wendy” and Lolita, Grimsley clearly alludes to Nabokov’s novel. Desai’s longing for the judge’s daughter is manifested by his preoccupation with her name: “I know her name, Elena, and roll it around in my mouth” (Grimsley 2006c: 97). This is reminiscent of Humbert Humbert’s obsession with his nymphet: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” (Nabokov 1996: 7). Interestingly enough, just as Lolita remains quite popular on syllabi for literature classes, as an example of the use of an unreliable narrator, Jim Grimsley’s “Wendy” has made it into at least one syllabus as well: Laura Otis, a professor at Emory University, used the short story in her course “Cognitive Science and Fiction” in a unit in which she explores the relationship between literary point of view and theories of mind, with Grimsley as guest writer in her seminars (Otis 2012). Nevertheless, the use of the molester’s point of view along with the lack of poetic justice in “Wendy” has thus created a synergy that makes the story digestible to even fewer readers. While the publisher might get away with such a story under different circumstances, in a situation when the public’s condemnation has already been turned on the magazine and its treatment of sexand abuse-related issues, it is only understandable that Roman Trušník 78 the publisher would decide not to run the story. In the case of “The 120 Hours of Sodom,” which Asimov’s did publish, the magazine felt it necessary to accompany the story with a proper disclaimer: “A word of warning: There are scenes in this story that may be disturbing to some” (Grimsley 2005: 16). Even William Schafer, who eventually published “Wendy” for the first time in Subterranean, included an ominous warning about the contents: “Literary novelist and short story writer Jim Grimsley’s Subterranean debut is not one to take lightly, a tale which examines the all-too-dark, and all-too-possible ways in which people may one day utilize technology. A word of warning to the reader: ‘Wendy’ contains mature themes, images, and language” (Grimsley 2006c: 93). “Wendy” and the controversy associated with its publication seem to have left a permanent mark in the world of science fiction. When editor and critic Dave Truesdale announced on another Internet forum that he was “putting together a list of some controversial SF stories” in 2012, Grimsley’s short story as well as the discussion surrounding it was brought up quickly by a user identified as Rob, who remembered the conversation on the Asimov’s website, remarking that “It was quite a thread - Harlan Ellison even had two posts, if I recall correctly.” This user also provided a link to A. R. Yngve’s blog entry in order to “refresh some memories” (Truesdale [2012]). Fortunately, the case did not leave a permanent mark on the relationship between Grimsley and Sheila Williams (or Asimov’s), as Grimsley submitted another short story just two weeks after “Wendy” had been rejected. In his cover letter to the short story submission dated June 19, 2006, he wrote to Williams: “as far as I’m concerned ‘Wendy’ was a fluke in an otherwise wonderful relationship” (Grimsley 2006a). Indeed, the story Grimsley tendered in June, “The Sanguine,” was accepted on September 21 (Dell Magazines 2006), and the writer has also published numerous other short stories in Asimov’s since then. Moreover, under the influence of the discussion on the Asimov’s Message Board, Sheila Williams sent Grimsley a check with the kill fee, regardless of his earlier rejection of the payment. She wrote to Grimsley: “It’s not so much that I should suggest that we pay you some sort of kill fee as it is that we are obliged to do so” (Williams 2006). Although it is not known if Grimsley cashed the check or not in the end, the fact that Williams sent it to the author proves that the publisher did monitor the discussion and it is thus a salient example of how fan discussions are actually influential in the field of science-fiction publishing. It can be argued that with “Wendy” Grimsley, once again, happened to offer a text to a publisher at the wrong time, as can be seen in how little attention it has attracted in the overall context of Grimsley’s short fiction. Grimsley has always acknowledged his works that belong to the literature of the fantastic as an equal part of his œuvre, and when he put together a collection of his short stories, he naturally included some of his sciencefiction ones. Published by Alyson Books in 2008, Jesus Is Sending You This Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 79 Message thus included not only “Wendy” but also two stories previously published by Asimov’s, namely “Peggy’s Plan” (October-November 2000) and “Unbending Eye” (February 2006). Conspicuously, the two Asimov’s stories that provided background to Grimsley’s 2006 novel The Last Green Tree, “The 120 Hours of Sodom” and “Perfect Pilgrim,” were omitted from the collection. Unlike previous books by Grimsley, Jesus Is Sending You This Message received very limited media coverage. Indeed, while some scholars cite the endorsing introduction by Dorothy Allison, there are actually very few mentions of the collection in the press. I could locate only a single fullfledged review of the book, written by Gary Kramer and published by Philadelphia Gay News in 2009. Kramer’s opinion of the collection is rather low, as he describes it as a “disappointing collection of short fiction by the talented gay author of ‘Boulevard,’ ‘Dream Boy’ and ‘Comfort and Joy.’ Although it boasts a kind introduction by Dorothy Allison that gushes about Grimsley’s writing, somehow this book never quite excites readers to the same degree.” He devotes a single sentence to “Wendy”: “Another entry, ‘Wendy,’ about a man who creates a young girl, deals with the legal ramifications of what he has done, but it is equally tedious [as another story, ‘Unbending Eye.’]” (Kramer 2009). Yet it is significant that although the reviewer considers the story “tedious,” he does not express any of the kind of indignation present in the reaction of Asimov’s publisher. The theme of child abuse plays a significant role in the work of Jim Grimsley and his works have greatly enriched our understanding of the trauma that abuse causes to its victims (cf. Trušník 2010; Deutsch 2019). Moreover, Grimsley has explored this theme both in literary fiction and literature of the fantastic, which offers the author more speculative opportunities to discuss the ramifications of abusive behavior, and he has run into difficulties publishing his fiction both in the realms of literary fiction as well as fantastic fiction. The half-forgotten case of Grimsley’s “Wendy” thus deserves a permanent place in the history of American literature because it demonstrates that there are limits of what is acceptable not only in literary fiction, but also in science fiction, a genre focused on a speculative exploration of possible developments of society. Yet, even science fiction exists in ever-changing real-life contexts influenced by real economic and social constraints. While “Wendy” might at another time have gone unnoticed in Asimov’s, just like it did in the collection of Grimsley’s short stories, in a situation jarred by negative publicity and false accusations by a parent and inferior news reporting by one local TV station, the publisher decided to kill a previously accepted story, even at the price of offering the honorarium as compensation to the author, as it happened in this case. And we can only imagine how destructive to Asimov’s the Grand Rapids incident might have turned out in the present-day United States in which social networks rather than local TV stations have demonstrated an unprecedented level of power and influence. Roman Trušník 80 Last but not least, this episode in American literary history shows how much of its development is not only hidden from the general readers, but also gets lost from the focus of literary historians. Were it not for the Internet community of science-fiction fans along with innovative research tools such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine or using the history of Wikipedia entries, the whole case would have been long forgotten. Works Cited Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth. “Asimov’s Message Board” (2006). Asimov’s, June 8, 2006, to June 16, 2006. [online] https: / / web.archive.org.web/ 20060617082402/ http: / / www.asimovs. com/ discus/ messages/ 2/ 5614.html (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Also available as a printout in Jim Grimsley Papers, box 25, folder “Wendy, Folder 2 of 2,” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Asimov’s Science Fiction (2004). “Our response to the sensationalized and highly inaccurate news report broadcast by WOOD TV’s 24 Hour News 8 on February 12, 2004, stating that Asimov’s is full of ‘stories about sex, drugs, and molestation.’” Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 18, 2004. [online] https: / / web.archive.org/ web/ 20040312234544/ http: / / www.asimovs.com/ _issue_0403/ response.shtml (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Ashley, Mike (2005). “Science Fiction Magazines: The Crucibles of Change.” In: Seed, David (Ed.) (2005). A Companion to Science Fiction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 60-76. Deegener, Günther (2001). “Child Abuse.” In: Smelser, Neil J. and Paul B. Baltes (Eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 1672-1676. Deutsch, David (2019). Understanding Jim Grimsley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Dell Magazines (2006). “Dell Magazines to Jim Grimsley,” September 21, 2006. Jim Grimsley Papers, box 31, folder “Correspondence, 2000-2018 5 of 5.” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Grimsley, Jim (2005). “The 120 Hours of Sodom.” Asimov’s Science Fiction 29 (2). 16-38. Grimsley, Jim (2006a). “Jim Grimsley to Sheila Williams,” June 19, 2006. Jim Grimsley Papers, box 28, folder “General Correspondence 2001-2009 5 of 5.” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Grimsley, Jim (2006b). “Wendy.” Jim Grimsley Papers, box 25, folder “Wendy 2006 + n.d. Folder 1 of 2.” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Grimsley, Jim (2006c). “Wendy.” Subterranean 5. 93-97. Grimsley, Jim (2008). “Wendy.” In: Jesus Is Sending You This Message. New York: Alyson Books. 135-153. “Internet Archive Wayback Machine” (2020). The Internet Archive. [online] https: / / archive.org/ web/ (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Kramer, Gary (2009). “Story Compilations Fall Short.” Philadelphia Gay News January 2, 2009. [online] http: / / www.epgn.com/ arts-and-culture/ literature/ 384- 1048336-story-compilations-fall-short (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 81 Nabokov, Vladimir (1996, originally 1955). Lolita. In Novels 1955-1962: Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, Lolita: A Screenplay. New York: Library of America. 1-298. “Option for Film Rights to ‘Wendy’” (2008). Jim Grimsley Papers, box 28, folder “General Correspondence 2009-2010.” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Otis, Laura (2012). “Cognitive Science and Fiction.” Syllabus. Emory University, Fall 2012. http: / / cmbc.web.emory.edu/ documents/ Otis%20Syllabus%20PDF 2.pdf (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Ravenel, Shannon (1985). “Shannon Ravenel to Jim Grimsley,” October 10, 1985. Jim Grimsley Papers, box 29, folder “Algonquin correspondence, royalties 1985- 2003,” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Scalzi, John (2006). “Killed! ” Whatever, June 9, 2006. [online] http: / / www.scalzi. com/ whatever/ 004275.html (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (Eds.) (2004). A Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Slusser, George (2005). “The Origins of Science Fiction.” In: Seed, David (Ed.) (2005). A Companion to Science Fiction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 27-42. Smith, Abby (2005). “Preservation.” In: Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (Eds.) (2004). A Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 576-591. Stableford, Brian (1995). “Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction.” In: Seed, David (Ed.) (1995). Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 46-57. Truesdale, Dave [2012]. “Controversial Stories.” Fantasy&Science Fiction. [online] www.sfsite.com/ fsf/ blog/ forum/ topic.php? id=90176 (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Trušník, Roman (2010). “Memories of Child Abuse in Jim Grimsley’s Dan Crell Trilogy.” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 2 (1). 53-63. Trušník, Roman (2018). “Jim Grimsley at the Crossroads of Southern Literature: From Literary Fiction through Fantasy to Science Fiction.” In: Ciugureanu, Adina, Eduard Vlad and Nicoleta Stanca (Eds.). National and Transnational Challenges to the American Imaginary. Berlin: Peter Lang. 239-250. Wikipedia.org (2020a). “Asimov’s Science Fiction.” Wikipedia.org, January 20, 2020. [online] https: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Asimov's_Science_Fiction (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Wikipedia.org (2020b). “Asimov’s Science Fiction: Revision history.” Wikipedia.org, March 10, 2020. [online] https: / / en.wikipedia.org/ w/ index.php? title=Asimov’s_Science_Fiction&action=history (Accessed: 10.03.2020). Williams, Sheila (2006). “Sheila Williams to Jim Grimsley,” July 13, 2006. Jim Grimsley Papers, box 28, folder “General Correspondence, 2001-2009, 5 of 5,” David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. Wood TV (2004). “Adult Magazine Part of School Fundraiser.” Wood TV 24 Hour News 8. February 13, 2004. [online] https: / / web.archive.org/ web/ 200405311 84251/ http: / / www.woodtv.com/ Global/ story.asp? s=1645394 (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Yngve, A. R. (2006). “The Jim Grimsley Debate.” A. R. Yngve’s “Notes Towards Becoming a Better Writer.” June 13, 2006. [online] http: / / aryngve.blogspot. com/ 2006/ 06/ jim-grimsley-debate.html. (Accessed: 20.01.2020). Roman Trušník Faculty of Humanities Tomas Bata University in Zlín Semiotic Fitness The Chinese Written Character and its Metamorphosis in Modern American Poetry Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung Since American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscript The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry was compiled, published and commended by Ezra Pound in 1919, it has become a major document of twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. Though the Chinese written character is unavoidably misunderstood by both Fenollosa and Pound, Fenollosa’s text plays an important role in the poetic revolution of Americanization. Most poets, especially young Beat poets and San Francisco Renaissance poets in the 1950s, tried to mimic graphemic creativity embodied in Pound’s Cantos and officially introduced some Chinese written characters into their literary productions. In their poetic experiments, they also attempted to create visual poems that mimicked pictorial features of some Chinese written characters within the alphabetic writing system, which, in turn, reflects the nature of graphemic creativity embedded in the Chinese writing system. This graphemic creativity makes Chinese written characters and their linguistic metamorphoses, as verbal-and-visual images, more expressive in sense and content. Consequently, by self-entanglement, they can generate beauty and power, which helps them to be semiotically fit in some poetic works. Engaging with Pound’s publication of Fenollosa’s manuscript and with poems by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and E. E. Cummings, this paper examines, from both theoretical and aesthetic perspectives, how modern American poets achieved semiotic fitness by using and mimicking Chinese written characters in their creative works. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0015 Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 84 1. Introduction In the history of twentieth-century American literature, the year 1913 is of significance, due to the Chinese written character’s official entry into modern American poetry and poetics. It is the innovative use of the Chinese written character which triggered a revolutionary movement for literary Americanization: “Make it new.” According to the archival research of the critic Zhaoming Qian, Mary McNeil Fenollosa, widow of American Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), met Ezra Pound (1885-1972) three times, on 29 September, 6 October, and 11 October, during that year in London (1995: 24-25). Following her talks with Pound, Mary determined that Pound was “the only person who could deal with her late husband’s note books as he would [have] wished” (quot. Saussy 2). In mid-December, she then sent her late husband’s notes and manuscripts concerning the Chinese language, Chinese and Japanese poetry, and art to Pound (Qian 1995: 24-26). Pound was then involved in the Imagist Movement and had already, with F. S. Flint (1885-1960), articulated the three principles of Imagisme in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in March 1913 (Jones 129). Coincidentally, the first principle of imagism, “Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective” (Jones 129), is in accordance with the nature of the Chinese written character, which helps Pound find an approach to “perfect Imagism with new models” (Qian 1995: 25). Even though Pound had read Chinese poetry with the help of his Chinese literature tutor, Allen Upward (1863-1926) before his encounter with Mary, he recalled that he was, at that time, “totally ignorant of ideogram” (Saussy 2-3). With Mary’s parcel in hand, “Pound saw it as his duty to treat the Fenollosa manuscripts creatively as a scholar-poet instead of obscuring them with philology” (Ruthven 14). Accordingly, Pound’s compilation, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica, which first appeared in Little Review in 1919 and was subsequently published as a book in 1936 (Fang 215) 1 , recognizes the Chinese written character as a medium for modern English poetry, rather than “as a document whose sources were to be traced, arguments historicised, and errors corrected editorially” (Ruthven 14). However, in both Fenollosa’s manuscript and Pound’s further poetic experimentation, Chinese written characters are misunderstood as pictograms or ideograms with pictorial quality, though only about four percent are pictographic. 2 Practically, Fenollosa was aware of the fact that “the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not [sic] now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value,” but he still contended that “a large number of the primitive Chinese characters, even the so-called radicals, are shorthand pictures of actions or processes” (Fenollosa and Pound 59, 46). What really interested both Fenollosa and Pound were simple pictograms and composite ideograms, which, as a small minority, tended to be more abstract and The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 85 symbolic, with much of their pictorial quality lost in modern Chinese writing. Nevertheless, this misunderstanding never prevented them from discovering the potential of the Chinese written character and its becoming a medium for inventing the ideogrammic method in new poetry writing, that is, “the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated particulars capable of suggesting ideas and concepts through their relation” (Géfin 27). Pound himself, on the one hand, complained that “the whole Occident is still in crass ignorance of the Chinese art of verbal sonority” (Fenollosa and Pound 60). On the other, he commended Fenollosa’s essay as “a study of the fundamentals of all aesthetics” and “fruitful in ‘new’ western painting and poetry,” expecting that “an American renaissance” was approaching (Fenollosa and Pound 41). In Pound’s view, “[t]he later movements in art have corroborated his theories” (Fenollosa and Pound 41). Fenollasa’s essay should thus be comprehended “as a major document of twentieth-century American poetry and poetics” (Saussy 1). While challenging both Fenollosa’s and Pound’s misunderstanding of the Chinese written character as simple pictogram and composite ideogram, some (including Chinese) readers still take for granted that the etymon of ideogram is naturally related to an ideographic writing system. They ignore the fact that the ideogram has a link with the alphabetic writing system. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphics, though originally pictographic, had already developed into sound language. As Pound notes, “[t]he Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures” (Pound 1961: 21). The misapprehension of the nature and character of the ideogram has, with the exception of work on Pound’s Cantos, led to a lack of study of the direct appropriation of Chinese written characters in American poetic works. Equally lacking are studies of a mimesis of spatial visibility caused by transformed Chinese signs, a kind of linguistic metamorphosis using the romanized spelling or character dismantlement. According to Elaine S. Wong, the “character dismantlement” refers to “the Chinese rhetorical device based upon graphemic recombination” of Chinese written characters, which illustrates “the regenerative vitality of a graphemic system that can also be found in alphabetic writing” (Wong 6). The shared function of character or word dismantlement existing in both ideographic and alphabetic writing systems, in turn, makes the Chinese written character meaningful in another poetic language. In the alphabetic system, such Chinese written characters or transformed Chinese signs appearing between the lines create visible images when they are presented to the audience in an unfamiliar way. This distancing effect generates a power of spatial visibility, which attracts the reader’s attention. To clarify the function of the Chinese written character inserted in modern American poetry, we set out to rethink it from a new angle: the Chinese written character and its linguistic metamorphosis acting as translated im- Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 86 age, verbal-and-visual image, and thinking-and-thinging image. In the process of acculturation, semiotic fitness is taken as a critical means for measuring its effect in literary production. 2. The Semiotic Fitness Principle In Timo Maran’s lexicon, “semiotic fitness in its broader sense can be defined as the success of a subject in adapting to its environment, its skill in bringing together information originating from itself and information originating from the environment with the help of semiotic processes” (82). Such a semiotic process is, to a degree, a reflection of a translator’s interpretative activities, which is referred to semiosis. Hence, three main elements - semiotic selection, semiosis, and semiotic fitness - are involved in the translation process: “semiotic selection” determines the value of the subject in its original culture, “semiosis” interprets the information of the subject, and “semiotic fitness” measures the acculturation of the subject in its new environment. Maran posits that a subject can be analogous to a living organism. In order to survive, this organism-subject should be semiotically fit when “interpreting its organismic information in respect to the surrounding environment” (Maran 82). “While adapting to the environment the subject localizes itself in the environment; thus, semiotic fitness indicates success in localization” (Maran 82). The success of a translated image thus depends upon its semiotic fitness in the target language and culture. It needs to be taken into account that during the process of translation, some meanings of the original text might be adapted, distorted, or even lost, due to the translator’s understanding imprinted with his or her own knowledge, preference, intention, bilingual ability, and even socio-cultural background. Through translation, a translated image, though changed in some aspects, is still related to the original image created by the translator. If a translated image is semiotically fit and embraced by the reader in the target culture, we can infer that the translated image is successful. If a Classic in one culture can also be labeled as a Classic in another, the prerequisite condition is that a web of images related to the text is successfully created and can be semiotically fit in its new environment through multiple translations. “It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness” (Pound 1961: 14). Here, Gary Snyder offers us a standard to measure what a Classic is: The Classic provides a kind of norm. Not the statistical norm of behaviorism but a norm that is proved by staying power and informed consensus. Staying power through history is related to the degree of intentionality, intensity, mindfulness, playfulness, and incorporation of previous strategies and standards within the The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 87 medium—plus creative reuse or reinterpretation of the received forms, plus intellectual coherence, time-transcending long-term human relevance, plus resonances with the deep images of the unconscious. To achieve this status a text or tale must be enacted across many nations and a few millennia and must have received multiple translations. (Snyder 2010: 79) Snyder’s elaboration of the Classic provides a paradigm for measuring the Chinese written character as a successful translated image. The three “plus” principles he advocates are what the semiotic fitness principle adheres to. 3. The Chinese Written Character as a Translated Image In the evolution of written signs, apart from Chinese oracle bone script, other proto-written signs (such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Indus script and Maya glyphs) have long disappeared. These ancient logograms not only lacked the ability to capture and express philosophical ideas, profound thoughts, and deep feelings, but they also failed to record the mysterious, complicated things that happened in the physical world. One fact, though, is unquestionable: that all written signs originate from pictograms or ideograms, which makes feasible the shifting of the Chinese written character from an ideographic system to an alphabetic system in poetic production. This shifting process depends upon both a written sign’s own graphemic creativity and the poet’s creative use of it. According to Elaine S. Wong, “graphemic creativity” refers to “the creative expressiveness of written signs” (Wong 1). She explains that she opts for “graphemic rather than graphic to emphasize the nature of written signs as something both seen and read” (Wong 3). Wong holds that her conception “focuses more on creativity as a function of language than on the human agent’s power to create” (Wong 2). This paper, however, is more concerned with the semiotic fitness of the Chinese written character as a translated image in modern American poetry. Thus, it contends that the human agent’s creative use of some Chinese written characters and transformed Chinese signs can be also viewed as graphemic creativity. Here, “graphemic creativity” has a twofold meaning: “the creative expressiveness of written signs” and “the human agent’s power to create.” In other words, in the poetic production, graphemic creativity can be generated by both the function of written signs and by a poet’s dismantling, transforming or reinterpreting of written signs. In the West, the Chinese written character has traditionally been understood as an image and has long been treated as picture-thing. As early as 1811, Jean Pierre Abel-Rémusat, in his Essai sur la langue et la littérature chinoises, states that Chinese characters “present to the eye not the sterile and conventional signs of pronunciation but things themselves” (quot. Kern 1). For Fenollosa, “a picture is naturally the picture of a thing,” so he sees Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 88 Chinese written characters as picture-things and discovers them as “things in motion, motion in things” (Fenollosa and Pound 45-46). In reading Chinese, readers, therefore, seem to be “watching things work out their own fate,” for “Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature” (Fenollosa and Pound 45). Drawing on Fenollosa’s examination, Pound also points out that the “Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things” (Pound 1961: 21). When Chinese written characters are taken as picture-things, they are cast as material images seen in poetry, resulting in their power of pictorial visibility. In Pound’s definition, “an ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound 1991: 120). Pound’s further elaboration of an image helps him establish a new paradigm for the visual in poetry: comparing “IMAGE” to “the poet’s pigment” (Pound 1991: 279); taking “phanopoeia” as “a casting of images upon the visual imagination” (Pound 1960: 25); and presenting an image as a sense of “sudden liberation,” “freedom from time limits and space limits,” and “sudden growth,” just like our experience “in the presence of the greatest works of art” (Pound 1991: 120). Through the Chinese written character imagery, visualization and art are harmonized in a new form of visual poetry in the twentieth century, which had a great impact on imagist poetry, concrete poetry, and calligrammes. This visualization is a representation of a poet’s interpretative activities, or a manifestation of a poet’s translatorial action, even translatorial power, when the Chinese written character imagery is assimilated into another culture. Hence, the poet, acting as both the translator and the reader, recreates such exotic imagery in literary production “by using the device of fictitious translation, i.e. by presenting their work as the translation of another’s work” (Kaindl 17). This kind of translation is now referred to as transfiction. This burgeoning field focuses on the study of translation-related phenomena from a cultural-and-social perspective. In transfiction, though no clear demarcation concerning the boundaries between fiction and reality is attempted, “translation is not seen as a text-based activity but rather as a metaphor for cultural processes” (Kaindl 17). By contrast, “fiction,” in Rosemary Arrojo’s view, can be taken as “a privileged site in which our imagery finds the necessary freedom to express even our most hidden obsessions and aspirations” (quot. Kaindl 365). “As a result, change, transformation, fragmentation, dislocation and cracks have become key coordinates for understanding the motion created by translation” (Kaindl 2). When the Chinese written character embedded in English poetry is examined from the perspective of transfiction, we discover that the Chinese not only acts as an image, but that it also can be understood as a translated image. In Chinese poetry, an image is the basic, yet powerful component The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 89 through which a poet presents or visualizes a picture of a thing in his or her mind. When a Chinese written character enters an English poem, its spatial visibility and pictorial visibility make it function as a thing or a visual image in the alphabetical writing system, which can be both read and seen. However, for most Western readers, even the translator-poet, seeing a Chinese written character as a thing is more natural than reading or pronouncing it, due to their limited knowledge of Chinese writing. At the same time, the adoption of the Chinese written character in another poetic language is a kind of the translator-poet’s visual-creative “copy” or translation work to create a translated image in his or her literary production. As part of this creative process, selection, interpretation, imagination, appropriation and adaptation are involved. The process of translation is, thus, similar to that of visualization as well as the process of inter-signs or inter-symbols undertaken by the poet, whose aim is to discover a language or a discourse to translate or communicate his or her own vision. In this respect, a combination of interlingual translation, intralingual translation, and intersemiotic translation is unavoidably involved in recreating the Chinese written character imagery in literary works. In essence, to examine the dramatically effective use of the Chinese written character in Western poetry is to examine its semiotic fitness as a translated image in the alphabetical system. In modern American poetry, Ezra Pound is credited as a pioneer treating the Chinese written character as a translated image. In his Cantos, he inserted more than one hundred Chinese written characters between lines: some of these are in accord with the Chinese Confucian culture, such as words concerning the ethical codes: “benevolence,” “integrity,” and “happiness; ” and words regarding the celestial symbols: “sacrifice,” “spirit,” and “sensibility.” To project the spatial visibility and pictorial visibility of the selected Chinese written characters and make them readable, they are typeset into a boldface image, sometimes marked with pronunciation and tone. Typographically, this positioning makes a contrast with the lightface English words within the text; sometimes an etymological interpretation provides a clue for readers to seek the unseen relations between the lines. Pound heavily relies on this method to explain the Chinese written characters introduced in his Cantos. For example, in “Canto LXI,” he writes about his apprehension of the Chinese ideogram “happiness”: A man’s happiness depends on himself not on his emperor If you think that I think that I can make any man happy You have misunderstood the FU 福 (the Happiness ideogram) that I sent you (Pound 1975: 338) Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 90 In order to interpret the Chinese written character correctly, Pound uses the bracket and the pronunciation “FU” to signify “the Happiness ideogram.” His poetic paraphrase, “A man’s happiness depends on himself,” but “not on his emperor,” enhance the readers’ understanding of this character. Accordingly, the character he selected and translated is semiotically fit in the poetic stanza. In Pound’s “Canto LIII,” four Chinese written characters, literally “new,” “day,” “day” and “new” are individually and vertically placed in the righthand margin. Each character’s pronunciation and tone are marked with “hsin 1 ,” “jih 4 ,” “jih 4 ,” and “hsin 1 ,” while on the left, a story of the engraved words on the bath tub of Emperor Tching Tang of the Shang Dynasty (16 th - 11 th century BC) is narrated in the stanza. These four Chinese written characters are taken from The Great Learning, one of the four Confucian Classics, stating that “if you can make it new every day, you will feel fresh day by day, and you have another new day.” Pound depicts this historical story in his poem: “Tching prayed on the mountain and / wrote MAKE IT NEW / On his bath tub / Day by Day make it new / cut underbrush / pile the logs / keep it growing” (1975: 264-65). Pound’s apprehension or misapprehension led to his creative explanation of the Chinese character “new” as being a blend of the characters for “ax” and “tree” (Tan 7). Through his etymological interpretation, readers can understand that the poet’s purpose of clearing with an ax is to make it new by “cutting underbrush” and “keeping it growing.” The capitalized “MAKE IT NEW,” as both a translated image and a visual image, encourages readers to imagine its role toward a new American poetics. Following Pound’s etymologically interpretative method, a group of young American poets in the 1950s, including Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Lew Welch, created images that suited their unique individual poetic styles through some selected Chinese written characters. For example, in his poem “Another for the Same,” Snyder borrows the Chinese character for “hidden” to depict the beauty of Ono No Komachi (825- 900? ), a Japanese woman waka poet, after he watched the Japanese Noh play, Sotoba Komachi, in Japan. the best of your beauty always hidden, yū 幽 “a glow of red leaves in the dark woods” in your gray eyes. (Snyder 1971: 79) To make readers both read and see this character, the poet, as in his Cantos, placed it at the right end of the line and writes its meaning, “always hidden,” and its pronunciation and level tone, “yū,” on the left. Snyder saw it as picture-thing, due to its etymon being a pictogram , meaning “deep, The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 91 serene, and tranquil,” which can be dismantled into two parts: the oracle bone script (literally, “mountain”) and the large seal script (literally, “red”). The poet uses color adjectives as pigments to depict beauty: “red leaves,” “dark woods,” and “grey eyes” in a glow of dim light. The double quotation line below the character exhibits the poet’s visual imagination of “always hidden” beauty: the best beauty of a woman is hidden in her body, whereas the best beauty of nature is the whole body of nature hidden everywhere. Within this context, readers not only understand the meaning of the Chinese written character, but also the implied meaning of the title “Another for the Same.” 4. The Chinese Written Character as a Verbal-and-Visual Image To the Western mind, the Chinese written character is the picture-thing whose materiality, owing to its spatial visibility and pictorial quality, makes it act as a visual image in poetry. By contrast, as written sign, the Chinese written character is imagery, the immateriality with picture-ascode of which makes it function as a verbal image to express the imaginary thing in the mind. Hence, from the perspective of interarts studies, the Chinese written character signifies a verbal-and-visual image to seek “the representation of the unrepresentable” (Krieger 22). Historically, Chinese writing has been evolving for six thousand years, from the ancient script types, including the oracle bone script, bronze inscription, large seal script, and small seal script, to modern script types, including official script, cursive script, regular script, and semi-cursive script. Each type has its own typical handwriting, which has been developed into the art of calligraphy. In this respect, the Chinese written character is a representation of nature-text when the calligrapher imitates the traces left by winding streams, running lava, flickering wings, swaying branches, and galloping hooves in the physical world. As a result, “the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second world of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue” (Fenollosa and Pound 55). What Fenollosa discovered is the ontological principle of poetry writing extracted from the Chinese written language as natural metaphor: from the seen natural image to the unseen intellectual image. Here, “the seen” signifies its superficial structure, indicating visual, natural actions, whereas “the unseen” uncovers its deep structure, suggesting a kind of spirituality beyond its materiality. As he pointed out, Chinese would be a poor language and Chinese poetry but a narrow art, could they not go on to represent also what is unseen. The best poetry deals not only with natural images but with lofty thoughts, spiritual suggestions and obscure Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 92 relations. The greater part of natural truth is hidden in processes too minute for vision and in harmonies too large, in vibrations, cohesions and in affinities. The Chinese compass these also, and with great power and beauty. (Fenollosa and Pound 53) As natural metaphor, the Chinese written character (in particular, simple pictograms and composite ideograms) has its own “power and beauty,” due to its graphemic creativity and pictorial visibility. Energy erupts when “[p]oetic thought works by suggestion, crowding maximum meaning into the single phrase pregnant, charged, and luminous from within” (Fenollosa and Pound 58). This eruption represents the semiotic fitness of the Chinese written character in adapting to its new environment - when both the seen and the unseen qualities are successfully presented in another language through the interpreter’s semiotic selection and semiosis. Snyder’s poem “The Uses of Light” illustrates how the Chinese written character contributes to building up the unseen intellectual fabric in another poetic language. In this work, the poet encourages the stones, the trees, the moth and the deer to speak out their enlightenment through “the uses of light” (Snyder 1974: 39). For such beings, “light” as a tool has its own material use: warming, growing, lightening, and watching. But the poet passes the seen material light into the unseen immaterial relations, that is, the Buddha light acting as a mental image of transcendence and enlightenment. In the last stanza, the poet attempts to persuade all sentient beings to transcend: A high tower on a wide plain. If you climb up One floor You will see a thousand miles more. 禪 Chinese readers recognize straightaway that this stanza comes from the last two lines of a Tang poem, “Climbing Yellow Crane Tower,” by Wang Zhihuan (Wang Chih-huan). Critics may also know that they are adapted from Snyder’s own translation of Wang Zhihuan’s poem “Climbing Crane Tower”: The white sun has gone over the mountains The yellow river is flowing to the sea. If you wish to see a thousand li, Climb one story higher in the tower. (Snyder 1999: 542) The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 93 Comparing the poems, readers will find that the same seen material images are used in both poems: a high tower and a wide plain. Obviously, owing to its clarity, concision, crispness, and readability, Snyder’s translated images in his poem are closer to the last two lines of the original Chinese poem. Most importantly, to express the unseen immaterial relations, Snyder has placed the traditional Chinese character for “Chan / Zen” at the bottom, suggesting that the Buddha light, a kind of philosophical, transcendental wisdom, can be used for transcendence. The white space between the character and the line, “You will see a thousand miles more,” indicates that this transcendence will enable people to see what the real land is. The poet, like a guru, invites readers to climb up and have a “right seeing” of the cultural and political scene embedded in the character. Hence, the Chinese character for Chan Buddhism, as a verbal-and-visual image, is semiotically fit in the poem “The Uses of Light.” In American poetic experiments, simple pictures are sometimes used to facilitate a better understanding of the deep structure of the Chinese written character. Like a painter or a calligrapher, a poet draws rather than writes a thing or a picture-thing image with special pigment in a poem. In the Poundian ideogrammic line, Philip Whalen is one of the pioneers using both pictures and Chinese written characters in his poetry. For example, in his poem “Scenes of Life at the Capital,” he points out that some serious mistakes are unavoidably made if the Chinese written character is understood word by word, in particular when the character is a polysemant. In the poem, a proper noun containing the same three Chinese ideograms, literally “Great Book Mountain,” is enumerated to express his attitude toward the Poundian wrong approach. He glosses them as “BIG / HEAD- QUATERS / MOUNTAIN / (temple of whatever Buddhist sect)” (Whalen 630) on the right, which contrasts with the Chinese ideograms placed vertically on the left. The capitalized “BIG / HEADQUATERS / MOUNTAIN” gives readers an impression of warning. For him, this is a new kind of philological crime: “I wish to God / I never see your face / Nor heard your lion tongue” (Whalen 631). To alert other poets, Whalen draws a simple picture: a man with glasses is dropped into the “word ocean,” where he screams out: “get me out of here! Bail me out of the WORD OCEAN” (see the picture below). Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 94 The phenomenon of “WORD OCEAN” reflects the bewilderment of the 1950s young American poets when they followed Pound in their poetic experiments. Like a philologist, in The Cantos, Pound tended to excavate the multifarious lexical meanings of the selected Chinese ideogram, marking with its Chinese pronunciation, tone and English meanings on the page based on his Chinese-English dictionaries (Qian 1995: 102; 2003: 211). 3 This scientific, etymological interpretation is what Pound advocated in his poetics, that is precision. It is a way of historicizing Chinese Confucian ethic in the “WORD OCEAN,” which misunderstanding is unavoidably generated due to some ideograms with multiple meanings. Some young poets criticized Pound after they had learned Chinese. For example, Gary Snyder, often categorized as follower of the Poundian ideogrammic method, contends that he acquired his ideogrammic method not from Pound, but “[f]rom the Chinese poetry directly” (Snyder 1999: 324). In relation to Fenollosa’s essay, Snyder stated that “I could never make sense of that essay by Pound. I already knew enough about Chinese characters to realize that in some way he was off, and so I never paid much attention to it” (1999: 324). Hence, he had “more of a sense of clarity” than “Pound or even Fenollosa” when “juxtaposing apparently unrelated things” to “make a whole form” (Faas 132-34). 5. The Transformed Chinese Written Character as a Thinkingand-Thinging Image Unlike the calligrams of the concretists, modern American poets have created their own poetic form, the “concrete ideogram,” which is a less visually abstract use of word design. Instead, more pictorial Chinese ideogrammic elements are employed in their creative works; hence, typographic design is a crucial means to make the whole poem look like the “thing” depicted in phonetic writing. In their poetic experiments, American poets prefer to use indented lines, white space, romanized spelling, and character dismantlement in the text. They attempt to make the transformed Chinese written character function as a thinking-and-thinging image. E. E. Cummings is the acknowledged master of graphemic creativity, adept at making words into pictures in his poetry. The correspondence between Pound and Cummings evidences that Cummings had some knowledge of Chinese ideograms and was well acquainted with Pound’s ideogrammic method. In his letter of 26 December 1935 to Cummings, Pound wrote, “[I] [h]ave just had proofs of the Chinese character, with my new notes,” which refers to his edition of Fenellosa’s essay as a book. In a letter from Cummings to Pound, from about 1956, Cummings wrote a big traditional Chinese written character , explaining that “[t]he Chinese characters [sic] at the top of this note can be interpreted variously as ‘fry,’ The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 95 ‘cook,’ or ‘burn’” (Pound / Cummings 86, 381). Cummings’s understanding is correct regarding the meaning of this character. Pound also discussed Chinese ideograms with Cummings in his letter, stating that “an English word is NOT the equivalent of an ideogram,” and “[a] trans / of an ideogram CAN assist the reader of not-chinese toward an understanding of an ideogram” (Pound / Cummings 334). For Pound, translation, in particular transliteration, is necessary for understanding more comprehensively the meaning of Chinese characters. In his footnote to “Canto LXXXV,” Pound explained that the “[m]eaning of the ideograms is usually given in the English text, transliterations as Couvreur and Mathews” (559). Through his interpretative activities, Pound successfully linked Chinese ideograms with new American poetics. In fact, Pound’s “Ideogrammic Series” was intended to include “volumes by Pound, Cummings, Eliot, Williams, and possibly others” (Pound / Cummings 61), though it was not, in the event, published. Though Cummings includes no Chinese written character in his poetry, he topographically designs his poems into word-pictures by dismantling English words, using indented lines and white space, and imitating object shapes, whose method is similar to Pound’s character dismantlement approach. Take one of his poems as an example: Beautiful is the unmea ning of (sil ently) fal ling (e ver yw here) s Now (Cummings 713) This is an untitled poem without any punctuation, in which the poet attempts to define what is “beautiful” in a word-picture, that is, “Beautiful is the unmeaning of (silently) falling (everywhere) snow.” The poet employs the material image “falling snow” to visualize the dynamic process of nature and make the reader perceive what is “beautiful.” The effect of this metaphorical enumeration is similar to that of a koan in Chan Buddhism, in which esoteric teachings are explicated by Chan master via nature imagery. To express “the unmeaning of falling snow,” Cummings adopts the character dismantlement approach to split “unmeaning” into “unmea + ning,” which interrupts the continuity of the meaning. His direct treatment of “falling snow” as an “unmeaning” thing corresponds to the first principle Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 96 of Imagism that Pound advocated. To project its spatial visibility and temporal transiency, the poet dismantles “everywhere” into “e + ver + yw + here” and “snow” into “s + Now,” in which the meaningful phrase “here and Now” induces readers to experience the visuality of snow falling everywhere. The capitalized “Now” illustrates a visual picture of the momentarily falling snow “here,” right on the spot which the poet sees or pictures mentally. Also, the dismantled parts, like “ning,” “ling,” “sil,” and “s,” make readers “here” seem to hear the sound of “silently falling snow.” Like his well-known “falling leaf” poem “l(a),” Cummings utilizes his typical “visual stanza,” a spatial structure, in this “falling snow” poem to “create meaning which is not present in the words themselves” (Heusser 278). In such a “visual stanza” poem, “lines are arranged in reference, not to rhyme and meter, but to a shape reflecting the poet’s thought” (Triem 12). For Cummings, the main qualities of “beautiful” are embodied in pure, simple, natural, yet sometimes transitory things, like “falling snow” in the physical world. In this poem, through the material image of “falling snow,” the poet, therefore, unravels the unseen immaterial relations with the concept of “beautiful,” in which “the expression becomes an expressible that intervenes in sense together with content-expressible” (Wong 7). Manifest intertextuality is another approach used by American poets to seek the representation of the unseen relation in the process of acculturation. It extends Julia Kristeva’s original concept of intertextuality, which is defined as “the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position” (Kristeva 15). “In manifest intertextuality, individual other texts are explicitly present in the text under analysis” (Fairclough 1992: 271). Its objective is “to specify what other texts are drawn upon in the constitution of the text being analysed, and how” (Fairclough 2006: 233). A better understanding of the transformed Chinese written character in modern American poetry can be gained through this concept. In his poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Allen Ginsberg refers to his borrowing of the Chinese ideogram “truth” from Pound and introduces it into his own text: “Language, language / Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth / defined as man standing by his word / Word picture: forked creature / Man / standing by a box, birds flying out / representing mouth speech” (Ginsberg 400-01). He admits that this “truth” ideogram virtually derives from both Fenollosa’s and Pound’s explanation, which constitutes a manifest intertext. The title “vortex” has a twofold meaning: one refers to Pound’s poetic revolutionary movement in the wake of imagism (later “vorticism”) that Ginsberg claims to follow; the other indicates the nation’s crisis of integrity, for it is now falling into a vortex. The word “sutra” suggests that this poem appears to be like a Buddhist teaching on integrity. Though no Chinese character appears in the poem, the lines give us an indication that the etymological interpretation of the character “truth” as “man standing by his word” is in accordance with the character The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 97 dismantled in Fenollosa’s essay. That is, “[m]an and word, man standing by his word, man of his word, truth, sincere, unwavering; ” and “[t]he word sign is radical supposedly from combination of tongue and above: ? mouth with tongue coming out it” (Fenollosa and Pound 69). Fenollosa’s question mark in his interpretation does not prevent Ginsberg from dismantling the character “word” into “mouth” and imagining it as a box. For the “forked creature” who never abides by the “truth,” the man is “standing by a box” with “birds flying out.” The dismantled part “mouth” from the character “word,” “representing mouth speech,” makes the character “truth” in this poem shift from the moral thinking of the “truth” to the natural process of the “word picture,” a sort of thinging. Language is a record of one’s thinking, but its unseen power should not be ignored, for it can be used as a weapon. As the poem continues to articulate, “The war is language, / language abused / for Advertisement, / language used / like magic for power on the planet: / Black Magic language, / formulas for reality — / Communism is a 9 letter word / used by inferior magicians with / the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold” (400-01). The metaphor, “The war is language,” indicates that America “had just accepted a packet of fabricated incidents as reasons for the escalation of the war in Vietnam” (Saussy 7). Hence, in reality, the formulas of language are equivalent to language energy with two extremes: when language is abused for propaganda, the situation will worsen, just like “the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold.” In 1950s American poetry, one outstanding example of manifest intertextuality between English and Chinese picture-signs is Lew Welch’s “The Wanderer” (217-18), the last poem in his collection Ring of Bone: Collected Poems 1950-1971. It was written in 1970, one year before his mysterious suicide-style disappearance in the woods of Nevada County, California. Welch employs four hexagrams 56, 39, 2, 55 from the Chinese Classic I Ching or Book of Changes as an interpretation of his life journey. As a result, the poem is his poetic miniature spiritual autobiography. Unlike Pound, Snyder, and Whalen, Welch never placed any Chinese written character in his text, but drew simple pictures as illustrations, complemented by the romanized spelling of the character to show its pronunciation. Without his hand-made hexagram as a clue on the left side, few readers would recognize that the title “The Wanderer” is derived from the LU hexagram (meaning “the wanderer; ” LU, literally, “journey”) from the I Ching. In his drawing, one may discern that Chinese ideograms are written in alphabetical writing signs, such as CHIEN (meaning “obstruction”), K’UN (meaning “earth”), FÊNG (meaning “abundance”), LI (meaning “fire”), and CHÊN (meaning “thunder”), with brief interpretations in English. Welch’s drawing is based upon Cary F. Baynes’s English translation of The I Ching or Book of Changes, which is rendered from the German translation of Richard Wilhelm. The hexagrams with boldface and lightface type in his drawing look like Chinese calligraphy, akin to an ekphrastic poem with hexagrams or Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 98 trigrams. To show the dynamic process of changes, Welch used the sign “o” for “broken line,” and “x” for “unbroken line” in his drawing so that readers can understand how the first hexagram 56 (LU) is changed into the second hexagram 39 (CHIEN), from the third hexagram 2 (K’UN) to the fourth hexagram 55 (FÊNG), and then know how his life journey is changed into the wrong direction (see Welch’s hand-made hexagram picture below). From Welch’s poem with a hand-drawn picture, we can determine that this poem is a multiple-manifest intertext concerning the motif that “Life is a journey,” a culturally conceptual metaphor. The manifest intertextuality exists in three ways: first, between the poet’s hand-made hexagram and his poem “The Wanderer”; second, between the poet’s hand-made hexagram and the related hexagram in the I Ching or Book of Changes; and third, between the poet’s life experience away from the Beat Generation Literary Movement and the content of the poem “The Wanderer.” With Welch’s own hexagram in mind, readers realize that this poem is much simpler and easier to understand. The first stanza is about the first hexagram LU (THE WANDERER), which consists of two trigrams: LI ( ☲ , CLING FIRE) and KEN ( ☶ , KEEPING STILL MOUNTAIN). The poem starts a description of “fire on the mountain” and his “seeking to put it out.” When he “chose to move to the right,” the poet found that it is “an Easterly direction, against / all Nature (for he had not / noticed that the Sun, his sign, / moves Westerly — and that all / Men follow the Sun” (217). His destiny is changed, due to the wrong direction: “Thus the Wanderer walked / All the 64 spokes of the / Great Wheel — of course, he was fortunate enough, / or fool enough, to have / lept over many of the / Stations of The Way” (217). In the second hexagram, because “fire, LI, flames up and does The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 99 not tarry,” LI ( ☲ ) is now changed into KAN ( ☵ ), “the abysmal, water” situation. In I Ching, the CHIEN hexagram, consisting of two trigrams: KAN and KEN, “represents obstructions that appear in the course of time but that can and should be overcome” (Baynes 351). The Chinese character for CHIEN can be dismantled into two parts: “obstruction” and “feet,” a visual perception of overcoming obstacles by walking. Consequently, as the poem informs readers, the wanderer had to leap over “many of the Stations of The Way.” These two stanzas suggest Welch’s own thinking of his life experience with a wrong direction as thinging, which eventually leads to his mysterious Han Shanian death as thinging. Welch unfortunately missed the famous historical poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955, launched by Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure, when he went to Chicago for part-time work. His journey from San Francisco to Chicago is absolutely “an Easterly direction against all Nature” as he depicts in his poem, for he had not anticipated the influence of this poetry reading in society, nor did he realize that this historical meeting of young poets from eastern and western coasts would be recorded as a big event in American literary history. As it says in the fourth stanza, “Perhaps he was only born / upside down, or with his / eyes turned in the wrong / direction, or crossed or / something. Who knows? ” (217). As a result of his absence at the poetry reading, his poetic talent was largely ignored by the media and by critics who study the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s. On 23 May 1971, like Han Shan, an ancient Chinese Tang hermit, a Beat hero he admired, Welch walked out of the poet Gary Snyder’s house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, leaving behind a suicide note. He carried a stainless steel .22 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, but his body was never found. The poem may suggest his own philosophical thinking about his planned mysterious death, for the poet addresses his wife Magda: “It’s enough to be home, / at last, Magda, for / when you found me I / wasn’t even wandering / anymore, just lost — / Abundance, fullness, right / before my eyes” (218). The fourth hexagram 55 (FÊNG) is the same hexagram inverted as the first hexagram 56 (LU), indicating a life circle, from dust to dust. 6. Conclusion Of the unprecedented influence of the Chinese ideogram in Western poetry, in particular in modern American poetry, Fenollosa asserted in the opening of his manuscript, “[t]his twentieth century not only turns a new page in the book of the world, but opens another and a startling chapter” (Fenollosa and Pound 42). This startling chapter is about the advent of the Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 100 Chinese written character (including its linguistic metamorphosis) as a medium for modernist poetry, which points towards a new poetics of literary visual culture. When the Chinese written character as an image or a translated image is semiotically fit in its new environment, we cannot take for granted that it is only one character or a combination of characters as picture-thing placed in another language. It should be understood as an intertextual or a manifest intertextual text, in which the deep structure of the character, including philosophical thinking, can be interpenetrated through the seen material character to its unseen immaterial relations, eventually to achieve its semiotic fitness in its adapted environment. In this sense, manifest intertextuality involving the Chinese written character in modern American poetry is a reflection of Fenollosa’s organicism: “The real process of thought does not merely label things, like so many apothecary’s jars on a shelf. A thought grows like a living tissue”; “thinking is thinging, to follow the buds of fact as they open, and see thought folded away within thought like so many petals” (quot. Chisolm 168). Like a biologist, Fenollosa analyzed the living tissue of the Chinese ideogram and outlined its essential, natural properties. His work is in accordance with Pound’s final goal of seeking “the objective presentation of material” for American new poetics “without the need for symbolist, expressionistic or romantic attributes” (Nadel 2). To Pound’s mind, “[t]he first definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa’s Essay on the Chinese Written Character” (1961: 18). Relying on Fenollosa’s scientific analysis of the Chinese ideogram, Pound invented the ideogrammic method for poetry writing. In particular from Pound’s practice, Géfin found that “[t]he isomorphic-cumulative ideogram is almost invariably tied to myth, and through myth to fundamental processes of nature” (29-40). However, in light of Fenollosa-Pound’s ideogrammic-etymological method, we have to acknowledge that Fenollosa emphasized the Chinese written character as nature metaphor, a vehicle for English poetry. By contrast, Pound invented the ideogrammic method out of the Chinese written character and took it as a scientific method, a method of poetry generated out of its etymological link with the root of the Chinese written character as picture-thing. In Pound’s view, “Fenollosa’s essay was perhaps too far ahead of his time to be easily comprehended. He did not proclaim his method as a method. He was trying to explain the Chinese ideograph as a means of transmission and registration of thought” (Pound 1961: 19). What Pound cares about is “to get his method correct, the method for The Cantos and for modernist poetry; ” rather than “whether he represented the Chinese character correctly or Fenollosa correctly (Qian 2003: 152). The Poundian ideogrammic method fascinated many young American poets in the 1950s so that they started to translate, imitate, emulate and innovate the Chinese ideogram as an image and as translated image in their The Chinese Written Character in American Poetry 101 own poetic writing. For them, the application of the ideogrammic method goes beyond how to understand the Chinese written character itself; it is not only a new method for their poetry writing, but also a new tradition deviating from the mainstream represented by giants such as T. S. Eliot. Following the Poundian ideogrammic tradition means that they would have the chance of becoming “part of a movement representing a ‘new poetry,’ one generated by an altered conception of the poet’s relation to phenomenological and artistic experience” (Beech 19). In this respect, “Pound’s work foregrounded for younger poets the importance of understanding language and form beyond the traditional concerns of poetry (diction, tone, and rhyme) so as to encompass the structural, etymological, and sonic properties of language, as well as the implicit social and political structures language contains” (Beech 22). No wonder young American poets such as such Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg acknowledge Pound’s influence and especially his techniques on them (Tan 136). Following Pound’s ideogrammic way, some young American poets, such as Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, Welch, and Cummings we discussed above, attempted in their own poetic experiments to mimic pictorial features and capture the regenerative vitality of the Chinese written character within their alphabetic writing. The expressiveness of Chinese written characters and these poets’ power of translating Chinese characters into pictures or pictorial things virtually constitute the two sides of graphemic creativity, which make Chinese written characters, acting as verbal-and-visual images, become more expressible in both sense and content. Consequently, as both images and translated images, by self-entanglement, Chinese written characters produce beauty and power, which enables them to be semiotically fit in modern American poetry. Like living organisms, the survival of Chinese written characters in another language articulates their success in reinterpreting related organismic information while adapting to its new environment. Whatever etymological, historical, or aesthetic strata they reside in, as verbal-and-visual images in modern American poetry, Chinese written characters testify to both the success of a revolutionary art of words into pictures, and the semiotic fitness of the Chinese written character as a translated image in a target language. Therefore, the entire process of deploying the Chinese written character and its linguistic metamorphosis in phonetic writing, from semiotic selection, through semiosis, to semiotic fitness, is an embodiment of Fenollosa’s idea of “thinking is thinging,” an “organic interplay” of uniting a poet’s “educational, historical, and aesthetic thinking” (Chisolm 168). As David A. Colón holds, “[t]he ‘ideogram’ must be understood as a protracted endeavor that spanned the entire Modernist period” (16). Joan Qionglin Tan and Sandro Jung 102 Notes 1. According to Achilles Fang, Fenollosa’s essay was “first published in Little Review VI, 5, 6, 7, 8 (Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec., 1919) and then reprinted in Instigations of Ezra Pound (New York, 1920, pp. 357-88); in 1936 it appeared as a book (New York: Arrow Editions; London: S. Nott) as Number 1 of ‘Ideogramic Series edited by Ezra Pound’ (there is no subsequent number of this series)” (p. 215). The essay, edited by Ezra Pound in 1918, was accompanied by a subtitle together with its authorship and illustration, that is, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: An Ars Poetica, Ernest Fenollosa, with a Foreword and Notes by Ezra Pound. 2. According to Shuo-wen jie-zi (Explanations of Simple and Composite Characters), a second-century dictionary (about 121) by Xu Shen, it is estimated that only about four percent of Chinese written characters are pictographic (simple pictograms and composite ideograms), while semantic-phonetic characters (composite phonograms) account for about eighty-two percent. Regarding the formation of the Chinese written character, there are six scripts or six graphic principles known as Liu Shu in traditional Chinese etymology, that is, hsiang-hsing (simple pictograms, or pictographs, meaning “imitating the form”), chih-shih (simple ideograms, meaning “pointing at the thing”), huei-yi (composite ideograms, meaning “understanding the meaning”), hsieh-sheng (composite phonograms or pictophonetic compounds, meaning “harmonizing the sound”), chuan-chu (transmissive words, meaning “mutually defining”), and chia-chieh (borrowed words, meaning “borrowing”) (James J. Y. Liu 3-6). 3. 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