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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8476-2 Volume 37 (2021) The Pleasures of Peril Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction Edited by Tobias Döring and Martina Kübler Adventure fiction often seems embarrassing. Sophisticated readers may dismiss it as a juvenile indulgence, full of clichés, silly heroes, and cheap thrills, i.e., formulaic genre fiction which literary culture and academic discourse leave behind. And yet, this volume demonstrates, adventure has never really left the scene. The pleasures of adventure tales may be perilous but carry on - and are being carried, not just into adult life, but also into modern and contemporary literature where they serve, sometimes in secret but often rather openly, as forceful drives and forms to work with. This volume takes a decidedly literary interest, focussing on the residues, rewritings and/ or reappropriations of adventure tales in anglophone literature since their eighteenth-century heydays, through Victorian and modernist times up to present-day realisations in postmodern and postcolonial writing. 37 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 37 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Ansgar Nünning · Donald E. Pease 37 The Pleasures of Peril Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction Edited by Tobias Döring and Martina Kübler All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. © 2021 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de · eMail: info@narr.de Satz: pagina GmbH, Tübingen CPI books GmbH, Leck ISBN 978-3-8233-8476-2 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9476-1 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0312-1 (ePub) ISSN 0723-0338 Editors Tobias Döring, LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey † (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) 5 Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction � � � � � 15 Liminal Experience: Wandering, Circulation, and Adventure’s Imperial Entanglements V id S teVanoVić The Pleasures of Circulation: Vicissitudes of the Drive in Robinson Crusoe, Roderick Random, and the Adventures of Money � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 31 e nno r uge “[T]he wildest of adventurers, or one at the relation of whose crimes the world must shudder”: The Venetian Bravo as a Literary Character in Zschokke, Lewis, and Cooper � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 53 i ngo b erensMeyer “Round Many Western Islands”: Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) � � � � � � � � � 73 s usanne r eichl No Time Like the Present: Tracing 19 th -century Ideologies in 21 st -century Time Travel Adventures � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 89 Against Empire? Adventures in / of Postcoloniality F abienne i Mlinger Against Reading� Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 119 a nniKa M c P herson Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre: Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 147 s TeFanie F ricKe Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure: Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 171 u rsula K luwicK Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte � � � � � � 195 g ero g uTTzeiT Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 215 No Blank Spaces: The (Im)Possibility of Modernist Adventures J ens e lze Imperial Representations - Romantic Dis / Enchantments - Modernist Aesthetics: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure � � � � � 237 T obias D öring Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 259 r oger l üDeKe The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 281 Cowardly Men and Heroic Women: Adventure and Gender s TeFanie l eThbriDge The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 297 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 319 M arTina K übler Life as Adventure: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 349 7 Acknowledgements a cKnowleDgeMenTs This volume is part of the activities of the DFG-funded Munich research group “Philology of Adventure” (see https: / / www�en�abenteuer�fak13�unimuenchen�de/ index�html)� It was originally planned as a conference for May 2020� But, like the genre it set out to investigate, our conference met with unexpected difficulties and had to deal with formidable challenges in the form of the global pandemic that has rerouted not just academic ventures and that, as our volume goes to press, continues to deeply unsettle not just research routines� Unlike the genre of adventure writing, however, the pandemic offers no pleasures at all� So it is with special gratitude that the editors acknowledge the unfailing commitment of all colleagues and contributors whose work, despite pervasive strain and stress, has made this venture possible� In particular we would like to thank Kathrin Härtl, who curated the conference programme� Thanks also to Katrin Bauer, Franziska Stolz, and Sonja Trurnit for their invaluable help in editing the contributions, to Kathrin Heyng at Narr Verlag for her cooperation, and to the National Library of Ireland for granting permission to reprint a page from the Joyce Papers collection� Above all, we thank all our contributors for their perseverance and proven belief that difficulties can be overcome (and pleasures, hopefully, deferred to better times)� 9 Notes on Contributors n oTes on c onTribuTors Ingo Berensmeyer is Professor of Modern English Literature at LMU Munich� He is currently working on a media history of English literature, a book on literary representations of authorship since the eighteenth century, and a database and quantitative study of British women writers active between 1945 and 1960� His books include Literary Culture in Early Modern England, 1630-1700 (de Gruyter, 2020) and The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, ed� with Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor (Cambridge UP, 2019)� Tobias Döring teaches literature in the English department at LMU Munich� A member of the research group “Philology of Adventure”, he takes special interest in modernist city writing and has published on Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and their engagements with adventure fiction. His books include Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (Routledge, 2002) and Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange, ed� with Ewan Fernie (Bloomsbury, 2015)� Jens Elze is assistant professor of English at Georg-August-University in Goettingen. Adventure fiction has been prominent in his research through an interest in the picaresque novel and the bildungsroman as central genres of modernity� His related publications include Postcolonial Modernism and the Picaresque Novel: Literatures of Precarity (Palgrave, 2017) and the edited volume The Enigma of the Picaresque (Winter, 2018)� Other ongoing research and teaching interests are theories of realism and the novel, literature and infrastructure, as well as postcolonial and world literatures� Stefanie Fricke teaches literature and didactics in the English department at LMU Munich� Her research focus is the literature, culture, and history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the didactics of literature, and modern popular culture� Her publications include Memento Mori: Ruinen alter Hochkulturen und die Furcht vor dem eigenen Untergang in der englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (wvt, 2009) and Narrating the Self, Narrating the Other: British Eighteenth-Century Captivity Narratives (wvt, forthcoming in 2021)� 10 Notes on Contributors Gero Guttzeit teaches English literature at LMU Munich� He specialises in transatlantic and rhetorical contexts of literature and culture since the eighteenth century, and is particularly interested in authorship, popular genres, and invisibility studies. His first monograph deals with The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric (de Gruyter, 2017), and his articles have been published in such venues as Forum for Modern Language Studies, Scholarly Editing, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, and Anglistik� Fabienne Imlinger is the coordinator of the research group “Literature and Globalization” at LMU Munich� A scholar of comparative literature by training, her research interests include gender and postcolonial studies as well as the history of knowledge� Her dissertation Hermaphroditische Anatomien (Königshausen & Neumann, 2015) is a historical study on the construction of gender ambiguity at the intersection of literature and science� Her current work focusses on the history and representation of the transatlantic slave trade in France� Ursula Kluwick teaches modern English literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she is a Senior Researcher in the SNSF Project “The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century”� Among her main research interests are postcolonial literatures, non-realist forms of writing, and the Environmental, especially the Blue, Humanities� Her books include Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (Routledge, 2011) and The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, edited with Virginia Richter (Ashgate / Routledge, 2015)� Martina Kübler is a postdoctoral researcher at LMU Munich� Her research interest include disability, gender, and queer studies as well as whiteness studies, and her dissertation titled Man Enough: Reading Disability in Lawrence, Hemingway, and Faulkner focussed on the intersection of disability and masculinity in the transatlantic Modernist literary canon� Stefanie Lethbridge is associate professor of English literature and culture at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg� She is a member of the university’s collaborative research centre on ‘Heroes, Heroization and Heroisms’� She has published on representations of the heroic in Victorian and contemporary popular culture� Her collection Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction since 1800 (Palgrave, 2017), edited with Barbara Korte, traces important stages in fictional explorations of the heroic. 11 Notes on Contributors Roger Lüdeke is Chair of Modern English Literature at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf� His research focusses on literary theory (theory of fiction, politics of the writing scene, text/ image relations, concepts of world literature, and popular culture) and on methods of textual analysis� He has published monographs on William Blake and Henry James as well as articles on Renaissance and Contemporary Drama, Romanticism, and the eighteenthand twentieth-century novel� Recently, he has finished a book on Reading Practice in Literary Milieux and started working on The Adventures of James Joyce from Brighton Square, Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland� Annika McPherson is Professor of New English Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany� She previously taught British and Global Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg� From 2017 to 2019 she served as President of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS)� Her research and teaching areas include postcolonial studies; theories, policies, and literary representations of cultural diversity in comparative perspective; as well as Anglophone Caribbean, West African, South African, Indian, and Canadian literatures and popular cultures� Sylvia Mieszkowski is professor of British literature at the University of Vienna and currently deputy-head of the research platform GAIN (Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities)� Her current research is on short fiction (most recently by A. L. Kennedy and Zadie Smith), dystopian narratives (literary, filmic, and graphic), and on the dialogue between Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture� Her publications include Resonant Alterities: Sound, Desire and Anxiety in Non-Realist fiction (transcript, 2014) and “Polymath Revisited: Cross-Lighting R� F� Burton between Cultural Passing and Steampunk Action” in Neo-Victorian Biofiction: Re-Imagining 19 th -Century Historical Subjects eds� M� L� Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Brill/ Rodopi, 2020)� Susanne Reichl is professor of contemporary English literature at the University of Vienna and specialises in children’s and young adult literature� She is also interested in time travel stories, in literature education, and in the interaction of literature and social media� She is head of the interdisciplinary research platform #YouthMediaLife, which deals with young people’s media practices and lifeworlds� Her books include Cultures in the Contact Zone: Ethnic Semiosis in Black British Literature (wvt, 12 Notes on Contributors 2002) and Cognitive Principles, Critical Practice: Reading Literature at University (Vienna UP, 2009)� Enno Ruge teaches literature in the English department at LMU Munich� Apart from English Literature set in Venice, he is interested in Country House literature and the literature of WWI� His publications include Bühnenpuritaner: Zum Verhältnis von Puritanern und Theater im England der Frühen Neuzeit (de Gruyter, 2011) and Realigning Renaissance Culture: Intrusion and Adjustment in Early Modern Drama, edited with Stephan Laqué (wvt, 2004)� Vid Stevanović is a PhD candidate at the research training group “Globalization and Literature” at LMU Munich, where he is currently completing a thesis on eighteenth-century It-Narratives� His research interests include economic criticism, thing-theory, structural psychoanalysis, and the literature of globalization� He is co-editor of Literatur und Arbeit (Frank & Timme, 2018) and has recently published in Textpraxis and Forschungen der Deutschen Kafka-Gesellschaft� His forthcoming articles include an analysis of eighteenth-century counterfeit-narratives in Being Untruthful: Lies, Fictionality and Related Nonfactualities, edited by Monika Fludernik and Stephan Packard (Nomos)� Contents 13 i nTroDucTion 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction Adventure fiction often seems embarrassing. George Orwell once called Rudyard Kipling’s work “almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life” (141)� In just this way, sophisticated readers often dismiss adventure writing as a juvenile indulgence, full of clichés, bogus action, silly heroes, and cheap thrills, i� e� formulaic genre fiction which any self-respecting literary culture leaves behind and which, in academic discourse, mainly serves to set off serious and critically worthy literature� Even though “[t]he adventure plot formed and forms part of the basic expectation with which all readers come not only to fiction, but also to the ways in which they articulate life narratives” (Bruzelius 23) and, as such, adventure forms a basic building block of storytelling (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 1), the genre is rarely assigned much value outside of children’s and young adult literature or in literary fiction past the Victorian age� Accordingly, the history of modern literature can be told as a programmatic resistance to adventure, discarding and denouncing both the genre and the cultural experience which it used to catch or prompt: the crossing of a threshold and departure into some uncharted, unknown space, wild and open, full of hope and promise, and beyond the strict confines of everyday routines� Sometimes in modern writing such memories resurface, but otherwise the modern world seems to have “ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery - a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over” (Conrad 8)� With this wistful phrase, Marlow, Joseph Conrad’s notorious narrator in Heart of Darkness (1899), articulates a sense of cultural nostalgia which, by the later nineteenth century, was about to make adventure with all its pleasure and allure a tale of the past: archaic, conservative, colonial, conventional� And yet, our volume argues and would like to demonstrate, adventure has never really left the scene� 1 As implied by Orwell’s quip, the pleasures may be perilous but carry on - and are being carried, not just into adult life but also into modern and contemporary literature where they serve, sometimes in 1 Our project is part of the activities of the Munich research group “Philology of Adventure”, whose previous publications (especially von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher as well as Grill and Obermayr) throughout inform the present volume and its introduction; see also https: / / www�en�abenteuer�fak13�uni-muenchen�de/ index�html 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 16 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 secret but often rather openly, as forceful drives and forms to work with� Even a twentieth-century avantgardist like Virginia Woolf acknowledged how the seafaring tradition, manifest in Richard Hakluyt’s early modern compilation of English maritime travelogues, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, captured and enraptured her: “I used to read it & dream of those obscure adventures“ (Woolf 271)� Many of her novels, like Orlando or even Mrs Dalloway, testify to her preoccupation with adventure writing by taking up, taking on, and creatively transforming the typical adventure rhetorics of risk and fortune� What is more, performances of masculinity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - and narrative or critical engagements with them - continue to draw on old adventure plots and their gender repertoire, though not necessarily just to continue classic models but often in the process of rethinking or redressing contemporary sexual politics� While today the discourse of adventure seems particularly powerful and pertinent in filmic formats and new media, where the old story patterns are frequently played through on screen and in the virtual reality of games, our present volume takes a decidedly literary interest, focussed on the residues, rewritings and / or reappropriations of adventure tales in anglophone literature since their eighteenth-century heydays, through Victorian and modernist times up to present-day realisations in postmodern and postcolonial writing� With regard to writers as diverse as Tomi Adeyemi, Carl Ashmore, Eleanor Catton, Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, Daniel Defoe, Damien Dibben, Arthur Conan Doyle, T� S� Eliot, George MacDonald Fraser, Zora Neale Hurston, Mat Johnson, James Joyce, Mary Kingsley, Matthew G� Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, M� NourbeSe Philip, Arthur Ransome, Salman Rushdie, Alex Scarrow, Mary Seacole, Tobias Smollett, and Rose Tremain, our contributions set out to reread adventure fiction - reread both in the sense of ‘read again’ and ‘read against the grain’ - in an effort to establish what functions it might (still) fulfil, what pleasures (if any) it may offer, and for whom. The most recent novel discussed in this volume, in fact, harks back to one of the oldest and foundational texts for all post-medieval engagements with adventure� Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte (2019) openly recalls Don Quixote of la Mancha (1605 / 15), in which Miguel de Cervantes four centuries ago both parodied and perpetuated the medieval romance tradition by letting one of its most avid readers loose into a modern world clearly unaccommodating for knights-errant� So, the passionate as well as desperate reenactment of knightly adventures that Cervantes’s hero performs for the pleasure of his readers sets up a pattern oft repeated in the modern novel: resisting old adventure plots by exhibiting their standard features, incongruous in a social world without giants or dragons, and so exposing them to our ridicule and laughter The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction 17 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 even while continuing their fascination and paying tribute to their power� The famous windmills the hidalgo fights still remind us of the losses we incur through disenchantment and which we partly compensate by taking pleasure in the limited perceptions of a misguided protagonist whose delusions we feel we have outgrown but whose visionary power still attracts us� Avid readers ourselves, we may well share this reader’s wistful visions and can hardly help marvelling at his passion - perhaps secretly and guiltily but pleasurably just the same - in taking seriously what he reads� For this reason, resisting adventure in the name of enlightened modernity and rational behaviour principally also involves our work of mourning for a fantastic world of romance and probation, of perils and pleasures long gone� That is why modern novels often go in search of what adventures used to offer, like Don Quixote, even as they measure out the growing distance that separates us from the wondrous world they would like to regain by means of transformation� “If ever the story of any private man’s adventures in the world were worth making publick […], the editor of this account thinks this will be so” (Defoe 25)� With the Preface to The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, published a century after Don Quixote in 1719, the adventure tradition gains admission into the world of Protestant middle-class merchants, where adventure now appears transformed in the “great variety” of one particular man’s life, a variety also “of our circumstances” (ibid�), which Providence might keep in stock for us, as Defoe writes in his Preface� But this is also the world of Protestant middle-class readers, whose serious business leaves them little time for purely pleasurable reading� Whenever they might happen to encounter fiction, therefore, they read it at their own peril and with a bad conscience� Unlike Cervantes’s hero, who reads chivalric romances with passion, Defoe’s protagonist only ever reads one book, the Bible - a pious model we might strive to follow, were it not for the extra pleasures we suspect in other books� In his Preface, Defoe therefore adopts the role of a stern editor and opens his adventure novel by stressing that he is presenting us “a just history of fact”, a story “told with modesty, with seriousness, and with a religious application of events” (ibid�)� On this condition, all serious-minded resenters of fiction as fantastic stuff may risk and read whatever strange surprising adventures are recorded here� And yet, the “editor” must also stress the “wonders of this man’s life” (ibid�) and so concede that parts of what he offers will exceed the rational account: his book may involve some wondrous and fantastic bits, after all� This undecidedness is surely part of its attraction and characteristic of adventure fiction especially in the modern age: it always involves and provokes both pleasure and peril, desire and shame� 18 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 In thinking, reading, and writing about adventure, Robinson Crusoe offers a good starting point� From its genesis in early eighteenth-century London as a place and time of political and societal upheaval to the present, similarly turbulent moment in which many of us desperately wish for a desert island to escape a global pandemic, the story of a man on an island, and centuries of readers’ fascination with it, also provides a good insight into the pleasures and perils of reading, into how we read, and why, and into how adventure literature travels across space, time, and contexts. In the first contribution of our volume, V id S teVanoVić indeed takes his starting point in Defoe’s novel in order to explore how Crusoe’s inclination to wander, which situates the text in the generic tradition of picaresque works such as Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), is indicative of a structural impasse of the drive� The mobility and permutability of the protagonists of these novels, Stevanović demonstrates, are then radicalised in the It-Narratives of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which objects, often coins or bank notes, embark on the adventure of circulation, thus inevitably detaching the drive toward adventure from human agency� Trying to pinpoint exactly what we talk about when we talk about adventure often leads to an impasse: adventure is so commonplace not only in fiction writing but also in how we conceive of our own lives, how we structure experience, and how we narrate personal stories on a daily basis that trying to define it seems superfluous. A shorthand formula for widespread experience just as for widespread narration, adventure perhaps functions somewhat in the same way that US Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward, in 1964, discerned pornography: we know it when we see it� Upon closer inspection, however, the paradoxes multiply� As von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher have noted in their recent volume, to theorise adventure is not an easy task in spite of its ostensible simplicity, as the term seems trivial but its abstract and constructive quality, its status as a narrative building block, renders it notoriously impalpable (1)� With its roots in medieval courtly verse narratives - originating from the terms ‘aventure’ or ‘avanture’ in Old French (2), which signified “a thing about to happen to anyone” (Pierce n� p�) -, the adventure novel in anglophone literature proliferated especially via the imperial and male quest romances of the nineteenth century, and the literary progeny of these early adventure stories in turn continues to allure authors and readers to the present day� In their efforts to determine the structural level of adventure within a given narrative, von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher note further that the use of adventure as a genre of fiction writing did not come about until the rise of the popular adventure novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century� A hinge form of sorts, these works connected earlier traditions of adventure The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction 19 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 writing with subsequent popcultural phenomena of the twentieth century (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 3)� Structurally, adventure has always been ambiguous: while it seems to characterise more than a mere event or function in a narrative, it is at the same time less comprehensive than an entire hero’s journey and more specific than a theme (6)� Von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher conclude that adventure is situated between the micro and the macro level of a text, and is therefore less a structural and much more a phenomenological entity (ibid�)� In the context of literatures in English, adventure was from the beginning inextricably tied to romance and thus to popular fiction rather than to the novel� It can be said that the adventure tale in itself is “anti-novelistic” (Pierce n� p�) in that it favours escapism, risk, and the extraordinary experience rather than the quotidian trials and tribulations of bourgeois society - such as the finding and securing of partners and wealth - with which the nineteenth-century realist novel principally concerned itself� Rather, adventure stories were a “masculinized variety of romance” (Baldick n� p�), as “the erotic and religious dimensions common to other types are subordinated to or completely replaced by an emphasis on vigorous outdoor activity and the practical arts of survival amid unexpected dangers, along with a cultivation of such virtues as courage and loyalty” (ibid)� With a focus on masculine heroism, early adventure fiction frequently turned to past events and “treats the development of nation states, revives episodes of their heroic pasts, or furnishes myths of national values and virtues” (Pierce n� p�), themes that can be observed most distinctly in canonical works such as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826)� Importantly, these historical novels “often are set in borderlands, such as that between England and Scotland” (ibid�), with adventure thus frequently featuring a subplot of national belonging and territorial disputes� It is no wonder, then, that war was and continues to be a prime subject of adventure fiction, as it combines adventure’s main desires for heroism, masculinity, and devotion to the nation state as well as personal sacrifice and growth. In line with adventure’s propensity for liminal spaces, e nno r uge ’s contribution in this volume examines a stock character of adventure fiction in an exceptionally interstitial locale: Gothic Venice, a setting equally charged with political intrigue as with mythical deception� In his discussion of Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice: A Romance (1804) and Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Ruge traces the origins of the Venetian bravo as a literary character back to Heinrich Zschokke’s Abaellino der große Bandit (1794) and the German Räuberroman and subsequently diagnoses the demise of the bravo’s appeal as a protagonist in adventure writing after Cooper� 20 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 The importance of borders, boundaries, and the crossing thereof to adventure stories is further highlighted by adventure’s currency in the imperial romance� Martin Green holds that adventure is “the energizing myth of English imperialism” (3) in that adventure stories not only traditionally depicted military and mercantile imperial endeavors but the myth of adventures in the name of the Empire conversely also became a vehicle of imperialism in its own right� By portraying daring heroes in their search for foreign lands and climes unknown, by having them move from the imperial European centres to exotic and colonised territories, adventure fiction educated generations of European males in compliance with an ideology of imperialism, white supremacy, and white saviourism as it instilled in young readers - mostly boys and young men - a sense of ownership of the world and of the humans that people it� i ngo b erensMeyer ’s contribution picks up one of the classics of British children’s literature in order to explore adventure’s imperial entanglements� In his rereading of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930), Berensmeyer demonstrates how aventure writing for young readers resonates with ideas of both Britishness and the Empire during the interwar period� Strikingly, these ideas are transported via the innocent pastime of the young protagonists’ play: in intricate role-plays and incidents of make-believe, and in plot elements lifted from Defoe and R� L� Stevenson, the novel both reveals and transports dominant English and imperialist ideologies to its audience� The novel furthermore creates a microcosm of British sea power in the Lake District, referring to ships and shipwrecks just as abundantly as to the infusion of English literary history with the canon of adventure writing, making Ransome’s a “meta-imperialist meta-adventure novel”� s usanne r eichl similarly locates a residual of British hegemony in twenty-first-century young adult fiction when she traces some of the imperialist attitudes of the nineteenth century in contemporary time travel adventures for young adults� In her comparative analysis of three British time travel adventure series - Alex Scarrow’s nine-volume series TimeRiders (2010-2014), Carl Ashmore’s The Time Hunters (six volumes to date, 2012-), and Damien Dibben’s The History Keepers (three volumes to date, 2011-) - she inquires whether and how the genre’s early ideology of British imperial hegemony remains valid in a twenty-first-century ethics of adventure. While adventure’s proclivity to favour boys and stereotypically masculine behaviour can be observed even in these contemporary young adult novels, Reichl notes how time travel is a logical continuation of the imperialist desire for outward expansion: instead of charting territory and purportedly bringing wealth and civilisation to the Empire, these young explorers travel back in time in search of adventures, often with a desire to know the temporal Other and with an entitlement to ‘fix it’ - history, in this case. The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction 21 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 One of the bedrocks of adventure writing, Margaret Bruzelius has argued, is that it is characterised by a sense of the “elsewhere” (14)� Crucially, the classics of adventure all take us across thresholds, into unknown, liminal or interstitial space, to the margins of a world, and always beyond boundaries� As the world became increasingly charted - already deplored, as cited earlier, in Heart of Darkness - and subjected to Western imperialist powers, however, adventure stories turned to ever more exotic and remote locations or indeed to remote periods in time� As Bruzelius adds, “[o]ther common elsewheres of romance are the past, as in historical fiction, and the future and space, as in science fiction. But even the back of a closet” - or indeed of a wardrobe, as in C� S� Lewis’s fantasy classic The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) - “can be enough of an elsewhere for the romance” (14)� While the protagonists of Henry Rider Haggard’s late-Victorian novels ventured out into the most difficult to reach regions of the African continent, other writers turned to such locales as the heart of Australia (Ernest Favenc), the moon (Jules Verne), and the future (H� G� Wells)� Since the demise of the colonial casualness and power structure that used to prompt and sustain such fictions, later twentieth-century and especially present-day writers must tackle the question of where to experience adventure in an increasingly globalised world that knows no traditional ‘outside’� Yet, as several of our contributions show, even the late-modern and fully mapped contemporary world holds plenty of possibilities for adventure, with the complexities of an intensely stratified or striated space reverting into a semiotic jungle that once more attracts explorers to enter at their peril� It is the trope of transgression that allies the adventure quest not just to fantasies of conquest, dominance, and power but potentially also to more subversive ventures that renegotiate the bonds and bounds that make up our daily world� Indeed, in spite of their imperial impulse, adventure stories are seldom unequivocal: rather, their protagonists often harbour “anguish and self-doubt” (Pierce n� p�) about their own position in the world� This renegotiation of power structures is especially pronounced in adventure’s manifestation as imperial romance, as these stories can be said to paradoxically also voice the ambivalence at the heart of the imperial enterprise (ibid�)� With the rise of postcolonial writing in the later twentieth century, and the new perspectives it provides, this lesson has been powerfully learned� Looking back at his own schooldays in the late-colonial Nigeria of the 1940s, Chinua Achebe remembered reading H� Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan and their ‘African’ books in the classroom� And he remembered taking “sides with the white men against the savages”, imagining himself to be part of the imperial explorers’ team in their “hair-raising adventures” 22 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 (Achebe 7)� But he eventually realised that these writers, as he put it, “had pulled a fast one on me” (ibid�) because, as an African, his designated position was not on the team nor on the boat but somewhere in the mass of nameless bodies on the river bank: “That was when I said no, and realised that stories are not innocent; that they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you” (ibid�)� The reading experience he recounts has fundamental relevance: his point that stories are “not innocent” acknowledges the very real impact fiction may have on the world and so corresponds to Edward Said’s notion of the “worldly text”, i� e� the claim that texts are “events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted” (4, italics in original)� As such, adventure texts are all the more important to study for the worldly moves they make� Precisely because adventure stories seem escapist and take us to an otherworld, it is urgent we consider what their effects are on the world as we know it and ask, in Achebe’s words, whom they might have dispossessed. All adventure heroes must cross thresholds and find themselves in unknown territories - yet these are rarely empty space but rather contact zones in which colonial encounters take place� Can the ones therein encountered begin to tell their own views of adventure? What happens if and when they do? It is for the reason of adventure’s imperial entanglements that postcolonial writers have frequently engaged with versions of adventure writing - consciously, critically, creatively - so as to reconsider and re-vision imperial legacies and texts from early modern to Victorian times as part of their own agenda� Authors from the erstwhile “elsewhere” of traditional adventure fiction - most notably Australia, Asia, Africa, or the Americas - have thus made and continue to make assaults on and revisions of a genre that, though notoriously outdated and continously transformed and rewritten, paradoxically still survives and flourishes in a postcolonial world. F abienne i Mlinger turns to Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection Zong! (2008) in order to fundamentally question the relationship between reading, pleasure, and adventure literature� By simultaneously provoking and defying a close reading, by foregrounding its own unreadability while also supplying clues for its own decipherment, Imlinger argues, Philip’s text performs what public opinion of the sentimentality of aventure writing has long implicitly criticised: that to engage in the solitary and pleasurable experience of reading an exciting story is somehow petty, almost shameful� a nniKa M c P herson ’s contribution engages with works of young-adult fiction by two Nigerian-American authors. Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (2011) and Akata Warrior (2017) and Tomi Adeyemi’s The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction 23 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 fantasy novels Children of Blood and Bone (2018) and Children of Virtue and Vengeance (2019) illustrate how the perilous heroine’s journeys of their young female protagonists on different quests to save Nigerian-inspired magical realms can be read as writing back to Eurocentric male-centred adventure and fantasy genres imbued with the legacies of colonialism� s TeFanie F ricKe focusses on two contemporary Neo-Victorian novels that rewrite or resist traditional narratives of the New Zealand gold rush, Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013)� Even though a gold rush seems like a stereotypical setting for adventure stories about ambitious men in search of fortune and a better life, Fricke demonstrates that these novels eschew such an obvious route� Rather, she argues, both novels deconstruct key elements of (gold rush) adventure stories, inverting the stereotypical gender order or even denying to narrate the gold rush adventure entirely� In addition to boundary crossings, desire is one of the fixtures at the heart of every adventure� Adventure is something that the heroes - and sometimes heroines - of these stories actively seek and desperately desire, to the point that the significance of the object that must typically be won, found, or conquered fades in comparison with the daring and the excitement of the journey or the search itself� Indeed, “the adventuring impulse may run contrary to, and even impede, the desire for gain” (Pierce n� p�), and even though, as Joseph Campbell has pointed out, the “ultimate boon” (159) must be won and returned home safely for many adventurers to complete their journeys, the drive that keeps the story going is adventure itself, not the golden fleece, ring, grail, or captured princess that must be returned� Rather than merely hunting for a treasure, adventure goes in search of pleasure� When we follow the heroes of adventure stories on their perilous journeys, their trials and tests of courage, the suspense and dangers inherent in such a boundary crossing turn into an adventure all in itself: the adventure of reading and the vicarious pleasure of experiencing something extraordinary along with the story’s hero or heroine� Perhaps it is because of adventure’s appeal to the readers’ affects that adventure stories and romances are commonly regarded as ‘bad literature’� As Grill and Obermayr expound, in the delineation between high and low culture set off in the modern era, texts featuring a high incidence of adventure motifs are overwhelmingly assigned to the realm of popular literature (6)� In spite of adventure’s being written off as light entertainment, this value judgment nevertheless did little to hinder its success, as its numerous variations betray: the nineteenth century saw a considerable upsurge in all tales adventurous, and the mass publication of dime novels and penny dreadfuls, serial novels, chivalric novels, travel and colonial novels as well as detective novels 24 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 flourished (ibid.). This proliferation of adventure stories in turn did not help to reconcile its bad reputation (ibid�)� In the light of adventure’s assignment to low culture and light entertainment, it is nevertheless striking that many of the most canonical authors in anglophone literatury history have indeed written adventure stories, often in what would become their best-known works� While the English novel originates in adventure with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the list of high-profile adventure writers does not end there: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling have all prominently turned to adventure, and other modern, postmodern, and contemporary writers, this volume shows, have done so as well, albeit perhaps less obviously and more creatively, subliminally, or subversively� As Grill and Obermayr indicate, adventure remains with us throughout modern literature, and it can be regarded as a phenomenon that is interlinked with the historical circumstances and aesthetic and poetological programmes of modernity, even beyond the classic adventure novels of the nineteenth century (8)� In particular, they hypothesise, adventure undergoes a transformation at the beginning of the twentieth century and throughout high modernism that is characteristic for the period’s break with established artistic principles: in accordance with the modernist programme, adventure likewise transmorphs, becomes knotted, twisted, complicated (ibid�)� In view of such crucial and creative transformations, several of our contributions focus on adventure in modernist literature� J ens e lze addresses one of Conrad’s most explicitly imperial adventure stories� Lord Jim (1900), he argues, notoriously marks Conrad’s entrance into modernist aesthetics while simultaneously being in conversation with a multitude of adventure topoi and intertexts� Rather than claiming an absence of adventure in modernity, Elze demonstrates, the novel suggests a modernist vision of adventure as evoked by the modern uncontrollability of life and its many contingencies� r oger l üDeKe turns to one of the prime representatives of high modernism� In his contribution focussed on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Lüdeke finds traces of adventure in one of the hallmarks of James Joyce’s poetics: both Joyce’s and his fictional alter ego’s epiphanies, he argues, is where adventure finds its way into a modernist aesthetic and life with otherwise adverse circumstances for nineteenth-century remnants of adventure� T obias D öring undertakes a reading of T� S� Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), a signature text of modernist poetics, in dialogue with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), one of the early tales of Sherlock Holmes and, as such, characteristic of late-Victorian adventure thrills� The close conjunction of these two rather different texts, commonly categorised as representative of high versus popular culture, draws attention to quite a few commonalities - their The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction 25 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 anthropology of modern London life, their engagement with fragmentation and disconnection, their conjuring of India and Eastern riches - and so suggests the mode by which adventure survives in modernity: as a ghostly and yet crucial presence� In the list of canonical modern writers who have prominently turned to adventure, one detail stands out: all of these authors are white men writing adventure stories about white male adventurers, presumably for predominantly white male readers� Any thinking about and rethinking of adventure in modern fiction must thus necessarily also concern itself with questions of racial and gender performances� As for gender, Paul Zweig has accordingly noted “the unrelenting masculinity of adventure literature” (61) in that it is almost exclusively male heroes who set out for their adventures� Yet, Zweig also notes that the heroes’ departure is often occasioned by women: frequently, the safety or honour of a woman must be secured by the hero’s valiant actions, or the hero must escape from the domestic sphere or the confines of the female space associated with it (63)� Sometimes, women in adventure stories signify “the power to bind” (68), as they represent everything that is “immobile” and “predictable” (69), and the movement and continuity of adventure become the male antidote to this power� At the same time, as adventure is usually a process of initiation, the individual trials that make up a male hero’s journey are the ideal theatres to perform and prove his masculinity, often in turn to impress or woo an initially unconvinced prospective love interest and always in order to find a place in patriarchal society. This is not to say that women cannot set out in search of adventures� Yet, in traditional adventure stories, as Bruzelius argues, “those who do are maimed and scarred by their authors and rarely survive their tales” (15)� A number of contributions in the present volume question this claim, however, and show that modern literature has found ways to write adventure stories with heroines� Far from remaining “plot free and marriagable” or “resisting-but-doomed-to-fail” (26), the heroines discussed in various chapters of our volume are both valiant and successful, both actively engaged in their plots and in charge of telling and writing their adventure stories� To begin with, s TeFanie l eThbriDge ’s contribution dismantles the myth of the self-assured, valiant male hero of adventure writing� In her discussion of the Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser’s series The Flashman Papers (1969-2005), Lethbridge demonstrates how notions of the typical adventure hero’s masculinity as noble, courageous, and chaste become complicated in Fraser’s cowardly hero� When readers are, rather disturbingly, encouraged to root for a blatantly immoral character and his constant bragging and womanising, these novels work to simultaneously unroot and reroute the mechanics of readerly identification with the hero 26 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 familiar from traditional male quest romances� s ilvia M ieszKowsKi ’s contribution features the accounts of two famous female Victorian adventurers whose autobiographical narratives are both to a similar extent characterised by the frequent use of anecdotes� Via a thorough engagement with the poetics of the anecdote, Mieszkowski demonstrates how Mary Seacole’s and Mary Kingsley’s accounts of their travels to the African continent - titled Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and Travels in West Africa (1897), respectively - likewise reproduce and offer critical reflections on imperial ideology and colonialist practice� M arTina K übler also engages with a text that chronicles a female author’s real-life adventures� In her discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Kübler traces structures of archetypal mythological adventure texts in Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) and asks if and under which circumstances it is possible to narrate a Black woman’s life in the Jim Crow-era US as a heroine’s journey� Next to adventure’s rather obvious traditional connection to maleness and masculinity, the fact that most adventure stories focus on white adventurers has gone largely unremarked in previous discussions� Of course, with adventure’s origins in European courtly verse narratives, the adventurer’s whiteness seems natural but does not explain its endurance past the middle ages� In the context of the British Empire and the United States’ westward expansion, narratives of border crossings and individual and ethnic mobility also proliferated amongst Black and Indigenous writers as well as writers of colour, and yet their stories only rarely used the adventure formula centered on an individual hero to tell their narratives of migration and displacement, of bondage and flight. g ero g uTTzeiT discusses a recent engagement with one of the most canonical works of anglophone adventure writing� Guttzeit argues that Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), a satirical rewriting of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), not only revises the allegorical meanings of the genre of adventure writing but, by drawing on the picture-book tradition of African American writing, importantly brings to the fore the absurdity of the racialisation of the visual� u rsula K luwicK demonstrates that Salman Rushdie’s novel Quichotte (2019) draws not just on Cervantes but on a distinctly US-American version of the adventure genre, namely the road trip narrative, to engage with questions of ethnicity and race which have always been central to Rushdie’s writing� By having a hero of Indian origin go on a road trip as a key trope of US-American identity, Kluwick argues, Rushdie explores Americanness and its discontents as an example of the resurgence of uninhibited nationalism and racism� As this introductory survey shows, much is clearly missing in our present volume� What we provide is neither a systematic nor a comprehensive treat- The Pleasures of Peril: Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction 27 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 ment of anglophone adventure writing� Instead, we offer a series of connected case studies focussing on texts selected for their power in challeging readers to reflect upon what we are doing when we read about adventures. When George Orwell described reading Kipling’s work as “an almost shameful pleasure” (cited at the outset), he also identified at least one instance where a Kipling reader failed to confess his act: in a footnote, Orwell cites a Kipling stanza which John Middleton Murry quotes prominently in one of his essays but misattributes to Thackeray� As Orwell says, this “is probably what is known as a ‘Freudian error’� A civilised person would prefer not to quote Kipling - i� e� would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed his thought for him” (Orwell 140n1)� The point is perhaps symptomatic of adventure fiction, too. As civilised readers, we might well prefer not to feel that it is adventure writing which has expressed and done so much that we treasure� And yet, as Freudian analysis indeed suggests, every civilised reader still entertains uncivilised desires, like reading about forays beyond civilisation and into unmentionable perils. Rereading anglophone adventure fiction, then, our volume hopes to find new ways by which such pleasures can be reached� Works Cited Achebe, Chinua� “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration�” Chinua Achebe: A Celebration, edited by Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford� Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1990, pp� 1-10� Baldick, Chris� “Adventure Story�” Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford UP , 2008, https: / / search-proquest-com�emedien�ub�uni-muenchen�de/ encyclopedias-reference-works/ adventure-story/ docview/ 2137969662/ se-2? accountid=14596� Accessed 15 Feb� 2021� Bruzelius, Margaret� Romancing the Novel: Adventures from Scott to Sebald� Lewisburg: Bucknell UP , 2007� Campbell, Joseph� The Hero With a Thousand Faces, commemorative edition� Princeton: Princeton UP , 2004� Conrad, Joseph� Heart of Darkness, edited by Paul B� Armstrong� 1899� New York: Norton, 2017� Defoe, Daniel� Robinson Crusoe� Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985� Green, Martin� Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire� New York: Basic Books, 1979� Grill, Oliver, and Brigitte Obermayr� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer in der Moderne, edited by Oliver Grill and Brigitte Obermayr� München: Fink, 2020� Orwell, George� “Rudyard Kipling�” Selected Essays� 1936� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2021, pp� 131-144� 28 T obias D öring anD M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0001 Pierce, Peter� “Adventure Novel and Imperial Romance�” The Encyclopedia of the Novel, edited by Paul Schellinger et al� London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998� https: / / search-proquest-com�emedien�ub�uni-muenchen�de/ lion/ docview/ 2137914376/ F47FF- B12407A474DPQ/ 1? accountid=14596&segment=LitRef� Accessed 15 Feb� 2021� Said, Edward W� The World, the Text, and the Critic� Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1983� von Koppenfels, Martin, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer. Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019, pp� 1-16� Woolf, Virginia� The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1930, edited by Anne Olivier Bell� London: Hogarth Press, 1977� Zweig, Paul� The Adventurer� London: Basic Books, 1974� l iMinal e xPerience : w anDering , c irculaTion , anD a DvenTure ’ s i MPerial e nTangleMenTs 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 V id S teVanoVić The Pleasures of Circulation: Vicissitudes of the Drive in Robinson Crusoe, Roderick Random, and the Adventures of Money I. From Robinson to Rousseau Now more than 300 years after its publication, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is still very likely one of the most popular books of adventure writing� If it holds true that adventure fiction is nowadays relegated to the realm of children and young readers (Bristow 30), then one reason for its ongoing popularity is certainly the fact that it already lent itself well to such an audience in the past� As early as 1762, a little more than four decades after the first publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the text is featured prominently in Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’éducation, where it is the only book that Rousseau recommends to his hypothetical ward� In focusing only on select aspects of the original volume, Rousseau anticipated what was to become a major trend in the editorial practice around the book� While there had certainly been a number of abridged versions before, these had mainly been led by commercial considerations, and although the text had certainly been read by children before, particularly in the popular chapbook versions, Rousseau was the first to assign it an explicitly pedagogic function and argue in favour of an abridgement according to this function (Petzold 44)� The main result of this abridgement is the sole focus on the island, restricting what critics have called Robinson Crusoe’s “episodes” (Watt, Rise 93) or “anecdotes” (Van Ghent 131, Swenson 16) to a single one, albeit the most prominent� By cutting the parts that deal with the time before the shipwreck, i. e. his upbringing, the first unsuccessful voyages, the enslavement by pirates, his own slaving voyage, and his life after the rescue from the island, a potentially problematic narrative surplus is omitted� Focussing exclusively on the island episode - more so if it is, as in Rousseau’s proposed version, purged of its more controversial parts 1 - allows for understanding Robinson Crusoe as the story of a man surviving against all sorts of adverse circumstances, with its main character either working towards making his abode more hospitable or devising means for an 1 Such as the relationship to Friday, the salvaging of tools, and Robinson’s theological reflections (Petzold 45). 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 32 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 escape� Of such a book, Rousseau can claim that it would induce the desire to learn “all that is useful and […] only that” (Rousseau 185)� With Rousseau’s abridgement comes the claim of a specific purposefulness of the text that goes beyond the ‘mere’ pleasure of reading it for its adventures� The original text, however, with the passages that Rousseau dismisses as “its rigmarole” (ibid.), is far more conflictive on that topic and poses some serious problems for the relationship between ‘useful’ and ’pleasurable’ reading� It is particularly interesting here that the very beginning - part of the narrative surplus that Rousseau vows to omit in his pedagogic novel - deals with questions of pedagogical authority. On the first pages, we are told how Robinson Crusoe, born into a well-off family, disregards his father’s advice of pursuing a career in law and instead sets to sea as a venturing merchant� Against the injunction to rest content with his “middle Station of Life” (Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner 2 6), Robinson gives way to what he calls his “wandering Inclination” (ibid�) and “rambling thoughts” (2)� These are strong enough to disregard not only his father’s advice, the entreaties of his mother, and those of various friends but also his own sound reasoning that finds in the “middle Station” 3 the paragon of “Human happiness” (6)� Hence, Robinson sets out to sea in order to make a fortune through trade� This “original Sin”, as Robinson’s yielding to his inclination has been called following Watt’s seminal analysis (Rise 62), is far from the only instance where he acts against his own best interest� He meets with various hardships, amongst which the two years spent as a slave are only the most prominent example� Yet, instead of learning from what the reader now recognizes as a fundamental personal flaw, he sets out time and again, only for bad luck to strike once more and strand him on his island� While most readers will well remember the misfortunes he suffers there, it serves right to remind oneself what happens after he is rescued� Having returned to London after 28 years on his island, Crusoe discovers that the plantations that he set up in Brazil on one of his earlier voyages are still held in his name and embarks on another voyage to claim their profits before returning to the Channel by land� But even then, on the last pages of the text, an urge to set off again keeps haunting any attempt of stable closure that the novel might have hitherto suggested: despite having married and raised kids, we are told that his “inclination to go abroad […] prevailed” in 2 Henceforth shortened to RC in in-text citations� 3 This “middle Station” should not be confused with the idea of a middle class in the contemporary sense of the word� For a nuanced exploration of this problem, see Rogers 51-52� The Pleasures of Circulation 33 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 the end (RC 256-257)� How come, then, that this novel, which is so much concerned with impulsive mobility, is so frequently read for the relative stasis of the island episode? II. And Back Again As hinted at already, Robinson’s inclination to wander is not only contested from the outside, by figures of authority and peers alike, but - more significantly - from within. Robinson frequently dwells on the contradiction between his urge to go to sea and his better judgement of remaining content with his current station in life� To understand this puzzling tension that was cut out by concentrating on the island episode, we need to examine what the removal of this material means for the text as a whole� The abridgements in the tradition of Rousseau, and the critical and popular interest that they both reacted to and - in turn - shaped, not only resulted in a change of the textual content but a shift in genre� As Martin Green points out, this editorial tradition turns what was essentially a picaresque text into its reverse (50-51)� When returning to the original text, much more so to the original trilogy, one recovers the episodic structure of the picaresque� 4 The island episode, then, is only one - albeit the longest - of several episodes that constitute the picaresque text of Robinson Crusoe (Green 50)� 5 Whereas the island episode features a story of static survival by a figure that could be read as the example of civic duties, the picaresque would tell the episodic and highly mobile life of a character condemned to wandering (51-52)� The Robinson who sells his fellow escapee Xury into slavery is certainly a more ambiguous figure than the Crusoe who engages in moral self-criticism on the island, but he is certainly not a rogue in the sense of the tradition of the Lanzarillo de Tormes or Richard Head’s The English Rogue. Yet, it is not the restoration of episodes foregrounding a roguish aspect of Crusoe’s character that could vouch for its kinship to that genre but the internal logic of this episodic structure itself� In “Episodic Structure and the Picaresque Novel”, Sheila Ortiz-Taylor proposes a theory of these narrative dynamics (218)� The text she uses for exemplifying these claims is Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, published in 1740� Written in the period between 4 One need only consider the original Frontispiece that emphasises the “Strange and Surprizing Adventures” over the rest of the title, framing the island episode as just one amongst many such adventures (Sertoli xiv, Moretti 32)� 5 Interestingly, Dieter Petzold points out how early German Robinsonades did not necessarily contain an island episode but were collections of adventurous travel stories (40-41)� 34 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 the publication of Robinson Crusoe and its proposed abridgement in Rousseau’s Émile, Smollett’s novel shares central problems with that of Defoe: impasses that will shed light on a conflict that goes much deeper. Roderick, a young Scotsman, is shunned by his relatives after the disappearance of his father and given into the care of his grandfather� After a prank on the local schoolmaster gets out of hand, he is turned out by his grandfather and tries to reclaim his father’s social status by becoming a gentleman� After a number of unsuccessful attempts at rising through the social ranks, he obtains the position as a surgeon’s mate on a royal navy vessel, yet subsequently loses this position and falls in love with Narcissa, whom he cannot marry due to his precarious finances. Finally, he is reunited with the long-lost father whose fortune secures Roderick’s ambitions� In a number of close readings, Ortiz-Taylor examines the structure of Roderick Random’s episodes and their relations to each other in order to develop a narrative theory of the picaresque� As in the case of Robinson Crusoe, the term picaresque here relates more to the mobility and permutability of the protagonist than to his roguish schemes� Thus one could follow Simon Dickie, for whom this type of mobility is one of the main characteristics of a genre that extends both above and below the picaresque and that - in accordance to how these texts were classified in their time - he calls the “ramble novel” (102). In contrast to Dickie, however, who focuses on the comic element of these texts, I propose to emphasize the name he gives to the genre itself and focus on the ramble - the “wandering Inclination” (RC 6) in Defoe’s words - as a specific mode of mobility that unites the protagonists of these texts� Indeed, the concept seems fitting for the protagonists of the two texts. Roderick Random is very familiar with the “rambling thoughts” that plague Robinson Crusoe: he goes through the occupations of an apothecary, a surgeon’s mate, a soldier in two armies, a valet, and a professional gambler while travelling from a rural seat in Scotland to the naval offices in London and from the beaches of Sussex to the Spanish forts of South America� For the narrator, the transitions between these social positions are brought about by sudden strokes of fate: a ship is lost; a friend dies; an enemy is brought into a position of power� Yet, Ortiz-Taylor is quick to add that this apparent succession of chance events that serves as a narrative motor tends to correspond to a fault in the picaro himself. This flaw is both inside the subject and outside of his control as if there were something in the picaro that was constantly sabotaging the possible stasis that the episode offers� A prominent example of this is found when Roderick, like Robinson, is stranded� While Roderick Random finds relative stability in serving as a surgeon’s mate on board a navy vessel, the episode is brought to its end by the sudden death of the ship’s captain� By The Pleasures of Circulation 35 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 a string of unfortunate incidents, it is Crampley, Roderick’s chief antagonist on board, who succeeds the captain� While trying to leave the ship during a storm, the two men come to blows� As happens frequently in the text, Roderick is provoked into physical violence, inciting a duel in which he sustains heavy wounds and is left to die on the deserted shore� Upon a closer look, such an impulsive urge is at the centre of many of the episodic transitions in the text� The prank on the schoolmaster at the beginning (Smollett 17-18), the confrontation with Gawky (111-113), the striking of Doctor Mackshane that Roderick calls “one of the most unlucky exploits of [his] life” (166), the striking down of Sir Timothy in defence of Narcissa (229), the duel with Quiverwit that leads to Narcissas abduction (364-365) - all of these work towards the expulsion of the protagonist from situations that promise stability� A similar dynamic pervades Defoe’s text: while one might read the first part of Robinson Crusoe as a story of upward social mobility - after all, as various commentators have noted, he is financially better off at the end of the first volume (Watt, Rise 162; Starr 73) - the same argument is harder to sustain in the sequel� In Robinson Crusoe’s Further Adventures, 6 the protagonist, although a wealthy man with a family, is plagued more desperately than ever by his “native propensity to rambling” (1), the difference being that by now he is well aware that there is no material reason for humouring this inclination: I had no fortune to make; I had nothing to seek: if I had gained ten thousand pounds I had been no richer; for I had already sufficient for me, and for those I had to leave it to; and what I had was visibly increasing; for, having no great family, I could not spend the income of what I had […] so that I had nothing, indeed, to do but to sit still, and fully enjoy what I had got, and see it increase daily upon my hands� (2) And yet, the inclination persists� It haunts him “like a chronic distemper” (ibid�), leaving him sleepless at night and breaking “violently into all [his] discourses” (ibid�) at day� Although Robinson is aware that these thoughts are imposing themselves upon him as if from the outside, 7 he is helpless� The urge to go to sea again imposes a strain on his marriage� As a last measure, he goes as far as to buy a farm and employ himself in manual labour in order to find distraction. While this brings a certain momentarily relief to Robinson’s impulsion, the death of his wife a couple of years later paves the way for its return with a vengeance, to which he finally cannot but give way, setting out to sea again� 6 Henceforth shortened to FA in in-text citations� 7 After all, he is quite conscious of this: “all my discourse ran into it, even to impertinence; and I saw it myself” (Defoe, Further Adventures 2)� 36 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Consequently, one would assume that Robinson now enjoyed the mobility that he has yearned for repeatedly. Yet when he finally finds himself on the move again, he is set back by contrary winds and a variety of adverse circumstances that lead him to muse about how he is destined to “be never contented with being on shore, and yet to be always unfortunate at sea” (FA 7)� His inability to enjoy the consummation of his “rambling thoughts” is less surprising if one considers that the strange urge has already been shown as something that encroaches upon Robinson’s enjoyment� 8 Before he sets out, he testifies to the way it affects him, admitting that he has “no enjoyment of [his] life, no pleasant hours, no agreeable diversion but what had something or other of this in it” (ibid�)� Pleasure itself has already been tainted with something that incessantly points towards this problematic urge� Still, he pursues it against the static enjoyment of his wealth: Nothing else offering, and finding that really stirring about and trading, the profit being so great, and, as I may say, certain, had more pleasure in it, and more satisfaction to the mind, than sitting still, which, to me especially, was the unhappiest part of life� (2) Whatever this tainted pleasure might be, it is certainly not the feeling resulting from the “best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness” (RC 6) that Robinson’s father suggests as the result of the “middle Station” in life� Robinson’s “stirring about” is undertaken in the pursuit of “more pleasure”. Yet, as evident already in the first volume, it is not pleasure in the conventional sense of the word but a troubling insistence that does not abate with satisfaction� The pursuit of this contradictory pleasure is the driving force that Rousseau cuts out in his abridgement� III. A Rambling Drive Under such a contradictory force, the subject must appear as split: a problem that remains an unsolvable impasse for a pre-modern conception of a self-identical subjectivity� Yet, in psychoanalysis, such a split is not only theorized, but it is the constitutive problem from which all its tenets proceed� 9 When Crusoe laments how his rambling thoughts break “violently into all 8 While his analysis of this topic follows a different trajectory than what will be expanded in the following pages, Moretti noticed that enjoyment indeed is a pervasive concept in the novel - despite the emphasis on labour that is central to the island episode (44)� 9 It serves well to remind oneself that, for Freud, the insight that the Ego is not master in its own house is the central blow that Psychoanalysis delivers to human narcissism (“Vorlesungen” 295)� The Pleasures of Circulation 37 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 [his] discourses” (FA 2), one is reminded of the way that the psychoanalytic symptom insists in the subject - breaking forth and tainting all aspects of the patient’s life� 10 This foreign speech that infects Crusoe’s daily talk seems to come from a point in the self that is not identical with this self� Ça parle is the dictum that Jacques Lacan proposes for this phenomenon - it speaks (L’Éthique 244). It testifies to the constitutive split that gives rise to the unconscious in the subject, its speech emanating from an interiority that is at the same time an exteriority� The unconscious, so to speak, slips in through language� Where the guard against this slippage is less acute, its demands are voiced most clearly: Robinson relates how he “talked of it in [his] sleep” (FA 2), the paradigmatic domain of unconscious articulation� However, the demands which the protagonists of the two novels suffer are of a special kind: they seem to be directed against the interest of both Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random� In both cases, they go against their better judgement and direct interest in self-preservation. When he reflects about the urge of going to sea again, Robinson remarks that he: “had no more business to go to the East Indies than a man at full liberty has to go to the turnkey at Newgate, and desire him to lock him up among the prisoners there, and starve him” (FA 88). The domain that Freud first understood as the source from which the fantasies and pleasures of the subject proceed is here apparently oblivious even to the self-preservation of this subject� 11 In Jenseits des Lustprinzips, faced with the neuroses induced by the trench warfare of WWI, Sigmund Freud discovers another, more troubling, dynamic at the heart of the modern subject: something oriented toward a secret urge for self-annihilation� In his unsettling survey of the modern psyche, Freud is fascinated by the same libidinal impasses that Defoe’s protagonist suffers� He touches upon it in the epistemological problem that is posed for psychoanalysis in the repetition of unpleasant dreams and extends this problem to encompass the question of a compulsion to repeat - the repetition of behaviour that the subject experiences as foreign and / or undesirable� Indeed, desire seems the wrong word for the compulsive urge that is articulated in Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random� In Smollett’s case, we do see Roderick longing for Narcissa, but it is not only her name that casts doubt on the idea that what is at stake here is the desire for an other: although the 10 As Bruce Fink notes, the symptom stands in a peculiar relationship to enjoyment� Even though the symptom is experienced as an inhibition to (libidinal) enjoyment, it at the same time is sustained by the production of another kind of enjoyment (3-4)� 11 Above all, in the idea of the dream as “Wunscherfüllung” (‘wish-fulfillment’) (Freud, “Traumdeutung” 127-138) and the concept of “Unlustprinzip” (‘un-pleasure principle’) and “Lustprinzip” (‘pleasure principle’) (Freud, “Formulierungen”; “Jenseits”)� 38 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 reader might take the love for Narcissa to be the motor of Roderick’s striving for social mobility, this is soon dispelled by an episode in which he takes up correspondence with a wealthy woman� 12 Even though he has fallen in love with Narcissa before (Smollett 219), he loses “all remembrance of the gentle Narcissa” (303), while his ambition draws him to the rich Miss Sparkle� Defoe’s text, on the other hand, is notorious for its absence of sexuality (Watt, Myths 169)� 13 It is only at the very end of the first volume that we learn in plain and utilitarian words that Crusoe “marry’d, and that not either to [his] Disadvantage or Dissatisfaction” (RC 256)� But even then, the death of this wife on the first pages of the second volume swiftly clears the stage for Robinson’s Further Adventures� It is not too far-fetched to follow Simon Dickie and posit that the absence of desire is a characteristic of the ramble novel 14 : “Plot is so rudimentary in these texts and characterization so shallow, that the usual motors of narrative are just not there� Ramble novels are almost without desire, as a narratologist might say� There are no important mysteries to be resolved, no hermeneutic plot” (266)� Instead of aiming at the satisfaction of a specific desire in sexual gratification or socio-economic ascent, the driving force of these narratives seems only to call for infinite repetition. 15 Freud’s name for this force is drive, and it is set out as a duality� 16 The manifestation of compulsively repeated behaviour is the product of a death-drive that is working against the life-drive, which seeks to preserve the existence of the individual and / or that of the species� It is precisely such a tension between death and life that Ortiz-Taylor posits as the motor of the picaresque narrative� The individual episode ends in metaphoric death and transitions into the next sequence by the imagery of rebirth. We find such transitions prominently in both Roderick Random and 12 Narcissism is found as a strong theme in both novels� Take, for example, the scene of Robinson’s self-portrait or the allusion to the classical myth of Narcissus in the parrot that Crusoe domesticates and that echoes his name (Spaas, particularly 100-107)� 13 See also James 4, Bell 29, Volkmann 129� 14 This is where my analysis departs from what is otherwise a similar theoretical outline in Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot. In the texts that I deal with here, the “forward looking intention of desire” (Brooks 103) is openly superseded by drive: plot, as the structural ground for narrative desire is minimal, instead giving way to the repetition of largely independent episodes� 15 For the systematic distinction between desire and drive, see Moati� 16 Note the problematic rendering of the German Trieb as instinct in James Strachey’s first English translation of Freud’s collected works. The translation relegates Trieb to the domain of the natural or the organic, although nothing could have been further from Freud’s intent as scholars have since then shown (Tomšič 23-24; Lacan, Écrits 803; Lacan, Quatre Concepts 148)� Indeed, even Freud’s early conceptions of the drive insist in its location at the border between the psychic and the somatic (“Triebe” 214)� The Pleasures of Circulation 39 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Robinson Crusoe� Both come close to literalizing the metaphor of death and rebirth when they find themselves alive on deserted shores. Following the Duel with Crampley, Roderick - against all odds - regains consciousness and finds himself stripped of his belongings on the beach: When I received the use of my understanding, I found myself alone in a desolate place […]� - What a discovery this must be to me, who but an hour before, was worth sixty guineas in cash� I cursed the hour of my birth, the parents that gave me being, the sea that did not swallow me up, the poignard of the enemy, which could not find the way to my heart, the villainy of those who had left me in that miserable condition, and in the extacy of despair, resolved to lie still where I was and perish� (Smollett 210) Even though the blow that struck Roderick might have ended his life, the consequences of losing his relatively stable position prevail over any appreciation of the luck of still being alive� His reaction to this miraculous survival is an outburst against a life not worth living and ends in a mimesis of death� With Crusoe, on the other hand, the tone is decidedly different: I walk’d about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I may say, wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance, making a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my Comrades that were drowned and that there should be not one Soul sav’d but my self; […]� (RC 41) Yet, just as Roderick’s episode is followed by a scene of a metaphorical rebirth when he is rescued and - evoking the new-born Christ - found in a barn, so Defoe’s text is quick to adopt the imagery of death when Robinson finds himself afflicted by his “distemper” after a short time on the island (RC 74-83)� What is more, when Crusoe is stranded on his island and realizes that he is still alive, his rapture is hardly distinguishable from the ravings of Roderick� 17 One could further strengthen the argument Ortiz-Taylor makes by reminding the reader that the very name of the first picaro, Lazarillo (‘little Lazarus’), refers to such a structure of rebirths� Lazarus, brought back to life by Christ, provides a strong figure of circularity and spells out the metaphorical dichotomy of life and death that Ortiz-Taylor uses to develop her argument� Nor is this point too far-fetched for Roderick Random’s story: after all, when Roderick assumes his post as surgeon’s mate on board a vessel of the Royal Navy, 17 Crusoe himself is aware of this blurring between pleasure and pain. Reflecting on his reaction to his miraculous survival, he observes that “sudden Joys, like Griefs, confound at first” ( RC 41)� This foregrounding of a monistic intensity is repeated in Further Adventures, when the narrator describes the raptures of a priest saved from a damaged ship (10)� 40 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 he is involved in the British attempt at storming the Spanish stronghold at the castle of St. Lazarus at Cartagena. The castle is itself a figure of repetition as it is attacked time and again by the body of British soldiers, of which “a sufficient number remained to fall before the walls” (Smollett 186), only for ever new soldiers to retry this ill-fated endeavour� Such scenes suggesting the uncanny movement of revenants, simultaneously alive and dead, point to the frequent associations of the drive with figures of the un-dead (Sigurdson 364, Žižek 54), i. e. figures that point to the increasingly precarious distinction between life and death in the drive� An uneasy constellation between these two poles can be traced back to Freud’s text, where they experience numerous reconfigurations (“Jenseits”). Lacan proceeds from this conflation of death and life in the drive in order to propose a concept of the drive as a monistic force (Ecrits 848)� Here, there is only one drive and its telos is neither life nor death but life in death or a “negative vitalism” (Tomšič 59). Interestingly, the curse that Roderick Random directs against his parents is a curse against his being in the world: it echoes the me phunai - to not have been born - of Oedipus at Colonos. Schuster accordingly alludes to this ontological peculiarity of the drive when he calls it a “failure not to be” (15)� Drive is thus negative in the sense that it is oblivious to the life of the subject, yet it is positive, vitalistic, in that it is the source of ontological addition - of a constant production: in Lacan’s terms, the production of jouissance� In homology to the breakdown of the distinction between life and death, the distinction of pleasure and pain is rendered meaningless in Lacan’s concept� It is no longer a pleasure that corresponds to a decrease in tension for the subject, as Freud had it at the beginning of his inquiry (“Jenseits” 3), but pleasure that ever increases tension and thereby becomes indistinguishable from pain� As it is not neutralized in a cathartic release of pressure, the special kind of pleasure that is thus produced is not limited but strives towards infinity. Hence the drive introduces a break with any idea of a natural homoeostasis; beyond the organic life of the subject, there is the endless accumulation of jouissance. This conflict between mechanic accumulation and organic homoeostasis is dramatized in the literary texts under discussion here� Robinson’s “original sin” can be re-figured as a break with an organic community that is evoked in the family context and the fatherly advice of staying in the “middle station”, where subjects go silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the hands or of the head, […] nor harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body of rest, nor enraged with the The Pleasures of Circulation 41 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 passion of envy, or the secret burning lust of ambition for great things; but, in easy circumstances, sliding gently through the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter; feeling that they are happy […]� (RC 6-7) The “middle station” thus promises a peaceful enjoyment that would disengage pleasure from its connection to the drive, allowing for “the sweets of living, without the bitter”, i� e� an enjoyment without its dark underside� Instead of the constant drive of jouissance, it promises the happiness of a homoeostatic pleasure� 18 Thus, when Robinson is advised against going out to sea, this is done in the register of equilibrium and stability� His father cautions him that going to sea is “for Men of desperate Fortunes on one Hand, or of aspiring superior Fortunes on the other” (RC 6), but not for someone who enjoys the equilibrium of the middle station� In such a position, “placed in the Middle of the two Extremes, between the Mean and the Great” Robinson should enjoy the “just Standard of true Felicity, […] to have neither Poverty or Riches” (ibid�)� Ironically, it is precisely the island episode that appears as a consummation of this fantasy of homoeostasis. Reflecting on it, Robinson finds an image of perfect equilibrium and self-sufficiency: I lived in my kingdom, the island; where I suffered no more corn to grow, because I did not want it; and bred no more goats, because I had no more use for them; where the money lay in the drawer till it grew mouldy, and had scarce the favour to be looked upon in twenty years� (FA 4) The island thus provides a space where the logic of the drive seems suspended and replaced by the purposefulness that Rousseau calls for� There is a natural limit to production, corn is grown, and goats are kept, but only in quantities that are needed for Robinson’s survival� The island economy is self-sufficient: money, that symbol of infinite growth, is relegated to the margins of this enclosed world� And yet it is there� The reader might remember one of the most curious scenes of the novel, namely the situation in which Crusoe salvages the shipwreck and encounters a considerable sum in international coins, an incident that sparks a passionate monologue: O Drug! […] what art thou good for, Thou art not worth to me, no not the taking off of the Ground, one of those Knives is worth all this Heap, I have no Manner of use for thee, e’en remain where thou art, and go to the Bottom as a Creature whose Life is not worth saving� However, upon Second Thoughts, I took it away […]� (RC 50) 18 For the conceptual history of the ideas of accumulative and homoeostatic pleasure, see Tomšič 33-99. 42 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Despite being evidently of no purpose on the island, he runs the risk of taking the gold with him, thereby endangering his life while trying to swim back to shore on the verge of a storm (49-50)� From the very start, the world of accumulation taints the apparent self-sustainability on Crusoe’s island� In the scene in which Crusoe gives in to the strange - and unexplained - urge to take the money, he reiterates his earlier internal quarrels and Roderick’s self-sabotaging actions. Following Jean-Claude Milner and Samo Tomšič, this conflictive dynamic of the drive can be said to result from a parasitism of the infinite on the finite (Milner 67, Tomšič 183). In this, the subject is suffering between the virtual endlessness of the drive, “the constant demand for infinite satisfaction” (Tomšič 184), and the finitude of the body that imposes a ‘natural’ check against it: human finitude is plotted against the non-human infinity of the drive. This clash of the non-human and the human points to the effect of a certain non-human quality in the subject� This is precisely the compulsion to repeat that Freud associated with the death-drive and that is responsible for infinite repetition. It thereby points towards a mechanistic element in the subject, the non-human dynamic of endless repetition, striving for the “more pleasure” that Robinson seeks, thereby bringing to the fore an object-like quality in the subject� 19 On second thought, the protagonists of our text are associated with the inorganic on the very first pages of the respective texts. The story of Roderick Random kicks off with the relation of a dream that his mother had while pregnant with him: She dreamed she was delivered of a tennis-ball, which the devil (who, to her great surprise, acted the part of a midwife) struck so forcibly with a racket that it disappeared in an instant; and she was for some time inconsolable for the loss of her offspring; when, all of a sudden, she beheld it return with equal violence, and enter the earth, beneath her feet, whence immediately sprang up a goodly tree covered with blossoms, the scent of which operated so strongly on her nerves that she awoke� The attentive sage, after some deliberation, assured my parents, that their firstborn would be a great traveller; that he would undergo many dangers and difficulties, and at last return to his native land, where he would flourish in happiness and reputation� (Smollett 1) In this dream the structure of the narrative as a whole is foreshadowed: the protagonist is literally made into a thing - a thing propelled forward by an 19 This can be understood as characteristic for adventure fiction per se, if we subscribe to Hansen-Löve’s observation that the genre strives towards a mechanisation of plot structure (237)� The Pleasures of Circulation 43 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 uncanny and malignant force� Roderick is reduced from subject to object in a devilish game of a constant back and forth� In Robinson Crusoe, the association is more subtle, yet nonetheless significant� At the very beginning, we learn that he was not always called by the name that came to title Defoe’s novel� His story begins with the tale of his father’s migration from Bremen to Hull� There, “by the usual Corruption of Words in England” (RC 5), the name Crusoe is adopted as a butchered version of the German “Kreutznaer”, evoking the German low-domination coin, the Kreuzer 20 : from the first page onwards, Crusoe is associated with the non-human� Although the roving protagonists of these two tales are pictured as things at the start of their adventures, in neither case is the non-human associated with rest or stasis but with incessant activity� The quick back and forth of a ball in the game of tennis and the fast-paced circulation of a coin through the marketplace are figures of an extreme mobility beyond the human. Thus, from their very beginning, the texts suggest that what drives their protagonists forward is not human agency that seeks to realize desire but an impersonal drive, a thing-like quality in the subject� IV. The Adventures of Currency The conflict between the human and the non-human that is only hinted at in Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random is literalized in another example of adventure literature� In Aureus, or the Life and Opinions of a Sovereign, the protagonist of the story is a thing, more precisely: a coin� Although much less known than the two previous texts, it belongs to a sub-genre that enjoyed considerable popularity in its time - It-Narratives (Blackwell 10-11)� Between 1750 and 1850, more than 100 titles of this genre were published (Bellamy 134)� Their defining trait is an idiosyncratic narrative layout: non-human narrators - mostly commodities - relate the stories of their circulation through human societies� Much like the human narrators discussed above, these things are constantly driven forward, passing through the hands of different people in a chain of loosely connected episodes and thereby gaining access to a wide variety of social and geographical spaces� This mobility connects them to the ramble novels and serves as a narrative device for satire as the it-narrators can report on the vices and schemes at all levels of society� These non-human narrators span a wide variety of entities, ranging from a lapdog to a wig and from a quire of paper to a pen� What connects them is that 20 I am indebted to Alexander Regier for this observation� 44 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 they are almost universally styled in the fashion of ‘The Adventures of […]’ and that these adventures are exclusively those of the social sphere, i� e� the adventures of circulation� The largest sub-group of these narrators are coins and banknotes, and it is on these money-narrators that I want to focus on in order to provide a new perspective on the texts discussed above� The hypothesis here is that money narrators were particularly well-suited to realize the logical end of the ramble genre: potentially infinite circulation. They are “objects of circulation par excellence” (Rodrigues 105) because they are perfectly abstract, radicalizing the picaro’s permutability� In the same way that Robinson and Roderick are driven forward by an urge to keep their circulation going, the money narrators embody the propensity of It-Narratives to go from hand to hand at its most extreme level. In one of the first stories of this kind, Joseph Addison’s The Adventures of a Shilling (1709), the eponymous coin reflects upon this urge in words that could well be Robinson Crusoe’s: “I found in myself a wonderful inclination to ramble, and visit all parts of the new world into which I was brought” (Addison 211)� Yet there is a difference between the “wonderful inclination to ramble” and the “rambling thoughts” of Robinson Crusoe� Unlike the roving protagonists of the texts above, their counterparts in It-Narratives are no subjects� Where the concept of agency is complicated by the split in the subject, it is altogether absent in an object� 21 The circulating things in It-Narratives are largely passive: they record the trajectories and circumstances of their movements, but they have no means of altering their course� Impediments to their circulation are thus always fashioned as external and embodied most prominently in the figure of the miser. The central anathema to circulating money, the miser is evoked time and again as an example of how money is bereft of its ‘natural’ propensity to change hands� This is illustrated in particularly vivid terms when the narrator of The Adventures of a Shilling tells of how it was forcibly removed from circulation: The people very much favoured my natural disposition, and shifted me so fast from hand to hand, that before I was five years old, I had travelled into almost every corner of the nation� But in the beginning of my sixth year, to my unspeakable grief, I fell into the hands of a miserable old fellow, who clapped me into an iron chest, where I found five hundred more of my own quality who lay under the same confinement. (Addison 211) 21 Proponents of Actor-Network-Theory might disagree, but the narrative logic of these texts - as it rests on contingent circulation - is realized precisely by an emphasis on the narrators’ lack of agency� The Pleasures of Circulation 45 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 For the currency-narrator, the social is natural: it is useful only for what it can be exchanged for, and thus every removal from circulation must be understood as a sin against its nature� In another classical text of the genre, Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy, a golden Louis d’Or offers a short theory of the miser: “[H]is [the miser’s] Love is as troublesome to us, as odious to all the World besides; for, shut up in his Coffers, we lose this agreeable Quality, which is only maintain’d by an absolute Freedom of circulating with the Sun about the World” (7)� At this point, one must qualify Simon Dickie’s thesis on the absence of desire in the ramble novel� In money-narratives, desire is present after all, just not on the side of the protagonist� In sudden interruptions such as the ones shown above, human desire - the miser’s “[l]ove” - is plotted against the non-human drive and its accumulation of jouissance in circulation� Whereas in Roderick Random and Robinson Crusoe, the conflict between accumulation and homeostasis is fought inside the individual, in It-Narratives it is externalized� In these texts, the circulating protagonist has been purged of all traces of the human - their money-narrators spell out the fantasy of a pure subject of the drive� This observation gains a sharper outline once we consider the narrative macrostructures of these texts� The circular structure that Ortiz-Taylor proposes is not only valid on the level of the episode but on that of the entire picaresque narrative: the individual circular episodes are themselves sublated in a circular narrative arc (218)� Here, the dream related at the beginning of Roderick Random comes to mind� When the tennis-ball is struck, Roderick’s mother loses sight of it, but shortly after, she sees it “return with equal violence, and enter the earth, beneath her feet, whence immediately sprang up a goodly tree covered with blossoms” (Smollett 1). As the first part of the dream comes true, so does the last: uprooted from his native Scotland in the beginning, Roderick finally manages to find his father - incidentally named Roderick himself 22 - and returns to take possession of his family seat as a wealthy man and husband to Narcissa, who conceives his child and firmly encloses the narrative arc in a genealogical framework� In the end, the episodes are thus re-framed in a higher order, a movement that the text accompanies by frequently evoking the workings of providence� 23 Robinson Crusoe, at first, seems much more open. After all, the book ends with the prospect of another voyage� Yet, this openness can only be maintained if the sequels are wilfully ignored� It is true that Robinson sets out 22 He is introduced as “Don Rodriguez” by his Spanish acquaintances (Smollett 412)� 23 Most prominently in the scene of the central anagnorisis between father and son (Smollett 413), but also at numerous other key moments in the text (230-231, 368, 425)� 46 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 again, driven by the same “rambling thoughts” that pushed him forward in the first volume. However, at the end of the second volume, he repeats his father’s migration, returning to England via what is nowadays Germany (FA 142-143)� Finally, the Serious Reflections, the third volume, is cleansed of any traces of the rambling spirit. Instead, the narrator reflects upon a number of theological questions, prominently featuring the concept of divine providence (204-238), suggested as the ordering force that can integrate the apparently contingent succession of events in an overarching plan� Whereas Serious Reflections still suggests that it is told by the narrator of Robinson Crusoe, its addendum, A Vision of the Angelick World, bears no apparent relationship to the prequels� Yet, by following Jeffrey Hopes’ observations on the concept of providence in Defoe (324), one recognizes that theology is always an implicit poetology for Defoe and that the circularity of Robinson Crusoe’s story is finally transposed onto an eschatological horizon in its last instalment (Serious Reflections 1-84)� 24 Thus, in both cases we can recognize the circular structure that Ortiz-Taylor proposes� The protagonists are returned to an ‘organic’ social or religious community at the end of their travels� In money-narratives, by contrast, the situation is different: the infinity of the drive is dislodged from its finite carrier. If misguided human actors do not intervene, then their circulation is potentially endless� Still, these narratives cannot escape finitude altogether: the medium itself imposes an external limit. This is a conflict that is apparent in the idiosyncratic ways in which money-narratives tend to end as the idea of an infinite drive clashes with the finite textual form� In The Adventures of a Shilling, this results in a violent cutting off of the narrative� While the coin foreshadows events that it will relate in the next chapter - promising an additional “two adventures” (Addison 213) - the text suddenly ends� Such a lack of closure is found in several similar narratives� Consider the ending of Aureus, or the Life and Opinions of a Sovereign (1824)� Following genre fashion, the coin itself is the main narrator of the text� In an instance of the ‘found manuscript’ trope, however, the last chapter is written from the perspective of the editor, who tells the tale of how he obtained the main story which was entrusted to him by the coin-narrator� The text ends with relating how this coin was lost at sea and “has met with a fate tantamount to dissolution, from which even a metallic Sovereign is not exempt” (Oakely 438)� This ending, although very sudden, seems to promise a closure of sorts� Yet, 24 The theological and eschatological discussions of the Serious Reflections can thus also be understood as an attempt on the side of Defoe to reassert control over the text (Hopes 314)� The Pleasures of Circulation 47 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 just below the last sentences of the narrative, one encounters a post-script: “* An indistinct rumour has been lately circulated, respecting a visit, in a diving-bell, to that part of the ocean in which the Sovereign was submerged� If this account be authenticated, the result will be regularly announced to the literary public” (ibid�)� Hence, at the very moment when closure is suggested, a paratextual surplus pries open the narrative circuit. The infinity of circulation is re-instated by circulation itself: that of a rumour� Here, the operation of an accumulative drive in the text intersects with the dynamics of a literary market, in which a lack of closure always means the possibility of adding a sequel, should the text prove profitable. If adventure literature as a whole is characterized by the collapse of contingency into providence (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 8), this group of It-Narratives resists this type of closure: while the ramble novels that feature human protagonists have been shown to exemplify the conflictive urge of the drive in a split subject, currency-narrators cater to the fantasy of a pure drive� But whereas the former are reeling in the infinite accumulation of jouissance by neutralizing it in a return to an ‘organic’ and ’purposeful’ community, the latter are confronting the infinite drive with the finitude of the form itself. V. From Pleasure Reading to Domestic Enjoyment What does this mean then for the initial observations around the pleasure(s) of adventure reading? The argument started with Rousseau’s cutting down Robinson Crusoe to the island episode� This can only be fully understood once the Strange and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is situated in the history of its publication - as one of three volumes with a very specific position in the literary marketplace� In this context, it set off an excessive production: as a text, it opened up its own semantic horizon to the further production of adventures, while as a product in the literary marketplace, it set the stage for a hitherto unprecedented amount of unauthorized copies, sequels, and adaptations� Defoe’s own sequels to Robinson Crusoe, finally, can be understood as attempts to both capitalize on this excess and reign it in� Only by extracting Robinson Crusoe from this context can Rousseau again be confronted with the problem of the book’s apparent purposelessness� In order to give purpose to what seems only the self-movement of the drive, the traces of Robinson’s connections to the outside world are left out: the money, the tools brought over from the ship, the institution of slavery, etc� Just as Robinson Crusoe does at the beginning of Further Adventures, when he replicates island life in England, Rousseau seeks refuge in the georgic mode that supplies a fantasy of homeostatic self-sufficiency. In this, Émile - a young Crusoe - is 48 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 temporarily sheltered from the vagaries of the commercial world and can learn (and find pleasure in) “all that is useful and […] only that” (Rousseau 185)� 25 Rousseau is thereby separating an unproblematic enjoyment from the jouissance of endless accumulation that lies beyond the pleasure principle delimited by the borders of the abridged version� But, as the further publication history of Robinson Crusoe, and indeed Defoe’s own framing of his work in Serious Reflections show, Rousseau’s abridgement is not the product of an idiosyncratic interest in pedagogy but indicative of a contradiction that permeates the cultural background in which these texts were written� 26 Just as Robinson Crusoe’s infinite circulation is neutralized in Serious Reflections, Roderick Random is brought back full circle in the end, trading merchant adventures for domestic tranquillity and the protean permutability of the picaro for the genealogic stability of the returned son� While the contradiction is defused, this operation leaves its mark on the narrative structure of the text: the sudden reversal of fate that brings about the resolution in the manner of a deus ex machina and results in the clash of two textual worlds (Stephanson 105)� The ways in which these endings are achieved - both Robinson Crusoe and Roderick Random are notoriously ripe with talk of providence - leaves a point of fracture in the text from which the antinomies of the drive can be reconstructed� As the popularity of the English picaresque or the ramble novel wanes around the middle of the eighteenth century, the problem of circulation is taken up in new literary forms� In It-Narratives, particularly those featuring money narrators, the drive is separated from its conflictual incarnation in the human subject� By embodying a pure relationality - that between all other commodities - the currency-narrators realize the tendency towards abstraction that is at the centre of the drive� Coins and banknotes now circulate detached from direct purposefulness: their purpose is realized in the circulation for the sake of circulation� The human subject is now removed from this operation, no longer the subject of an - albeit problematic - agency as in the ramble novel but the object of satiric commentary� This radical openness, however, did not last long� The popularity of money-narrators reached its apex towards the end of the eighteenth century� By the 1830s, their share among published It-Narratives had declined markedly, 25 In this regard it is maybe no coincidence that in Émile, after discussing Robinson, Rousseau tackles the problem of money, the embodiment of the purposelessness against which Émile is to be sheltered (189). 26 The narrator of Serious Reflections stresses this conservative teleology in the preface, subordinating the writing of the first two volumes to the ‘usefulness’ of the moral lesson provided in the third ( SR Preface)� The Pleasures of Circulation 49 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 often giving way to stories told by animals (Bellamy 130, 134)� Having said that, it is interesting that the currency narratives of the nineteenth century took up a decidedly different tone than their satiric predecessors� 27 This tendency was foreshadowed as early as 1780 by the publication of ‘Mr Truelove’s’ The Adventures of a Silver Penny� Here, the bitingly satirical tone of previous It-Narratives was replaced by a focus on pedagogy - the target audience are children (Bellamy 132)� 28 This shift in emphasis from the vagaries of the marketplace and chronotopes of circulation to the domestic context of homoeostasis in which education takes place hinges on the evocation of a moral economy in which “[o]ne good turn deserves another” (Mr� Truelove 26)� Accordingly, the oftentimes bleak outlook on systemic social vice permeating previous narratives was replaced by a textual world that is streamlined for a didactic purpose, as children’s tales such as Richard Johnson’s The Adventures of a Silver Penny (1787), the anonymous The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence (1800), and Rusher’s The Adventures of a Halfpenny (1830) followed� 29 The ‘purposeless’ pleasure reading of the biting satire found in eighteenth-century It-Narratives gives way to texts that are firmly embedded in functionality: Victorian It-Narratives are increasingly received as children’s literature� Thus, while the British Empire goes through its second phase of expansion and the circulation of people and commodities increases, the accumulative drive that lay bare in this subgenre is neutralized in the fantasy of a domestic pleasure that is sheltered from the perils of the commercial world� Virtually forgotten for the better part of the last century, it is only recently that It-Narratives such as the ones discussed here have attracted wider critical attention� Yet they offer a unique and hitherto neglected perspective on topoi that were central for their time� They might serve not only to question received ideas about the intellectual history of circulation and its importance for adventure fiction but also shed new light on the ideological operations that are under way at a historical moment that sees the large-scale return of organic communities� 27 Liz Bellamy shows that, against the understanding of It-Narratives as a phenomenon exclusive to the end of the eighteenth century, texts like these are still being produced throughout the nineteenth century� Yet, the relative share of currency-protagonists in It-Narratives decreases from the turn of the century onwards (134)� 28 Incidentally, the text is also featured in the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Hahn 4)� 29 Moretti puts forth the idea of a Victorian “infantilization of the national culture” (23), as the result of an anti-Weberian re-enchantment of social relations� Without having to adhere to this argument concerning Victorian culture as a whole, one can certainly uphold it for a subgenre that trades the world of commerce for the sphere of domestic happiness� 50 V id S teVanoVić 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0002 Works Cited Addison, Joseph� “The Adventures of a Shilling�” The Tatler, vol� 249, 1710, pp� 209-213� Anonymous� The Adventures of a Silver Three-Pence. 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London: Verso, 2008� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 e nno r uge “[T]he wildest of adventurers, or one at the relation of whose crimes the world must shudder”: The Venetian Bravo as a Literary Character in Zschokke, Lewis, and Cooper “Take care, Prince,” said I, incautiously; “We are in Venice! ” Friedrich Schiller, The Armenian; or, The Ghost-Seer� 1 The Picture of a Bravo After his unexpected coming into money and subsequent release from Marshalsea debtor’s prison, Mr Dorrit, now a gentleman, takes his family on a grand tour of Europe, which includes a prolonged stay in Venice� One day, his daughter Little Dorrit, the eponymous heroine of Charles Dickens’s penultimate completed novel, visits the Venetian home of the painter Henry Gowan, “an ill conditioned man” (Dickens 637) who, out of sheer “perversity” (636), has made friends with a dubious character named Blandois� When Little Dorrit and her sister are led into the artist’s studio, the first object that confronts her is “Blandois of Paris in a great cloak and a furtive slouched hat, standing on a throne platform in a corner” (641)� Blandois is acting as a model to the painter, who explains to the astounded ladies what the scene could mean: “There he stands, you see� A bravo waiting for his prey, a distinguished noble waiting to save his country, the common enemy waiting to do somebody a bad turn, an angelic messenger waiting to do somebody a good turn - whatever you think he looks most like! […] Or say, Cattivo Soggetto Mio, […] a murderer after the fact� […] He was formerly in some scuffle with another murderer, or with a victim, you observe,” said Gowan, “and these are the tokens of it�” (641) Of course, the painter is unaware that the man in question is really a murderer and thus how fitting the costume of a Venetian bravo, a notorious hired assassin and outlaw, is for Blandois, but his witty pun “cattivo sogetto”, which can mean both ‘hideous subject’ and ‘devious character’, hits the mark nonetheless� When he wrote and published Little Dorrit between 1855 and 1857, Dickens could obviously rely on his English readers’ familiarity with the popular 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 54 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 image of the Venetian bravo� The shadowy assassin had become, by then, an all too well-known stock figure in cliché-ridden adventure tales set in Venice. In the years following the success of Matthew Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice. A Romance (1804), a translation of Heinrich Zschokke’s novel Abaellino der große Bandit (1794), a considerable number of novels was published which featured bravos or bravo-like characters� These tales capitalised on the bravo’s reputation of being a murderous villain and thus catered to the popular demand for all things Gothic, which meant, however, that the bravo practically disappeared with other Gothic stock characters when the middle-class reading public got tired of Gothic romances� 1 In contrast to Little Dorrit, however, where, ironically, the costume of the bravo matches the villainous character of Blandois, a discrepancy between appearance and character is a common feature of most bravos we encounter in popular romances, as “the bravo also attracted writers interested in investing the apparently irredeemable villain with complexities that resist the type” (Simpson 156)� In these novels, the bravo usually turns out to be a heroic adventurer who uses the mask of the notorious assassin to accomplish his mission� Obviously, the ideal scene for these stories of shifting and mistaken identities is the dark Venice of la legenda nera, the city of intrigue, masks, deception, denunciation, political murders, secret legal proceedings, and la piombi, the high-security prison that, according to legend, culprits entered across the Bridge of Sighs, never to return (Sage)� 2 As Victor Sage points out, the Venice of Gothic tales is characterised by “the paradox […] of an excessive control in the same space as extreme lawlessness” (51-52)� It is not only to Little Dorrit (Dickens 665) that the whole city seems like a prison, and, as many Venetian-set narratives illustrate, the ultimate challenge - in addition to mastering the dangers lurking around every corner or finding one’s way through the maze of little streets and canals - is to get away from the city� It is no coincidence that one of the most famous adventure stories is Giacomo Casanova’s account of his spectacular escape from Venice, Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la République de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs (1788)� Adventures may thus lie in the risky world that seems enticing, exciting, unprecedented, and unknown outside the strict confines of the city� Crossing the threshold into Venice, however, may just as well be the beginning of an adventure as we can only suspect what is lurking behind the 1 According to Sutherland, by 1820, Gothic fiction “was regarded as déclassée” (336)� The bravo was a relatively late addition to the various myths about the city on the water, highlighting the “dark” or “black” Venice, which had always been part of narratives about the city but practically replaced the old myths of a glorious, wise and just Venice (if not la città galante) after the end of the republic in 1797� 2 See also Ruge� The Venetian Bravo 55 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 beautiful façade� This is, after all, what for Georg Simmel made Venice “the classical city of adventure” (“Venice” 46)� The greatest adventure, though, as Casanova’s example shows, may take place on the threshold itself� When the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper published The Bravo in 1831, the last novel with a Venetian bravo as its principal character, his intention was not, as he makes clear in his preface, to imitate the romantic bravos (even though he did so in some respects) but to present Venice as a republic that has betrayed the political ideals of its founders� The eponymous character is merely an instrument, and ultimately a pawn to be sacrificed, of a materialistic, power-conscious oligarchy that has turned La Serenissima into a police state� As it was for Byron, for Cooper Venice’s “lot is shameful to the nations”, if not, of course, “most of all [to] Albion! ” (Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” l� 149-151)� Instead, the corruption of Venice is presented as a warning to the then still young American republic which, Cooper feared, was in danger of giving up its original social contract in favour of a rising plutocracy (Scannavini 136). The first European reviews of Cooper’s Bravo immediately realised that the novel differed from the popular romances of Zschokke, Lewis, and their imitators in its critical ambition, even though that did not work to the novel’s credit (Dainat 26)� 3 However, there were also many similarities� Like Abaellino, Jacopo Frontoni, as Cooper calls his bravo, is no base cutthroat. The first is a persona invented by an unjustly disgraced nobleman who hides behind the bravo’s mask to bring down a group of dangerous conspirators against the Venetian state, to regain his reputation and get the girl� The latter is a genuine bravo, albeit one who was forced into service and who, in spite of his terrible appearance, is really a good-natured man innocent of the various heinous crimes he is charged with and who eventually turns against his masters - even though that means his certain death� The novels discussed here owe a lot to popular romances and adventure narratives� Zschokke’s Abaellino der große Bandit signals its indebtedness to the German Räuberroman in its title; Lewis’s translation is connected to the Gothic romance through the fame of the author of The Monk; and Cooper’s Venice is full of Gothic terror� As we shall see, Cooper deliberately refrains from exploiting the potential of the adventure story in order not to compromise his political critique� I argue here that Cooper’s choice - conscious or unconscious - to model his central character on the stock figure of the bravo who is noble at heart not only contributes significantly to his novel’s failure but destroys the stock character forever� 3 On the reception in America, see Scannavini� 56 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 2 The Stereotype If Cooper’s Bravo was not greeted enthusiastically by many critics, this had less to do with the novel’s many aesthetic flaws than with its political message. While American reviewers resented Cooper’s finger-wagging to his countrymen, Italian critics were piqued by the novel’s denunciation of the Venetian republic as a “cruelly inhuman form of state which forces its citizens into duplicity” (Corbineau-Hoffmann 272, my translation), and they criticised Cooper’s historical mistakes and inaccuracies� Among other things, the Italians pointed out that the role of the bravo “never existed in the domains of the Repubblica” and that “more study of Italian usages […] would have better instructed the author” (Scannavini 144)� As it turns out, however, the author knew his Venetian history better than his native detractors� As Mila Manzatto has shown, bravos were very common in the Venetian domains at the time the plot takes place: Il bravo, figura attestata fra il Cinque-Seicento con un'immagine sociale di latore ed esecutore di violenza, da cui il suo ancoraggio alla categoria dei criminali nella legislazione dell'epoca, e la conseguente folta presenza negli atti processuali, scompare dalla scena storica all'inizio del Settecento. (155) 4 The historical bravo, according to Manzatto, was a member of a private army in the service of local lords who operated in the territories belonging to Venice as well as in Lombardia, a “soldato mercenario, al servizio di un signore per proteggerlo, per difenderne i beni, per affrontare i suoi nemici” (Battaglia, qtd� in Manzatto 157, italics in original)� This is the type of bravo encountered by the curate Don Abbondio at the beginning of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827): The curate, having turned the corner, directed, as was his wont, a look toward the little chapel, and there beheld what he little expected, and would not have desired to see. At the confluence, if we may so call it, of the two narrow lanes, there were two men: one of them sitting astride the low wall; his companion leaning against it, with his arms folded on his breast� The dress, the bearing, and what the curate could distinguish of the countenance of these men, left no doubt as to their profession� They wore upon their heads a green network, which, falling on the left shoulder, ended in a large tassel, from under which appeared upon the forehead an enormous lock of hair� Their mustachios were long, and curled at the extremities; the margin of 4 “The ‘bravo’, in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, socially portrayed as a messenger and executor of violence, considered a member of the category of criminals by the legislation of the time, who, as a result, frequently appeared in trial documents, disappeared from the scene of history at the beginning of the 18 th century” (Manzatto 156)� The Venetian Bravo 57 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 their doublets confined by a belt of polished leather, from which were suspended, by hooks, two pistols; a little powder-horn hung like a locket on the breast; on the right-hand side of the wide and ample breeches was a pocket, out of which projected the handle of a knife, and on the other side they bore a long sword, of which the great hollow hilt was formed of bright plates of brass, combined into a cypher: by these characteristics they were, at a glance, recognised as individuals of the class of bravoes� (3-4) The bravi have been waiting for the curate to warn him, on behalf of their master Don Rodrigo, not to wed the eponymous bride and bridegroom on the following day� The bravi’s task is to deliver the message, but their threatening appearance and reputation leave the frightened Don Abbondio in no doubt that they are prepared to enforce the order with violence if necessary� It is impossible - and negligible here - to distinguish between the historical bravo and the stereotype� What matters, though, is that the widespread phenomenon of the bravos in Lombardy and especially the mainland territories of Venice can be seen as a symptom of political crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries� The republic of Venice, it seems, was either unable or unwilling to sustain the monopoly of violence in its dominions after the fifteenth century, which resulted in growing numbers of vagabonds, banditi, and bravi (Manzotto 158). One of the first historians to describe this phenomenon and its impact on the ultimate decline of Venice was the Frenchman Pierre Daru in his Histoire de la République de Venise (1819): The nobles of the mainland had to pay homage to the Venetian aristocracy; this was because of justified suspicion that these nobles were dissatisfied with their political insignificance. Thus the government established a system to maintain divisions between families and to destroy the more powerful nobles� The government thought its interests lay in perpetuating hatred, and therefore it tolerated crimes that manifested and cemented private grudges� Normally such crimes were commissioned to those disreputable men called bravi, whom the rich, the timid, and vindictive women kept in their pay� This profession was encouraged by the sale of pardons� (qtd� in Povolo 497) Thus, together with the vagabonds and bandits, the bravos destabilised the Venetian dominions of Terraferma with their criminal activities� These apparently included contract killings encouraged by the Venetian oligarchy, who - as it turned out, erroneously - hoped to benefit from the latent anarchy. It is possible to see why Cooper, who named Daru’s Histoire as one of his principal sources, chose to make the “liminal figure” (Manzotto 158) of the bravo the eponymous character of his novel about the decline of the republic� 58 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 Yet, Cooper’s bravo differs significantly from the historical bravi in that he is a loner, acts under direct orders from the senate, and operates within the city of Venice, not in its mainland territories� For this kind of bravo, Cooper, even though he denied it, may be indebted to the works of Heinrich Zschokke and Matthew Lewis� 3 Gothic Venice As we have seen, “the paradox […] of an excessive control in the same space as extreme lawlessness” (Sage 51-52) became a common feature of adventure stories set in Venice at the end of the eighteenth century� Until then, the dark underside of Venice had been the world of petty crime, prostitution, carnivalesque inversion, deception, denunciation, and political intrigue and conspiracy - hardly ever, though, of hired assassins� Why and how the literary character of the bravo came to show up in Venice almost a hundred years after an exemplar of the historical species was last mentioned in legal documents is not known. In all likelihood, however, the first Bravo-narrative was Heinrich Zschokke’s novel Abaellino der große Bandit, published in 1794 and made popular in the English-speaking world through Matthew Lewis’s translation� Together with Christian August Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini der Räuberhauptmann (1799), Zschokke’s novel is seen as one of the foundational Räuberromane, even though, in contrast to Rinaldini, Abaellino is not a robber, despite the epithet of “bandit”� In fact, Zschokke’s hero is outraged when mistaken for a “robber”, 5 as is Matteo, the leader of the band of bravos whom Abaellino joins at the beginning of the novel: “‘Scoundrel! ’ interrupted Matteo, frowning and offended, ‘amongst us robbery is unknown� What? Dost take us for common plunderers, for mere thieves, cut-purses, house-breakers, and villains of that low, miserable stamp? ’” (Lewis 18) 6 � Nonetheless, Abaellino is one of the two novels that brought the character of the noble hero whom misfortune has made an outlaw from Germany to Italy� 7 As is well known, the popular robber romances are conventionally traced back to Friedrich Schiller’s drama Die Räuber� There is, however, another text by Schiller which had an even 5 “Zum Teufel, seht Ihr mich denn für einen Banditen an? ” (Zschokke 9)� Cf� Matthew Lewis’s translation: “Hell and confusion! Do you take me for a robber, then? ” (Lewis 10)� I quote from Lewis’s translation, which follows the source text fairly closely, though with a tendency to enlarge it� 6 See Zschokke 17� 7 “Zschokke und Vulpius markieren den Übergang vom Drama zum Roman und den Wechsel des Schauplatzes nach Italien� Mit keinen anderen Namen verbinden sich ähnliche Einschnitte in der Gattungsgeschichte” (Dainat 19)� The Venetian Bravo 59 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 more decisive influence on Zschokke’s Abaellino� Der Geisterseher (1788-89), a Gothic mystery set in Venice, makes use of a number of “specifically Venetian thematics - masquerade, for example, and the notion of labyrinthine architectural space” (Sage 55) in order to create a particularly Gothic atmosphere� In Schiller’s story, two young German aristocrats are caught up in a monstrous conspiracy against one of them, a prince from a small German state� As part of the perfidious intrigue, the Prince is lured into a typical Venetian set-up in a gaming house, in which he strikes one of the card-players who insults him� His friends counsel him to leave Venice instantly because the next thing that will happen in the Venetian plot is that he will be assassinated by a Venetian ‘Bravo’, whom the card-player will hire for a few shillings� (Sage 56-57) Interestingly, a bravo is not mentioned in the German text at all but does appear in the English translation (to which Sage’s summary, which I quote, apparently refers)� 8 Nevertheless, the episode from The Ghost-Seer seems to be the first suggestion of contract killings as a Venetian ‘custom’, as it were. Before the Germans can escape or an assassin can strike, the prince and his companion, the Count of O, are ordered to follow a group of men who identify themselves as officers of the Venetian state inquisition: They conducted us under a strong escort to a canal, where a boat waited for us� We were ordered to embark; but before we quitted it, our eyes were blindfolded; and, upon our landing, we found that they led us up a stone stair-case, and then through a long winding passage over arches, as we could discover by the repeated echoes that sounded under our feet� We soon arrived at another stair-case, which in twenty-six steps brought us to the bottom� We then heard a door creak upon its hinges; and when they took the bandage from our eyes, we found ourselves in a spacious hall, encircled by an assembly of venerable old men� All appeared in sable robes, and the hall hung with black cloth, was dimly lighted by a few scattered tapers� A deadly silence prevailed through the assembly, which caused in us an awful sensation too powerful to be described� One of the old men, who appeared to be the principal state inquisitor, came near to the Prince, and spoke to him with a solemn countenance, whilst another set before him the Venetian� (Schiller, Armenian 17-18) 8 Cf� “‘Sie sind verloren, gnädigster Herr’, sagten diese [die Freunde des Prinzen], ‘wenn Sie nicht sogleich die Stadt verlassen� Der Venezianer, den Sie so übel behandelt haben, ist reich und von Ansehen - es kostet ihm [sic! ] nur 50 Zechinen, Sie aus der Welt zu schaffen’” (Schiller, Geisterseher 13). Compare this to the first English translation from 1800: “‘You are lost, gracious sir’, said a Frenchman, ‘if you do not leave the city directly� The Venetian, whom you handled so roughly, is rich enough to hire a bravo; - it will only cost him 50 sequins to be revenged by your death�’” (Schiller, Armenian 16)� 60 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 The Venetian is no other but the man who provoked the Prince in the tavern: “Do you acknowledge this man to be the same that you used so roughly in the coffee-house? ” “Yes! ” answered the Prince� Then turning to the prisoner - “Is that the person you would have assassinated this evening? ” The prisoner answered, “Yes�” Immediately the judges opened the circle, and we saw, with the utmost horror, the head of the Venetian separated from his shoulders. “Are you satisfied with this sacrifice? ” said the State Inquisitor. The Prince fainted in the arms of his conductors. “Go,” he continued, with a terrible voice, as he turned towards me, “and think in future more favourably of the administration of justice in Venice�” We could not learn who our unknown friend was, who had thus delivered us, by the arm of justice, from the diabolical plans of the assassin� We reached our habitation terrified in the extreme. It was midnight. (ibid.) This is Gothic Venice at its best� While the seemingly supernatural elements of the plot, like necromancy, for example, are eventually explained, the horror of the decapitation scene, which anticipates the secret tribunals of Cooper’s Venice, derives from the fact that the Germans do not know the identity of the inquisitors (which is, in fact, never revealed, as Schiller did not finish the novel)� It is likewise left unanswered whether the venerable men are really representatives of the republic or whether they belong to a secret Jesuit-like society, “the stereotype of the Holy Roman Empire, carried to us in the corrupt microcosm of the Venetian Republic” (Sage 58)� By contrast, there is no such disturbing indeterminacy in Heinrich Zschokke’s Abaellino. Right at the beginning, the readers are informed by the hero himself that the figure of Abaellino is a disguise for a disgraced nobleman from Naples who has fled to Venice - a character confusingly called Obizzo by Zschokke and Rosalvo by Lewis� 9 Before long, we are also told that the bravi, whose band Abaellino joins, were hired to commit a series of political murders by a group of malcontent patricians who aim to destabilise the citystate so that they can take over� 10 Their enemies are the kind Doge Andrea (or Andreas in Zschokke) Gritti and his loyal councillors� At the beginning of the narrative, Rosalvo, dressed as a beggar, resembles a Byronic hero, full of bitterness and dangerously capable of violence: “Fate,” he at length exclaimed in a paroxysm of despair, “Fate has condemned me to be either the wildest of adventurers, or one at the relation of whose crimes the world 9 Lewis simplifies the bravo’s name to “Abellino”. To make matters even worse, Lewis changes Abellino’s name to Rugantino in the second edition of The Bravo� 10 This scenario will have reminded English readers of Thomas Otway’s tragedy Venice Preserved (1682)� The Venetian Bravo 61 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 must shudder� To astonish is my destiny� Rosalvo can know no medium; Rosalvo can never act like common men� Is it not the hand of fate which has led me hither? Who could ever have dreamt that the son of the richest lord in Naples should have depended for a beggar’s alms on Venetian charity? I—I, who feel myself possessed of strength of body and energy of soul fit for executing the most daring deeds, behold me creeping in rags through the streets of this inhospitable city, and torturing my wits in vain to discover some means by which I may rescue life from the jaws of famine! Those men whom my munificence nourished, who at my table bathed their worthless souls in the choicest wines of Cyprus, and glutted themselves with every delicacy which the globe’s four quarters could supply, these very men now deny to my necessity even a miserable crust of mouldy bread� Oh, that is dreadful, cruel—cruel of men—cruel of Heaven! ” […] “Yet will I bear it—I will submit to my destiny� I will traverse every path and go through every degree of human wretchedness; and whate’er may be my fate, I will still be myself; and whate’er may be my fate, I will still act greatly! Away, then, with the Count Rosalvo, whom all Naples idolised; now—now, I am the beggar Abellino […]�” (Lewis 11) 11 As it happens, the hero will become adventurer and villain� In addition to the bravo, he decides to impersonate a dashing Florentine youth called Flodoardo who jumps to the doge’s aid and courts the beautiful Rosabella� It is strongly suggested that the boundaries between the roles the Neapolitan chooses for himself are permeable� Actually, Rosalvo seems to enjoy changing back and forth between the roles and sometimes even conflating them. This is shown most effectively in the spectacular finale in the Doge’s palace, where the Neapolitan stages the exposure and arrest of the conspirators - much to the dismay of the court in the disguise of the bravo Abaellino� In particular, the hero relishes the disconcerted reaction of Rosabella: Rosabella opened her eyes; their first look fell upon the bravo. “Oh, God of mercy! ” she exclaimed, “he is still there� Methought, too, that Flodoardo -� No, no; it could not be! I was deceived by witchcraft�” Abellino advanced towards her, and attempted to raise her� She shrunk from his touch with horror� “No, Rosabella,” said the bravo, in an altered voice, “what you saw was no illusion� Your favoured Flodoardo is no other than Abellino the bravo�” “It is false! ” interrupted Rosabella, starting from the ground in despair, and throwing herself for refuge on Camilla’s bosom� “Monster! thou canst not be Flodoardo! such a fiend can never have been such a seraph. Flodoardo’s actions were good and 11 Cf� the German: “Das Schiksal hat mich zum Abentheurer oder gar zum Bösewicht verdammt” (Zschokke 10)� 62 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 glorious as a demi-god’s! ‘Twas of him that I learned to love good and glorious actions, and ‘twas he who encouraged me to attempt them myself; his heart was pure from all mean passions, and capable of conceiving all great designs� Never did he scruple, in the cause of virtue, to endure fatigue and pain, and to dry up the tears of suffering innocence—that was Flodoardo’s proudest triumph! Flodoardo and thou—! Wretch, whom many a bleeding ghost has long since accused before the throne of heaven, darest thou to profane the name of Flodoardo! ” Abellino (proud and earnest)�—Rosabella, wilt thou forsake me? Wilt thou retract thy promise? Look, Rosabella, and be convinced: I, the bravo, and thy Flodoardo are the same� He said, removing the patch from his eye, and passed a handkerchief over his face once or twice� In an instant his complexion was altered, his bushy eyebrows and straight black hair disappeared, his features were replaced in their natural symmetry, and lo! The handsome Florentine stood before the whole assembly, dressed in the habit of the bravo Abellino� Abellino�—Mark me, Rosabella! Seven times over, and seven times again, will I change my appearance, even before your eyes, and that so artfully that, study me as you will, the transformation shall deceive you� But change as I may, of one thing be assured: I am the man whom you loved as Flodoardo� (Lewis 83-84) We are told that “[l]ove struggled with abhorrence in Rosabella’s bosom”, as she still believes that the man before her killed several fine men in his role as undercover bravo, but she cannot hide that she is fascinated by both facets of her lover: “[S]he threw upon him a look innocent and tender as ever beamed from the eye of an angel, and that look betrayed but too plainly that the miscreant was still master of her heart” (84)� In the end, it is the bravo she gives her heart to: “‘Abellino,’ said Rosabella, and extended her hand to the handsome bravo� ‘Triumph,’ cried he, ‘Rosabella is the bravo’s bride�’” (89)� 12 It should be noted, however, that the novel’s hero is not innocent� In fact, he is responsible for the death of quite a number of people� He treacherously stabs Matteo, the leader of the bravos, and, in the role of Flodoardo, arrests the remaining members of the band, who are subsequently executed� Finally, he kills the Prince of Monaldeschi in “honorable combat”, a man who was not only his “inveterate enemy” who had dispossessed him and destroyed his reputation back in Naples, but who was also his chief rival for the hand of Rosabella (88)� Thus, Rosalvo’s / Obizzo’s killings in disguise are honourable killings of a gentleman, for which he cannot be blamed� 12 Once again, the German original differs significantly: “‘Abaellino! ’ jauchzte Rosamunde, und küsste den schönen Banditen mit Glut� ‘Rosamunde,’ rief Abaellino und vergas [sic! ] in dieser Umarmung die ganze Welt” (Zschokke 93)� The Venetian Bravo 63 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 As Rosalvo knows well, his success rests on his exceptional talent for disguise, which comes in handy in Venice� As the scene quoted above has shown, it is the striking contrast between the beautiful Flodoardo and the hideous Abaellino, which is particularly effective in the fictional text. But what about its effect on the reader? Consider for example the following description of Abaellino: If the reader is curious to know what this same Abellino was like, he must picture to himself a young, stout fellow, whose limbs perhaps might have been thought not ill-formed, had not the most horrible countenance that ever was invented by a caricaturist, or that Milton could have adapted to the ugliest of his fallen angels, entirely marred the advantages of his person� Black and shining, but long and straight, his hair flew wildly about his brown neck and yellow face. His mouth so wide, that his gums and discoloured teeth were visible, and a kind of convulsive twist, which scarcely ever was at rest, had formed its expression into an internal grin� His eye, for he had but one, was sunk deep into his head, and little more than the white of it was visible, and even that little was overshadowed by the protrusion of his dark and bushy eyebrow� In the union of his features were found collected in one hideous assemblage all the most coarse and uncouth traits which had ever been exhibited singly in wooden cuts, and the observer was left in doubt whether this repulsive physiognomy expressed stupidity of intellect, or maliciousness of heart, or whether it implied them both together� (Lewis 15) As Victor Sage notes, the effect of this description is comic rather than terrible� One does not have to agree with Sage that the result in both Zschokke and Lewis is “a very ‘stagy’ mixture of satire and Gothic romance” (60), but it seems obvious that neither of them intended to write a truly shocking story of terror� This is corroborated by the narrator’s “Conclusion” (“Nachschrift” in the German original), where he wonders whether the readers would be interested in hearing more about the Neapolitan count’s life and adventures: “but before I begin Rosalvo’s history, I must ask two questions - First - do my readers like the manner in which I relate adventures? Secondly - If my readers do like my manner of relating adventures, can I employ my time better than in relating them? ” (Lewis 90)� 13 13 Lewis expands Zschokke’s brief conclusion (“Nachschrift”) considerably, which I quote here in its entirety: “Freilich wäre es so unrecht nicht, wenn man sich jezt zwischen den Graf Obizzo, der schönen Rosamunde und dem alten Doge hinsezzen, und Obizzo’s Erzählung von seiner Herkunft und seinen ehmaligen Abentheuern, die ihn nach Venedig trieben, mit anhören könnte - allein hier sind vorläufig nur zwei Fragen zu beantworten; die alles entscheiden� Erstlich: hört man mir gern zu, wenn ich 64 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 Zschokke must be credited with having reinvented the figure of the Venetian Bravo� He brings him from the dominions of Venice to the city proper and makes him get rid of the band of banditi in order to act on his own� 14 Instead of pursuing criminal activities, including murder for money, he becomes a kind of protector of the community who acts in the shadows while retaining the bravo’s notoriety� At the same time, the terrifying image is reduced to a mere masquerade, and a rather comic one at that� Regardless of whether Cooper knew Lewis’s translation of Zschokke’s romance or not, it was their kind of adventurous bravo he inherited and had to deal with� 4 The Last of the Bravos: James Fenimore Cooper’s Venice “I have not decided on the name, but I believe it will be ‘Bravo’” (qtd� in Simpson 168n12), Cooper told Charles Wilkes while writing The Bravo� “I find Monk Lewis has a story called ‘The Bravo of Venice’, which may induce me to choose another title” (ibid�)� We know he did not change the title� Nevertheless, he must have been aware that the decision to keep it would invite comparisons between Lewis’s immensely popular book and his own, but it seems that he was shocked by the hostile reviews, which included charges of plagiarism� 15 It is of course futile to speculate whether Cooper had read Lewis’s translation of Zschokke’s Abaellino or William Dunlap’s translation of Zschokke’s dramatisation of his own novel� 16 There is no denying, however, that Cooper retains Zschokke’s decisive changes to the stock character: in Cooper’s novel, too, the bravo’s area of operation is the city of Venice rather than the Terraferma, and he is the only one of his kind as there is no indication that there are, or have been, any other bravos active in the city� What is new in Cooper’s version is that Jacopo Frontoni is the man he appears to be� The Märchen erzähle? - Zweitens: Hab ich auch Zeit genug übrig Märchen zu erzählen? -” (Zschokke 94)� 14 “I will be the only dealer in this miserable trade […]” (Lewis 21)� 15 For example in the notorious review signed by “Cassio”, published in the American magazine Athenaeum in 1832, Cassio condemned the novel in its entirety: “We have forgotten the plot, we have forgotten the hero and heroine, we have even forgotten in what small portion of the work we were interested” (qtd� in Scannavini 140)� According to Scannavini, “[k]nowledge of Dunlap’s Abellino or Lewis’s The Bravo was insistingly denied by Cooper himself and by Susan Fenimore Cooper” (147n10)� 16 Zschokke turned his novel into a play in 1796� The immense success of the play soon overshadowed the novel (Dainat 240n268)� When Lewis published his translation of the novel in 1804, most contemporary English critics believed the play to be Zschokke’s original version of Abaellino’s adventures and, therefore, considered Lewis’s novel a reworking rather than a translation� The play was translated into English by William Dunlap as Abellino: The Great Bandit. Boston, Russel and Cutler, 1802� The Venetian Bravo 65 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 bravo’s terrible outward appearance is not grotesquely overdetermined as that of Abaellino but very effective nonetheless (or, rather because of that)� His appearance is in fact so impressive that at one point he even irritates the powerful senator Gradenigo, a member of the dreaded Council of Three (who apparently ‘runs’ him as his agent): The Bravo resumed his disguise with the readiness of one long practised in its use, but with a composure that was not so easily disconcerted as that of the more sensitive senator� The latter did not speak again, though he hurried Jacopo from his presence, by an impatient movement of the hand� (Cooper 1, 91) 17 The look of the bravo is not - or at least not simply - a masquerade, but, conversely, Frontoni skilfully uses masks to hide his infamous identity� Yet the image of the bravo is also a kind of screen as Jacopo appears not to work as a contract killer at all� In fact, he never once uses violence and claims to be “innocent of shedding blood” (Cooper 2, 210)� He is thus a secret agent, a spy, operating as the link between the leaders of the state and Venice’s criminal underworld� He deals, for example, with wine smugglers like the shifty Annina, who is also an informant, and organises secret transports of people and things� In these exploits, he skilfully uses all kinds of disguises, whereas he, somewhat paradoxically, appears in public as a bravo, where people habitually shun him because of his terrible reputation of being an assassin in the service of the state� He appears openly on the piazzas of the city as a constant reminder of the power of the state: 18 The citizens marvelled that one like me should go at large, while the vindictive and revengeful took the circumstance as a proof of address� When rumour grew too strong for appearances, the [Council of] Three took measures to direct it to other things; and when it grew too faint for their wishes, it was fanned� (211) But the bravo is also a decoy� Those foolish enough to approach him in order to use his service as an “avenger of private wrongs” (89) will be reported by him to the authorities who can then use this information against them: “I was applied as a public Bravo, and my reports, in more ways than one, answered 17 I quote from the American edition of The Bravo in two volumes (1852)� 18 “‘This Jacopo is one that should not go at large in an honest city, and yet he is seen pacing the square with as much ease as a noble in the Broglio�’ - ‘I know him not�’ - ‘Not to know the boldest and surest stiletto in Venice […] is to thy praise� But he is well marked among us of the port, and we never see the man but we begin to think of our sins, and of penances forgotten� I marvel much that the inquisitors do not give him to the devil, on some public ceremony for the benefit of small offenders.’” (Cooper 1, 111). Of course, this is exactly what is going to happen at the end of the novel� 66 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 their designs” (210)� In other words, Jacopo is an ingenious invention of the despotic rulers: His ‘bravoness’ is a symbol of what the state is capable of when threatened, but it is also a cover for his secret activities in the service of that very state� Notably, Jacopo is not devious and duplicitous by nature and not a mercenary� He is forced to serve his masters because they have his aging father in their power, who was arrested on trumped-up charges (ibid�)� He seems to have no illusions about the republic, but he is also not corrupted or cynical� Jacopo’s good nature shows itself in his secret visits to his father in the piombi but most strikingly in a spectacular gondola race where he lets the old fisherman Antonio win� He also supports Antonio’s suit to free his young grandson who was forced into military service� Jacopo even facilitates a hearing of the old man’s petition before the “secret and stern tribunal” (Cooper 1, 174) of the Council of Three (a scene that is reminiscent of the court scene in The Ghost-Seer but without achieving a comparable Gothic atmosphere) - a favour with possibly dangerous consequences for the bravo himself� It is not until Antonio is murdered by the secret police, though, that Jacopo turns against his employers� During a dramatic nightly encounter in the Jewish burying ground on the Lido with Don Camillo Montforte, a duke from Naples, who came to Venice to claim his inheritance (a revenant of Rosalvo? ), the anguished Jacopo opens his heart: 19 “Then they have proved too ruthless even for thee? ” said Don Camillo, who watched the contracting eye and heaving form of his companion, in wonder� “Signore, they have� I have witnessed, this night, a proof of their heartlessness and bad faith that hath forced me to look forward to my own fate� The delusion is over; from this hour I serve them no longer�” (Cooper 2, 38) Jacopo has finally realised that the senate has deceived him and will not keep its promise to let him and his father go free after a certain amount of time� Instead, he learns that they will kill his father whenever it is convenient for them� In fact, Jacopo is ostracised immediately because he is assumed to be 19 In the context of the novel, the place of the encounter is symbolic� The Venetian Jews are portrayed as cunning, greedy, chicken-livered usurers who - how could it be otherwise in Cooper’s Venice - also report to the Council� Like the untrustworthy Annina’s, their meanness is offset against the bravo’s ‘purity’� Thus, according to the novel’s logic, Jacopo’s open antisemitism (“Thou likest not the Hebrew, Jacopo” (Cooper 1, 88)) is not a flaw but an asset. However, the fact that he withdraws to the Jewish burying ground when he is at the lowest ebb and muses that he will soon share the fate of the “heretics” (Cooper 2, 41) suggests that he realises at last that he is not any better� As far as I can see, the fact that Cooper unhesitatingly deploys the crudest anti-Jewish stereotypes has not been found worth mentioning by the novel’s critics� The Venetian Bravo 67 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 Antonio’s murderer� But not even then does the bravo make use of his renowned stiletto� 20 Instead, his resistance takes the form of organising the escape of Don Camillo and his lover Violetta, a ward of the senate, whose rich inheritance the state plans to secure for itself� When he learns of Don Camillo’s desperation at Violetta’s abduction by the secret police, the bravo finds her and, using his secret contacts, gets the couple safely out of the senate’s reach� As Scannavini points out, the abduction of Violetta by the government’s thugs should start, conventionally, a series of escapes and pursuits leading to some kind of happy - although qualified - ending. As reviewers complained, however, this does not happen. The subplot loses momentum, it is functionally abandoned and quickly resolved, to move on to Jacopo’s undeserved death sentence� (145) In fact, as Lance Schachterle has shown, Cooper had originally conceived of a spectacular sea chase but eventually abandoned the already finished chapters. These chapters, according to Schachterle, “narrate an exciting quest by sea as Don Camillo, the Bravo, and their associates sail after Don Camillo’s abducted bride” (87), which may have been expanded into an “adventure narration of naval pursuit” (Scannavini 146)� Schachterle suggests that such an adventure narrative was discarded because it would have detracted readers from “Jacopo and his plight” (91)� This is probably so, but Jacopo is also denied an adventurous episode in which he could excel and, possibly, die a heroic death while saving the lovers� Thus, what is left for him to do is speak wry parting words to Don Camillo and calmly face his destiny: “Don Camillo Montforte, […] distrust Venice to your dying day� Let no promises - no hope - no desire of increasing your honours, or your riches ever tempt you to put yourself in her power� None know the falsehood of the state, better than I, and with my parting words I warn you to be wary�” “Thou speakest as if we were to meet no more, worthy Jacopo�” The Bravo turned, and the action brought his features to the moon� There was a melancholy smile, in which deep satisfaction at the success of the lovers was mingled with serious forebodings for himself� “We are certain only of the past,” he said, in a low voice� 20 The idea that a small stabbing weapon was the bravos’ favourite means of assassination may go back to the painting Il Bravo (1515-20, probably by Titian or Giorgione), in which a young man is surprised by another man (probably the Bravo of the title), who hides a dagger behind his back� The painting may be found under https: / / www� habsburger�net/ de/ medien/ tizian-der-bravo-um-151520 (accessed 8 Aug� 2020)� 68 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 Touching the hand of Don Camillo, he kissed his own and leaped hastily into his gondola� The fast was thrown loose and the felucca glided away, leaving this extraordinary being alone in the waters� The Neapolitan ran to the taffrail, and the last he saw of Jacopo, the Bravo was rowing leisurely back towards that scene of violence and deception from which he himself was so glad to have escaped� (Cooper 2, 156) Cooper’s Venice is hell� It is reminiscent of the Venice of Byron’s drama The Two Foscari (1821) where Marina, the wife of one of the title characters, refuses to be lectured on the virtues of the republic: Keep Those maxims for your mass of scared mechanics, Your merchants, your Dalmatian and Greek slaves, Your tributaries, your dumb citizens, And masked nobility, your sbirri, and Your spies, your galley and your other slaves, To whom your midnight carryings off and drownings, Your dungeons next the palace roofs, or under The water’s level; your mysterious meetings, And unknown dooms, and sudden executions, Your “Bridge of Sighs,” your strangling chamber, and Your torturing instruments, have made ye seem The beings of another and worse world! Keep such for them: I fear ye not� I know ye; (II�1 299-312) However, the result of Byron’s apparent debunking of the old flattering myths was just another myth, as John Ruskin eventually realised: The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved sympathy, ever crossed the ‘Bridge of Sighs’, which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice� (Works 10�8-9) Cooper’s Venice is, despite his intention, the Venice of romance, where Jacopo Frontoni takes leave of his dying father in the piombi before he is arrested on the Bridge of Sighs� Yet Cooper denies his protagonist both an adventure episode where he could excel and a flamboyant accusation of the hypocritical city fathers comparable to Marina’s� On the contrary, the bravo is divested of the only feature that makes him remarkable as his terrible reputation turns out to be a mere construction of his masters� He is not a mercenary who sells The Venetian Bravo 69 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 his service to those who pay but rather a slave who is “to be pitied” (Cooper 2, 211)� After all, as an early reviewer put it, Cooper’s bravo does not seem much more than a victim “of his own ill fame” (Scannavini 138)� 21 He may be, as I suggest, the victim of his literary predecessors’ ambivalent fame as well� It was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later Byron’s “worse world” and the liminal character of the bravo would come together� Perhaps Cooper was inspired to place a bravo at the centre of his narrative by the role of the bravi in the erosion and eventual demise of the Venetian republic which he had encountered in Daru’s Histoire, while his literary predecessors (of whom he had at least heard) may have induced him to use the liminal character to get to the heart of Venetian corruption� Obviously, there is no room for a romantic hero in Cooper’s Venice, so his version of the bravo turns out to be more stoic than heroic� However, as I have argued, his story of the brave bravo is full of awkward pathos reminiscent of the kind of sentimental romance Cooper did not want to write� It is likely that Cooper would have agreed with Simmel’s description of Venice as a city of lies: Here, at St Mark’s Square, at the Piazetta, one senses an iron will to power, a dark passion that stands like a thing-in-itself behind this cheerful appearance� […] But in Venice, where all that is cheerful and bright, free and light, has only served as a face for a life that is dark, violent and unrelentingly functional, the city’s decline has left behind a merely lifeless stage-set, the mendacious beauty of the mask� (“Venice” 43-44) 22 Cooper’s (perhaps inevitable) failure to exclude “the ambivalent beauty of adventure” (Simmel, “Venice” 46) from his narrative compromises his attempt at exposing the iron will to power behind the glorious façade� 5 The Venice of Cloaks and Daggers “Before me the dagger of the cloaked bravo or of the jealous husband gleams, and I hear the splash of the body as it falls into the dark canal” (James 194)� William Wetmore Story’s vision of a Venice where violence lurks around 21 Frontoni himself appears to corroborate this: “I consented to let them circulate such tales as might draw the eye of the public on me� I need not add, that he who lends himself to his own infamy, will soon attain his object” (Cooper 2, 211)� 22 “Hier, am Markusplatz, auf der Piazzetta, empfindet man einen eisernen Machtwillen, eine finstre Leidenschaft, die wie das Ding an sich hinter dieser heitern Erscheinung stehen� […] [H]ier aber, wo all das Heitere und Helle, das Leichte und Freie, nur einem finstern, gewalttätigen, unerbittlich zweckmäßigen Leben zur Fassade diente, da hat dessen Untergang nur ein entseeltes Bühnenbild, nur die lügenhafte Schönheit der Maske übriggelassen” (Simmel, “Venedig” 300)� 70 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 every corner, quoted by Henry James in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), expresses a nostalgic longing for a dangerous city of the past that never existed - a longing that Henry James, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and other writers who stayed in Venice did not share, even though they were well aware of it� 23 According to James, William Wetmore Story, a sculptor, found inspiration “in a country where the breath of the centuries of violence was still in the air and where the fancy could still so taste it […]� So the lingering lurid, in Venice, did more for the charm than […] the ghostly Grimace of Carnival” (194-195, italics in original)� If nineteenth-century writers mention the Venetian bravo, it is usually to distance themselves from the stereotypical masquerade� John Ruskin, for example, lists the bravo among other hackneyed Venetian motifs that made him abandon his tragedy Marcolini in 1836 (when he was 17)� “[W]hen I had described a gondola, a bravo, the heroine Bianca, and the moonlight on the Grand Canal, I found I had not much more to say” (Praeterita 146), Ruskin recalled later when he had become contemptuous of all myths of Venice� 24 When Cooper came into money after his first literary successes, he decided (like Mr Dorrit) to travel around Europe with his family� When he arrived in Italy in 1828, he was, according to Nathalia Wright, “prepared to encounter bandits; he decided Italy’s reputation for them was exaggerated” (115)� Like Byron and many others before him, Cooper expected to see a Venice as described by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho - and possibly by Schiller and Lewis� If, as Wright suggests, Cooper’s stay in Venice made him see the city more realistically, his Venetian novel shows no evidence of this� 25 23 James comments Story’s vision as follows: “He sees, in fine, what we all used to see, or what was obligingly seen for us (for consequent clearing of the air); that operatic side of the picture in which the idea of ‘crime’ recurs very much as one of the indispensable rhymes of the libretto” (194-195, italics in original)� 24 As Erik Simpson (155) points out, young Ruskin’s aborted tragedy was probably inspired by an episode in Samuel Rogers’ popular narrative poem Italy (1830) where a naive young man named Marcolini is hanged for a murder committed by a ruthless bravo, but, as we have seen, the hired assassin had come to literary fame earlier in the course of the vogue for Räuberromane and Gothic tales� On Ruskin’s growing disillusionment with the mythical Venice, see Hewison� 25 Ruskin sneers at Cooper’s naive use of the Venetian setting in a letter to his father: “It is marvellous how ridiculous the common novel-sentiment about Venice appears to anyone who really knows anything about it; but more marvellous still that a seaman like Cooper should never have found out that the lagoons were shallow - and should have represented the State inquisitors as drowning a criminal in the lagoons” (Ruskin, Letters 207)� In the same letter Ruskin writes: “The republicanism and the abuse of the Venetian government are also so absurd that it may be worthwhile taking notice of them in a note, as I daresay this book is an authority with the Americans about Venice” (ibid�)� The Venetian Bravo 71 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 What is more, his plan to present a cautionary tale from Old Europe as a deterrent to his fellow Americans appears not to have been as successful as he wished (Scannavini 137)� 26 Thus, Cooper’s innovative treatment of the figure of the bravo falls doubly flat, and the literary character is finally extinct, even though he lingers luridly in the visions of painters, sculptors and writers� Works Cited Byron, Lord, George Gordon� “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”, Canto the Fourth� The Complete Poetical Works, edited by Jerome J� McGann� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1980� ---� “The Two Foscari�” The Complete Works of Lord Byron� Paris: A� and W� Galignani & Co, 1837� Corbineau-Hoffmann, Angelika� Paradoxie der Fiktion. Literarische Venedigbilder 1797-1984� Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993� Cooper, James Fenimore� The Bravo. A Tale� New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1852� Dainat, Holger� Abellino, Rinaldini und Konsorten. Zur Geschichte der Räuberromane in Deutschland� Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996� Dickens, Charles� Little Dorrit� London: Penguin, 2008� Hewison, Robert� Ruskin on Venice: ‘The Paradise of Cities’� New Haven: Yale UP , 2010� James, Henry� William Wetmore Story and His Friends. From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, vol. 1. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903. Levine, Robert S� Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1989� Lewis, Matthew G� The Bravo of Venice. A Romance, by Heinrich Zschokke�, translated by M� G� Lewis� 1886� Fairford: The Echo Library, 2015� Manzatto, Mila� “Il Bravo tra Storia e Letteratura�” Acta Historiae, vol� 15, no� 1, 2007, pp� 155-178� Manzoni, Alessandro� The Betrothed� London: Richard Bentley, 1834� Povolo, Claudio� “The Creation of Venetian Historiography�” Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797, edited by John Jeffrey Martin and Dennis Romano� Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 2002, pp� 491-519� Ruge, Enno� “Enchanting Venice: Der Romantische Blick auf Venedig� Byron, Turner, Ruskin�” Unwirklichkeiten. Zum Problem der Realität in der Moderne. Das Symposium, edited by Hans-Günther Schwarz et al� München: Iudicium, 2020, pp� 106-119� Ruskin, John� Praeterita, edited by Francis O’Gorman� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2012� ---� Ruskin’s Letters from Venice: 1851-1852, edited by John Lewis Bradley� New Haven: Yale UP , 1955� 26 Robert S� Levine gently mocks Cooper as a “republican Jeremiah […] warning of oligarchical-corporate subversion” (61)� Ironically, in view of the history of the United States, Cooper may have proved a true prophet� After all, he referred to The Bravo as “the most American novel I ever wrote” (qtd� in Scannavini 134)� 72 e nno r uge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0003 ---� The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E� T� Cook and Alexander Wedderburn� London: George Allen, 1903-1912� 39 vols� Sage, Victor� “Black Venice: Conspiracy and Narrative Masquerade in Schiller, Zschokke, Lewis, and Hoffmann�” Gothic Studies, vol� 8, no� 1, 2006, pp� 52-71� Scannavini, Anna� “The Reception of Cooper’s The Bravo�” RSA Journal, vol� 19, 2008, pp� 134-150� Schachterle, Lance� “A Long False Start: The Rejected Chapters of Cooper’s The Bravo (1831)�” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol� 115, no� 1, 2006, pp� 81-126� Schiller, Friedrich� Der Geisterseher. Aus den Memoires des Grafen von O**, edited by Mathias Mayer� Stuttgart: Reclam, 1996� ---� The Armenian, or, The Ghost Seer. A History Founded on Fact, translated by W� Render� London: H� D� Symonds, 1800� 2 vols� Simmel, Georg� “Venedig�” Der Kunstwart. Halbmonatsschau über Dichtung, Theater, Musik, Bildende und Angewandte Künste, vol� 20, no� 2, 1907, pp� 299-303� ---� “Venice�” Theory, Culture & Society, vol� 24, no� 7-8, 2007, pp� 42-46� Simpson, Erik� Mercenaries in British and American Literature. 1790-1830. Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 2010� Sutherland, John� “The Novel�” A Companion to Romanticism, edited by Duncan Wu� Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, pp� 333-344� Wright, Nathalia� American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers: Allston to James. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1965� Zschokke, Heinrich� Abaellino der Große Bandit� 1794� Paderborn: Outlook Verlag, 2018� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 i ngo b erensMeyer “Round Many Western Islands”: Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons (1930) - for Talli and Christoph, who know - Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, first published in 1930, is one of the undisputed classics of British children’s literature, but it has fared less well internationally� Early translations into Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish, for example, have apparently not been reissued since the 1950s, and the German translation was last seen in print in 1966 (its success probably not exactly promoted by the German title Der Kampf um die Insel)� 1 Ransome continued to write eleven more novels in this series until 1947, all published with Jonathan Cape, and they have never been out of print since� In this contribution, I am focusing on the first volume, a very early, if not the first, historical example of the subgenre of the children’s holiday adventure� Its innovative blend of genres mixes elements of the robinsonade with stories of pirates and treasure hunting� As the classical instance of the children’s holiday adventure, Swallows and Amazons also resonates with ideas of Britishness and the Empire during the interwar period� Children’s versions of the robinsonade have a long history in the wake of eighteenth-century popular chapbooks and ballads inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)� 2 Adapted into a mixture of adventure novel and pedagogy, Defoe’s novel of shipwreck and hard work was transformed into essential reading for children in books such as Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson the Younger (Robinson der Jüngere, 1779-80) and Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (Der Schweizerische Robinson, 1812, written 1794-98)� Next to Robinson Crusoe, obvious inspiration for Swallows and Amazons came from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1882), William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands (1903)� After a 1 See translations by Fronemann and Gradmann-Gernsheim� I have derived bibliographical information on translations of Swallows and Amazons from allthingsransome�net (accessed 17 Jan� 2020)� It is quite likely that young readers of the German version were encouraged to associate this with Felix Dahn’s popular book Ein Kampf um Rom (A Struggle for Rome), first published in 1876. 2 For a detailed account of this correlation, see O’Malley� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 74 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 chequered literary career, Ransome found the winning formula for lasting success in the late 1920s, towards the end of a period often described as the ‘golden age’ of children’s literature� The Swallows and Amazons series presents children experiencing adventures during their summer holidays in the Lake District; these adventures are deeply influenced by the books these children have read and the poems they have been taught� Children’s literature, including Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island as well as poems like Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, forms a textual filter through which the children make sense of their world� Events that occur are always already interpreted with the aid of fictional or historical adventures so that the novel turns into a sort of meta-adventure novel� Moreover, the British Empire and colonial attitudes are a pervasive presence in this world� Imperialist concepts are taken up by the children in the novel both playfully and with all appropriate seriousness as a way of seeing (and making) the world into which they are about to grow up� A few brief remarks on the author’s life - an adventurous life indeed - may serve to relate this book more closely to its historical context� Arthur Michell Ransome (1884-1967) was born into an upper-middle-class family in Leeds, where his father was a professor of history and modern literature at Yorkshire College (now the University of Leeds)� His grandfather, Thomas Ransome, had been an inventor and scientist; his cousin, Laurence Binyon, is well-known as the author of the poem “For the Fallen”, which is still regularly recited on Remembrance Day, 11 November, in memory of the soldiers who died in the Great War� Young Arthur Ransome was taught to skate by none other than the famous Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin� Ransome read Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe at the tender age of four and was then presented with a copy by his father (Chambers 18)� 3 After attending Rugby public school and studying science at Leeds for two terms, he tried to gain a foothold in the literary world of London� For twelve years, he muddled through as a publisher’s assistant, author, book reviewer, and ghostwriter� One of his early books bears the telling title Bohemia in London (1907)� Ransome gained some notoriety as the author of the first critical biography of Oscar Wilde in 1912, and even more because he was immediately sued for libel by Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas� The trial received a lot of public attention and ended with his acquittal. It was the first time that Wilde’s De Profundis, the letter he wrote to Douglas from prison, became publicly known� Unhappily married, Ransome decided to go to Russia in 1913, initially to edit a volume of Russian fairy tales� He soon wrote dispatches for the Daily News and later the Manchester Guardian. His personal closeness to the Bolshe- 3 Biographical information is based on this and on Avery� See also Lovelock� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 75 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 viks, in particular to Lenin and Karl Radek, led to his writing a number of texts in support of the Russian revolution� It took until 2002 for evidence to appear that Ransome was in fact employed as an agent for the British Secret Service to infiltrate revolutionary organizations. In 1924, he married Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, Trotsky’s former secretary� He wrote for the Manchester Guardian from Estonia, also undertaking journeys to Egypt and China for the paper� Having moved back to England, he began writing Swallows and Amazons in March 1929 in his cottage near Windermere in the Lake District� A year earlier, he had spent a holiday there in the company of the family of W� G� Collingwood, a painter and disciple of John Ruskin� A lifelong sailor, Ransome taught the Collingwood grandchildren to steer their small sailboat, the Swallow, on Coniston Water: Taqui, Susie, Mavis - known as ‘Titty’ - and Roger� Readers of the novels will recognize the names Susan, Titty and Roger; only Taqui was changed into the more conventional ‘John’� Published by Jonathan Cape in 1930, the first novel did not sell at first; success came, however, with the third volume in the series, Peter Duck (1932), which Ransome also illustrated� He received an honorary doctorate from Leeds University in 1952 and was made CBE in 1953; he died in Manchester in 1967� Headstone of Arthur and Evgenia Ransome, Rusland, Cumbria� Photograph: Ingo Berensmeyer, 2019� 76 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 All play begins with the imagination� In its opening paragraph, Swallows and Amazons celebrates this by allowing us to share in the joy of transcending boundaries between reality and fantasy, and between human beings and nonhuman objects, as we witness Roger, the youngest child of the Walker family, running uphill and playing at being a yacht - the Cutty Sark, no less: Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays� He ran until he nearly reached the hedge by the footpath, then turned and ran until he nearly reached the hedge on the other side of the field. Then he turned and crossed the field again. Each crossing of the field brought him nearer to the farm. The wind was against him, and he was tacking up against it to the farm, where at the gate his patient mother was awaiting him� He could not run straight against the wind because he was a sailing vessel, a tea-clipper, the Cutty Sark. (Ransome 15, italics in original) The famous Cutty Sark, now a tourist destination in Greenwich, was used as a cadet training ship in Cornwall in the 1920s� It had been open to the public since 1924 (“Cutty Sark”), so Roger may have seen it during a previous holiday� “Sail was the thing” (Ransome 15): sailing is the central activity around which the entire novel is constructed� This initial appearance of the recollection of an old “tea-clipper” stimulating a boy’s imagination sets the scene for the novel’s continuous blurring of reality and imagination, of action in the real world and its accompanying “luminous halo” (Woolf 9) of imaginary adventures� More romantic than “steamships”, which, according to Roger’s elder brother John, “were just engines in tin boxes” (Ransome 15), the sailboat is an apt metaphor to describe the innocence of the children’s adventures on the lakes, which turn into a world in miniature� The sailboat can be read as an ambiguous object and image, harking back to an exciting past of pirates and treasure while also looking forward to a future of work and real politics� The children’s activities are play, but they are also preparations for more serious maritime exploits in connection with a seafaring nation (or at least a testimony to the persistence of naval power in Britain’s national mythology): ‘Britannia, rule the waves’� Yet Roger’s delightful imitation of the Cutty Sark, in his “zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field” also resembles a reader’s movement across the page: the repeated, boustrophedonic ‘turning and crossing’ that itself resembles the movement of a plough drawn by oxen� Land and sea, running and sailing, writing and reading, reality and fiction become interchangeable, joyously joined together� Hard-and-fast distinctions are dissolved by nothing other than the sheer power of literature� The literariness of this dynamic is Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 77 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 enhanced even more by the chapter title, “The Peak in Darien”, and the epigraph, giving us the last four lines of Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: “Or like stout Cortez” etc� The lyric and the epic are another pair of opposites to be conjoined here, and with that sonnet, land, sea and sky are opened up to the history of imperial discovery and conquest, venture capital as well adventure, “eagle eyes” staring “at the Pacific” (ll. 11-12), travelling “in the realms of gold” (l� 1) and “[r]ound many western islands” (l� 3)� Importantly, however, the sonnet is also the record of an intense reading experience, written immediately after Keats and his friend Charles Cowden Clarke read “the ‘famousest’ passages” (Clarke 129) of Homer in a borrowed copy of George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey� While not a Lake Poet himself, Keats also evokes English Romanticism, which is centrally associated with the Lake District� The children’s summer holidays are thus imbued not only with a sense of maritime adventure but also with the historical association of the Lakes as a culturally central, albeit geographically marginal, site of English literature� The world the children experience is a microcosm of Englishness, full of cultural memory, of reading and rereading or vaguely remembering something read within a distinctly English literary tradition� Ransome’s novel emphasises the symbolic nature of this location by the very fact that it does not strictly adhere to the Lakes’ geography but is set in a fictional version with invented place names and different lakes. The children are allowed to camp for a few days and nights on an island in the lake, which they name Wild Cat Island� They have secured their father’s permission to sail in a small boat, the Swallow� At the same time, the children’s father also happens to be on board ship, sailing from Malta to Hongkong: Commander Walker is securing the perimeters of the British Empire on a Royal Navy destroyer� His permission comes via telegram: “BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN” (Ransome 16)� Their mother, meanwhile, is taking care of baby Vicky and occasionally delivers food to the island� Since the children, in their play-world, have assumed the identities of sailors, explorers and pirates, the grown-ups around them act as “natives” (Ransome 48, 61, etc�)� The real adventure begins when the Walker children meet the Blackett children, Nancy and Peggy, who are also pirates and have a boat named Amazon. They wage a ‘war’ against each other during which the Swallows manage to capture the Blacketts’ boat using a trick� Then they form an alliance against the Blacketts’ uncle, Mr Turner, whom they refer to as ‘Captain Flint’ in accordance with Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Mr Turner, who lives on a houseboat and is writing his memoirs there, had unjustly suspected the Swallows of committing an act of vandalism� United, the children defeat him in a naval battle and make him walk the plank, pirate-style� 78 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 Shortly after, there is a burglary on the houseboat in which Mr Turner’s memoirs are stolen� Titty coincidentally overhears the thieves talk about where they have hidden the manuscript, and she manages to locate this ‘treasure’ in a buried chest on an island� Full of gratitude, Jim Turner - whose character resembles the author, Arthur Ransome - gives her his green parrot as a present� As this brief summary of the plot reveals, the novel is a clever combination of realism and fantasy, frequently echoing Stevenson and Defoe� In its language, it is much closer to Defoe, using fairly short words, simple syntax, and precise descriptions of objects and actions, with many nautical terms like ‘painter’ or ‘thwart’ thrown in� Like Defoe, Ransome is a writer of “literal-minded prose” (Moretti 63), interested in details, disenchantment, and mastery, choosing “productivity” over “meaning” (66)� 4 Despite the rather narrow environment of the lake and the island, Ransome’s prose opens up the children’s world to include distant regions, from the “peak in Darien” to “the Indies” and “Sydney Harbour” (Ransome 27-28)� The horizon of the novel’s world, and its “structure of feeling” (Williams 132), 5 are circumscribed by a particularly British outlook on life during the interwar years: “nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny” (Orwell 196-197)� George Orwell’s analysis of the “Boys’ Weeklies” sums up this zeitgeist and ethos extremely well, and he is not far off the mark in describing, quite unintentionally, Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons: a mixture of “team spirit”, “the Boy Scout movement” and “Admiralty advertisements” (191, 193)� John, the eldest boy of the Walker family, is - obviously and naturally - the leader and captain of the Swallows, whereas Susan, the oldest girl, is the first mate� Although this technically casts her in a male role, she is almost exclusively in charge of provisions and cannot seem to think of anything else than preparing food� Little Roger - who plays Cutty Sark at the beginning - is ship’s boy� Yet, the most interesting character emerging in the course of the story is able seaman Titty, whose bravery and intelligence are rewarded at the end� Also, despite the otherwise typical gender roles and clichés in the novel, John finds his equal in Nancy Blackett, the captain of the Amazon. 6 4 This description of Defoe’s prose can be found in Moretti, 25-66� 5 As defined by Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature: “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone […] not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity” (132)� The concept was taken up by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism to show how literature “participat[es] in Europe’s overseas expansion, and […] creates what Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’ that support, elaborate, and consolidate the practice of empire” (14)� 6 On gender in mid-twentieth-century children’s novels, see Poynter� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 79 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 This is a world that is at once both realistic and far-fetched; its relationship to the real world, though innocent enough, is filtered through a British public-school mindset as well as through the model of Robinson Crusoe and its reception as children’s literature, combining amusement with instruction� As early as in Rousseau’s treatise of education, Robinson Crusoe (if in an edited version) is the first book that little Émile will be made to read and emulate: Since we must have books, there is one already, which, in my opinion, affords a complete treatise on natural education. This book shall be the first Emilius shall read. In this, indeed, will, for a long time, consist his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place among others� […] It will serve as our guide during our progress to a state of reason; and will even afterwards give us constant pleasure, unless our taste be totally vitiated� You ask impatiently, what is the title of this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon? No� It is Robinson Crusoe� (333-334) Obviously, Ransome’s bunch of adventurous children have read Robinson Crusoe with an equally “constant pleasure”, complemented by works by Captain Marryatt, R� M� Ballantyne, and Robert Louis Stevenson� At the very least, if they have not read them, the children definitely know of them as indispensable parts of the ‘structure of feeling’ of early twentieth-century Britain� The children’s awareness of Keats’s poetry, moreover, is substantiated explicitly by the narrator: “[Titty] had heard the sonnet read aloud at school, and forgotten everything in it except the picture of the explorers looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time” (Ransome 17). 7 The children not only name a promontory in the Lake District after the “peak in Darien”, a province of Panama where Balboa (not Cortéz) became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean in 1513� Keats’s comparison of the discovery of a literary world (Homer’s Iliad as translated by Chapman) to the discovery of the Pacific is paralleled in the Swallows’ exploration of Wild Cat Island through the filter of English literature, including Keats as well as Defoe� The main adventure in Swallows and Amazons, then, is one of conquering the world by means of, or at least with the help of, literature� Despite Ransome’s communist sympathies, his view of the world remains firmly that of a late Victorian public school boy. “BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS! ” (Ransome 16), the father’s telegram resounds through the novel, “loud and bold” (Keats l� 8)� It resonates down the ages even beyond the Second World War, by which time Swallows and Amazons has become a part of the tradition of British children’s fiction and can in turn inspire the stranded children in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies 7 The ‘school’ here is a boarding school� Strictly speaking, of course, the explorers in the poem are looking “at each other” while Cortéz alone “star’d at the Pacific”; see Bode 26. 80 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 (1954), next to Treasure Island and Coral Island (Golding 38). By then, it is fit to serve as a foil for Golding’s bitter revision of the entire tradition of maritime children’s fiction as he “seeks to dispel [its] intertextual glamour with grim realism” (Singh 206) and as he “deflates and diminishes the heroic occasion and mode” (208) of earlier boys’ adventures (and, at least indirectly, to condemn its involvement with colonial violence)� 8 In the microcosmic world of Swallows and Amazons, the idea of Britain as a naval power is foregrounded, advanced by practical skills of navigation and unflagging ‘team spirit’. Even though the dangers involved in these children’s holiday pastimes are limited by the relative safety of a lake, it is the sea that actually inspires their reading as well as the way they perceive their own adventures� The sea is mapped onto the lakes in a manner best explained by recourse to Fredric Jameson’s analysis in “Modernism and Imperialism” (154-158): in modernist narrative texts by Kipling, Conrad, and others, the colonial other is masked and rendered invisible by a trick of representation that makes use of spatial effects of dislocation, blocking awareness of colonial exploitation by focusing on narratives of imperial rivalry� As the homely Swallows and their classically inspired rivals, the Amazons, fight it out on the lakes, they mirror geopolitical imperial conflicts in a nutshell (or a dinghy) while the ‘natives’ sit idly by and function as little more than ornamental elements in a pseudo-colonial tapestry rather than being agents within the narrative� 9 For a literary naval power as the one envisaged in Swallows and Amazons, it goes without saying that any ship, be it ever so small, has to have a library, be it ever so tiny. So which book is the first to be taken on board? Not the German Dictionary, even though that might come in handy when talking to ‘natives’ since “[i]t’s full of foreign language” (Ransome 33)� The dictionary would be too heavy for the boat� To quote Rousseau again: “No� It is Robinson Crusoe” (334)� This is because Defoe’s novel is the best survival manual there is: “It tells you just what to do on an island” (Ransome 33)� Motifs from Robinson Crusoe and the genre of the robinsonade pervade Swallows and Amazons: there are pirates, ‘natives’, and ‘savages’, the island is deserted but then turns out not to be entirely uninhabited. Similar to Robinson, who finds a mysterious footprint, the Swallows detect traces of earlier occupants on Wild Cat Island� Also, in parallel to Defoe, they have to make themselves at home on the island, though they do so as a group and not as a solitary individual� 8 Though Singh describes Lord of the Flies as “written out of the agonized consciousness of England’s [sic] loss of global power” (207), she does not countenance the possibility of a postcolonial reading� 9 On ‘ornamental’ aspects of Empire, see Cannadine� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 81 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 The actual robinsonade of the novel begins in chapter 18, when the Swallows want to go to battle against the Amazons and Titty has to remain behind to keep watch on the island� The reference is unmissable not only because this chapter is called “Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday” (Ransome 199) but also because it is made explicit by the narrator: “The able-seaman watched them with the telescope until the brown sail disappeared behind the Peak of Darien� She then became Robinson Crusoe, and went down into the camp to take command of her island” (198)� It takes some effort for Titty, however, to make the world around her fit her self-fashioning as Robinson Crusoe. What bothers her, at first, is that there are two tents on the island when “a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island ought only to have one” (199)� But then she decides to leave both of them standing since one of them could serve as “Man Friday’s tent” (ibid�)� She muses: “Of course I haven’t discovered him yet� But it’s ready for him when the time comes” (ibid)� Evidently, she has some trouble fitting into the mould of Robinson. Moreover, in her opinion, the Robinson story has one crucial flaw: the rescue. As she exclaims: “who would wave a flag to be rescued if they had a desert island of their own? That was the thing that spoilt Robinson Crusoe. In the end he came home� There never ought to be an end” (200)� For the child adventurer, the inevitable ending of the story and the physical limits of the book must be a let-down, as must be the irrevocably approaching end of the holidays, which is why the desire is so strong to keep the adventure a ‘neverending story’, as it were� For the novel, this also means that it takes place in a state of exception, outside of the normal routines of everyday life� The next novel, one year later, will pick up where the first one has to leave off; the holiday promises a serial escape from reality, as does the book series� Similarly, perhaps, the imperial arena may have served at least some of its colonial agents as a welcome escape from their lives at home� The part of ‘Man Friday’ has to be played by the children’s mother, who, on finding Titty alone on the island, immediately joins her role-playing. Like the children, and like mother and daughter at this point, the narrator maintains the fusion of fantasy and reality when he tells us in a surprising sentence that “Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday then kissed each other as if they were pretending to be Titty and Mother” (203)� Having adopted new identities in the mode of play, they need to ‘pretend’ to be who they are in reality because play and imagination take precedence� Fiction and reality have changed places to the extent that the logic of make-believe, expressed in the conjunction “as if”, is reversed� This role-playing is kept up throughout the chapter, with ‘Man Friday’/ Mother telling ‘Robinson Crusoe’/ Titty about her/ his childhood and youth in the sensational style of one of Defoe’s novels: for example, “how 82 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 she had nearly been eaten by savages, and had only escaped by jumping out of the stew-pot at the last minute” (205)� Switching to Mother, she goes on to tell Titty about her childhood on an Australian sheep farm before saying goodbye and leaving her alone again on the island� In this central sequence, which roughly marks the novel’s mid-point, Swallows and Amazons briefly stages a robinsonade or, rather, self-reflexively incorporates the robinsonade into its own web of maritime adventure narratives� In the subsequent chapters, after the children have reunited, the model of Treasure Island takes over to propel the plot forward� As we read in chapter 23, for example: “We’ll go to a desert island, a really desert island, not this one, and there we’ll dig for treasure buried by pirates� For a long time we shan’t find it. They never do. But then, at last, there will be a hollow sound under our pickaxes, and thousands of gold pieces will be rolling about in the sand” (Ransome 267)� They declare Cormorant Island, one of the nearby smaller islands, “Treasure Island” (268)� They draw up a map, similar to the one that is printed on the book’s endpapers; this reminds Roger of “Daddy’s chart of the China Seas” (270), once more evoking the context of Empire� If the British Empire is represented and consistently doubled in the Lake District, so that the charcoal burners of Cumbria are turned into ‘savages’ who live in wigwams (how the children see and interact with members of the rural labouring classes could be the subject of a different essay), and if the lake is turned into a miniature ocean and Titty into Robinson Crusoe, the book’s author, Arthur Ransome, is represented in the character of the Blackett girls’ uncle, the author Jim Turner� Mr Turner, in turn, plays the role of Captain Flint, while his parrot mimics Long John Silver in Stevenson’s Treasure Island by shouting “Pieces of eight” (Ransome 318)� Similar to Commander Walker, the children’s father, Mr Turner has a significant connection to the Empire: the reader learns that he has just returned from ‘the East’ a year earlier, from where he has brought with him a Siamese flag. As an author, Mr Turner is writing his memoirs, titled “Mixed Moss, by ‘A Rolling Stone’” (286)� These are stolen by burglars, buried on Cormorant Island, and later discovered by Titty. What could be more fitting for a novel such as this one than that the treasure to be dug up is not one of silver or gold but one of literature, a book? “And after all, even if her treasure was not Spanish gold, it was a book, and a pirate book” (302)� Yet what might interest us even more than the content of this book is its packaging: the suitcase it rests in is a treasure chest full of exotic signs that draw attention to the imperial world� These signs are listed by the narrator almost in the form of an epic catalogue: Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 83 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 It was entirely covered with labels� There were labels showing ‘P� and O� First Cabin’� There were labels of the Bibby Line, of the Dollar Line, of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha� There was a label with palm trees and camels and a river from some hotel in Upper Egypt� There were labels showing the blue bays and white houses of Mediterranean seaports� There was a label saying, “Wanted on the Voyage”� There were labels with queer writing on them, and no English writing at all except the word Peking� There was a label of the Chinese Eastern Railway� There were labels of hotels in San Francisco, Buenos Ayres, London, Rangoon, Colombo, Melbourne, Hong Kong, New York, Moscow and Khartoum� Some of them were pasted over others� Some were scratched and torn� But each one delighted the able-seaman and the boy� In the middle of the lid were two letters, “J� T�” (332-333) This suitcase with its labels pasted one over the other is legible as a palimpsest of early globalization as seen by the English, namely as pure ‘ornamentalism’� 10 The ‘exotic’ place names, including London itself as the Empire’s distant capital city, are a source of enthusiasm because they promise that no distance is ever too far, nothing unattainable� They invite whoever reads them to embark on a journey “[r]ound many western [and eastern] islands” (Keats l� 3), a journey whose sole purpose is for the traveller/ adventurer to connect otherwise unconnected destinations - “New York, Moscow and Khartoum”� Incidentally, they may also remind readers of Defoe’s continuation of the Crusoe story, the Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), which lead his protagonist as far as Moscow and Arkhangelsk� Historically, Ransome’s use of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe still needs to be seen in the context of Victorian adventure literature for children and young adults, particularly boys - writings such as R� M� Ballantyne’s Coral Island, G� A� Henty’s colonial stories, Kipling and other literary feeders of the imperialist imagination� For these, Defoe’s classic novel can be regarded as a forerunner: “the prototype of literary imperialism” (Green 5)� This was still a typical way of reading Robinson Crusoe around 1900� In this year, we find a Cambridge edition of the novel introduced as follows: One great secret of the charm of Robinson Crusoe is that in the hero of the story we recognize those qualities of resourcefulness, activity and practical common sense that have made Great Britain the greatest colonizing power in the world� The act of ‘making the best of things’ was one that Englishmen had to learn when they went out to plant the flag of England in the waste places of the earth. […] And so the simple story of a man who by labour and patience conquered despondency and doubt can never lose its charm for those who know that labour and patience - effort 10 For this term, see Cannadine� 84 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 and faith - are still the forces that overcome the world� (Masterman, qtd� in Blewett 188n49) Labour and patience, effort and faith - Victorian colonial adventurers liked to recognise themselves in such descriptions� British publishers saw clear advantages in presenting explorers’ exploits within such a framework - a framework that accomplishes one thing above all: to accentuate a clear divide between white Englishmen and people of different skin tones, or between civilisation and savagery� This interpretation of Robinson Crusoe as a story of “resourcefulness, activity and practical common sense” has its own resourcefulness as a template for the narrativisation of explorers’ accounts in the form of heroic adventure stories� To give just one example: David Finkelstein, in his history of the publishing house of Blackwood, has demonstrated how the Blackwoods in the early 1860s went to great lengths to turn the hardly readable account written by the African explorer John Hanning Speke into “a most quaint, interesting Robinson Crusoe like narrative” (Finkelstein 57)� In another letter, John Blackwood characterises the merely functionally literate Speke as follows: “He certainly has not the pen of De Foe [sic] but he has the heart of Robinson Crusoe with a dash of Friday about him” (67)� Their ‘resourceful’ hiring of a ghostwriter helped make Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) into a bestseller: “Within a year of initial publication, the work had sold 7,600 copies and gone through three editions, and foreign rights to the work had been negotiated in France, Germany, and the United States” (68-69)� “Activity and practical common sense” - similar to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whom Ransome got to know at the tender age of four, these are certainly qualities that Ransome’s child pirates also cultivate, especially as their reading of novels is almost overshadowed by more practical books on navigation or birdwatching� This is reading “for action” (Jardine and Grafton) and, quite obviously, this sort of education prepares them for future roles in an imperial context� As minor would-be explorers and colonizers in the microcosm of the Lake District, aren’t they destined to grow into actual colonizers? Well, not exactly� Few childhood Jim Hawkinses will turn into adult buccaneers� But doesn’t its imperial context mean that Ransome’s robinsonade and treasure hunting story had better be kept away from children nowadays? Should it be a cause for concern that Swallows and Amazons is still selling well, apparently, in times of Brexit, when there are renewed attempts to re-heroicise British history? In a Britain haunted by “postimperial melancholy” (Baucom 284), 11 11 Baucom’s term has since been adopted to describe (part of) the structure of feeling in contemporary Britain, especially England; see Gilroy� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 85 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 the book’s success is perhaps no surprise� Is Swallows and Amazons nothing more or better than a fantasy of imperialist hubris? I think this interpretation would fall short of the novel’s potential� Why? Ever since the publication of Martin Green’s trailblazing study Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire in 1980, adventure and the adventure novel have been regarded as the “energizing myth of empire” (xi). But a superficial reading of Swallows and Amazons as a jingoistic paean to imperialism would miss this novel’s deliberate self-reflexiveness, which foregrounds above all the reading of adventure stories as a mode of interpreting the world, the self, and the “imagined communities” (Anderson) of family, peer group, and nation� Their reading allows the children in the novel to expand their imagination, to take on different roles as adventurers - but also to give them up again after a while, and thus to test them and question them in the mode of play� The intertextual references in the novel enable readers to engage in second-order observation and rereading, observing how these children interact with their world using literature as a springboard or sounding board for playful simulations� There is, then, no “political unconscious” (Jameson, Political Unconscious) to detect here in the analytic mindset of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ 12 - both the political direction of the novel and its own questioning of this direction in a mode of playful engagement or even at times of parody are overt, on the surface, and do not require additional efforts of decoding or unmasking� Swallows and Amazons is not an imperialist adventure novel but at best (or worst) a ‘meta-imperialist’ meta-adventure novel� 13 It toys with key questions of authority and power in the interwar years as well as issues of powerlessness, law and injustice, freedom, and violence� It does so not with a ‘critical’ intention, not in the way that Orwell, for instance, a few years later condemned the British colonial regime in Burma in his essays “A Hanging” (1931), “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and the novel Burmese Days (1934), where the focus is on the corrupting effects that colonialism has on the colonizers themselves� Unlike Orwell, Ransome was not a political realist but, in the final account, a political dreamer and fantasist. His world is above all a highly artificial and literary one, mediated and filtered by poems and novels. Swallows and Amazons views real life through the filter of adventure stories. It is a book about the power of books� For Ransome’s protagonists, this is lib- 12 The expression ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is usually traced back to Paul Ricœur’s Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. 13 A few of the later novels in the series are even more explicitly metafictional, as when Peter Duck (1932) includes a yarn about an imagined adventure in the Caribbean (Poynter 7)� 86 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 erating because it grants them agency and greater degrees of freedom� They and their readers can at least temporarily forget who they really are or are supposed to be� A liberal utopia, perhaps, this transgression of boundaries (at whose cost? ); but then again, is the achievement of not always taking oneself too seriously so despicable? Also, there is no ‘health and safety’ on Wild Cat Island� The children test their own limits and make their own rules - a formula that many writers have followed in various ways, from Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island (1942) and many subsequent books in the Famous Five series to more recent examples of the genre such as Simon Cherry’s Eddy Stone and the Epic Holiday Adventure (2018)� Another aspect to consider in Ransome’s favour is that he “never mentions gender as an obstacle to action” (Poynter 59) and that he “has, perhaps surprisingly, more girls than boys in general” (Poynter 49)� Arguably, the main protagonist in Swallows and Amazons is Titty, the ‘Robinson’ on the island� In contrast to the long tradition of “Tom Brown’s imperialist sons” (James), Ransome breaks up at least some of the gender stereotypes of the adventure genre� The metafictional references to Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island distance the novel from an all too literal reading of these pre-texts as imperialist templates in the Masterman fashion� There is no appeal to the ideology of “possessive individualism” (Macpherson) or the representation of a homo oeconomicus or even a homo imperialis that generations of readers have detected in Robinson Crusoe. Ransome’s novel calls up its literary pre-texts in a reflexive way, without bigotry or preaching� It returns something of their original freshness to these pre-texts and even gains some ironic distance to the Empire by shrinking warships into sailboats and oceans into Northern English lakes� Its references to Empire can thus also be turned the other way, as if viewing them through an inverted telescope� Swallows and Amazons allows its readers sufficient freedom to question the norms that shape the way we see and make the world and that filter reality for us just like the genre conventions of robinsonades and pirate stories� Dreaming of the possibility of an island is not the worst experience a reader can have; reality will wake us up again soon enough� It is certainly one of the functions of literature to help us find a different outlook on the world. In spite of its flaws, Swallows and Amazons can still take us to Wild Cat Island� Works Cited Anderson, Benedict� Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism� London / New York: Verso, 2016� Children’s Adventure, Empire, and Rereading 87 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 Avery, Gillian� “Ransome, Arthur Michell (1884-1967)�” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP , 2004, https: / / doi�org/ 10�1093/ ref: odnb/ 35673� Accessed 16 Dec� 2020� Baucom, Ian� “Mournful Histories: Narratives of Postimperial Melancholy�” Modern Fiction Studies, vol� 42, no� 2, 1996, pp� 259-288� Blewett, David� “The Iconic Crusoe� Illustrations and Images of Robinson Crusoe.” The Cambridge Companion to Robinson Crusoe, edited by John Richetti� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2018, pp� 159-190� Bode, Christoph� John Keats: Play On. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C� Winter, 1996� Cannadine, David� Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Oxford: Oxford UP , 2002� Chambers, Roland� The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome. London: Faber and Faber, 2009� Clarke, Charles, and Mary Cowden Clarke� Recollections of Writers, 2 nd ed� London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1878� “Cutty Sark.” Wikipedia, https: / / en�wikipedia�org/ wiki/ Cutty_Sark� Accessed 16 Dec� 2020� Finkelstein, David� The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era. University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State UP , 2002� Gilroy, Paul� After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon: Routledge, 2004� Golding, William� Lord of the Flies� 1954� London: Faber and Faber, 1985� Green, Martin� Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire. London / Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980� James, Louis� “Tom Brown’s Imperialist Sons�” Victorian Studies, vol� 17, 1973, pp� 89-99� Jameson, Fredric� “Modernism and Imperialism�” 1990� The Modernist Papers. London: Verso, 2016, pp� 152-169� ---� The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca / New York: Cornell UP , 1982� Jardine, Lisa, and Anthony Grafton� “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy�” Past and Present, vol� 129, 1990, pp� 30-78� Keats, John� “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer�” The Complete Poems, edited by John Barnard, 3 rd ed� London: Penguin, 1988, p� 72� Lovelock, Julian� Swallows, Amazons and Coots: A Reading of Arthur Ransome. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2016� Macpherson, C� B� The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962� Moretti, Franco� The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature. London / New York: Verso, 2013� O’Malley, Andrew� Children’s Literature, Popular Literature, and Robinson Crusoe. New York: St Martin’s Press / Palgrave Macmillan, 2012� Orwell, George� “Boys’ Weeklies�” 1940� Essays, edited by Peter Davison� New York / London / Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 2002, pp� 185-211� Poynter, Elizabeth� You Girls Stay Here: Gender Roles in Popular British Children’s Adventure Fiction, 1930-70. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018� 88 i ngo b erensMeyer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0004 Ransome, Arthur� Der Kampf um die Insel, translated by Wilhelm Fronemann� Stuttgart/ Berlin / Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1933� ---� Der Kampf um die Insel, translated by Edith Gradmann-Gernsheim� Aarau / Frankfurt am Main: Sauerländer, 1966� ---� Swallows and Amazons. 1930� London: Jonathan Cape, 2017� Ricœur, Paul� Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970� Rousseau, Jean-Jacques� Emilius; or, a Treatise of Education. Translated from the French of J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva� 3 vols� Edinburgh: Printed for J� Dickson and C� Elliot, 1773� Said, Edward� Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993� Singh, Minnie� “The Government of Boys: Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Ballantyne’s Coral Island.” Children’s Literature, vol� 25, 1997, pp� 205-213� Williams, Raymond� Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP , 1977� Woolf, Virginia� “Modern Fiction�” Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw� Oxford: World’s Classics, 2008, pp� 6-12� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 s usanne r eichl No Time Like the Present: Tracing 19 th -century Ideologies in 21 st -century Time Travel Adventures Introduction: Edith Nesbit’s Little Would-be Conquerors and 21 st century World-savers In one of the earliest time travel adventures written explicitly for children, The Story of the Amulet (1906), Edith Nesbit constructs a charming mock-imperialist confrontation in Egypt “eight thousand years ago” (50), with four children from Edwardian London - “where nothing now surprises anyone” (61) - who have just employed a charm and the help of a sand-elf for their first time travel adventure� Feeling uncomfortable about being marvelled at by Egyptian villagers, the eldest of the children, Cyril, takes the lead� Remembering an article in the Daily Telegraph, he announces: “we come from the world where the sun never sets� And peace with honour is what we want� We are the great Anglo-Saxon or conquering race […]” (ibid�)� He considers for a moment and then hastens to add, “[n]ot that we want to conquer you”, suggesting a milder version of subjectification instead: “[w]e only want to look at your houses and your - well, at all you’ve got here, and then we shall return to our own place, and tell of all that we have seen so that your name may be famed” (61-62)� In true imperialist fashion, Cyril does not consider that the neolithic Egyptians do not need to have their name famed in early twentieth-century England� Even though they - miraculously - understand him (it is fantasy after all), they are not particularly impressed with his speech: little wonder, given that the British Empire is still some thousand years in the future� Though politically engaged, Edith Nesbit has not gone down in history as an outspoken critic of the British Empire, but the irony in this passage suggests at least mild criticism� 1 Cyril, a boy of middle-class standing in Edwardian London, would have been a reader of nineteenth-century adventure tales for boys, which were strongly intertwined with the mindset and the rhetoric of Empire, and would have understood himself as part of the colonialist enter- 1 Edith Nesbit was a member of the socialist Fabian Society, as was H� G� Wells who, in The Story of the Amulet, features as a revolutionary socialist who is revered in the future� See Frank for an appraisal of the political and literary connections between Wells and Nesbit� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 90 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 prise (Butts, “Birth” 449)� He displays a clear sense of superiority over the Egyptians, whom he mistakenly interprets as British imperial subjects, and instantly applies the metanarrative of the British who bring peace and progress to the far reaches of the Empire� Being a mild-natured child, however, he instantly relents and joins in the hubbub that ensues when the Egyptians curiously inspect the children’s clothes� Anthea, the second eldest, picks up on Cyril’s superiority discourse and assumes “the tone of authority [towards the Egyptians] which she had always found successful when she had not time to coax her baby brother to do as he was told� The tone was just as successful now” (Nesbit 62)� When Robert later wonders aloud, along the same lines, “what a lot we could teach them if we stayed here” (64), Cyril responds that the Egyptians could teach them something, too, thus introducing a more respectful tone and a more reciprocal perspective� The authorial narrator’s subsequent summary deflects any imbalance in the conversation between the Egyptian and the English children: “It was like when you come back from your holidays and you want to hear and to tell everything at the same time” (ibid�)� This encounter turns into a wholesome learning situation for the Edwardian children, who are beginning to understand “how very few of the things they had always thought they could not do without were really not all that necessary to life” (65)� Nesbit’s meandering between a distinctly imperialist ideology on the one hand and a focus on the children’s experiencing a wondrous adventure on the other is not surprising: Victorian adventure stories traditionally lent themselves well to imperialist doctrine (Grenby 187-189)� Moreover, since her target group were child readers rather than teenagers or young adults, an elaborate reflection on the ideologies of imperialism would have been out of place here� Instead, Nesbit’s young time travellers enjoy their historical adventure despite being uneasily caught up in the paradoxes of the here and now of time travel: “‘It isn’t eight thousand years ago,’ whispered Jane� ‘It’s now - and that’s just what I don’t like about it� I say, do let’s go home again before anything more happens’” (66, italics in original)� Evidently, it is in the nature of adventures that things do happen, and when the children finally go home, in a temporal and spatial sense, Cyril sums up: “My hat! […] that was something like an adventure” (83)� Since at this point the reader has only come to the end of chapter five out of fourteen, their adventures are rightly expected to continue� Curiously, though, after their return from Egypt they find that no time has passed while they were away and they are squeakyclean, even though they got themselves very dirty on their adventures and must have spent roughly twenty-four hours away� “Then all that adventure 91 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures took no time at all” (84) and had no effects on their primary world: even “[t]he buns [were] quite soft still” (83)� Roughly one hundred years later, young time travellers are still implicated in essentially the same structures: they enjoy their adventures, lose little time in the past, and arrange their regular exploits around supplies of food usually provided by the adults involved� Since Nesbit, time travel adventures, or, as Bradford calls them, “multi-temporal fantasies” (42), have evolved and merged with other genres and media (Ederer 3): computer and live action games, picture-books, feature films and TV series, transmedia franchises, graphic novels and anime, all those make time travel stories available to readers of all ages. Self-publishing, online publishing, and fan fiction mean that the market for adventure stories today is even broader and less organised than before but also that there is no end to the creative impulses that drive the generic and thematic evolution of adventure stories in general and time travel in particular� Out of this diverse offer of contemporary time travel adventures I have selected three British series for children and young adults published since 2010, to try and track the evolution of Nesbit’s firmly Anglo-Saxon attitudes of British hegemony into a twenty-first-century ethics of adventure. I will investigate the genre’s structural affordances and their ideological implications to find out what we can learn about adventure stories through time travel narratives and the other way around. I will also consider the significance of serialisation and the rhythms of adventure which time travel stories exhibit within, but also across, the individual parts of the series� The adventures I will be looking at are Alex Scarrow’s nine-volume series TimeRiders (2010-2014), Carl Ashmore’s The Time Hunters (six volumes to date, 2012-), and Damien Dibben’s The History Keepers series (three volumes to date, 2011-)� 2 While TimeRiders came to an end with volume 9 (2014), volume 3 of The History Keepers leaves the ending open with the abduction of the protagonist� The recently published volume 6 of The Time Hunters series (June 2020) prepares the ground for more adventures after seemingly bringing the story of Becky and Joe to a close with the reunion of the family in volume 5 (2015)� All three series, like Nesbit’s time adventures, are episodic in nature: in each volume, there are several journeys into (mostly, but not exclusively) the past, and while the young characters become more mature as they face physical and ethical challenges, the structure is circular rather than linear� 2 Henceforth, Scarrow’s Time Riders is shortened to TR in in-text citations, Ashmore’s The Time Hunters to TH , and Dibben’s The History Keepers to HK , with the added numbers indicating the corresponding volume of each series� 92 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Old Wine in New Bottles? Adventure and Generic Structures Although the adventure story is as old as storytelling itself, the most concise and helpful analyses of the genre for children and young adults come from studies of nineteenth-century adventures� In the early nineteenth century, boys began to feature as heroes in adventure stories, either on desert islands, after the fashion of Defoe, in the historical past, following Sir Walter Scott, or in exotic frontier regions, echoing James Fenimore Cooper (Butts, “Birth” 447-448). Each of these settings can be related to the twenty-first-century time travel adventure� I will therefore resort to this kind of research in order to draw parallels, find analogies, and identify in how far contemporary time travel adventures contain traces of nineteenth-century adventure stories as well as twenty-first-century developments. Nineteenth-century adventure books, as Dennis Butts points out in his entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, are usually composed of the following plot elements: • a fairly ordinary but bright hero supported by a faithful companion or friend • absent parents, a domestic crisis or a family secret • a journey to an exotic setting • obstacles and dangers: hostile natives, wars or shipwreck, reflecting ethical and moral challenges • a blend of realistic and extraordinary events • a happy and successful return with material rewards for the hero (“Adventure Books” 14) 3 It is possible to identify each of Butts’s features in time travel adventures, though of course transformed to accommodate almost two centuries of literary and historical development� In the following, I will analyse in how far plot structures of nineteenth-century adventures have been adhered to and / or transformed in contemporary time travel stories� By focussing on genre, I am not so much interested in the structures themselves as in what they are able to reveal about the ethics and ideology of time travel fiction in the 2000s. To talk or write about adventure as a genre is not a straightforward affair� Matthew Grenby, in the context of children’s literature, claims that “[t]he adventure story, it might be argued, is not really a genre at all, but rather a sort of flavour or colouring, used to give an appealing taste or appearance to works with other agendas” (173)� 4 If we pursue this line of thought, adventure emerges as a pleasant packaging for particular ideologies or teachings, 3 For similar summaries, see Butts, “Birth”; Baldick; Hanke et al� 4 See also von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 5� 93 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 much like the sugar that helps the medicine go down� Grenby has a point: especially nineteenth-century stories for boys quite openly promoted ideals of muscular Christianity and imperialist superiority, remnants of which we can trace in Nesbit’s Edwardian adventure sampled above� On the other hand, it would be flippant to read the nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century adventure as no more than a glossy veneer engineered to brainwash readers into more easily accepting hidden messages behind otherwise largely insignificant stories. This would be an unacceptable overgeneralisation of the variety of stories on offer and of the equally diverse range of reading positions that afford more or less resistance to the doctrines of the day� The same resistance to generic labelling can be found in discussions of the fantastic or the science fictional. Farah Mendlesohn has claimed that science fiction writing does not merely fulfil certain expectations as to plot and tropes but constitutes “an ongoing discussion” (“Introduction” 1)� Mendlesohn also points to the overlap in children’s and young adult literature between science fiction and fantasy, criticising that too often science fiction texts for children underestimate their readers’ intellect by blending technology with the supernatural, thus blurring the boundaries between the possible and the impossible (“Is There” 284)� Maria Nikolajeva, equally distrustful of generic boundaries, reflects on fantasy in Tolkien’s sense as “a feature rather than a genre” (Magic 9) but then does continue to refer to it as a genre throughout the book� Rather than rejecting genre altogether, my understanding of generic features is based on family resemblance and schema theory, following Derrida’s notion of texts participating in rather than belonging with genres (qtd� in Kearns 202)� I would suggest that texts which participate in the genre of adventure writing, just like fantasy or science fiction, can be rewardingly analysed with a view to recurring thematic concerns, narrative structures, audiences, and speaking positions� This does not suggest that adventure stories constitute uniform text types or formula fiction featuring flat characters: on the contrary, the thematic diversity, complex character development, and the cross-genre and cross-media potential are extraordinary� Thinking through adventure in generic terms helps us to compare, contrast, and say something meaningful about a range of texts beyond their individual significance, but without losing sight of their very individual properties and without metaphorically squeezing round building blocks into square holes� Normal Kids and Absent Parents: Gender and Genre While the hero of Victorian adventures was often on his own, maybe with a loyal sidekick, the protagonists in contemporary adventures are often part of No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 94 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 a team� This is especially true of TimeRiders, which employs what Nikolajeva refers to as a “collective character” (Rhetoric ch� 4): rather than a single protagonist who drives the adventure on and functions as the narrative centre, the novel implements three equally important main characters with different talents and characteristics each� These characters are also focalisers and provide a multi-perspectival narrative, often separated by various historical epochs� Other series feature teams of siblings (The Time Hunters) or colleagues who eventually become friends (The History Keepers), and values such as friendship, trust, and loyalty are clearly crucial in these teams� Like the heroes of monomyths in ancient mythology and medieval quests, but also in fantasy epics like Harry Potter, the hero of time travel adventures is often a very “normal” young person (Butts, “Adventure Books” 14) whose special talents only emerge in the course of the adventure� While the characters seem unassuming and unimpressive at the beginning of the series, they turn out to be ‘chosen ones’ - either through family connections that only slowly come to the surface or through the possession of a particular supernatural power that only manifests gradually, such as Becky’s telekinesis in The Time Hunters� As Grenby states, an adventure is a “fantasy of empowerment” (174), and unlike in ancient, medieval or even most nineteenth-century adventures, which adhered very closely to traditional gender norms, the empowered hero can of course be a heroine, and this in itself is a significant departure from nineteenth-century fiction. Even in twenty-first-century adventures, however, male and female characters are not exactly equal, which in our examples is reflected in their stance towards the term ‘adventure’, among other things� In The Time Hunters, Becky tends to refer to ‘adventure’ in connection with its pleasures and its perils: “She longed for another adventure, but she also knew the dangers involved” (TH2 loc� 1227)� As the older sister, she is more careful and more empathetic than her rash little brother, and when Joe sketches an apparently easy plan of how they will proceed on their trip to El Dorado as a “piece of cake”, Becky counters: “Nothing is ever a piece of cake with our adventures” (TH5 182)� Crucially, the success of their adventures typically hinges on a combination of both Becky’s telekinetic powers and Joe’s physical prowess and dexterous handling of weapons, but Joe is usually more caught in the momentum of adventure than Becky� In The History Keepers, Jake Djones, who is more of an individual character if not a monomyth, does not have a big sister to balance his masculine reactions� He is frequently labelled as an adventurer, and his own sense of self evolves accordingly as the story develops� As early as page 10, “the adventurer in Jake [is] intrigued” (HK1 10) by the mystery that his abduction throws him in and he very quickly grows into this role: at first, like an actor on a stage, 95 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 performing his identity as an adventurer in Erving Goffman’s sense, he tries to “remember some lines from his favourite adventure films” (HK1 115) when he does not want to be left behind on what becomes his first journey through time. When he later tries on a sixteenth-century outfit, “his new adventurer’s clothes” (HK1 150), and looks in the mirror, he sees “a bold adventurer staring back at him” (HK1 148). Later in the first volume, when he reunites with his parents, his father “proudly” notices that he “look[s] every inch the adventurer” (HK1 382) while his mother is more worried than proud, reportedly having lost one son already to the dangers of time travel� In both series, the young male time travellers tend to be the rasher and more hot-headed ones, testosterone-driven and physically involved� The protagonists in The History Keepers and The Time Hunters return home alive and without any major injuries, looking back fondly on their adventures and excitedly planning the ones that lie ahead of them. By contrast, in the first six out of the series’ nine volumes, the TimeRiders are so busy rectifying historical contaminations and reinstalling correct timelines at great danger to themselves that they hardly have an opportunity to enjoy their adventures - in fact, the word ‘adventure’ is hardly ever mentioned� It is only in volume 7, TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings, that there are plenty of references to adventures� Liam and Rashim, who are stranded in the seventeenth century and transported to the Caribbean on board a pirate ship, experience an adventure that is not enabled by sophisticated displacement technology but by very archaic pirate ships� While they are busy fighting and building up a flourishing business as privateers and pirates, they do not think of it as their adventure either� It is the girls in the team who, frantically trying to locate them in the past from their late nineteenth-century base, imagine the appeal of the adventure and the freedom it might bring for the boys, specifically a freedom from the constraints of time travel: “[Maddy] could imagine how appealing that might be for them, particularly Liam: a wide-open horizon full of adventure and the freedom to sail off in any direction he chose” (TR7 loc. 2349). Sal, too, later reflects on the opportunities of escaping the infringements of time travel with a view to the freedom that adventures bring - by imagining the Wild West: “‘Cowboys and Indians, huh? ’ Sal could see the appeal of that� Wide-open prairies, crisp blue skies and rocky mountain skylines� A largely undiscovered frontier world full of adventure and all manner of possibilities� ‘Nice idea� I like it�’” (TR7 loc� 3050)� While girls and boys are equally indispensable for the successful outcome of the team’s endeavours, it is entirely in keeping with the gender structures of traditional adventure stories that the girls should be the ones hankering romantically after the fantasy of adventure while the boys are experiencing the ‘real thing’� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 96 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 The heroes and heroines prove themselves by passing the trials and tribulations the past or the future confronts them with and that often concern domestic crises, like a father (TH) or a brother (HK) who are believed to be dead but turn out to be alive and held captive somewhere in time� In the series I have selected, the protagonists turn out to be gifted to excel in their tasks, either in terms of character traits or particular skills and knowledge� They usually have a flaw, however, that puts them in positions they might have wanted to avoid. These flaws, such as Becky’s stubbornness and Joe’s testosterone-driven impulsiveness (TH), Jake Djones’s need to prove himself before his love interest (HK), Maddy’s doubting her leadership skills or Sal’s homesickness and dark moods (TR), are offset by their strengths: either technological or historical knowledge, a special talent for sifting through data, physical strength or emotional intelligence, or classical virtues such as bravery, friendship, loyalty, or selflessness. Twenty-first-century adventures, unlike their historical predecessors, allow for those skills and virtues to be distributed relatively equally among female and male protagonists� In The History Keepers, for instance, the team in volume 3 consists of two boys and two girls, and the girls are fighting just as fiercely as the boys� Their historical and linguistic knowledge is equal, too� There is, however, one competence that is left to the male gender, and that is science: while in The Time Hunters Becky and Joe are equally uninformed about the science of time travel, which reinforces the power distribution between children and adults, none of the female characters in The History Keepers seem to have any knowledge about the physics involved in time travel, not even those who are regular time travellers� Rose does not even try to explain “the science” to her nephew Jake, referring him to her male colleagues instead: It all sounds ludicrous, I know� And don’t ask me to explain the science of it, I’m useless at it� Jupitus would do a much better job� Or ask Charlie Chieverley - he’s a real scientist� It’s all to do with our atoms� They possess this memory of history - every single moment of it� (HK1 49) Aunt Rose also refers to the process of time travelling as “unforgettable” and “the best rollercoaster ride ever” and daintily points out a “little machine [that] is called the Horizon Cup” (53). After this altogether unscientific and rather juvenile discourse she hands over to Charlie, who, as a teenage genius, manages to explain almost everything, while Jake observes Jupitus, an adult male, “carefully mov[ing] the device’s gauges and dials to precise settings” (ibid.). Charlie explains the procedure in (pseudo-)scientific language, almost ironically so - “an incredibly specific ratio” (ibid.). The gender divide is evident: the female discourse is about sensations and emotions, whereas the 97 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 male discourse about science is marked by more formal lexical choices� Similarly, the female teenage protagonist, Topaz, after trying to explain the system to Jake, ends on: “I know it all sounds mad, but somehow it works” (HK1 81), in lieu of a more convincing and informed explanation� While the female agents in the society of The History Keepers are entirely capable of speaking a stunning variety of languages, retaining minute details of history in their memories, fighting enemies with a vast array of weapons, and saving the world every so often, they have no scientific prowess and cannot ever be seen to explain time travel to anyone� Children’s literature research has repeatedly pointed out how children and teenagers in fiction can only experience empowerment in the absence of their parents (Nikolajeva, Power 10)� For a thrilling nineteenth-century adventure in an exotic setting to happen, the absence of parents (if not of adults altogether) is an essential condition� The same is true of many twentieth-century adventurers� Reading Enid Blyton’s Famous Five in the early twenty-first century, for instance, one cannot but wonder where the parents are: from a presentist perspective, the Blyton parents are neglectful, representing the exact opposite of today’s 24 / 7 surveillance and helicopter parenting� As one of the readers who could never have gone on an adventure herself (seriously lacking private islands, adventurous cousins with dogs, and non-intrusive parents), the striking absence of parents has always seemed fortuitous to me: it clearly enables the children to go on their adventures in the first place. How, then, can contemporary children or teenagers go on an adventure when parental supervision is so tight and parental fear for their offspring’s safety so acute these days? Or, in Julia Eccleshare’s words: “how can you go on an adventure in a yellow safety jacket? ” 5 How are twenty-first-century time travel adventures even possible? Of the three series I have selected for this contribution, each solves the problem of parental interference with adventure very elegantly� In TimeRiders, the protagonists are three teenagers who are allegedly saved a moment before their certain death: from a burning building, a sinking ship (the Titanic, no less), and a crashing plane (TR1 1-19)� Their families and friends think they are dead, so they can easily embark on their time adventures without being missed or worried about: they have been given extra lifetime� The protagonist of The History Keepers, Jake Djones, finds out to his great surprise that his parents do not just run a boring shop for bathroom appliances but are actually very capable time travelling agents� 5 This was a question raised by Julia Eccleshare in her keynote lecture with the title “Abandonment and Adventure: How Contemporary Jeopardy Fits into the Traditional Themes of Children’s Literature”, presented at the IRSCL Congress 2015 at the University of Worcester� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 98 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Time travel, then, becomes something of a family business, which makes the intergenerational scruples and confrontations a little easier� Finally, Becky and Joe in The Time Hunters experience time travel under the supervision of their uncle, without their mother’s knowledge, while they spend their summer holidays in his supposedly peaceful country estate� The all-important “time away from the parents” (Ederer 142), then, is rendered relatively unproblematic� 6 In both cases of family-friendly time travel, though (The History Keepers and The Time Hunters), the young protagonists at some point need to break the rules so they can time travel without their elders and betters: those are their moments of agency and power, and they always return victorious from these adventures� ‘Out there’: From Exotic Places to Exciting Times While adventurers of the nineteenth century ventured to the frontiers of unknown territories and unchartered terrains, later adventure stories stick to the same principle but extend the scope of this urge to push at boundaries to other domains� As the ultimate demarcation line to our powers of mobility in the world as we know it, transcending time is quite as daring and adventurous as a journey into central Africa was in colonial times� The difference is one of dimension, not of principle: while Ulysses and Gulliver travelled by sea, many nineteenth-century adventurers travelled first by ship, then by train, finally by foot, and every now and then acquired faster and more innovative means of transport such as camels or hot air balloons, which broadened their scope of action� In the course of the twentieth century, aviation adventures developed, the most popular in the UK probably being W� E� Johns’s Biggles series from 1932 to 1968, revolving around pilot James Biggleworth, nicknamed “Biggles”, whose ability to quickly fly across the channel made him go further faster than other adventurers of his time (Butts, “Adventure Books” 16)� Fast cars and planes, and spaceships and rockets in science fiction, pushed twentieth-century adventurers onwards and upwards: “out there” (n� p�), as Rigby points out, which used to be synonymous with empire, meant outer space in the twentieth century� Time travel adventures add the fourth dimension to the mobility of its heroes and heroines, once again pushing the boundaries of how far adventurers can go� In this sense they are a logical continuation of the nineteenth-century conviction that no place on the map should remain white, no corner of the Empire unexplored� The temporal dimension is not one that is artificially added to the adventure story: the Empire is understood both as 6 See also Nikolajeva, Power 10� 99 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 a place and as a time� Conceptually, Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (15) applies as much to a nineteenth-century adventure in the South Pacific as to a time travel adventure in medieval England: the space that is explored, however timeless it might appear, is “charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (ibid�)� In time travel adventures, the temporal qualities are simply more salient and therefore often commented on� In both time travel and more traditional adventures, ‘getting there’ is not merely the way into or towards the adventure: it is already an intrinsic part of the adventure� With time travel stories, of course, the novum (in Darko Suvin’s sense) for readers is to find out how time travel is possible on the story level, through fantastic or scientific means. In the three series under investigation, both modes can be observed� I would suggest conceptualising this issue as a continuum between the poles of ‘fantastic / magical’ and ‘realistic / scientific’. While TimeRiders is clearly closest to the realistic end of the spectrum, with the description of chaos space and time waves being the only vaguely supernatural elements in the otherwise very technology-focussed series, The Time Hunters is closer to the fantastic pole with its combination of a high-tech laboratory, quirky time machines, and ancient mythology and its reliance on Becky’s telekinetic and Joe’s physical prowess, both of which verge on superpowers� The way time travel works in The History Keepers is probably the most fantastic of all: while there is a sort of pseudo-science involved, similar to The Time Hunters, which links chemical compounds and the alignment of the planets, the sensations that Jake experiences and the notion that big historical ships can jump through time without a trace of modern technology position the series on the fantastic side of the spectrum� Instead of exotic places, then, the time travellers go to exciting times, usually the past: in The History Keepers and The Time Hunters, travelling into the characters’ future is not even possible according to specific time travel laws so that the adventures are exclusively historical ones� In TimeRiders, historical journeys dominate but the time travellers also travel into various versions of the future to see for themselves the consequences of their actions in the past and the present� However, since the future is more malleable than the past, these trips resemble reconnaissance missions rather than extended journeys� The link between present and future is generally much tighter in the narrative of TimeRiders than in the other series: while the chronotopic home base is New York in 2001 or, from volume 6 onwards, London in 1889, there are frequent prolepses into the future (without anyone actually travelling there) which serve to explain how time travel was implemented, abused, and banned but No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 100 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 also to illustrate the dystopian dimensions of the twenty-first-century human exploitation and destruction of the planet� Another connection across the epochs is the fact that each of the main characters comes from a different time and place, from Ireland in the early twentieth century (Liam) to the US in the 2000s (Maddy), India in the 2020s (Sal), and the US again in the 2060s (Rashim, from volume 5 onwards)� Giving each time traveller a different chronotope of origin broadens the spectrum of knowledge of history and popular culture and enables a varied historical appraisal of the times that the teenagers find themselves in: Liam, for instance, compares the poverty he sees in medieval England to the one he witnessed in his “old life” in early twentieth-century Ireland (TR3 145), and Sal keeps conjuring up her memories of a polluted and congested Mumbai in the 2020s (TR7 loc� 363)� It also complicates the otherwise relatively easy categorisation of past, present, and future� The TimeRiders’ base for the first 6 novels, an archway in New York programmed to reset around the days of September 11, 2001 in a seemingly endless cycle, constitutes the distant future for Liam, the present (plus a few years) for Maddy, and the past for Sal and Rashim, i� e� before either of them was born� Time is shown as contingent and relational rather than objective� This is in accordance with the malleability of past, present, and future for time travellers, which is an important precondition for the cycles of adventures of the series� The adventure of ‘getting there’ is followed by the adventure of surviving there and fulfilling whatever task the time travellers have been set or set themselves, from simply surviving to saving the world single-handedly� While H. G. Wells’s first intentional time traveller in The Time Machine (1895) was driven by his intellectual curiosity to travel far into the future, contemporary teenagers usually travel into the past to “fix it” (TR3 198)� Both teams in TimeRiders and The History Keepers have made it their mission to protect historical timelines and reverse any contaminations� In The Time Hunters, there is the aim of historical education - “I suppose it may benefit your education to see Victorian England” (TH1 87) - but they also rescue other time travellers, debunk historical myths, and solve quest-like mysteries� Intellectual curiosity is there to some degree but these modern time travellers are largely driven by duty, loyalty, and a spirit of adventure rather than scientific interest: “We put our lives out on a limb to save history” (HK1 105)� It is only later in TimeRiders that the sense of duty is overruled by a sense of adventure and curiosity, when Maddy suggests enjoying time travel for the diversions it might bring: Explore a little� Not too far back in time� And not too far away in distance� I mean, just think of all the things we could get a look at without pushing the displacement machine to its limits: the coronation of Queen Victoria, the execution of Charles I, 101 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 the first stone of Westminster Abbey being laid. Shakespeare? How cool would that be? Meeting Will the Quill, giving him some story ideas? (TR7 loc� 415) However, their first attempt at time-travel tourism goes horribly wrong and they end up in grave danger in the middle of the Great Fire of London in 1666, losing Liam and Rashim, who are then transported to the Caribbean and have to be rescued by the rest of the team� Stop and Go: The Rhythm of Adventure Adventure stories follow a certain rhythm of activity and rest: after the adventurer has spent some time fighting or running from dangerous people or animals, they have to rest and eat or sleep� Periods in which the adventurer needs to solve mysteries or develop plans interrupt the “speed and urgency” (Hanke et al� 6) and constitute an “enforced physical immobility” (Rigby n� p�)� Twenty-first-century time travel narratives, too, follow a rhythm of contemplation and action, of stop and go: phases of travelling, fighting, and rescuing alternate with phases of reflection, dialogue, and rest. They are episodic adventures adhering to the basic home-away-home structure so prevalent in children’s literature (Nodelman and Reimer 197-203), ‘home’ here in both a temporal and spatial sense, with the ‘home’ phases tending to be quieter and more reflective and often connected with food: while in The Time Hunters the adventurers have lush picnics or return home to lavish feasts, the TimeRiders seem to live frugally on ordered pizza, coke, and coffee� It is often food and other practicalities that establish a balance between the extraordinariness of the adventures and the realism (Butts, “Adventure Books” 14) needed to enable young readers to identify or empathise with the teenage hero� The serialisation of the adventures means that this structure is repeated several times in each volume, which provides more occasion over the course of the series to include protagonists’ long-term developments� This echoes Georg Simmel’s definition of adventure in that each individual trip into the past “revolves around its own center” and is still part of a larger structure, “a segment of a life-course” (231)� The means of time travel determine the narrative pace of the adventure to some extent: travelling from one epoch to another and back again in the milkfloat, the campervan, and other high-speed time machines in The Time Hunters takes no time at all, whereas time travel on historical ships across oceans via horizon points (The History Keepers) makes for fairly heavy-handed and slow progress and leaves plenty of time for reflection and even for romantic relationships to blossom� TimeRiders has the most scientifically plausible means No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 102 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 of travel: displacement technology, which needs plenty of coding by the AI that has been sent back from the future, a sophisticated appliance involving water tanks, and a great deal of energy - which becomes a major issue when the team relocate from the twenty-first to the nineteenth century. Generating this energy and calculating the time coordinates takes some time so that in this series, too, there is a great deal of waiting in between fast-paced action which the characters spend on eating, discussing their next moves, or reflecting on their situation and their identities� The rhythms of activity and waiting which result from the affordances of the time machines seem to replace the more traditional rhythms of day and night, of waking and sleeping, in nineteenth-century adventures� A topos of adventure stories in the popular nineteenth-century Robinsonades is the shipwreck (Butts, “Adventure Books” 12). In twenty-first-century time travel adventures this often morphs into characters being stranded in time without the power or equipment to go back (or forward) and waiting to be saved by fellow time travellers� Waiting for a rescue team can turn into an opportunity to reflect on the epoch the protagonists are stranded in and a detailed comparison with their chronotopic homes: Rashim, for instance, while stuck on a pirate ship in 1667, has an opportunity to discuss his feelings about returning to his native 2060s with Liam while looking out on the “beautiful unpolluted colours that seemed to belong to another planet entirely” (TR7 loc. 2138): “The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the hands of a smarter species than humans, could have been remarkable� […] Instead, we just thrashed our planet� Rendered it inhospitable” (loc� 2152)� The contrast between his essentially uninhabitable ‘home’ and the unspoilt nature surrounding him could not be greater� Another kind of reflection takes place on board the Escape, the time-travelling ship in The History Keepers, which moves so slowly that Jake can engage with a whole list of things as they are approaching land: At the prow of the Escape, Jake waited patiently� Gradually he started to discern the faint outline of land, shrouded in early morning mist� Then, directly ahead, he spotted a faint triangular shape outlined against the rocky coast� […] But as he looked more carefully, he realized that it was an island […]� He […] examined the curious triangle in more detail� […] She [Topaz] was eating one of Charlie’s almond and chocolate croissants� French people always ate their pastries with such panache, Jake reflected, and Topaz was no exception� Even the simple action of catching crumbs and tipping them into her mouth he found inexplicably dazzling� As the island continued to materialize out of the mist, Topaz told Jake all about it� (HK1 81, my italics) 103 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 The highlighted lexical and grammatical choices and the detail of observation here reflect the slow pace at which the ship moves, which enables Jake to observe the coastline and indulge in his love interest, not without a little stereotypical observation, while Topaz tells him the history of the headquarters of the History Keepers� Even in an otherwise action-packed adventure, there is time for all this� Good or Bad Times? Appraising History In these reflective pauses, what do the time travellers think about the epochs they have just encountered? There are two attitudes for young characters to respond to past periods: nostalgia, i� e� the uncritical longing for a simpler version of the world, and presentism, i� e� stereotypical ascriptions of historical epochs as inferior to the present� Both attitudes can occur in the same novels and be performed by the same characters so that a general diagnosis of one series or one character as presentist or nostalgic would be simplistic� Instead, it is more interesting to identify which particular aspects or periods of history are met with presentism or nostalgia, or a combination of both, and to what end� Both attitudes can be explained with a lack of knowledge: while travelling to the past is comparable to going to exotic places, the ‘knowability’ of these times and places is similar, too� Adventurers to the outposts of the British Empire were equipped with limited knowledge and plenty of prejudices about these places, and while historical knowledge is available to today’s time travellers, it is often patchy and just as biased� This becomes especially noticeable in connection with the Middle Ages, a time that has traditionally been constructed as the temporal Other of modernity (Bradford 1, 7)� Bradford identifies two types of representation of the Middle Ages in children’s literature: “a romanticised pre-industrial and pre-technological world whose inhabitants lead simple, wholesome lives; or as a primitive time / place permeated by filth, disease and superstition” (7). Both can be found in the selected series� In TimeRiders, the Middle Ages receive a more nuanced treatment: before Liam’s journey to late twelfth-century England, medieval times are thought of schematically as dark and dangerous - “Just remember, guys … it’s January 1194� Dark times” (TR3 85) - and compared unfavourably to the romantic portrayal of Robin Hood in early twentieth-century films: “Nothing at all like the films, I’m afraid. No men in tights, or maidens with golden locks waiting to be rescued from Disney-like castles� It’s a dark and brutal time” (ibid�)� The conviction that the Middle Ages are a dark time is even articulated by a medieval ‘native’, Sébastien Cabot, a Cistercian monk, who explains that No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 104 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 in “[d]ark times as these […] [e]vil stalks these woods, stalks this country” (TR3 98) and that in these “dark, troubled times” (TR3 110) especially the poor would easily believe in supernatural stories� While the darkness and the fear the monk expresses can be explained with the political situation in England at the time, five months before King Richard’s return from the crusades and his captivity, the utterance still sounds like an echo of the historical presentist stereotype� However dark it might be, the longer Liam stays in medieval England, the more appealing it seems to him, and he starts to be critical of his own time: “It’s a crowded world,” he [Liam] replied. “That’s what I find. A crowded world full of noisy fat people�” [Cabot: ] “Fat? ” He nodded� “As plump as the lords and barons� Everyone, even the poorest, lives a lord’s life by comparison to the people here� Everyone eats more than they need� Everyone has more things than they would ever need�” “’Tis a good time that ye come from, then�” He shrugged� “It should be�” Cabot’s eyes narrowed� “But ye do not miss it? ” (TR3 229) From Cabot’s perspective, a time in which everyone is well-fed is clearly preferable to his own times� Yet, Liam is not altogether in agreement with Cabot’s positive appraisal of the twenty-first century, which might have to do with the fact that he has developed a penchant for the lifestyle in medieval England� But the passage also reveals a rather slanted perspective that his ‘home’ in the early twenty-first-century US gives him: evidently, not everyone in the twenty-first century is richer and better off than the medieval English� There are plenty of poor and homeless people living in the US, and of course there is a whole world of poverty outside the US, too, which Liam might not be aware of� What he also fails to mention are the dangers of terrorist attacks such as 9 / 11 (which is close to the team’s home base in New York), the pitfalls of modern technology, the lethal consequences of environmental destruction, or the horrors of modern warfare, all of which become very real in the course of the series as the travellers develop an understanding of the planet’s future� Rather than a self-assured time traveller who is confident about the worth of the twenty-first century, this is a doubting, insecure character, but one who is clearly beginning to see the Middle Ages in a different, and altogether brighter, light� The attraction Liam feels for the pre-industrial landscape and society in 1194 - “he’d miss rising each morning with the sound of cockerels stirring and the distant ring of a blacksmith’s hammer, the smell of woodsmoke and unleavened bread baking in hundreds of clay ovens” (TR3 228) - gives us an 105 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 idea of the nostalgia that accompanies such a view: he does not consider the blacksmith’s hard work or the bakers who have to get up before the break of dawn, so the material basis for Liam’s stimulating sensations is invisible� Liam is fascinated by the lifestyle of the upper classes of the twelfth century, which he participates in, and becomes a little class-blind as a consequence, in the same way that he is rather selective about his assessment of the twenty-first century. Although nostalgia is a sentiment that is felt for former times, a retrospective emotion, the time travellers feel it at the very moment in which they experience the former time� Their lived experience of both times enables a direct comparison� The enchantment with pre-industrial landscape is echoed in other time travel series: When Jake sees the Egyptian pyramids in 27AD, he is overawed: As he gazed at the ancient structures, serene and alone in the vast landscape, utterly untouched by the modern world, he felt a sudden surge of emotion� His heart swelled and a tear came to his eye� “History is amazing …” he whispered solemnly� “Just amazing! ” (HK2 199) Again, there is no consideration of the human toil that has gone into the pyramids; Jake perceives them almost as if they were natural wonders, in the same way that Becky responds to the mythical El Dorado in seventeenth-century Guyana: [S]he was astounded by what she saw� All around, the dark, dank rainforest had been replaced by a very different scene. Flowers flourished in every colour, sunlight burst through a copse of trees illuminating a wide pool of the bluest water� It was like they’d stepped into another world entirely - an enchanted world, one flushed with boundless beauty and magic� (TH5 211) The theme of an “overcivilized society regaining contact with nature through the adventure of the individual” (Rigby n� p�), which can be found in nineteenth-century adventure stories, applies here, too, and seems to trigger a sense of the sublime in the face of the wonders of preindustrial, sometimes even prehistoric, landscapes� When Uncle Percy takes the children back to the Ice Age and they witness what he calls “Mammoth Gorge”, Becky is overcome with awe and starts crying (TH1 72); when she encounters medieval England, she appreciates the lack of any “marker of civilisation […] something that evinced so called progress - electrical pylons, motorways, cars zipping down country lanes, planes soaring overhead� Here there was none of it� And she liked it� She liked it very much” (TH4 150)� Similarly, the TimeRiders enjoy every moment spent in preindustrial settings and outside cities, whether in the sixteenth-century Caribbean or in medieval England� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 106 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 The positive appraisal of past times in time travel series goes beyond the individual periods and extends to history as such, endowing history with an ontological status� Frequently, history is “amazing” (HK1 303), “magical beyond belief” (HK1 454), “awesome” (TH5 276), and seen as predominantly positive, almost naively so, as a passage from The History Keepers shows: That blue planet had been home to all those epochs and their glories - their art and learning, their progress and invention; their kings, conquerors and despots� It was a moment of profound wonder that Jake knew he would never forget� (HK2 137) Jake mentions the despots almost in passing but does not linger on the negative sides of history: it is the “glories” and the “progress” he sees in the past of the planet, despite the fact that on his adventures he has encountered some of the vilest fictional characters created in the genre, such as the crudely named Prince Zeldt and Mina Schlitz� Despite the nostalgia, the awe, and the occasional temptation to stay in the past, all the young time travellers return to their home times and places, sometimes out of a sense of duty, sometimes to be with their loved ones� In the case of Becky, we can actually witness a self-aware maturation process: “I mean, we’ve got some awesome things - the net, mobile phones, laptops, hair straighteners, pot noodles - […] but you end up taking it all for granted� I know I did� I s’pose one thing I’ve learnt from travelling is not to do that so much� Uncle Percy never takes anything for granted�” (TH3 193) This relativism does not override the certainty that the best time to live is the present, whenever that might be� In the case of TimeRiders, after relocating their headquarters to Victorian London, Maddy considers moving to a different epoch to spend her life there, in a quasi-dialogue with herself� “Hey� Look at me, eh? Just like someone picking out a holiday online�” Because that’s how she figured she must appear to anyone looking on: some college kid picking out a gap-year tour of exotic places to visit� Ancient Rome? Nah, been there, done that� Egypt in the time of the pharaohs? Too hot� Tudor England? Too much beheading going on� Elizabethan England? Too much Catholic-burning going on� Renaissance Italy? 107 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Hmmm … She rather liked the fancy clothes and the idea of looking up Leonardo da Vinci and maybe posing for a portrait or two� But then decided that the poor sanitation, plague and a little too much zealous persecution of heretics was somewhat off-putting� (TR7 loc� 4759) This ironical assessment of past epochs asserts Maddy’s conviction that, if they cannot move to twenty-first-century New York for reasons of personal safety, they might as well stay in Victorian London� ‘History is sacred’: Free Will and Determinism If we try and trace family resemblances from nineteenth-century adventure stories to twenty-first-century time travel adventures, then what are we to make of exotic adventures asserting British superiority and strengthening readers’ belief in England as the best place to be? Rigby defines as the central paradox of adventure stories that “[a]dventure happens ‘out there,’ but its meaning is found at home” (n� p�)� In other words, the adventures serve to underpin domestic values� For time travel adventures this could suggest that the journeys into historical epochs have the main function of asserting the belief that the present is the best time to live in or even that the present is superior to the past� As my examples above have shown, this is not always the case: there is a sense of nostalgia through which historical epochs are often idealised uncritically, and the lack of technology or of any signs of industry is often held to be an advantage over the dirty, crowded cities of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The time travellers’ enthusiasm is often offset by the horrors and the villains of the past, and an appreciation of modern conveniences, as Maddy’s assessment above suggests� What is equally striking is the attitude towards changing history: notwithstanding the evil characters and atrocities that history is made of, it must be kept on course as a basic rule of time travel� As Galliana Goethe, the head of the History Keepers, explains this rule to Jake at the very beginning of his adventures, […] once it has happened, we must never try to change the past� We cannot, and do not, bring people back from the dead, or stop wars or undo catastrophes once they have existed� We cannot and should not stop the Great Fire of London or the sinking of the Titanic, no matter how we feel about those events� […] History is sacred� The past may be littered with horrors, but remember, Jake, that those horrors could be a million times worse� (HK1 121) No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 108 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 For readers familiar with mainstream time travel narratives in popular culture, not just those in young adult fiction, this decree comes as no surprise: whether their generic roots are in science fiction or in fantasy, time travel stories have in common that history must not be meddled with� Instead, its course needs to be protected and repaired from all contaminations� This time travel law is a useful trigger for characters’ moral and ethical conflicts: despite the fact that they know they must not interfere with history, Joe and Becky save a child from a burning house when they travel to the Great Fire of London in 1666 (TH6 73)� In the other two series, the rule is more fervently defended: History is seen as inviolable and immovable� There is no other option: the modalities used in the quotation above point to the inability (“we cannot”), to the moral implications (“we should not”), and to an unquestioned practice that seems to forbid even thinking about an alternative (“and do not”)� There is an underlying determinism here that history is the best sequence of events available and that every endeavour to change it for the better can only result in a corrupted, a ‘bad’, timeline� This is an echo of time travel stories such as Stephen Fry’s Making History (1996), in which the plan to avoid Hitler being born results in a fascist world in the twentieth century, and a faithful execution of the time travel directives in “Sound of Thunder”, Ray Bradbury’s influential science fiction story of 1966 about a time traveller stepping on a butterfly in the past and thus changing the future for the worse. The plot development of the first volume of TimeRiders is a radical version of this: with Hitler not invading Russia, Germany wins the Second World War, which results in a German New York controlled by a “Greater Reich” in 2001� After an attempt by the TimeRiders to change this development for the better, New York in 2001 is hit by nuclear disaster and ravaged by murdering mutants� The implications here are clear and do not leave the reader much room for dissent or resistance: even though it might be bloody, atrocious, and injust, the history we know is still its best available version� It seems that if the past as we know it is immutable, it is a firmer foundation than a potentially changeable past� In other words: we can only believe in our identity if our history is accounted for� In TimeRiders volume 3, a change in history results in a much more peaceful timeline and the USA being French, and a short argument among the team reveals deep-seated beliefs about national identity: “My God! ” uttered Maddy� “Then there’s no America either! ” “There is,” said Sal, “but it isn’t English, that’s all�” Maddy shook her head� “Hey! It’s not the same, Sal� It’s not America if it isn’t, you know, if it isn’t English! ” 109 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Sal shrugged at that� “I would still be Indian, English empire or not� You are the soil you are born on, not a flag or a language. Well, that’s what my old ba used to say�” “Well,” Maddy continued, muttering under her breath still� “I wouldn’t call this place America without the Stars and Stripes� Just isn’t right�” (TR3 197) Even though this alternative timeline looks more sustainable and peaceful, the TimeRiders follow their principle and restore history back to the Anglo-American version they know and feel comfortable with� Within this predetermined universe, however, the characters can still execute a modicum of free will and break the rules� As the longest and most complex series, the last three volumes of the TimeRiders series engage with this in great detail� The protagonists discover that their initial instructions to protect history as it is lead to an annihilation of the human race from the planet: humans have wrecked the environment, incited oil wars, and eventually set loose a deadly virus� With this knowledge, the rule to never allow any changes to history is slowly replaced by a new conviction: that they must try and change its course. This is presented as a long and difficult argument among the protagonists, leading to a surprising turn of events that involves an encounter with Jesus, a plan to rewrite the Bible, and the mission to change history for the better� To save the world, free will has to rule over historical determinism� As the only completed series, TimeRiders traces the most complex development of characters and their attitudes towards time travel and the mission they are on� With the other series still open-ended, the verdict is still out on whether the dictum that history remain unchanged prevails� Conclusion: Echoes of Nineteenth-century Adventures in Twentyfirst-century Time Travel Series Maria Nikolajeva is fairly critical of Nesbit’s adventures in time, referring to them as “time picnics” (Mythic 154) and critiquing the stories (and other fantasies, such as C� S� Lewis’s Narnia tales) for the fact that the children’s adventures have no impact on their lives after the adventure and that they return home unchanged� With regard to Narnia Nikolajeva claims that, like in computer games, the children can easily escape from their adventures “when things become too scary and complicated” so that the whole adventure becomes a “time-out” (Mythic 128): “in most quest stories for children […] the protagonists, unlike the hero in myth (or a novice during initiation), are liberated from the necessity to suffer the consequences of their actions” (125)� Does this ethical judgment of Nesbit’s time travel adventures apply to more recent examples? I would argue that the seriality of the novels is indeed an in- No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 110 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 trinsic structural guarantee that the protagonists will survive the dangers, but their experiences in all three series complicate the idea of an inconsequential ‘picnic’� While the children almost always return physically unharmed from their travels, they do experience loss and pain, and they go through changes in their personalities� Becky and Joe have to witness the death of their great friend and mentor Will Shakelock (TH 4), something that affects them deeply in the subsequent volumes, and in The Time Hunters 6 they have to save their parents and their friends while risking their own lives� The TimeRiders, too, lose friends and members of their team, but the effect time travel has on their sense of self is even more profound: in the course of the first six volumes, they have to come to terms with the fact that they are clones, “meatbots” (TR6 loc� 2470), as they call them, with at least partly engineered memories� As if to demonstrate their inviolable humanness, they react to this discovery with very strong emotions, from rage to depression, to the point of Sal considering suicide� The fact that these characters are also internal focalisers adds to the strength of representation of these emotional upheavals and shows that they are far from having an inconsequential picnic or wearing a safety jacket� Twenty-first-century time travel adventures raise a number of ethical questions, from what is human to equally complex issues of what constitutes a peaceful and just history� Dealing with each in detail would go beyond the scope of this contribution, so instead I would like to revisit the ethics and ideologies that nineteenth-century adventures have been attested with and try and identify what they have developed into more than 100 years later� Does Cyril’s assumed imperialist superiority, however ironical, still surface in the twenty-first century? Obviously, twenty-first-century adventurers would look rather ridiculous and pompous if they assumed an air of British imperialism, and the series are explicitly anti-racist and anti-slavery, which becomes evident in Liam’s treatment of run-away slaves in their Caribbean adventures (TR7 loc� 2883) or in Jake’s furious reaction to seeing slaves in 27 AD (HK2 148)� But there are social structures the time travellers are oblivious of, and they suggest that the adventure format might not lend itself to a complex ethical engagement of slavery and other historical atrocities� Despite Jake’s impulsive response to the slaves sold in the streets of Messina, he fails to see them in another situation: As Jake steered the Conqueror on towards the harbour of Messina (he was increasingly enjoying navigating), he noticed another ship approaching from the other direction, her two dozen oars moving swiftly and perfectly in time� He gaped in awe as she sped past them, decks teeming with activity� […] At the stern, under an 111 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 awning, an imperious-looking couple reclined on a large velvet divan� An attendant was fanning them with peacock feathers� (HK2, 143) Jake sees the ship and is overawed by its splendour and activity, not stopping to think who it is that makes the oars move so “perfectly in time”, who is responsible for all the activity, and what the social role of this “attendant” is - in all likelihood a slave� Similarly, when Becky encounters poverty in Victorian Oxford - “[d]ozens of people trudged the long, bustling road, some in formal attire, others wearing little more than rags� A red-haired woman with a dirtstained face shivered on the street corner, clutching a bucket brimming with wilted flowers” (TH1 93) - she does not stop to question or comment on what she sees� The poverty becomes part of a scenery, a schema for the Victorian age she may be familiar with but which she does not inquire into� Becky is otherwise a rather empathetic teenager, so it is a little out of character for her not to notice, and my explanation is that there is simply not enough time to discuss poverty� At this point, they are just on their way to the Ashmolean and rather pressed for time to proceed with the next step of their adventure� On the whole, most characters are quick to point out social injustices but to fully dwell on the social inequalities of the various historical periods would seriously slow down the pace of the adventure� The Time Hunters series does point towards imperialist ideology still inherent in contemporary adventure series, however� The children’s Uncle Percy, despite his characterisation as a near-saint with the best of intentions, collects animals from different times, bringing them back to his estate to keep as pets, and builds houses on supposedly uninhabited islands� While the series vindicates his activities by a display of how well the animals are cared for, some even being released back into their natural habitat, and due to the fact that no one is disturbed by his appropriation of far-flung places in the past, Percy still poses as a colonial collector and settler� Of the three series, The Time Hunters is the one in which time travel is most often undertaken for the sake of education, fun, and relaxation; in the latest volume the children even travel back in time to escape the danger of a COVID-19 infection� The entitlement at the root of this often leisurely travelling through time is based on Percy’s riches: again, every attempt is made to characterise Percy as a modest character and to downplay his wealth, but the cars he drives, his mansion, grounds, and lifestyle do not entirely back this strategy� Adventure for adventure’s sake, the motivation that generally makes nineteenth-century adventurers embark on their travels, is not entirely gone or transformed in twenty-first-century time travel: Jake Djones in The History Keepers is the character most obviously driven by a sense of adventure and No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 112 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 curiosity, and his fascination with historical times and places is set out right at the beginning when he has a good look around the London office of the History Keepers and the reader is filled in on his character: “He was intrigued by history; by the type of powerful, mysterious people in the murals he had just seen - rulers and emperors - but sadly his history teacher was not one of the interesting ones” (HK1 18). This masculine and glorified version of history that Jake is fascinated with and his strong sense of himself as an adventurer is what motivate him to fight for his right to time travel. When Rashim, in his seventeenth-century pirate adventure (TR7), refuses to stop fighting for even more money and gold, he appeals to Liam’s “sense of adventure”, claiming that the “even bigger win […] out there” is merely waiting for him “to go and grab it” (TR7 loc� 3366)� Our contemporary time travellers seem to have adopted the imperial gesture of entitlement to whatever is ‘out there’� This, to me, is a watered-down continuation of nineteenth-century imperialist entitlement� Time travel in TimeRiders, by contrast, is associated with a sense of burden rather than entitlement, and the teenagers battle with the consequences of what they experience on their travels: “monsters, mutants, dinosaurs, hominids, Nazis, eugenics […], time waves, churning storm fronts of infinite realities, […] chaos space haunted by ever-encroaching apparitions” (TR7 loc� 4462)� The awareness of physical dangers to themselves and the ongoing conflict between their official agenda and their own desires add to their daily worries and leave no doubt that these adventures are anything but a picnic� The TimeRiders go through a development in which they first time travel out of a duty that is largely extrinsically motivated, then assume agency and try to establish their own agenda, before eventually being certain about the ethically correct way of saving the planet, and this is where the series ends� In the introduction to a recent collection of essays on adventure, von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher set up a dichotomy of “Abenteuerlust oder Lebensnot” (5) as the poles that motivate adventures, and while TimeRiders is closest to a life-or-death necessity, Jake in The History Keepers is closest to the thirst for adventure when it comes to his reasons for time travelling� While the TimeRiders decide for themselves when and where to travel, Jake and Becky and Joe are not free to go� In both cases, adults control access to time travelling devices, and the question of whether or not they can travel gives rise to a number of confrontations and broken rules� While the parents might not be present, there are other adults who control the freedom of their movements, possibly in their best interest but annoyingly so nevertheless, and the intergenerational conflicts in both The History Keepers and The Time Hunters revolve around keeping the children safe or involving them in dangerous missions� While on the story level the teenagers often throw ethics overboard and de- 113 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 cide to break the rules by time travelling without permission, the structural dynamics of adventures demand that they go: the alternative would be to put on their metaphorical safety jackets and wait at home for the return of their friends, and that, as we know, does not constitute an adventure� While the selection of destinations in nineteenth-century adventure stories was in accordance with the imperialist mental geographies at the time and focussed on unexplored territory that was still part of the British Empire, the time periods selected in twenty-first-century adventures are closer to home: while all three series span the globe and a number of centuries, the destinations in TimeRiders are selected with a clear Anglo-American bias, either because they are set in the US or the UK or because they are tightly connected with US or British history� Clearly, history as we know it needs to be upheld, and while The Time Hunters humorously debunks myths like the Argonauts and the Minotaur, the TimeRiders and The History Keepers series for the most part are concerned with making sure nothing changes from what it says in the history books� In The History Keepers the team is an international and intertemporal one, the agents coming from a variety of chronotopes, and in The Time Hunters we encounter a similarly international community of time travellers, but in TimeRiders, saving the world lies firmly in the hands of an American-based team predominantly concerned with saving US-American history� This cannot only be explained with a lack of creative imagination on the part of the author: to me, it also indicates that there is a clear representational hierarchy in the history of this world� The TimeRiders travel to various periods in American, European, and South American history but never to Asia, Africa, Australia, or the Pacific region. This problematically translates a popular nineteenth-century view of colonised places as places without history or identity into the twenty-first century: places that do not appear to be of primary concern or of foundational significance for Western civilisations do not only receive less media attention, they also feature less in fiction for young readers. Despite the genre's tendency to push at boundaries, some perceptual and ideological boundaries are still firmly in place in the twenty-first century. Finally, a kind of historical imperialism can be traced in the insistence on history as we know it as the best version available� Our historical past is the basis for the way we live now and, even as a thought experiment, an altered past would seriously shake the foundations of how we define ourselves today. Making sure history is not changed therefore affirms our identity and our modernity� As Clare Bradford argues for the representation of the Middle Ages, the “weirdness” of the past “testif[ies] to the solidity and reliability of the present” (55)� The past is the Other, but as long as it is a knowable Other, it reaffirms the present in its conviction that it is at its pinnacle of material and No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures 114 s usanne r eichl 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 moral progress� More than a century after the height of the British Empire, this echo of imperialist ideology is still present in the narrative structures of adventure stories, and with the increasing popularity and diversification of time travel adventures we can also expect it to remain with us for some time to come� Works Cited Ashmore, Carl� The Time Hunters. Addlebury Press, 2010� eBook� [ TH 1] ---� The Time Hunters and the Box of Eternity. Addlebury Press, 2011� eBook� [ TH 2] ---� The Time Hunters and the Lost City� Addlebury Press, 2015� eBook� [ TH 5] ---� The Time Hunters and the Spear of Fate� Addlebury Press, 2012� eBook� [ TH 3] ---� The Time Hunters and the Sword of Ages� Addlebury Press, 2014� eBook� [ TH 4] ---� The Time Hunters and the Wraith’s Revenge� Addlebury Press, 2020� eBook� [ TH 6] Bakhtin, Mikhail� “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics�” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson� Columbus: Ohio State UP , 2002, pp� 15-24� Baldick, Chris� “Adventure Story�” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4 th ed� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2015� eBook� Bradford, Clare� The Middle Ages in Children’s Literature� London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015� Butts, Dennis� “The Birth of the Boys’ Story and the Transition from the Robinsonades to the Adventure Story�” Revue de Littérature Comparée, vol� 4, 2002, pp� 445-454� ---� “Adventure Books�” Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Jack Zipes, vol� 1� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2006, pp� 12-16� Dibben, Damian� The History Keepers: Circus Maximus� London: Random House, 2013� eBook� [ HK 2] ---� The History Keepers: The Storm Begins� London: Random House, 2012� eBook� [ HK 1] Ederer, Petra� The Empowered Child: Discourses of Childhood in Time Travel Stories for Children and Young Adults� 2019� University of Vienna, PhD dissertation� Frank, Cathrine� “Tinklers and Time Machines: Time Travel in the Social Fantasy of E� Nesbit and H� G� Wells�” Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry� New York: Routledge, 2003, pp� 72-88� Goffman, Erving� The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life� Garden City, NY : Doubleday, 1959� Grenby, M� O� Children’s Literature. Edinburgh Critical Guides� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 2008� Hanke, Veronica, et al� “Adventure Stories�” The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English, edited by Victor Watson� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2001, pp� 6-9� Kearns, Michael� “Genre Theory in Narrative Studies�” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al� London: Routledge, 2005, pp� 201-205� Koppenfels, Martin von, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp� 1-16� 115 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0005 Mendlesohn, Farah� “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction�” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2003, 1-12� ---� “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s Science Fiction? A Position Piece�” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol� 28, no� 2, 2004, pp� 284-313� Nesbit, Edith� The Story of the Amulet, illustrated by H. R. Millar. 1906. London: Puffin Books, 1996� Nikolajeva, Maria� From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature� Lanham: The Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, 2000� ---� Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers� New York: Routledge, 2010� ---� The Magic Code: The Use of Magical Patterns in Fantasy for Children� Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988� ---� The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Literature� Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002� Nodelman, Perry, and Mavis Reimer� The Pleasures of Children's Literature, 3 rd ed� Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003� Rigby, Nigel� “Adventure Story�” The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, edited by Rosemary Herbert� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2005� 10�1093/ acref/ 9780195072396�001�0001� Accessed 1 Aug� 2020� Scarrow, Alex� TimeRiders. London: Puffin Books, 2010. eBook. [ TR 1] ---� TimeRiders: City of Shadows. London: Puffin Books, 2012. eBook. [ TR 6] ---� TimeRiders: The Doomsday Code. London: Puffin Books, 2011. eBook. [ TR 3] ---� TimeRiders: The Pirate Kings. London: Puffin Books, 2013. eBook. [ TR 7] Simmel, Georg� “The Adventure”, translated by David Kettler� Partisan Review, vol� 26, no� 2, 1959, pp� 231-242� Suvin, Darko� Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP , 1979� No Time Like the Present: Time Travel Adventures a gainsT e MPire ? a DvenTures in / oF P osTcolonialiTy 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 F abienne i Mlinger Against Reading� Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #1 something else “The concept is very interesting, but I found it difficult to read and to select passages for us to discuss in class”� You can sense a collective gasp of relief in the room when my student starts her presentation of Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! with this confession� 1 Other students have had a similar experience, as did I, their teacher� Even though we read Philip’s essay in the Notanda section of the book and thus understood what her poems were about and why she wrote them in this particular way, we struggled with actually reading the poems themselves� My contribution takes its inspiration from the discussions we had in class and from the discrepancy, or paradox, so aptly discerned by my student� There is a tension at work between understanding and reading, between pleasure, frustration, and even aversion� At the heart of this tension is a form of reading I learned to practice, with a zeal bordering on reverence, during my university career, namely close reading� For Suman Gupta, the “powerful convention of close reading” in English Studies is “conventional” because it “doesn’t need to be justified; it is accepted a priori” (13). My main argument in the following is that Zong! calls upon and questions this a priori character of close reading� I take these preliminary remarks as my point of departure because they resonate with the title of this volume and the relationship it posits between reading, pleasure, and adventure literature� It might seem odd to write about a collection of poems in this context since adventure fiction is commonly associated with the novel, and the novel is commonly associated with the pleasure 1 A short note on Setaey Adamu Boateng, who in library catalogues sometimes appears as co-author of the book. On the book’s cover, we find beneath the title and the name Marlene NourbeSe Philip the specification “as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng”. The book’s inside jacket flap then identifies Setaey Adamu Boateng as “the voice of the ancestors revealing the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong”� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 120 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 of reading� 2 It serves my purposes well that George Orwell once illustrated the bad reputation adventure fiction generally has when he referred to Rudyard Kipling’s work as “almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life” (190)� Incidentally, Orwell is not talking about Kipling’s novels in his essay, but about Kipling’s poetry, criticizing that: […] most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite “The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu” with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means� At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like “Gunga Din” or “Danny Deever,” Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life� But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced� Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as: For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay! ’ (189-190) I want to highlight two aspects with regard to this passage� First, note the contorted construction of the last sentence, which buries an affirmative under a heap of allegations, negations and conditional clauses� Instead of saying “I enjoy reading Kipling’s poetry”, Orwell writes: “Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as”� This is a performative, if maybe unconscious demonstration of his assertion that reading Kipling’s poetry is something no one, or, in any case, no intellectual on the left, would publicly admit to� Second, what makes reading Kipling allegedly shameful in this particular passage is not the ideology of his texts or the political standpoint of the author, both of which have been the main subject of Orwell’s essay up until this point� Reading Kipling is shameful because it is bad poetry or, as Orwell later calls it, “good bad poetry”� He does not specify why Kipling’s poems are bad and what exactly makes them so “horribly vulgar” and “spurious”� He considers it evident that they are so, and to prove it he simply cites them, trusting that they will speak for themselves, trusting the reader will have the 2 In any case, some of the seminal texts on pleasure and reading deal with prose, e� g� Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot (1984) or Roland Barthes’ Le Plaisir du Texte (1973), to name but two� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 121 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Against Reading� Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! same reading experience as himself� He then goes on to give more examples of good bad poetry: There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790� Examples of good bad poems - I am deliberately choosing diverse ones - are “The Bridge of Sighs”, “When all the world is young, lad”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, Bret Harte’s “Dickens in Camp”, “The Burial of Sir John Moore”, “Jenny Kissed Me”, “Keith of Ravelston”, “Casabianca”� All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet - not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them� (Orwell 190) Again, two observations only� First, note the slight shift from “and yet […] giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means” in the previous excerpt to “and yet […] giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them” in the paragraph cited above� I am interested in this shift; it intrigues me, maybe because it is unclear how you get from one to the other� In the first instance, pleasure is described as occurring in defiance of the reading subject, despite its (good) taste - still, there is some sort of pleasure (any pleasure), and you’d be a snob and a liar to say otherwise� In the second instance, pleasure, and true pleasure at that (as opposed to the one wrung from you by unfair means), results from an act of intellectual mastery: not only caring for poetry or knowing poetry but also - and more importantly - knowing right from wrong, good from bad� In other words, now the subject’s ability to produce an aesthetic judgment is pleasurable; the object of pleasure has shifted, possibly also pleasure itself� How do you get from a sensation experienced, it seems, almost instantaneously while reading (let us leave aside for a moment whether it is a positive or a negative feeling) to a sensation that results from an act of cognition? Are these two steps of the same process, called reading? Is the aesthetic judgment a sublimation of the “shameful pleasure”, a rationalization of being affected? Does the pleasure result from ‘getting it’, whereas beforehand you were being “seduced, unquestionably seduced”, carried away, you somehow ‘lost it’, lost yourself? Second remark: According to Orwell the good bad poems “reek of sentimentality”, which is a deadly sin in the eyes of the sophisticated modern reader, even worse than rhyming “say” with “-lay”� It might come as no surprise that the pejorative attributes of sentimentality are akin to those of adventure fiction. Sentimental and adventure fiction are siblings, born from what Peter Brooks (1984) has called the melodramatic imagination� Brooks conceptualizes melodrama not as a particular genre but as “a mode of heightened dram- 122 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 atization inextricably bound up with the modern novel’s effort to signify” (ix)� According to him, melodrama is “a response to the loss of tragic vision” originating in the political and social upheavals at the turn of the nineteenth century, the French Revolution figuring as the exemplary reference point for the “liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch)” (14)� The characteristics of melodrama - in which one can recognize characteristics of both sentimental and adventure literature - include: […] the indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution of the good and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety� (11-12) At the end of his study, Brooks argues that a particular strand of modern literature in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert establishes itself in opposition to the melodramatic mode by voluntarily de-dramatizing plot and action (198)� In a similar vein, Martin von Kopppenfels finds in Flaubert the professed intention to block or disable the affective disposition and identification of the reader (32)� Von Koppenfels retraces a tradition of anti-sentimental and anti-mimetic textual strategies throughout the twentieth century� This modern disdain for and discharge of sentimentality - and indirectly of adventure fiction - manifests itself in Orwell’s phrase “to reek of sentimentality”� The metaphor and the change of register from the edible (“like the taste for cheap sweets”) to the olfactory, from the pleasurable to the disgusting is curious, not to say symptomatic� 3 Other than rhetorically discrediting sentimentality, the metaphor is interesting because it conflates, to the point of being indistinguishable, sensation and judgment, or to be more precise: “disgust stands on the boundary between conscious patterns of conduct and unconscious impulses” (Menninghaus 2)� It is striking, then, that in the passage quoted above we move from a negative to a positive sensation, i� e� from disgust (“reek of”) to pleasure (“and yet true pleasure”)� Whereas before the (guilty) pleasure resulted from indulging in something that was too easy to have, you are now, by an act of cognition, 3 Having read Julia Kristevas Powers of Horror (1980) I cannot help but think of her notion of the abject� But one does not have to go through the depths and intricacies of psychoanalytic theory to establish a connection between sentimentality and femininity since it has been well established and analysed, particularly in its negative aspects, by literary scholars such as Claudia L� Johnson (1995) and Suzanne Clark (1991), to name two examples for the context of English literature� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 123 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 overcoming an instantaneous feeling of revulsion, and this transformation occurs through the aesthetic judgment� 4 Finally, I would like to point out what probably needs no explication, namely the implicit and explicit snobbery in all of this� Elitism is implicit in Orwell’s allegation that only a “snob” and a “liar” would not admit to experiencing pleasure when reading Kipling (or good bad poetry in general) and in his casual display of literary knowledge when he evokes a wide range of poems only by their title� It becomes explicit later on in the essay when he observes that there “is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity” and that poetry “is, and must be, the cult of a very few people”� He then goes on to recount the following anecdote: Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ [= good bad poetry according to Orwell] in one of his broadcast speeches� I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them� But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this� (Orwell 191) Note the difference between the “intellectual” and the “ordinary man” (Orwell’s terms) which, among other things, manifests itself as a difference in being affected. Where the first one is embarrassed, the other is impressed - in any case, that is what Orwell assumes� Through the opposition between himself, the singular intellectual, and the group of ordinary men, the anecdote indirectly stages Orwell’s assertion that poetry - that is, good poetry - is the cult of the few, unpopular and not accessible to the masses� Interestingly enough, though, we have now moved from a scene of silent and, one can assume, solitary reading to a communal scene of reading, or rather hearing, of poetry� With this change of scene, the use of the poem itself changes: from an aesthetic object read for pleasure to an aesthetic object inserted into a political context to achieve a certain effect/ affect� The political dimension of Orwell’s essay (and Kipling’s poetry) returns through the back door, as it were� I will return to this in the last section of my contribution, but presently I turn to Zong! and the particular role adventure and reading play in it� 4 There is a connection between the “cheap sweets” of the previous excerpt and the disgust present in the second� Menninghaus notes that the standard eighteenth-century example of a disgusting taste is excessive sweetness (39)� Sweetness and sugar, in turn, can be linked to the colonial history of slavery and the slave trade as Sidney Mintz has shown in his seminal study Sweetness and Power (1986)� 124 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #2 adventure Marlene NourbSe Philip’s Zong! is a work about unreadability� The poems in the sections Os, Sal, Ventus, Ratio, Ferrum and Ebora are the opposite of an easy read, and with good cause: their ‘topic’ is the massacre of enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong in 1781� The historical event behind the literary text is an adventure in the sense of a remarkable occurrence� However, it became so only after the fact, namely in 1783, when the Zong’s owners pursued compensation from the insurance company for the loss of their ‘cargo’� Thanks to the work of Ouladah Equiano and Granville Sharp, what could have vanished in the archive of the slave trade as an ‘ordinary’ case of marine insurance policy and law, became a “staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic” (Baucom 31)� According to historian James Walvin, the affronted public reactions to the events aboard the Zong and the ensuing trial marked the beginning of a “change in British attitudes to the slave ships and everything they stood for” (104)� Walvin’s study takes as its starting point - and as its cover - the earliest artistic representation of the Zong massacre, J� M� W� Turner’s The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), first exhibited in 1840� The widespread criticism the painting elicited among its contemporaries denounced two things first and foremost: Turner’s use of colour and his choice of subject matter, “suggesting that drowning slaves was horrific and unsuitable for depiction in paint” (Walvin 7). Walvin also recounts that the painting deeply troubled its first owner, John Ruskin, who “never really found a suitable place for it in his home, hanging it in various rooms: in his bedroom, in the hall, and even propping it on his bed before he finally decided that he simply could not live with it” (8). The image of Ruskin trying to find an appropriate place for Turner’s painting is symptomatic insofar as it raises questions such as: how can we ‘enjoy’ such a work of art? How can we live with the dead and our own complicity in a system of violence? Furthermore, the contemporary discussions surrounding the painting already, albeit implicitly, address the question of whether or not the Zong massacre is a ‘proper’ or ‘suitable’ subject for artistic representation and what an appropriate or ‘good’ rendering of such a subject might be� Up until today, these are central ethic and aesthetic concerns accompanying representations of the Zong in art and literature alike� Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s choice to make the ‘event’ of the Zong unreadable is striking in this regard� By making the ‘event’ unreadable, she resists the Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 125 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 spectacular dimension of the horror that was by no means exceptional but, on the contrary, belonged to the typical and the everyday of the slave trade� We just have to look at the last section, Ebora, to understand that these poems are ‘about’ unreadability� With its fading font and superposed words, Ebora is the final chord of a carefully orchestrated decomposition. It opens with Zong! #1, a poem that splays single letters across the page which finally, after three lines, form a word: “www w a wa/ w a w a t/ er” (Philip 3)� The following poems in Os consist of complete words and their arrangement on the page re-establishes a seeming order and verticality� But this order collapses again in the following sections as words are once more mangled, spliced, and dispersed horizontally over the page� Their arrangement rarely produces intelligible sentences� The reader only catches a glimpse of meaning here, an idea of a story or a scene there� Reading becomes a challenge, or, as Laurie Lambert pointedly notes, “the scene of reading” is defamiliarised (120)� The poems call attention to the way we read in the most basic sense, i� e� reading as a movement of the eyes from left to right and from top to bottom (for someone alphabetized in the Roman alphabet)� Furthermore, reading becomes perceptible as a process through which we establish meaning and in this particular case: a sense of the past� By blocking this process, the reader is left to “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” (Philip 193) - although what “else” we should be reading for is precisely the question� The impossibility of reading Zong! metonymically signifies the unreadability of the event itself, i� e� our inability to really know what happened aboard the Zong (or any slave ship, for that matter)� The course of events, as far as we are able to reconstruct them, is as follows: In September 1781, […] the Zong sailed from the West coast of Africa with 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, seventeen crew members, and their Captain, Luke Collingwood� The ship was owned by Messrs� Gregson, a father and son enterprise based in Liverpool […]� Instead of the customary six to nine weeks, the journey took four months or eighteen weeks� By November 27 th sixty or at least sixty Africans and seven crew members succumbed to a sickness that was ravaging the ship� Forty additional Africans could have thrown themselves overboard in response to the horrific site of seeing others of this “cargo” tossed into the sea� Collingwood, reasoning that the insurers would not compensate losses generated by sick cargo, devised a plan to throw live bodies overboard� He cited a lack of water to sustain them� This type of loss would be compensated under the insurance law […]� Though not a uniformly popular decision among the crew, they carried out Collingwood’s orders� On November 29 th , the crew heaved fifty four [sic! ] bodies into the water. On November 126 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 30 th , they sent forty-two or forty-three overboard� On December 1 st , it rained� Or, it rained for the first two days of December. The crew replenished their supply of water with six casks, which gives evidence that continuing the massacre was not necessary� Nevertheless, Collingwood ordered on December 2 nd or 3 rd to throw twenty-six more bodies overboard� It is possible that either ten of these jumped of their own volition, or ten bodies in addition to the twenty-six took themselves into the water� By some accounts, one survived and crawled back on to the ship� Upon arrival, the ship contained 420 gallons of water� Of the 470 or 442 or 440 slaves, either 150, 133, 132, or 123 were thrown in the Atlantic. Forty or fifty may have jumped into the water to avoid being thrown or ordered to jump against their will� Thirty more were dead on arrival in Jamaica� When the insurers refused to pay out for the losses incurred on the Zong, the Gregsons appealed to the courts� (Fehskens 407) I chose Erin M� Fehskens summary because she deliberately highlights the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the various documents and accounts of the case� It is important to bear in mind that what is commonly called the ‘archive of the slave trade’ is a disparate and at times meagre convolute of documents; documents that can be difficult to read or even unreadable, faulty, or obscured - sometimes on purpose - by the various interests that permeate them� 5 According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), silences are inherent to history because the very mechanisms that make any historical recording possible also ensure that historical facts are not created equal. They reflect differential control of the means of historical production at the very first engraving that transforms an event into a fact� […] As Emile Benveniste reminds us, the census taker is always a censor - and not only because of a lucky play of etymology: he who counts heads always silences facts and voices� (48) The historical recordings of the slave trade, however, go beyond the silences inherent in the production of historical facts. Édouard Glissant describes the fundamental asymmetry permeating the archive of slavery and the slave trade: “The only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the 5 I make a point of this because there is a tendency in the secondary literature on Zong! to take the evidence, availability and readability of the archive as a given, as if ‘the archive’ was a perfectly clear-cut, monolithic, undisputable entity, and to posit as its opposite the literary text (see for example Sharpe)� If you try to read a logbook or ledger of the time, you quickly realize that it can be hard to even decipher the handwriting, and thus to read it in the most basic sense of the word� Notwithstanding the violence and asymmetry of the archive of the slave trade, I would allow for a less clear-cut conception of it; a conception in the tradition of Michel Foucault, where the historical documents and what they record is not evident, straightforward, or unambiguous� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 127 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 exchange value of slaves� Within the ship’s space, the cry of those deported was stifled, as it would be in the realm of Plantations. This confrontation still reverberates to this day” (5, footnote)� Aboard the slave ship, the account is not only a method for “counting heads” but also a form of dehumanizing violence� The account ledger does not record or document violence, it is itself violent: a transformation of human beings into cargo, into perishable goods, into exchange value� It is crucial to emphasize the importance of accounting and double entry bookkeeping which, far from being merely a cursory element of the slave trade, lie at the heart of its rise in the eighteenth century� Significantly, this aspect also brings us back to the notion of adventure. Because of the capital needed for outfitting a slave ship and the time it took to complete the vast triangular circuit, slave traders had to conduct much of their ‘business’ on credit� It is telling, in this respect, that the French term designating the credit for equipping a slave ship is pret à la grosse aventure, literally translated a ‘credit for the big adventure’� The “big adventure” designates the perilous journey of a ship across the Atlantic but also - and more importantly - resonates with the term venture: a high-risk enterprise, promising spectacular benefits but possibly also bearing spectacular losses. 6 The slave trade in the eighteenth century capitalizes adventure� The slave ship becomes an object of investment and speculation for which new methods of financing had to be devised, one of them being insurance policies. According to Ian Baucom, the determination of the participants in the slave trade to “credit the existence of imaginary values” (17) is vital to the functioning of the system as a whole: Central to that form of value was a reversal of the protocols of value creation proper to commodity capital� For, here, value does not follow but precedes exchange […] it exists not because a purchase has been made and goods exchanged but because two or more parties have agreed to believe in it� (ibid�) Regarding the case of the Zong, Baucom argues that value existed the moment the insurance contract was signed and the total value of the Zong - including its ‘cargo’, i. e. the slaves - had been fixed at 15,700 pounds (17). This capitalization of risk made the murder of 123, 132, 133 or 150 people aboard the Zong not only possible but, in the logic of the slave trade and its system of credit, rational: 7 6 The massacre on the Zong is a case in point that ‘loss’ was first and foremost a financial term, it is precisely not the loss of actual lives that is at issue in the legal case� 7 The Latin word ratio, which also figures in Zong! , designates not only reason but also calculation; it is a term designating proportions� 128 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 It is […] at once obscene and vital to understand the full capital logic of the slave trade, to coming to terms with what it meant for this trade to have found a way to treat human beings not only as if they were a type of commodity but as a flexible, negotiable, transactable form of money. Absent this financial revolution in the business operations of the slave trade […], there would have been no incentive for Captain Luke Collingwood to do what he did, to confidently massacre 132 slaves aboard the Zong, secure in the conviction that in doing so he was not destroying his employer’s commodities but hastening their transformation into money� (15) French historian Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau considers double entry book keeping and accounting as one of two central factors in the financial reorganization of the slave trade, the other being the rise of a “new kind of man”: [u]n nouveau type d’homme capable de maximiser l’efficacité du principe de la commandite (lequel ne se généralise guère avant les années 1720) et qui doit être capable de rassembler les investisseurs, de choisir un bâtiment approprié et un capitaine expérimenté, de procédér à l’armement du navire et d’assurer le suivi technique de l’expédition (réalisation du bénéfice par la vente des marchandises de retour, calcul et distribution des dividendes)� Cet homme, c’est l’armateur, […]� (64-65) [a] new kind of man able to maximize the effectiveness of limited liability capital (itself uncommon before the 1720s)� He needs to be able to assemble a group of investors, to choose an appropriate structure and an experienced captain, to outfit the slave ship and to guarantee the technical proceedings of the expedition (redeeming the benefits by selling the commodities of the goods arriving from the colonies, calculation and repartition of the dividends)� That man is the slave trader� (my translation) In a similar vein but speaking from a more (ethically) critical stance, Baucom attests the emergence of a “new social person” in eighteenth-century Britain (64)� An accounting innovation was not, by itself, enough; the system of credit also required the ability of the participants “to read one another’s character, trustworthiness, and credibility” (ibid�)� In other words, what unites the participants of the slave trade is not only the common belief in imaginary values but also the belief in the credibility (in both senses of the word) of each other� 8 8 It is interesting to note, however, that the association within families (between father and son, brother and brother, or in-laws) was most common not only for financing, but also for organizing the voyage as a whole� Citing historian Hugh Thomas, Dalton and Leung point out that the slave trade was essentially “a thing of families” (5), because blood relation (or relation by marriage) could be trusted to endure� This was also the case for the Zong: among the group of six merchants who owned the ship, “the three Gregsons, William [the father], James, and John [his two sons], were undoubtedly the most influential party” (Baucom 39). Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 129 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 The sentimental paradigm (‘to read one another’s heart’) is not a coincidence� Here is Baucom again, this time paraphrasing Catherine Gallagher’s study Nobody’s Story (1994), to point out the connection between the speculative and the sentimental: “The man whose faculties have been engrossed by business, and whose heart never fluttered but at the rise and fall of stocks,” Johnson suggests in a Rambler essay, “wonders how the attentions can be seized or the affections agitated by a tale of love�” To which Gallagher responds: “Here the man of business and the feminine or feminized sentimental reader of love stories are juxtaposed in a way that reveals their abstract similarity: both hearts ‘flutter’ to a set of signs that, although not personally addressed to them, seize and agitate them, inviting or discouraging an investment for a defined term. […] As readers, they both speculate.” (64) Baucom stresses that the creation of “the speculative, commercial and sentimental subject” which Gallagher so pointedly captures, was part and parcel of the profound epistemological shift that made the capitalization of the slave trade possible to begin with (18)� He emphasizes the particular role of imagination and the rise of the novel as a pivotal element in “creating and training the imagination of the speculative subjects of finance capital” (Baucom 64). To this I merely want to add a particular focus on reading, present in both Baucom’s and Gallagher’s remarks, and, by doing so, return to the question of close reading in Zong! � “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #3 not reading My argument began with the premise that there is a particular kind of violence to the account ledger: it does not merely record violence; it is itself a form of violence� To this, I want to add another layer� The account ledger is violent precisely because the actual violence, the suffering, is so blatantly absent; the deaths and the lives - “the cry of those deported”, as Glissant puts it - reduced to a mere recording of numbers� There is a horror, to (mis) use Hannah Arendt’s term, in the banality of evil that permeates the account books of the slave trade� 9 9 I am aware that the comparison between the slave trade / slavery and the Holocaust is problematic� I explicitly do not want to compare them� Rather, my aim is to highlight the counterintuitive effect of the historical documents, an effect that results from the particular form they have� 130 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 As such, they are unreadable but in a somewhat different way than one might assume� With regard to the particular form of the slave ship’s logbook, Baucom writes: The logbook of the Zong does not survive� Here then is an outline list of what was so numbingly typical taken from the log of the Ranger - a Liverpool slave ship […]� It is a long and repetitive list, one whose reiterative predictability both requests the eye not so much to read as to skim and one whose flattened pathos solicits the reader’s indulgence for horror banalized, horror catalogued� So I ask, do not skim, read: […] January 28 [1790]: The Ranger purchases its first slaves: one man and one woman. January 29: The captain sends the Gregson upcoast for fresh water� January 31: Christian Freeze, a crewman, is discovered embezzling rum from the Ranger’s cargo hold; he insults Mr� Woods (the second mate) and has his rum allowance suspended for eight days� February 4: One slave purchased: a man� February 5: The captain orders the crew to check and clean their guns; purchases one woman� February 7: One woman� February 9: One woman� February 13: Two women� February 14: Canoe sent upshore for water; one man and one woman� February 15: One man� February 17: First child purchased, a boy; the captain also buys a woman� February 19: The boatswain and several other crew members are caught embezzling rum by boring a hole into a puncheon of rum with a gimblet; they speak mutinous words to Mr� Woods, second mate� No record of punishment� February 20: Three men are purchased� February 21: The captain dismisses the boatswain from service, he departs the ship� February 24: One man, one woman� February 25: Thunder in the distance, lightning, distant appearance of a tornado� February 27: Loading water; one man and one woman� March 1: Two women, two more children, girls� March 4: One woman� March 5: Two men� March 6: One man� March 7: Crew engaged in drying the sails; one man� March 8: One woman� March 9: One man, one woman� March 10: The cooper is still working on anchors� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 131 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 March 22: One man� March 12: The captain orders the slavehold cleaned; the crew spends the day “taking care” of the slaves� (11-12) What Baucom tries to point out by quoting extensively from the logbook is a certain effect of the form through which we, as present-day readers, access the history of the slave trade: the absolute exteriority of accounting, of counting “one woman, one man, one child, a boy” and its lack of subjectivity and (hi)story, of narrative, as it were� This inevitably produces boredom or at least an inclination, on the side of the reader, to skim and skip, to scan the page rather than reading it word by word� Because of that you have to consciously - as Baucom would have us by asking us not to skim but to read - imagine and remind yourself what you are actually ‘reading’ here, what all of this is ‘about’� “First child purchased, a boy”� We have to imagine the violence, the drama, the horrific details - a boy violently taken from his family, and at what age? We have to imagine what hides behind the euphemism “the crew spends the day ‘taking care’ of the slaves” and what it was actually like to find oneself in the hold of a slave ship� “Imagine two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them” (5), writes Glissant: Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, if you can, the swirling red of mounting to the deck, the ramp they climbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, this dizzying sky plastered to the waves� Over the course of more than two centuries, twenty, thirty million people deported� Worn down, in a debasement more eternal than apocalypse� But that is nothing yet� (5-6) Imagine, if you can, Glissant tells us, knowing very well we can’t� Yet he tries to invoke the slave ship by bringing together the abject (vomit, lice, the dead and the dying) and the poetic (swirling red of mounting, black sun on the horizon)� It is impossible to imagine the horrific reality of the slave trade because of the constitutive asymmetry of the archive� The voices of the African people sold as slaves were violently erased while the power to write, to kill, to profit lay firmly in the hands of the slave traders, most of them Europeans. Moreover, the question of representation today also raises an ethical dilemma since telling the story of the Zong runs the risk of making the lives and deaths of African people once more “consumable”; it runs the risk of exploiting and “reinforcing the spectacular character of black suffering” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection 3): How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? […] 132 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counter-history, an aspiration that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting again rituals of torture? […] Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? (3-5) As a writer, Marlene NourbeSe Philips asks similar questions to those expressed by historian Saidiya Hartman� The poet condenses her ethical and artistic dilemma in the first sentence of the Notanda section: “There is no telling this story; it must be told” (Philip 189)� This paradoxical mantra, which echoes Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, repeats itself throughout Notanda, an essay in which Philip recounts and accounts for the choices she made throughout the artistic process� 10 In the essay she quotes extensively from the diary she kept during the writing process� The central motif emerges, first, from a sense of uneasiness about novelistic representation: “I begin reading a novel about it [the Zong], but am uncomfortable: ‘A novel requires too much telling’, I write, ‘and this story must be told by not telling’” (Philip 190)� 11 Philip is well acquainted with the novel and, more particularly, the adventure novel and its colonial history, having previously, in her 1991 novel Looking for Livingstone, engaged with that tradition� 12 Thus, she now deliberately decides against the novel as an appropriate form for her rendering of the Zong case and then goes even further by deliberately fighting “the desire to impose meaning” (194). This resistance eventually leads to the material destruction of text: “the not-telling […] is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the text” (198)� Philip mutilates and fragments both her own writing and a historical document: the Gregson vs. Gilbert legal decision, which is reprinted as the final page of Zong! � The poet uses “the text of the legal decision as a word store” (this is the interesting concept my student was referring to), she fragments and cuts open the historical document, making it literally unreadable, and then recompiles, reshuffles, and redresses the pieces into poems that are themselves disordered and fragmented� The anagrammatic procedure mirrors the violence done to the African people, a violence that is among other things exerted in 10 Jenny Sharpe, among others, has noted the similarity to the ending of Toni Morrison’s novel: “‘this is not a story to pass on’, a double entendre suggesting both the transmission of a story and its withholding, a simultaneous remembering and forgetting” (466)� 11 Although Philip does not specify the title of the novel she has read, one might conjecture that it was Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997)� 12 Typical tropes of the colonial adventure narrative in the nineteenth century include “a journey in the quest of riches, an exotic setting, and (of course) a version of the demonic male” (Di Frances 3)� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 133 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 and through language and writing� As Lee Jenkins aptly notes, Zong! “is not about the [historical] event but of it, in a material sense” (172)� Just as there is no telling the story and yet it must be told, there is no reading this story and yet we try to read, we try to make sense of it� We do so even more because of the fragmented and disorienting shape of the poems: The resulting abbreviated, disjunctive, almost non-sensical style of the poems demands a corresponding effort on the part of the reader to ‘make sense’ of an event that eludes understanding, perhaps permanently� […] In the discomfort and disturbance created by the poetic text, I am forced to make meaning from apparently disparate elements - in so doing I implicate myself� The risk - of contamination - lies in piecing together the story that cannot be told� And since we have to work to complete the events, we all become implicated in, if not contaminated by, this activity� (Philip 198) The activity in which we, as readers, implicate ourselves, is reading, or rather: the particular kind of activity that is close reading� I will return to this point in a moment� For now, I want to highlight the notion, reminiscent of Orwell’s essay, that the poetic text is doing something to its reader against their will� In Orwell’s mind, this textual force is expressed in the register of seduction (“being seduced, unquestionably seduced”), the language of seduction being one of the major topoi of reading in general and close reading in particular� 13 Philip’s description, however, is closer to the language of coercion� In her rendering, the text is not titillating; it is “disturbing” and “discomforting”, and the reader is thereby forced, implicated, and then potentially contaminated� Let us examine this metaphor of contamination more closely� Contamination is a term designating intertextuality: c� The blending of two or more stories, plots, or the like into one� d� Philology� The blending of forms, words, or phrases of similar meaning or use so as to produce a form, word, or phrase of a new type� e� Textual Criticism� A blending of manuscripts resulting in the occurrence in a manuscript or group of manuscripts of readings belonging to different lines of tradition� (“contamination, n�”) Zong! is thus contaminated by other texts: by the legal document, obviously, but also and most notably in its visual form by the account ledger� 14 The poem 13 For a critical overview of the relationship between close reading and the erotic, see Dieter� 14 For a detailed analysis of the intertextual relationship between Zong! and accounts / catalogues, see Fehskens� 134 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Zong #9 in the Os section, for example, graphically reproduces accounting columns (17)� Another example is the stream of names at the bottom of the pages in the same section. Philip calls them “ghostly footnotes floating below the text” (200) and inserts the (fictional) names as a reparative act, an answer to the defacing violence through which “African men, women, and children on board the Zong were stripped of all specifity [sic! ], including their names” (194)� Finally, there is a section at the end of Zong! entitled Manifest, which explicitly refers to a document of the same name listing the cargo, passengers, and crew of a ship� The Manifest in Zong! alludes to this document through its form as well, while at the same time inserting a displacement reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ notorious Chinese Encyclopaedia: it lists, among other things, Body Parts, African Groups & Languages and Women Who Wait (185-186)� Erin Fehskens argues that the poetic structure of Zong! pivots around the double meaning of account, i� e� “narrative or recitation” on the one, “a method of reckoning or enumeration” (410) on the other hand� Bearing in mind the definition of contamination quoted above, one could say that the blending of form (account in the numeric sense) produces a modification of plot or story (account in the narrative sense) - even if “account” here might mean nothing more than the absence of a coherent narrative� Just like Zong! is a blending of different texts and forms, Philip conceptualizes the act of reading as a “piecing together of the story that cannot be told” (198)� Through this process the readers themselves are contaminated� The image of contamination here evokes an involuntary permeation of the subject where the border of subject/ object, self/ other but also the difference between self/ environment is at risk or at least blurred� The negative connotations of contamination surprisingly echo Orwell’s olfactory metaphor of reek, since contamination is closely associated with defilement, pollution, infection, and impurity (“contamination, n�”)� To conceptualize the process of reading Zong! in those negative terms can be explained by its ‘topic’� By reading Zong! we are implicated in a history of violence, a history of human beings treated as objects, a system that made the lives of Black people disposable - a system, finally, which our present is still very much part of. How does this contamination happen? I suggest that it happens not by reading about the Zong and the history of the slave trade since the poems give us so little in the way of narration, facts, or historical context� Rather, we are contaminated by the act of reading itself and particularly by ‘close’ reading the poems, in every sense of the term: carefully reading them, paying close attention to details, by slowly reading, lingering and pausing� It is through this process that we ultimately establish a certain ‘meaning’ and extrapolate a sense of the text as a whole (even if it is Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 135 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 a fragmented one)� We piece together disparate elements in an effort to know or to understand, in order to “complete the events”, as Philip would have it� 15 The activity of reading implicates us because herein lies the connection - our connection - to the speculative and sentimental reader of the eighteenth century� 16 “Someone whose heart flutters at a set of signs” is, after all, a rather accurate description of a literary scholar� Coming back to Gallagher’s observation of the abstract similarity between the man of business and the feminine or feminized sentimental reader, I merely want to add that the man of business - in this case: the slave trader - is also a close reader� He is the “type of man” whose heart not only “flutters at a set of signs” but who also pays attention to the minutiae of accounts, both in the narrative and in the numerical sense, and brings them together for the ‘benefit’ of his enterprise. 17 “Do not skim, read” - Ian Baucom’s request or challenge resonates with what Philip is willing us to do as readers of Zong! : to pause and pay attention, to imagine what cannot be imagined, what lies beyond the bare, dispersed words� Laurie Lambert argues that Philip’s poems thereby urge us to practice “a reparative reading”, a reading that changes our perception of the known or quotidian aspects of slavery and [estranges] us from familiar words, letters, and other fragments on the page� This reparative reading practice is itself a way of creating new kinds of knowledge about slavery� […] They [readers] become aware of how language plays a part in society’s collective compression of black life […], [and this] awareness helps to create a more self-reflective experience of reading colonial archives and Philip’s poetry� (120) 18 15 Fehskens’ analysis of the literary form of the epic catalogue is once more relevant in this regard� She points out the ambivalent relationship between the whole and its parts inherent to cataloguing and the form of the catalogue in the epic tradition: “[T]he totalizing efforts of listing assumes that identifying a collection of parts will help us to know their sum, but in separating out that whole into such pieces and parts, the list reveals a structural instability in the totality - that the whole and its parts are not necessarily co-extensive” (419)� 16 M� NourbeSe Philip herself calls upon the sentimental tradition in Zong! since one of “the strongest voices” in the poems, “who appears to be a white, male, and European” (204), expresses itself through the epistolary form� 17 As Dalton and Leung observe, an important aspect of the “managerial qualities” of slave ship owners “was an accumulation of knowledge […] about slave markets throughout the Atlantic� Owners maintained correspondence with a network of contacts throughout the markets in order to stay up to date on the details about current prices, shipments, and other relevant information for the success of their own slave voyage” (6)� 18 Contrary to what people familiar with Queer Theory might assume, Lambert takes the term reparative reading not from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), but from anthropologist Deborah A� Thomas� “While in dialogue with reparations debates that have 136 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Yet, there is an ambivalence in this process� This is the case because reading itself is, as I have argued, the activity that implicates us and “repairs” (in Lambert’s sense of the word)� Reading is in this sense a phármakon: poison and remedy at the same time� Furthermore, Philip’s poems run the risk of producing the converse effect, i� e� that instead of close reading, we skim and skip� Take for example the names at the bottom of the pages in Os� One might start to read them one by one, registering each name, wondering about their linguistic and regional origin, who the people ‘behind’ those names were, etc� But after a couple of pages, after realizing that this is - to quote Baucom out of context - “a long and repetitive list”, one begins to not really pay (close) attention to them anymore, just as it was hard to actually read, one by one, the enumeration of “one woman, one man, one child, a boy”� Considering that the poems - or at least some sections in Zong! - intertextually reproduce the form of the account ledger, one might argue that this is a calculated risk� At the beginning of Notanda, Philip (herself a lawyer by training) describes how she turns to studying legal texts while working on Zong! , admitting that “the boredom that comes with reading case after case is familiar and, strangely, refreshing, a diversion of going somewhere I do not wish to go” (190)� Maybe, then, the poetic text - purposely or not - offers us such a “diversion” by allowing us not to go where we do not wish to go? Maybe, then, the form functions as a shield, allowing us not to read the text for meaning but for form and poetic structure? Maybe the poetic text wants to put us in the shoes of the “man of business” whose heart flutters at a set of signs but who is not affected by the absence of voices, of cries, of lives brutally extinguished and lost? I want to revisit once more the metaphor of contamination and thereby return to some of my initial observations� Contamination has a close semantic and etymologic connection with contagion� To imagine the process of reading through this metaphor is all the more interesting because it has a complement on the side of the author and the narrator, namely immunity� Martin von Koppenfels considers immunity a constitutively modern trope and a phancirculated in studies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and recent political discourse, this concept of reparations is not concerned with the payment of monies or debt relief� Instead it is invested in the production of new knowledge� This knowledge works toward the dismantling of oppressive systems of thought while drawing attention to previously ignored or marginalized perspectives� Reparations in this context is also focused on structures of healing that have been produced within harmed communities for and by themselves” (Lambert 109)� I can imagine that Sedgwick’s analysis of paranoid and reparative reading might be of value in this context, but this is obviously the topic of a different essay� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 137 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 tasm of authorship, with Gustave Flaubert as its godfather� The heart of what von Koppenfels calls immunity are the textual strategies destined to avoid or attenuate affectivity, some of which I have already mentioned� In spite of the fact that we are dealing with a collection of poems here, there is a parallel between the anti-mimetic and the anti-narrative ambition of Zong! and this modern aesthetic tradition� 19 It seems to me, finally, that the anti-mimetic strategies of the poems run the risk of not affecting the reader or maybe affecting them only by way of bewilderment or boredom� And yet there is also the converse desire in Zong! , a desire to affect the reader and to “dramatize”, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, “the production of nothing” (“Venus in Two Acts” 4)� Glissant pointedly noted that there is a “confrontation” reverberating to this day between the written records of the account ledger and the stifled “cry of those deported”. It is, among other things, a confrontation between the scriptural and the oral, and Zong! stages this tension on many levels� At the end of her essay, Philip makes explicit what might not need explication, i� e� the connection (in the English language) between song and Zong(! ): “with the exception of one letter the two words are identical; if said quickly enough they sound the same” (207)� She then adds: “Why the exclamation mark after Zong! ? Zong! is chant! Shout! And ululation! Zong! is moan! Mutter! Howl! And shriek! Zong! is ‘pure utterance’� Zong! is Song! And Song is what has kept the soul of the African intact when they ‘want(ed) water … sustenance … preservation’” (ibid�)� Coming back to the example of the names printed at the bottom page of the poems in Os, it is revealing to listen to M� NourbeSe Philip read from Zong! � 20 I was curious to know whether, or how, she would read those names - after all, footnotes are usually not part of the ‘actual’ text but a margin and, like the exclamation mark, eminently scriptural, something that is easy to see but difficult to speak. 21 During her readings, Philip reads the names one by one, carefully and slowly and with emphasis, making the footnotes not only an integral part of the poems but a sort of epitaph that closes and seals every single one of them� It is only when listening to her reading that I realised what had not occurred to me before, namely, that those names function as prosopopeia, as the fiction 19 Among the most famous and canonical modern intertexts of Zong! are avant-garde poems such as Stéphane Mallarmés Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (1897) and the work of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets from the 1960s and 1970s� 20 There are numerous recordings of her reading Zong! available online� 21 The exclamation mark in Zong! is a visual mark of orality, something we might perceive or think of as belonging to spoken language, but which it is in fact a constitutive part of the written language� 138 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity - with all the ambivalent, abysmal undertones such an apostrophe to the absent, deceased or voiceless might have in this case� And so, where the eye might start to wander, her voice insists� She thus appropriates, one might say, a form that is by definition devoid of affect (the legal document; the account ledger) and attempts to charge it with affect� Most of the secondary literature is unanimous on the poem’s effect: “The disembodied sounds and voices a reader sees and hears [in Zong! ] constitute a more visceral form of memory than history or storytelling” (470), to quote just one example, an essay by Jenny Sharpe� I am not sure if this is really the case� Judging from my (silent) reading experience of Zong! , I cannot say that “the words that do not conform to the grammar of language” and the “sounds” present in Zong! “evoke an intuitive response rather than thought and contemplation” (ibid�)� It is at this point of uncertainty that I want to come back to the question of pleasure with which I began my contribution� “not reading the text for meaning, but for something else” #4 not reading / pleasure Philip’s description of the effect Zong! has (or should have) on the reader - “the discomfort and disturbance created by the poetic text” (198) - echoes Roland Barthes’s conception of pleasure in his seminal The Pleasure of the Text (1973)� At the end of my essay, I want to recapitulate its central aspects, particularly the two kinds of pleasure he conceives, not only because of the parallel to Notanda but also because it ties back to my initial observations and questions� Barthes begins by describing a sensation that results from “the corporeal striptease of narrative suspense” (Pleasure 10): the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy’s dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction)� Paradoxically (since it is mass-consumed), this is a far more intellectual pleasure than the other: an Oedipal pleasure (to denude, to know, to learn the origin and the end) […]� (ibid�) In Barthes’ categorization, reading adventure literature - and popular literature in general, as his remark “mass-consumed” suggests - falls under the category of oedipal pleasure: the reader’s desire for the end is satisfied or, rather, too easily satisfied. The implicit notion is that the reading of such texts is straightforward and fast; the image Barthes uses is “like a priest gulping down his Mass” (11)� Barthes’s image of ingurgitation is reminiscent of Orwell’s metaphor of “cheap sweets”, and the latent eroticism in Orwell (“being Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 139 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 seduced, unquestionably seduced”) is all too explicit in Barthes� In the latter, however, the reader seems to be doing something to the text and not the other way around; reading appears as a form of denuding; it is not the text seducing the reader against their will� It is also surprising - or paradox, to use his own term - that Barthes categorizes this kind of pleasure as intellectual, i� e� as a desire to know (the end, the solution, the revelation, etc�)� (Note again the elitism: the paradox being that a pleasure of the masses should be qualified as intellectual�) Whereas for Orwell, pleasure was linked to knowledge through the aesthetic judgment (“giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them” (190)), Barthes explicitly turns to pleasure to avoid “critique”: “If I agree to judge a text according to pleasure, I cannot go on to say: this one is good, that bad” (Pleasure 13)� (Again, a note on elitism: One might rightfully question this apparent withholding of judgment of a text’s aesthetic quality since all of Barthes’s examples are from canonical authors, and thus he implicitly ascribes to a certain literary standard�) Contrary to what one would assume, Barthes’s categorization of two pleasures is not contained by the dividing lines of high and lowbrow� With regard to canonical nineteenth-century novels, he writes: Yet the most classical narrative (a novel by Zola or Balzac or Dickens or Tolstoy) bears within it a sort of diluted tmesis: 22 we do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversation; in doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual (like a priest gulping down his Mass)� Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure, here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets what is useful to a knowledge of the secret against what is useless to such knowledge; […] it does not occur at the level of the structure of languages but only at the moment of their consumption; the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read� And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and 22 “Tmesis” is a rhetoric figure that refers to the “separation of the elements of a compound word by the interposition of another word or words” (“tmesis, n�”)� (Footnote not in the original text�) 140 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 what is not read that creates the pleasure of great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Pleasure 10-11, italics in original) I quote this passage at length because it ties back with the observations made so far, both with regard to Orwell and with regard to Zong! � First, Barthes here paints an image of the process of reading - his reading process, really - in which he airily admits skimming the great classic for the “warmer parts”� The “warmer parts of the anecdote” (in French they are even burning: “lieux brûlants” (Plaisir 21)) are not necessarily of an erotic nature but rather the central moments in the unfolding of the plot� Contrary to Orwell’s remarks, there is no shame or guilt in this pleasure� It is also interesting to register the parallel metaphor of the reader turned spectator� 23 For Barthes, however, the reader/ spectator assumes an active role; they are even breaking the fourth wall between stage and auditorium in order to hasten disclosure and revelation whereas Orwell’s reader/ spectator hides in the shadow of the purple limelight� It is striking that by using tmesis as a figure of pleasure, Barthes conceptualizes reading as a disfigurement or fragmentation of the text, something that the author cannot anticipate or control� Unconcerned with its integrity (and the intentions of the author, one might add), the reader cuts through the text, albeit respecting the linearity of the narrative (“tearing off her clothing, but in the same order”, italics in original)� This process is a form of close reading, at least to some extent, insofar as the reader selects key passages or scenes, something literary scholars are of course very familiar with� To this kind of ‘cherry-picking’ reading method, Barthes opposes another kind of text, a text that demands a different kind of reading and produces a different kind of pleasure: Whence two systems of reading: one goes straight to the articulations of the anecdote, it considers the extent of the text, ignores the play of language […]; the other reading skips nothing; it weighs, it sticks to the text, […] it is not (logical) extension that captivates it, the winnowing out of truths, but the layering of significance; as in the children’s game of topping hands, the excitement comes not from a progressive haste but from a kind of vertical din (the verticality of language and of its destruction) […]� Read slowly, read all of a novel by Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the discourse […]� (Pleasure 12-13, italics in original) 23 The image in Orwell’s essay is “watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face” (189-190)� Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 141 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Just as you cannot read Zola or Proust word by word and slowly because it would bore you, it is impossible to read a modern text with the cherry-picking method outlined above� In what Barthes calls “the text of pleasure” (Pleasure 21), the reading process appears a gradual, if hastened, unfolding of the narrative and its “truths” (in French: “effeuillement des vérités” (Plaisir 23))� In opposition to this, the modern text must be read slowly and without skipping so much as a word because it is a vertical “layering of significance”, as Barthes would have it: nothing ‘happens’ but language itself; the form becomes the subject of representation� The French phrase here is “feuilleté de la signifiance” (ibid.), which is striking not only because it ties back to the “effeuillement des vérités” by a play on words but also because feuilleté is a cake made of puff paste layers� The culinary metaphor of sweetness returns, but the delicate pastry of the feuilleté is obviously the opposite of Orwell’s “cheap sweets”� A text like this cannot be “devoured” or “gobbled down”, you have “to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover - in order to read today’s writers - the leisure of bygone readings: to be aristocratic readers” (Pleasure 13, italics in original)� Considering this rich culinary image, it is somewhat curious to discover how Barthes further characterizes what he calls texts of bliss (“jouissance” in French). It is this passage, finally, that evokes Philip’s description of the reading process in Notanda: Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language� (Pleasure 14) Barthes now understands pleasure as a fundamental unsettling of the subject through the text and / or the reading experience; the subject itself is at peril� This is a conception that makes sense if you have read Jacques Lacan but might seem odd to almost everyone else� And so one might wonder at the paradoxical notion of pleasure at work in this passage: loss, discomfort, boredom, unsettledness and crisis� It is counterintuitive to associate these experiences or emotions with pleasure as we commonly understand it, i� e� “a sensation induced by the experience or anticipation of what is felt to be good or desirable; a feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment; delight, gratification” (“pleasure, n�”)� What manifests itself, albeit indirectly, in this particular kind of pleasure is a disruption that could be qualified as political: the unsettling of “the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions” can be understood as a moment of revelation of the ideological status quo� Politics, one might say, manifests itself through the aesthetic form, through language itself� 142 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Both in Orwell and Barthes pleasure is thus intrinsically ambivalent, albeit for different reasons: pleasure appears as a sensation including negative and positive affects� Whereas in Orwell, the pleasure resulted from an act of intellectual mastery (i� e� knowing good from bad poetry) that transformed disgust into pleasure, in Barthes, pleasure (or at least a certain kind of pleasure) results from an unsettling of everything the reader knows, including their taste (and thus their ability to produce an aesthetic judgment at all)� Let us now turn to Zong! in order to understand how Barthes’ two forms of reading (and) pleasure might unfold here� I suggest that M� NourbeSe Philip’s work as a whole plays with both types of reading as outlined by Barthes� It is striking in this respect - and rarely analysed or questioned in the critical literature - that Zong! encompasses more than just the poems in the sections Os, Sal, Ventus, Ratio, Ferrum and Ebora� Most notably, what is rarely commented upon is why Philip chose to include her essay in the work itself, which, due to the layout of the title, must be understood as another section of Zong! , just like Os or Ebora� This is an ambivalent gesture since she explicates much of what the poems ‘do’ or are supposed to ‘do’ and what relationship they have to the historical document and the historical event� Consequently, most of the interpretations and readings are already anticipated in her essay; there is little one can say about the poems that has not been said or at least hinted at by Philip herself� At the very end of Zong! , the author thus appears herself as a close reader� Moreover, in this essay Philip tells us about the massacre aboard the Zong and recounts at least some of its historical context, particularly the ethically problematic aspects of dealing with the archive of the slave trade. She finally also includes the historic document itself (the legal decision) at the end of Zong! � To rephrase the verdict quoted above by Jenny Sharpe, the disembodied sounds, the words not conforming to grammar or narrative - in short: the poems in Zong! - rely on history and storytelling� To put it differently: The relationship between essay and poems can be understood as supplementary in the Derridean sense� While allegedly of second nature, a ‘belated’ testimony to the ‘actual’ writing process and the artistic oeuvre, Notanda might just as well replace what it is supposed to complement and comment on: the poems� So much so that, when I read Philip’s essay, I do not have to go through the process of painstakingly piecing together the “disparate elements”� Or, to put it with Barthes: in my desire to know the end, I might easily skip to the Notanda section, situated at the end of the book, and know the ‘whole’ story� (Maybe not the whole story, but the basic course of events and the reasons why Philip chose ‘not to tell’ the story in her particular way�) Indeed, one can imagine that those of us who are not “aristocratic readers” (as Barthes would have Against Reading. Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 143 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 it), who are not part of the few who “care for poetry” (according to Orwell), would skip to the end of the book or worse: not bother reading Zong! at all� Unlike a certain strand of modern poetry, such as the notoriously hermetic and self-reflexive Un coup de dés by Stéphane Mallarmé, in the case of Zong! the desire to resist meaning and ‘not tell’ the story conflicts with a desire of not having the reader miss the point� There is, in other words, something eminently political, and not just aesthetic, at stake here� This is why there seems to be a fear present in Zong! , a fear of reducing, as it were, the ‘story’ - and, most importantly, the death and lives and bodies of the African people enslaved - to a “feuilleté de la significance”, in Barthes’s sense. The dilemma manifests itself right at the beginning of Zong! � The Os section opens with an epigraph taken from a Wallace Stevens poem: “The sea was not a mask” (Philip 2)� This epigraph evokes the “verticality of language and of its destruction” (Barthes, Pleasure 12) and at the same time points towards the limits of signification: the sea is not a symbol or a metaphor, it is the place where the lives of 123, 132, 133 or 150 African people were brutally ended� Tyrone Williams makes a pertinent point with regard to this, noting in his review of Zong! that “documentary is the preferred mode for many poetries of witness, presumably because reportage seems less ‘artificial’ than imaginative re-creation” (786)� Williams’s observation is telling because it highlights, on the one hand, Philip’s uncommon approach towards the Zong case� At the same time, “the documentary” is not completely absent from Zong! ; it ultimately finds its way into the work in Notanda and in the reprint of the legal document� On the other hand, Williams’s observation suggests that an ‘artificial’ re-creation such as Zong! is (more) in need of justification. In light of this, another meaning of ‘account’ can be discerned as an implicit motif of Notanda, namely, ‘account’ in the sense of ‘being accountable’� The essay is in this sense also an “answering for conduct” (“account, n�”)� At the end of my contribution, I briefly want to return to the question of pleasure and reading� Both Barthes and Orwell conceptualize the reading process and the pleasure of reading as a solitary, silent rumination on / of the text as a purely aesthetic object� The image of the ‘artistocratic reader’ is set up against the background of ‘the masses’, allegedly incapable of experiencing ‘true’ pleasure (Orwell) or ‘bliss’ (Barthes)� In contrast to this, I believe that Zong! is a work that cannot be understood, cannot be ‘enjoyed’, in this kind of solitary reading� It is a work that does not want to be read only by the “few” people that “care for poetry”� It calls for community in manifold ways� It calls for a loud, communal reading� It wants to be heard (in both senses of the word)� Indeed, this is what struck me when hearing the poems read by the author but also, obviously, when I discussed Zong! with my students: It is 144 F abienne i Mlinger 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 through the act of coming together, when we try to make sense of the ‘unsettling’ experience of the silent reading together, that we “complete the story” and become aware of our own implication in it� Works Cited “account, n�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP , 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 1194� Accessed 17 Dec� 2020� Barthes, Roland� Le Plaisir du Texte. 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Discarding Adventure in Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 145 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0006 Menninghaus, Winfried� Disgust. Theory and History of a Strong Sensation� Albany: State U of New York P, 2003� Mintz, Sidney� Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History� New York: Viking, 1985� Orwell, George� “Rudyard Kipling�” Critical Essays� London: Harvill Secker, 2009, 177-193� Pétré-Grenouilleau, Olivier� Les Négoces Maritimes Français. XVII e - XX e Siècle� Paris: Belin, 1997� Philip, Marlene NourbeSe� Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng� Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008� “pleasure, n�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP , 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 145 578� Accessed 5 Oct� 2020� Sharpe, Jenny� “The Archive and Affective Memory in M� NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! ” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol� 16, no� 4, 2014, pp� 465-482� “tmesis, n�” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, 2020, www�oed�com/ view/ Entry/ 202690� Accessed 5 Oct� 2020� Trouillot, Michel-Rolph� Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History� Boston: Beacon Press, 1995� Von Koppenfels, Martin� Immune Erzähler. Flaubert und die Affektpolitik des Modernen Romans� München: Fink, 2007� Walvin, James� The Zong. A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery� New Haven: Yale UP , 2011� Williams, Tyrone� “Zong! (Review)�” Review of Zong! African American Review, vol� 43, no� 4, 2009, pp� 785-787� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 a nniKa M c P herson Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre: Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone Introduction In 2018, Tomi Adeyemi’s Young Adult (YA) novel Children of Blood and Bone hit the market as “one of the biggest YA debut novel publishing deals ever”, with movie rights to her “Black Lives Matter-inspired fantasy novel” (Newkirk II n� p�) having been secured prior to the book’s publication (Fleming Jr n� p�)� 1 The novel instantly became a number one New York Times bestseller and the author, risen to fame on the internet and social media following the deal and backed up by a substantial marketing machinery, toured numerous talk shows and gave interviews across a wide range of online and offline media, many of which featured comparisons to other texts and authors� Entertainment Weekly, for example, asked if Adeyemi was the next J� K� Rowling (Canfield n. p.), while her novel was often likened to George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones� The author herself, however, pitched it as the “African The Last Airbender” and, distancing herself from controversies surrounding Game of Thrones, as “Black Panther with magic” (Waters n� p�)� 2 One of the writers to have cleared the ground for globally circulating YA fiction set in Africa long before Adeyemi’s breakthrough is Nnedi Okorafor� 3 Hailed, in turn, as the potential “next George R� R� Martin” (who is an executive producer of the forthcoming HBO TV series based on Okorafor’s 2010 novel Who Fears Death, see Morgan), Okorafor’s Akata Witch - much to 1 The film is in development by Disney’s Lucasfilm in partnership with 20 th Century Fox� 2 Indicative of the substantial increase in market interest following the long-standing demands for more diversity in YA fiction, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé’s forthcoming Ace of Spades (2021) - described by the author as “Gossip Girl meets Get Out” - landed a similarly lucrative book deal for the U� S� market (Flood)� The author’s comparison is also symptomatic of the current narrative alignment of televisual, film, and literary formats. 3 There is of course a substantial corpus of African YA fiction. With the notable exception of the 130 popular ‘Pacesetters’ novels published by Macmillan between the late 1970s and the 1990s, however, few titles have been in large-scale circulation outside of the continent and its diasporas� Osa outlines related developments in African children’s literature and Nigerian youth literature across a series of articles, while Coulon discusses the ‘Pacesetters’ novels in more detail in “Onitsha Goes National”� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 148 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 the author’s chagrin - is frequently referred to as the ‘Nigerian Harry Potter’� In a thread of Tweets commenting on these comparisons (@Nnedi, “I really wish”), Okorafor presents an alternative list of her most important influences: family trips to Nigeria, the Igbo girl Sandra Marume who inspired her protagonist Sunny Nwazue, as well as Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952) and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), two canonized postcolonial novels from the first and second generation of Nigerian writing in English according to common - yet not uncontroversial - categorizations� 4 Based on these influences, Okorafor classifies her trilogy as “Nigerian-American YA fantasy (#africanjujuism)” and calls upon those who instead see tropes à la Harry Potter or Star Wars at play in her work to check their privilege, as she is “not interested in jumping on bandwagons or riding coat tails” but is “building and flying [her] own space ship” (@Nnedi, “I really wish”). Okorafor has indeed developed distinct styles and modes of writing, which she calls Africanfuturism - a “sub-category of science fiction” to be distinguished from Afrofuturism (a label she rejects for her work) - and Africanjujuism, depending on the overall thematic setup and mode of the respective text (“Africanfuturism Defined”). 5 Aside from the Akata series and Who Fears Death, her works include Zahrah the Windseeker (2005), Lagoon (2014), the Binti trilogy (2015-2018, currently in adaptation as a Hulu TV series), The Book of Phoenix (2015), and Ikenga (2020), as well as further titles spanning across children’s, YA, and adult fiction. Next to her numerous award-winning novels and novellas, she has written Black Panther: Long Live the King (2017-2018), Wakanda 4 Emmanuel and Aboh, for example, criticize this categorization of Nigerian literature as “generationalizations palaver” which “hinders the bond of continuity in terms of understanding the linguistic modality and thematic similarity Nigerian writers have shared over the years” (143)� 5 According to Okorafor, “Africanfuturism is similar to ‘Afrofuturism’ in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future. The difference is that Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West� Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa. It’s less concerned with ‘what could have been’ and more concerned with ‘what is and can/ will be’� It acknowledges, grapples with and carries ‘what has been’� Africanfuturism does not HAVE to extend beyond the continent of Africa, though often it does� Its default is non-western; its default/ center is African” (“Africanfuturism Defined” n. p.). Okorafor pinpoints the difference with the following juxtaposition: “Afrofuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in Oakland, CA , USA ”, whereas in “Africanfuturism: Wakanda builds its first outpost in a neighboring African country” (ibid.). Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 149 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Forever (2018), and the Shuri (2018-) series for Marvel comics and is a co-writer for the forthcoming film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980)� In 2019, Okorafor and Adeyemi were nominated for the prestigious Hugo and Lodestar Awards respectively, with Children of Blood and Bone winning the 2019 Lodestar for Best Young Adult Book, which Akata Warrior had been awarded the year before� 6 Both authors grew up in Chicago suburbs, with Okorafor using the labels ‘Nigerian-American’ (on her website with, on her blog without the dash) and ‘American-born Igbo’ or ‘Naijamerican’, her Igbo heritage - honed not least during the “epic family trips to Arondizuogu” - listed as a prime influence on her works in the already mentioned Tweet thread� Adeyemi, by contrast, generally states having had less exposure to her Yoruba background while growing up� While the comparisons of both author’s works speak to the popular cultural moments of their publication, Adeyemi’s Black Lives Matter invocation in her author’s note to Children of Blood and Bone and Okorafor’s references to Okri and Tutuola address much more telling dimensions of their works� As the following analysis shows, Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone use different strategies to transgress the worn-out postcolonial ‘writing back’ paradigm towards specific modes of engagement with current issues that are interwoven not only with the authors’ investments in the politics of literary representation but also with the layered processes of production, distribution, and consumption that Hannah Pardey calls the “digital affect” (225-228) in a case study of other types of so-called new Nigerian novels� Before elaborating on this aspect, I will compare the perilous journeys of Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s young female protagonists on their respective quests to save magical realms against the backdrop of the colonial legacies of adventure and fantasy writing that these authors inevitably find themselves writing against. As crucial interventions into the overbearing whiteness of fantasy, they celebrate and reimagine West African cultural contexts while consciously catering to global audiences� This necessitates a tightrope walk between the genre’s legacies and the conventions each novel engages with in a distinct mode of reconfiguration. However, especially in the context of YA fiction, Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s novels serve as important reminders that the relevance of their stories and characters by far exceeds critical attempts to question their emancipatory potential. Criticism highlighting the global commodification of their works or their adherence to genre tropes in turn frequently conveys and 6 In 2019 Okorafor had been nominated for best novella for Binti: The Night Masquerade and for Black Panther: Long Live the King for best graphic story� Her works have previously received the highly prestigious World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula, and Eisner Awards amongst many others� 150 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 performs a sense of critical nostalgia that is symptomatic of the melancholia that has stifled the field of postcolonial studies over the last two decades. Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Challenges in YA Adventure Fiction and Fantasy In European literary cultures from Antiquity and the Middle Ages onwards, the differences and continuities within and across adventurous narratives have been traced through different modes, forms, and genres such as, for example, the Odyssean apologoi or the medieval courtly âventiure of Arthurian tales and quest narratives, the popular adventure novels of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, and twentieth and twenty-first-century popular culture (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 2-5)� Particularly in fantasy, Joseph Campbell’s “standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero” (23) with its ‘monomyth’ and nucleus of the rite of passage of separation, initiation, and return continues to loom large (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 16)� According to Campbell’s frequently cited formula, “[a] hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (x): fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (y): the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [sic] (z)” (23)� Differences between adventure tales relate, for example, to the types of transgression and risk-taking, the particular challenge to the order of things, the modes of being tested, whether the adventure is actively sought out or destined by some form of providence, or whether there is a metaphysical quest and transcendental promise (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 1-16)� 7 In the British context, youth magazines and adventure novels were formative to the development of popular narrative modes aligned with imperial ideology, as Patrick Brantlinger and Daphne M� Kutzer, amongst others, have shown� Robinsonades, for example, mostly constituted narratives “of morally justified imperialism” (Green 22). They were not restricted to the commercially highly successful boys’ adventure stories but also included female Robinson figures whose narratives illustrated “the tension between fulfilling conventional feminine roles and developing individual potential” (Fair 142)� 7 For a detailed examination across different modes and genres, see the entire collection Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzipien, Genre edited by von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher, which also includes chapters on the paratextual framing of Victorian adventure fiction (Härtl), and on the structure of adventure in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Söffner)� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 151 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Especially later female Crusoe figures cross and combine ostensibly feminine and masculine spheres in a refutation of stereotypical roles (156-157)� Jochen Petzold, in his examination of the popular Girl’s Own Paper magazine’s “interconnected topics of emigration, armchair travelling and exotic adventure” (35), however, emphasizes that although adventure fiction featured “daring and plucky ‘girls’”, they mostly “remain within the bounds of Victorian propriety” (40)� 8 Even though some Victorian narratives challenged stereotypical role models, in the interwar period “the bulk of empire stories in children’s literature and comics, popular fiction and films of the empire genre focused on active and expansive masculine heroism” (Webster 9)� When narratives of empire became “increasingly feminized” (10) in the course of the 1950s, they tended to foreground white women whose representation was attributed with “intrepidity, courage, moral strength, benevolent concern for the welfare of the colonized - but in the context of colonial wars they also became symbolic of national weakness and vulnerability” (ibid�)� Across these narratives, the white woman was variously represented as a guardian of “the boundaries of her home against invasion”, an image “of a nation under siege by immigrants”, or as guarding “sexual boundaries against ‘miscegenation’”, thus demonstrating the “interplay of ideas of racial and gender difference” (9-10)� Especially with fantasy literature’s frequently blurred boundaries between children’s, young adult, and adult varieties in terms of actual readership or debates on its suitability for specific age groups, the genre’s complicity in imperialist and colonialist mindsets has come to be criticized more vehemently over the last few decades� As with adventure tales more generally, the genealogy of children’s fantasy often focuses on European examples that are tied to the conceptual emergence of childhood, to Enlightenment “instructive works for young readers” (Nikolajeva 50), to the Romanticist “interest for, on the one hand, folklore, and on the other, the child as innocent and untouched by civilization” (ibid�) as well as the “chosen child” trope (57)� 9 Whether placed in secondary worlds or having “magical agents [brought] into the everyday life of ordinary children” (51-52), modern fantasy narratives have increasingly become a tool “for the characters’ self-exploration rather than for educational purposes” (54)� Variants include stories of an “archetypal hero of unknown 8 For a detailed examination, see Smith’s Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture as well as Smith et al� 9 Nikolajeva traces the fantastic from E� T� A� Hoffmann, Carlo Collodi, and Lewis Carrol to Edith Nesbit as “the creator of modern fantasy for children” based on the texts’ narrative voice and perspective, with Edward Eager, Pamela Travis, and James M� Barrie or Frank L� Baum as further notable examples of English-language children’s fantasy authors (51-52)� 152 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 parentage destined to save the world from evil” (57), quest narratives which “contain parallel worlds and times with boundaries barely tangible” (ibid�), as well as “the classic device of sending the protagonist to an alternative world by means of some magic agent, with the purpose of temporary empowerment” (58): At its best, fantasy for children provides moral and spiritual guidance for young people, addressing an audience that has yet not any firm distinction between reality and imagination; that does not dismiss magical worlds and events as implausible; that has stronger potential for secondary belief� The best examples of classical fantasy for children use the fantastic form as a narrative device, as a metaphor for reality� The fantastic mode allows children’s writers to deal with important psychological, ethical and existential questions in a slightly detached manner, which frequently proves more effective with young readers than straightforward realism� […] In particular, fantasy can empower a child protagonist in a way that realistic prose is incapable of doing� In this respect fantasy has a huge subversive potential as it can interrogate the existing power relationships, including those between child and adult, without necessarily shattering the real order of the world� (Nikolajeva 60-61) Although it generally functions as a “socialization vehicle” (61), children’s fantasy is thus frequently marked by an element of empowerment through the subversion of power relations as well as through its metaphorical relation to the target audience’s lifeworld� Based on the common notion of the socialization function of children’s and YA fiction in general, not only cultural representation but also cultural appropriation has become a contested topic� In relation to fantasy, this can be exemplified via the debate on Patricia Wrightson, a white Australian writer who, like several others, has drawn on a, “from a European cultural perspective, radically-estranged [sic] universe of Aboriginal legend” and has “introduced many Australian schoolchildren to a somewhat sanitized version of Aboriginal beliefs, traditions, and history” (Attebery 327) with her popular Wirrun trilogy that was first published in the late 1970s. Today, Wrightson “is no longer cited, as she once was, as an interpreter of Aboriginal culture and spokesperson for Aboriginal experience” and her employment of “fictional collaborators” taken from Indigenous contexts has contributed to her now “uneasy” status in the genre (Attebry 336)� 10 That cultural appropriation is 10 With little concern for cultural appropriation, in Nikolajeva’s survey chapter of children’s fantasy Wrightson’s trilogy is said to present “a fluctuant boundary between the magical and the ordinary, incorporating Aboriginal lore into the story of a young person’s quest, with animated nature and indigenous creatures as helpers and adversaries” (58)� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 153 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 no longer benevolently overlooked becomes clear in the widely discussed controversy surrounding J� K� Rowling’s “appropriating and amalgamating cultural elements from a range of Indigenous traditions” in her “History of Magic in North America” series in 2016 (Cecire 203)� As Maria Sachiko Cecire has argued with a focus on what she calls the Oxford School surrounding J� R� R� Tolkien and C� S� Lewis, children’s fantasy - and, by extension, YA fantasy as well as fantasy in general - has long overlooked the overbearing whiteness of its canonical works� Taking her cue from notions of ‘white magic’ and ‘black magic’, Cecire illustrates how Romantic “[s]paces of childhood and enchantment are not only metaphorically ‘white’ in their supposed purity and goodness [but], in nearly all cases, implicitly raced white as well”, with ‘black magic’ having been negatively connoted by imperial racial power dynamics (173-174)� Tracing this legacy, Cecire shows how “racial and ethnic coding made it possible for the genre to extend an Anglo-American empire of the mind in youth culture even as the actual British empire declined” (174)� From The Hobbit to Game of Thrones, the “imperial model of adventuring, mastery, and success” (175) continues to play out� The common fantasy scenario of “[i]ssuing forth into dangerous, magical wildernesses to perform a task or seek a goal” has to be read against texts in which “English youths set out onto the high seas or into the African or Asian interior to meet physical and mental challenges in lands filled with exotic cultures and people”, displaying “manly qualities that affirmed ‘Anglo-Saxon’ superiority and right to rule” (187) in the process� Textual continuities from the “colonialist bildungsroman” are also transposed into “pseudo-medieval and otherworldly settings” that are nevertheless allegorically tied to a nation connoted as white (190) and, for example, frequently include tests which “require defeating monstrous foes or managing unruly Indigenous peoples” (193)� It is against this backdrop that authors such as Nnedi Okorafor “reimagine the genre as oriented around the myths and experiences of non-European cultures and people of color” (Cecire 186)� Cecire thus positions Okorafor’s novels as referencing Anglo-American medievalist fantasy in a revisionist way with her protagonists, “young Black women who embark on journeys of self-discovery and emerge as heroes” (269)� In this regard, Okorafor and Adeyemi can indeed be said to ‘write back’ to imperialist and colonialist genre legacies� Aligning them instead with the “post-ironic turn of the new millennium”, however, Cecire points out that their narratives “include arcs of inner growth toward love, wholeness, and peace with one’s identity, making special room for considering how mixed and nonwhite identities might understand their relationship to magic” (271), which I discuss in the following analyses of Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone� 154 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Okorafor has detailed this relationship to magic in her essay “Organic Fantasy”, in which she elaborates on her fiction’s connections to Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and novels by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, especially Wizard of the Crow (2007)� 11 For these writers and herself, she claims, rather than conceiving of the fantastic as a mode, by “writing about Africa the magic naturally, organically sprouted” (158)� To Okorafor, Okri’s Nigerian setting “went over the deep end when it came to magical elements” and she adds that “on top of all this, [she] could tell that Okri believed in what he was writing” (“Organic Fantasy” 155, italics in original)� Given Okorafor’s explicit engagement with Tutuola, Okri, and Ngũgĩ, it comes as no surprise that the epigraph to Akata Witch is a quote from Wizard of the Crow that aligns with Okorafor’s notion of ‘organic fantasy’: “Here, in the new venture, the extraordinary, the magical, the wonderful, and even the strange come out of the ordinary and the familiar”� Yet, it is important to also recall Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s emphasis in Decolonising the Mind (1986) on the “psychological violence of the classroom” in that, whereas the “bullet was the means of physical subjugation”, it was language that “was the means of the spiritual subjugation” (9), not least through colonial literary education: Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world� How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings� (16) To facilitate cultural self-perception, Ngũgĩ famously insisted on the writing of African literature in African languages� Although removed from his specific politics of language, in relation to both the socializing and the lingering educational functions of children’s and YA literature, Okorafor’s notion of ‘organic fantasy’ and her emphatic call for “diversity within the genre of young adult fantasy as a whole” (“Organic Fantasy” 159) are closely tied to the importance of modes of orature and the (re)imagination of cultural contexts that are not only to enable Black readers to “see themselves reflected in these types of books”, but for all readers to “eventually follow the roots that extend deep and firmly into the rich African soil and sand and learn a thing or two about this potent part of the earth” (ibid�)� 11 The essay was first published in African Identities, vol� 7, no� 2, 2009, pp� 275-286� For a more detailed discussion of ‘organic fantasy’, see Pundt� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 155 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Akata Witch and / as ‘Africanjujuism’ In an extension of the notion of ‘organic fantasy’, Okorafor has defined the Africanjujuism of her Akata series on social media as well as on her blog as “a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative” (@ Nnedi, “The Akata series”)� 12 The reason she gives for this distinction from fantasy as commonly understood is that “historically African cosmologies and spiritualities have systematically shown to be less than (less important, less powerful, less impactful etc [sic]) any other, worldwide� This label acknowledges and applies that needed respect BEFORE jumping to the fantasy part” so as to facilitate “a different, more nuanced reading” rather than a perpetual reduction to Western categories (@Nnedi, “The Akata series”, emphasis in original)� Having to manage the backlash by those who reject the idea and necessity of diverse representation in literature or who cannot relate to the ‘seamless blend’ of real and imaginative spiritualities and cosmologies in her Afrojujuist worldbuilding, Okorafor hones what I call an ‘author-izing’ online presence to actively respond to unfounded criticism, to mediate debates on her writing and to address misunderstandings as well as oversights� In response to discussions of the word ‘akata’ - which is commonly used by Nigerians to refer to African Americans and is mostly considered derogatory in its connotation - Okorafor addresses relations between continental and diasporic Africans, especially African Americans, which are also portrayed to affect her protagonist� 13 In the novel, the word is clearly used as a term to demean Sunny with utterances such as “You stupid pale-faced akata witch! ” (Okorafor, Akata Witch 14 11), heightened by the school bully Jibaku’s doubling up on exclusionary language when she yells “Stupid oyibo akata witch” (13) at her, adding the similarly controversial common term ‘oyibo’, a reference to white foreigners� This is further compounded by Chichi referring to her as ‘onyocha’ (15), another expression for white Europeans and other foreigners which Sunny vehemently rejects, and as “ghost girl” (17) upon their first meeting. Sunny’s marginalization relates to both her albinism and her having been born and raised in the United States until the age of nine, 12 See also “Africanfuturism Defined”. 13 However, the term is at times also defended by pointing to its originally referencing “a ‘wild’ cat that does not live at home” in Yoruba and hence being applied metaphorically in the sense of not living in Africa, in opposition to ‘ologbo’ (“a cat that lives at home”, which is also the general term for ‘cat’ in everyday use)� The controversy is addressed in numerous YouTube videos and blog posts� 14 Henceforth shortened to Witch in in-text citations� 156 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 as is topicalized in the novel’s prologue: “My name is Sunny Nwazue and I confuse people” (3)� In a poignant scene of the sequel Akata Warrior that Okorafor also points to in a blog post (“The Word”), 15 Sunny confesses to having used the term ‘akata’ herself as an insult to shame her fellow student Faye, who had ostracized, threatened, and physically violated her at their Manhattan school where, though we were all mixed up there, the other kids didn’t really mix, you know? Kids stayed with their own kinds, especially black and white� The African people kept to themselves in my school. The African Americans acted like they were kings. And queens. I sort of moved from group to group. I didn’t fit in anywhere. I was African, but not really African. I was born in America, but not really African American. (Akata Warrior 16 336-337, italics in original) Hurling the insult at her attacker while making fun of Faye’s menstrual blood showing on her pants is Sunny’s last defensive retort, and although she is aware that the meaning of the “nasty word” is likely unclear to Faye, it “is all in the way it’s said, the sound of it� It’s ugly� It’s an insult� It’s like a dagger that is a word” (Warrior 340)� The skirmish ends with more physical violence and insults and Sunny recalls this as “the most painful day of her childhood” (336)� Although she is aware of remote historical connections, this leads her to question the proneness to mutual insults she witnesses between Africans and people of African descent from both sides of the Atlantic� The scene connects back to the prologue of Akata Witch in that Sunny again points out that she confuses people (Warrior 341), but it also exemplifies the way in which Okorafor weaves current and everyday topics into her novels (and, arguably, answers criticism of the first novel’s use of the word by having her protagonist reflect on it in the second part). Through Sunny, the series addresses the discrimination of persons with albinism, a common issue in Nigeria and many other sub-Saharan African countries, where “myths and misbeliefs surrounding persons with albinism have led to witchcraft-related harmful practices, involving the use of their body parts obtained through brutal attacks and mutilations” (“About”)� 17 This 15 In this context it is also telling that the first part of the trilogy was published as What Sunny Saw in the Flames and the second one as Sunny and the Mysteries of Osisi by Nigerian publisher Cassava Republic� 16 Henceforth shortened to Warrior in in-text citations� 17 The situation of persons with albinism in Nigeria, where a National Policy on Albinism was adopted in 2012, is outlined in Action on Albinism (“Nigeria”)� A Regional Action Plan was adopted by the African Union Executive Council as a continent-wide policy in July 2019, see Action on Albinism (“Regional Action Plan”)� See also documentaries such as In the Shadow of the Sun (2012) in relation to Tanzania, Black Man White Skin (2015) by Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 157 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 context is invoked in the novel through the ‘ritual killer’ Black Hat Okotoko, whose atrocities are reported in local newspapers and whose plan to bring back the violent spirit Ekwensu must be averted by Sunny and her Oha coven: they must save the world to prevent the potential “nuclear holocaust” (Okorafor, Witch 307) that Sunny has seen in her premonition described in the novel’s prologue� In attempts at cultural translation Ekwensu - referred to as “Evil Spirit” in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (122) - is often likened to the devil in spite of significant conceptual differences. In Akata Witch, Ekwensu is “not a metaphor or a symbol� She’s one of the most powerful masquerades in the wilderness”, a “super-monster” that, once brought into the world, “no person or thing can stop” (312)� The Oha coven, “a group of mystical combination, set up to defend against something bad” (84) consists of Sunny, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, the latter having been sent to Nigeria from the U� S� to be ‘straightened out’ after having used higher-level juju powers to trick his non-magical ‘Lamb’ classmates, thus breaking the rules of the juju-empowered ‘Leopard Persons’� Whereas colonialist tropes of ‘black magic’ as outlined by Cecire have contributed to juju’s predominantly negative connotation and representation, the novel differentiates between potentially harmful and thus “illegal juju” (Witch 158) and its positive, powerful variations - which, however, are only to be used according to one’s proven skill level� By highlighting the capacity of positive applications of juju while simultaneously acknowledging and demonstrating the effect of potential misuses, the novel writes back not only to reductive colonialist representations of juju, 18 but also reframes the widespread condemnation of ‘traditionalist’ practices in Nigeria that is frequently fuelled by evangelical Christian churches� Furthermore, what the Lambs consider ‘disabilities’, the Leopards know to be the basis for heightened magical abilities� In line with this, Sunny is presented as a girl who merely “happens to have albinism” (Okorafor, “The Word” n� p�) and whose “defect” (Warrior 341) is key to unlocking her abilities as one of the ‘free agents’ who are “a result of mixed-up and confused spiritual genetics” (Witch 96)� Story-world context is provided by the excerpts from the book Fast Facts for Free Agents that precede the first ten chapters of Akata Witch� Presented as written by an author who is biased against both free agents and African Spanish advocacy groups, as well as Born Too White (2017) on people with albinism in Tanzania and Malawi� It is important, however, to point out the respective advocacy contexts of production as well as to not limit engagements with the worldwide discrimination of persons with albinism to African contexts� 18 A prominent example of such representations is Joyce Cary’s The African Witch (1936)� I thank Tobias Döring for pointing out this potential intertext� 158 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Americans (Witch 113), they facilitate further commentary on prejudice and the positionality of knowledge� Mainly, however, by studying Fast Facts, Sunny and the reader learn about the Leopard Persons’ abilities, rules, practices, and culture� These excerpts also provide an occasional tongue-in-cheek commentary on Nigerian issues such as the notorious e-mail scams (“419 Scams and Leopard People”, Witch 120)� Frequent references to popular culture (e� g� to Fela Kuti, highlife and afrobeat music), the use of food, flora, and fauna as cultural signifiers (Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy” 153), place names like Aba or Abuja, literal translations and explanations of Igbo or Efik terms and phrases to the respective non-speakers of each language in the Oha coven, as well as commentary on Nigeria’s history, ethnic and religious diversity provide not only local flair and ample potential for identification but also basic information to readers unacquainted with the cultural context� The novel likewise features occasional intertextual references, for example when Sunny is reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (Witch 39)� The motley coven of “the princess, the American, the dyslexic, and the albino” (Witch 130), as Sasha’s mentor Kehinde calls them, has to come together - in spite of initial animosities based not least on social, economic, and ethnic differences - to use their complementary skillsets to safeguard Leopard Knocks and, ultimately, the entire world� Through her ability to go into the ‘wilderness’ in between the realms, a series of adventures demonstrate how Sunny learns to master invisibility and can “mess with time” (116), while Orlu can “undo bad things” (23), Sasha has a photographic memory and is capable of anticipation, and Chichi is a ‘Nimm’ princess (her mother being a priestess) with a heightened memory, facilitating acts of higher-level juju based on her extensive study of instructive and other books� Having to trust each other and needing to work together to avert the end of their world, the coven in many ways allegorizes contemporary social divisions, and it is spirituality that paves the way to the coven’s capacity to transcend their differences for the common good� In Akata Witch the Nigerian setting is imbued with verisimilitude, while the literal ‘wilderness’ that Leopard Persons can access and the parallel world of Leopard Knocks form part of a global secondary realm that Lambs are unaware of� Sunny’s journey to self-discovery and her battle to “know herself” (93) are connected to her learning to control her powers and her spirit face, a distinguishing feature of Leopard Persons that connects them to the spirit world� Aside from marking her spiritually empowered identity as Anyanwu (‘eye of the sun’ in Igbo, 152), this is also an intertextual reference to Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, where “Anyanwu is a shape-shifter who can become anything she tastes and analyses” (Okorafor, “Organic Fantasy” 152)� The fantasy Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 159 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 trope of unknown parentage as outlined in Nikolajeva’s survey above is here shifted by a generation, as the mystery surrounding Sunny’s grandmother is gradually revealed to be the reason for her destiny to save the world� After initiation, mastering juju demands life-long guided learning and scholarship and, first and foremost, responsible usage according to one’s tested level of skill� Her juju powers also set Sunny apart from her staunchly Catholic mother and enable her to embrace the Leopard heritage derived from her grandmother, which is kept secret by her mother for fear of her daughter’s safety� The Leopard world also comes with its own sign system, Nsibidi, derived from the same symbolic language of southeastern Nigeria that also inspired the Black Panther depiction of Wakanda’s language (Desowitz n� p�)� In addition, the Leopard world features some unique creatures, whereas references to common spirits such as Mami Wata exemplify the seamless blend of references that mark Okorafor’s ‘organic fantasy’, which demands a “skewed lens” so as not to be perceived as “strange” (Okorafor, “Hugo Nominee”)� This lens is refocused, as it were, when Sunny gradually becomes emotionally and spiritually more grounded due to her exposure to and embracing of her cultural heritage, to the point where she no longer requires an umbrella in the sun to protect her skin� This does not necessarily constitute an ableist overcoming of her albinism but can also be seen to symbolize her finally being at ease with herself� After all, it is her very albinism that - unbeknown to the ignorant Lambs who marginalize her - actually empowers her� Another key worldbuilding element that illustrates the blend of African cosmologies with both the Oha coven’s adventure tale and Sunny’s identity formation is the novel’s portrayal of masquerades� Okorafor’s depictions of masquerades as “a staple in several Nigerian cultures” (“Organic Fantasy” 156) draw inspiration from Ben Okri’s 2007 novel Starbook, her mother’s recollections, and her own visits to Nigeria: In Igbo tradition, the spirits of the underworld and the ancestors are believed to come through the anthills to spend time with the living� They are only seen during key events such as weddings, funerals, holiday celebrations and large parties� An individual, typically a man, dons a Masquerade costume and he is believed to become the spirit or ancestor� A Masquerade must never ever be unmasked; to do so would be the ultimate disrespect and require a most severe punishment� And a man or boy must be initiated into and trained within a secret society in order to put on the costume of Masquerade and be possessed by the spirit or ancestor� (ibid�) 19 19 Masquerades also play a key role in Okorafor’s Binti trilogy, especially the third part, Binti: The Night Masquerade (2017)� 160 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 In Akata Witch, it is Ekwensu who is brought forth by ‘Black Hat’ Otokoto Ginny� As Chichi describes her, Ekwensu “is what Satan is to the Christians […]� But more real, more tangible� She’s not a metaphor or symbol� She’s one of the most powerful masquerades in the wilderness” (Witch 311-312) and “of such deep evil that her name was rarely spoken, even in the Lamb world” (324)� Controlling this masquerade is the ultimate task and climax of the coven’s many previous adventures� A greedy former “oil dealer who did big business with the Americans”, Otokoto’s hunger for power “opened him up to terrible powers of the earth” in the form of “forbidden juju” (308) requiring the sacrificial death of the children he kidnapped. The personification of corruption, Otokoto also forms the decisive connection to Sunny’s grandmother Ozoemena, who had been murdered by him� The existential threat posed by Ekwensu is averted by both the Oha coven’s joint, fearless, and transgressive actions in the form of the use of unlicensed juju as well as by the former oil dealer’s own sins of greed and corruption as Chichi uses a “bring back” charm against him that had been revealed to her mother by Sunny’s grandmother (331)� However, in the climactic scene it takes Sunny’s instinctual guidance of Anyanwu, “her spirit, her chi”, and her “other self” (326) to order Ekwensu back and thus save the world� Yet, Sunny has another, more mundane task to fulfil in that she finally stands up against her father’s rejection and threat of physical violence� Only through the revelation of her grandmother’s status as a Nimm warrior can Sunny finally answer the question “Who am I? ” (339), her grandmother’s letter offering her “a glimpse of her own soul” (345)� From this perspective, Akata Witch might well be labelled a ‘postcolonial bildungsroman’ of sorts� Yet, its idiosyncratic blend of real and imaginative spiritual and cosmological contexts with fantastic tropes and the coven’s many adventurous tasks that culminate in sending Ekwensu back to the spirit world facilitates identification and empowerment through cultural representation, which becomes visible not least in the online fandom surrounding the novel, where fan art depictions of Sunny frequently feature next to those of characters from Children of Blood and Bone� Trauma and the Impossibility of Spiritual Healing in Children of Blood and Bone Whereas spiritual healing is achieved through self-knowledge and the fulfilment of the predestined task in Akata Witch, Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, the first part of her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, dwells more explicitly on Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 161 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 structural violence� In her author’s note, Adeyemi contextualizes the writing of the novel “during a time where I kept turning on the news and seeing stories of unarmed black men, women and children being shot by the police� I felt afraid and angry and helpless, but this book was the one thing that made me feel like I could do something about it” (Children of Blood and Bone 20 526)� Listing “black lives taken too soon”, she urges her readers to not only cry and grieve for the characters of the novel, but also “for innocent children like Jordan Edwards, Tamir Rice, and Aiyana Stanley-Jones [who] were fifteen, twelve, and seven when they were shot and killed by police” and “for all the survivors of police brutality who’ve had to witness their loved ones taken firsthand”, invoking the story’s “power to change the evils in the world” (Blood and Bone 526-527) as a call to real-world action� The context of police brutality is also alluded to in Akata Witch when Sasha refers to his experiences with police and comments: “Y’all don’t know what it’s like for a black man in the U� S� and y’all certainly don’t know Chicago cops on the South Side” (Witch 60)� Adeyemi’s references explicitly complicate the relation between the real “pain, fear, sorrow, and loss” (Blood and Bone 526) on the one hand and the fantastic animals and sacred rituals of her novel on the other� Her paratext thus highlights the above-cited notion of a Black Lives Matter-inspired fantasy via the direct link between the real-world trauma caused by hatred and systemic violence and its allegorical representation in the mode of a fantastic adventure tale� Set in Orïsha, Blood and Bone details the ten ‘maji clans’ whose titles - Reapers, Burners, Connectors, Winders, Tiders, Grounders and Welders, Lighters, Healers and Cancers, Seers, and Tamers - refer to their different abilities in relation to their respective Yoruba deity� Reimagining the real-life context of Orisha worship as practised across the Atlantic world in different ways, Adeyemi creates a secondary world that is replete with medievalist fantasy tropes� 21 The topographical outline of Orïsha in the paratextual map roughly resembles a version of the current state of Nigeria that is, however, fractured into islands� Place names such as Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Calabar, or Benin City are retained but shifted geographically to varying degrees� From the beginning, the protagonist Zélie Adebola is depicted as a fighter who is awaiting her graduation match in Mama Agba’s secret training facility that is disguised 20 Henceforth shortened to Blood and Bone in in-text citations� 21 Although her interest in the Orishas was sparked by her much-cited study trip to Brazil as a student, Adeyemi has qualified this somewhat, e. g. in an interview on the Not Another Book Podcast (“‘Children of Blood and Bone’: Live with Tomi Adeyemi”)� For a general introduction, see Baba Ifa Karade’s chapter “The Oriṣa” in The Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts� 162 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 as a sewing workshop� In an event referred to as ‘the Raid’, which happened eleven years prior to the narrative present, magic was literally killed with King Saran’s genocidal massacre of the ‘maji’ in which Zélie lost her mother� To further subdue potential maji - who are divîners until their powers emerge, usually at the age of 13, and who are born with white strands of hair -, their Yoruba language has been outlawed, making it more difficult to practice and pass on their cultural traditions� The alloy ‘majacite’ is the powerful weapon that breaks maji powers and kills them, as young Zélie had to witness when her mother was chained and lynched� The first-person narration alternates between Zélie, the princess Amari, and the crown prince Inan, whereas Zélie’s brother Tzain is not given a narrative voice. The four are positioned on opposite sides of Orïsha’s power differential between the potentially magic-wielding but subdued and disenfranchised ‘divîners’ and the ruling ‘kosidán’, with shifting and at times unclear allegiances, so that trust between them is always precarious� Yet, they have to fatefully join forces across the maji/ kosidán divide in their quest to bring magic back and to empower the divîners against the tyrannical and murderous king� Zélie is to achieve this task with the help of three artifacts needed to perform a sacred ritual at a designated time and place, which provides the countdown for their perilous journey� The king and his henchmen refer to the maji and divîners as ‘maggots’ and keep them in perpetual debt bondage through ever-increasing taxation, with the constant threat of being sent to and permanently enslaved in ‘the stocks’� Especially Inan’s switching and at times unclear loyalties leave ample room for speculation as to who is ‘good’ or ‘evil’� As his father Saran has bestowed upon him a sense of “duty before self” - a phrase he reiterates almost obsessively whenever he needs to justify his actions - Inan initially refers to magic as a “virus” or “curse” and to the maji as “parasites” (e� g� Blood and Bone 73, 84, 173, 134), only to later discover that he is a divîner himself, a revelation he desperately tries to hide� References to real-world imperialism are also only thinly veiled, but when King Saran tells his son a story of endless battles for power, he offers an interesting counter-narrative: “When I rose to the throne, I knew magic was the root of all our pain� It’s crushed empires before ours, and as long as it lives, it shall crush empires again�” I nod, remembering Father’s rants from long before the Raid. The Britāunîs. The Pörltöganés. The Spãní Empire - all civilizations destroyed because those who had magic craved power, and those in charge didn’t do enough to stop them� (82) In another iteration of his ostensible reason for killing the maji (but not the divîners, who cannot activate their magic without maji), Saran tellingly con- Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 163 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 ceptualizes the eradication of magic as a burden in a way that recalls Kipling’s invocation of the ‘white man’s burden’: “We are not the first to bear this burden� To go to these lengths to keep our kingdom safe� The Bratonians, the Pörltöganés - all crushed because they didn’t fight magic hard enough” (432). Saran tries to school his son in how to break the will of the ‘maggots’, continuously dehumanizing them rhetorically as well as in his actions (e� g� when branding ‘maggot’ into Zélie’s flesh), although he at one point acknowledges magic to be “a gift from the gods” and “a spiritual connection between them and mankind” that had been broken “with royals generations ago” (82)� In this sense, the war between the divîners and the kosidán is also a spiritual one, but the lines between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ do not always run seamlessly along those of oppression� Aside from the many allusions, some of which cater to adult rather than younger readers, the novel’s complex worldbuilding facilitates the immersive secondary world experience of epic or ‘high’ fantasy by way of an elaborate cultural reference system based on or inspired by Yoruba terms and concepts� One example for this is the narration of the mythical origin of the world: “On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone� In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses� Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul” (Blood and Bone 159)� Other concepts borrowed from Yoruba spirituality are alâfia, which designates a state of peace, and apâdi, “eternal hell” (98, 202-203)� While Adeyemi can also be said to write ‘organic fantasy’ in the sense of merging actual and imaginative spiritual and cosmological references, the secondary world she creates in her Legacy of Orïsha novels is overall more allegorical than Okorafor’s, which emerges from the everyday� The relationships between Adeyemi’s characters are complicated, fraught, and shift along the way of their quest to bring back magic, revealing a broad spectrum of moral and ethical questions that also resonate with current real-life contexts� Within this medievalist world, topics such as colorism or racialized oppression are also directly addressed, e� g� when Zélie begins “to realize how far others will go to keep us down” (Blood and Bone 163)� Zélie frequently renders the oppression that is experienced by the divîners as the inability to breathe: 22 Afraid� I am always afraid� It’s a truth I locked away years ago, a fact I fought hard to overcome� 22 Throughout the text, breath and breathing allude to the Black Lives Matter movement’s use of the phrase “I can’t breathe” since the chokehold killing Eric Garner in 2014� 164 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Because when it hits, I’m paralyzed� I can’t breathe� I can’t talk� All at once, I crumple to the ground, clasping my palm over my mouth to stifle the sobs� It doesn’t matter how strong I get, how much power my magic wields� They will always hate me in this world� I will always be afraid� (312-313) When she meets the temporarily allied Inan in their shared dreamscape and he pleads for Zélie to explain her fear to him so that he can understand, she interrupts him by straightforwardly calling out his privilege: “You can’t� They built this world for you, built it to love you� They never cursed you in the streets, never broke down the doors of your home� They didn’t drag your mother by her neck and hang her for the whole world to see�” Now that the truth is out, there’s nothing I can do to stop� My chest billows as I sob� My fingers tremble at the terror. Afraid� The truth cuts like the sharpest knife I’ve ever known� No matter what I do, I will always be afraid� (312) Although the return of magic had felt “like breathing for the first time” (170), Zélie’s and the maji’s deep-seated trauma cannot be overcome� 23 Symptomatic for this are the festivities at the divîner camp, during which they “dance like there’s no tomorrow, each step praising the gods� Their mouths glorify the rapture of liberation, their hearts sing the Yoruba songs of freedom� My ears dance at the words of my language, words I once thought I’d never hear outside my head” (377) - are interrupted by the violent attack of the king’s troops, demonstrating that even temporary joy is impossible and freedom illusory� As lack of power is equated with oppression (311), and since the return of magic cannot bring peace but only provide “a fighting chance” (389), the violence inherent in the social order needs to be fully exposed to effect any meaningful change� King Saran is the embodiment of this violence: “in this man - this one wretched man - is an entire kingdom� An entire nation of hate and oppression” (414), again alluding to both colonial and contemporary forces of oppression� In light of this, one of Zélie’s most heroic acts is to “not let [her] fear silence the truth” (416) when she finally faces him: “You crushed us to build your monarchy on the backs of our blood and bone� Your mistake wasn’t keeping us alive. It was thinking we’d never fight back! ” (ibid.). Even 23 See also Adeyemi, Blood and Bone 91, 450� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 165 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 though Saran is ultimately brought down and killed by the hands of his own daughter and in spite of the heroic fulfilment of her quest, Zélie is granted but a momentary relief, as the entire system of oppression with its constant power struggles has to be undone for there to be any chance at freedom and peace� In this endeavor, which strongly and clearly resonates with the author’s stated Black Lives Matter inspiration, the “children of blood and bone” are foreshadowed to also be “instruments of vengeance and virtue” (519) in an allusion to the second part of the trilogy as well as a necessarily open ending - much like Sunny’s announced next quest to find out what it means to be a Nimm warrior in Okorafor’s sequel Akata Warrior� Perilous Journeys in and Beyond the “Digital Affect” Demonstrating a sense of empowerment through representation, both Akata Witch and Children of Blood and Bone have drawn online fandoms in the form of fan art, fan wikis, and discussion boards� While Okorafor frequently comments on her novels on social media, Adeyemi’s novel has an accompanying publisher’s website featuring author videos, a teacher’s guide with reading questions to be discussed in the classroom (Odean n� p�), as well as a quiz to find out one’s maji clan affiliation (“What’s your Maji Clan? ”). 24 Without a doubt, both novels and writers are commercially successful and cater to broad global audiences way beyond the assumed niche markets for diverse YA fiction. Success is often eyed with suspicion, frequently leading to charges of commodification, lack of significant critique, or dismissal due to ostensible adherence to formulaic genre tropes� Such criticism also followed Black Panther’s unanticipated scope of success - of which Nnedi Okorafor is an integral part not only due to her authorship in several of the Marvel comic series, but arguably also more generally due to her very conceptions of and manifold contributions to ‘organic fantasy’, ‘Africanfuturism’, and ‘Africanjujuism’� Although it is certainly significant that both series under discussion are by diasporic authors residing in the United States, who therefore tend to have comparatively easier access to agents and major publishing deals than those residing on the African continent, it is important to keep in mind the relative representational void that their texts fill, especially Okorafor’s earlier works. Just like their protagonists’ temporary relief, the authors’ success, then, can 24 This recalls the popular Hogwarts Sorting Experience for Harry Potter fans (“Discover your Hogwarts house on Pottermore”) and also speaks to the social media and expected merchandising campaigns for the forthcoming movie� 166 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 also be seen as but a small victory in the long quest towards necessary changes in the global publishing industry and book market� Yet, Hannah Pardey’s exploration of the “digital pathways” of “consumption patterns of the new Nigerian novel” (218) alerts us to the fact that, as she argues, “an affective online community of metropolitan and ethnically diverse readers whose interest in self-realization through empathetic but distanced suffering with others functions to adjust the middle-class emotional habitus to the conditions of an increasingly globalized market economy” (ibid�)� Given that the novels she examines are “by Nigerian-born writers residing and publishing in the UK or the US” (220) 25 , can similar conclusions be drawn for the YA fantasy novels under discussion here? Pardey convincingly reveals the “digital affect” to consist of “a tightly-knit pattern of production, distribution and consumption” (224) and argues that its manifestation in the form of “middlebrow 2�0” aligns this “expression of postmodern culture” (225) with an emotional function catering towards capitalism� Are emphatic statements as to the empowering potential of novels such as Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s just another version of such “emotion talk” which provides “relief from capitalist alienation” (226-227)? While in the present examples certainly much can be said to support the thesis that “the digital affect seeks to counter the market with emotions - only to be continually reintegrated into its mechanism” (228), the finding that it represents “a homogenous cultural space that is marked by a capitalist basis” (230) for the present novels would have to be substantiated with the same methodological diligence and data that Pardey bases her examples on� A case study can certainly be constructed that would prove the “contradictory habitus of the digital affect” which “both counteracts and confirms the capitalist mechanisms that produce the online community in the first place” (235), although in the examples outlined here this would hopefully be less prone to “ignore or appropriate racial, national, and age differences” or to transpose “contemporary middle-class ‘problems’ in the affluent West […] onto black girl protagonists” (236)� The dynamics of reception and production can be complicated not only by Okorafor’s and Adeyemi’s genre reconfigurations and their author-izing interventions in the form of social media and authorial paratexts, but also by the fan art that young readers produce in their varied and pronounced engagements with and discussions of the novels, which is where one can best encounter the dynamics of empowerment� 25 Pardey exemplifies the “digital affect” through discussions of Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Diana Evans’s 26a (2005), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2004), and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005)� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 167 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Pointing out the simultaneity of counteracting and conforming to capitalist mechanisms, however, also speaks to a critical desire to escape the postmodern dilemma of complicity� This problem might indeed be more productively addressed through a post-ironic than through a postmodern lens� The desire to escape rather than to address complicity is also visible in criticism which calls for “rewarding” reading experiences that pose a “challenge […] both in terms of content and form”, and for texts that refrain from “clichéd metaphors” or “predictable plot moves” (Stedman 207)� Okorafor and Adeyemi certainly avoid the popular “unreconstructed genre elements such as happy endings, babies signifying a happy future, a loving gaze at black or brown skin on white, stilted dialogue, exoticism without ironisation, [or] whiteness as the unquestioned norm” (ibid�) that Stedman sees perpetuated in recent British Black and Asian fiction featuring “surface diversity” (ibid.). Yet, YA fantasy’s necessary tightrope walk is one that happens in-between the genre’s problematic legacies and its active reconfiguration, not least by employing fearless female protagonists� It is, however, also the very fantasy that readers desire to be represented in and that authors calling for diversification within this genre can creatively transgress in their own perilous journeys along the boundaries of genres and markets� To not grant them this liberty would be just another expression of critical nostalgia for ostensibly more ‘resistant’ texts� Works Cited @Nnedi (Nnedi Okorafor)� “I really wish people would stop calling my Akata series a ‘Nigerian Harry Potter’� I appreciate people being excited about these books and I know people want some kind of easy shorthand to describe it, BUT you’re doing a disservice to my hard work in the long run�” Twitter, 18 Feb� 2020, 3: 51 p�m�, https: / / twitter�com/ nnedi/ status/ 1229780456993906688� ---� “The Akata series is Africanjujuism, a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative�” Twitter, 25 Sept� 2019, 4: 01 p�m�, https: / / twitter�com/ Nnedi/ status/ 1176859245045866498� Achebe, Chinua� Things Fall Apart� 1959� New York: Anchor Books, 1994� “About�” Action on Albinism, https: / / actiononalbinism�org/ en/ page/ s3e6cfhxqxie7v46ridjnstt9� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Adeyemi, Tomi� Children of Blood and Bone� London: Macmillan, 2018� Attebery, Brian� “Patricia Wrightson and Aboriginal Myth�” Extrapolation, vol� 46, no� 3, 2005, pp� 327-337� Black Man White Skin� Directed by Jose Manuel Colón, performance by Óscar Jaenada, Ochoa Juan, and Zoe Saldana, Alquimistas Producciones and Genial Media, 2015� 168 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Born Too White. Directed by Clare Richards, performance by Oscar Duke, Dragonfly Film and Media Productions, 2017� Brantlinger, Patrick� Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914� Ithaca, Cornell UP , 1988� Campbell, Joseph� The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3rd ed� Novato, CA : New World Library, 2008� Cecire, Maria Sachiko� Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019� “‘Children of Blood and Bone’: Live with Tomi Adeyemi�” Not Another Book Podcast, 18 Sept� 2018, https: / / www�spreaker�com/ show/ not-another-book-podcast� Coulon, Virginia� “Onitsha Goes National: Nigerian Writing in Macmillan’s Pacesetter Series�” Research in African Literatures, vol� 18, no� 3, 1987, pp� 304-319� Desowitz, Bill� “‘Black Panther’: How Wakanda Got a Written Language as Part of its Afrofuturism�” IndieWire, 22 Feb� 2018, https: / / www�indiewire�com/ 2018/ 02/ black-panther-wakanda-written-language-ryan-coogler-afrofuturism-1201931252/ � Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� “Discover your Hogwarts House on Pottermore�” Wizarding World, 1 Jan� 2018, https: / / www�wizardingworld�com/ news/ discover-your-hogwarts-house-on-wizarding-world� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Emmanuel, Ima, and Romanus Aboh� “A Re-assessment of Generationalizations in Nigerian Literature: The Generationalizations Palaver�” Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, vol� 53, no� 1, 2015, pp� 143-164� Fair, Thomas� “19 th -Century English Girls’ Adventure Stories: Domestic Imperialism, Agency, and the Female Robinsonades�” Rocky Mountain Review, vol� 68, no� 2, 2014, pp� 142-158� Fleming Jr, Mike� “Fox 2000, Macmillan Land African Flavored Fantasy Novel Children of Blood And Bone In Splashy Deal�” Deadline, 28 Mar� 2018, https: / / deadline�com/ 2017/ 03/ children-of-blood-and-bone-fox-2000-movie-deal-african-flavored-fantasy-novel-1202054322� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Flood, Alison. “Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé: The 21-year-old British Student with a Million-Dollar Book Deal�” The Guardian, 8 September 2020, https: / / www�theguardian�com/ books/ 2020/ sep/ 08/ faridah-abike-iyimide-british-student-million-dollar-book-dealace-of-spades� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Green, Martin� The Robinson Crusoe Story� University Park: Penn State UP , 1990� Härtl, Kathrin� “Abenteuerliche Paratexte: Selbstbeschreibungen viktorianischer Abenteuerfiktionen.” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp� 189-212� In the Shadow of the Sun� Directed by Harry Freeland, performance by Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, Mussa, and Mizengo Pinda, BBC , Century Films and ITVS International, 2012� Karade, Baba Ifa� The Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts� Newburyport, MA : Weiser Books, 2020� Kutzer, M� Daphne� Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books� New York: Garland, 2000� Perilous Journeys Across Gender and Genre 169 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Morgan, Adam� “Is Nnedi Okorafor the Next George R� R� Martin? ” Chicago Magazine, 18 Sept� 2017, https: / / www�chicagomag�com/ uncategorized/ fall-culture-preview/ nnedi-okorafor/ Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Newkirk II , Vann R� “Where Fantasy Meets Black Lives Matter�” The Atlantic, Apr� 2018, https: / / www�theatlantic�com/ magazine/ archive/ 2018/ 04/ children-of-blood-andbone-tomi-adeyemi/ 554060/ � Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� “Nigeria�” Action on Albinism, https: / / actiononalbinism�org/ page/ 4rjyujp24gelam590fs8o- 7p66r� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Nikolajeva, Maria� “The Development of Children’s Fantasy�” The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2012, pp� 50-61� Odean, Kathleen� “Teacher’s Guide for Children of Blood and Bone�” Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, https: / / images�macmillan�com/ folio-assets/ teachers-guides/ 9781427295507TG�pdf� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Okorafor, Nnedi. “Africanfuturism Defined.” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog, 19 Oct� 2019, http: / / nnedi.blogspot.com/ 2019/ 10/ africanfuturism-defined.html. Accessed 15 Jan. 2021. ---� Akata Witch� 2011� New York: Speak, 2017� ---� Akata Warrior� 2017� New York: Speak, 2018� ---� “Hugo Nominee Nnedi Okorafor: ‘I Love Stories - And So I Write Them’�” Interview by Farai Chideya� NPR , 20 Aug� 2016, https: / / www�npr�org/ 2016/ 08/ 20/ 490771640/ hugo-nominee-nnedi-okorafor-breaks-down-her-sci-fi-writing? t=1598862606027. Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� ---� “Organic Fantasy�” The Black Imagination, Science Fiction and the Speculative, edited by Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman� London: Routledge, 2011, pp� 149-160� ---� “The Word ‘Akata’ and the Pain Behind It,” Nnedi’s Wahala Zone Blog, 24 Aug� 2018, http: / / nnedi�blogspot�com/ 2018/ 08/ akata�html� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Osa, Osayimwense� “Didacticism in Nigerian Young Adult Literature�” Journal of Reading, vol� 29, no� 3, 1985, pp� 251-253� ---� “The New Nigerian Youth Literature�” Journal of Reading, vol� 30, no� 2, 1986, pp� 100-104� ---� “The Rise of African Children’s Literature�” The Reading Teacher, vol� 38, no� 8, 1985, pp� 750-754� Pardey, Hannah� “Middlebrow 2�0: The Digital Affect and the New Nigerian Novel�” Imperial Middlebrow, edited by Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch� Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp� 218-239� Petzold, Jochen� “A Girl’s Own Empire? Imperialism and the Girl’s Own Paper, 1880 to 1903�” Imperial Middlebrow, edited by Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch� Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp� 22-43� Pundt, Johanna� “Organic Fantasy and the Alien Archetype in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon�” Exploring the Fantastic, edited by Ina Batzke et al� Bielefeld: transcript, 2018� 165-188� “Regional Action Plan on Albinism�” Action on Albinism, https: / / actiononalbinism�org/ page/ sfj6gs7s8kjd5f6c6zyhw7b9� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� Smith, Michelle J� Empire in British Girl’s Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915� London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011� 170 a nniKa M c P herson 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0007 Smith, Michelle J�, Kristine Moruzi, and Clare Bradford� From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840-1940� Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2018� Söffner, Jan� Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp� 263-279� Stedman, Gesa� “Sidelining Racism and Discrimination - Recent British Black and Asian Fiction�” Imperial Middlebrow, edited by Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch� Leiden: Brill, 2020, pp� 206-217� Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature� Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986� von Koppenfels, Martin, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp� 1-16� Waters, Michael� “Children of Blood and Bone Author Tomi Adeyemi Calls YA Debut ‘Black Panther With Magic’�” The Hollywood Reporter, 5 Mar� 2018, https: / / www�hollywoodreporter�com/ bookmark/ ya-author-tomi-adeyemi-black-directors-black-panther-her-7figure-book-deal-1090465. Accessed 15 Jan. 2021. Webster, Wendy� Englishness and Empire, 1939-1965� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2005� “What’s your Maji Clan? ” Children of Blood and Bone, https: / / childrenofbloodandbone�com/ wp-content/ quiz/ Macmillan/ views/ index�html� Accessed 15 Jan� 2021� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 s TeFanie F ricKe Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure: Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) On 27 February 1865, an uncommonly large shipment of gold entered the port of Nelson on the South Island of New Zealand, setting off a gold rush to the island’s West Coast: 1 Nelson […] echoed with oaths as goldseekers fought to buy tickets on ships lading with all haste for Hokitika� […] Wellington across the strait seemed to empty itself of its young men and boys. […] Fistfights broke out among fretful diggers vying for berths on ships weighing anchor in Otago Harbour� (Eldred-Grigg 133-136) 2 Hemmed in by vast mountains and with no established roads, the new goldfields were hard to reach: “Diggers sometimes fell over cliffs, starved to death, or were buried alive by snow� A digger would take weeks to walk all the way from Christchurch to the West Coast” (142)� The journey by ship was hardly less arduous for these were perilous waters and many ships vanished either during the journey or were wrecked on the bars of the West Coast (137-142)� But the lust for gold was stronger than the obstacles, and at Christmas 1865 the newly established and fast-growing port town of Hokitika, the gateway to the goldfields, already sported as many as 72 hotels. “At the peak of the rush, in 1867, there were probably about 29,000 people on the West Coast - around 12 % of New Zealand’s European population at the time” (Walrond n� p�)� A gold rush is the perfect background for adventure stories, as narratives by Jack London, Mark Twain, and others show� Thousands of men setting out to find riches and a better life, pitting themselves against unforgiving nature and the lawless society of the goldfields, make for an exciting read. This essay will analyse how this setting is used in two Neo-Victorian novels, Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Eleanor Catton’s Booker-Prize-winning The Luminaries (2013), which are both set during the West Coast Gold Rush� 1 On the history of the West Coast Gold Rush, see Eldred-Grigg 123-157� 2 Otago, a region located in the southern half of the South Island of New Zealand, had been the site of a previous gold rush, but the fields there, as well as in Victoria, Australia, seemed exhausted, and accordingly many diggers left Otago to try their luck on the West Coast� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 172 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Focussing on the lesser-known gold rush in New Zealand adds a layer of exoticism to a setting more familiar from North America: New Zealand had only become a separate British colony in 1841 (before that, it was part of the Australian colony of New South Wales) and was not made self-governing until 1852� An island like Britain but situated at the other end of the earth and full of wild and alien nature, it appeared strange and uncivilised to the Victorians (Bright 14-16)� Rose Tremain similarly states: “It seems to me that a huge landscape like New Zealand is very promising: it’s a wilderness where anything can happen and where human frailty is very extreme, and where everyone believes that they can change their lives and become something else” (Page 30)� In true adventure-fashion, both Tremain and Catton have their characters “overcom[e] obstacles and dangers and accomplish […] some important […] mission” (Cawelti 39)� Their gold seekers leave Britain to travel into wild and open spaces beyond the strict confines of everyday routines and face the wilderness of the New Zealand landscape as well as the arduousness of the goldfields during exciting quests. As will become apparent, however, both authors also deconstruct key elements of (gold rush) adventure stories, for example by inverting the hyper-masculinity of the protagonists, or by denying to narrate the gold rush adventure in the first place, thereby creating something new out of traditional plot patterns� The Female Quest Romance: Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) Tremain’s novel is set in 1864 / 65 and tells the story of Harriet and Joseph Blackstone from Norfolk who have come to the South Island of New Zealand with Joseph’s mother Lilian to start a new life� 3 Their marriage is not based on love, but on the wish to escape England: Harriet is sick of her life as a governess, while Joseph is responsible for the death of his lover Rebecca, a crime he tries to leave behind by travelling to the other end of the earth� They purchase a piece of land near Christchurch and Joseph builds a humble house out of cob� Their endeavours to turn their land into a prosperous farm, however, prove harder than Joseph had imagined. One day he finds a few grains of gold in a creek and immediately becomes obsessed by ‘the colour’, as gold is termed. He starts prospecting but finds only very little. Frustrated 3 According to Tremain, she was inspired to write her novel by the physical remains of the gold rush: “there’s a little museum with the artefacts of the gold rush in Arrowtown - the tools, the hobnailed boots, the pans� I was really moved by the idea that people set out to change their lives with these very basic tools” (Rustin)� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 173 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 by his failure, he decides to leave Harriet and Lilian to try his luck on the new goldfields on the West Coast. Unlike many other Neo-Victorian novels, The Colour is not a pastiche of Victorian texts, trying to recreate nineteenth-century language� It does, however, draw on popular Victorian genres such as the adventure novel and especially the late nineteenth-century imperial romance or (male) quest romance as epitomised in the novels of H� Rider Haggard� 4 These stories depict thrilling adventures in far-away places, sometimes including a confrontation with supernatural elements and / or the discovery of some sort of treasure� An important topic is the construction and assertion of masculinity which is threatened and ultimately re-affirmed through the encounter with various dangers. This genre is often seen as a reaction to various contemporary (male) anxieties, for example regarding the feared demise of the British Empire, degeneration, moral corruption, and the deterioration of traditional gender roles� The imperial romances themselves, which were frequently addressed to a young audience, were perceived as a possible remedy against these developments, instilling in their readers a positive view of imperial ventures and traditional gender roles (Arata 79, 89)� 5 Consequently, the alien landscapes depicted in these novels are constructed as a contrast to civilised and prosaic Britain, a space in which men can be ‘real’ men� 6 British women hardly feature in these stories and do not seem to be eager to participate in the men’s ventures abroad� They are left at home in the domestic, familiar sphere, which is contrasted with the setting 4 Other terms used for these texts are novels of empire and imperial gothic. For this genre, see Fraser and Brantlinger� These are, however, not the only Victorian intertextual connections of Tremain’s novel� Chialant points out similarities of The Colour to Victorian novels focused on the development of female characters: “A further category I would add [to Neo-Victorian fiction] is works which attempt neither a parody of Victorian narrative models nor a reworking of earlier classics, but which focus on the compulsion towards self-realization and fulfilment undertaken by Victorian women - a realist convention adopted in Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss and Tess of the D’Urbervilles - and portray female characters that embody the self-made woman, but develop their sexuality in more explicit terms� Consider, for example, Jane Rogers’s Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1991) and Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003)” (43)� James, on the other hand, draws attention to similarities between Tremain’s landscape descriptions and those of Thomas Hardy (7-9)� 5 See also Eldridge 56-58, 70, 77; Fraser 2� 6 A prime example of this is Sir Henry Curtis, one of the heroes in H� Rider Haggard’s bestsellers King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and its sequel Allan Quatermain (1887)� For him, travelling to Africa not only means a chance for adventure and financial advancement, but for realizing his true ‘manly’ self� Only there can he can pit his male prowess against wild animals, deadly natural conditions, and warlike natives� At the end of Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry remains forever in Africa and becomes the king of the fantastic country of Zu-Vendis� 174 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 of the adventure proper, and the relationship to them is replaced by a strong homosocial bond between the male adventurers (Fraser 3)� In Tremain’s The Colour, a ‘typical’ hero of the traditional male quest romance is introduced in the figure of Toby Orchard, a prosperous sheep farmer and neighbour to Harriet and Joseph: “Toby Orchard was a big man who had always felt confined and hot and unhappy in his job in the City of London. A voice inside had called to Toby night and day: Set me free, set me free, set me free� […] He longed to ride strong, unbreakable horses and shoot guns and shout at dogs under a monumental sky” (36, italics in original)� 7 As it turns out, however, Toby Orchard is only a minor character who has already accomplished his goal of self-realisation in his new surroundings� More narrative focus is given to Joseph, the Englishman who embarks to New Zealand to pursue a career in farming and later departs even further into the wilderness on his search for gold� Again, however, traditional expectations are thwarted� Joseph neither thrives in his new, adventurous surroundings nor does he manage (or even want) to establish strong homosocial bonds with his fellow adventurers. Most importantly, however, he also does not find any gold. Instead, in a reversal of gender roles, it is his wife Harriet who becomes the real heroine of Tremain’s take on the imperial romance� That Harriet is better suited than Joseph for their ‘adventure’ already becomes apparent in their different reasons for “travel[ing] across the world” (3) and different ways of responding to the strangeness and opportunities that New Zealand represents� Joseph primarily sees New Zealand as a refuge from his crime as well as a space in which he can achieve financial success and social advancement� But he fails with all his plans and, even worse, also finds that bringing as much geographical distance as possible between him and England does not mean that he can leave his past and guilt behind� At the end of the novel, Joseph decides to go back to England for “it was as though nothing could cheer him now, nothing in New Zealand, nothing that Nature or Man could contrive here� All he wanted was to sail away” (325)� For him, the adventure of emigration, as well as of gold prospecting, only leads to failure and pain� Whereas Joseph sees in New Zealand the possibility for escape and a prosperous future, for Harriet it offers a chance to realise her true nature� She is “a woman who longed for the unfamiliar and strange� As a child, she’d seen it waiting for her, in dreams or in the colossal darkness of the sky: some wild world which lay outside the realm of everything she knew” (5)� Just as for the traditional male heroes of the imperial romance, these dreams cannot be 7 All following quotes from the novel will be given with only the page numbers� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 175 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 realised at home in Britain, where “in her thirty-four years of life she had never been tried or tested, never gone beyond the boundaries society had set for her” (6), but only far away� And so, when Joseph proposed marriage and emigration, she took this chance although she did not love him� Arriving in New Zealand, she finds ‘civilised’ Christchurch too familiar and consequently boring� Instead, she longs to be in the true wilderness and to face the strangeness of this alien country: “In Christchurch, I do not feel as though I have yet arrived� Where Joseph is, there will I encounter the true Aotearoa, there will I feel the extraordinary difference of things. There will I see flightless birds and glaciers shining in the sun” (10)� In her reaction to New Zealand, Harriet is not only contrasted with her husband but also with her mother-in-law, Lilian� Lilian did not want to leave England at all but was forced by her financial situation to join her son and his wife� She represents the traditional femininity that Harriet eschews and perceives the open, wild, and lonely place where her son is building his farm as a “godforsaken” (24) “desert of grass” (28)� For Harriet, in contrast, the landscape cannot be lonely enough� She does not dream of domestic bliss with her husband but instead wants to directly engage with the wilderness on her own: “And the further away from her they moved, the more exhilarated Harriet became. To be alone here, alone with a strong horse in all this magnificent vastness! Alone and alone and alone, with no one guiding or leading� Alone in a desert of hills that lay between the mountains and the sea …” (52)� 8 Harriet’s dreams of adventure and her longing for freedom would seem commonplace in the conventional male hero of adventure fiction but are unusual for a female character of the late nineteenth century� Accordingly, even in New Zealand, where societal norms do not seem to be as strict as in Norfolk, Harriet’s thirst for adventure can only be quenched by disregarding Victorian gender roles and by clashing with the expectations of her husband� When they arrive in New Zealand, Harriet is eager to immediately take to the wilderness and help Joseph build their house, but he orders her to stay in Christchurch to look after his mother� On their farm, he similarly wants her to spend more time indoors with his mother to fulfil the gendered activity of care work. While Harriet is contrasted with her mother-in-law, she finds a fellow-spirit in her neighbour Dorothy Orchard� Following Dorothy’s lead, who proclaims “What a nuisance long hair is in this country! ” (42), Harriet cuts off her hair, feeling that by doing so she is preparing herself for new, less gendered adventures (94)� Joseph, however, only sees that she has made herself “ugly” (271) and does not approve� 8 See also also Tremain 60, 92-93� 176 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 But Harriet’s greatest transgression - which also ultimately enables her to realise her true, adventurous nature - comes when she sets out towards the goldfields. After Joseph has been gone for a while, his mother dies and their house is destroyed by the elements� Harriet, in true adventure-hero fashion, decides not to stay with her neighbours but rather wants to follow Joseph to the West Coast� When she endeavours to cross the mountains, she invades the male sphere for only men undertake the arduous journey to the goldfields, and her presence on the road is met with disbelief� As soon as Harriet arrives in Hokitika, however, Joseph tries to re-establish ‘proper’ gender rules and power relations and refuses to take her with him to the goldfields for “[t]here are no women on the gold-diggings” (255)� 9 Finally, however, he relents, and Harriet consequently becomes “a curiosity: a woman at Kokatahi - just as she’d been a curiosity on the dray road to the Hurunui” (263)� On the goldfields, Joseph again at first wants to relegate her back to performing stereotypically female tasks such as washing, “as though he didn’t trust her to search for gold: he just wanted her to make things clean again” (265). But in contrast to Joseph, Harriet soon finds gold further up the river, and this gives her the opportunity to leave her husband and to prospect on her own: “with a tent, and with the gun Joseph had given her, and with Lady [her dog] by her side and with some rudimentary supplies, she would be able to go where she liked” (258)� Her new-found riches also make it possible to imagine a life without Joseph: “I am dreaming of a new house by our old creek, a house made of wood, not cob, and situated out of reach of the winds� But I do not see Joseph in this house� I see only myself” (303)� Just like in some imperial romances, at the end of the adventures the hero finds riches which would be unimaginable in England� But in Tremain’s novel it is not Joseph, the white Anglo-Saxon male, but Harriet, a figure usually marginalised in Victorian society and especially in the genre of the imperial romance, whose endeavours are rewarded with gold� Harriet, however, not only finds gold and thus financial independence on the goldfields but also sexual fulfilment with her new lover, the Chinese Chen Pao Yi� Pao Yi is another usually marginalised character 10 and makes visible the increasing Chinese immigration to New Zealand at that time� Outsiders because of their appearance, language, dress, and also the use of opium, they faced daily prejudices and mostly lived in their own settlements (Walrond n� p�)� Again, Harriet’s transgressive romantic relationship with the Chinese 9 See also also Tremain 256� 10 For a more detailed analysis of the role of the Chinese in Tremain’s novel see Franchi, “Neo-Victorian Chinese Diaspora”� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 177 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Other fits into the imperial romance scheme for it is a gender-reversed version of similar plot structures in those novels where the male white hero enters into a relationship with an inappropriate but alluring native / exotic woman (see, for example, Captain Good and the native girl Foulata in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines)� In nineteenth-century imperial romances, these affairs are doomed from the beginning and so is Harriet’s relationship with Pao Yi� After a flash flood destroys the gold diggers’ camp, Harriet and Pao Yi spend the winter together cut off from society in his hut in the mountains, but they know that their transgressive relationship has no future. When they find even more gold in a cave they retreat to for their most intense sexual encounter, this signals the inevitable end of their affair, for to get at the gold means destroying their cave and sanctuary� Additionally, the gold also makes it possible for Pao Yi to return home to China a rich man, thereby fulfilling his obligations to his wife and son, but at the same time separating him from Harriet, who lets him go without telling him about her pregnancy� This pregnancy constitutes another difference from these kinds of relationships in traditional imperial romances� While there, the danger of miscegenation is averted, for example by the death of the woman (again, see Foulata in King Solomon’s Mines), Harriet is happy to be pregnant with Pao Yi’s child and imagines him as a boy who resembles his Chinese father, so that while she had to give up her lover, “in this boy’s sweet face she would see the face of her lover, and the child would never leave her” (358)� The role of Pao Yi, as well as the fact that Harriet’s child will be half-Chinese, also challenges traditional accounts of the white, Anglo-Saxon colonisation of modern New Zealand (Franchi, “Neo-Victorian Chinese Diaspora” 93-96, 105)� Harriet’s child, who symbolises the future generation which will stay in New Zealand and profit from the gold rush, is a hybrid character but, interestingly, one in which English and Chinese immigrants are combined, excluding the Maori population� Much has been written about the connection between adventure fiction in general and the imperial romance specifically and British imperialism: “the writing and reading of adventures and other novels, both in Europe and in the colonies themselves, were part of the process of (ideological and material) colonialism� Adventures constructed an imaginative space in which colonisation could take place, and sometimes mapped the course of that colonisation” (Phillips 68)� 11 Neo-Victorian fiction, by contrast, is often seen as critically engaging with imperial ideologies from a modern point of view, drawing attention to the dark aspects of British imperialism and giving a voice and 11 See also Green 3� 178 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 representation to marginalised groups (Ho 11)� 12 Yet, The Colour in this regard seems to adhere closer to the traditional imperial romances for here the reality of British conquest is hardly problematised� The fact that land is given to and transformed by British settlers is not presented as negative, and the fate of the Maori and their conflict with the Pākehā, the white settlers, is hardly touched upon� The Maori are nevertheless present in the novel in the character Pare, the former nurse of the Orchard’s son Edwin, and in their relationship a utopian alternative of mutual understanding and affection is presented: ever since he was a baby, Edwin and Pare seem to have shared some mythic connection, and Pare comes to see him from time to time in secret and shares with him her songs and stories� But this relationship has no future, at least at that moment in history, and seems ultimately even injurious to Edwin� Being somehow supernaturally connected to Pare, who gets injured, falls ill, and dies, Edwin, too, is affected by her deterioration and finally dies. A further connection with the Maori is never arrived at nor attempted� While Tremain’s handling of the colonial background to her story seems rather traditional, her use of the quest structure prevalent in most adventure fiction and imperial romance is more interesting and again defies readers’ expectations. Just as in traditional imperial romances and adventure fiction, the characters in The Colour undergo a number of quests which test their resolve and in some cases bring on personal development. These may be difficult journeys in which the characters face a number of obstacles, or just the attempt to fulfil or achieve a certain goal. Interestingly, however, in The Colour most of these quests fail: “To an unusual degree, Tremain’s story is taken up with failure, and so bitter is its taste that you feel yourself in the hands of a connoisseur” (Smee 64)� For Joseph, his goal in departing for New Zealand was to leave behind his guilt and build a new, prosperous life� But he never manages to quieten his bad conscience, and the farm he tries to establish also fails� This is symbolised in the fate of the Cob House that he constructs with his own hands� In spite of the advice of his local helpers, he builds it on an elevated position which is in the pathway of the winds. While Joseph is at first proud of his humble house, he realises soon that it was a grave mistake to construct it on such an exposed spot� Similarly, his plans for making the surrounding landscape more ‘English’ by planting European trees and building a pond also fail� Finally, the Cob House itself is slowly destroyed by the merciless New Zealand weather, first turning to dust by drought and hot winds, then into mud when the rains 12 On Neo-Victorianism and Empire, see Ho� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 179 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 come� Its demise thus becomes not only a symbol of the cruelty of New Zealand’s nature but also for Joseph’s failure to create a permanent home and new life in New Zealand� Failing his first ‘quest’, to create a prosperous farm, Joseph eagerly turns to the new “adventure” (131) of becoming a successful gold prospector� For him, this means again a new beginning, a chance to finally remake himself: “Now, he would make his fortune� Now, he would dig himself a new future” (186, italics in original)� Moreover, having failed in leaving the past and his guilt behind, he now sees gold also as a means to at least atone for his crime: 13 “He thought he would send money to Rebecca’s family� […] And then I will be free from guilt. Then I will have made amends. Then I will have done enough” (120, italics in original)� 14 For Joseph, the successful quest for gold is furthermore a test of his bravery and manliness, and he imagines that through gold “[h] e would become the kind of man who inspired envy in other men and longing in women” (130)� Conversely, he is also afraid of being outperformed by other, less educated men just because they might find gold. Leaving the farm to travel to Hokitika moreover removes Joseph from the female sphere of his home, where he feels that the presence of Harriet and Lilian hampers his secret prospecting for more gold, to a predominantly male one� Once Joseph arrives at the West Coast, however, he is also loath to join the company of the other diggers and tries to stay away from them as much as possible� At the same time, he is not able to bear the loneliness and starts a sexual relationship with a young boy, Will, who is a prostitute to the gold diggers and who reminds him of his dead lover Rebecca: “he thought […] how satisfying it might become to impose upon Will Sefton the tasks of a housewife� In the coming chaos, Will would keep the tent ship-shape and purchase supplies and cook trout from the river on fires that he’d made with his small hands. He would do the washing” (180-181)� 15 His dreams of all-male domestic bliss, however, fail when he does not find gold and cannot pay Will for his sexual services. In the end, Joseph never succeeds as a prospector and because of that indirectly also fails to prove his masculinity� Tellingly, it is only because he takes some of the gold found by his wife that he can embark on his final quest, to 13 From the beginning, gold for Joseph is connected to memories of his dead lover Rebecca: Joseph finds the first bit of gold just after thinking about her, and later he realises that “this drift [of his mind] towards gold had somehow opened a door on to the past, a door he had thought was closed for ever, but was not” (Tremain 121)� 14 See also also Tremain 285� 15 In this, as well as in Joseph’s failure to enjoy ‘manly endeavours’ and his later occupation building an intricate doll house, one could also argue that Joseph seems to adhere to gay clichés. For a discussion of gender fluidity and homosocial bonding in American gold rush literature, see Stoneley� 180 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 return home to England, confess his crime, and give the gold to Rebecca’s family, so that “now the damage was going to cease” (288)� When he arrives in Norfolk, however, he never manages to confess his guilt, nor does he give the gold away. Instead, the only consolation he finds is in constructing an intricate dolls’ house� While the house he had built in New Zealand crumbled after just one year, “The doll’s house was his - his house - and it would be the place where he would take refuge from the world” (363, italics in original)� The motif of the house, and of making a home in the wilderness, is central to Tremain’s novel� In New Zealand, where nature is cruel and alien, to create a physical as well as emotional home is absolutely necessary for survival, as Harriet’s neighbour Dorothy Orchard states: “Nature is grand here� But too grand� To survive in New Zealand, we all have to re-create, if not the past exactly, then something very like it, something homely” (46)� While Joseph literally fails in building a home and therefore a future in New Zealand, it is strongly implied that Harriet will succeed� Again taking over the predominantly male roles of the successfully returning hero, house builder, and provider, Harriet at the end of the novel returns to her land a rich woman intending to make a good life for the child she carries and to construct a new, permanent house: “She would site it lower down the flats […] where it would be sheltered from the wind� It would have a wide verandah, Harriet decided, and a tiled roof. There would be five or six rooms with floors of totara pine and bright colours on the walls” (365)� In contrast to Joseph, Harriet thus achieves her overall goals, to build a new life in New Zealand, to escape from the confines of Victorian femininity, and to realise her dreams of adventure and autonomy� She fails, however, in an important other quest: Edwin, the neighbours’ young son, asks her to look for his Maori nursemaid Pare, who herself had been on a quest to find greenstone on the West Coast� Because of their seemingly magical connection, Edwin knows that Pare is injured, stranded in the mountains, and needs help� Harriet agrees to take on this quest and intends to follow Pare across the mountains, which are also called “the stairway of hell” (47), via the terrifying Hurunui Gorge� But she has no accurate idea of it and believes that the way will be hard but manageable� When she arrives at the gorge, however, and realises that she cannot take her horse with her on the steep descent, she decides to turn back� Harriet does not overcome this obstacle and does not prove the male gold diggers wrong, who doubt “that a woman could do it” (198)� Here, the novel runs counter to the traditional adventure plot and also disappoints readers who would have Harriet undertake the adventurous voyage into the threatening gorge� When Harriet returns to Orchard Run, however, Toby Orchard Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 181 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 provides her and the readers with an alternative - if less adventurous - interpretation: “Of course it was brave […] but it was also lunacy� It was suicide� […] I’m all for women showing your kind of spirit� But we all have to learn the difference between what is brave and what is foolhardy� You showed great courage by turning back” (221-222)� No matter how one interprets this turning away, as failure or reason, it means that “[s]he’d failed in her mission to find Pare” (223). Harriet does not want to give up, though, and when she goes to the West Coast by the sea route, she still intends to “embark on the quest with which Edwin Orchard had entrusted her: she would go in search of Pare” (258)� 16 It is while she is looking for Pare that she finds her first nugget. But ultimately, with her prospecting for gold and the arrival of the flush, Harriet is no longer able to continue the search� Pare, who also fails in her quest for greenstone, sickens more and more and finally dies, which occasions the death of the boy Edwin as well� Readers’ expectations of a successfully completed quest and a happy end for Pare and Edwin are thwarted in a rather cruel way� Denying Adventure: Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries Denying and thwarting readers’ expectations is also characteristic for Eleanor Catton’s 2013 Booker Prize-winning novel The Luminaries, which uses the same historical and geographical background as Rose Tremain’s but to a rather different effect� The Luminaries is a sprawling, extremely complex story, which starts in January 1866 when a young Scot called Walter Moody arrives in the gold rush town of Hokitika� 17 By coincidence, Walter stumbles into the secret gathering of twelve local men, a very heterogeneous group representing a cross-section of the town’s society, including a shipping agent, a chaplain, a chemist, and a newspaperman but also a Maori scout and two Chinese� The group has come together to discuss three strange events that occurred two weeks earlier, on 14 January 1866: the death of the old hermit Crosby Wells in whose cabin a fortune in gold has been found; the disappearance of Emery Staines, a young and extremely wealthy prospector; and the attempted suicide by opium of Anna Wetherell, a local prostitute� All twelve characters are somehow connected to these incidents and they present their versions of events in order to determine what actually happened� Moody is let in on their stories and in the 16 See also also Tremain 257, 265� 17 With 832 pages, The Luminaries is the longest novel ever to win the Booker Prize, and Catton, age 28, the youngest author (Brown n� p�)� 182 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 following weeks and months becomes ever more involved in occurrences that are not only determined by the recent past but also by what occurred one year ago in Dunedin, thirteen years ago in Sidney, and decades ago in China� 18 According to Catton, she was inspired by mystery and adventure novels for children and young adults such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Philip Pullman’s Sally-Lockhart trilogy (1985-1990) (“How She Wrote The Luminaries” n� p�)� She also states that she “wanted to write an adventure mystery of some kind […]� The west coast gold rush of the middle 1860s presented itself quite naturally: the west coast is a part of New Zealand I know fairly well, and a gold rush seemed a fine theatre in which to play out an adventure story” (ibid.). The finished novel indeed uses the setting of an adventure story - the gold rush town society at the edge of civilisation - and presents a great number of characters who, just as in The Colour, have come to New Zealand to start a new life� Only the Maori Te Rau Tauwhare and the banker Charlie Frost seem to be born in New Zealand; all others are emigrants from Australia, the British Isles, China, Germany, Norway, and France� It is from the perspective of the latest immigrant, the 27-year-old Walter Moody, that the readers are introduced to Hokitika and New Zealand as a whole� For him, New Zealand is an odd mixture of familiarity and strangeness, of wilderness and civilization� He has a dim sense […] that the colony was somehow the shadow of the British Isles, the unformed, savage obverse of the Empire’s seat and heart� He had been surprised […] to see mansions on the hill, quays, streets, and plotted gardens - and he was surprised, now, to observe a well-dressed gentleman passing his lucifers to a Chinaman, and then leaning across him to retrieve his glass� (Catton, The Luminaries 11) 19 The trappings of Englishness are transplanted to and maintained in New Zealand, but at the same time old structures and certainties are called into question, and Moody experiences a feeling of disorientation on his arrival in New Zealand: [H]e had cast his gaze skyward, and had felt for the first time the strangeness of where he was� The skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the Pole Star beneath his feet, quite swallowed. At first he searched for it, stupidly, wanting to 18 In terms of its temporal structure, the novel describes a circle: from the beginning until page 713, the story is set in the time between 27 January 1866 and 27 April 1866, with people referring to the past in their memories or narrations� Starting with page 625 and 27 April 1865, the more recent past is also depicted chronologically in detail until the novel finally ends on 14 January 1866, the beginning of the narrative. 19 All further quotes from the novel will be given with only the page numbers� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 183 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 measure his present latitude from the incline of his rigid arm, as he had done as a boy, on the other side of the earth� (342-343) Like many other immigrants, Moody has come to New Zealand to leave family and money trouble behind, “to make his fortune” (502), preferably by finding a lot of gold, and thereby also to ‘remake’ himself: “But yours is the way of the goldfields, is it not? Reinvention! Dare I say - revolution! That a man might make new - might make himself anew - truly, now! ” (29-30, italics in original)� As in The Colour, gold motivates most of the action, which revolves around an elaborate intrigue built upon a stolen bonanza which is used to blackmail a politician, sewn into women’s dresses, lost, and found again� But unlike Tremain’s novel, which vividly describes the obsession with gold, the arduous and dirty quest for it as well as the final moment of its discovery, Catton’s novel contains hardly any actual prospecting for gold� Set about a year later than The Colour, to embark on the search for gold here seems already rather clichéd: an over-familiar dream of adventure, sudden riches, and social advancement which, in reality, turns out to be rather uncomfortable� This is shown again and again in the fates of several characters, Moody being a prime example� He intends to become a prospector more because of a lack of alternatives than because of real enthusiasm, and his knowledge of the realities of gold-seeking is scant and stereotypical� After having purchased all the necessary clothes and implements, he is very reluctant to actually start digging. When he finally does, he stakes “a claim close enough to Hokitika to permit his continued board at the Crown Hotel� This arrangement cut into his weekly earnings rather severely, but he preferred it to sleeping in a tent beneath the open sky, something he had attempted only once, to his great discomfort” (523)� As it turns out, Moody is also not a particularly skilful prospector, and his claim yields hardly any gold� It is only at the end of the 1866 plot line that Moody fully commits to being a prospector and leaves Hokitika to try a different, more promising area further north� But we, as readers, never learn if he is ever successful� Moody is only one example of a number of characters who find that the realities of a digger’s life do not agree with them� The Norwegian Harald Nilssen had only attempted to prospect for the colour once, and found it miserable work - lugging pails of water to and from the river to sluice the stones, slapping at the sandflies that crept up his jacket until he was mad enough to dance. Afterwards his back ached and his fingers stung and his feet stayed spongy and swollen for days� […] Nilssen did not try his luck again (125)� 184 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Another one, Charlie Frost, has “in the seven months since he had crossed the Hokitika bar, […] never once ventured inland” (209) and, when finally faced with the reality of the diggers’ camp at Kaniere, knows “that his spirit was not well suited to adventure” (ibid�)� Emery Staines, the young and extremely wealthy prospector whose disappearance is one of the central mysteries of the plot, also started out with romantic notions: “Having long been enamoured of the idea of the prospector’s life, which he conceived of in terms quixotic and alchemical” (733), on his twenty-first birthday he decides to try his hand at prospecting. Once in New Zealand, however, he finds that reality does not meet his romantic notions: He far preferred to sleep and dine in the society of others than to do so alone in his tent beneath the stars, the romance of which did not endure, he discovered, past the first experience. He had not been prepared for the bitterness of the West Canterbury winter, and was very frequently driven indoors by the rain (759)� Catton here ironically undermines adventurous narratives of the arduous but ultimately successful search for gold and the stereotypical depiction of manly and hardy gold seekers. Her potential prospectors all find that a gold digger’s life does not really suit them and try to avoid it as much as possible, much preferring the comforts of civilisation to braving the hard life of the goldfields. 20 But readers’ expectations are yet further thwarted� For even if a character’s endeavours are finally rewarded by finding gold, this is not narrated in Catton’s novel. When Emery Staines takes his first nugget to the bank, it is not actually his but one found by another man who asks him to bank it on his behalf� This is the beginning of Staines’ famous luck, which eventually makes him the richest man in Hokitika, owner of more than a dozen claims� But, apart from the story of the nugget which was not his own, we, as readers, never learn how he actually got so rich� Catton thus sets up everything for a traditional gold rush adventure tale but deconstructs it by having her characters refuse the adventure of prospecting and also by refusing to narrate the stereotypical gold diggers’ adventure stories of those few characters who actually engage with it� This also applies to various other characters that made a fortune on the goldfields. Of the twelve men we meet at the beginning, Dick Mannering and Thomas Balfour successfully prospected on goldfields in California and Otago, but, again, this is only mentioned in passing� At the time of the story, 20 The only character who is depicted as actually working as a prospector is the Chinese Quee Long� But he is indentured to a duffer claim which does not yield anything� The only gold he ‘finds’ in the course of the action is the one secretly sewn into the dresses of the prostitute Anna� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 185 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 these men have long moved on because now, the real money is no longer made by digging for gold but “[a]t the hotels� At the shanties� Mates spend the stuff as soon as they find it” (42). Consequently, most of the characters earn their living not as prospectors but as bankers, justice clerks, hoteliers, chemists, and so on� This also shows that Hokitika, the “gold-town […] new-built between jungle and surf at the southernmost edge of the civilized world” (6), is actually more civilised than readers might have expected� While the sea-journey and Hokitika bar are as dangerous as in The Colour, the town is “growing faster than San Francisco” (32) and sports over 60 hotels, a courthouse, a newly-built prison, and a local newspaper� According to George Shepard, the governor of the Hokitika goal, the town stands between savage digger’s law and civilised legal control, between the disorganised individual efforts of the diggers and a corporate future in which these have given way “to dams and dredges and company mines” (133)� 21 In the course of the story, the newly formed electoral district of Westland receives a seat in parliament and it is implied that the ongoing development of infrastructure will make Hokitika more accessible in the future� This is no longer an uncivilised, unregulated frontier town but actually a space in which people’s lives are very much controlled by increasingly diversified commerce, laws, and legal procedures. While Hokitika seems fairly civilised, the diggers’ canvas settlement inland at Kaniere conforms more to expectations of diggers’ squalor and adventure� But, as stated before, the characters do not actually do much prospecting (and the little which is done is not given much narrative attention), and the story is hardly ever set at Kaniere� The reality of the diggers’ life does not play a role in the novel at all� Consequently, the characters in Catton’s story are not in danger because of the forces of nature (which play a much less prominent role than in Tremain’s novel) or the dangerous diggers’ life but because of intrigues and the shadow of the law. Significantly, for Walter Moody, the character who develops the most over the course of the story, the real test and chance to show his worth comes not in the form of a conventional adventure but when he agrees to act as Emery Staines’ and Anna Wetherell’s solicitor� He trained for this back in England but came to New Zealand partly because “I have no real love for the law� I could not stomach it� I sailed for New Zealand instead” (28)� It is his legal knowledge and eloquence, however, and not any manly prowess, that is needed now� 21 See also Dalley 470� 186 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 One of the reasons for the omnipresence of the law, as well as the lack of adventure in the conventional sense, are the genre affiliations of The Luminaries� For while there are ironic references to traditional gold rush adventure stories, this novel is also very much modelled on the hugely popular sensation novel of the 1860s, the decade in which The Luminaries is set� Just as the bestsellers by Wilkie Collins and the like, The Luminaries sports elaborate intrigues and an obsession with crime and detection and puts much emphasis on topics such as illegitimacy, stolen identity, the importance of legal documents, and forgery� 22 In Lydia Wells, a ruthless self-made woman who challenges gender roles with her ‘male’ assertiveness and pitiless actions (Franchi, “Written in the Stars” 135-138), it also sports a character reminiscent of the dangerous and transgressive femme fatales of Victorian sensation fiction (Pykett 6-7). Yet there is one crucial difference with regard to setting: One of the most shocking and thrilling aspects of sensation fiction, as far as its first readers and reviewers were concerned, was the fact that the action of these fast novels of crime and passion usually occurred in the otherwise prosaic, everyday, domestic setting of a modern middle-class or aristocratic English household� (Pykett 6) In The Luminaries, by contrast, the adventure story is situated not at the centre but at the periphery� According to Catton, “we don’t have a tradition of these kinds of 19 th -century-style novels in New Zealand, and I felt like I was writing New Zealand into this tradition” (Lyall n� p�)� 23 Setting her sensation novel in the landscape of the New Zealand gold rush also again emphasises the fact that the West Coast is a space in transition “between the old world and the new” (135), no longer just providing the perfect setting for traditional adventure stories but also for the more elaborate narrative structures, legal machinations, and domestic intrigues of the sensation novel� Catton’s refusal to focus on the stereotypical gold rush adventure story thus also could be read as a way to civilise New Zealand and to write it into the more sophisticated literary tradition of the sensation novel� This generic transition from gold rush adventure story to sensation novel is also embodied in the trajectory of the major female character, the prostitute Anna Wetherell� For Shephard, the governor of the local goal, she is an affront, an impediment to his civilising mission: “We must do away with the old […]� I will not suffer whores, and I will not suffer those who frequent 22 For Victorian sensation fiction, see Pykett and Radford. 23 Erin Mercer notes, however, that this is not true: “[Margaret] Bullock’s Utu: A Story of Love, Hate and Revenge (1894) and [Gilbert] Rock’s By Passion Driven: A Story of a Wasted Life (1889) are examples of a local Victorian sensation tradition […]” (301)� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 187 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 them” (135)� Fitzpatrick similarly states about the prostitute in the California gold rush: Because her presence symbolized lawlessness, efforts to establish social order after the rush required the expulsion of the prostitute through moral reform, local legislation, and vigilante violence� To complete the process of conquering the West the prostitute was cast out to make room for stable family structures and stable frontier communities� (164) Starting out as a symbol of lawlessness, Anna in the course of the story first refuses to go on working as a prostitute and at the end is established as the future wife of Emery Staines, transforming herself and by implication Hokitika from moral duplicity into a paragon of Victorian domesticity and pillar of a civilised society� Following the conventions of the sensation novel, the narrative satisfaction of The Luminaries depends to a great extent on the gradual uncovering of the central secret(s)� To this end the most effective sensation writers developed techniques of narrative concealment and delay or deferral� Collins, for example, developed the split or shared narrative which used a variety of first-person narrators, none of whom was in possession of the whole story� Braddon and Wood have recourse to a kind of narratorial coyness, declining […] to disclose crucial items of information, or having key events occur offstage (so to speak) and only revealing their occurrence at the denouement (Pykett 5)� Catton uses both these methods to very slowly uncover the diverse mysteries at the centre of her plot� From Wilkie Collins’ novels - i� e� The Woman in White (1859-60) and The Moonstone (1868) - Catton adopted multi-perspective narration (which here, however, is presided over by an authorial ‘we’) so that the story is pieced together laboriously by following the narrations and thoughts of various characters� Accordingly, as it turns out, the overarching quest here is neither for gold, nor for self-realisation, but for ‘the truth’� The readers, as well as some of the characters, therefore begin to feel “like a detective” (201), and the search for the truth, just like in a detective novel, becomes an adventure in itself� 24 However, as with the gold rush adventure plot, expectations are thwarted, and this quest can only be fulfilled to some degree. 24 According to Birns, the characters of Catton’s novel are reminiscent of G� K� Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) (227)� 188 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 This is, first of all, due to the fragmented and subjective nature of the characters’ knowledge and narration� As Moody notes: “I only wished to remark that one should never take another man’s truth for one’s own� […] I trust that you have given me the truth, and nothing but the truth� But your perspectives are very many, and you will forgive me if I do not take your tale for something whole” (282)� 25 The novel itself draws attention to the problem of representing the ‘truth’ - or simply telling a story - time and again� 26 For the characters, it is ultimately impossible to find out what really happened for not only are reports subjective, fragmentary because of lack of knowledge and potentially unreliable due to the characters’ own agenda and/ or the consumption of opium, but neither do all characters disclose everything they know� 27 Another problem arises in the communication with the two Chinese characters because they speak little English and the Westerners speak no Chinese at all� Consequently, crucial information is either lost in translation or not conveyed in the first place. At the trial of Anna Wetherell and Emery Staines at the end of the 1866 plot line, an official attempt is made to discover the ‘truth’, and Moody, who is defending them, presents a version of events that is convincing to the public� We, as readers, know, however, that it is not the ‘truth’ at all but a narrative construct made up of reality and blatant lies� One reason for this is that there seems to be a strong supernatural element to the story which is never explained and which would not hold in a court of law, 28 the other reason being that Moody and his friends want to thwart the machinations of Lydia Wells and Francis Carver, the two antagonists in this story� When, after the trial, we meet Moody for the last time, he is walking north and is asked by his travel companion to entertain him with a story� Moody comments on the impossibility of telling the ‘truth’: “I am trying to decide between the whole truth, and nothing but the truth […]� I am afraid my history is such that I can’t manage both at once”� He receives an answer which can also be read as a comment on the events and ultimately the novel itself: “‘Hi - no need for the truth at all,’ said Paddy Ryan� ‘Who said anything about the truth? You’re a free man in 25 See also also Catton, The Luminaries 281, 351� 26 This ambivalence can however also be found in Victorian multi-perspective sensation novels such as Collins’ The Moonstone (see Meifert-Menhard 177-189)� 27 For example when Moody does not tell the others that the dead prospector Crosbie was the politician Lauderback’s bastard-brother� 28 It seems that Anna and Emery - because of their love and their sharing of the same birthday - are connected to each other in a supernatural way, so that when Anna accidentally shoots herself, the bullet wounds Emery and not her� Furthermore, Emery becomes suddenly addicted to opium while Anna does no longer need it, the illiterate Anna can suddenly read, write, and sign with Emery’s signature, and Emery is kept alive by the food Anna eats� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 189 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 this country, Walter Moody� You tell me any old rubbish you like, and if you string it out until we reach the junction at Kumara, then I shall count it as a very fine tale’” (713). We, as readers, know much more than the characters because we have read all the narratives, are given additional information and insight into the minds of the characters by the authorial narrator, and also know the stories of the Chinese� But even for us there is no convincing ‘truth’ because not only are the individual reports subjective, biased, and sometimes contradictory, but many crucial parts of the story are ultimately not or not fully depicted� 29 The narration - which is otherwise so abundant - refuses to reveal these final secrets. Moreover, all information we get is filtered through the authorial narrator who freely admits that he has changed and edited the accounts: The interruptions were too tiresome, and Balfour’s approach too digressive, to deserve a full and faithful record in the men’s own words� We shall here excise their imperfections, and impose a regimental order upon the impatient chronicle of the shipping agent’s roving mind; we shall apply our own mortar to the cracks and chinks of earthly recollection, and resurrect as new the edifice that, in solitary memory, exists only as a ruin� (44) Thus, the novel at the same time tries to present a ‘realist’ gold rush adventure / sensation story while drawing the readers’ attention to the constructedness and artificiality of each narrative, the novel itself included. As Stead states: “it doesn’t allow me to forget, even for a moment, that this is fiction - the novel as game” (n� p�, italics in original)� This metafictional quality is further strengthened by the structural principle to which the novel adheres for Catton’s story is based on the movements of planets and other heavenly bodies during the historical setting of the story and how this would have influenced the characters in an astrological sense: I found a programme online that could track the movement of the planets through the constellations of the zodiac� I typed in the co-ordinates of the Hokitika gold fields, dialled the clock back to 1864, when gold was first discovered in the region, and began to watch the skies revolve. Over the next four years (of goldfields time), I tracked the movements of the seven bodies visible to the naked eye over Hokitika’s skies, wondering how I could turn the archetypes of the zodiac into human characters and a sequence of horoscopes into a story� (Catton, “How She Wrote The Luminaries”) 29 It is, for example, heavily implied but not spelled out that Carver is killed by Te Rau Tauwhare; we do not know how exactly Carver kills Crosbie; and we never find out how Anna lost her baby� 190 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Each chapter is preceded by an astrological chart, and each character is associated with a heavenly body or sign of the zodiac, his or her actions influenced by the movements of the stars� So Dick Mannering, who ‘owns’ the prostitute Anne Wetherell, represents Leo: “I thought, OK, well, Leo’s the fifth house of the zodiac, it’s associated with games and competitions, and it’s called the house of pleasure, so I’ll make him a whoremonger” (Cochrane n� p�)� Accordingly, characters might seem to behave realistically, but their actions and relationships are in fact predetermined by astrological principles: 30 “Astrology thus functions as a source of ironic distance� Characters believe themselves to possess self-understanding and agency, but readers - better informed of how the characters’ world operates - see their confidence is misplaced” (Dalley 472)� This determinism also again runs counter to the expectations for an adventure story, which is very much founded on the free will and agency of its characters� The artificiality of the story is further foregrounded by the structure and print layout of the novel: it is composed of twelve parts (just as there are twelve men at the beginning), each half the length of the previous one so that the novel itself wanes like the moon. The first part has twelve chapters, the last only one� At the end of the story, the ever-decreasing length of the chapters and the increasingly fragmentary nature of their content give a new narrative speed and urgency to the content� In the last chapters, the importance and length of the old-fashioned narrative chapter headings also increase until they are as long as the text proper. The heading of the last chapter finally sums up what happened on that fatal 14 January 1866 and seems to reveal (or at least to give some hints at) the final secrets. So while for much of the story the novel poses as a mixture of adventure and sensation novel, at the end “the writing style strips its ornateness, transforming Victorian realism into something far more contemporary” (Mercer 305)� Both The Colour and The Luminaries use the traditional adventure setting of the New Zealand West Coast Gold Rush and narrative elements taken from adventure fiction but ultimately deconstruct the gold rush adventure and subvert readers’ expectations: in Rose Tremain’s novel, the hypermasculine hero of gold rush adventure stories as well as imperial romances is inverted, and it is the female, not the male protagonist who takes pleasure in peril, successfully prospects for gold, has a transgressive relationship with the racial other, 30 There might, however, also be an ironic twist here for, as Birns points out, this astrological system is based on the Northern Hemisphere sky and seasons, and thus its application to New Zealand and to characters not only from Europe but also to Chinese and Maori is inherently questionable� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 191 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 and is ultimately able to build a new life and home in New Zealand� Here, the structures of the male quest romance, which originally created a space specifically for the affirmation of traditional male identity, serve to make the self-realisation of an uncommon heroine possible� At the same time, this novel presents a number of failed quests which frustrate readers and ultimately also lead to the death of the two characters who stand for a possible successful understanding between Maori and white settlers� In contrast to The Colour, which, while subverting the tradition of the imperial romance, still depicts an adventurous story, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries denies its readers all adventures usually connected to its gold rush setting� Instead, it ironically presents prospectors reluctant to enter the harsh life of the goldfields and shows a town which has moved on from the chaos of an uncivilised gold rush settlement and is now turning into an example of nineteenth-century capitalism controlled by the strict forces of the law� This is mirrored in the genre of the novel itself: the adventure story gives way to the more sophisticated sensational novel, which was originally set in domestic middleand upper-class England but is now adapted for a colonial setting� At the same time, while The Luminaries adheres to many characteristics of the sensation novel, it refuses its characters as well as readers the successful completion of their quest for truth, just as it denied the exciting adventures readers might expect from the gold rush setting� Instead, meta-structures of astrology and mathematical structuring of chapters emphasise the constructedness of this novel and imply that its characters are not free agents but mere puppets of fate, or at least the author� Works Cited Arata, Stephen� Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1996� Birns, Nicholas� Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead� Sydney: Sydney UP , 2015� Brantlinger, Patrick� Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914� Ithaca: Cornell UP , 1988� Bright, Michael� “Macaulay’s New Zealander�” The Arnoldian, vol� 10, no� 1, 1982, pp� 8-27� Brown, Mark� “Eleanor Catton Becomes Youngest Booker Prize Winner�” The Guardian, 15 Oct� 2013, https: / / www�theguardian�com/ books/ 2013/ oct/ 15/ booker-prize-eleanor-catton-luminaries� Accessed 25 Aug� 2020� Catton, Eleanor� “Eleanor Catton on How She Wrote The Luminaries�” The Guardian, 11 Apr� 2014, https: / / www�theguardian�com/ books/ 2014/ apr/ 11/ eleanor-catton-luminaries-how-she-wrote-booker-prize� Accessed 25 Aug� 2020� ---� The Luminaries� London: Granta, 2013� 192 s TeFanie F ricKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Cawelti, John G� Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976� Chialant, Maria Teresa� “Dickensian Resonances in the Contemporary English Novel�” Dickens Quarterly, vol� 28, no� 1, 2011, pp� 41-51� Cochrane, Kira. “Eleanor Catton: ‘I’m Strongly Influenced by Box-Set TV Drama� At Last the Novel Has Found its Screen Equivalent�’” The Guardian, 7 Sep� 2013, https: / / www�theguardian�com/ culture/ 2013/ sep/ 07/ eleanor-catton-interview� Accessed 27 Aug� 2020� Dalley, Hamish� “The Meaning of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers in the Postcolonial Historical Novel�” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol� 51, no� 3, 2018, pp� 461-481� Eldred-Grigg, Stevan� Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The Story of the New Zealand Gold Rushes� Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2008� Eldridge, C� C� The Imperial Experience: From Carlyle to Forster� London: Macmillan, 1996� Fitzpatrick, Angie� “‘The Glorious Climate of Californy’: Gold Rush Prostitution and Transformation in Western American Literature�” New Wests and Post-Wests: Literature and Film of the American West, edited by Paul Varner� Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp� 164-85� Franchi, Barbara� “The Neo-Victorian Chinese Diaspora: Crossing Genders and Postcolonial Subversion in Pacific Gold Rush Novels.” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol� 11, no� 2, 2019, pp� 91-117� ---� “Written in the Stars? Women Travellers and Forgers of Destinies in Ealanor Catton’s The Luminaries�” Partial Answers, vol� 16, no� 1, 2018, pp� 125-143� Fraser, Robert� Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Conan Doyle� Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1998� Green, Martin� Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire� New York: Basic Books, 1979� Haggard, H� Rider� King Solomon’s Mines� 1885� London: Penguin Classics, 2008� Ho, Elizabeth� Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire� London: Continuum, 2012� James, David� Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception� London: Continuum, 2010� Lyall, Sarah� “A Writer Thanks Her Lucky Stars�” The New York Times, 19 Nov� 2013, https: / / www�nytimes�com/ 2013/ 11/ 20/ books/ eleanor-catton-discusses-the-luminaries�html? searchResultPosition=1� Accessed 25 Aug� 2020� Meifert-Menhard, Felicitas� Conflicting Reports: Multiperspektivität und unzuverlässiges Erzählen im englischsprachigen Roman seit 1800� Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009� Mercer, Erin� Telling the Real Story: Genre and New Zealand Literature� Wellington: Victoria UP , 2017� Page, Benedicte� “Digging Back into the Past�” The Bookseller, 10 Jan� 2003, p� 30� Phillips, Richard� Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure� London: Routledge, 1997� Pykett, Lyn� The Sensation Novel: From the Woman in White to The Moonstone� Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994� Radford, Andrew D� Victorian Sensation Fiction� Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009� Deconstructing the Gold Rush Adventure 193 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0008 Rustin, Susanna� “Costume Dramatist�” The Guardian, 10 May 2003, https: / / www�theguardian�com/ books/ 2003/ may/ 10/ featuresreviews�guardianreview5� Accessed 18 Aug� 2020� Smee, Sebastian� “Going for Gold: The Colour by Rose Tremain�” The Spectator, 17 May 2003, pp� 63-64� Stead, C. K. “The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton: An Epic of New Zealand's Gold Rush with a 19 th -century Feel�” Financial Times, 6 September 2013, https: / / www�ft�com/ content/ c465775c-109e-11e3-b291-00144feabdc0� Accessed 3 Feb� 2021� Stoneley, Peter� “Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte and Homosociality�” Journal of American Studies, vol� 30, no� 2, 1996, pp� 189-209� Tremain, Rose� The Colour� 2003� London: Vintage, 2004� Walrond, Carl� “Gold and Gold Mining - West Coast�” Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http: / / www�TeAra�govt�nz/ en/ gold-and-gold-mining/ page-4� Accessed 28 Aug� 2020� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 u rsula K luwicK Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre is associated with many literary movements and traditions: magical realism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, historiographic metafiction, and alternative history are some of the labels most frequently attached to his writing. Adventure fiction is not among them, and yet, upon closer scrutiny, Rushdie’s novels can be seen to frequently gravitate towards the adventure genre� Many of them can at least partially be read as adventure stories, starting with his first novel, Grimus (1975), in which a character wanders the world for 743 years after taking an elixir that makes him immortal� Having become tired of life, he arrives on Calf Island and embarks on a series of adventures as he attempts to reach the peak of Calf Mountain, where he hopes to regain his mortality� Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Light (2010), the two young-adult novels Rushdie wrote for his two sons, exhibit a similar basic structure: the protagonists’ ultimate goals can only be reached after they have successfully passed through various adventures� Haroun sets out to save his father by restoring his gift of storytelling in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Luka attempts to capture the fire of life in order to prevent his father’s death in Luka and the Fire of Life� By contrast, The Enchantress of Florence (2008) employs a set-up inspired by the Arabian Nights in order to mix the joys and hazards of the act of storytelling with the perils and pleasures of the adventures narrated� In this novel, the exploits of Qara Köz, the eponymous heroine or “enchantress”, are related to the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great by Qara’s alleged descendant Mogor dell’Amore, who can only count on the emperor’s grace as long as he is able to interest him in his story� As with Scheherazade, the very act of telling hence becomes a precarious exercise, an adventure in its own right. Rushdie first employed the model of Scheherazade in Midnight’s Children (1981), but, while the first-person narrator Saleem in that novel frequently reflects on the construction of his narrative and is under high pressure to both complete his story and please his audience, The Enchantress of Florence puts much more emphasis on narrative crafting as a skill that can be put on trial� Here, the storyteller’s art is a matter of life or death� This shift to the act of telling as an integral part of adventure also links The Enchantress of Florence with Rushdie’s latest novel, Quichotte (2019)� In it, adventure brackets several textual levels, including that of the 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 196 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 extra-textual reader, whose attempts to disentangle the relations and echoes between the various narratives within the novel form an adventure in itself� This contribution explores the various forms and functions of adventure in Quichotte� I argue that Quichotte is a culmination of Rushdie’s engagement with adventure because the manner in which he employs this genre here speaks to one of the core concerns of his oeuvre: the role of cultural hybridity for the (re-)formation of personal and national identity� In Quichotte, Rushdie draws on a distinctly US-American version of the adventure genre, namely the road trip narrative, to engage with questions of ethnicity and race, which have always been central to his writing� The road trip narrative encapsulates mobility and as such is closely connected with a key value of Americanness: 1 in fact, one can argue that it has helped enshrine mobility as a core US-American characteristic� 2 As Pérez asserts, “mobility lies behind most versions of the myths that have shaped the construction of the modern American nation, with a collective journey as its genesis” (127)� The “road symbolizes ‘American-ness’” and “has been a central image and theme in American culture” (Pérez 127), also due to its close affinity with the American Dream as another version of mobility� But mobility has, of course, also always been a central component of Rushdie’s exploration of cultural, national, and personal identity, his engagement with the roots and routes of characters as well as countries. Hence, this chapter argues that, through his specific version of the road narrative as a US-American adventure genre, Rushdie explores Americanness and its discontents as an example of the resurgence of uninhibited nationalism and racism� On the Road with Quichotte Quichotte is part road trip narrative, part contemporary rewriting of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, part spy novel, part science fiction, part magical realism, and part metafiction: in short, a generic tour de force� The novel starts as a parody of Don Quixote� Rushdie’s protagonist is Ismail Smile, a travelling pharmaceutical salesman of Indian origin and without fixed abode who adopts the name “Quichotte” when he decides to set out on a quest� He is advanced in years and handicapped by a loss of mid-term memory caused 1 With “Americanness” I refer to a set of ideas about US -American national identity� See Cananau for a discussion of Americanness as a concept� 2 As Heather McFarlane argues about her own “broad” definition of the road trip narrative, “a major criterion is that the travelling itself is as important a part of the trip as the destination” (10)� Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 197 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte by “a dramatic Interior Event many years earlier” (Rushdie, Quichotte 5)� 3 In addition, his mental powers have been diminished by his addiction to junk culture, specifically “mindless television” (3), Rushdie’s contemporary version of the romances responsible for Don Quixote’s knightly delusions in Cervantes� The novel commences when Ismail Smile is laid off, but rather than being anxious about his loss of income, he embraces this development as a fortuity that finally sets him free: “‘Oh, not a problem,’ Quichotte replied. ‘Because, as it happens, I have to embark immediately on my quest’” (14)� Just as with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Quichotte’s “quest” is a measure of his delusion: he falls in love with a television superstar, “the delectable Miss Salma R” (13), famous US-American talk show host and former Bollywood actress, and sees his quest as a series of tests designed to ensure his worthiness of “the Beloved”� Quichotte conceives of these tests in terms of Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, a Sufi poem that structures the quest for enlightenment as a passage through seven valleys� Quichotte appropriates this model to give shape to his road trip through the United States, which he envisages as a steady progression through seven valleys - of the quest, of love, of knowledge, of detachment, of unity, of wonderment, and of poverty and annihilation - and towards his Beloved� Despite the clear mythical structure that this appears to impose on Quichotte’s quest, however, the trajectory of his journey remains essentially arbitrary, and so what is intended as an ordering principle becomes a further symptom of Quichotte’s eccentricity� 4 Yet, in another sense, Quichotte’s mythical reading of his own quest is characteristic of the road trip narrative� According to Heather McFarlane, the road trip narrative “resembles the quest narrative in that some kind of internal trip always parallels the physical one” (21)� As she observes, the image of the road invites the idea of spatial as well as psychological progress: “The road, in its linearity and prescribed forward motion, naturally implies both physical and psychological movement” (ibid�), and this allows it to function, in Cohan and Hark’s words, as “an alternative space where isolation from the mainstream permits various transformative experiences” (qtd� in ibid�)� At the same time, however, the importance of the road trip in US-American culture means that individual experience is always related to a collective, national experience: 3 In what follows, unspecified quotations are from Rushdie’s Quichotte. 4 As Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher argue, the quest differs from adventure in its purest form with respect to the openness of the protagonists’ projects� While the heroes of the adventure genre have no clear trajectory but embrace adventure for the sake of it, quests have specific goals. As von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher note, however, quests can flip back into adventure when their primary impulse becomes the creation of adventurous situations rather than the achievement of certain objectives (5)� 198 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 “By extension […] a search for personal identity involves collective identity as well, reflected in the search for nation, community, or belonging” (ibid.). Hence the road trip offers a form for the exploration of individual in relation to collective identity against the foil of Americanness� This is relevant insofar as Rushdie sends two pairs of Indian American characters onto the road in Quichotte, whose experiences raise questions about racism and the place of non-white US-Americans in mainstream conceptions of Americanness. The first pair of travellers consists of Quichotte and his son, called Sancho after Don Quixote’s companion in Cervantes’s novel� But Rushdie’s Sancho is a different kind of creature altogether: he is, literally, a product of wish-fulfilment, a “parthenogenetic son” (154) created out of his father’s - Quichotte’s - deep need for a child� Rushdie here mixes Cervantes with Collodi, and henceforth echoes of Pinocchio become more obvious than references to Don Quixote� After having been wished into existence by Quichotte, Sancho at first only appears in black-and-white and only to his father. His memories are Quichotte’s and he has no independent existence of his own� Once he has in his turn dreamt up a talking cricket, the Disneyan Jiminy, however, Sancho is given “an insula” (101), a part of the brain which creates “consciousness, emotion, perception, self-awareness”, empathy, and other qualities that in Rushdie’s novel signify humanity. As a result, Sancho becomes a real fleshand-blood human being visible to all� Together, Quichotte and Sancho travel across the United States in a reversal of the typical set-up of the road genre in which white US-American characters either travel through their own country or through “an exotic destination” (Goldberg 20) such as Mexico, as tourists or drop-outs� While the travellers have more definite objectives in Quichotte - to find a path towards the Beloved in Quichotte’s case and towards independence and freedom in Sancho’s - the flexibility and spontaneity of the road trip nevertheless shape their journey, which also becomes an exploration of Americanness and of their place within it� The United States here are turned into the subject of the gaze of two men of colour who identify as Indian-American and to whom the road trip offers the opportunity to (re)familiarise themselves with their adopted homeland� This aspect is particularly noteworthy with respect to Quichotte, who, as a travelling salesman, has spent much of his life on the road but has hitherto remained detached from the people and places he has visited in his professional capacity� The road trip he undertakes with Sancho, by contrast, demands interaction with their surroundings� On their travels, they encounter many bizarre and dangerous situations which they have to master in order to pass on and, in Quichotte’s reading of their journey, become worthy of their goal� To the overlap of physical and psychological movement to which McFarlane draws Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 199 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 attention, therefore, Quichotte adds a mythological dimension which turns their trip into an almost sacred quest� It is consistent with this interpretation that one consequence of their journey is a purging: a brief reconciliation with Quichotte’s estranged sister, after which he gains access to the Beloved� At the same time, the prosaic nature of the road trip and the circumstances under which Quichotte reaches his goal ironically undercut this mythical interpretation and highlight the sordid reality of which Quichotte and Sancho are a part: Quichotte is only admitted to Salma R because he delivers drugs, and Sancho runs away after stealing from his aunt in a bid for independence� The road narrative finally becomes intertwined with science fiction and the apocalyptic when the fabric of reality begins to disintegrate and holes appear everywhere� Quichotte’s story ends ambiguously, on the brink of rescue or perdition as he and the Beloved prepare to pass through a portal to a neighbour earth� Intertwined with the story of Quichotte is the story of his author, Author, or Brother, a writer who, after a career of writing mediocre spy novels, wants to produce a work of ‘serious’ literary fiction. Brother is introduced in the second chapter of the novel, where the text suddenly moves to a different diegetic level, with the focus shifting to the “author of the preceding narrative” (21)� From this moment on, the two storylines alternate, with Brother reflecting on the novel he is writing even as his own story evolves� Like Quichotte, Brother is of Indian origin and, also like Quichotte, he is both estranged from his sister (“Sister”) and has a complex, also estranged relationship with his son (“Son”), who turns out to be a cyber attacker whom Brother is eventually forced to help recruit for the CIA� Brother reconciles with Sister just before her cancer-related suicide and also with Son, with whom he subsequently undertakes a road trip following the steps of Quichotte and Sancho� This road trip is very brief and takes up only a few pages of the novel, but this suffices for its function to become clear� Brother and Son’s trip is a repetition of and a comment on the one undertaken by Quichotte and Sancho: the second pair of adventurers visit the same places and encounter some of the same situations as Quichotte and Sancho, and in repeating his fictional characters’ road trip, Brother partly repeats and partly manages to rewrite the version of the trip he has written, above all with respect to his reaction to racism� In what follows, I discuss Quichotte and Sancho’s road trip as a re-encounter with a US-American reality shaped by racism before turning to the metafictional elements which turn the novel into a reading adventure. Rushdie employs metafiction, I suggest, to argue for the importance of literature as a comment on real-world events� Rather than offering an escape from reality, adventure literature, for Rushdie, permits an assessment of the troubles of this world� 200 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Escapism and the Road Back to Reality In his typology of formula stories, John G� Cawelti draws attention to the importance of the hero for the adventure tale: “The true focus of interest in the adventure story is the character of the hero and the nature of the obstacles he has to overcome” (40). Martin Green concurs, arguing that the specific journey the protagonist undertakes is determined by his personality, which “may be said to ‘generate’ or at least to characterize his adventures” (21)� What kind of adventure might one, then, expect from Quichotte? Surely one that satisfies all the rules of escapism, for Quichotte, the protagonist of the tale within the tale to whom the reader is introduced in the first chapter, is interested in little apart from mind-numbing television� Quichotte is old, unemployed, without a home, alone, and unloved, marked both physically and mentally by the “Interior Event” that interrupted his career in academia and journalism years earlier, and, due to his addiction to junk culture, he is linked to reality by the most tenuous of ties� Not only is he clearly no superhero, the first of the two main types of protagonists Cawelti lists for adventure, but he also seems inferior to a regular “one of us” (40) figure, Cawelti’s second type, as he appears to have far less heroic potential� Other characters regard him as hardly capable of leading a normal life, let alone fit for adventures: for them, he is simple, delusional, and unpredictable, not to be held accountable for his actions� In addition, as an immigrant of Indian origin who is frequently mistaken for a citizen of various countries associated with radical Islam, he is treated with suspicion by his fellow US-Americans and regarded as a potential terrorist� The objective of his quest, to win the love of Salma R, is met with general embarrassment and unease, rejected as harassment rather than saluted as romantic love� For the hero of an adventure story, this is an inauspicious beginning - or, as Rushdie’s narrator puts it: “Such stories do not, on the whole, end well” (10)� Quichotte, as the reader initially encounters him, then, is an anti-hero whose only investment is in escapism, and just as with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, his grand project is belittled and ridiculed by those around him� Indeed, there is a sense of melancholy about Quichotte’s inadequacy that links him to Cervantes’s knight of the woeful countenance� Rushdie’s narrator explicitly emphasises the fact that Quichotte used to have a far more adventurous nature and paints the picture of a character whose scope has been suddenly and tragically reduced: In his youth […] he had been a wanderer of a purer kind than the salesman he eventually became, had adventured far and wide simply to see what he could see, from Cape Horn to Tierra del Fuego, the ends of the Earth where all the colour drained Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 201 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 out of the world so that things and people existed only in black-and-white, to the eastern wastes of Iran […]� However, at a certain point in early-middle age the Interior Event changed everything� When he came to his senses after the Event he had lost all personal ambition and curiosity […]� (10) Here, we get an inkling of a character maimed by a personal catastrophe and changed from an adventurer driven by sheer wanderlust to a diminished version of his former self� Quichotte’s fading taste for adventure, therefore, expresses a fundamental personality change� With the “Interior Event” and his subsequent loss of interest in the world around him, Quichotte becomes divorced from life and from his fellow humans and retreats to the virtual reality of television junk culture� Indirectly, and contradicting the general identification of the adventure formula with escapism, the novel thus identifies a zest for adventure with a grounding in life. This innovative approach to adventure as the reverse of escapism becomes more pronounced over the course of the novel� Quichotte’s return to adventure brings him back in touch with the world around him and with the changes it underwent while he was not paying attention� By taking him out of his escapist comfort zone, his quest forces him to reconnect with reality and to look at society with newly perceptive eyes� In Rushdie’s novel, therefore, adventure does not consist in escaping reality but in seeing it clearly, in all its bizarre craziness� As one of the mantras repeated in Quichotte goes, “It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen” and “in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen” (7) - as, in this partly magically realist novel, indeed it does� It is his return to such a disconcerting reality after a long retreat that eventually turns Quichotte into a hero� The following scene shows the dynamics between the different versions of reality that come together in Quichotte’s quest� Sancho has just commenced his transformation from a wholly imaginary being into a real young man of flesh and blood, and Quichotte is attempting to teach him the parameters of his quest� In a nod to the parallel development of physical and psychological journey typical of the road narrative, he is also trying to determine their route towards New York with the help of a map, at the same time as he is explaining his quest with recourse to a mythological structure, the passage through the seven valleys adopted from The Conference of the Birds already mentioned� For Quichotte, there is an essential synchrony between “the sphere of the actual” and “the sphere of the symbolic” (105) which connects the two realms: “We may be after a celestial goal, but we still have to travel along the interstate” (ibid�)� 202 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 However, the harmony he sees between his metaphysical perspective and reality is tested when the two travellers are confronted with a very different view of affairs� Quichotte and Sancho are still studying the map of the United States when they are accosted by a young woman for whom a map in the hands of men of colour has only one possible explanation: ‘What is that? ’ the white lady said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the map� ‘You hatching some kind of scheme? ’ ‘We are travellers like yourself,’ Quichotte replied mildly, ‘so it is not unreasonable that we should map out our route�’ ‘Where are your turbans and beards? ’ the white lady asked, her arm extended toward him, an angry finger pointing right at him. […] ‘I think I can say without fear of inaccuracy that I have never worn a turban in my life,’ Quichotte replied, with a degree of puzzlement that displeased his interrogator� ‘You got a bad foreign look to you,’ the white lady said� ‘Sound foreign too� […] What’s your purpose? That map� I’m not loving the map�’ (125-126) Different conceptions of reality clash in several ways in this scene� On the one hand, there is Quichotte, whose understanding of the mythical import of his quest is the rock on which his self-image as a traveller rests� His mounting confusion and inability to comprehend his interlocutor’s fears and suspicions attest to the discrepancy between his view of life and hers and to his detachment from the climate of the post-9 / 11 USA� At the same time, what is also at issue here is an even larger discrepancy between conceptions of personal freedom and of what America should be - and, above all, whose it should be� The “white lady” has clear views on who counts as American: “You asking me where I’m from? Imma tell you where I’m from� I’m from America� Who knows how you got here� This ain’t a place for you” (126; italics in original)� Not only is she naturalising her own presence while simultaneously denying Quichotte’s right of residence in America, but by questioning how he “got here”, she is also challenging his right of free movement� Her suspicion about Quichotte’s reasons for consulting a map thus also constitutes an implicit negation of his right to explore and travel and, ultimately, to adventure� By contesting Quichotte’s right to travel, the “white lady” aggressively challenges his national belonging� Mobility has long been understood as a quintessential US-American trait. Brian Ireland confirms the historical longevity of this view: “In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner addressed a special meeting of the American Historical Association at the World’s Columbian Exposition, to argue that ‘movement has been [the] dominant fact’ of American history and American national character” (498, parenthesis in original)� This is linked to a “process of mythogenesis” (499) that connects the Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 203 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 journey with “significant themes in American history and culture” and turns it into a “distinctly American” experience (ibid�) as well as a “potent cultural myth” (500)� In this sense, mobility is an important element of collective US-American identity, and by disputing Quichotte’s right to move and travel, the “white lady” excludes him from this notion of Americanness� Indeed, by presupposing that his consultation of a map must have a sinister purpose, she denounces Quichotte’s mobility as a threat to Americanness� A first consequence of Quichotte’s decision to embark on an adventure, then, is a collision with what the novel suggests is a changed reality of which his retreat into the virtual world of television has left him unaware� 5 The “white lady” at Lake Capote is supported by a crowd of people, including the security guards, and both the numbers of the attackers as well as their support by those officially responsible for the security of all visitors show that with the spread of racism to his own segment of the population, i� e� South Asian immigrants, Quichotte can no longer ignore the rifts within US-American society and the hostility that is becoming increasingly palpable� The beginning of Quichotte’s adventure, then, takes him outside the world of motel rooms and confronts him with an animosity that breaks “that innocent trust in people he always had” (139), as Sancho realises� Quichotte initially retreats back into virtual reality: he wants to stay inside the safe haven of hotels and television, to “shut out” the world “with unfriendly white ladies in it” (131), and to abandon their adventure before it has really begun� Yet, now that he has reconnected with the present through his encounters with racism, escapism is becoming increasingly impossible� As Sancho realises, the world has “stopped making sense� Anything can happen� Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies� Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to� The whole thing has come apart at the seams” (138)� While reality initially remains comfortingly stable within their hotel rooms, outside it undergoes inexplicable changes� Sancho cannot rely on waking up in the same city as the one in which he fell asleep, nor does time seem to follow its usual course� Eventually, this reality also seeps into 5 The novel makes this argument about the fluctuation of racism against South Asian immigrants through Brother, who explicitly addresses the “confusing history” of people of South Asian decent in America when he thinks about the effects of various immigration acts and important events since 1790� As a background to his engagement with racism in the Quichotte narrative, he singles out the 1965 Immigration and Nationality act, after which it “turned out that hindoos were not to be a major target of American racism after all” but that they were “excused, in many parts of the USA , from racial abuse and attacks” (26), and the terrorist attacks of 9 / 11, after which people of colour suddenly came to “look Islamic” in the eyes of white US citizens: “There were too many hostile eyes looking at people like him now” (27)� 204 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 the previously secure space of the motel rooms and breaches the boundaries of Quichotte’s virtual haven when the television newsreader addresses him directly with news that concerns him (332-334)� While this might or might not be a hallucination, the news conveyed in this manner reconnects Quichotte with the world outside: reality will no longer be locked out� To face reality is a daring project for two men of colour in America� In the age of fake news, truth has become indistinguishable from lies, and the novel argues that this protects the perpetrators of racist violence, the more so because so many people “are too blind to see” (138) what is happening� Accordingly, in the valley of love, the second valley of the quest, Quichotte and Sancho are faced with nothing but hatred, and the town of Beautiful, through which they pass, becomes the site of an unmotivated fatal racist attack in which two Indian men are shot and one killed by a drunk (144)� The novel expresses the repercussions of this reality in the following questions, asked by immigrant characters: “Do we belong here? […] Is there a place for us in this America? ” (145)� What is at stake here is, of course, the very nature of Americanness and the collective identity the United States wants to endorse� These questions indirectly also trigger the re-commencement of Quichotte and Sancho’s adventure, which can partly be understood as an attempt to (re-) gain control over their lives and to forge an identity as South Asians in a frequently hostile America� This endeavour involves the development of a new perspective on the United States� Accordingly, after their experience of racist slander in the two valleys of the quest and of love, they are now sent through the valley of knowledge, in which, as Quichotte explains, all knowledge “becomes useless” (153)� As so often in this novel, this is ironic in more ways than one and, while Quichotte sheds some of his acquired encyclopaedic knowledge, the two men gain a much deeper insight into US-American society� Their road trip towards New York City takes them through a country that begins “to make sense” (ibid�) again even as it turns increasingly fragile and fantastic� This reconnaissance is made possible, on the one hand, through the structure of the adventure that gives meaning to their journey and, on the other hand, through an act of possession through language� Sancho asks Quichotte to teach him his native language as a sign of his belonging but also of his self-confident embrace of his hyphenated identity. His goal is to “speak to each other in that language, especially in public, to defy the bastards who hate us for possessing another tongue” (151) and thus to insert their immigrant identity into the US-American mainstream� He wants to make visible their own existence within and contribution to US-American reality and so to claim their own power to shape Americanness� Quichotte and Sancho’s adventure thus becomes an act of multiple defiances: Quichotte rejects both Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 205 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 conventionality and rationality in his pursuit of the Beloved and acquires dignity through his persistent investment in a dream that is not even deflated by the end of the world� Together, Quichotte and Sancho re-enact the quintessentially US-American adventure of the road trip as a form of mimicry and assert their right to mobility and to adventure, which the “white lady” from Lake Capote would deny them, in order to create their own version of the American dream. And, finally, through their “linguistic act of possession”, they demonstrate not only their own participation in US-American culture but, more generally, also that languages and words other than English “have rights over the land” (152)� Thus, their linguistic emancipation also recalls the “lost power” of cultural perspectives that have been suppressed by the white anglophone majority since the beginning of European colonisation and settlement of Northern America� It is worth recalling the imperial legacy of the adventure genre at this point� As Green highlights in his taxonomy of adventure literature, the various types of adventure he identifies “together give us the self-imagined history of the white race from 1700 on, as it expanded over the other four continents and its domination over the other races” (47)� The adventurer as explorer and what Ted Beardow calls “empire hero” long offered a powerful icon for the imperial project� Late nineteenthand early twentieth-century adventure tales “extolled the challenges and excitement of empire, promulgating ideologies of nationalism, race and empire” (Beardow 66), and authors of adventure fiction participated in, and contributed to, “a system of signs, values, and hierarchies” that allowed them “to write white, Christian, English, heterosexual identity into perpetual supremacy” (Kaufmann 519)� Adventure narratives also formed important vehicles for the spread of specific ideas of Englishness. As Ficke argues, adventure fiction was one of the “cultural tools that played a significant role in consolidating and disseminating definitions of Englishness, manhood, and British citizenship throughout the empire” (514)� However, it is not only in imperial contexts that the adventure genre is “explicitly associated […] with national identity” (Ficke 515) but also in a more nationally domestic sense� As McFarlane proposes in her discussion of the genre, the road narrative, as a specific sub-genre of adventure fiction, is closely linked to “collective national geographies and histories” (4) through its referencing of real places as they “intersect with the characters’ personal histories” (ibid�): “The process of physically covering ground and telling stories about it thus connects the personal to the collective� The act of writing road trip narratives is therefore also nationalistic, or representative of literary nationalism, since telling stories about real places reflects an exploration and claiming of the land or, conversely, the process of being claimed by the land” (McFarlane 206 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 4-5, italics in original)� In Rushdie’s novel, Quichotte and Sancho make the land tell their own stories when they reconnect with it through Quichotte’s native language� Quichotte feels “joined to his youth again” (152), and as the different places that have shaped his life are linked through language and description, he becomes more confident at expressing his own Indian American identity, thus claiming his place in US-American culture just as he allows America to claim its role in his personal history� At the same time, this individual act of repossession highlights the manifold linguistic traces of other cultures and peoples that are apparent in the place names on any map of the United States but whose legacy is frequently ignored or even suppressed� In this sense, this linguistic recovery is also a nationalist project that seeks to make visible the hybrid nature of Americanness� The notion that language shapes reality is a familiar argument within the context of Rushdie’s fiction, expressed most memorably in the words of a character from The Satanic Verses, who explains to a fellow immigrant - transformed into a goat-like devil upon his return to England - how racist power is exercised: “They describe us […]� That’s all� They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct” (168)� In Quichotte, Rushdie’s immigrant characters, Quichotte and Sancho, discover that they, too, can influence reality once they seize linguistic control: “The world settled down” (153)� Looking at their US-American environment through the lens of Quichotte’s native language and all its cultural resonances gives them “the illusion, at least, of comprehensibility” (ibid�)� Metafictional Puzzles and the Adventure of Reading The shaping of reality through language and the desire of making the world comprehensible through narrativisation are repeated in Quichotte on a different diegetic level, that of the fictional author of the Quichotte story, Brother. As mentioned before, for Brother, writing this new novel is an adventure in itself because it takes him out of his comfort zone of “commonplace fictions of the secret world” (22), i� e� his spy stories� With it, he turns to a new genre and a more ambitious project� This is both a national project, in the sense that Brother uses the Quichotte story to explore the present condition of the United States, and a personal project, because in writing about Quichotte, he also writes about himself, about his past, and about his position as another Indian American� At the same time, chapter 2, in which Brother is introduced, signals to the reader the beginning of a different kind of reading adventure, with its reference to the “author of the preceding narrative” (21) indicating a metafictional switch that turns the story of Quichotte into a tale within a tale. Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 207 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 The mutually reflective quality of the novel’s two levels is highlighted from the beginning� When Brother conceives the idea of his new novel, he is immediately aware of the relationship it bears to his own life: Quichotte is “a shadow-self he had glimpsed from time to time in the corner of his eye” (22)� But, as Brother also realises, the situation is more complex than this, as reflection is not a unidirectional phenomenon: “Quichotte himself might say […] that in fact the writer’s tale was the altered version of his history, rather than the other way around, and might have argued that his ‘imaginary’ life added up to the more authentic narrative of the two” (ibid�, italics in original)� And in addition, of course, there is another writer hovering in the background, the real author of Quichotte, Salman Rushdie, whose origins share some basic facts with his characters: “They were both Indian American men […], both born long ago in what was then Bombay, in neighbouring apartment blocks, both real” (ibid�)� These apartment blocks appear to be located close to the childhood homes of most of Rushdie’s protagonists, such as Saleem in Midnight’s Children, Saladin in The Satanic Verses, and Moraes in The Moor’s Last Sigh, an area which, as Rushdie has revealed in several interviews, also coincides with the location where he himself grew up� Without proposing any overt connection, the text playfully alludes to such parallels in order to highlight “the porous boundary between reality and fiction” which Nurnberg argues is “Rushdie’s real inheritance from Cervantes” (14)� Accordingly, there are refractions of Rushdie throughout the novel: Quichotte’s Beloved is called Salma R, and her assistant and lover uses the name Conrad Chekhov when he negotiates a delivery of drugs for her, an allusion to Rushdie’s adoption of “Joseph Anton” as a pseudonym during his years in hiding� As Patricia Waugh suggests, “the lowest common denominator of metafiction is to simultaneously create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction” (6), and this strategy is obviously emphasized in Quichotte: Rushdie not only openly encourages his readers to read Quichotte as a created fiction, but also to pay particular attention to the context of its production� As Lowdon argues in her review, “Quichotte is above all a novel about the traffic between fiction and reality” (n. p.), and over the course of the novel it becomes increasingly clear that this traffic is two-way. When Brother, the writer of spy fiction, is contacted by a CIA agent in order to help recruit his son, he recognises the plot of one of his own novels in the story he is told and of which he becomes a part� Unable to determine how much of this “is a fairy tale” (Quichotte 227), he comes to doubt even his own reality status� The “dizzying union of the real and the imagined” (229) gives rise to a vision of his own fictionality: “A third party, reading these accounts, might even, at a certain point, conclude that both were fictional, that Brother and Sister and 208 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Son were imaginative figments just as Quichotte and Salma and Sancho were. That the Author’s life was a fake, just like his book” (ibid�)� Like Sancho in an earlier passage, Author begins to suspect that he might merely be a character in someone else’s book� There are several aspects to this metafictional puzzle that turn Quichotte into an increasingly intense reading adventure� On the one hand, there is a Chinese-box effect as Rushdie adds yet another layer to his metafiction, making readers more aware of the extradiegetic narrator who reports Brother’s thoughts in free indirect discourse� The echoes between the two passages in question highlight the extent of the exchange between the various diegetic layers of the novel, which share and reflect each other’s concerns. Here is Sancho trying to find words for the third presence he feels in Quichotte’s mind: I get the weirdest sense that there’s someone else in here� […] It feels to me, at those moments when I have this sense of a stranger, as if there’s somebody under slash behind slash above the old man� Somebody - yes - making him the way he made me� Somebody putting his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories, into the old man the way the old man put that stuff inside me� In which case whose life am I remembering here? The old man’s or the phantom’s? (84) By stressing the importance of personal memories and experiences to the process of fictional creation and thus encouraging a biographical reading, Sancho indirectly reminds the reader of the real author, Salman Rushdie, as an additional presence behind the “stranger” who he senses has created Quichotte� Whose memories is the reader reading? Sancho’s, Quichotte’s, Brother’s, or Rushdie’s? And who authors what and whom? The text teases the reader with such questions, playfully turning authorship into a kaleidoscopic vision that changes at every turn� The novel starts with the Quichotte story and a strongly palpable but impersonal extradiegetic narrator, who intrudes in the form of comments and footnotes� 6 It proceeds to introduce Brother as the author of the Quichotte narrative in chapter 2, but he likewise appears within the context of heterodiegetic narration, with an extradiegetic narrator perceptible in the background that employs the same techniques for commenting as the extradiegetic narrator of the Quichotte story. The very first page of chapter 2, for instance, has a footnote to explain why Sam DuChamp will be called “Brother”: “This is partly because his relation- 6 For instance, the narrator uses a footnote to comment on the apparent “kindliness” of Quichotte’s cousin, Dr Smile: “But Dr Smile was by no means kindly in all matters� As we shall see� As we shall presently see” (12)� Hence, he positions himself as a guiding, and omniscient, presence that controls the manner in which information is shared with the audience� Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 209 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 ship with his estranged sibling, Sister, will be central to his story; but also for another reason, which will be given on page 31” (21)� The effect of this is threefold: first, this footnote stresses that Brother, even though introduced as the author of what the reader has just read, is also a character, thus emphasising the metafictional set-up. Second, the footnote draws attention to the extradiegetic narrator as author - or as posing as the author - of Quichotte� The reference to a specific page in the book which the reader is reading (the page on which the reason for the name of “Brother” is in fact really divulged) clearly accentuates the role of the book as an object in the reader’s hands and links the narrative voice with the extratextual reality. This is confirmed, for instance, by the fact that this footnote has been adapted for other publishing formats: the German translation, for instance, references page 46, while the e-book version of the novel uses the phrase “on this page” with “this” constituting a clickable internal link that leads to the footnote� By signalling its awareness of the specific medium and form of publication with which individual readers engage, the narrative voice also asserts its alliance with the reader’s world and its separateness from Brother’s� 7 Third, what this also means, however, is that the identity of the extradiegetic narrator of the Quichotte story is unclear� While the revelation that Brother is the author of this narrative would seem to invite readers to identify the intrusive narrative voice of the Quichotte chapters with Brother, or rather with a narrator invented by Brother, the fact that an extradiegetic narrator who uses the same communicative techniques is also present in the Brother story raises the question of how many different extradiegetic narrators there actually are in Quichotte� Gérard Genette insists that the “narrating instance of a first narrative is […] extradiegetic by definition” (229), but in a metafictional narrative, this rule does not necessarily hold� In Quichotte, the extradiegetic narrator of the first chapter might actually be closer to an intradiegetic narrator if viewed from the perspective of the entire novel, invented by another elusive author figure, intruding into Brother’s story through the extradiegetic narrator of chapter 2, and the shift between diegetic levels that this would indicate also implies the complexity of the narrative set-up of the novel as a whole� But the alternative, that one and the same extradiegetic narrator narrates chapters one and two, is almost more dizzying, as it would mean that the narrator who narrates the Brother story is also the narrator written by Brother as an element of the Quichotte story, thus creating a logically impossible state of affairs� 7 The narrator also addresses the reader of Quichotte directly, in the manner of an omniscient Victorian narrator, as “kind reader” (54)� 210 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 The ambiguous status of Rushdie’s narrator(s) suggests that the reading adventure is constituted by the metafiction of Quichotte� But there are other aspects that combine to make the novel the literary equivalent of an Escher painting� As already mentioned, the relationship between the two stories and the diegetic levels which they represent becomes progressively unstable over the course of the novel, turning readerly navigation between them into an intellectual challenge. There are significant similarities between the Quichotte and the Brother stories and Brother himself highlight the reflections between events and character constellations that link Quichotte’s story with his own� But the direction in which reflection works, or the identity of original and mirror image, becomes increasingly unclear as Brother’s life begins to reflect his novel as well� When he realises that he has invented a history of sexual abuse in his novel of whose correspondence to occurrences in his own family he was completely unaware, he also comprehends that the relationship between the story of his life and the story of his novel, as well as that between him and Quichotte, is less straightforward than it seems and that he is not necessarily the only one to dictate what happens: 8 “Now Quichotte and I are no longer two different beings, the one created and the one creating, he thought� Now I am a part of him, just as he is a part of me” (302)� Not only is the border between reality and fiction crumbling; their spheres are becoming intertwined and cause and effect interchangeable� The confusion of cause and effect, and of the relation between fiction and reality in general, is one of the staples of magical realist fiction, and Quichotte shares much with this mode of writing� From the moment in which Sancho appears out of thin air as Quichotte’s longed-for child, the novel mixes realism and the supernatural. Initially, this mixing seems to be confined to the Quichotte story, and the blurring of realms appears to be marked as strictly fictional. But if readers originally believe that it is only the tale within the tale that can be categorised as magical realist and that Brother’s story is firmly realist, the development of this narrative strand soon encourages them to revise their conception of the novel as a whole� Not only does Brother’s spy fiction begin to seep into his real life, as detailed above, but more distinctly magical occurrences eventually also demand a further readjustment of readers’ assessments of the novel. For instance, when Brother flies to London to be reconciled with Sister, his plane almost crashes� Brother sees the angel of death, “standing on the horizon and holding the aircraft in one hand and 8 Sister reveals to him on her deathbed that she was abused by their father but that she and her mother kept this knowledge from him, concluding that “You don’t know and you made it up without knowing” (299)� Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 211 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 shaking it”, and it is only when Brother toasts the angel to show him that he is no longer afraid of death that the angel relinquishes the plane: “The death angel bowed in recognition of the gesture, and let the jumbo jet go� With a brief shudder the aircraft settled back into its course” (280)� This appears to be a classical instance of literalisation, a favourite magical realist device in which a metaphor is taken literally and turned into reality� As Wendy Faris observes, this “implicitly suggests the linguistically determined nature of experience” (110), “celebrates the solidity of invention and takes us beyond representation conceived primarily as mimesis to re-presentation”, highlighting “the question whether words reflect or create the world” (115). In this sense, literalisation is intimately connected with one of the core concerns of both Quichotte and Don Quixote, namely the influence of words, language, and literature on reality and the world� In the novel, and expressed by the echoes and breaches of boundaries that I have described, the literary universe created by Brother affects the world in which he lives in multiple ways, the most concrete of which is the final metalepsis with which the novel ends: in a last attempt to survive, Quichotte and Salma walk through a portal that connects their own disintegrating earth with a parallel earth, and as they step through, Brother sees two minute human figures, his characters, about to enter his office through a tiny door (390, italics in original)� They are at the end of their adventure, on the threshold of a wonderland to which they are unassimilable (ibid�, italics in original) and in which they are hence unlikely to survive� But even as they are about to die, together with their author, as the novel suggests, the hope and the courage expressed by their very presence in Brother’s world become visible� The text foregrounds their achievement in having reached this point, and the final sentence leaves the tragedy of their impending death in suspense: “There they stood in the gateway, on the threshold of an impossible dream: Miss Salma R and her Quichotte” (390, italics in original)� Conclusion: The Necessity of Fictional Adventures and the Necessary Adventure of Fiction As I have argued, Quichotte’s reconnection with reality is a daring adventure after his extended retreat from the world around him, and it ends, in all likelihood, with his death� But his adventure is nevertheless necessary� With Macbeth, we might conclude that he “should have died hereafter” (5� 5� 17): after all, the world which he and his Beloved are about to flee is disintegrating, and Quichotte is old and his health poor� But such a terse conclusion would deny Quichotte’s impending death its meaning� In the ending that 212 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Brother and Rushdie write, the threshold which finally emerges as the end of Quichotte’s journey is redeemed as a worthy goal because it is a reminder of promise, of the value of risk even in the face of loss: Who knows what lies beyond it? But on this side of the door, there’s hope� There may after all be a life after death� He grasps her hand� She squeezes his hand� A long quest comes to an end� Here they stand in the Valley of Annihilation, with the power to disappear into the universe� And just possibly into something new� Quichotte, a sane man, understands that it won’t happen� But on this side of the door, it’s possible, for a few last moments, to set that knowledge aside, and believe� (389) This final moment before Quichotte and his Beloved pass over the threshold encapsulates the message the novel conveys about the power of literature� Literary fiction might not be able to step out into the real world and change it, but it can keep knocking on its door. The metafictional puzzle of Quichotte confronts its readers with numerous boundary breaches between fiction and reality, on every level of the text, with respect to plot, characters, and narrators, and the passage above, which directly precedes the final metalepsis, suggests that dreams about how reality, the readers’ reality, might be different can also form such breaches. On “this side of the door” is fiction, the world of Brother’s novel, and fiction, as the text makes clear, can construct alternative worlds that confront extratextual reality with its possible Others� In Quichotte, there is, of course, more fiction on the other side of the door, but this mise-enabyme only serves to underscore how fiction and reality can reflect and how they can bleed into each other� And it is because Quichotte realises this that he, the character whom all the others regard as mad, is redeemed as ‘sane’ in the end, just like his literary forefather, Cervantes’s Don� But Quichotte, of course, also contains a personification of the possibilities of fiction as a comment on reality: Sancho, the invented - fictional - character emerges as the sharpest observer and analyst of the reality within the Quichotte story� It is Sancho who notices that some people walk around with neckwear that resembles broken dog collars (a metaphoricalisation of unleashed, and mostly racist, violence), and it is Sancho who sees and acknowledges both that the world is coming “apart at the seams” and that “stuff” is being allowed to happen that most “are too blind” or “too determined not to see” (138). And so Sancho, despite being a flawed and selfish character in the tradition of his fictional father Pinocchio, also becomes a symbol of the power of fiction to register and communicate what is happening in this world. As Michael Wood argues in his review of Quichotte for the London Review of Books, “Rushdie’s Sancho is not an example of the power of fiction to turn fantasy Adventure as a Return to Reality in Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte 213 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 into reality, even within the story, although that is how we have to see him at first. He is an instance of fiction telling truths we can’t get at otherwise” (32)� Read like this, however, Sancho’s fate also contains a warning: in an increasingly chaotic, incoherent, and hostile world, Sancho becomes weaker and weaker until he finally disappears just as suddenly as he originally appeared in response to Quichotte’s wish, at the very moment when he reaches his own Beloved: ‘No’, she said […] ‘there’s nobody. Someone definitely knocked but there’s nobody here now�’ And then there was nobody there� (354) If Sancho represents the power of literature to analyse, describe, and convey truths about the world, this sudden disappearance foregrounds the importance of an audience willing to listen to what literature has to say� In the absence of an audience, the communicative power of literature fades away� Sancho is not a likeable character, but he does represent some inconvenient truths, and his disappearance is brutal in its shocking finality. The death of Sancho, the death of Quichotte, the death of Brother: all of these indicate how risky it is to face the world and reality head-on� All three characters set out to embrace this risk in a spirit of adventure: Quichotte begins a quest that takes him away from the bubble of mindless junk culture and that forces him to acknowledge and engage with a world turned hostile� Sancho initially accompanies Quichotte but eventually leaves him to gain his independence in a world which has never welcomed him, which maims him, and whose chaotic disintegration he only escapes by vanishing first. Brother, finally, leaves the comfort zone of the escapist spy fiction he has created for a very different kind of literary venture that, in allowing him to tackle his own past, leads him towards reconciliation as well as death� In Rushdie’s modern adaptation of the distinctly US-American road trip trope, these are three versions of the “picaresque hero whose adventures offer a critique of the society in which he operates” (Ireland 500). By pulling the reader into a metafictional labyrinth in which the different characters’ roads cross and crisscross across various self-reflexive diegetic levels, Quichotte points to the fundamental links between his characters’ adventures and the reader’s world and suggests that the manifold negotiations that take place in the novel, about national identity and belonging, about fiction, lies, and truth, are questions that concern us all. 214 u rsula K luwicK 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0009 Works Cited Beardow, Ted� “The Empire Hero�” Studies in Popular Culture, vol� 41, no� 1, 2018, pp� 66-93� Cananau, Iulian� Constituting Americanness: A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature� Bern: Peter Lang, 2015� Cawelti, John G� Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture� Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 1977� Faris, Wendy B� Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative� Nashville: Vanderbilt UP , 2004� Ficke, Sarah� “Constructing A Post-Victorian Empire: Rupert Gray, A Tale In Black And White�” Studies in the Novel, vol� 47, no� 4, 2015, pp� 514-531� Genette, Gérard� Narrative Discourse� Ithaca: Cornell UP , 1980� Goldberg, Paul L� “Reading the Road Trip in the Age of Globalization: Travel and Place in Pablo Soler Frost’s Yerba Americana�” Confluencia, vol� 28, no� 2, 2013, pp� 19-36� Green, Martin� Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre� University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP , 1991� Ireland, Brian� “Errand into the Wilderness: The Cursed Earth as Apocalyptic Road Narrative�” Journal of American Studies, vol� 43, no� 3, 2009, pp� 497-534� Kaufman, Heidi� “King Solomon’s Mines? : African Jewry, British Imperialism, and H� Rider Haggard’s Diamonds�” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol� 33, no� 2, 2005, pp� 517-539� Koppenfels, Martin von, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019� Lowdon, Claire� “Quichotte by Salman Rushdie review - The Satanic Verses author is back on fine form; A glorious reworking of Don Quixote�” The Sunday Times, 17 Aug� 2019, https: / / www�thetimes�co�uk/ article/ quichotte-by-salman-rushdie-review-rushdie-rides-again- 3gsjg8dr9� Accessed 5 Oct� 2020� McFarlane, Heather� Divided Highways: Road Narrative and Nationhood in Canada� Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2019� Nurnberg, Alexander. “Himself in Every Layer: Salman Rushdie’s Metafictional Take on Don Quixote.” The Times Literary Supplement, 6 Sept� 2019, https: / / www�the-tls�co�uk/ articles/ review-quichotte-salman-rushdie� Accessed 11 Sept� 2020� Pérez, Jorge� “The Spanish Novel on the Road: Mobile Identities at the Turn of the Century�” Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, vol� 33, no� 1, 2008, pp� 127-151� Rushdie, Quichotte� London: Jonathan Cape, 2019� ---� The Satanic Verses� London: Viking, 1988� Shakespeare, William� Macbeth� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1990� Waugh, Patricia� Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction� 1984� London: Routledge, 2001� eBook� Wood, Michael� “The Profusion Effect�” London Review of Books, 12 Sept� 2019, https: / / lrb� co�uk/ the-paper/ v41/ n17/ michael-wood/ the-profusion-effect� Accessed 11 Sept� 2020� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 g ero g uTTzeiT Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure Introduction If the idea of the embarrassing ‘pleasures of peril’ defines much of the reception of adventure fiction in modernity, then Mat Johnson’s Pym (2011), a satirical rewriting of Edgar Allan Poe’s sole novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), reimagines that peril, and those pleasures, for the contemporary reader� 1 Poe’s Narrative is not only one of the most relevant adventure novels when it comes to the problematic heritage of the genre in terms of race, but Pym, its rewrite - or, as I shall argue below, its re-vision - also reframes the ideological dimensions of both pleasure and peril in the reading process, redeploying the form of the adventure in order to make visible the history of race in the United States� Johnson’s contemporary novel satirises the racialised Manichean world of its classic model, thus evincing the power of adapting the traditions of adventure fiction to reflect and problematise contemporary issues of race in the United States and beyond� Pym extends the possibilities of adventure fiction far beyond regression or escape, proffering a comic critique of the social perils of the pleasurable genre and its history� Establishing coordinates for a comparison of Pym with its predecessor, Poe’s Narrative, enables a discussion of the cultural work that the two novels - viewed as complex examples of adventure fiction - perform in their respective historical constellations� Pym imagines the journey of Chris Jaynes, an Americanist who is refused tenure, to the South Pole, where he - together with a crew of Black family and business partners including his long-time friend Garth, his cousin Booker, and his ex-girlfriend Angela - discovers a still-living Arthur Gordon Pym among the monstrous, gigantic, and excessively white Tekelians, yeti-like beings inspired by the notoriously open end of Poe’s novel� Having set out to capitalise on the region’s clear drinking water, Chris and his crew, following an unspecified apocalyptic event that isolates them from civilisation, 1 Research for this publication was supported by LMUexcellent as part of LMU Munich’s funding as a University of Excellence within the framework of the German Excellence Strategy� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 216 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 are enslaved by the Tekelians but, with the bizarre aid of arch-conservative painter Thomas Karvel, who lives in an Antarctic biodome with his wife, manage to obliterate the Tekelians� In the end, Chris and Garth escape to an island - possibly Poe’s Tsalal - where they appear to be greeted by a “brown” (Johnson 322) man� 2 As this short summary makes clear, Pym takes no satirical prisoners in its “appropriately preposterous” (Vermeulen 70) rewriting of Poe’s novel as it skewers contemporary issues of race, capitalism, political polarisation, and climate catastrophe� Considering its recent publication in 2011, Johnson’s critically acclaimed novel has already been the subject of a number of scholarly articles and book chapters� Pym has been read from approaches ranging from critical race studies to Marxist criticism and ecocriticism, which may be taken as additional evidence of the wide range of issues with which Johnson’s novel engages through the prism of race� Jennifer Wilks reads Pym as a theoretically informed treatment of the history of race in the United States that demonstrates - in the spirit of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993) - the inextricability of Blackness and Whiteness. Published during Barack Obama’s first term, Pym, Wilks argues, “does not posit a postracial fantasy that enables its characters to escape the complications of race and history so much as it projects a multi-layered, multiracial world in which such complications [of Blackness and Whiteness] might be acknowledged and worked through” (17)� The novel’s satirical strategies are situated in the tradition of African American utopian texts by Kimberly Chabot Davis, who argues that Pym is an anti-utopian text since it “critiques not only the white supremacist utopian rhetoric of the past and present, but also Afrofuturist idealizations and Afrocentric utopias based on a romanticization of a primitive past” (19)� Johnson’s anti-utopian satire ultimately “attempts to dislodge the bedrock - the fictional concept of race itself - that has undergirded American society since its inception” (41)� In explicit contrast to Davis, Julie A� Fiorelli contends that Pym is written “in the spirit of the critical utopia”, which critiques “utopian projects that don’t recognize their own historical contingency” but maintains a “utopian desire” (223)� Building on Fred Moten’s kind of Black optimism, Fiorelli argues further that “Pym presents utopia as a means of working through historical problems” (223)� Issues of race in Pym need to be discussed in terms of political economy, as Tim Christensen maintains� He characterises Pym as a parodic critique of the postmodern consumerism of late capitalism, in which the protagonist, Chris Jaynes, “proceeds from the margins of American market society toward its white heart” (191)� 2 Unless otherwise mentioned, all in-text citations mentioning Johnson refer to Pym� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 217 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure The most recent interpretations of the novel address it as an example of Anthropocene fiction: Taylor McHolm argues that “the novel creates an allegory of the Anthropocene through an extended metaphor of a Eurocentric pastoral landscape made real in Antarctica” in order to “assess racial formation and settler colonialism” (75)� Pieter Vermeulen, in turn, analyses Pym as “part of a leaky ecology in which genres refract the entanglements of forms of life and life forms” (72) and which he sees as indicative of the difficulty of writing the Anthropocene� While Vermeulen’s point on the entanglement of differing genres is well taken, especially as analyses of Pym frequently focus on the tropes of satire and utopia, the question of genre is one well worth pursuing further� Pym incorporates a variety of genres, among which scholars have pointed out not just Anthropocene fiction and anti-/ utopian satire but also the neoslave narrative, the “macabre revenge plot” of ‘kill-the-white-folks’ narratives (Davis 33), and ‘new weird’ fiction, understood as “a sideways glance at the gothic residues of nineteenth-century literature” (Marshall 631)� It is striking that the tradition of adventure fiction is mentioned in virtually all scholarly work on the novel, yet does not seem to be discussed anywhere in detail� So does the adventure genre hum in the background of the text like the petrol generators in Thomas Karvel’s Antarctic biodome? Poe’s text, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, certainly absorbs much of this noise, standing as it does in the context of nineteenth-century adventure fiction. Indeed, Poe’s short novel might almost be viewed as constituting a genre of its own, as Mat Johnson himself used to point out on his website (PYM Sequels)� Johnson compiled a list of novels “directly inspired” by Poe’s text, describing them through the metaphor of “offspring”: Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (Le Sphinx des glaces, 1897), Charles Romeyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899), and Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936)� 3 While Pym, in terms of genre, is arguably far more kin to Gulliver’s Travels (1726) than to Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the crucial aspects of Johnson’s rewrite is that it remakes the tradition of adventure fiction that is already reworked to a considerable degree in Poe’s source novel� My thesis is that Pym re-visions racialised subjectivity by rewriting Poe’s novel and, by foregrounding the visual dimension of racialised subjectivity, revises the allegorical meanings of the adventure genre. In what follows, I first relate Fredric Jameson’s notion of allegory to adventure writing in order to explore how the two novels rewrite the adventure tradition moving into the 3 Another successor to Poe’s Narrative is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), see Vermeulen 66-71� 218 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 abyss of race in the United States as understood by Patrice Rankine� Finally, I read Pym as a re-vision of Poe’s novel that, as part of what Lena Hill has called the “Picture Book” tradition of African American writing (3), foregrounds the absurdity of the racialisation of the visual� Allegorising Adventure Reading Pym in terms of an “archaeology of adventure” (2), as suggested by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher, can help us identify in what ways Johnson employs tropes of adventure fiction, but it also highlights how issues of racialised identity and subjectivity can be rearticulated in the genre� In what ways, then, is Pym an example of adventure fiction? If we begin by posing this question in systematic rather than historical terms, we can turn to the minimal definition of adventure as established by the Munich Research Group Philology of Adventure on the basis of Erich Auerbach’s thoughts on the medieval tradition of the genre (123-142). This definition includes “(1) an identifiable hero, (2) a cross-border movement in space, (3) a moment of (dangerous) contingency, and (4) a narrative instance that establishes the context in which that contingency turns out to be a trial or test” (von Koppenfels et al� 4, my translation)� One potential reconstruction of the novel’s action in these terms is the following: (1) marked as an outsider by White society and culture, Chris Jaynes recruits an African American crew, who (2) travel to Antarctica, where (3) they become entangled in a fight for life and death with the fantastic white monsters of the underground city of Tekeli-li, (4) all of which is narrated by Chris himself, who views the trials of his own adventure as part of the longue durée of the “pathology of Whiteness” in US history (Johnson 14)� This brutal abbreviation does not do justice to the complexity of the novel, but it demonstrates that all crucial elements of the generic structure are present in it� The notion of contingency is particularly useful in the interpretation of Pym, as it highlights one of Johnson’s major poetic strategies� The novel obliquely integrates historical elements that do not fit stereotypes, as it discusses, for instance, the African American arctic explorer Matthew Henson (11, 71)� Even the name of the “Creole Mining Company” (114) might be based on historical precedent since a 1907 report on Mineral Resources of the United States mentions a company of that name (United States Bureau of Mines 355)� This strategy of subverting readerly expectations by demonstrating historical contingency is especially pronounced in the ironic partial reversal of the roles of colonisers and colonised in the middle section of the novel, when the crew attempt to turn two Tekelians into profit, are enslaved by the Tekelians as a Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 219 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 result, and end up committing a “genocide” (Johnson 196), thus commenting wryly on the history of White Americans enslaving African Americans and violently displacing Native Americans� It is characteristic of the adventure tradition, particularly in such self-aware texts as Don Quixote (1605), that questions of definition apply not only to the genre but to its heroes who seek to define themselves: von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher call these “veritable adventures of definition, which are an integral part of their [the heroes’] story, and often function as catalysts for other forms of adventure which no longer deal with mere semantics but with life and death” (3, my translation)� Certainly, when the adventure concerns race, it is always already a matter of life and death� In many ways, the tradition of African American satiric fiction - recently in the limelight when Paul Beatty’s The Sellout became the first American novel to win the Booker prize in 2016 - could not be more distant from Eurocentric medieval chivalric adventure� 4 Yet viewing the adventure (avanture) as raw material that allows its own concrete textual gestalt (conjointure) to emerge from it (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 2) helps us to examine the interstitial spaces between literatures often thought of as disparate� The intertextuality that connects Johnson’s and Poe’s novels might be viewed in terms of avanture and conjointure and not just in terms of the traditions of the imperialist adventure novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries� Such an approach entails a formal understanding of adventure that oscillates between what John Frow has described as ‘mode’ and ‘genre’� He distinguishes between “mode in the adjectival sense as a thematic and tonal qualification or ‘colouring’ of genre” and “genre or kind, a more specific organisation of texts with thematic, rhetorical and formal dimensions” (67)� Interestingly, adventure is usually taken as a genre of its own and simultaneously, in such theories as Campbell’s monomyth, as the story of stories, but it is rarely understood as a mode in the adjectival sense, as we can see in the complete absence of the adjective ‘adventurous’ as a genre qualifier. In light of the two novels under discussion here, adventure should be understood both modally and generically, extending from common tropes and structures of the genre to the tones and undertones of the mode� In order to complement the idea of an archaeology of adventure and further complexify the generic dimension of the adventure, I turn to the notion of allegory as redefined by Fredric Jameson in his recent Allegory and Ideology (2019). For Jameson, allegory is not just a fixed genre but also an independent 4 See also Darryl Dickson-Carr’s seminal monograph on African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (2001)� 220 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 rhetorical process and interpretive scheme that can be abstracted from its theological uses; its “four levels essentially exhaust the various terrains on which ideology must perform its work” (xvi)� These levels are the 1) literal or historical, 2) allegorical or mystical, 3) moral, and 4) anagogical meanings of a text� This notion of allegory, Jameson suggests, helps characterise the periods of modernity and postmodernity, when it is contrasted with its earlier, traditional meaning: “modern allegory”, Jameson argues, involves a kinship between processes, unlike the personifications of classical or traditional allegory: it is the interechoing of narratives with one another, in their differentiation and reidentification, rather than the play with fixed substances and entities identified as so many traits or passions, for example, incarnated in individual figures all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical� […] [I]t is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity. (48) In modernity, then, allegory is no longer a contemporary genre, but it remains relevant as a mode in Frow’s sense� Jameson’s insistence on the continuing importance of the traditional four-fold system of meaning also suggests a way to interpret early adventures, often told with a specific allegorical or mystical meaning (the second of the four levels) in mind: “Beginning with Chrétien de Troyes, it is only the initiated who know what an aventure is - and they have notorious difficulties explaining it to the uninitiated” (von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher 3); in other words, they know how to read allegorically� Allegory, according to Jameson, continues in modernity and postmodernity� In modernity, Jameson argues, there is “the need for any adequate modern allegory to include the very problem of representation within its own structure” (14)� Finally, for postmodernism, Jameson makes the “historical claim […] that meaningful narratives today, in late capitalist globalization, tend to find their fulfillment in structures that call for allegorical interpretation” (309). What I suggest calling the ‘allegories of adventure’ extends across the longue durée of the genre and mode of adventure with a particular emphasis on the Jamesonian “interechoing of narratives with one another” and the need for complex interpretation� As we see in the manner that Poe’s Narrative and Johnson’s Pym draw on the genre and mode of adventure, the former includes the problem of the representation of race within its own structure of writing in black and white, while the latter presents postmodern “allegoresis, as a conflict of interpretations that has no particular structural basis” (xix) and ultimately demands its own allegorisation from the reader� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 221 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Historicising Adventure While they do so in the differing modes of the Gothic and the satiric, respectively, both Narrative and Pym certainly draw on the adventure tradition in the generic sense� This commonality becomes clear when we turn to Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a prime example of the genre and look to its traces in the two texts� The literature on Poe’s only novel is legion, but I would like to single out one strain of its contemporary reception that viewed it less as a collection of exploration narratives plagiarised by Poe (see Pollin, “Sources”) and more of an example of the structure of Defoe’s seminal novel� 5 The adventurous character of Poe’s text was not lost on his most fervent interpreter, Charles Baudelaire, as indicated by the title of the latter’s translation of the novel in 1857: Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym. Indeed, the title page of the first edition of the novel in 1838 overflows with the descriptions of the dangerous events of Pym’s journey in a manner reminiscent of the title page of Robinson Crusoe and arranges these descriptions in a typographical layout shaped like a ship in the water, as John Tresch argues� While various adventure novels were evoked in comparison by contemporary reviewers, the connection between Pym and Crusoe stood out among them (see, e� g�, Thomas and Jackson 254)� A reviewer in the New Monthly declared that “Arthur Pym is the American Robinson Crusoe” (“Review” 429)� While this comment was tongue-in-cheek, the truth of the statement goes beyond what the reviewer intended� For one, it establishes a formal and thematic connection between the two novels� As Burton Pollin has pointed out, Crusoe as a model is evident in “the very first pages of the [Southern Literary Messenger] version of the novel, with its succession of personal and place names, its schooling data, and its promise of dire adventure: the method and even the material, to a degree, of Robinson Crusoe” (“Introduction” 5)� Secondly, Robinson Crusoe and the adventure form were viewed by Poe - while always sceptical of literary nationalism - as crucial for the development of American literature� Poe later, in a letter dated 1 June 1840, dismissed his own attempt in the Crusovian vein as a “very silly book” (Letters 1, 130), and editor Burton Pollin takes the many grammatical mistakes, stylistic infelicities, and errors in continuity to be evidence of Poe’s own low estimation of the novel (“Introduction” 14)� However, this reception of the Narrative does not take away anything from the relevance of this strand of literary history, a strand whose centrality for American literature Poe himself made explicit� 5 For an overview of the critical literature on Poe’s novel, see Peeples 93-108; on Poe and race, see Kennedy and Weissberg� 222 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Poe had reviewed an edition of Defoe’s novel by Harper and Brothers for the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1836, saying that he had “seldom seen a more beautiful book” (Essays 203) and lauding it as “an honor to the country” (201)� Poe apparently saw Defoe’s archetypal imperial, Protestant, bourgeois novel to be of crucial importance for the United States’ ongoing struggle for cultural independence in the antebellum period� In effect, he establishes a parallel between this cultural process of maturation and the typically gendered reception of adventure novels: “How fondly do we recur, in memory, to those enchanted days of our boyhood when we first learned to grow serious over Robinson Crusoe! ” (ibid�)� The “potent magic of verisimilitude” (202) of the novel makes reading Robinson Crusoe and gaining cultural independence part and parcel of the process of growing up in the American grain� To Poe, then, Robinson Crusoe, as the foremost representative of adventure fiction, is foundational to his vision of American literature. How, then, does Pym take up the link between the Narrative and Robinson Crusoe? It does so in both explicit and implicit ways, through theory and allusion� For one, Pym’s protagonist Chris Jaynes explicitly discusses the intertextuality between Poe and Defoe in his summary of the four major interpretations of the Narrative’s ending� One reading, Chris summarises, is that the ending operates as “a taunt for a possible sequel”, a technique that also harkens to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, from which Poe borrowed liberally throughout� People forget that, after Crusoe escaped from the island, he and Friday went on to further adventure for another chapter in the wild hills of Italy, chased by ferocious wolves and the like� People forget that part because they want to—it’s anticlimactic, pointless, and silly� (Johnson 230) What is more, Johnson remakes what is probably the most famous image from Defoe’s novel, the footprint in the sand� Explicating his theory of Whiteness in Poe and other American authors such as Melville and Hemingway, Chris - in Morrisonian spirit - says: “I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages� I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand” (27). Though discovered long before he makes his first appearance in Crusoe, the footprint is usually thought of as the footprint of the man whom Crusoe will come to call Friday and make his servant� 6 Johnson’s allusion ironises the passage from Defoe since the footprint of a non-white man does exist in the novel but only in the position of a cannibalistic enemy or Christianised servant, not in the position of someone who reads signs such as footprints� The original discovery of the footprint in Crusoe is framed in 6 On race in Robinson Crusoe, see Wheeler 50-68� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 223 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 terms of spectrality: “It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood […] as if I had seen an Apparition” (Defoe 130)� This spectrality is reframed in Pym as monstrosity through the apparently large size of the footprint, but the analogy also positions the Tekelians as the equivalent of the Indigenous Friday in Crusoe� In one of the many passages in chapters eight and nine that mention footprints, Chris says: “I saw footprints as well� They were like little craters, oblong, in a pattern that suggested the gait of a biped” (Johnson 105)� As one of the foremost visual examples of the index as a semiotic type of sign, the footprint not only connects the crew and the Tekelians, but it is also the trace of Robinson Crusoe in Pym� Beyond the connection to Robinson Crusoe, Poe’s Narrative echoes with other elements and structures of the tradition, which, taken together, can be seen as indicative of a certain development in adventure fiction. Its specific difference lies in what J. Gerald Kennedy identifies as a “philosophical split at the heart of the narrative” between (Christian) providence and (Pagan) fortune: “belief in Providence assumes a coherent plan behind the contingencies of experience, while trust in fortune implies a resignation to the absurd unpredictability of events” (xiii)� Poe’s Narrative can be viewed as torn between a divinely well-ordered world and the blind workings of chance� It would then encapsulate a distinctly transformative moment in the development of the adventure as its characters struggle to overcome chaos in a world potentially forsaken by divine providence� While the circumstances of its composition certainly had an impact on the textual integrity of Narrative, these often curious, sometimes absurd or shocking, inconsistencies are also evidence of a shift in the tectonics of the genre of adventure� Its early stage is marked by a stringent “belief in Providence” in Robinson Crusoe, while, in its late stage, Pym revels in “the absurd unpredictability of events” (Kennedy xiii)� Poe’s Narrative, then, mediates between the early and the late example of this adventurous tradition� Rewriting Adventure In his discussion of Pym, Tim Christensen has drawn attention to Christian Moraru’s definition of “postmodern rewriting”, arguing that “Johnson’s novel-length engagement with Poe’s novel can be broadly understood in terms of [that] practice” (Rewriting 168)� Moraru emphasises that “[t]he rewrite reworks not only a text from the past - a form - but also cultural formations, i� e�, the values underlying that text” (“Postmodern” 460)� As a rewrite in 224 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 the basic sense of a reworking of a text from the past, Pym is nowhere as close to Narrative as in Chris Jaynes’ preface, which closely models Arthur Gordon Pym’s, thus foregrounding the intertextual relationship between the two� 7 Interestingly, the first change Johnson makes to Poe’s text is to replace “adventure” (Poe, Narrative 3) with its plural form “adventures” (Johnson 3)� While this change might be interpreted as a correction of Poe’s slipshod writing, this small detail can be taken as representative of Johnson’s strategy of foregrounding the plurality of the elements of Poe’s text� What is more, it is the earliest generic marker in the text, thus priming the reader for what to expect: adventures� In a departure from Poe’s novel, Johnson has Chris describe his own motivations in contrast to those of the gentlemen he initially speaks to about his adventures (and this is the first addition to Poe’s preface by Johnson): “Yet here our intentions diverge (at crossroads travelers may meet, then move on in different, at times opposing directions)� For sociological and historical purposes they wanted me to tell my story, to enlighten them about my experience” (3)� This emphasis on “diverg[ing] intentions” may be taken as a metafictional allusion to Pym’s divergence from the path of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, moving as they do in “different, at times opposing directions”� Moraru’s second feature of the rewrite - that it reworks “cultural formations” - applies in particular to African American fiction. One methodological point of entrance into African American fiction that engages explicitly with earlier White fiction in the vein of myth and adventure has been suggested by Patrice Rankine in his seminal study Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (2008)� Rankine applies Joseph Campbell’s monomyth - in which “the hero travels through a frontier and across an abyss to emerge with some unprecedented truth for his society” (16) - to the exploration of black classicism, arguing that “[i]n America, this heroic journey is across the abyss of race” on the model of the mythical katabasis (ibid�)� Journeys such as that described in Ulysses in Black are “an exploration of the hero’s (or America’s) travels through a classical past, into the abyss of race, and to 7 It is difficult to say which version of Poe’s text Johnson used for his own rewriting. On his personal website, Johnson listed the Gutenberg edition of Poe’s novel (digitised from the so-called “Raven Edition” of 1903 in five volumes), but this edition - in contrast to other editions of the novel - begins with an “Introductory Note” rather than a “Preface”, as Johnson also has it in Pym (3)� The 2011 Spiegel & Grau paperback edition of Pym, from which I cite, contains a reprint of chapters 18 to 22 of the 2002 Modern Library edition of Poe’s novel (329-363), which also has a “Preface” (3)� The version I use for comparison is the standard scholarly edition prepared by Burton R� Pollin for Gordian Press, which I cite in its more readily available reprint in Richard Kopley’s 1999 Penguin Classics edition� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 225 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 a potential triumph, namely our realization of a broader cultural integrity” (ibid�)� If we transpose Rankine’s discussion of the katabasis, the heroic journey into the underworld across the abyss of race, to the tradition of adventure fiction, Chris Jaynes’ idea of going back to Poe to understand the meaning of race and the origin of racism in the United States becomes legible as a textual adventure that deals with the American literary past and political present� The abyss of race shows in Narrative in the doubled chasms at the end of the novel. The final chapter ends with the passage that was identified by Toni Morrison as the foremost early American literary example of “images of impenetrable whiteness” that “appear almost always in conjunction with representations of black or Africanist people who are dead, impotent, or under complete control” and “function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness” (33)� As Pym and Dirk Peters, with the dead Tsalal native Nu-Nu at their feet, approach the sublimely limitless cataract, “a chasm threw itself open to receive us� But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (Poe, Narrative 217)� Pym - in one of many often-noted inconsistencies - is supposed to have first returned and then died from this incipient katabasis, but he, in any case, does not return with the Campbellian elixir of the hero� He is also unable to read the literal writing on the wall in the chapter set in the chasms on Tsalal that is explained in the editorial note at the end of the book, both late additions to the text by Poe (Ridgely 29-36)� The figures in the chasms are part of another displaced katabasis in Poe’s novel, one just as crucial for the construction of the absolute opposition of White and Black that is undermined only by Dirk Peters’ ambiguous racialisations: he first appears as being of Indian and African heritage and then suddenly turns “white” (Poe, Narrative 188)� Pym refuses to recognise as writing the writing on the wall in the Tsalal caves, which the editor will later identify as the Ethiopian, Arabic, and Egyptian words for, respectively, “To be shady”, “To be white”, and “The region of the south” (220)� Here it becomes apparent how the Narrative makes an adventure of reading Blackness as a danger - it displaces the perils of race in the US American South and attempts to turn them into a pleasure for its readers� In doing so, it is representative of what Terence Whalen has called the “average racism” of Poe and the antebellum literary marketplace, which “was not a sociological measurement of actual beliefs but rather a strategic construction designed to overcome political dissension in the emerging mass audience” (111-112)� Poe gothicises the adventure formula, which means that he makes use of bodily horror and mental excess in order to turn the adventure novel into a text with an “effect” (Essays 586)� 226 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Even though Narrative spans the globe, moving as it does from Nantucket to the (imaginary) South Pole, it remains occupied with Pym’s difficulties in reading the visual and, in particular, race� The katabasis in Pym can be located exactly, as Johnson stages the literal entrance into the abyss of race in the Antarctic, displacing elements of Poe’s ending into the major complication of the first sighting of a Tekelian by Chris Jaynes� In one of the many ironic twists of the novel, the crew’s exploratory venture is also a commercial one� They are following Civil Rights activist Booker Jaynes’ idea to drill for Antarctic ice in order to sell it as drinking water, thus reviving not only the nineteenth-century international trade of ice at the beginning of modern cryoculture but also the inextricable entanglement of scientific exploration and colonial exploitation in Poe’s novel. When Chris and Garth start the - masculine-coded - drill, it disappears into a hole, leaving “only air”, “[a] crater the size of a good-size Texas house”, and an “abyss spread[ing] eighty yards from one crumbling side to the other” (Johnson 92). Initially motivated by the need to recuperate his financial investment, Chris, contemplating going down into the abyss, starts imagining himself as the hero of a mythical katabasis: “Even in death I would be redeemed, in life I would be a hero” (94)� At the same time, he distances himself from the “intention of turning this into yet another polar epic of man succumbing to nature” (ibid�)� Going into the abyss is the decisive cross-border movement of the adventure story, as Chris first sights “a figure of massive proportions and the palest hue” (96), the first of the Tekelians, the monstrous mixture of White slave-holders and Indigenous population� Chris’ intended journey to the heart of Blackness is thus preceded by a mock-heroic - and in its middle section also bizarrely Gothic - journey to the heart of Whiteness: “Down into the ground at the end of the world” (129)� Similarly, the novel takes up a plethora of other elements of the adventure tradition beyond allusions to Robinson Crusoe and mythical katabasis� The gay couple of Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter updates a variety of adventure elements: they are introduced as “two water treatment guys from Queens who ran what they called an ‘Afro-Adventure Blog’ on the side” (Johnson 75-76)� Going on adventures in place of their online audience, the two are representative of the commodification of contemporary participatory culture as the adventure novel turns into a video blog� 8 Yet the idea of “Afro-Adventure” as embodied by the two men also queers the traditional homosociality of the adventure novel that makes male bonding central to the plot and yet does not allow for male homosexuality� Of course, this is ironised by Chris, as 8 On commodification and fetishism in the novel, see Christensen 166. Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 227 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 he calls Jeffree “Mister Adventure Man” (128), yet Jeffree also has a point in saying that their audience “love[s] […] [p]olar adventure” and that “[p]eople need a hero” (102)� Furthermore, the action of the novel is also connected to the earlier history of adventure by being referred to as an “odyssey” (81) and by making reference to the “swashbuckling seafaring adventure scenes” (40) in Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, a prime example of the imbrication of the slave narrative with adventure writing and travel literature� The overall structure of the adventure (as sketched above in the application of the minimal definition of adventure) is thus reinforced by contextual references, intertextual allusions, and metafictional motifs. Re-visioning Adventure Visualizing Blackness has been central to the African American literary tradition, as Lena Hill has demonstrated� Complementing Henry Louis Gates’ notion of the Talking Book, Hill codifies African American authors’ practices of countering Western societies’ dominant images of Blackness in the trope of the “Picture Book”: “black writers signify on visual practices in their literature to challenge the visual terms on which African Americans are excluded from full national belonging and artistic appreciation” (3)� She traces this “inscription of vision” (ibid�) in texts that interconnect with cultural practices related to, for instance, painting, the plastic arts, and the museum� Pym engages with the trope of the Picture Book in complex ways, using aspects of it to rewrite Narrative and the adventure genre� Pym thus insistently revises the “assumption […] that ‘blackness’ is a transparently readable sign of racial identity” (Mitchell 162)� As Moraru argues, the postmodern rewrite amounts to, on the one hand, “a notable, formal surplus”, and, on the other, “an ideological, revisionary difference” (Rewriting 7)� It is this “revisionary difference” that is explicitly coded in visual terms in Pym, which makes it an example not just of a re-write but of a re-vision: in rewriting Narrative, Pym revises it but also replaces its vision with a counter-vision� This re-vision plays out particularly in Chris’ racial interpellation� When the Black crew make contact with the Tekelians and find that Arthur Gordon Pym is still alive, the latter “look[s] quickly” over the whole crew and asks Chris: “have you brought these slaves for trading? ” (Johnson 134)� Pym keeps on treating Chris as a White slaveowner, despite Chris’ assertions to the contrary, until Chris refers to himself by the antebellum term for a person who is one-eighth Black by ancestry: “octoroon” (149)� In between, Chris explains: “I am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety 228 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 white guy� But I’m not� […] I am a black man who looks white” (135)� Pym’s interpellation of Chris as a White slaveholder inverts an earlier instance of racial interpellation in the novel when Dirk Peters, who does not view himself as Black (61-62), meets Edgar Allan Poe: “What he [Poe] says back to me [Peters] is ‘Who is your master? ’” (65), on which Chris comments that “an astute southerner, particularly one as conscious of caste as Mr� Poe, could discern negritude in the palest of those mixed in race” (67-68)� Such racializing interpretations of the visual are not only judged as preposterous through Chris’ narrative but are further undercut by Chris’ self-identification. Christ meets Mahalia Mathis, a woman who looks like a “black American” to Chris but who self-identifies as “Native American” (53). To her, Chris speaks of “my fired alabaster skin” (ibid.), using a colour as description that is, in the remainder of the narrative, only ever associated with the Tekelians’ “alabaster tongue” (123, 127, 290) and “alabaster digit” (287)� “In interracial literature”, as Werner Sollors points out in his seminal book Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, “no single image is totally in or totally out, auto-image or hetero-image” (26)� In the scenes that play off the visual against its racialization, Pym fully undermines the ideological premise of any kind of naturalised connection between the two� Full of allusions to and citations from Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Henry Louis Gates Jr�, the novel also incorporates the trope of invisibility as most fully developed in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)� For instance, Chris alludes to the grandfather in Ellison’s novel and Chris’ early work is known by his academic successor Mosaic Johnson as “your Ellison theory” (Johnson 18)� However, the re-vision not only applies to the intertextual dimension, as many other elements within the text are informed by the question of vision, but it also extends to the characterizations of the members of the crew, whose individual senses of vision form a crucial part of their textual introductions� Thus Angela, with a “poor” “sense of direction”, “her eyesight worse”, refuses “to get glasses because she was a little vain and was afraid of falling into a downward spiral of myopia” (79)� Filmmaker Carlton Damon Carter describes his relationship with his partner Jeffree by stating: “He’s my muse […] I’m his lens” (77)� Booker Jaynes’ vision, in turn, is marked by a past of state violence against his protesting body: “when Booker Jaynes looked at you, he really looked at you with his whole body: an errant billy club in Little Rock in ’64 had resulted in a loss of rotation in his neck” (72)� Moreover, their visions fail in a metaphorical sense, as well: they all die in the genocidal feast with the Tekelians (302-307)� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 229 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Yet no one’s vision is as fraught as that of Thomas Karvel, the thinly disguised parody of the kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade� Hiding from “ARMA- GEDDON” (152) in his biodome, the heat emissions of which destroy the Tekelians’ city of ice, Karvel is the prime example of Whiteness as invisible power� The latter, Chris argues, is “about being no thing, nothing, an erasure”, which covers “over the truth with layers of blank reality” (225)� 9 Arguably mediated also by the figure of the landscape artist Ellison in Poe’s tale “The Domain of Arnheim” (McHolm 76), Karvel’s signature in the sky of his biodome replaces the hieroglyphic writings found in the caves on Tsalal as he inscribes only Whiteness into his paintings and the world he creates: “Karvel’s world seemed a place where black people couldn’t even exist, so thorough was its European romanticization” (Johnson 184)� Karvel himself describes his project in terms of the interlocking of monolithic look and vision: “There is only one look� There is only one vision� Perfection isn’t about change, diversity� It’s about getting closer to that one vision� And there’s still so much, so much to do” (251)� Karvel’s gaze is countered by Chris’, yet even Chris’ vision remains tentative on some level� Chris’ perception at Pym’s ending, in particular, is another excellent example of the uncertainty of visual interpretation as it pervades the whole novel� Whereas in Narrative, it is the scream of the “[m]any gigantic and pallidly white birds […] the eternal Tekeli-li! ” (Poe 217) which leads to Nu-Nu’s death, in Pym, Arthur Gordon Pym dies after seeing something that cannot be clearly identified but is perhaps the appearance of the “brown” man at the end. Beginning with this ambiguity over Pym’s lethal vision, the novel’s ending insists on foregrounding the visual and its tentative interpretation: Looking up to see what vision had mortified him, what there was beyond the tan sand and green palms that seemed so inviting, we could find no explanation. But we did see something, something that finally caught both sets of our eyes. Rising up in our pathway was a man� He was naked except for the cloth that covered his loins� He was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him� Past him, minutes later, we saw that he was joined in welcoming us by others, women, more men, and the offspring both had managed� Whether this was Tsalal or not, however, Garth and I could make no judgments� On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority� (Johnson 312-322) The passage is filled with visual imagery made to catch our eyes. In contrast to Poe’s text, the figure of the man is “naked”, (Johnson 322) not “shroud- 9 On the invisible power of Whiteness, see Dyer 3� 230 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 ed”, (Poe, Narrative 217) and “of normal proportions” (Johnson 322) rather than “very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men” (Poe, Narrative 217). Rather than being directly classified in terms of his skin colour - “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow” is, of course, the ending of the final chapter of Poe’s text (217) - the man gestures and is only later implicitly described as being among “a collection of brown people”� To a certain extent, Chris is aware of the limits of his inferences, as he and Garth “could make no judgements” (Johnson 322)� Yet, as Davis has pointed out, he is drawing an inference with regard to the gesture of the man (39), moving as he does from “he was shaking his hand in the air” to “waving it” (Johnson 322)� The movement from a potentially threatening gesture to a welcoming one marks this as an act of interpretation by Chris of whose implications he is not fully aware� This is even more so since this final scene partially repeats the scene of first contact with the Tekelians, in which Chris, out of necessity, relies on universalist assumptions: “Drop whatever’s in your hands, and hold them out to show that they’re empty”, he says to his fellow crew members, and thinks: “That’s what waving and shaking hands are all about: showing we have no weapons to attack with” (Johnson 125-126). The final scene thus not only rewrites Poe’s text but also rewrites the earlier scene within Pym, opening up the ending to even more ambiguity� Whether the island (and the planet) can be a utopia or will remain an anti-utopia is still open for discussion, but, in any case, Johnson’s text, as a rewrite, re-visions Poe’s adventure novel by foregrounding the difficulty of interpreting the visual, thereby thoroughly undermining the racial fixations of its source text� Conclusion Pym’s renegotiation of the racialised world of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a re-vision of Poe’s novel. In the satirical flurry of Johnson’s Antarctic novel, the adventure tradition stands out� Pym’s adventure demonstrates the historical contingency of acts of (mis)recognition while at the same time constructing a literary archaeology of race in the United States� By illustrating the follies of the all-too-powerful fiction of race, Pym is more than alert to the complexity of the visibilities and invisibilities structuring subjectivity� The “Author’s Note” added only to the paperback edition of Pym harks back to Poe’s original note and connects the body of the text of Pym closely to the other paratexts included: excerpts from Poe’s novel (chapters 18-22) and the discussion questions for a book club� These paratexts amplify the open ending of the novel itself� While the insertion of book club questions at the Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 231 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 end of a volume is common, its combination with the excerpts from Narrative enables a comparison with the source text: a discussion of the meaning of the novel becomes the end of the book� In other words, the book demands the allegorisation of the adventure it presents, inviting the reader to reflect on its perils and its pleasures� The novel thus insists - in a textually unusual way - on its contextualisation and discussion, redeploying Poe’s notoriously open ending to the allegoresis that Jameson sees as typical of the postmodern period� By re-allegorising the Black-or-White dualism at the heart of Poe’s Narrative, Pym not only satirically reshapes the literary history of race but also re-visions how adventures of the past might be retold today� Works Cited Auerbach, Erich� Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 50 th Anniversary ed� Princeton, NJ : Princeton UP , 2003� Christensen, Tim� “Little Debbie, or the Logic of Late Capitalism: Consumerism, Whiteness, and Addiction in Mat Johnson’s Pym�” College Literature, vol� 44, no� 2, 2017, pp� 166-99� doi: 10�1353/ lit�2017�0009� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Davis, Kimberly Chabot� “The Follies of Racial Tribalism: Mat Johnson and Anti-Utopian Satire�” Contemporary Literature, vol� 58, no� 1, 2017, pp� 18-52� Defoe, Daniel� Robinson Crusoe, edited by Thomas Keymer and James William Kelly� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2007� Dickson-Carr, Darryl� African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel� Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001� Dyer, Richard� White: Essays on Race and Culture� London: Routledge, 1997� Fiorelli, Julie A� “Against ‘A Place Without History’: Contemporary Racism and Utopian Dynamism in Mat Johnson’s Pym�” Race and Utopian Desire in American Literature and Society, edited by Patricia Ventura and Edward K� Chan� Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp� 221-240� Frow, John� Genre� London: Routledge, 2006� Hill, Lena� Visualizing Blackness and the Creation of the African American Literary Tradition� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2014� Jameson, Fredric� Allegory and Ideology� London: Verso, 2019� Johnson, Mat� “ PYM Sequels�” Web Archive, 2011, http: / / www�web�archive�org/ web/ 20110309011928 / www�matjohnson�info/ sequels� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Johnson, Mat� Pym: A Novel� New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011� Kennedy, J� Gerald, and Liliane Weissberg, eds� Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2001� Kennedy, J� Gerald� “Introduction�” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Related Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe, 1994, edited by J� Gerald Kennedy� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2008, pp� vii-xx� 232 g ero g uTTzeiT 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 Marshall, Kate� “The Old Weird�” Modernism / Modernity, vol� 23, no� 3, 2016, pp� 631-649, doi: 10�1353/ mod�2016�0055� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� McHolm, Taylor� “Mat Johnson’s Pym and Reflecting Whiteness in the Anthropocene.” Literary Geographies, vol� 5, no� 1, 2019, pp� 72-89, literarygeographies�net/ index�php/ LitGeogs/ article/ view/ 140 / pdf� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Mitchell, W� J� T� Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994� Moraru, Christian� “Postmodern Rewrites�” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, et al� London: Routledge, 2008, pp� 460-461� ---� Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning� Albany: State U of New York P, 2001� Morrison, Toni� Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination� New York: Vintage, 1993� Peeples, Scott� The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe� Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2004� Poe, Edgar Allan� Essays and Reviews, edited by Gary Richard Thompson� New York: The Library of America, 1984� ---� The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by John Ward Ostrom� 3 vols� Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1948� ---� The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, edited by Richard Kopley� New York: Penguin, 1999� ---� The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, introduction by Jeffrey Meyers, notes by Stephen Rachman� New York: Modern Library, 2002� Pollin, Burton Ralph� “Introduction�” The Imaginary Voyages: Reissued with Minor Revisions and Corrections� 1981, edited by Burton Ralph Pollin� New York: Gordian, 1994, pp� 4-16� ---� “Sources�” The Imaginary Voyages: Reissued with Minor Revisions and Corrections� 1981, edited by Burton Ralph Pollin� New York: Gordian, 1994, pp� 17-28� Rankine, Patrice D� Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature� Madison, WI : U of Wisconsin P, 2008� “Review of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket�” The New Monthly Magazine, vol� 54, no� 3, 1838, pp� 428-429� Ridgely, Joseph V� “The Growth of the Text�” The Imaginary Voyages: Reissued with Minor Revisions and Corrections� 1981, edited by Burton Ralph Pollin� New York: Gordian, 1994, pp� 29-36� Sollors, Werner� Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1997� Thomas, Dwight, and David K� Jackson� The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe. 1809-1849. New York: Hall, 1987� Tresch, John� “The Compositor’s Reversal: Typography, Science, and Creation in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym�” History and Theory, vol� 57, no� 4, 2018, pp� 8-31� doi: 10�1111/ hith�12083� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� United States Geological Survey� Mineral Resources of the United States� Washington: U� S� Government Printing Office, 1907. Vermeulen, Pieter� Literature and the Anthropocene� New York: Routledge, 2020� Re-Visioning Race: Mat Johnson’s Pym, Poe, and the Allegories of Adventure 233 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0010 von Koppenfels, Martin, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp� 1-16� von Koppenfels, Martin, et al� “Wissenschaftliches Programm (Ausführlich)�” DFG -Forschungsgruppe „Philologie des Abenteuers“, www�abenteuer�fak13�uni-muenchen� de/ forschungsgruppe/ wissenschaftliches-programm/ index�html� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� Whalen, Terence� Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America� Princeton, NJ : Princeton UP , 1999� Wheeler, Roxann� The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture� Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000� Wilks, Jennifer M� “‘Black Matters’: Race and Literary History in Mat Johnson’s Pym�” European Journal of American Studies, vol� 11, no� 1, 2016, doi: 10�4000/ ejas�11523� Accessed 15 Nov� 2020� n o b lanK s Paces : T he (i M )P ossibiliTy oF M oDernisT a DvenTures 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 J ens e lze Imperial Representations - Romantic Dis / Enchantments - Modernist Aesthetics: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure Lord Jim is one of Joseph Conrad’s most explicit engagements with the chronotopes of the imperial adventure novel� Conveniently located at the turn of the twentieth century, it has at the same time been regarded as the “modernist novel’s inaugural text” (Seeley 495) and as such was considered notoriously resistant to adventure and its tendency to privilege “action” (Zweig 11) or generate a “reading for the plot” (Brooks)� Rather than simply offering a modernist rejection of adventure, however, the novel’s observation of the possibilities and limitations of adventure is actually so comprehensive that it can almost be said to offer a philology of adventure in its own right� In this contribution, I will look at the text through the prism of competing visions of adventure, the different lives, as it were, that adventure leads in Conrad’s novel, culminating in an implicit modernist identification of adventure with the possibilities and dangers of uncertain life� I will begin by looking at the novel’s evocations of imperial romance, a genre that was immensely popular in the late nineteenth century and even assisted in the recruitment for maritime and colonial service� In the largely mapped-out world of late-nineteenth-century commercial seafaring, however, this genre provided an ideological indoctrination rather than plausible templates for heroic self-realisation, which is registered in the catastrophe that dominates the first half of the novel. In the second part of the novel, the scripts of romance once again play out in the imperial space of a remote island, offering the protagonist a classically adventurous chronotope to actualise his fictionally inculcated ideals of self and conduct. Despite these favourable conditions and the protagonist’s transformative world-making, his desire for individual self-realisation remains nonetheless frustrated, leading to the romantic disenchantment that the self can never fully realise itself in the external world� Through this Flaubertian structure, however, the novel does not suggest a fundamental absence of adventure in modernity� Instead, the ending of Lord Jim, with the disruptive and deadly intrusion of the buccaneer Gentleman Browne, suggests that adventure is present in the world but that - akin to Robert Louis Stevenson’s quasi-aestheticist take on romance - it must be best understood not primarily as a narrative formula but more radically as the irruption of contingency and uncontrollable life� Using Giorgio 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 238 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 Agamben’s Heideggerian take on The Adventure, I will link this notion of adventure to Conrad’s defamiliarising impressionistic aesthetics of darkness� Conrad’s writing - in Lord Jim and beyond - can thus be understood to offer a vision of adventure that animates the dangers and possibilities of being that are typically obscured by the social and epistemological frameworks through which we translate uncertain life into stable forms and meanings� Imperial Representations Very early on in the novel, the protagonist’s desire for adventure is established as the principal drive for his turn towards seafaring: “after a course of light holiday literature, his vocation for the sea had declared itself” (Conrad, Lord Jim 7)� Critics agree that this light holiday literature indubitably refers to the adventure novels by authors such as Frederick Marryat, G� A� Henty, or H� Rider Haggard that had been immensely popular with young(er) English readers since the 1880s� Jim, then, goes to sea, primarily because he dreams of “valorous deeds” and of a “stirring life in the face of adventure” (ibid�)� As Fredric Jameson argues, Jim is a prime example of “bovarysme” (200), of imagining self-realisation towards a sphere of romantic ideals in terms of pervasive fictional examples. Jim is not exceptional in this regard, as all his fellow young seamen seemed to be trained on a similarly heroic diet: when aboard his training ship, a chance to recommend oneself suddenly appears, all the “Boys rushed past him” (8) to the task, eager to exert their heroic energy� The strange pervasiveness of adventure for a whole profession resonates with the status of adventure in Medieval Romance when, as Erich Auerbach notes in Mimesis, “an entire class, in the heyday of its contemporary flowering, should regard the surmounting of such perils as its true mission, in the ideal conception of things as its exclusive mission” (135)� Jim, part of a similarly flowering profession in the context of the late nineteenth century, explicitly distinguishes himself from those seamen who “live on such a small allowance of danger and toil” (Conrad, Lord Jim 13) and pities them for failing in their actual mission� As Jim’s bovarysme implies, popular adventure fiction was indeed historically important in the recruitment of boys for colonial and maritime service� By offering exotic landscapes suitable for heroic conduct, this kind of fiction tapped into adolescent desires for romantic self-assertion that could be channelled towards a commitment to imperial service� In this imaginary work, imperial romance provided a direct continuity between Dreams of Adventure and Deeds of Empire, as Martin Green’s classic title suggests� Green emphasises the importance of these publications for recruitment when he insists that the Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 239 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 popular writer “Marryat was often said to be the best recruiting officer the British Navy had” (5)� Yet, imperial adventure did not only serve as a tool for recruitment, but it also provided a pleasurable imperial education that included character formation and ideological inculcation� For one, the typical situations featuring in the genre helped prepare for a range of conceivable situations and settings� Joseph Bristow argues in Empire Boys that, along with other popular formats of the age, adventure provided a “practical survivalist education” (21) and helped to convey modes of military conduct that were vital for cultivating social discipline more broadly but especially for the sea-faring and imperial professions of the time� Similarly, Andrea White explains that adventure fiction espoused an “ideology of duty, discipline, honesty, obedience, and responsibility” (56)� By providing attractive models of heroic comportment, the genre offered a pleasurable introduction to the basic forms of conduct to be further cultivated in the schools of the merchant navy, which were considered “character-factories” (Puxan-Oliva 8), and in which, more than just practical knowledge of the trade, a particular form of conduct had to be learned and rehearsed� Due to such educational possibilities, these exotic stories increasingly “arrived with the blessing of authorities” (White 57) who were advocating “manly activities abroad” (43). Ideologically, adventure-fiction also directed the readers’ attention and desire towards an embrace of the English prerogative and duty of bringing civilization to the world, which further amplified the visions of adolescent possibilities of individual romantic self-assertion into a broader, potentially historical and civilizational force� In the context of such ideological and educational possibilities, adventure fiction became acceptable reading in Sunday schools where it was seen as a tool to advocate the missionary importance of imperialism (Bristow 21)� Coinciding with the emergence of adventure fiction in the 1880s, race became an increasingly important factor in late Victorian Britain’s dealings with the empire, as a sense of “ethnocentric” cultural superiority gradually transitioned towards a more “racialized conception” of society (Lorimer 16)� Therefore, the “racial stereotype of the English gentleman” (Puxan-Oliva 51) and his authority and responsibility became more central to the discussion and the management of empire, a shift that is also mirrored in the increasing importance of “English racial superiority” (Dryden 11) in imperial romance� Bristow also assumes that an important lesson to be learned from adventure fiction was that it placed the young adventurer at the “top of the racial ladder and at the helm of all the world” (21)� Many scholars therefore agree that these fictional texts were serving primarily didactic ends and were “promoting an ideology of patriotic heroism 240 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 and Christian dutifulness compatible with imperialistic aims” (White 54)� These didactic ends pertained not only to character formation but also to the distribution of knowledge about the imperial world� Closely allied with ‘travel writing’, nineteenth-century adventure stories paradoxically “purported to be informational” (42)� In distinction to the medieval tradition of adventure that often severed its relation to reality, colonial adventure fiction aspired to be perceived as “primarily factual” and was “demanding more credibility than other fictions” (41). A great part of adventure fiction’s appeal, for example, lay in providing accurate geographical information to its readers: “Part of the particular pleasure afforded by the genre was that it concerned real places with geographically verifiable names, not airy habitations without names” (45)� As White adds, the genre therefore had educational components that were increasingly demanded by its readers and publishers: “Essential ingredients of adventure fiction: at least a pretension to informal education and inspiration” (51)� To aid this didactic ambition, popular colonial adventure fictions followed highly formulaic patterns, in which a young man leaves for “untamed worlds, grows up and comes home” (Bruzelius 212)� The transgressive and syntagmatic enchantment of the world that adventure promises as an exploration of the unknown is in the genre templates of imperial romance actually pacified into an ‘informational’ relation to the world and into a paradigmatic story about male adolescence in which encounters with the potential unknown are always predictably patterned, rehearsed, and disenchanted� 1 When Jim finally enters the world of seafaring, he comments how the places he traversed were strangely prefigured by adventure fiction to the point that they were “regions known to his imagination”, resulting in the fact that he now “found them barren of adventure” (Conrad, Lord Jim 10)� Medieval adventure was also somewhat formulaic and related to an imaginary confirmation of class membership, but it had no such functional and disenchanting relation to reality but was, as Auerbach suggests, “raised above all earthly contingencies” (136-137)� Margret Bruzelius even argues that in its familiar formula “[a] dventure provides pleasure because of its certainties - in that sense, it is no adventure at all” (213)� Imperial adventure, then, thrived upon the transgressive and tense energies of adolescence but channelled them into “thrilling adventures in tropical locations where they prove their manliness, assert English racial superiority, and plunder the land of its riches” to eventually offer a “reassuring picture of English superiority” (Dryden 4)� The dynamics 1 For a comprehensive discussion of the “paradigmatic” and the “syntagmatic” in the history of the novel from Flaubert to modernism, see Mahler� Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 241 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 of colonial adventure are, therefore, intricately related to the twin principles of “transformation” and “classification” (7) that Franco Moretti described for the Bildungsroman and that made it into such an effective form of normative character formation. Given that adventure fiction propagated character types, ordered and mapped the spaces of the earth, plotted individual realisations, and reproduced racial hierarchies, it helped to reduce the complexities and uncertainties of the imperial encounter - but also of life more broadly - into fixed narrative paradigms. Imperial romance, then, offered a literature that belonged to what Jacques Rancière calls the “representational regime” of literature that was interested in “the valorization of resemblance” and of legitimating “hierarchies” (19)� Apart from the disenchanting familiarity that (literary) education in the genre of adventure fiction provided, the South Sea in Lord Jim is depicted to chronically and completely lack the enchanted chronotope necessary for the experience of proper adventure� The narrator explicitly argues that the “eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea” (Conrad, Lord Jim 12) is utterly devoid of the insecurities, tempests, and disasters that adventurous spirits require to assert themselves heroically� Calm seas and “[m]ailboats moving on their appointed routes” (272) undermine any possibility of adventure and signify an infrastructure of modernity that has pervaded into the very last corner of the earth. The shipping routes of the South Sea are fixed commercial structures rather than liminal spaces of adventure� In these spaces of safe passage and benevolent nature, the conduct of most seafarers was never appropriately tested� Living up to adventurous conduct simply meant an execution of racial superiority: “they loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews and the distinction of being white� They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement” (12)� For these seafarers, the allegedly adventurous spaces of the South Sea offered privileges in a colonial division of labour that provided them with the living conditions and authority that they could never acquire at home� The spaces of adventure for them were spaces of racial privilege and exotic desire� When Jim and his crew encounter their first challenge aboard the vessel Patna that carries 800 pilgrims to Mecca, they fail utterly and eventually abandon the ship to what they expect to be a hopeless disaster� Jim’s failure of conduct aboard the Patna upends the system of racial superiority, because he, an Englishman, subsequently joins the marginal and unprincipled group of Europeans and non-Europeans that have deserted the ship: his jump from the ship down to the lifeboat is a literal fall from grace for the English gentleman and resonates with fears of de-evolution that widely circulated in Britain at 242 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 the turn of the century� This scene is also a disastrous incident for the informal imperial technologies of government that, in the absence of complex bureaucracy and direct state rule, relied almost exclusively on the effectiveness of gentlemanly conduct and Christian duty� Jim’s behaviour, in spite of his training and his identity as a young middle-class Englishmen and as a parson’s son, suggests the precarious “flimsiness of an ideological creed supporting an entire system of imperial government” (Puxan-Oliva 52)� On the level of narrative form, the action of the adventure aboard the Patna and its effects are slowly revealed over dozens of pages through a multiplicity of perspectives and voices that comment on the incident and on Jim’s comportment� The oft-celebrated polyphony - and heteroglossia - of these passages is further complicated by a complex anachrony through which events are only precariously recuperated� This modernist process is highlighted by Jim’s own self-reflexive and hesitant narrative in which his consciousness tries to come to terms with his inexplicable failure� This results in a highly fragmented narrative of “human stuttering and stammering” (Kavanaugh 162) that is “ordered not by the logic of causal […] sequence but by the unpredictable movements of memory and the will to speech” (Levenson 183)� In keeping with the failed heroic conduct, the whole account is highly deconstructive of the plots, temporalities, and narrative voices of imperial adventure and suggests a widely celebrated priority of textual production over worldly action: Jameson even argues that “the first half of Lord Jim is one of the most breathtaking exercises in nonstop textual production that our literature has to show, a self-generating sequence of sentences for which narrative and narrator are mere pretexts” (207)� This complex textual proliferation in the novel is a far cry from the representational plots of imperial romance that had informed the protagonist� From the perspective of Jim’s fictionally rehearsed bovarysme, the challenge of the Patna-adventure was not only that it was more threatening than anticipated but also that it was notoriously unspectacular� Volker Klotz notes that one of the central functions of adventure fiction is to (re)create the readability and tangibility (“Ansehnlichkeit”) of the world by offering visions of straightforward sovereignty and antagonism that challenge the impersonal and reified complex machinations of capitalist modernity, in which agency is often difficult to locate (22-25). The scene aboard the Patna does not succeed in providing this sort of tangibility: it lacks storms, villains, and even people crying for help, as the pilgrims are mostly asleep under deck� The contingency of the situation is so extreme that it is utterly mundane rather than enchanted: a log of wood has probably hit the ship, but it went completely unnoticed� What must be activated in this scene are the abstract protocols of conduct that Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 243 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 in this particular version literally replicate rather than challenge the modern vision of man as part of a complex machinery of social relations and require passivity to boot� Such a situation cannot properly resonate with the scripts of imperial representation on which Jim was brought up� Jim’s response, therefore, points to a discrepancy between disenchanted worldly experience and fictional mastery. Rather than getting the chance to finally perform the “valorous deeds” that “were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality” (Conrad, Lord Jim 18), he experiences reality, including his own physical self, as unresponsive to the familiar scripts of adventurous self-actualisation� He encounters himself as an inscrutable other - as consisting of a vulnerable body and of nerves - whom the ideals and discourses of imperial conduct cannot control and who responds to the uncertainty of the situation almost independently: “’I had jumped […] it seems’” (86). The first part of the novel, then, offers a disenchanted vision of the self and of the world in which the possibilities for adventure are notoriously marginalised, even as imperial representations of romance proliferate discursively� Romantic Dis / Enchantments After the public trial through which the Patna-incident is reconstructed, Jim’s certificate as a mate is cancelled. From then on, he seeks to escape the judgments of civilization by taking on short term employments as a water clerk in various port towns of the East that he abandons as soon as he suspects that someone might have associated him with the incident� This middle part of the novel takes up the episodic and paradigmatic structure that is typical of popular romance but turns it into a picaresque meandering, into the motivated escape from situation to situation� At the exact middle of the novel, Marlow - a captain at sea and the intradiegetic narrator of this part of the story - and Stein - a former adventurer turned businessman - resolve to end Jim’s paradigmatic peregrinations� Stein and Marlow are enthusiastic about the “romantic” Jim and they set out to help him to find a place to redeem himself and to get the “clean slate” (142) he so desperately craves� They select a place that is off the grid of empire, where Jim does not have to fear the recognition by civilization that has provoked his previous escapes� By virtue of its isolation, this place is also sufficiently endowed with possibilities for heroic and adventurous self-assertion. With the region of Patusan - a fictional location typically located on North Eastern Borneo - they choose a place that is literally off the map, unlike the real-world locations that feature in imperial romance� This distance and isolation are also explicitly related to the freedoms 244 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 of fictionality and romance that many critics have noted about the whole Patusan section: three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of the imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art? Romance had singled Jim for its own […]� (215) Jim, thus, is inserted into a re-enchanted reality which, to the Eurocentric explorer, offers a piece of ‘available’ world for what Hans Blumenberg has termed “reality as the result of a realisation” (32), a form of world-making and self-making that, to the imperial consciousness, is unobstructed by the ‘brute facts’ of modernity and social life� Jim’s “clean slate” (Conrad, Lord Jim 142) offers the possibility of an adventurous plot in which the protagonist can finally imagine the syntagmatic world-making transitions into another form of life� The mapped-out spaces of the metropolis - apparently including the trade routes of the Southern Seas where Jim failed to properly encounter adventure - on the other hand offered perpetual obstacles to ambitions for self-realisation, which is why this reality is perceived as what Blumenberg calls “reality as the experience of resistance” (33): resistant to plot, world-making, and self-assertion. When Marlow visits Jim on Patusan, he confirms the powers of world-making that he has realised on the island: “Jim has regulated so many things […]� Things that would have appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and stars” (Conrad, Lord Jim 169)� He had led the island “from strife to peace” (206), offering true world-transforming and historical events with the romantic protagonist as their driving force� As compared to the regulated spaces of the South Sea, this island is able to bring back the “lost time of true exploration” (Enderwitz 83) and the hope of adventurous self-assertion� Richard Ruppel calls Patusan a space of experimentation, with Stein and Marlow acting as the scientists of a ‘magical naturalism’: They add all the ingredients of imperial romance, isolate the space from external influence, and watch the experiment unfold, quite akin to Zola’s idea of the naturalist roman expérimental� While they are eager to help Jim, they have also been fairly desperate to prove the legitimacy and possibility of such a form of imperial and romantic conduct and to “restore the credibility of the English gentleman” (Puxan-Oliva 58)� In this isolated space, Jim goes through all the possibilities and dangers of romantic individualism and benign imperialism: he fights proper villains - such as his grotesque predecessor, the Portuguese Malay Cornelius, or the fanatic Muslim invader Sherif Ali - and is further Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 245 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 afforded with all the accessories that an imperial romantic hero must have, like an exotic colonial wife and a “noble savage” best friend (Dryden 171)� Many critics since Ian Watt and F� R� Leavis have, therefore, seen in the second half of the novel the very “romantic schoolboy adventure” that the first part, in its “three-dimensional scrutiny” (Watt 308), renounced� Watt and Leavis were dissatisfied with the second half of the novel and complained that the romance part does “not develop or enrich the central interest” (Leavis 218) established earlier� Recent critics, on the other hand, see the Patusan section largely as a (quasi-) metafictional rehearsal of the “limitations of romance” (Dryden 137-194); according to Dryden, the final catastrophe points both to the impossibilities of benign imperialism and to the “shallowness” (184) of Jim’s fictional idyll that cannot operate in the real world. Another recent critic has even read the whole section as Marlow’s desperate attempt to persuade his listeners of the ideological suitability of the colonial gentleman - the most important infrastructure of informal empire - which is the reason why the second part had to change from “an interrogating modern mode” to “a trusting, consistent, and mythical one” (Puxan-Oliva 75)� While all of these readings are highly insightful, I want to take the setting and the actions of the passage literally and focus, not on how Jim fails in the ‘real’ world because of the fictionality and shallowness of his exploits. Instead, I would like to suggest that his successful handling of the most paradigmatic adventure still leads him towards a sense of insufficiency and a rejection of the very importance of imperial adventure for his conception of self� This points to a discrepancy between romance and what Robert Louis Stevenson called the “novel of character” (“Humble” 86) and to a seeming separation between the novelistic and adventure� 2 After establishing this alleged discrepancy, I will discuss how Conrad’s modernist text reintroduces a different conception of adventure that relies on a symbiotic relation between the disruptiveness of romance and the reflexivity of the novel. Marlow’s narrative of his visit to Patusan suggests that, despite Jim’s “immense” world-transforming success, Jim seems not fully at peace� He remains inscrutable and enigmatic to Marlow, who comments on Jim’s “gloomy” comportment that alternates with manic assertions of success: “‘It was […] immense! Immense’ he cried out aloud� The sudden movement startled me […] ‘Immense! ’ he repeated for a third time, speaking in a whisper, for himself alone” (Conrad, Lord Jim 207)� His ambition for self-realisation, it seems, can find no closure through adventure, even in a setting like Patusan, where Jim 2 On the ‘anti-novelistic’ tendency of romance and Gothic fiction and the anti-romantic rejection of action in the modern novel, see Zweig 11-18� 246 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 and the community have gone through the most transformative adventure plots imaginable� This is certainly related to the fact that his exploits cannot be translated into glory at home: “to Jim’s success there were no externals� Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of an indifferent world” (173)� Throughout the earlier parts of the novel, success for Jim was always closely related to the narratability of adventure: “You—shall—hear—of—me” (185), he confidently shouts to Marlow as he first leaves for Patusan. This intricate relation between narratability and adventure is later rejected, which signifies a changed relationship between Jim’s subjectivity and the possibilities of adventure� Upon Marlow’s departure, Jim shouts after him to “[t]ell them”, but he quickly reverts to a “[n]o—nothing […] and with a slight hand motioned the boat away” (256)� This rejection is typically read as the recognition that his exploits may never be duly acknowledged at home, that to success “there were no externals” (173), either because of his irredeemable previous failure or because of the racist diminution of his accomplishments that the letter of the so-called “privileged man” - to whom Marlow addresses the final section of the narration - implies when he states that “we must fight in the ranks or our lives don’t count” (259)� Linda Dryden is right to emphasise that Jim “stays within the enchanted world of Patusan, the only place where his heroic ego-ideal can be sustained” (176)� Indeed, upon Marlow’s departure, “[h]e stamped his foot upon the sand� ‘This is my limit, because nothing less will do�’” (Conrad, Lord Jim 254)� Jim’s rejection of tellability, however, also signals a general frustration with the relation between individual self-realisation and the imperial adventure form, which is why his insistent insularity can also be read as a reclusion from the very scripts with which he has heretofore sought to realise his self� This topological isolation from the world is later significantly intensified as Jim is drawn towards the interior of the island, at precisely the moment when an external threat invades Patusan (276)� It seems that, rather than mourning the lack of external acknowledgment for his successes, Jim has renounced his relation to the external world, as he mutters melancholically: “Yes, I have changed all that” (254). Marlow finally assumes that “of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself” (259)� He has become completely isolated from the temporalities of “order and progress” (ibid�), and even from the recognition he had so craved� This evokes his “romantic conscience” (235), but no longer as a desire suited to imperial adventure but as a potentially isolated perspective that challenges the idealised external forms of imperial conduct and becomes inscrutable and enigmatic� Throughout most of the novel, Jim is clearly beset by an abstract idealism, and the narrators and characters repeatedly reference it, often conflating his Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 247 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 “faithful” (255) adherence and aspiration to heroic conduct with his “romantic conscience”� Georg Lukács’s classic comments on the destiny of the novel of “abstract idealism” can perhaps help us shed some light on Jim’s enigmatic and mysterious comportment� Lukács argues that: the divergence between soul and reality becomes mysterious and apparently quite irrational; the demonic narrowing of the soul manifests itself only negatively, by the hero having to abandon everything he achieves because it is never what he wants, because it is broader, more empirical, more life-like than what his soul set out to seek� (109) Similarly, in the Patusan sections, Jim remains dissatisfied with and seems to renounce his achievements, and the movements of his soul do not correspond to his achievements in the world. Despite the quasi-fictional and enchanted setting of Patusan in which he can boast immense successes, he eventually falls prey to what Andreas Mahler terms the modern subject’s “paradigmatic disenchantment […] an unquenchable (romantic) longing for an unattainable aim, reducing all events to mere eventualities” (248)� Because this longing can never be quenched, not even by a complete real-life realisation of the scripts of imperial romance nor even by operating as a force of transformative history, Jim remains inscrutable and enigmatic for Marlow and his listeners, his self severed from the readable externalities of his world-transforming successes� Clearly, there are many - and at times competing - conceptions of the ‘romantic’ at play in the novel, but Jim’s “romantic conscience” that Marlow repeatedly references turns from a world-making ambition into a “romantic disillusionment”� 3 In Lukács’s discussion of historico-philosophical instantiations of the novel, abstract idealism and the romanticism of disillusionment follow one another as historical dominants in the novel, anachronistically synthesised by Goethe’s version of the Bildungsroman (132 ff�)� In Jim’s case, we could say that they metamorphose into one another because his idealist trajectory does not only culminate in a productive resignation in which his abstract ideal and the outer world conflict but one in which it becomes increasingly clear that an idealistically rehearsed but “purely internal reality […] enters into competition with the reality of the outside world” (Lukács 111)� Jim’s “[a]bility in the abstract” (Conrad, Lord Jim 5) with which the novel opened was finally actualised in the physical world of adventure, but even this actualisation of the abstract ideal has not led to a sense of self-realisation� From this perspec- 3 For a comprehensive discussion of the various conceptions of the romantic in the novel, see Laqué� 248 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 tive, Jim’s enigma is best understood from the perspective of a concern with subjectivity and individual consciousness that effectively translates into a rejection of life and world, a process of disillusionment that Lukács discusses in terms of an overcoming of adventure: The movement of life shows a definite and unmistakable progression towards the purity of the soul that has attained itself, learning from its adventures that only it alone, rigidly confined within itself, can correspond to its deepest, all-dominating instinct; that the soul is bound to be imprisoned and ultimately destroyed in a world which is alien to its essence: that every refusal to seize a conquered piece of reality is really a victory, a step towards the conquest of a self freed from illusions� (109-110, my italics) While Jim initially longs for the conditions in which to assert himself as an expression of his abstract ideals and hopes that these conditions might be offered in the adventurous spaces of seafaring or imperial romance, the novel makes clear that, regardless of the conditions, his romantic self cannot be sufficiently realised. The realisation of the ideal may have been ideologically connected to romantic self-realisation through the narrative desire of imperial-romance plots, but the paradigmatic ideal transported by imperial romance and the romantic vision of the individual never fully harmonise� This tension becomes manifest at the moment of the worldly actualisation of the abstract ideal� Marlow registers that Jim’s adherence to this ideal has become an increasingly alienated discursive ‘formula’: “’I shall be faithful,’ he said quietly� ‘I shall be faithful,’ he repeated, without looking at me” (Conrad, Lord Jim 255)� Lord Jim, then, offers Conrad’s persistent rejection of the “modern myth of realizability” (Mahler 253); a romantic myth that even in such a favourably adventurous setting as Patusan can only lead to eventual romantic disenchantment� While the renunciation of the outside world is a typical feature of the “romanticism of disillusionment”, most notably in Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, Lord Jim radicalises this tendency: in Flaubert, we really had the “nonrealization of the image” (Jameson 201) that led to disillusionment as a sense of an unchanging and resistant reality that allows no self-initiated world-making and is devoid of true adventure� In Lord Jim, we find disenchantment despite immense external actualisations and historical transformations authored by the protagonist, which points to a persistent discrepancy between the paradigmatic forms and ideals of imperial romance and the novelistic demands of individual linear self-realisation� Jim seems to come to the novelistic and anti-romantic conclusion that paradigmatic “actions and adventures hinder individuality, they do not reveal it” (Zweig 10)� Into this anti-romantic Flaubertian conception of the novelistic, however, Conrad (re) Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 249 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 inserts romance, but in a way that points to a different - non-paradigmatic - effect of adventure as the perpetual excess of life over the social and narrative patterns with which it is framed� Modernist Aesthetics Jim’s isolated and insular subjectivity is in the last part of the novel again disturbed by adventure in the form of Gentleman Browne and his Crew� Browne is a violent buccaneer who wants to raid Patusan but has his ship detained by Jim and his community� After Jim has pledged for his release, Browne kills dozens of Bugis, including Jim’s local friend Dain Waris, which eventually leads to Jim’s own death at the hands of Dormain, Dain Waris’s father� Gentleman Browne’s intrusion opposes Jim’s romantic reclusion from life and adventure, but it also literally goes “beyond the wildest dreams of his boyhood” (Conrad, Lord Jim 261), beyond the visions of imperial romance and romantic realisability� Despite their difference, the plots of imperial romance and the myth of self-realisation are both forms of taming contingency through plot-making that rely on “breaking the non-discrete flow of events into discrete units, to connect them to certain meanings […] and to organize them into regulated chains” (Lotman 182)� 4 With Browne, this semanticisation of life and adventure is no longer possible in the novel� Browne is one of these “extraordinary characters […] who defined themselves not socially, but demonically, in terms of their passions” (Zweig 15)� This is why Jim’s attempt to understand him fails: because he tries to read him socially - ‘novelistically’ we could argue with George Eliot’s theory of the serious novel as something devoid of extremes of character� 5 Jim tries to define and normalise (or novelise) Browne through his social context and through a possible sympathy with his individual experience: “They were evil-doers, but their destiny had been evil too […]� Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others” (Conrad, Lord Jim 300-301)� This inappropriate novelistic reading leads to Browne’s release and creates the novel’s final catastrophe. 4 For plot-making as a taming of contingency (“Kontingenzbewältigung”), see Warning� 5 See Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels and Lady Novelists”, published in Westminster Review in September 1856, and her poetological interlude, the famous chapter 17 of Adam Bede, called “In which the Story Pauses a Little”, for Eliot’s theory of the novel and of novelistic character� In what amounts to a manifesto of British realism, Eliot urges to avoid both idealisation and condemnation of characters and argues for the powers of sympathy that will dignify most characters upon closer scrutiny and in the context of their everyday lives� 250 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 In distinction to the role of villains in imperial romance, Browne’s role in the novel points towards a conception of adventure that is not geared towards knowledge and mastery but towards adventure’s commitment to transgression and utter insecurity� While he may effect Jim’s death and with it the closure of the tale, Browne - despite his own obvious genre affiliations - is a threat to the protocols of formulaic adventure tales which, as Margret Bruzelius emphasises, are not supposed to end in the hero’s death: “we will be surprised, perhaps even feel betrayed, if the hero dies” (206)� Browne may resemble a stock figure from imperial romance, but the novel leaves him radically resistant to mastery� From this perspective, it makes sense to view him not only through the protocols of imperial romance - as a return of a form for which Jim still remains unsuitable - but as an instance of the contingencies of life� From this perspective, Jim’s servant Tamb Itam and his partner Jewel, who have fled Patusan to live with Stein and on whose reports Marlow’s narrative of the adventure largely relies, would not be exiles from the plots of imperial romance; they are rather survivors of violence, rendering the narrative a “series of survivors’ testimonies to a past traumatic event” (Yamamoto 10)� It is no coincidence that the “pace and romantic detail” (Dryden 187) with which Browne intrudes into the novel and into Patusan has been related to the work of Robert Louis Stevenson� This relation, I argue, is not only relevant because Stevenson provided successful literary examples for a return of the adventure genre� Stevenson, who is often grouped with Conrad as a transitional figure between the adventure-tradition and modernism - between the (popular) Victorian and the modernist novel - is also important because his conception of adventure was not geared towards imperial romance and the certainties in which it dealt� 6 Instead, Stevenson proclaimed an aesthetic function of adventure and romance that offered a challenge to, rather than a channel for, ideas of bourgeois self-mastery and world-making, which in turn makes his work important for Conrad’s evaluation and evocation of romance� This position can be explicitly encountered in Stevenson’s poetological comments, in which he declared how he made the fascinating, perpetual uncertainty of life into the central element of the adventure genre� In his poetological essay “A Humble Remonstrance”, published in 1884 in Longman’s Magazine in response to Henry James, Stevenson emphasised, like James himself, the centrality of experience to life and to the art of fiction. Unlike James, however, he thought that “life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt” (85), too much so to be contained in a novel, much less a tightly dramatised one� 6 For a more comprehensive analysis of both Stevenson and Conrad as transitional figures between romance and the modernist novel, see Dryden et al� Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 251 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 Coherent novelistic form would simply be unsuitable to hold this excess of “life that goes before us, infinite in complication; attended to by the most various and surprising meteors” (ibid�)� This is why Stevenson consciously and with aesthetic conviction privileges romance and adventure, even if his novels are not particularly close to the “popular formula” (White 50) of the genre� Stevenson - particularly in his South Sea tales - uses adventure, not as a form of predictable and narratively or ideologically closed representational literature but as a genre whose imaginary excess, fragmentation, and loose temporalities are to him more suitable to the proliferating unfolding of experience and baffling cultural difference that life and the world have to offer� Through romance as a genre, Stevenson argues in an earlier essay, we can rehearse to “plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience” (“Gossip” 61)� Similarly, Browne’s romance intrusion - albeit generic and non-novelistic - is important for Conrad’s text as a fragmented modernist novel because, “instead of celebrating the patterns of social reality and the corresponding pattern of individual experience, it celebrates the energies which disrupt the pattern” (Zweig 14)� Conrad is clearly fascinated with adventure as an irruption of uncontrollable life, but he is not actively - especially after Lord Jim - working within the chronotopes of romance in the ways that Stevenson, for example, did� Where, then, lies the adventurous conception of life and literature for Conrad? It has been noted that “Stevenson’s interest in experience, the impulses and impressions that it comprises, and its ethical and imaginative responsibilities and costs, connect him both to the immediacy of the adventure novel and to the reflective qualities of aestheticism” (Fielding 162). Without arguing for Conrad as an aestheticist - in fact, he rejected this label as he rejected all other -isms - I suggest that he also finds adventure in impressions and aesthetic reflectiveness. A certain conception of adventure can be found in Conrad, particularly on the level of the aesthetic vision of life and being, in moments when the routine preconceptions and patterns of life in his novels are reflectively challenged by the central trope of darkness� This relates to Stevenson’s romance aesthetics insofar as he also stresses literature’s capacities to engage with darkness and the unknown: “there are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death” (“Gossip” 61)� While Browne is one of the most explicit enactments of the “inscrutable mystery” of darkness and “a blind accomplice of the Dark Powers” (Lord Jim 270), the trope of darkness in Conrad - both in Lord Jim and elsewhere - is not only related to such actual eruptions of violence and evil� Darkness, above all, is deeply tied to the momentary recognition of the insubstantiality of the frameworks and forms that structure our lives into predictable perceptions and chains of 252 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 events, therefore blocking our perception of newness and uncertainty� As J� Hillis Miller formulates in one of the most lucid takes on this trope, “it would be an error to identify it […] with evil, if that implies the existence of some opposing principle of good� The darkness is not nothingness, and it is not limited to the depths of human nature� It is the basic stuff of the universe, the uninterrupted” (21-22)� To comprehend the visions of life and being evoked in Conrad’s imagery of darkness through the lens of adventure, I will close this chapter by relating Conrad’s aesthetics to Giorgio Agamben’s recent take on adventure� This perspective can afford us a glimpse at a modernist notion of adventure in Conrad that resists the ideologies of imperial romance, and the myths of romantic realisability and disenchanted novelistic individuality, in favour of an open and responsive relation to life and being that rejects conventions of seeing and representation and that - though in ways different from Stevenson - lets us “bathe in fresh experience”� Agamben takes his conception of adventure largely from Heidegger’s ‘event’ - Ereignis - as the moment that inaugurates a new relation to the world; one that ends the metaphysical separation between “humanity and Being” (Agamben 77) towards a more open conception of life as “an adventure that still continues to happen” (83)� Heidegger emphasises the non-objectivity of being and the world and opposes it to the metaphysical frameworks and representations that humanity - especially in modernity, which he calls “The Age of the World-Picture” - has made in an effort to objectively master the world� This metaphysical mastery over a representation of the world tended to separate humanity and its history from the infinite and unpredictable temporality of being and the world (Heidegger, Being and Time 377 ff�)� In a recent postcolonial reading of Heidegger, Pheng Cheah expounds how such ontological and conceptual separations only enabled imperial forms of representation and mastery� He points out how imperial “discursive representations enable us to determine and shape the world” (8)� Cheah focuses on cartography and how it spatialises the indeterminacy and temporal “openness that is world” (17) into a fixed spatial object, ready for mastery, often with destructive - literally world-destroying or “unworlding” (ibid�) - consequences� The representational and educational protocols of imperial romance can also be understood as an important element of such imperial world pictures� Conrad’s imperial novels persistently show the destructive consequences of such world pictures because they generate the objects and the fantasies of adventurous world-making which always negatively impact on landscapes and communities on the ground� This pertains, most explicitly, to the destructive continuities between imperial representation and colonial destruction with which Heart of Darkness abounds, highlighted in Kurtz’s de-evolution of the heroic Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 253 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 discourse of enlightenment into a call to “exterminate all the brutes” (50)� From this perspective, however, an adventurer like Stein, whose differential mastery over his imperial possessions is relatively benign, is also a problematic figure because even the taxonomic collection of exotic butterflies that he keeps in old age cannot conceptually be separated from other more destructive endeavours at scientific objectification and imperial mastery. Through such a lens, it seems improbable that with this figure Conrad offered a vision of imperial adventure that simply “did applaud the desire but condemn its disastrous consequences, both at once” (White 7)� A conception of adventure that is more attuned to the event, on the other hand, is engaged in a rejection of world pictures and metaphysics; not only because they ultimately enable imperial world-making but also because they generally cover and obscure a more direct and diverse engagement with the plurality and temporality of being� The Ereignis is not simply an event but marks an instance in which something “takes place” (Heidegger, Event 211) that inaugurates a new relation to being and disrupts the metaphysical frameworks with which we have arrested the movements of life� Through an Ereignis, a new insight into existence and being announces itself that ends the “forgetfulness of being” (141)� For Agamben, because the event inaugurates such new beginnings, “it is therefore possible that the adventure […] presents several analogies with the Ereignis” (78)� Conrad’s work is full of such announcements, in which metaphysical relations to existence are radically called into question� His conception of darkness shows that “a momentary absence of mind, a new way of looking at a familiar object, a slight change of routine may be enough to shatter the structure of a life” (Miller 14)� For Marlow, certain events have the power “to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under […] as a tortoise withdraws within its shell” (Conrad, Lord Jim 239)� He typically pulls himself back from such considerations to the conviction that “in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive” (ibid�)� Marlow, therefore, insists on the stabilising power of mastery that makes these moments something extraordinary, an aberration to the flow of life that can be controlled by reverting to the metaphysical separation between humanity and life: “I went back to my shell directly� One must” (ibid�, italics in original)� His repeated evocation of such visions across various works clearly suggests the utter precariousness of these conceptual ‘shelters’ and ‘shells’ and a persistence of uncertain life that is increasingly difficult to be kept out. If adventure marks the event in which new relations to being announce themselves, then the moments of darkness in Conrad are intricately connected to such a conception of adventure, because they aim to shatter established rela- 254 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 tions to being and existence and open new - if often initially disturbing - ways of relating to the world� The exploration of Jim’s unpredictable and inscrutable individuality, of course, can also be comprehended through such a form of adventure that points to the uncertainty of fixed patterns in the engagement with the contingencies of life� Jim’s jump off the ship, therefore, prompts Marlow to reflect on “the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death - the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct” (41)� He implies that there is no sovereign metaphysical power that stabilises life and being but, as the scene aboard the Patna has shown, this vision of conduct is a man-made discourse that is always potentially evaded and exceeded by life� Without focussing on the dimension of adventure, a recent Heideggerian reading of Lord Jim has linked Jim’s jump explicitly to a rejection of Western metaphysics and its withdrawal and detachment from being towards “an opening up for what is yet unthought and unsaid” (Magrini and Schwieler 153)� In Conrad, such openings and events often arrive in moments of fear and uncertainty, but they can also offer a more vital insight into the contingency of the forms that separate humanity from being� Instead, they point towards a more open and less instrumental “being together of humanity and Being”, and towards a life “devoted […] to an adventure that is still in progress and whose outcome is difficult to predict” (Agamben 82). If adventure for Agamben is related to the event as an opening towards new relations to being, adventure is primarily a question of aesthetics, of ‘properly’ seeing the world� Conrad’s impressionistic theory of literature, commented upon in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1895), aspires to “make its appeal through the senses […] to reach the secret spring of responsive emotion […]� My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see” (259)� This form of seeing aspires to provide “impressions without interpretations” (Miller 19). The first step to such vision is the dissolution of the conceptual frames that separate humanity from the movements of life, which gestures towards one of modern literature’s prime tasks: defamiliarisation, of providing “vision” instead of “recognition”, of depicting elements of the world as if “perceived for the first time” (Shklovsky 10). Conrad’s impressionism is deeply indebted to this task when it dissolves familiar forms into un-captured impressions, shapes, and unfamiliar and abstract forms, as when Jim’s stable and white imperial form disappears from Marlow’s view to be engulfed by the enigmatic nature of his personality and the darker forces Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 255 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 of life: “the white figure […] appeared no bigger than a child - then only a speck, a tiny white speck […]� And suddenly, I lost him …” (Lord Jim 257)� 7 Yet, Conrad’s aesthetics of adventure is not only related to exposing a deeper lack of substance, of horror, or of fear but the dissolution of familiar forms and ontologies is also related to possibility, to “encouragement, consolation […] in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate” (“Preface” 261)� This can result in a positive relation to uncertainty - a giving over to being - that overcomes the myth of self-realisation and accepts the “abandonment to a ‘world’ of which it never becomes master” (Heidegger, Being and Time 326)� On the other hand, such a perspective can also be used critically and turned into the political capacity to effect what Cheah calls the “persistent opening of other worlds” that is always already possible by virtue of “the openness of the world” (18)� This links an aesthetic notion of adventure to the function of imaginary literature more broadly� In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Wolfgang Iser emphasises that the prime task of literature lies in imaginarily realising the “plasticity of man” (13) to recognise the given as a set of contingent institutions and to imaginarily exceed them - a plasticity that Marlow mentions when he famously insists that “the mind of man is capable of anything” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 36)� To achieve this, “we must […] suspend all our natural attitudes adopted toward the ‘real’ world” (Iser 13)� In Conrad this happens through aesthetic defamiliarisation, through the novel’s complex metaleptic fusion of texts and realities, and in its famous use of Marlow’s interlocked and associative narration that “introduces a new form of temporality into modernist fiction” (Levenson 182)� James Phelan summarizes that in Lord Jim such modernists’ “recalcitrance […] enhances our ethical engagement and ethical admiration for […] open-endedness” (58)� Such strategies, then, suspend natural attitudes and allow for none of the character-forming and world-making of imperial romance, whose representational scripts and alleged facticity typically demand that “natural attitudes continue unchanged” (Iser 13)� The notion of adventure that may be retrieved from Conrad’s aesthetics through Agamben, then, implies adventure as something that always confronts us with experiences and perceptions that challenge naturalised attitudes to the world and that urge us to accept uncertainty and / or to expand the scope of what is possible� If, in modernity, adventure has disappeared from the geographies of the world through the maps and texts with which we have replaced it, adventure can be retrieved by highlighting the possibilities and existences that these familiar maps and texts obscure� Rather than rehearsing the representational “pleasure […] of certainties” (Bruzelius 213) associated with imperial romance, or 7 For a list of examples of this technique across Conrad’s works, see Miller 17-20� 256 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 enacting the (self-)transformative myths of realisability and its novelistic individualist frustrations, such a modernist vision of adventure points to the more thoroughly aesthetic ‘pleasures of peril’ that constantly beset our lives, in Agamben’s words, offering “an adventure that still continues to happen” (83)� Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio� The Adventure, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. 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Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays, edited by Glenda Norquay� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 1999, pp� 51-64� 258 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 ---� “A Humble Remonstrance�” R. L. Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays, edited by Glenda Norquay� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 1999, pp� 80-91� Warning, Rainer, “Erzählen im Paradigma� Kontingenzbewältigung und Kontingenzexposition�” Romanistisches Jahrbuch, vol� 52, no� 1, 2002, pp� 176-209� Watt, Ian� Conrad in the Nineteenth Century� Berkeley, CA : U of California P, 1981� White, Andrea� Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1993� Yamamoto, Kaoru� Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity� London: Bloomsbury, 2017� Zweig, Paul� The Adventurer� New York: Basic Books, 1974� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 T obias D öring Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 1. From London to Romance London in the 1890s, the age of high imperialism and a stealthily approaching sense of doom� 1 A young man - a reporter for a London paper - proposes to his love, a charming yet somewhat capricious lady who rebuffs him because she longs for quite a different kind of husband, “a harder, sterner man […] who would look Death in the face and have no fear of him - a man of great deeds and strange experiences” (Doyle, Lost World 8)� Such a man, she tells her suitor, is bound to bring true glory to his wife and make her happy through heroic feats: “Think of Richard Burton� When I read his wife’s life of him I could so understand her love� And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband? ” (ibid�)� Her book-derived enthusiasm for Victorian explorers prompts the young reporter to seek out a chance for performing great deeds of his own, to prove his mettle and take up his role in her story of ideal masculinity� But its last chapter may have long been written� As his editor and boss explains, there simply are no glorious missions currently available: “the day for this sort of thing is rather past� […] The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere” (12). The world, it seems, has finally become a place as thoroughly explored and charted as the local neighbourhood, with no open space, no challenge nor enchantment� The diagnosis is familiar� Romance is a main manifestation of adventure 2 and, as such, desperately missed and missing in modernity� Burton’s or Stanley’s expeditions were the last of their kind� They are therefore invoked in the opening chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World to mark the very different premise on which this twentieth-century novel must proceed� Published in 1912, the novel opens by reiterating a cartographic topos oft employed since late-Victorian times to register civilisation’s progress as well as its discontent� The topos features for example in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), where Marlow’s intradiegetic tale of travel opens with the 1 Thanks to Kathrin Härtl, Martina Kübler, and Franziska Stolz for helpful comments and suggestions� 2 See Frye, O’Connell, Starke� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 260 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 narrator recalling his juvenile “passion for maps” (8) and their blank spaces of delightful mystery, unknown, unnamed, hence all the more attractive� And yet, as Marlow must immediately concede, such glorious dreams have ended as the blanks have filled since his “boyhood with rivers, lakes and names” (7-8)� In this way, Victorian adventurers were caught up in a paradox: they ventured into the unknown only to contribute, unwillingly yet unavoidably, to its inclusion into cartographic systems, thus eliminating opportunities for continuing adventure by diminishing the territories for it to take place� This does not augur well for post-Victorian adventure writing� As indicated with Doyle’s title, the genre cannot but admit to loss and must declare its own improbability: where then can aspiring adventurers turn? The Lost World seeks a radical solution� In order for the romance to proceed, the novel posits the existence of a large plateau somewhere in South America, utterly remote and inaccessible where, allegedly, Jurassic animals exist� A London palaeontologist, appropriately called Professor Challenger, claims to have discovered this uncharted place populated by living dinosaurs� In his professional capacity interpreting the fossilised remains of ancient life, Challenger is as concerned with clues and their significance as his more famous investigative predecessor in Doyle’s fiction, Sherlock Holmes. Like him, he follows traces so as to reconstruct the past� Unlike Holmes, however, Challenger is not at all respected: London society derides and disbelieves him� So, he now heads a South American expedition which is to bring conclusive evidence to verify his allegations - an opportunity, at the same time, for the young reporter, as he joins the team, to enact the kind of chivalry required for his courtship� In this way, a regular adventure plot is set in motion� With the promise of the marvellous plateau where prehistoric creatures long believed extinct apparently survive and still abound, Doyle’s narrative takes its protagonists as well as readers on a course that leads from London strictly towards romance� Yet, for the question of adventure in modernity, its outlook remains bleak� No matter how Doyle’s brave explorers fare, their quest does not succeed in winning the new territory� 3 On the contrary, the novel’s final implication seems to be that the adventure plot in 1912 is as dead as the dinosaurs� 4 My contribution would like to contest this cultural diagnosis� Against the background of Doyle’s early fiction - the first collection of his serialised stories is entitled, after all, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) -, I try to trace residual and resisting ways for early twentieth-century adventure writing to 3 See my discussion in Döring, Caribbean-English Passages 93-97� 4 On issues of adventure and modernity, see the contributions in Grill and Obermayr� Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 261 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 take place in the literary field of modernism. At the same time, I would like to explore how modernist poetics comes into itself by absorbing and transforming what it otherwise rejects: the romance and adventure plots of old� For this purpose, the years immediately preceding the Great War, with the Edwardian literary establishment already in decline and the avant-garde on the rise, offer a good point of departure� When The Lost World came out, thirty-year-old Virginia Woolf was finishing the manuscript of her first novel, another narrative about a trip to South America whose title reads as if it should remind us of traditional tales of seafaring� In fact, The Voyage Out, published in 1915, does not fully follow this tradition, but neither does it deny its shaping influence and so establishes the author’s lasting interest in maritime exploits, as evinced even in her later fiction like Mrs Dalloway (1925), not generally regarded as adventure writing� 5 Throughout her work, Woolf arguably draws on legacies of seafaring, helping to consign them to a distant past even while keeping their effects alive. Modernist fiction, more generally speaking, thus contributes widely to a critical rereading of adventure plots� 6 The same holds true, I would like to suggest, for modernist poetry and poetics� The year before The Lost World, T� S� Eliot, aged twenty-three, sailed for the first time from America to England where he would soon make his home. In 1914 he joined Merton College, Oxford, as a postgraduate in philosophy� From the same year dates a rhymed stanza of eight lines which he wrote and would eventually use in part V of The Waste Land (North 281), the earliest poetic fragment making it into this assemblage which, ten years after The Lost World, became a signature text of the modern age� The stanza includes a mentioning of “reminiscent bells” (Eliot, The Waste Land 7 l� 383) as if to signal further reminiscences and challenge readers to register the poem’s resonances of traditional sounds and forms� Hoping to accept the challenge, my contribution argues that adventure writing is among these forms, thus proposing to draw tentative connections between the texts and cultural contexts briefly sketched� In particular, it sets out to map some common ground between the works of Eliot and Doyle� Even though of different generations and from very different cultural backgrounds, these two authors also share some predilections, like their enthusiasm as young readers for The Boy Hunters or The Scalp Hunters 5 These issues are discussed more fully in my contribution on Woolf and adventure, Döring, “Virigina Woolf”� 6 This point also includes Joyce’s Ulysses, see my discussion in Döring, “Leopold Bloom”� 7 Henceforth, The Waste Land is shortened to WL in in-text citations� The reference, according to the Norton Critical Edition, ed� Michael North, includes line numbers instead of page numbers� 262 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 by Captain Mayne Reid, the popular nineteenth-century American writer of boys’ own fiction, who was a favourite of both (Crawford 15; Doyle, Memories 13)� To ask how Eliot’s poetic sequence may intersect or interact with popular detective series like Doyle’s and how both of them connect to classic modes of romance and adventure seems a useful, though perhaps unusual, question� As The Waste Land keeps insisting, disconnection serves as a pervasive trope in modernist accounts of self-reflection: A heap of broken images (l� 22) I can connect Nothing with nothing (l� 301-302) These fragments I have shored against my ruins (l� 430) What such a state of fragmentation seems to require most of all is the kind of power routinely exercised by Sherlock Holmes and supremely performed at the climax of the tales, when the detective manages to put everything in place: “I only require a few missing links to have an entirely connected story” (Doyle 270), he informs the clueless in The Sign of Four (1890)� 8 While Watson is still puzzling over “an insoluble mystery” (269), a heap of unconnected bits and pieces, Holmes prepares to piece them all together and integrate them into the coherent story to which they belong� Among the bewilderments of modern life, the detective thus embodies a great promise of order and connectedness (Stiegler 49)� Such a promise would indeed be helpful for a text like The Waste Land, whose readers since its publication have been wondering how - or if - it hangs together� But precisely because disconnection, brokenness, fragmentation, ruin, and decay are as frequently experienced when trying to confront this poem as they are reiterated in its self-descriptions, and in modernism at large, we may take them as our cue to seek or construct the kind of coherence they claim has been lost - or at least take them as prompts to question what their diagnosis means� When The Waste Land tells us that “[t]he nymphs are departed” (l� 175), it verbally invokes what is felt missing and so maps out a world like Doyle’s where “there is no room for romance anywhere”� Therefore, Doyle’s and Eliot’s projects share a cultural premise of loss� They proceed on similar grounds, diagnose the same affliction, and, each in their own way, try to deal with the predicament: how to respond to the shambles of modernity� Part of this response, I argue, is to resort anew to adventure writing� The Sign of Four, the second of the early and extended tales by which Doyle introduced his celebrated figure before launching his series of short stories 8 The Sign of Four is cited as SF in in-text citations� Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 263 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 for The Strand, is entirely narrated as a classic and supreme adventure� Not only is Watson’s discourse full of references to “our adventures” (SF 284), “the adventures of the night” (283) or “the final stage of our night’s adventures” (260); the tale also already opens with a morning conversation where Holmes and Watson discuss “romance” (217), in particular the romance involved in Holmes’ first investigative case and Watson’s account of it in A Study in Scarlet� The fact that Holmes disclaims the genre marker should not really distract us� Like Watson, we can see that “the romance was there” (SF 217) and that it has remained and been reiterated as the current case unfolds� The Sign of Four is no whodunit; as Stephen Knight observes (58), it makes “no puzzle of the culprits” and offers “no criminal-revealing denouement” because Doyle is working here “primarily in an adventure mode”� A mode, we may add, that persists and predominates throughout the Holmes canon: in the words of Joseph McLaughlin (45), all “the subsequent adventures of Holmes and Watson produce an image of metropolitan London as a stage rich with romantic adventure”� It is this stage, I argue, on which The Waste Land plays out, too� It is a truth widely acknowledged - not least, by Eliot himself - that The Waste Land owes a great deal to From Ritual to Romance, Jessie Weston’s 1920 study of the grail traditions and their ritualistic roots, vigorously debated in contemporary folklore, cultural anthropology, and medieval studies (Grayson 28-34)� But it is less often acknowledged, though no less relevant I think, that the poem came out in the Golden Age of English crime fiction, which Arthur Conan Doyle (though himself not English) had prepared and pioneered� T. S. Eliot (at the time not English either) was in fact an expert and great aficionado of the genre and, in particular, of Sherlock Holmes� In The Criterion, his literary magazine where The Waste Land first appeared in October 1922, he reviewed more than two dozen detective novels throughout the 1920s, both topical and classical, and in 1950 told the Sunday Times that he never bothered to read contemporary fiction except Simenon (Chinitz 56); other exceptions were Agatha Christie and, above all, Doyle, whose work he often singled out for praise� In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Eliot wrote in 1929, “the late nineteenth-century is always romantic, always nostalgic, and never merely silly” (Prose 602)� What it was that so attracted him - “I cannot think of anything to which to compare to Sherlock Holmes” (ibid�) - and resonated in his own writing, shaping it perhaps far more than hitherto acknowledged, 9 my engagement with his poem would like to explore� How, then, is the modern city turned into a territory for adventure? By which routes can urbanites, unless they actually travel to some unlikely place 9 Two notable exceptions are D’haen (2002) and Schäfer (2017)� 264 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 like Challenger and his team of dinosaur explorers, actually arrive at romance in the modern world? And what consequences do such ventures have for the forms and modes of modern writing? A conjunctive reading of these texts may offer some initial clues� 2. From Romance to Treasure Differences between The Waste Land and The Sign of Four are obvious enough� In their generic shapes, aesthetic strategies, and cultural agenda, the two texts could hardly form a starker contrast� Above all, their audience appeal diverges widely, with Conan Doyle’s exciting story of detection and deduction at the one end of a spectrum on which Eliot’s erudite and recondite and somewhat alienating poem must surely be located at the other� Early responses to The Waste Land show how perplexed and bewildered readers felt when trying to make sense of what they found: a disconnected series of verbal bits and pieces, in various foreign languages and widely different registers ranging from colloquial English to high poetic diction, many of them evidently learned literary citations or in some other way suggestive and allusive, though their true significance is likely to elude most readers. Even appreciative reviews, like Edmund Wilson’s in The Dial, would contemplate the possibility that Eliot had “written a puzzle rather than a poem” (143), whereas less appreciative ones, like Charles Powell’s in The Manchester Guardian, singled out the multiplicity of languages and sources which place the poem “under an enormously composite and cosmopolitan mortgage” (156)� Arcane as opposed to catchy, impenetrable as opposed to accessible, elitist as opposed to popular: the list of oppositions between Eliot’s and Doyle’s projects is easily continued� And yet, this impression should not keep us from questioning the plausibility of a connection and looking for conjunctions between them� Consider the following characteristic: we are dealing with texts which “are allusive and elusive, constantly suggesting connections to other literary works […], while avoiding simplicity and closure by offering us anomalies, incomplete solutions and un-decoded secrets” (Glazzard 236)� What reads like an apt summary of The Waste Land and its riddling qualities is in fact the concluding comment in Andrew Glazzard’s study of the Sherlock Holmes stories� Rather than following conventional wisdom, then, by placing Eliot and Doyle in opposing cultural camps of high versus popular culture, we should ask what happens when, for argument’s sake, we try to see and read their works together� We notice, for example, that The Sign of Four is multilingual, too, with Holmes quoting Goethe (282) and Jean Paul (293) in the German original and Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 265 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 with many Indian or Anglo-Indian words studding the text� Nor are these the only marks of erudition� Throughout, the tale involves highly specialised and learned issues - hence the copious explanatory notes in Leslie Klinger’s great edition - such as distinguishing between the ashes of various tobaccos (the subject of Holmes’ monograph, SF 219), the ethnography of foreign feet with special reference to the “Hindoo proper”, and the “sandal-wearing Mohammedan” (306-307), miracle plays, medieval pottery, Stradivarius violins, and the Buddhism of Ceylon as main topics of Holmes dinner table conversation (324) - or whatever else his “genius for minutiae” (220) might happen to digest� Stronger convergences emerge in the urban topography which both texts construct and clearly share, not just in the general image of a crowded, foggy, dreary, polyglot, and ethnically mixed imperial metropolis but also in the focus on specific London streets or sights, like the Strand, which features both in The Waste Land (l� 258) and The Sign of Four (240)� 10 The most prominent London feature, however, that functions as a central trope in Eliot’s poem as well as in Doyle’s story is the river Thames, to which both keep referring and returning: the vital urban life-line, rich repository of meaning, and reference line for the motivic organisation of their texts� In Eliot, the river is invoked and cited, with echoes ranging from Spenser to Wagner and beyond, as if to tap once more into a flow of cultural significance that has all but dried up in the present age (“The river’s tent is broken”; WL l� 173)� In Doyle, the river gradually becomes the vein of influx where all mysteries gather and unfold, where the climactic chase takes place, and where, finally, the object of desire is sunk: another case of loss� As such, the Thames is more than a familiar local landmark; it is a marker at the same time of the unfamiliar and the dislocating energies at work in the two texts, of the wider horizons they long for and the wider connections they go in search of, a marker, in short, of their desire for adventure� Like in Heart of Darkness, where the Thames is celebrated as the waterway into the imperial world channelling and stimulating also the expansive energies that set Marlow’s tale in motion, the river functions as a promise: a way to leave the present urban dreariness behind, a way out of the everyday, a relief route for the restless and the weary, and for the city to turn into a place of romance� This prospect is especially appealing in The Sign of Four� Essentially a tale about recovering a treasure chest - which colonial officials have brought back from the Raj where they stole it from a motely gang who, in turn, had stolen it 10 The Strand also plays a highly significant role in Woolf’s fiction, see Döring, “Virginia Woolf” 126� 266 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 from a local rajah -, the tale unfolds as the mystery of a damsel in distress in search of her father� Before her entry, boredom reigns� In the opening chapter, we encounter Sherlock Holmes languishing in his apartment, nervously indulging his cocaine addiction and desperately longing for something to happen, some action to begin, some call or case to rescue him from languor and ennui� “I abhor the dull routine of existence”, he exclaims� “I crave for mental exaltation” (SF 217), hence the drug as temporary compensation� The genius of his extraordinary mind feels fettered and imprisoned by the sheer ongoingness of ordinary life� “See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses”, he says to Watson� “What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? ” (224-225)� With the emphasis on the “prosaic”, this scenario corresponds to the opening of The Lost World - “no room for romance” - and recurs with many of the later tales� In “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1908), the London fog functions as the veil of commonplace existence that hides from Holmes the thrills he craves: “Look out of this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloud-bank� The thief or murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim” (Doyle, “Bruce-Partington Plans” 1301)� Holmes’ desperate gaze seems to produce a vision of the exotic space that forms the city’s Other, full of violence and danger, where he could find the challenge he is missing and thereby also find himself. For he does not seem to exist outside a case; that is to say, the prosaic would eventually consume him unless some criminal come to his rescue� Holmes lives on crime rather like Count Dracula on blood� The Indian jungle Holmes imagines therefore mainly serves to reinvigorate himself: a defence against pervasive dullness� The Waste Land, interestingly, proceeds on much the same premise, for “dullness” also marks the context in which it first appeared. In October 1922, the first volume of the first issue of The Criterion, the literary magazine Eliot edited, opened with an essay on this topic, “the most abominable thing to find” (2), written by George Saintsbury, the eminent and aged literary scholar, as if to provide background or perhaps a prelude to the poem printed some three dozen pages later - a poem, after all, written by a London city employee and bank clerk contemplating the routine of urban desk workers and their “violet hour” when “the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (WL l� 215-217)� In The Sign of Four, the waiting ends when at the end of chapter I “a crisp knock” at the door announces Miss Morstan’s arrival (225), the client who has come to terminate Holmes’ torturing period of the prosaic� At this point, the plot is put on rails and the engine of Doyle’s narrative gains speed� Eight chapters later, with the dramatic climax and four chapters Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 267 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 yet to come, it seems to have reached its desired destination: “It’s a romance! ” we are told� “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged sailor� They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl” (SF 311). Mrs. Forrester here lists all the required figures of chivalric tales, to which Miss Morstan then, referring to Holmes and Watson, adds the rest of their conventional cast: “And two knight-errants to the rescue” (ibid�)� But such a summary may sound a little more exciting and enchanting than what we have actually read� As its semiotic title indicates, The Sign of Four is at heart a tale of sign reading 11 and, as such, a laborious reconstruction of some action in the past� Its present is far more concerned with collecting clues and interpreting what stories they might tell - a chance for Holmes to demonstrate his fabled powers - than with adventurous undertakings� Though essentially a treasure hunt involving a nightly coach ride across London and culminating in a wild chase down the river, the narrative is otherwise remarkably static and stalled by repeated acts of lengthy story-telling: first Holmes’ ingenious story about Watson’s brother’s watch, then Miss Morstan’s story of her father’s disappearance, then Sholto’s story of his father’s and his brother’s fate, and finally Small’s story of his life that fills the whole of the last chapter. The mode is therefore mainly retrospective. All excitement that currently plays out in London is but the tail end of developments that began long ago and far away, especially in colonial India� True adventure, we learn, happens elsewhere� For this reason, and for all the suspenseful entertainment it may offer, The Sign of Four has a reflective and a self-reflexive quality: a narrative made up of several intradiegetic narratives, it folds back upon itself and invites us to consider strategies or conditions of contemporary story-telling and to decide what forms are still available for them� Hence the highlighting of romance as a traditional cultural shape to which the characters repeatedly resort, starting with Holmes’ and Watson’s morning conversation, so as to explore its plausibility and use� Hence also the playful, even parodistic tone in which Mrs� Forrester and Miss Morstan identify and list the elements of romance, as just quoted: as if suggesting that we should decide ourselves how fitting and appropriate the medieval pattern might be for the modern case� From this perspective, the entire tale turns into a trial of tradition� It uses many of the functional features of adventure writing such as the wooden-legged man whom Major Sholto fears (SF 251), clearly recycled from Treasure Island, or the mysterious single footprint in the sand (SF 256), strictly an impossible discovery that re-enacts Robinson’s equally impossible discovery on the beach, 11 See Carlo Ginzburg’s powerful and wide-ranging argument on this point� 268 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 or indeed the figure of the cannibal as the most intense expression of the anxiously desired Otherness adventurers engage with, a generic figure whose manifestations range from Defoe’s Man Friday, via Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym or Ballantyne’s Coral Island, to Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines or Heart of Darkness, and beyond� But in The Sign of Four, the heroes undertake no journey to some foreign coast and into the interior of an unknown continent� Instead, the cannibal comes to the city� The contact zones have been displaced to the metropolis and its less fashionable suburbs� The single footmark is not printed on the beach but in a suburban flower-bed (SF 256)� India is found among “long lines of dull brick houses” and “rows of two-storeyed villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden” (243), and yet it is an India complete with khitmutgar (245) and tiger-skins and hookah (247), “an oasis of art in the howling desert of South London” (246), as Sholto calls his artificial paradise. Doyle’s narrative thus offers us a customised, domesticated form of Otherness� And it activates once more the apparatus of adventure but displaces all its markers so as to make us think about how much of it survives in civilised and modern urban life and how much must be acknowledged, like the dinosaurs in The Lost World, to lie henceforth out of reach� As Doyle knew well from personal experience - in 1880, he sailed the arctic sea for months in search of whales and seals, “the first really outstanding adventure in my life” (Memories 34) -, tracking and hunting are outdoor practices that work best in the wild� So, when he determinedly sets up Sherlock Holmes as a tracker, according to McLaughlin, “the Leatherstocking of London” (41), he might not simply turn the city into wilderness nor simply recall Fenimore Cooper but require us to judge how well such turns and recollections work and how much credit they gain under present circumstances� Prompted by chapter III, which is entitled “In Quest of a Solution”, we can read the whole tale as a classic quest narrative� But its real quest, it now appears, is not for the Agra treasure box but for the forms and frames and means by which modern quests can come about and become narratable� It is this speculative and citational strategy, consciously presenting signs and tokens from a past tradition, that gives The Sign of Four, as several other tales in the Holmes canon, a ghostly quality: an occasion to encounter revenants of adventure� The place whence the more powerful and useful of these ghosts appear is certainly the Raj, backstage to imperial London and vanishing point for all the backstories of urban romance unravelling here, not just a counterspace of luxury and splendour but also an otherworld of risk and fortune, full of potential promise as of violence, betrayal, death� The fabled treasure which is brought from there, stolen from the “four” whose “sign” it bears and kept for years in Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 269 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 the false attic of a fake Indian lodge in Upper Norwood, functions like a grail: the elusive object of the quest and, as such, a sign of the rich romance that this narrative desires but cannot quite deliver� At the end, the treasure box is opened with the fire poker but found empty, its splendid content, like the cannibal who guarded it, sunk to the bottom of the Thames� At this point Miss Morstan, who first set the entire quest in motion, does not regain the treasure but herself becomes the treasure, in Watson’s words (SF 344), by accepting to become his wife� All that remains then of the Indian riches are a few lustrous pearls she used to receive annually through the mail, six altogether (232), tantalising tokens of a marvellous heritage that can no longer be possessed - pointing to the heritage also of classic romance, which Doyle’s tale seeks to court but cannot finally regain. Yet the empty box itself appears significant enough: a heavy, massive iron container “of some value” and quite “pretty”, as Miss Morstan says with understatement, Benares metal-work richly decorated, showing at the front “a thick and broad hasp, wrought in the image of the sitting Buddha” (SF 343); under it, Watson thrusts the poker to gain access to its secret, but in vain� This Buddha, guardian to the treasured content, captures all the aspirations - for oriental wisdom, richness, romance, and delivery from dullness - that drive Doyle’s narrative towards fulfilment and the ultimate frustration at which it arrives. All it can eventually find are husks that once contained them: emptied and discarded now, still pretty but not really functional anymore� The key to Buddha’s box is lost� 3. From Treasure to Waste The Waste Land, too, strives for fulfilment in all things Indian and indeed focusses on Buddha� The subtitle to section III, “The Fire Sermon”, and the “burning burning burning”-chant immediately preceding (WL l� 308), are the first of several clues to point readers into this direction and strengthen what Paul Stasi has identified as “India’s ghostly presence in London” (55). This is not the only point that holds Holmesian resonance� Reading Eliot’s poem against the background of The Sign of Four, we find further features the texts share despite their salient differences, points where they seem to converge or make common cause: above all, as mentioned earlier, the anthropology of modern city life and the view of London they construct, gloomy centre of a glorious empire which once served as a wide space of adventure� Now, such glories wane, and the city turns into an ersatz adventure playground where, in both texts, several of the threats and thrills formerly encountered in the colonies have come to haunt the centre� The cannibal in Doyle’s text - half devil 270 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 and half child and fully contrasted to civilised sophistication - corresponds to the figures of fecundity, primordial growth, and savagery in Eliot’s text that Robert Crawford calls “the savage in the city” and studies as a crucial feature in all of Eliot’s major work: “the uniting of the world of the savage with the world of the city” (1)� So, if the poem forms a contact zone where these two worlds meet, clash, and grapple, we should not be surprised at the affinities it shares with Doyle’s where a world of crime meets and mingles with a world of virtue, and peripheral with imperial figures, without always clear-cut boundaries (Watson remarks more than once that Holmes’ genius mind could easily turn criminal, SF 277)� In The Waste Land, boundaries blur everywhere so that memory and desire, text and pre-texts, here and there, centre and periphery often become indistinguishable� Especially the later sections show, in Stasi’s words, “an explicit inclusion of the periphery into the world of the metropole itself” (55)� The Indian material is part of this inclusive gesture� Beginning with “The Fire Sermon”, Buddha’s words are freely borrowed� Yet their status and potential function - why are they called on? to what effect and end? - remains rather uncertain. This is a general problem here. Throughout, we find many weighty words, religious formulas from The Book of Common Prayer (like the subtitle to section I) or elements of quest literature like the Chapel Perilous (WL l� 388)� But what the poem tries to do with them, what it ultimately strives for, where it is going, what kind of grail or goal it seeks, and whether it seeks any is not easy to make out. For we never find a key to unlock their significance. As regards quest motifs and structures, the key has often been assumed to lie in Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, arguing for the transformed survival of fertility rites in the romance tradition, which essentially deals with the “restoration to fruitfulness of a Waste Land” (12) after a long period of desolation� Eliot’s “Notes” open with the statement that not just the title but the “plan” and “symbolism” of his poem were suggested by this book (21)� On this basis we might say that The Waste Land, as a modern text, is inhabited by romance in much the same way that romance is, in Weston’s view, inhabited by the ancient mystery cults she traces in grail literature: as a distinct but covert presence perpetuated from a cultural context all but lost and now transformed under the changing conditions of time� But with Sherlock Holmes in mind, and with Eliot’s praise for these stories’ “perfect” form (Prose 603), we might also think that it is not so much Weston’s material but her method that the poet finds compelling, a method thoroughly semiotic and conjectural, collecting clues and resemblances (Weston 51), establishing sequences (33), and trying to find all the “missing links” (174) until “the chain is at last linked up” (5). This, surely, is a method quite attractive and conducive also for a poem whose Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 271 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 self-descriptions are as obsessed as this one’s with disconnection and decay, a poem, therefore, that requires Holmesian skills and so turns our reading process into an adventure� The poem’s goal or point of destination, however, remains doubtful for we never quite know when or whether we arrive� This problem is marked by the contrary responses, for instance, of two well-known early readers: the contrast between Cleanth Brooks, who in 1937 found a “statement of positive beliefs” in the poem that emerges “through confusion and cynicism” (210; italics in original), and F. R. Leavis five years earlier, who saw “no progression” and declared “the poem ends where it began” (179-180)� But where does it actually begin? The question is crucial for us because adventure writing needs a strong point of departure, an anchor, rest, and reference place, a Baker Street apartment, as it were� No matter whether this is felt to be a place of comfort or of boredom and unrest, it is this base whence the outward movement starts, the rambling, wandering, voyaging, and questing, and where the adventurer at the end returns� Nostos, or homecoming, is more than a plot convention here: if we regard adventure as a category of narration rather than just of experience, nostos is a structural requirement because only on this precondition can adventure ever become part of story-telling� So, to establish the beginning means to find the point from which everything else follows with necessity. In the case of Eliot’s text, however, notions of home and beginning are radically questioned� The very first line starts with “April” (WL l� 1), a month of spring, of growth and natural renewal, which might seem promising enough. But the first section is entitled “The Burial of the Dead”, which sounds more like an ending and is, for readers conversant with Anglican faith, an echo of the liturgy laid down in The Book of Common Prayer� Nor is “April” really a fresh start� Readers familiar with the English literary canon immediately hear it echoing the start of a medieval storytelling series and pilgrimage narrative, the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The first word of the poem, then, immediately works as a displacer shifting us towards other texts and contexts� The rest of the first stanza is hardly more homely and, to anyone unfamiliar with German or Bavarian landmarks, utterly confusing� Though showing no quotation marks, the stanza evidently presents various bits of dialogue in direct speech� But it does neither make clear how many different voices are involved nor what different languages these speak� As Robert Stockhammer observes (277), the number of speakers is not necessarily the same as the number of linguistic systems: polylinguality transects polyvocality, without representing given codes� In this way, the earliest verbal moves performed here undermine any potential sense of home� 272 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 Characteristically, the first time that a notion of home is established verbatim occurs in the second stanza, at several removes, in the German lyrics of a romantic opera’s version of a medieval romance, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu (WL l� 31-32; italics in original) Thus foreignised and doubly mediated, Heimat turns into a literary phantom, a search item, or a mirage that reappears at certain crucial moments in the text as if to lead us or to lead us on� The passage where it recurs most insistently is the Tiresias speech (again presented without quotation marks) in “The Fire Sermon”, numerically the central lines of the entire poem: I, Tiresias, […] can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins� (WL l� 218-23) With a wistful gesture of remembrance, the sailor “coming home from sea” evokes the great tradition of seafaring and adventure� But with a simple asyndetic shift, the sailor’s nostos turns into the typist’s and so returns here in a daily, perhaps dreary register. Still, the emphasis on fire and food sets up a homely scene of repast and regeneration that might provide the poem with a focus, literally a hearth (for this is what Latin focus means), where its motions come to rest� But then the ensuing rendezvous between “the young man carbuncular” (WL l� 231) and, presumably, the typist appears even more dismal and depressing when all this central place is good for is an act of joyless - in fact, violent - sex� So, we are faced again with just a wasted chance of home� In his “Notes”, the author has declared Tiresias “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” (23)� There is little in the actual text to support such upgrading and to privilege this one voice over any of the others or to show why and how it should be a uniting force� Or could the Tiresias persona, together with the typist, who enter the poem in an interesting conjunction at this point, be so relevant for other reasons: for the language and the language concept they each represent and practice? What Eliot might espouse is the idea of the kind of speech Tiresias performs: prophecy, an act not just of visionary but of verbal power prefiguring or pre-empting actual events� Since Homer, the blind have long been credited with their ability of worldmaking through language (Mayer), a vatic power that may well be at- Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 273 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 tractive for a modern poet as aware as this one is that literature, in Ellmann’s words, “is nothing but a plague of echoes” (102), i� e� constant repetition and citation� Aspiring to the prophet, the modern poet is nevertheless closer to the typist, less a creator than a copyist and recorder caught up in technologies of writing. Prophet and typist are thus dual, perhaps double figures to debate how language works and how it works on us� The actual typescript of the poem, which Eliot gave to Ezra Pound to read (who famously produced its present shape by cutting more than half and rigorously rearranging half the rest), shows that in Eliot’s original version the typist figured first in a traditionally cross-rhymed iambic quatrain. Pound’s scathing comment on this stanza reads: “verse not interesting enough as verse to warrant so much of it” (V� Eliot 45)� With the rejection of traditional form, rhyme is reduced and verse redacted so as to resemble more prosaic language� Other passages of the poem where rhyme remains are mostly either bits of Eliot’s older poetry, like the eight-line stanza he wrote in 1914 and made part of section V (WL l� 377-384), or evident citations like the Wagner lyrics at the outset (l� 31-34)� In this sense, writing The Waste Land might appear to have been an occasion for the poet to assemble and display textual left-overs which he found he could no longer trust or use but still found too good to waste� The emphasis on dryness, barrenness, and infertility we notice in the Weston-derived title and in so much of the imagery suggests a poet figure haunted by the feeling that modern verse - at any rate, his own verse - may not be interesting enough to go on producing much of it� Against this background, then, the poem’s distinct echoes of adventure writing gain new resonance: as determined, perhaps desperate appeals to a tradition and to a period of cultural expression when verse would still be warranted and treasured and romance not yet lost to the prosaic� The evocation of the sailor, in this sense, does not simply involve voyaging� He is also a meta-poetic presence because the sailor crucially evokes an ancient image by which poets - and especially epic poets working in modes of the Homeric and heroic - once used to describe themselves: writing poetry means setting sail� According to E. R. Curtius, who produced the first German translation of The Waste Land (published in 1927) and later studied the rhetorical legacy of Latin classics in medieval literature, this connection formed a topos that recurs from Virgil to Dante and beyond (138-139): an act of literary self-fashioning that makes poetic ventures equivalent to maritime exploits� Yet to transfer such a topos from the classical tradition onto the “heap of broken images” (l� 32) and “fragments” (l� 430) of The Waste Land is a doubtful enterprise, raising more questions than it may help answer� Because of the confusing mass of references and remnants it presents, we never know how much weight or credit we 274 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 should give to any single one of them: does the elusive poet figure use them to authorise his enterprise or, on the contrary, to question the authority they were formerly endowed with? The effect, at any rate, is that we read much of the poem in the constant awareness of other texts that trail and haunt and trouble our reading but cannot always be identified, absent texts we sense distinctly but cannot readily make out� And yet, as ghostly presence they persist, as in the following example: Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you (WL l� 359-362) In the guides and glosses to the poem, this passage is routinely related to the story of the road to Emmaus, told in Luke 24, when two travellers become aware that someone walks beside them but they do not recognise the risen Christ (North 17n7)� Eliot’s “Notes” tell us, however, that he is citing the account of Shackleton’s 1914 polar expedition (25), a heroic though somewhat pointless undertaking that nearly ended in disaster� Crossing the Antarctic snow and ice for miles on foot, the explorers say they felt the presence of another man walking beside them, even though he must have been imagined, the result of cold-induced delusions� Whatever else it may be, this is certainly a powerful adventure fragment included in the poem’s final section as if to declare allegiance to and demonstrate its interest in this genre� But the passage also functions as an allegory of our reading process� We are engaging with a text whose many voices seem to whisper constantly of other texts that make themselves felt - next to us though never making it quite close enough� Thus, The Waste Land is an adventure exercise in reading, as it has us pave our way through verbal scrub� Our main difficulty in this venture follows from the text’s most glaring feature highlighted already in the first reviews (as mentioned earlier) which has, since then, been continuously described and debated: what Tim Armstrong calls the “undergraduate parade of citation” (277) or Maud Ellman calls “verbal kleptomania” (101)� Even if we chose less drastic terms for it, the frequency and range of literary allusion here displayed are surely dazzling and confusing and Eliot’s “Notes” appended to the first book publication have not much helped to defuse the situation� Reading The Waste Land turns into a kind of treasure hunt, without however making sure what the treasure is and whether anyone would want it� Does “Dayadhvam” (l� 411), for instance, bring us any closer to it than “Co co rico” (l� 392), “Twit twit twit” (l� 202), or “h urry uP Please iT ’ s TiMe ” (l� 141)? Are the various echoes of oriental wisdom, like Buddha’s preaching or the Upanishads, which become more and more prominent until the “Shanti Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 275 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 shanti shanti”-chant of the last line, in any way more meaningful or meant to convey greater value than any of the other sounds - pub talk, bird song, or popular tunes - that we manage to identify elsewhere in the echo chamber? Unlike the mystery that Sherlock Holmes eventually solves, The Waste Land, though mysterious in many ways, is not really conducive to a problem-solving approach� What it offers is a hunt without the treasure, going through the motions of adventure, regaining and rehearsing various old auratic forms and figures, like Virgil’s epic seafarer or Buddha’s words or quest motifs, and trying out what may be done with them, or to them, but all the while uncannily suggesting that they have come to waste� 4. From Waste to Words On Sunday, 18 June 1922, Tom Eliot paid a visit to the Woolfs in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury� After dinner, he read them his new poem - or not exactly read it, he rather rendered it in a remarkable vocal performance which Virginia Woolf, evidently quite impressed, described in her diary: “He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it� It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity”� But then she added: “What connects it together, I am not so sure” (178)� Her comment highlights the key issue I have been exploring in my chapter, relevant more generally in modernist poetics: how to work connections and how to make them work� Woolf herself was struggling with the issue at the time, as she was completing Jacob’s Room, her first programmatically modernist novel published in the same month as The Waste Land� “Only connect! ” was the hopeful motto of E� M� Forster’s novel Howard’s End, published twelve years earlier� But, as argued, it might need the intellectual strength and acumen of a mind like Sherlock Holmes’, or Jessie Weston’s, to answer this imperative� Waste, at any rate, cannot be tolerated by such powerful connectors� For Holmes, “[t]he smallest point may be the most essential”, he explains in “The Adventures of the Red Circle” (Doyle 1274), so nothing must be lost or wasted, everything will gain significance, become a link in the chain, and so contribute to the larger story� What not just early readers of The Waste Land felt is lacking - the sense of connectedness by which all the random parts may be integrated, at least retrospectively, into the structure of a greater whole - is in fact a crucial feature of classic adventure tales: they exercise a strategy to come to terms with cultural contingency� 12 From a narratological perspective, ad- 12 The points made in the following sentences derive from Martin von Koppenfels and his proposal for the DFG research group “Philology of Adventure”, from which the present volume has emerged� 276 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 venture writing is so interesting because it tries to mediate between random chance and the order of narration� Unlike forms of providential storytelling, it first requires and desires openness and risk: stuff must happen and must happen unexpectedly for adventure to get going� In terms of the adventurer’s experience, to begin with, chance is therefore constitutive� But in terms of narrative requirements, chance must be domesticated and adventure also needs design, some plan or pattern by which whatever happens is eventually turned into a sequence so that all the separate passages or episodes gain meaning as a series of trials, for example as tests of strength or steps towards fulfilment. As a narrative project, adventure therefore promises to supersede and finally sublate contingency� At the end, chance is excluded and, at the same time, integrated - just as the disconnections in and of The Waste Land, after all, may dialectically work out connections: I can connect Nothing with nothing� (l� 301-2) Whoever “I” may be, we should not shy away from emphasising the positive statement in the first part of this sentence: “I can connect”, not thing with thing, perhaps, but word with word and phrase with phrase and so launch the course of the strange and surprising verbal adventures which are evidently taking place� In 1923, a reviewer described Eliot’s text as a series of separate passages, “not perhaps all written at one time or with one aim, to which a spurious but happy sequence has been given” (Aiken 152): a perfect phrase, it seems, to capture the conundrum� What is more, the question of connections has strong political implications, too� In “Modernism and Imperialism”, Fredric Jameson has shown that early-twentieth-century culture was based on a colonial economy of disconnection� With the metropolis establishing its power on peripheral spaces overseas, the world of empire is fragmented and turns into a disjunct space where evidence for the totality of all its various parts is missing: “For colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere”, he points out (Jameson 11) and argues that modernist literature and art invest in fragmentation because they cannot otherwise address the disconcerting feeling that imperial reality escapes them; a constituent element lies outside and is principally lost� His diagnosis holds special plausibility for The Waste Land and its “unreal city” - unreal, Stasi writes (47), because of the discontinuities built into imperial experience - no less than for the losses registered in Doyle’s fiction. The Lost World ends with the reporter returning from the dinosaur expedition, full of pride about his great adventure and hoping now to win approval Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 277 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 from his love - only to find she has married a local solicitor’s clerk. The Sign of Four ends with the treasure sunk and scattered at the bottom of the Thames where it lies together with the cannibal, its guardian figure. The splendour and the terror of the East: both come from India to the imperial centre but neither can be held nor fully integrated there, except by displacement� The desire for the treasure is displaced onto the woman, Watson’s wife-to-be, while the thrills the cannibal provided with his poisoned darts return eventually with the cocaine, the drug that Holmes consumes and needs again for satisfaction as soon as the case is closed� And yet, the savage cannot strictly be dismissed� It is not just his mortal body that remains in the river� His death is narrated in a chapter called: “The end of the islander” (SF 324)� This curious title may not be sufficiently explained simply by the fact that this cannibal happens to come from the Andamans� For Britain is an island, too, and ‘islander’ has long been a favourite self-designation of the British� In death, the Other turns into a double of the self� “I believe that the ‘Waste Land’ is really the very heart of our problem”, Weston writes in a crucial passage of her study of grail literature and legends� It “will place us in possession of the clue which will lead us safely through the most bewildering mazes of the fully developed tale” (63-64)� No doubt, this clue must be a truly treasurable possession� Eliot’s The Waste Land ends, however, in just the way it has taunted readers all along. The final stanza offers us a dizzying verbal sequence beginning with an English nursery rhyme, seamlessly leading us to some Italian words cited from Dante’s Purgatorio (so the “Notes” tell us), then to some Latin words from an anonymous poem, then some French words from a sonnet by Gérard de Nerval, eventually on to some English words from a Renaissance tragedy, and concluding with the Sanskrit words already cited earlier and translated in the “Notes” as “the Peace that passeth understanding” (Eliot 26) - a bewildering maze of borrowed and fragmented language whose connections are for anyone to figure out. The adventure trail continues, passing our understanding and calling for a celebrated fragment-fighter such as Sherlock Holmes: in the waste land, his heroics of connection finally seem less deliberate than desperate, a last attempt to make everything - or, at least, every word and line we have as clues - cohere� Works Cited Aiken, Conrad� “An Anatomy of Melancholy [1923]�” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, edited by Michael North� New York: Norton, 2001, pp� 148-152� Armstrong, Tim� “Eliot’s Waste Paper [1998]�” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, edited by Michael North� New York: Norton, 2001, pp� 275 - 280� 278 T obias D öring 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 Brooks, Cleanth� “The Waste Land: An Analysis [1937]�” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, edited by Michael North� New York: Norton, 2001, pp� 185-210� Chinitz, David E� T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide� Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005� Conrad, Joseph� Heart of Darkness, edited by Paul B� Armstrong� 1899� New York: Norton, 2017� Crawford, Robert� The Savage and the City in the Works of T. S. Eliot� Oxford: Clarendon, 1987� Curtius, Ernst Robert� Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter� 1947� Tübingen: Francke, 1993� D’haen, Theo� “Murder and Modernism� T� S� Eliot and Interbellum Detective Writing�” Crime, Detecçao es Castigo: Estudos sobre Literatura Policial, edited by G� Vilas-Boas and Maria de Lurdes Sampaio� Porto: Granito, 2002, pp� 125-138� Döring, Tobias� Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition� London, Routledge, 2004� ---� “Leopold Bloom oder Vom Abenteuer des Erzählens�” Glücksritter: Risiko und Erzählstruktur, edited by Wolfram Ette and Bernhard Teuber� München: Fink, 2021, pp� 235-258� ---� “Virginia Woolf und das Abenteuer der Moderne, dargestellt an Mrs Dalloway.” Abenteuer und Moderne, edited by Oliver Grill and Brigitte Obermayr� München: Fink, 2020, pp� 125-148� Doyle, Arthur Conan� Memories and Adventures� 1924� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1989� ---� “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans�” The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie S� Klinger, vol� 2� New York: Norton, 2005, pp� 1300-1340� ---� “The Adventures of the Red Circle�” The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie S� Klinger, vol� 2� New York: Norton, 2005, pp� 1272-1299� ---� The Lost World� 1912� London: Pan Books, 1945� ---� “The Sign of Four.” The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie S� Klinger, vol� 3� New York: Norton, 2006, pp� 209-382� Eliot, T� S� “Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land.” T. 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Secrets and Lies in Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction� Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP , 2018� Grayson, Janet� “In Quest of Jessie Weston�” Arthurian Literature, vol� XI , 1992, pp� 3-80� Sherlock in the Waste Land: Romancing the City 279 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0012 Grill, Oliver, and Brigitte Obermayr, editors� Abenteuer und Moderne� München: Fink, 2020� Jameson, Fredric� Modernism and Imperialism� Derry: Foyle Arts Centre, 1988� Knight, Stephen� Crime Fiction, 1800-2000. Detection, Death, Diversity� Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004� Leavis, F. R. “The Significance of the Modern Waste Land [1932].” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, edited by Michael North� New York: Norton, 2001, pp� 173-184� Mayer, Mathias� Dialektik der Blindheit und Poetik des Todes. Über literarische Strategien der Erkenntnis� Freiburg: Rombach, 1997� McLaughlin, Joseph� Writing the Urban Jungle. Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000� North, Michael, editor� T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land� New York: Norton, 2001� O’Connell, Michael� “Epic and Romance�” Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, edited by Martin Coyle et al� London: Routledge, 1990, pp� 177-187� Powell, Charles� “So Much Waste Paper [1923]�” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, edited by Michael North� New York: Norton, 2001, p� 156� Saintsbury, George� “Dullness�” The Criterion, vol� 1, no 1, 1922, pp� 1-15� Schäfer, Gerd� “T� S� Eliot, Krimileser� Kritiken aus The Criterion.” Schreibheft, vol� 88, 2017, pp� 109-131� Starke, Sue P� “Romance�” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al� London: Routledge, 2005, pp� 506-508� Stasi, Paul� Modernism, Imperialism, and the Historical Sense� Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012� Stiegler, Bernd� Spuren, Elfen und andere Erscheinungen. Conan Doyle und die Photographie� Frankfurt a� M�: S� Fischer, 2014� Stockhammer, Robert� “Das Schon-Übersetzte� Auch eine Theorie der Weltliteratur�” Poetica, vol� 41, 2009, pp� 257-291� Weston, Jessie� From Ritual to Romance� 1920� Garden City, NY : Doubleday, 1957� Wilson, Edmund� “The Poetry of Drouth [1922]�” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, edited by Michael North� New York: Norton, 2001, pp� 140-144� Woolf, Virginia� The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Oliver Bell, vol� 2� London: Hogarth, 1978� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 r oger l üDeKe The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland Faintly, under the heavy summer night, through the silence of the town which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no carresses [sic] move, the sound of hoofs upon the Dublin road� Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment as they pass the dark windows the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow� They are heard now far away-hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as diamonds, hurrying beyond the grey, still marshes to what journey’s end - what heart-bearing what tidings? (Joyce, “Epiphanies’’ 37) Something out there slowly approaching with the flair of newness and some vague promise to overcome an urban life lacking in passion and dreams - suddenly a break into the inert silence and the tacit call to a journey into the unknown. This short text enacts adventure fiction in its most basic form. Composed between approximately 1901 and 1904, it is part of James Joyce’s earliest written work for which he chose the label “Epiphanies”� Forty of these epiphanies have survived� Blending his writerly life with his fictional world is a trademark of Joyce’s literary practice� Accordingly, the concept of epiphany also forms a crucial item on the aesthetic agenda of Joyce’s fictional alter ego Stephen Daedalus in Stephen Hero, the first version of what would eventually become Joyce’s 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Daedalus was renamed to Dedalus: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation […]� He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments� (Joyce, Stephen Hero 1 211) The propensity of these epiphanic moments for adventure is not least owed to their specific quality of time. The entire chronotope of the adventure story, Mikhail Bakhtin has argued, lies in the “gap, the pause, the hiatus that appears between […] two strictly adjacent biographical moments” (89) of the protagonist’s life� Similar to the passing hoofs in Joyce’s epiphany, adventures 1 Henceforth shortened to SH in in-text citations� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 282 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 have the momentary ability to kick us out of the ho-hum flow of our everyday routines� “[T]he most general form of adventure”, writes Georg Simmel in his seminal Das Abenteuer, “is its dropping out of the continuity of life” (222)� In spite of their radically discontinuous quality, adventures are however not entirely separable from the rest of our common life� Adventures, it can be further argued with Simmel, form intense moments of meaning and of being which interrupt the habitualized patterns of our life; and for this reason, adventures challenge us, artistically no less than existentially, in our capacity to re-embed these extraordinary points in time into the regular rhythm of our ongoing work and existence, into the made-up tales and storylines of our life� Such adventurous moments, for which Joyce single-handedly recycled the expression ‘epiphany’, are crucial for the protagonist’s artistic development in Stephen Hero� So much bigger the surprise, then, that the term completely disappeared after Joyce had transformed this first draft of a novel into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man� Here, the word ‘epiphany’ is not even mentioned once� In fact, when the label has one last re-appearance in Joyce’s work, it is only referred to with utter sarcasm, as the following interior monologue of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses demonstrates: Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years […]� (Joyce, Ulysses 2 141-143) Whether ‘adventure’ is derived from adventus (advent), from the plural neutral of the future participle of advenio (to arrive), or from eventus (event), the common denominator of all these different etymologies, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, is that “the term designates something mysterious or marvelous that happens to a given man, which could be equally positive or negative” (23)� From the very start of his career as a writer, Joyce aimed for this appearance of something out of the ordinary and out of the orderly, and he tried to bring this adventurous potential into literary being by composing what he understood to be ‘epiphanies’� The fact that from Stephen Hero to Finnegans Wake, “three-quarters of Joyce’s epiphanies are reused in his later works” (MacDuff loc� 180) bears witness to the abiding importance of epiphany writing for Joyce’s literary career� 3 Nevertheless, the poetological terms and the poetic practice by means of which Joyce began to realize this aesthetics of 2 Henceforth shortened to U in in-text citations� 3 The only exception is Dubliners which does not include any epiphanies - at least none of those that have made it down to us� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 283 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 epiphany appear to have soon proved insufficient for how he wanted to conceive of, and actively pursue, his actual writerly life� “[W]hen we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology” (Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 4 176), Stephen tells his friend Lynch in Portrait, and for reasons the present article finds worth examining, the original notion of epiphany, as defined in Stephen Hero, was no longer eligible for this aesthetic enterprise� Following the genetic traces of Joyce’s epiphanies in Portrait and Ulysses, I will show how his homegrown poetics of epiphany was soon caught up by a writerly force that is aptly described as ‘adventurous’� The idea of the epiphany as self-sufficient and enclosed as “the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (SH 211) was transformed into a poetic practice proceeding towards a fundamentally uncertain future of artistic and existential import� 5 Fashioning his writerly life along these radically temporal terms, Joyce remodeled his original notion of epiphany from a “spiritual manifestation” (SH 211) into a mode of being, from a phenomenon of aesthetic perception and of cognition into a matter of writerly life� 6 In this way, it is possible to describe the becoming of Joyce’s literary existence as an adventure in the original sense of ἐπιφάνεια, a word and concept for which, over the course of a long tradition, the Latin translation adventus has etymologically asserted itself� 1. The following passage is taken from the second chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man� Mirroring his own artistic practice once more onto his fictional universe, Joyce has the protagonist take the same epiphanic stance towards his surroundings as the author’s younger self: “[Stephen Dedalus] chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret” (P 56)� Immediately after this, we are given a sample of these acts of chronicling: 4 Henceforth shortened to P in in-text citations� 5 This temporal notion of adventure is also at the center of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s study L’Aventure, l’Ennui, le Sérieux: “L’avenir est ambigu d’abord parce qu’il est à la fois certain et incertain� Ce qui est certain, c’est que le futur sera, qu’un avenir adviendra; mais quel il sera, voilà qui demeure enveloppé dans les brumes de l’incertitude” (59)� 6 Sangam MacDuff’s thorough study on Joyce’s epiphanies clearly bypasses this ontological turn� Instead, it claims that Joyce’s early concept develops into an epiphany of language in which the latter becomes the medium of its own disclosure� Strongly inspired by post-structuralist theory, for MacDuff this epiphanization of language amounts to the awareness that sense-making in and through language forms nothing less and nothing more than an open-ended process� 284 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt’s kitchen. A lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace and by its light his aunt was reading the evening paper that lay on her knees� She looked a long time at a smiling picture that was set in it and said musingly: —The beautiful Mabel Hunter! A ringletted girl stood on tiptoe to peer at the picture and said softly: —What is she in, mud? —In the pantomime, love� The child leaned her ringletted head against her mother’s sleeve, gazing on the picture, and murmured as if fascinated: —The beautiful Mabel Hunter! As if fascinated, her eyes rested long upon those demurely taunting eyes and she murmured again devotedly: —Isn’t she an exquisite creature? And the boy who came in from the street, stamping crookedly under his stone of coal, heard her words� He dropped his load promptly on the floor and hurried to her side to see. But she did not raise her easeful head to let him see� He mauled the edges of the paper with his reddened and blackened hands, shouldering her aside and complaining that he could not see� (P 56) This passage is the first in a sequence of three short descriptions that are all marked by the same beginning: 1� “He was sitting on the backless chair in his aunt’s kitchen�” (P 56) 2� “He was sitting in the narrow breakfast room high up in the old darkwindowed house�” (P 56) 3� “He was sitting in the midst of a children’s party at Harold’s Cross�” (P 57) As mentioned earlier, although the word ‘epiphany’ did not make it into Portrait, individual pieces of Joyce’s actual collection of epiphanies in fact did� The second and third sections in the sequence just quoted give evidence of this, as these passages are clearly derived from Joyce’s stockpile of epiphanies: number 3 and 5 respectively, if we follow the arrangement suggested by Robert Scholes and Richard M� Kain (13, 15)� Passage 1, which interests me here, could therefore also be based on a piece from the collection of epiphanies, although no longer existing� Otherwise, Joyce has just emulated the epiphanic quality of this passage from scratch� Again, passage 1 demonstrates the adventure potential of Joyce’s practice of epiphany� Here, it is the nomadic existence of the travelling actress that invokes thrilling journeys into realms of exquisite mystery� As Simmel has noted (and perhaps also slightly overstated) “our linguistic custom hardly lets us understand by ‘adventure’ anything but an erotic one” (227)� As far as this goes, “the beautiful Mabel Hunter” (P 54) joins the ranks of numerous other adventuresses forming the subject of young Stephen’s amorous desires, among these no less a character than Mercedes, the heroine of Alexandre Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte-Cristo; whenever “he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood” (P 54)� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 285 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 With regard to the Mabel Hunter episode, it is crucial to note that the scene presents in fact the perfect example of an epiphany in the process of utter failure: to begin with, Stephen, the epiphanic chronicler, is radically excluded from whatever could be a possible adventure� Like the little boy with his six and a half kilos of coal on his shoulders, he simply does “not see”� Nothing is revealed; the act of sensing an extraordinary moment of life in an uncertain future is precisely not coming to pass� The impact of this failure is not least tangible in how this passage is narrated� The opening suggests that it is Stephen “who chronicled with patience what he saw”. However, Joyce’s younger fictional self is not granted this privilege; instead, Joyce has the narrator take the part of the chronicler� Of course, even thus, Joyce could have marked his character’s vision by means of a point-of-view narration (focalisation interne in Gérard Genette’s terms (10-11))� But, again, this is exactly not the case here: it is the narrator’s perspective prevailing all along the way� In terms of the narration as well, then, Stephen does “not see”� He is not even given a glimpse into the extraordinary life of the beautiful actress� Adventure is clearly not taking place here� In Old French, aventure can mean ‘accident’, ‘event’, ‘dangerous enterprise’, ‘knightly trial’, ‘destiny’, ‘heroic deed’ on the one hand and, on the other hand, the ‘narration thereof’ (Lebsanft 311)� 7 Giorgio Agamben has followed the traces of this double meaning in the lais of Marie de France� With regard to the co-existence of the adventurous event as well as its narration, he has argued “that the adventure does not precede the story […] but remains inseparable from it from the beginning”; and, as a result of this “inseparable unity of event and tale, thing and speech”, Agamben concludes that “the adventure cannot but have a properly ontological meaning beyond its poetological value” (30, my italics)� 8 Joyce’s juvenile poetics of epiphany seems to have eventually become inadequate for the genuine adventure of this literary ontology� As we have seen, the original notion comprises moments of outstanding cognitive and perceptual value, a “sudden spiritual manifestation” (SH 211), which, however, do not fully extend into a form of being in-and-with the world� Epiphanies, the protagonist of Stephen Hero explains to his friend Cranly, reveal the “whatness” of things, their soul: “The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant� The object achieves its epiphany” (SH 32)� The scholastic notion of quidditas is central in Stephen’s aesthetic discourses, both in Stephen Hero and in Portrait (P 179)� Yet, as Umberto Eco has famously argued, what makes this concept of “whatness” in medieval philosophy crucially dif- 7 My thanks for this reference go to Martin Baisch� 8 See also Strohschneider 380� 286 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 ferent from Joyce’s appropriation of the term is that in the former it represents a strictly ontological (and theophanic) category (26-27)� For Joyce, by contrast, quidditas represents a singular moment of insight surpassing the ordinary state of perception and cognition: the epiphanic experience of whatness refers to a superior degree of comprehension achieved by an aesthetically sensitized subject� It does not expand into a mode of being in and with the world� Moreover, the passage from Stephen Hero quoted at the beginning of the present section makes it very clear that at this stage of his artistic progress, Joyce restricts the value of epiphanies to written artefacts: “it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care” (SH 211)� However, epiphanies-as-written-documents are invariably removed from epiphanies-as-extraordinary-moments-of-being� The outcome of writing, they depend on complex technical and semiotic mediation, not unlike the process of the chronicling and gazing staged in the Mabel-Hunter episode� The mediated presentation of the adventurous actress includes a “lamp with a reflector hung on the japanned wall of the fireplace” and an evening newspaper in which the picture of the beautiful Mabel is “set”, reachable “only on tiptoe” and with “reddened and blackened hands” (P 56)� In addition to this, there is a series of different spectators that the narrative agency interposes between the protagonist and the readers on the one hand and, on the other hand, the object of what protagonist and readers so fervently desire to see� Because of this mediate structure, the act of noticing epiphanies, let alone the act of noting them down, is ever delayed: it comes at a time when the genuine moment of marvel is already bound to give way to the commonplaces of an author’s writerly life and work� Epiphanies, in other words, are substantially flawed by the attempt to record them on paper which forever excludes them from the adventure proper - a critical point that has often been raised against adventure literature, too: “Ainsi l’aventure est en quelque sorte une œuvre fluente et mobile et toujours inachevée; et vice versa on pourrait dire (si l’aventure n’exigeait le mouvement) que l’œuvre d’art est une aventure immobilisée” (Jankélévitch 95)� 9 Realizing adventure not just as a manner of writing but as a mode of writerly being was the true challenge for Joyce� It meant to transform the concept of epiphany from an epistemological into an ontological category� What Joyce had earlier referred to as “epiphanic” required to be made an integral part of his literary existence and not just a linguistic reality ‘in the head’� The next section will argue that Joyce achieved this goal by transposing the vital dynamic of adventus onto his own practice of writing� 9 See also Krüger; including comprehensive references to Blumenberg� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 287 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 2. First traces of this artistic development show towards the end of Portrait� This is where the epiphany with which this essay set off has a wondrous re-entry - this time transformed into a truly adventurous mode of being: 10 April: Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the town city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the Dublin road� Not so faintly now as they come near the bridge; : and in a moment as they pass the darkened windows the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow� They are heard now far away-, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as diamonds gems, hurrying beyond the grey, still marshes sleeping fields —what heart? —bearing what tidings? (P 212) 10 Not so much the alteration of individual words but the new setting in which Joyce has placed his early epiphany makes all the difference here� Originally, in the epiphany, the passage was a self-sufficient piece of text recording an extraordinary, albeit very vague, experience� In Portrait, the same text is included in Stephen Dedalus’s “Journal” with which Joyce’s novel ends, containing entries from the month before the protagonist finally leaves Dublin. Famously, Joyce’s own departure from Ireland to Paris on 1 December 1902 marked an important turning point in his biography� After coming back to Dublin on 11 April 1903 to honor his dying mother, he met Nora Barnacle, and they both set off to the Continent on 8 October 1904 to never settle in Ireland again� In a textual milieu so full of future potential from the past, the rather abstract call to a journey of unknown bearing turns into a very concrete component of Joyce’s and Stephen’s life; and not least does it invoke an adventurous escapade of the amorous kind: the elopement with the subject of their respective desires, “E[mma]� C[lery]�” in Stephen D[a]edalus’s and Nora Barnacle in James Joyce’s case: “11 April: Read what I wrote last night� Vague words for a vague emotion� Would she like it? I think so� Then I should have to like also” (P 212)� Crucially, Joyce and Stephen refer to the journal entry from the previous night in the explicit terms of a piece of writing� Whereas the original epiphany stood as an isolated piece of self-secluded text, the same passage is now addressed as a sample of writing� In this way, it begins to form part of an open-ended process of artistic composition, incorporating the adventurous becoming of the author’s and his fictional Artist’s biographies� 10 In this quote, the strikethroughs and bold words mark the changes from the original epiphany - cited at the very beginning of this paper - to Portrait� Bold words equal additions, strikethroughs are deletions� 288 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 In the original epiphany, “the silence […] cloven by alarm as by an arrow” did not so much as crack, and adventure time in the potential fullness of future artistic articulation was unable to pour into the self-sufficient silence of the epiphanic present: the future journey into the unknown was as intensely invoked by the short-lived hoofs speeding into an unknown direction as effectively brought to an eternal standstill within the confines of a perfectly chiseled little piece of text. In the new milieu of his first novel’s ending, by contrast, Joyce regains his early epiphany in its genuine quality of adventus: as a way to expose his (fictional) self to a writerly career of indeterminate bearing, approaching from indefinite times and places yet to come. As we will see in the following, it was Joyce’s next novel, Ulysses, that became the work in which he realized this potential by making the adventure of his character a vital part of his own writing practice and, vice versa, by making his own writing practice a vital part of his character’s adventures� I will concentrate on the third chapter of Ulysses - commonly known as the “Proteus” episode according to the two schemas distributed by Joyce among his friends - which also contains the aforementioned dismissal of the “deeply deep” epiphanies� Here, we witness Stephen Dedalus walking along Sandymount Strand in the direction of Dublin Centre� Towards the end of the chapter, he re-embraces his literary ambitions, and he begins to write� This is how the passage has been preserved in one of the earliest surviving drafts of Joyce’s novel: +something he has twice forgotten in a dream He turned his back to the sun and, bending across towards a slab of rock, scribbled the word�+s� 11 Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A The nine manuscript pages from which this passage is derived include a series of 17 short segments, separated by horizontal lines of asterisks, which Joyce probably wrote between early and mid-1917 (Crispi n� p�)� The textual design explains why the segments have been compared with Joyce’s collection of Epiphanies from 15 or so years earlier: Crispi has referred to them as an “integral, epiphany-like set-piece” (n� p�), Sam Slote has described them as “in- 11 My warmest thanks for the deciphering of the Proto-Proteus draft as well as for many inspiring talks and thoughts go to Hans Walter Gabler� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 289 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 dividual epiphanic units” (n� p�)� 12 In this way, the “Proto-Proteus” segments offer the perfect opportunity to study how Joyce has transformed the poetic concept of epiphany into an integral part of his writerly being� Drafts of the ‘Proteus’ episode from Joyce’s Ulysses ‘Subject’ Notebook (MS36,639 / 07 / A), reprinted with permission from the National Library of Ireland The text just quoted is part of the second to last item of this collection� As the facsimile of the manuscript shows, Joyce immediately replaced the one succinct “word” by “words”. In the final 1922 version of his novel, the definite 12 In terms of the genesis of Ulysses, the “status of this draft”, writes Crispi, “is hard to define. Is it simply the accidental appearance of a composition in process, a succession of passages that Joyce wrote in this copybook? Or is it a stylistic device reflecting a deliberate aesthetic choice, a mode of presentation that was later discarded in favor of a different option? [Daniel] Ferrer [55] suggests that it is the latter, while I [Crispi] believe it is the former� I would argue that this manuscript is a transitory collection of blocks of text, based on previously written material (possibly in more than one manuscript or on disparate sheets of paper) that Joyce merely consolidated in this document� I maintain that this manuscript served as a temporary repository for these discrete textual fragments on their way towards a more fully elaborated draft […]” (Crispi n� p�)� Sam Slote has concurred with Crispi’s view: “I would propose that Joyce, at this early stage of the development of ‘Proteus’, conceptualised the episode as a series of discrete units that would be rearranged and linked together through additional material into one more-or-less integral narrative thread� In other words, the fragmentary arrangement was fungible” (n� p�)� 290 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 article of “words” is also deleted, making of Stephen’s writing a radically unspecific activity: “Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words” (U3 406-7)� Not so much what is written (“scribbled the word” > “scribbled the words”) but the sheer act of writing itself (“scribbled words”) is finally put into focus. Likewise, and as yet another result of Joyce’s revisions of his early text, the content of Stephen’s composition is no longer mysteriously regained from what has been “twice forgotten in a dream”� Instead, in 1922 the adventurous nature of “something mysterious or marvelous that happens”, to quote again Agamben’s explication of adventure, has been fully transposed to the material reality of a simple piece of paper: “That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter” (U3 407)� As short as it is, this phrase is also representative of the third episode of Ulysses as a whole, which, as many other chapters in Joyce’s novel, is rendered mostly through interior monologue, including Stephen’s perceptions, daydreams and thoughts� Genetically speaking, the stream-of-consciousness style forms the exact continuation of Stephen’s diary in Portrait� 13 And in Ulysses no less than at the end of his first novel, a good amount of artistic energy is put into fleshing out the adventus quality of writing: His shadow lay dark on the rocks as he wrote, ending� Why not endless? +till the farthest star? (Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A) The adventurous outreach into the “endless” parts of space and “till the farthest star” connects Stephen’s shadow play of writing with the movement of the sun and the distant stars� The association of Stephen’s writerly gesture with processes on a cosmic scale is further underlined in the final version where - directly after “farthest star? ” - Joyce has added the following passage: Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds� Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars� (U3 409-412) In the same way as Portrait, Ulysses deals with a fictional character trying to become a writer; and given their autobiographical foundation, both works tell the story of a young man who eventually became the author of the novels we 13 Similarly, MacDuff has argued that it is the combination of “the lyrical-symbolic mode of the dream epiphanies” which creates “an unbroken flow of associations” and “Stephen’s diary” including “frequent ellipsis” that “plays a key role in shaping Dedalus’s stream-of-consciousness style in Ulysses” (loc� 1704)� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 291 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 are holding in our hands: “Inevitably when we contemplate Stephen’s artistic productions”, writes Robert Kellogg, “we are led to a consciousness of his being […] the future author of the work in which he is himself a character” (166)� In Ulysses, the fusion of James and Stephen reaches a notable peak: in the passage just quoted, this amalgamation is indicated by a characteristic use of the firstand third-person pronouns: “Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash […]” (U3 410-11, my italics)� In addition to the Hiberno-English colloquialism, this can be read as James referring to himself as “Me”, wearing one of Stephen’s props: the ashplant� At the same time, it is also possible to read “Me” as Stephen referring to himself and to read “his” as signifying his real-life creator� In other words, Joyce is sitting here with Stephen’s walking stick, and Stephen is sitting there with Joyce’s - a reading which is not least supported by the fact that the costume of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses is strictly identical with how Joyce used to fashion himself after his return from Paris to Dublin in 1903, including the notorious ashplant as well as “a Latin Quarter hat” which is also referred to in “Proteus” (U3 174) (Colum 36)� The reference to the “augur’s rod of ash” evokes the ancient priestly practice of divining the future by reading the flight of birds in the sky. In this way, Stephen’s and Joyce’s walking stick is transformed into a “lituus, a staff with one curved end that Roman priests used to consecrate a sector of the sky before reading the appearance of birds for omens” (“Ashplant”)� On the one hand, the passage revives an archaic gesture of quasi-writing from the ancient past, thus rooting the order of temporal events in a stable metaphysical foundation� At the same time, the “augur’s rod of ash” downscales this cosmic proportion by re-embedding it into the timelines of Stephen’s personal and his creator’s writerly past: in the last chapter of Portrait, Joyce’s fictional doppelgänger is seen on the steps of the National Library in Kildare St�, Dublin, watching the birds in the sky “[f]or an augury of good or evil” (P 189)� 14 Recalling the “inseparable unity of event and tale, thing and speech” that Agamben locates at the heart of the medieval aventure, Stephen’s aesthetic production and Joyce’s artistic practice form an indivisible whole: I throw an ended shadow from me and call it back� […] 14 The fact that in the same passage, Stephen also recalls the Egyptian God Thoth disrupts this trans-textual site of writing even further by stretching it back into an immemorial mythical past in which this cultural practice is supposed to have its origins: “Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon” (P 189)� “Thoth’s orginal name was Djehuty (also dhwty) meaning ‘He Who is Like the Ibis’, that is, a sacred bird in ancient Egypt” (“Thoth”)� 292 r oger l üDeKe 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 I throw and call it back�, writing these words� Who will read them? Who sees me? +Who sees me? Who will read them? (Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A) In this drift towards an unforeseeable future, the disruptive rhythm of Stephen’s actions emulates the temporal quality of adventus including extraordinary moments of potentially existential and artistic import: “Who sees me? Who will read [these words]? ” Inversely, Stephen’s adventure of writing requires Joyce to constantly “call […] back” these moments of meaning and of being in order to re-organize them into the flow of his own ongoing writerly work and existence, a process of which the Proto-Proteus segments themselves bear impressive testimony. After five or so years of writing “Proteus”, in the final version of the novel, Stephen’s shadow on the rock - “an this ended shadow” (Joyce, “Proteus - Proto-Draft” MS 36,639/ 7/ A) - will have become the exact equivalent of those “Signs on a white field” (ibid�) that Joyce himself left on the paper which we have been in the process of deciphering here, now: “Who watches me here? Whoever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field” (U3 414-415)� The author of Ulysses has, in other words, achieved a poetics of epiphany by transforming its inherent potential of adventure into a mode of writerly being in and with the world� Surpassing a merely linguistic existence on paper, The Adventures of James Joyce unfolds between different places and phases of biography, between different faces and masks of authorship, between the singular moves and grooves of an outstanding craft and, all said and told, a rather unspectacular life� Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio� The Adventure, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa� Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2018� “Ashplant�” The Joyce Project, www�joyceproject�com/ notes/ 010099ashplant�htm� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� Bakhtin, Mikhail M� “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics�’’ The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist� Austin: U of Texas P, 1990, pp� 84-258� Blumenberg, Hans� Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, translated by Steven Rendall� Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1996� Colum, Mary, and Padraic Colum� Our Friend James Joyce� New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958� The Adventures of James Joyce from Rathgar, County Dublin, Ireland 293 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0013 Crispi, Luca� “A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts�“ Joyce Studies, vol� 11, https: / / www�geneticjoycestudies�org/ articles/ GJS11/ GJS11_Crispi� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� Eco, Umberto, and David Robey� The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce� Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP , 1989� Ferrer, Daniel� “What Song the Sirens Sang … Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture: A Preliminary Description of the New ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens’ Manuscripts�” James Joyce Quarterly, vol� 39, no� 1, 2001, pp� 53-67� Genette, Gerard� Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. New York: Cornell UP , 1983� Jankélévitch, Vladimir� L’Aventure, l’Ennui, le Sérieux� Paris: Flammarion, 2017� Joyce, James� A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Jeri Johnson� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2000� ---� “Proteus - Proto-Draft�” MS 36,639/ 7/ A. Dublin: National Library of Ireland� ---� Stephen Hero, edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer� A New Edition Incorporating the Additional Manuscript Pages in the Yale University Library� New York: New Directions Books, 1963� ---� “The Epiphanies�” The Workshop of Daedalus, edited by Robert Scholes and Richard M� Kain� Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP , 1965, pp� 3-51� ---� Ulysses: The Corrected Text, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior� New York: Random House, 1986� Kellog, Robert� “Syclla and Charybdis�” James Joyce’s Ulysses. Critical Essays, edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman� Berkeley: U of California P, 1974, pp� 147-179� Krüger, Tobias� Meerfahrten. Poetik und Ethik eines Narrativs zwischen Wissenskultur und Weltverhalten� München: Fink, 2018� Lebsanft, Franz� “Die Bedeutung von Altfranzösisch Aventure� Ein Beitrag zu Theorie und Methodologie der Mediävistischen Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte�” Im Wortfeld des Textes: Worthistorische Beiträge zu den Bezeichnungen von Rede und Schrift im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Dicke et al� Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006, pp� 311-337� MacDuff, Sangam� Panepiphanal World: James Joyce's Epiphanies, Kindle ed� UP of Florida, 2020� Scholes, Robert, and Richard M� Kain, editors� The Workshop of Daedalus� Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP , 1965� Simmel, Georg� “The Adventure�” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone� Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1997, pp� 221-232� Slote, Sam� “Epiphanic ‘Proteus’�” Joyce Studies, vol� 5, https: / / www�geneticjoycestudies� org/ articles/ GJS5/ GJS5lote� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� Strohschneider, Peter� “Âventiure-Erzählen und Âventiure-Handeln� Eine Modellskizze�” Im Wortfeld des Textes: Worthistorische Beiträge zu den Bezeichnungen von Rede und Schrift im Mittelalter, edited by Gerd Dicke et al� Berlin: 2006, pp� 377-84� “Thoth�” Ancient History Encyclopedia, www�ancient�eu/ Thoth� Accessed 1 Apr� 2020� c owarDly M en anD h eroic w oMen : a DvenTure anD g enDer 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 s TeFanie l eThbriDge The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers Introduction “I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer in Cardigan’s Hussars; tall, masterful, and roughly handsome […] and say that it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward - and, oh yes, a toady” (Fraser, Flashman 1 13)� Harry Flashman, knighted and celebrated war hero, decorated with the Victoria Cross, introduces himself in distinctly unflattering terms� On the basis of such candour about his character, he claims truth and authenticity for his tale: “I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true” (ibid�)� The Flashman Papers, a series of novels by the Scottish author George MacDonald Fraser published between 1969 and 2005, purport to be the memoirs of Harry Paget Flashman and follow his career as “soldier, duellist, lover, imposter, coward, cad, and hero” (FM back cover)� Untypically for neo-Victorian literature and postcolonial rewritings of canonical texts, the Flashman Papers do not re-centre their narrative to tell a well-known story from the point of view of a marginalised or suppressed character, as does, for instance, Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), one of the earliest examples of Neo-Victorian writing� Instead, the series offers a re-centring by reassessing (in fact discrediting) the motives behind the actions of the so-called hero in mainstream adventure tales from the point of view of a representative of hegemonic power - the decorated soldier-hero Flashman� Though Fraser had considerable trouble finding a publisher for his story, Flashman became instantly successful when it eventually came out with Herbert Jenkins (Taylor n� p�)� The series was republished by HarperCollins in the early twenty-first century. In the protagonist’s satirical self-inspection, the Flashman Papers complicate and deconstruct (Victorian) ideals of heroic manliness linked to courage, self-sacrifice, duty, and patriotism� Throughout, Fraser reproduces the conventions and tropes of the adventure novel, only to invert its values and ridicule the patriotic or romantic sentiments evoked by writers such as G� A� Henty, John Buchan, or Anthony Hope� Apart from exposing the inadequacies and hypocrisy of the 1 Henceforth shortened to FM in in-text citations� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 298 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Victorian military, the disarming honesty with which Flashman describes his efforts to cover up his own failings also reveals the cultural work involved in ‘hero-making’� There is a sting in this type of deconstruction of recognizable genre techniques: experiencing familiar historical events through Flashman’s irreverent eyes, readers are, rather disturbingly, encouraged to root for a blatantly immoral, or at least amoral character and become complicit in his sordid endeavours to make the ‘best’ use of the opportunities life as a Victorian soldier and member of the upper class offers� Paradoxically, and not least through the attractions of the adventure form, the openly and knowingly unheroic protagonist becomes a hero nonetheless� This contribution focusses on the second volume in the series, Royal Flash (1970), which rewrites Anthony Hope’s popular adventure romance, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) with Flashman, the braggard, coward, and womanizer, replacing the noble, courageous, and chaste Rudolf Rassendyll as protagonist� Rewriting History The character Harry Flashman started his literary career as the school bully at Rugby public school and personal enemy of Tom Brown in Thomas Hughes’ bestselling Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856)� At Rugby, Flashman delights in torturing the younger boys - at one point he roasts Tom Brown over the fire until his trousers catch fire - though he is never officially reprimanded for his bullying� Tom Brown recognises him for a coward but is in no position to attack Flashman’s place in the general estimation: He played well at all games where pluck wasn’t much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff offhand manner, which passed for heartiness, and considerable powers of being pleasant when he liked, went down with the school in general for a good fellow enough� (Hughes 161) After Flashman’s expulsion from Rugby (the last we see of him in Tom Brown’s Schooldays), the Flashman Papers follow his career as a (reluctant) soldier and accidental hero through twelve volumes, published between 1969 and 2005� The eleven novels and three short stories rewrite some of the most widely known events of nineteenth-century British and American military history from Flashman’s perspective� As a young soldier, Flashman earns (unmerited) laurels as a survivor of the retreat from Kabul and the showdown at the besieged Jallalabad in 1842 (Flashman, 1969), which marks the beginnings of his life as a hero� Always desperate to dodge bullets and evade edge-weapons, he participates in the Charge of the Light Brigade (Flashman at the Charge, 1973), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (Flashman in the Great Game, 1975), the The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 299 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers Anglo-American slave trade (Flash for Freedom, 1971), the second Opium War (Flashman and the Dragon, 1985), the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Flashman and the Redskins, 1982), and the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (Flashman and the Tiger, 2005), among others� Fraser himself had experience as a soldier on the subcontinent, in the Middle East, and North Africa before he turned journalist, novelist, and screenwriter (Taylor n� p�)� 2 The basic formula of the Flashman narratives is to retell well-known historical events from the point of view of a participant on the ground level and, though he tries to avoid it, often at the battle front� In line with revisionist historians of the twentieth century, Flashman as narrator openly attacks the arrogance and utter incompetence of the British military leadership who hesitate when they should act or send their soldiers to their death unnecessarily� Flashman is intent on securing an easy life of sensuous pleasures, but, inevitably, his (empty) swagger fools people into believing him to be a daring and courageous fellow, and his lechery draws the revenge either of the betrayed lover or the ill-treated woman� Thus, ironically, Flashman’s (often fake) narratives designed to cover up his desire to avoid adventure lead to further journeys abroad and ever more adventures, in turn requiring further narratives� While Flashman prefers to make a lot of noise in the back of any battle or take to his heels, he is unfailingly forward in engaging, often forcing, the sexual favours of any female within reach - both British and foreign, ranging from the prostitute or humble servant girl to the wives of fellow officers, concubines of kings or ruling foreign queens. These affairs teach him local customs (in and out of the bedroom) as well as the local language(s)� It is this knowledge and intimate contact with the locals that frequently give him an advantage over fellow British officers and army leaders - who usually do not speak the language and remain supremely uninterested in local concerns, thus often misunderstanding or misjudging a situation. Accordingly, Flashman realises what insults the British inflict on Afghan leaders and - unlike General Elphinstone - foresees that treating with an Afghan warlord will not guarantee a safe retreat from Kabul� He also understands, long before the army leaders, why the Sepoys in India are discontent� While Flashman’s contact with the native is considered ‘slumming’ by his contemporaries, this is actually a mark in his favour from a postmodern or postcolonial point of view, which would advocate an engagement with local people(s)� His relation to the natives is, however, almost inevitably exploitative. Despite Flashman’s position as a British army officer, his close contact with the natives as well as his irreverent and frequently humorous distance 2 Henceforth, Flashman at the Charge is shortened to FC , Flashman in the Great Game to FG and Flashman and the Dragon to FD in in-text citations� 300 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 from Victorian ideologies of empire and British patriotism thus frequently offer a type of revisionist ‘history from below’ or, as D� J� Taylor puts it, a “worm’s eye view of history” (n� p�)� Similarly in line with dominating twentieth-century convictions, Flashman neither romanticizes nor glorifies war: When you are young and raw and on the brink of adventure, you set great store by having your side-arms just right, because you are full of romantic notions of how you will use them� […] But when you’ve seen a sabre cut to the bone, and limbs mangled by bullets, you come out of your daydream pretty sharp� (Fraser, Royal Flash 72) 3 A blatant racist himself, Flashman’s talent for disguise repeatedly leads to his being mistaken for a person of colour and treated accordingly� For instance, on his 1855 arrival in Peshawar with news that is to save the British possessions in India, he is greeted with “What’s this beastly-looking nigger doing on the office verandah? ” (FC 321)� In such moments Flashman not only approaches the perspective of a suppressed racial other but momentarily merges with this other rather than treating it only with arrogance and disdain� In the tone of revealing the ‘truth’ behind official historical positions, the Flashman Papers pose as authentic history, a thick packet of personal papers accidentally discovered “during a sale of household furniture” in 1965� George Macdonald Fraser, as the so-called editor of these papers, claims merely to correct spelling errors and supply a few editorial footnotes to supplement Flashman’s excellent historical memory (FM 7)� This type of revelatory history gained further credibility in a wave of critical biographies that became popular after WWII in the context of “mid-twentieth-century interests in the ‘real’ man behind the public image” (Dawson 152) and a tendency to debunk empire heroes, an effort “symptomatic of a more generalized reckoning with the values, standards and ideals of a pre-1939 imperialism” (ibid� 217)� The pretence of the memoirs, reinforced by the reprint of a Who’s Who entry in the first volume, was so successful that, much to the amusement of Fraser himself, a number of the initial reviewers in the United States took these ‘memoirs’ to be genuine: “‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of” (Fraser, “Idea of Flashman” vii)� The series continued to be lauded by historians and journalists� The front cover of Royal Flash for the 1999 HarperCollins edition cites Max Hastings’ description of the Flashman series as “drop-dead funny, unputdownable story-telling, and much better history than anybody gets taught in schools”� The 3 Henceforth shortened to RF in in-text citations� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 301 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 cover of the 2015 HarperCollins edition of Flashman and the Mountain of Light presents an endorsement by no less a figure than Boris Johnson: “Politically incorrect, lascivious and fiendishly handsome, Flashman is the greatest”. The series’ charm would seem to lie in its transgressive irreverence for established codes, both Victorian and contemporary, and its knack for compelling adventure narrative� The “politically incorrect” can be taken to refer to Flashman’s unabashed racism, sexism, and homophobia� Despite these retrograde attitudes, the novels have also been praised as interrogating outmoded ideals and deconstructing established myths� As Matthew Crofts observes, “Fraser rewrites history without the patriotism and morality”, undermining Victorian illusions of “their military, their virtues, their sobriety, chastity, Christianity and honesty” (35)� Fraser himself emphatically denies any political ambitions and asserts that “the anti-imperialist left-winger [is] sadly off the mark” (“Idea of Flashman” viii)� Instead, Fraser describes himself as having “a lifelong love affair with British imperial adventure” (ibid� ix), albeit with an eye for the appeal of “the looks, swagger and style” of a glamourous “villain” like Flashman (ibid� x)� Rewriting Zenda Royal Flash represents a somewhat unusual case in the Flashman series� Most of the Flashman novels employ the format of the imperial adventure tale, recycling stereotypical aspects of the adventure narrative� By contrast, Royal Flash is set in Europe and it specifically draws on Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, even claiming the Flashman story as the direct (and ‘historically authentic’) source: “Only once did I tell the tale, and that was privately some years ago, to young Hawkins, the lawyer - I must have been well foxed, or he was damned persuasive - and he has used it for the stuff of one of his romances, which sells very well, I’m told” (RF 288)� 4 The Prisoner of Zenda tells the story of Rudolf Rassendyll, an idle English aristocrat, who travels to the small kingdom of Ruritania, located not far from Dresden� As a result of the illicit affair of one of his female forebears with an Elphberg, the ruling family of Ruritania, Rudolf looks so much like the current king of Ruritania that even close associates mistake the two men for each other� Rassendyll accidentally encounters this royal lookalike and distant cousin in the forest in Ruritania, and the two of them celebrate their meeting with a sumptuous 4 Anthony Hope’s full name was Anthony Hope Hawkins, a lawyer by profession� For an account of the enormous popularity and widespread adaptation of The Prisoner of Zenda for the stage and the screen well into the twentieth century, see Watkins xvii-xix� 302 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 dinner on the night before the king’s official coronation. During that dinner, the king is drugged by his jealous half-brother ‘Black Michael’, making him unfit to appear at the coronation. His loyal servants, Colonel Sapt and Fritz von Tarlenheim, ask Rassendyll to take the king’s place during the ceremony in order to foil Michael’s plans to usurp the crown as well as marry the king’s designated wife, the beautiful princess Flavia� While the ceremony with Rassendyll as the replacement king proceeds successfully, a band of Michael’s ruffians, among them the debonair but ruthless Rupert von Hentzau, abduct the real king and imprison him in Michael’s moated castle at Zenda� Forced to play the role of the king much longer than originally planned, Rassendyll wins the favour of the Ruritanian people and he and Flavia fall desperately in love� In an act of chivalrous self-denial, Rassendyll eventually attacks the castle with a few loyal supporters and manages to free the prisoner before Michael’s henchmen are able to dispose of the king down a pipe that leads into the moat� Rassendyll returns to England, leaving a heart-broken Flavia, who opts to remain as the future wife of the (real) king� With the exception of the resourceful Rupert, Michael and his ruffians are killed in the final showdown at the castle� 5 The king’s supporters are adamant in acknowledging the chivalrous spirit of the English gentleman, even hinting at his superiority over the man who inherits the crown� Thus Marshall Strackencz, leader of the royal guard, assures Rassendyll: “I have known many of the Elphbergs […] and I have seen you� And happen what may, you have borne yourself as a wise King and a brave man; ay, and you have proved as courteous a gentleman and as gallant a lover as any that have been of the House” (Hope, Prisoner of Zenda 69)� 6 The Flashman version of the story relocates the main events to the imaginary duchy of Strackenz (adopting the name of Hope’s marshall) in the north of Germany during the Schleswig-Holstein crisis and student revolts in Germany in 1847 / 48� On the bidding of a power-hungry Otto von Bismarck, who wants to unsettle the precarious relations between German and Danish ethnicities in order to annex Schleswig-Holstein, Flashman is lured to Munich by his former lover Lola Montez, who has risen to a powerful position as the mistress of the Bavarian king Ludwig I� Bismarck has borne a grudge against Flashman ever since a brief encounter in England five years earlier. Bismarck and his henchmen, among them the suave but reckless Rudi von Starnberg, stage a trumped-up rape charge and blackmail Flashman, who is the looka- 5 Hope’s Rupert of Hentzau (published in 1898), the much less popular sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, relates further adventures of Rupert and Rassendyll� 6 Henceforth shortened to PZ in in-text citations� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 303 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 like of the Danish prince Carl Gustav, destined to marry the Duchess Irma of Strackenz, to take the prince’s place� Flashman is put through rigorous training at Bismarck’s castle at Schönhausen and successfully takes Carl Gustav’s place, making himself popular with the Strackenz people and - after a violent wedding night - with Irma as well� When Bismarck’s henchmen try to murder him in order to create the desired political upheaval, Flashman escapes but falls into the hands of Danish nationalists, led by Major Sapten, who, in their turn, force him into a desperate campaign to free Carl Gustav, who is imprisoned in the moated castle of Jotunberg� Flashman manages to liberate Carl Gustav, but, in a final showdown with Rudi von Starnberg, he falls down the pipe in the prince’s prison cell into the icy lake� Miraculously, he manages to extricate himself, returns to Strackenz, where he steals the crown jewels, and makes his escape from Bismarck’s revenge back to Munich, where he joins Lola Montez who, at this very moment, is forced to flee from mob violence. Lola rescues Flashy, but absconds with the crown jewels, leaving him to return home without glory and without even a present for his wife Elspeth� The plot parallels between the stories are evident� To enforce the connection, Fraser also re-uses identical or only mildly modified names for the minor characters and adds an editorial note to point out the similarities: “[N]ames like Lauengram, Kraftstein, Detchard, de Gautet, Bersonin, and Tarlenheim are common to both stories […] and no amateur of romantic fiction will fail to identify Rudi von Starnberg with the Count of Hentzau” (RF 292)� More interesting than the similarities are, of course, the changes� Like all Flashman stories, Royal Flash is placed in verifiable historical context. The feature of the imaginary “cardboard kingdom” 7 as a chronotope that is both foreign and yet not too remote is kept, providing “an escape hatch from modernity into an old-fashioned, rural, and feudal kingdom in which true heroes and heroines can still flourish” (Daly 8). The fictitious ‘Black Michael’ is replaced by a thoroughly historical Otto von Bismarck, who is portrayed as the chief villain in the context of his machinations to gain control over Schleswig Holstein� In fact, the German setting perfectly complements the chronotope of the “cardboard kingdom” and resonates with British notions of Germany as a backward and rather savage ‘fairy tale country’, both in the setup at Munich, which evokes the power intrigues of an absolutist court, and in Bismarck’s seat Schönhausen in the forests of Prussia, which “looked in silhouette like the setting for some gothic novel, all towers and spires and rugged stonework” (RF 103), complete with ruffians that Flashman dubs “the Brothers Grimm” (RF 105)� In clear contrast to The Prisoner of Zenda, Flashman is recruited by 7 The term was introduced by Raymond P� Wallace, “Cardboard Kingdoms”� 304 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 the ‘villainous’ side for the impersonation of the prince� While Rassendyll helps out a momentarily incapacitated monarch to keep his rightful place, Flashman, from the start, is merely an instrument in the hands of power-hungry imperialistic foreign forces. Since he fights against these forces in trying to extricate himself from his situation, this puts him in the position of the underdog who is likely to draw sympathy from readers� In addition to Bismarck as a recognizable historical personage, Royal Flash’s equivalent of Black Michael’s captivating mistress Antoinette de Mauban is the historical Lola Montez, both in her brief career as “Spanish dancer” in London and in her position as the ruling mistress at the Bavarian court supported by student fraternities (Verbindungen) until her expulsion from Munich by an angry mob in 1848� Richard Wagner is introduced as a newly fashionable musician at Lola’s salon in Munich and Karl Marx makes a guest appearance as political agitator at the wedding in Strackenz� Despite the fairy-tale setting, Fraser’s version thus anchors the tale firmly in verifiable and fairly familiar historical events� Central, however, is the revision of the celebrated British gentleman-hero Rassendyll into the self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking and cowardly Flashman� Parody through Reversal In almost meticulous fashion, Fraser works through generic tropes of the adventure romance and reverses standard alignments and meanings: the chance encounter, the journey into dangerous foreign spaces, the duel, disguise of the hero, imprisonment and escape, spectacular rescue, the love story and return home with honour (and reward)� 8 This is not the place to rehearse all the details, but a few examples will illustrate Fraser’s technique: By the nineteenth century, the duel was an outdated mode of settling questions of honour, but adventure fiction nevertheless employed it in order to establish the hero’s superior moral standing� Where the duel could not be avoided without damaging the honour code, it helped to establish the hero’s superior skill in fighting as well as his forbearance because he does not usually kill his opponent (Wallace 8)� 9 Flashman is practised in avoiding the danger but reaping all the honour of the duel, as, in the first novel of the series (Flashman), he is forced into a duel with a fellow officer whose mistress he seduced. Flashman bribes the second to replace the bullets in his opponent’s pistol with 8 For details of these genre conventions, see, for instance, Steinbrink, and more specifically relevant to the ‘Cardboard kingdom’ adventure tale, Wallace 29-30� 9 See also Klotz 50� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 305 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 paper bullets� While his opponent, a crack marksman, thus unaccountably fails to hurt Flashman with his first shot, Flash himself fires ostentatiously wide, accidentally taking off the top of a bottle of spirits nearby� After this, he is celebrated for having spared his opponent and “at the same time giv[ing] proof of astonishing marksmanship” (FM 51), even while he refuses to pay the promised bribe to the second (who cannot make the deception public without dishonouring himself)� In typical Flashman manner, he avoids danger for himself by dishonest means but ensures a maximum display of heroics� In Royal Flash, two duels are fought which reveal both Flashman’s ill-natured cunning and a pathetic fear of pain. The first duel takes place at a country-house party in England where Flashman, annoyed by Bismarck’s sneering mockery of the British national sport of boxing, tricks him into a fight with a retired boxing champion where Bismarck gets thoroughly mauled and humiliated into the bargain� In revenge, when Flashman is held prisoner at Schönhausen, Bismarck forces him into a duel with his henchman de Gautet to demonstrate the superiority of the German “schlager” custom - and also because Flashman needs the same scars on his head that Carl Gustav has� Rather than facing his foe with courage, Flashy gets through the confrontation with self-pity and whining: “I saw the most unpleasant sight I know, which is my own blood; it coursed down my cheek and on to my hand, and I howled and dabbed at the wound […] ‘It’s not fair! ’ […] ‘I think my skull’s fractured! ’” (RF 131)� While fearing pain for himself, Flash is quite happy to inflict it on others. When, after a failed attempt to murder Flashman, de Gautet is at his mercy, Flashman takes open pleasure in torturing any useful information out of him - “showing him the advantages of an English public school education” (RF 190) with his knowledge of how to produce maximum pain with minimal effort - before he pushes him to his death down a cliff after having sworn to spare him: “foreigners tend to take an Englishman’s word when he gives it� That’s all they know” (RF 192)� The scene subverts the common alignment between the ideals of a public school education (as instigated by Thomas Arnold when he was headmaster at Rugby school and popularized by Thomas Hughes, among others) and the ideals of chivalry, honesty, and bravery that are commonly associated with the adventure hero (Esser 94)� 10 Flashman even inserts a swipe at the British, suggesting that their word of honour cannot be relied on� The rescue of prince Carl Gustav similarly reveals Flashman as a despicable and whining coward: “I should certainly be launched […] into the most dangerous adventure of my life […] trying to rescue a man I’d never met - I, who 10 See also Crofts 31� 306 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 wouldn’t stir a finger to rescue my own grandmother. It was all too much, and I had a good self-pitying blubber to myself […]” (RF 216)� The minutely developed contrast with Rassendyll highlights Flashman’s ‘yellow-belly’ (Flashman’s own term) ignominy� Rassendyll, on an equally reckless rescue endeavour in The Prisoner of Zenda, equips himself for his stealthy swim through the moat by carefully oiling his body, selecting woollen underclothes for protection against cold, and carefully choosing extra tools� He swims the moat calmly and alone, with supreme disregard for the dangers of his situation: “I remember that my predominant feeling was, neither anxiety for the King nor longing for Flavia, but an intense desire to smoke” (PZ 106)� Flashman, on the other hand, resents the “most disgusting” (RF 217) woollen underwear after he has been oiled; when crossing the moat for their secret attack, he noisily complains to his companion of cramp (“Jesus, I’m done for� Save me, you selfish bastard! ” (RF 222))� Having landed at the castle he falls straight into the hands of the enemy who shoot his companion but offer terms to Flashman� If such failed heroics might be considered excusable - after all, not everyone is born to endure pain and violence - Flashman’s sheer enjoyment of cruelty or violence inflicted by himself on others severely limits any compassion his vividly described sufferings might otherwise evoke� In fact, his feud with Bismarck only develops because he initially imagines “that he was one of those to whom I could be rude with impunity - servants, tarts, bagmen, shopkeepers, and foreigners” and treats him accordingly� His standard behaviour to inferiors is little less than disgusting� In a twenty-first-century female reader, Flashman’s use and abuse of women is likely to evoke even more profound disgust� With incredible cynicism, Flashman actually prides himself on having ‘only’ ever raped one woman in his life since he claims to prefer them “willing” (FM 105)� Yet he thinks nothing of beating women when he is in a bad temper, and he uses them as simple consumer objects� In Royal Flash, for instance, when he is newly installed as prince, he has the chambermaid brought to his rooms for her sexual services because he feels that he has been abstinent for too long during his imprisonment. Callously, after “thrashing about [with her] in first-rate style” (RF 154), Flashman has no further thought for the girl than to wonder whether the encounter lead to a child who mistakenly thinks himself the illegitimate offspring of a prince (“truly […] an ignorant bastard” (ibid�))� His wedding night with Duchess Irma initially also threatens to turn violent when he “pop[s] her on” but finds her too unresponsive and considers “smarten[ing] her up with a few cuts across the rump” (RF 183). Not only does Flashman enjoy inflicting physical humiliation; he is also fully aware that his behaviour might cause permanent psychological damage: “I’d not have been surprised if after the The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 307 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 way I’d handled her, she’d been put off men for good” (RF 184)� Rather to his surprise, however, Irma discovers her own taste for vigorous sex and henceforth adores Flashman� Flashman’s representation of events - and he is not an entirely reliable narrator - comes remarkably close to the classic defence of the rapist that women actually wish for abuse� In fact, critics tend to fall into line with Flashman’s self-presentation and admire him for his “experience and prowess” (Higdon 95), classify his activities as those of a “seducer” (Bargainnier 117), or euphemistically describe him as “philandering cad who has no use for the concept of consent” (Esser 92)� 11 To a certain extent, revulsion at Flashman’s sexual exploitation is weakened by the fact that in the end, the joke is on him� Flashman as narrator persistently deludes himself� Notably, Irma, while convincing Flashman of her undying devotion to him (“she loved me, you know” (RF 261)), apparently engaged in an affair with Rudi von Starnberg during her honeymoon with Flashy (since Rudi left Strackenz after that)� Flashman does not make that connection, even when he discovers - 40 years after his sojourn in Strackenz - that Irma’s son is Rudi’s lookalike: “she had her son with her; he was a chap in his forties […] and the point is that he was the living spit of Rudi von Starnberg - well, that can only have been coincidence, of course” (RF 289)� In a number of novels, the power relations between Flashman and his women are reversed and Flashman is shown in humiliating positions: Queen Ramalova of Madagascar uses him as a sex slave (Flashman’s Lady) and he is worn to a frazzle by the insatiable appetite of the Maharani Jeendan (Flashman and the Mountain of Light)� Flashman also encounters a superior force when he uses violence against Lola Montez in Royal Flash� Sex with Lola makes him feel like “I had been coupling with a roll of barbed wire” (RF 22), which he does not enjoy since he prefers “softer women who understand that it is my pleasure that counts” (RF 24)� Lola also retaliates “like a wildcat, screaming and clawing” (RF 24-25) when he beats her, throwing everything in reach, including the chamber pot, after a Flashman who has to flee her wrath with his trousers still off� In fact, Lola encounters him more than once as a ‘dude in distress’� On two occasions, she rescues him from pursuit: right at the beginning of the story, when he hides in her coach from police who caught him in a gambling den, 11 It is worth recalling that Fraser also contributed to the screenplay of Octopussy (1983)� Roger Moore’s James Bond incorporated a similar consumer attitude to women while he was celebrated as a hero� Fraser himself - in his role as editor of the Flashman Papers - describes Flashman’s attitude to women as “deplorable” although he hastens to point out that there were some women “for whom he felt a genuine attachment, and even respect” ( FG 392), apparently by way of excuse for Flashman’s abuse of most other women� 308 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 and right at the end, when she allows him to join her in her own flight from Munich� It is Lola’s ruse, however, which lures Flashman to Germany and into Bismarck’s scheme, in revenge for his treatment of her in England, and she nonchalantly disregards his appeals for help� Overall, and even if some women manage to gain the upper hand, Flashman’s treatment of women is inexcusable and revolting� To readers of Royal Flash, the persistent deconstruction of the adventure hero into a self-serving, cruel, at times ridiculous and frequently duped coward are highlighted in the contrast to the noble (and chaste) Rudolf Rassendyll� Within the novel, however, Flashman remains a hero because he is a master of creating narratives that describe his actions in the most advantageous terms possible� Flashman’s true nature is usually recognized only by members of his immediate family (though not his wife) and, notably, by the villain of each story who, typically, recognises vice more easily than virtuous characters do (a trope that Shakespeare’s Iago also relies on)� Bismarck, for instance, pegs him as “brutal, lecherous ruffian” (RF 107) and Count Ignatieff, an evil Russian spy, has no trouble recognising him as “a great, coarse bully of a man, all brawn and little brain” (FC 185)� Flashman, in his turn, as master of hypocrisy, can spot hypocrisy in others� Persons who witness Flashman’s most obvious moments of ignominy usually die - sometimes with a little help from Flashman himself - and thus cannot bear witness to his failures� 12 This allows Flashman to circulate a version of events that puts him in a heroic light� His main technique is actually to remain nobly silent, allowing others to sing his praises. Flashman’s behaviour in the aftermath of the fight for Jallalabad (described in Flashman) demonstrates his strategic use of silence and his reliance on the assumptions of others� In this episode, Flashman gains the undeserved reputation as the hero of Jallalabad when, after the final assault, he is found unconscious outside the city walls, clutching the British standard. While Flashman had in fact rushed to the flag in order to hand it over to the enemy just before he passed out, General Sale connects the posture with an established version of desperate battle heroics: “a handful of sepoys, led by an English gentleman, defied a great army alone, and to the bitter end”, thus protecting Jallalabad (FM 256)� Needless to say that the “handful of sepoys” are not even mentioned by name� Flashman’s carefully staged bashful reluctance to praise his own deeds only helps to increase his reputation for courage� When in threatening situations, Flashman also resorts to convincing lies about his actions, drawing freely on established tropes for the heroic 12 Kohlke discusses this phenomenon with reference to Flashman and the Dragon in more detail (“Killing Humour” 88)� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 309 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 English gentleman and, again, leaving his interlocutors to fill in the gaps. Thus, for instance, when the Danish freedom fighters capture him in Royal Flash, he gives his name as Thomas Arnold and tells a moving story of how Bismarck’s ruffians kidnapped his wife and child, the “little golden-headed Amelia” (RF 206), in order to blackmail him into impersonating the prince� He also enacts a furious denial when it is suggested that during their week of marriage (technically bigamy, since Flashman is already married) he was intimate with the Duchess Irma, which the reader, of course, knows to be all too true: “‘I am not so dead to honour,’ says I, trying to look noble and angry together, ‘that I would stoop to carry my imposture as far as that� There are some things that no gentleman …’ And I broke off as though it was too much for me” (RF 208)� Technically, of course, Flashman does not even tell a lie here� Carefully gauging the impact of controlled (manly) emotion, Flashman is distinctly pleased with his acting abilities, comparing himself to one of the most successful actors of the Victorian age: “This chap Irving has nothing on me! ” (RF 261)� 13 In fact, Rudi von Starnberg refers to Flashman as “the play-actor” throughout most of the novel, emphasizing both his skill in impersonating the prince and the pretence of his position� When Flashman returns to Strackenz to steal the crown jewels, he spins a tale of love and duty to Irma: “I would not go, but I must - and you must remember that you are a duchess, and the protector of your people - and, and all that� Now will you trust me, and believe me that I do this for the safety of Strackenz and my own darling? ” Irma readily accepts her role in this framework: “These royal wenches are made of stern stuff, of course; tell ’em it’s for their country’s sake and they become all proudly dutiful and think they’re Joan of Arc” (RF 260-261)� This is the Flashman version of Flavia’s heartrending self-denial when she decides to serve her country rather than follow Rassendyll back to England: “My honour lies in being true to my country and my House� I don’t know why God has let me love you; but I know that I must stay” (PZ 132-133)� The strength of Flashman’s position relies on the fact that everyone around him readily recalls the ingredients of a standard hero narrative� All Flashman needs to do is deliver a few easily recognizable cues to make others interpret his actions according to story-book rules� Flashman’s adept use of recognizable poses of the melodramatic stage or adventure romance to disguise his self-serving behaviour casts a general suspicion on rhetoric that sounds the high pathos of duty and self-sacrifice. As Joseph Kestner has argued, The Prisoner of Zenda already dwells on the 13 Incidentally, one of Irving’s specialties was the role of the role of the villain-hero (Poore 3)� 310 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 performative aspects of heroic masculinity: “Hope repeatedly refers to Rassendyll’s function as playing a role, suggesting that after all masculinity, even royalty, is a question of role-playing, not actuality” (155)� In The Prisoner of Zenda, however, performance clearly works as a teaching tool and the formerly irresponsible king actually learns from the gentleman play-actor: “You have shown me how to play the king” (PZ 130), he explains to the departing Rassendyll, determined to follow his example as a king who cares for his subjects� Initially a role-player, Rassendyll becomes a role model� Flashman, on the other hand, performs both duty and emotion entirely as a front for his personal gain, discrediting the concepts themselves� The fact that social interaction is a game just like poker, which requires some luck but mostly good tactics and the ability to bluff (and possibly cheat), is brought out by the novel’s title, of course, which plays on the ‘royal flush’ hand in poker, but also in constant references to card games throughout the story� Thus Flashman, when pushed into a corner in front of the magistrate after the false rape charge, regretfully has to admit to himself that he has been “robbed of the two cards” he normally plays in a crisis: whining and blustering (RF 98). Even more significantly, Lola Montez’ life motto, “Courage! And shuffle the cards” (RF 287), brings home Flashman’s final humiliation when she takes off with the stolen jewels, having cheated the cheater� The card game metaphor subverts the widely accepted ideal of ‘fair play’ associated with the English gentleman� Public schools in particular encouraged sports games because “such games helped form valuable social qualities and masculine virtues” (Watkins xii)� It is no accident that Tom Brown characterises Flashman first and foremost via his performance on the playing field. While Rassendyll throws himself into the game of impersonating the king with Newbolt-like enthusiasm to “Play up! Play up! and play the game! ”, Flashman is happy to play whenever he holds a winning hand and prefers to cheat if not� With the clear discrepancy between performance and being, Fraser discredits the concepts of duty, dedication, chivalry, or self-denial as - potentially - mere hypocrisy, revealing, as other neo-Victorian writers have done, their construction through narrative (Carroll 182)� With this move, the “chivalrous gentleman, a concept central to Hope’s portrait of masculinity, is re-presented as hardly more than an affectation in an age of hubris and chance” (Esser 84)� Whether he intended to or not, with his parody of the adventure hero, Fraser necessarily questions ideological implications that are written on and into the adventure format� “Flashman’s papers stand in relationship to Hughes’ novel in much the same way that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies does to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, as an assault on its moral and ethical assumptions about man and society” (Higdon 89)� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 311 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 This assault goes further than merely discrediting the Victorian hero-rhetoric as wholesale hypocrisy� On the contrary, Flashman continues to depict those who honestly believe in the type of muscular Christianity that Thomas Hughes had propagated, but he clearly feels that they do more harm than good� They either turn out self-deceiving and basically ineffectual leaders (like Elphinstone, Havelock, or Cardigan, portrayed in various Flashman novels) or a positive danger to people who wish to survive a war that other people started� One such dutiful soldier is Scud East, close friend to Tom Brown in Hughes’s novel, whom Flashman meets during the Crimean War, and whose plan for escape threatens Flashman’s comfortable enjoyment of a fairly easy imprisonment in Russia with regular helpings of the sexual favours of the prison keeper’s daughter: I know my Easts and Tom Browns, you see� They’re never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace, and they can feel they’re doing the right, Christian thing - and never mind the consequences to anyone else. Selfish brutes. […] They’ll do for us yet, with their sentiment and morality� (FC 222) These observations are all the more pertinent since earlier in the novel Flashman visits a field hospital and is visibly distressed at the sight of the mangled bodies of common soldiers who had been sent off “stuffed with lies and rubbish, to get killed and maimed for nothing except a politician’s vanity or a manufacturer’s profit” (FC 135-136)� On the one hand comically undermined as admirable hero, even made despicable as sexist, racist, greedy and amoral, Flashman on the other hand defends views that are likely to resonate with a late twentiethor early twenty-first-century audience, such as a thorough scepticism of empire ideology and the honour code that was (reputedly) fostered to prepare youngsters for war� In Royal Flash specifically, which does not take place in an Empire setting with a clearly marked racial other, we see less of Flashman’s racism and also less self-congratulation about British superiority than in other Flashman novels� Despite his cowardice and sexual abuse, Flashman is thus a deeply ambivalent protagonist, offering a confirmation of liberal twentiethand twenty-first-century views as well as representing everything such a liberal would reject� In fact, it is this curious pull into two opposing directions through conflicting characterisation, the use and subversion of the classic adventure plot, and the focalisation through the unscrupulous Flashman, that make the narratives a fascinating phenomenon� 312 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 The Lure of the Villain, or, the Perils of Pleasure It is worth disentangling the fairly complicated and contradictory interplay of revulsion and identification that Flashman offers a modern audience. While the character, considered in the rational light of day, must appear despicable even to an only moderately liberal reader, the irreverent assessment of Victorian mores from the point of view of this anti-hero as well as the suspense of the adventure plot make this, rather worryingly, an “engaging” tale nonetheless (Helena Esser’s adjective to describe Royal Flash (82))� Addressing the question of how a reader can possibly “like a coward, a cynic, a seducer, and a rogue” (117), Earl F� Bargainnier cites Flashman’s candour and his humour: “His sheer honesty about himself is disarming and ingratiating� […] The second reason for liking him is his sense of humor” (117-118)� Flashman’s superior insight into and sardonic exposure of the cultural myth-making the Victorians indulged in makes it quite easy not only to laugh about him but to laugh with him and thus to share his sense of superiority over his self-deluded fellow-Victorians� As Benjamin Poore points out, Neo-Victorianism draws on cultural assumptions that turn the Victorians into “history’s villains” (17); they have become a convenient short-form for anything that we “rigorously seek to exclude from the liberal and ‘liberated’ ideal of postmodern identity” (Kohlke and Gutleben 11)� Ranging from imperialism to sexual repression, from the exploitation of the labouring classes to racism, sexism or large-scale ecological destruction, there are few inequities that the twentiethand twenty-first-centuries do not trace back to their nineteenth-century forebears. Seeing the Victorians exposed as mere self-serving hypocrites, like Flashman and through Flashman, in the end confirms what we have known all along and with this, the Flashman Papers confirm a sense of our own cultural and ideological superiority� The account of Flashman’s sexual adventures even offers a chance to sexually liberate the Victorians, a popular trope in Neo-Victorian writing, adding a form of voyeuristic “sexsation” to the representation of people that are still popularly considered to be so very prude and repressed (Kohlke, “Sexsation”)� All of this is made more pertinent by the detailed historical connections, suggesting sensational revelations about ‘real’ persons, something that was paralleled by trends in historiography which, from the late 1950s onwards, was particularly fascinated with the sexuality of Victorian heroes, especially empire heroes like T� E� Lawrence or General Gordon (Jones 179)� Apart from offering a platform for fantasies of sexist and racist violence for those who regret the loss of such opportunities in an age that insists on “political correctness”, the worse Flashman turns out to be, the more he confirms The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 313 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 twentieth-century liberal outrage about the Victorians� In a curious sense, this can be liberating for readers of adventure tales who are often vaguely ashamed of deriving pleasure from cultural memes that tend to be associated with young adult reading or with the ‘wrong’ ideology� Martin Green practically equates the Victorian adventure tale with empire ideology: “The adventure form carries its own imperialist message, despite the individual artist’s intention” (335), and Mark Girouard aligns the chivalric code propagated in adventure narratives with elitism and imperialism (260-261)� While we are self-righteously repelled by Flashman’s exploitative conduct, we can read a ripping adventure tale without apparently condoning the ideology that comes with it� As one reviewer had it: The Flashman Papers offer “a considerate sort of parody that allows a double-tracking reader to enjoy his old chestnuts even while he roasts them” (Melvin Maddocks on Royal Flash, qtd� in Higdon 93)� At the same time, Flashman frequently offers sardonic remarks that might well apply to twentiethand twenty-first-century conditions, for instance a series of pejorative comments about royalty� When Flashman, for example, pities Prince Albert’s inferior position as prince consort, this parallels the situation of Prince Philip as consort to Queen Elizabeth II, a source of tension that is played out, for instance, in the popular Netflix series The Crown: “He’s always one step behind his adoring spouse, and even if she dotes on him […] he still has to get his own way, if he wants it, through her good leave� […] God knows how our late lamented Albert stuck it out, poor devil” (RF 186)� For the early twenty-first-century reader - when the Flashman novels were all reprinted - Flashman’s sneer against Edward, the Prince of Wales’s general clumsiness and inability to extricate himself from the unpleasant consequences of his sexual adventures might well ring familiar in the context of similar antics in the current royal family, from Prince Charles’s extramarital connections (and published telephone conversations) with Camilla Parker-Bowles to Prince Andrew’s involvement in the Epstein circle: I […] wondered why people will make such a fuss over royalty� It’s the same with us; we have our tubby little Teddy, whom everyone pretends is the first gentleman of Europe, with all the virtues, when they know quite well he’s just a vicious old rake - rather like me but lacking my talent for being agreeable to order� Anyway, I was aboard Lily Langtry long before he was� (RF 162) While Hope’s Rassendyll stresses the responsibility of rulership, Flashman’s blissful indulgence in the pleasures that come with being a prince amusingly feeds into a discourse of class envy and anti-royalism: 314 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Sumptuous wasn’t the word for them - silk sheets, lace pillow, solid silver cup and plate by the bed […] even the pot under the bed was of the best china […]� Well, thinks I, they may talk about cares of state, and uneasy lies the head and all that tommy-rot, but […] you may take my word for it, next time you hear about the burdens of monarchy, that royalty do themselves damned proud� (RF 152) In the context of the royal family’s efforts to gain more popular support at the time of the novel’s publication, remarks like this resonate with discussions about the justification of monarchy - then and now. Flashman on the one hand as typical Victorian villain, on the other as spokesperson for past and present social inequities, thus offers an ambivalent appeal� If Flashman’s ruthless exposure of past and present hypocrisy reinforces stereotypical vilifications of Victorians (and / or royals), the late twentieth-century entertainment industry has actually accustomed audiences to a degree of sympathy for the villain� Media trends of the last 50 years have offered a large number of villains in place of somewhat outworn heroes - whether this is the pitied monster (in Shrek), the rehabilitated vampire (in Twilight), or the marginalised character forced into evil (in Joaquin Phoenix’ Joker)� 14 While morality - and especially the type of moral codes that are associated with chivalrous Victorian heroes - have become suspect, enjoying the transgressions of a villain has become the mark of viewer sophistication, who, rather than falling for the simplistic ideals represented by the hero, indulge in the complicated and conflicting motivations of the anti-hero, the hero-villain or the villain: “This recent set of cultural protocols, which can sometimes feel like the celebration and aestheticisation of a cool amorality (or at least, extreme moral relativism) serves to demarcate which aspects of popular culture have an ‘adult’ dimension” (Poore 12)� A standard technique to create sympathy with the villain, as Benjamin Poore points out (29), is to present him in contrast with a considerably ‘worse’ villain� In Royal Flash, this is achieved by a representation of Germans, in particular Prussians, that has marked Nazi undertones� Rather than emphasizing British patriotic fervour - which tends to be a standard element of nineteenth-century imperialist adventure fiction - it is the German villains that are invested with (excessive) rhetoric about the greatness of the ‘fatherland’. Especially Otto von Bismarck has a clearly inflated sense of his own importance: “God has sent you to Germany, and I send you now to Strackenz [where] you will play such a game as has never been played before in the history of the world� […] What a destiny! To be one of the architects of the new Fatherland! ” (RF 143)� Allied occupational forces after 14 For a more detailed overview of this trend, see Poore 10-12� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 315 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 the end of WWII sought to repress the ‘Prussian spirit’ in Germany as one of the elements that had smoothed the road to national socialism� In the realm of fiction, Piers Paul Read’s novel The Junkers (1968) had stressed the connections between Prussian aristocracy and Nazi politics, two years before the publication of Royal Flash (Stevenson 416-417)� Replacing the clearly marked racial other of the imperial adventure novel with the ‘wicked Nazi’ was a general trend in adventure fiction in the second half of the twentieth century where the jungle or desert setting was often replaced with German-occupied countries or the Alpine castle - for which Jutonberg castle in Royal Flash offers an equivalent: “colonial adventure found itself subsumed into this larger field of heroic, national memory, which continued to resonate at the heart of the post-imperial British imaginary well into the 1980s” (Dawson 229)� Flashman’s parody of Germans attacks the aristocracy, with the self-important Bismarck and his uncivilized henchmen� It also ridicules the lower orders, stereotyping them as dull and under the spell of authority, like the amazingly pathetic German mob (“Let anyone stand up to ’em and they shuffle and look at each other and touch their forelocks to him” (RF 278)) or the romantically deluded ensign Wessel (recalling Horst Wessel) who unquestioningly follows the orders Flashman, as prince, gives him to leave his post as guard of the crown jewels to defend the supposedly endangered duchess: “He was one of those very young, intense creatures […] He’d cut the whole bloody German army to bits before he let anyone near Irma� Likewise, and more important, he didn’t doubt his prince for a minute� Ah, the ideals of youth” (RF 263)� The characterisation of Germans as either power-hungry, brutal, and unsophisticated or stupidly subservient easily resonated with post-war British stereotypes about Germany� The notable exception is the extremely clever and charismatic Rudi von Starnberg, who shares the first name with Rudolf Rassendyll but is the worst villain of all� Rudi is not German, as it turns out, but “Austrian, actually” (RF 98)� This, of course, might well be taken as another Nazi joke, for Hitler was also Austrian� Conclusion Fraser’s Royal Flash has been described as a “magnificent send-up” (Higdon 93) of Hope’s adventure tale The Prisoner of Zenda� But it is more than that� On the surface, it parodies the adventure hero as well as the associated ideals of duty, honesty, chivalry, and courage� Fraser presents his protagonist as the opposite of all these ideals, who nonetheless manages to dupe his environment into believing him to be a hero� Especially when read against The Prisoner of Zenda, this highlights the importance of narrative to create meaning 316 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 out of the initially uncoded raw materials offered by events� The presentation of Flashman as villain also pleasantly confirms judgements that have been passed on the Victorians, in particular their racist, sexist, and imperialist attitudes� At the same time, Flashman also feeds into a postmodern pleasure in transgressing established moral codes as a form of (sophisticated) revolt against authority� While we might well disapprove of Flashman the character, the average reader with liberal inclinations is likely to share many of his assessments, like the condemnation of war politics, the sneer against the upper classes, or his resistance to proto-Nazi rhetoric. Significantly, the revulsion from his character is counteracted by the lure of the adventure plot which presents Flashman, though himself a villain, in a suspense-filled struggle with a worse villain, which encourages readers to root for him despite his despicable character. In fact, Fraser improves some of the more obvious deficiencies of Hope’s plotting and thus adds some dramatic moments: For instance, while Hope spends much time and effort to establish the horrors of the pipe descending into the lake in the prisoner’s cell, it plays no part during the liberation of the king� Fraser, on the other hand, employs the pipe in a climactic moment, when Flashman accidentally slides down this pipe after he has all but managed to evade the ferocious Rudi von Starnberg� The attractions of the adventure plot are further assisted by the humour of the narrative� As Marie-Luise Kohlke has observed, Flashman’s bluff and sardonic attitude hides some of the atrocities he either commits or at least condones and lures readers into condoning these crimes with him: “Humour, like aesthetic beauty, can become a distraction from the full horrors of history� It risks disabling an ethico-critical confrontation with the past and its traumatic legacies and vitiating retrospective witness-bearing to historical suffering” (“Killing Humour” 72)� Flashman might be despicable and wicked - though others are clearly worse, and at least Flashman is funny, while the Germans are deadly dull� Flashman offers all the attractions of inventive vice (as opposed to Rudolf Rassendyll’s rather predictable virtue)� The villain, as Benjamin Poore has remarked, offers a Dionysian element “both in the character’s frequent theatricality […] and in his shape-shifting and deception” (22) which makes his adventures less predictable than those of the chivalrous hero� Even Flashman’s cynicism is calculated to arouse admiration or at least tolerance, as we admire rather wittily expressed views that are widely shared in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Our potential alignment with a character who is clearly despicable but whose victory over perils we nonetheless follow with pleasure has some troubling implications - we seem to be closer to the Victorians than we thought� The Cowardly Hero and the Perils of Pleasure: The Flashman Papers 317 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Works Cited Bargainnier, Earl F� “The Flashman Papers: Picaresque and Satiric Pastiche�” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol� 18, no� 2, 1976, pp� 109-119� Carroll, Samantha J� “Putting the ‘Neo’ Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction�” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol� 3, no� 2, 2010, pp� 172-205� Crofts, Matthew� “Flashman and the Art of Fictional Autobiography�” Peer English, vol� 10, no� 3, 2015, pp� 26-36� Daly, Nicholas� Ruritania: A Cultural History from The Prisoner of Zenda to The Princess Diaries� Oxford: Oxford UP , 2020� Dawson, Graham� Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities� London: Routledge, 1994� Esser, Helena� “Doppelgängers and Impostors� Flashman’s Neo-Victorian Adventures in Zenda�” Victorian Popular Fictions, vol� 2, no� 1, 2020, pp� 82-97� Fraser, George MacDonald� Flashman� 1969� London: HarperCollins, 1999� ---� Royal Flash� 1970� London: HarperCollins, 1999� ---� Flashman at the Charge� 1973� London: HarperCollins, 2006� ---� Flashman in the Great Game� 1975� London: HarperCollins, 2015� ---� Flashman’s Lady� 1977� London: HarperCollins, 2005� ---� Flashman and the Dragon� 1985� London: HarperCollins, 2015� ---� “How did I Get the Idea of Flashman? ” Flashman and the Dragon� 1985� London: Harper- Collins, 2015, pp� v-xiii� ---� Flashman and the Mountain of Light� 1990� London: HarperCollins, 2015� Girouard, Mark� The Return of Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman� New Haven: Yale UP , 1981� Green, Martin� Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire� New York: Basic Books, 1979� Higdon, David Leon� Shadows of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction� London: Macmillan, 1984� Hope, Anthony� The Prisoner of Zenda� 1894� London: Penguin, 1994� Hughes, Thomas� Tom Brown’s Schooldays� 1856� London: Penguin, 1994� Jones, Max� “‘National Hero and Very Queer Fish’: Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918-72�” Twentieth-Century British History, vol� 26, no� 2, 2015, pp� 175-202� Kestner, Joseph A� Masculinities in British Fiction, 1880-1915� Farnham: Ashgate, 2010� Klotz, Volker� Abenteuer-Romane: Sue, Dumas, Ferry, Retcliffe, May, Verne� Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979� Kohlke, Marie-Luise� “Sexsation and the Neo-Victorian Novel: Orientalising the Nineteenth Century in Contemporary Fiction�” Negotiating Sexual Idioms: Image, Text, Performance, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza� Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp� 53-77� ---� “Neo-Victorian Killing Humour�” Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben� Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp� 71-102� 318 s TeFanie l eThbriDge 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0014 Kohlke, Marie-Luise, and Christian Gutleben� Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-Imagined Nineteenth Century� Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012� Poore, Benjamin� “The Villain-Effect: Distance and Ubiquity in Neo-Victorian Popular Culture�” Neo-Victorian Villains: Adaptations and Transformations in Popular Culture, edited by Benjamin Poore� Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp� 1-48� Steinbrink, Bernd� Abenteuerliteratur des 19. 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Oxford: Oxford UP , 2005� Taylor, D� J� “George Macdonald Fraser�” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2012, https: / / doi�org/ 10�1093/ ref: odnb/ 99880� Accessed 1 Dec� 2020� Wallace, Raymond P� “Cardboard Kingdoms�” San José Studies, vol� 13, no� 2, 1987, pp� 23-34� Watkins, Tony� Introduction� The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1994, pp� vii-xxii� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 1 Introduction Located at the fringes of what might count as ‘adventure fiction’ proper, the two texts at the centre of attention in this article, Mary Jane Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) and Mary Henrietta Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa (1897), combine life-writing, travel literature, micro-historiography, and (auto-)ethnography (Salih, “Gallant Heart” 173; Pratt, Imperial Eyes 7) while frequently drawing on the anecdotal as a narrative mode� 2 Both authors, neither of whom was formally educated, became quite famous during their respective lifetimes, to which articles and poems in Punch magazine testify� 3 Seacole, proclaimed by Jane Robinson’s biography to be “the most famous Black Woman of the Victorian Age”, was “free-born” (Fish 475) and “a Creole” (WA 11) who described herself as “only a little brown - a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much” (13)� Kingsley was white but also of ‘mixed extraction’ as far as class was concerned: her father had married his pregnant servant and together they had averted, as Dea Birkett suggests, the social stigmatisation which would have followed their child’s illegitimacy by a “shotgun wedding” (Adventuress 15). Both Seacole and Kingsley, therefore, were figures of the third, in a sense; simultaneously inand outsiders or, to borrow the title of Stuart Hall’s autobiography, ‘familiar strangers’� Both were also products of British imperialism 1 I am indebted to Anecdotal Theory in more than one way, and my title pays homage to Jane Gallop who, alluding to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, called her collection’s article on Lacan and Derrida “A Tale of Two Jacques”� 2 Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is henceforth shortened to WA in in-text citations� To distinguish between Kingsley’s works, Travels in West Africa is shortened to TWA , while Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons is shortened to CCC in in-text citations. 3 The magazine honoured “Dame Seacole” in a poem (“A Stir”) she found flattering enough to include in Wonderful Adventures and helped raise money for “Mother Seacole”, portrayed in a cartoon as “our own vivandière” (“Our Very Own Vivandière”)� It also mildly lampooned Kingsley, by allusion, in a satirical poem, some verses of which refer to “a lady an explorer? A traveller in skirts? ” who - at least according to voices that opposed the Royal Geographical Society opening its doors to female members - “mustn’t, can’t, and shan’t be geographic” (“To the Royal Geographical Society”)� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 320 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 (although during different phases) who staged themselves (albeit in different ways) as British subjects, remained positioned firmly within imperialism’s ideological framework, and - perhaps most disturbingly - both occasionally made use of “the period’s racist language” (Om 90)� Kingsley even adhered to polygenism - a racist/ racial theory already outdated at the time that claimed “that Africans were not a lower or less developed form of Europeans, but essentially different” (Birkett, Adventuress 69) -, which she combined with a vigorous defence of African cultures (93)� In Seacole’s case, there is a lively scholarly debate on how she positions herself in relation to the Empire and its underlying ideology� Some suggest that Seacole - strategically or not - identifies with “the colonizing paradigm, with its assumption of Western superiority and endorsement of empire” (Fish 479), which has been read as an “endorsement of affective imperialism” (Salih, “Gallant Heart” 175)� Others claim that she “makes a joke out of her position as colonial mimic” and “revels in her performance of Englishness” (Poon 504), thus not only supports but also creolises (Chang) and “undermines the values of the imperium” (McKenna 221), even “disrupt[ing] the ‘master narratives’ of both the literary and imperial authority systems” (Hawthorne 315-316)� Om concedes that Seacole “does speak the language of the empire” but argues that “she does so to unsettle the empire’s fundamental assumptions about race” (97), which ultimately makes Wonderful Adventures a subversive text that must be read as a “nuanced challenge to […] racism” (79), specifically in its function of justifying imperialism� To sum up, the spectrum of positions ascribed to Seacole is broad� There is no doubt that Kingsley was a life-long supporter of colonialism� Birkett describes her as “a self-confessed and active imperialist” who “never challeng[ed] the right of Britain to colonial expansion in Africa” (Adventuress 95)� Also, it is generally accepted that Kingsley’s work is “merely aimed at improving rather than dismantling colonialism” (Mills 153)� At the same time, she has also been hailed as a radical defender/ proponent/ advocate of “cultural relativism” who criticised and fought individual imperial policies, driven by the “utopian desire” to realise “her conception of a humane colonialism” (Gikandi 150). Gikandi has also argued that this justifies the claim that “Kingsley’s experiences parallel those of colonial subjects such as Seacole” (146) and that this is the reason why Travels just as much as Wonderful Adventures needs to be read as “a discourse that exists both inside and outside colonialism” (ibid�)� Although the different paradoxes in Seacole’s and Kingsley’s (self-) representations - and the fault lines that develop because of them - are fascinating, I will not join in disentangling, tracing, and debating them� Instead, I would like to add to the discussion of Kingsley’s and Sea- Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 321 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 cole’s textual strategies by posing the question of how both the anecdote (as a genre) and the anecdotal (as a mode) serve the goal of these two authors to inscribe themselves into literary traditions that did not open easily to female and / or black writers� Neither Seacole nor Kingsley was a stranger to the ‘pleasures of peril’, and although both blithely blew to smithereens contemporary notions of passivity as essentially feminine, neither of them, while enjoying these pleasures, was willing to give up her claim to being a lady� Both actively sought out what Mary Louise Pratt has described as “contact zones” (“Arts” 34), but while Seacole spent substantial parts of her long life in these “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (ibid�), Kingsley could only make three trips to Africa before she died of typhoid fever while nursing soldiers during the Boer War� Seacole, a widow who had learned nursing and how to run a guesthouse from her mother, traces her “affection for a camp-life, and […] sympathy with […] ‘the pomp, pride, and circumstance of glorious war’” (WA 11) back to her Scottish father, a soldier in the British army� After travelling the Caribbean and running a hotel in Panama and before she returned to her native Kingston, Jamaica, she made her way from the Empire’s periphery to its centre� Having presented herself in London to volunteer as a nurse for the Crimean War and having been rejected - most probably due to reasons of race and age (she was fifty, at the time) -, she travelled to the Black sea peninsula under her own steam, opened the British Hotel with an officers’ mess, “two miles from Balaclava” (Salih, “Chronology” x), and tended to the sick and wounded, the badly fitted-out, and the hungry (Palmer n� p�)� Kingsley, a spinster who had “rarely ventured beyond the garden gate” (Birkett, Adventuress 8) during her youth, nursed her mother for years while her absentee father - a physician - accompanied his wealthy clients around the world� After having lost both parents within a few weeks, she left the Empire’s centre to finally experience life at the ‘periphery’, specifically the Congo, first-hand rather than through her father’s library of travel books (10)� She chose climes to which only few white people had been, to collect and study “fish and fetish” (Brisson 326), and travelled to remote regions in long skirts and blouses buttoned to the neck, overcoming more than one life-threatening encounter with wild animals along the way� Describing some of the indigenous peoples’ social conventions, most famously fetishist and cannibalistic practices, Kingsley stressed the Africans’ rationality and aimed to explain these customs’ internal logic (Birkett, “Kingsley” n� p�)� 322 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 The editorial histories of Seacole’s and Kingsley’s texts differ somewhat in terms of availability� Although Wonderful Adventures, published in two editions during the nineteenth century (Salih, “Chronology” liii), was internationally and widely reviewed (Staring-Derks et al� 518), it subsequently went out of print for a long time. Seacole herself became “a forgotten figure” (Alexander and Dewjee 45) soon after her death until feminist scholars brought her to public attention again and “republished her narrative in 1984” (Om 77)� Oxford University Press (1988) included Wonderful Adventures into its programme only a few years later, it being after all “one of the first travel memoirs published by a black woman” (Lee and Erikson 68)� Even more recently, Penguin (2005) republished it as part of its classics series while Routledge (2015) anthologised a section of it� By comparison, Kingsley’s Travels, “an immediate bestseller” (Birkett, Adventuress 81) and “outstanding success” (89) that was also broadly reviewed at the time, fared better in terms of uninterrupted accessibility. Less than half a year after it first came out in January 1897, “five editions were in circulation, including an abridged version designed for a wider audience” (Blunt, “Mapping” 56)� In the course of the twentieth century, at least three popular editions were issued and there are currently at least five in print. Moreover, excerpts from Travels are frequently included in collections issued on both sides of the Atlantic� 4 For a while, particularly during the 1980s, scholarly interest in British women travel writers tended to produce what Blunt, listing a few examples (Travel 44), terms “descriptive and often primarily anecdotal accounts celebrating intrepid, eccentric individuals” (34)� My article, too, deals with two female Britons who wrote about their adventures in foreign parts, and I am likewise interested in the anecdote as a genre as well as the anecdotal as a narrative mode� The latter, however, is not an organising principle of my own study but rather the focal point of my analysis� In other words, instead of writing anecdotally about Seacole and Kingsley, I am interested in their use of anec- 4 For example, Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (1994), Victorian Prose: An Anthology (1999), Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence (2003), The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose 1832-1900 (2012), or A Woman’s Place in the World: An Anthology of Victorian Travel Narratives (2019)� In the following, I shall quote Seacole from the Penguin edition� For citations from Kingsley, I shall rely on the edition by National Geographic (2002)� Like most currently available print editions, this abridged version compresses three of Kingsley’s original twenty-eight chapters into one and completely omits five others as well as all of the appendices. In addition to this, it does not contain one of the anecdotes I am going to discuss in detail, which is why I shall be drawing, where necessary, on the digital version of Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons, published by Cambridge University Press (2010)� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 323 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 dotes and in what these do to the balance between life writing and adventure fiction in their work. My article’s core claim is that anecdotes play a crucial role in both authors’ self-representations, that it is in fact due to their anecdotes that Seacole’s and Kingsley’s texts achieved their respective goals: ensuring financial survival for the former and carving out a career as a public persona for the latter� Retaining their humorous flatness, anecdotes work, on one level, as entertainment� But at least some of them also offer themselves as small spaces of critical self-reflection against the backdrop of imperial ideology and colonialist practice because of the way in which they - frequently, if not always - incorporate the perspective of the (cultural or non-human) ‘other’� Since a contribution on two autobiographical texts needs to be justified within the context of a volume on adventure fiction, I shall first, in the section “Colonial Tales of Adventure”, show how Seacole and Kingsley position themselves and their texts in relation to adventure and how scholars have perceived these relations. Then, I shall discuss some of the fictionalising elements in Seacole’s and Kingsley’s factual accounts� In order to substantiate my core thesis, the section “Anecdotal Theories” offers an overview of how the anecdote, in its characteristic unverifiability, has been defined and described within academic discourse in its relation to fact, truth, and history and what contentions have been made about its potential to stabilise, support, supplement, undermine, disrupt, and act as a method to help think through theoretical issues� The last part of this contribution, “Anecdotal Adventures”, is dedicated to analysing four examples - the hencoop and the gold anecdote from Wonderful Adventures and the Silurian and the game-hunting anecdote from Travels in West Africa - to demonstrate how each in its own way calls up topoi that belong to different strands of adventure literature, gestures which help inscribe Seacole and Kingsley within or at least in relation to this tradition� I shall begin, however, by trying to explain why both writers’ texts are positioned precariously on the edge between adventure literature and (auto-) ethnography� Colonial Tales of Adventure If ‘adventure fiction’ does not seem a likely first pick of a genre that accommodates both Seacole’s and Kingsley’s works, this is not because their authors would have wanted to deny having written about their adventures� Seacole, after all, uses the term in her title and again in the heading of chapter xii (8)� She confesses to an “inclination to rove” (11), even a “longing to travel” (13), and recognises that her determination to get what she wants exposed her 324 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 to “some strange and amusing adventures” (11)� Only three pages into her narrative she describes, for the first time, an event - discussed below as my first example - that “very nearly brought to a premature conclusion” to what she calls “my life and adventures” (13)� Moreover, she states clearly that “my adventures had carried me to the battle-fields of the Crimea” (16) and uses the term five more times as her account unfolds. Kingsley, although she refrains from explicitly announcing her travels as an ‘adventure’ on the cover of her book and describes herself only once, and then indirectly, as “the adventurer” (TWA 631), also uses the term “adventure” a few times (166; 319; 344)� In addition, she refers to her and her African travel companions’ “misadventures” (72; 356). She also admits to a weakness for a specific sub-genre of adventure fiction 5 and might have been pleased, one feels entitled to speculate, that none other than National Geographic decided to publish Travels as part of its adventure-classics series� Neither would scholars who have worked on these two Victorian authors and their texts disagree that adventure is pivotal to each� Sandra Pouchet Paquet discusses how the mid-Victorian widow Seacole “carves out a new life for herself as an adventurer, an entrepreneur and professional healer” (652) and argues that her text “reflects an idealized self as heroic subject of the British Empire” (656), which testifies to “her love of adventure, her desire to perform heroic national service and to receive […] recognition” (ibid�)� Amy Robinson speaks of “the many roles she occupies in the course of her adventures” (542), Evelyn Hawthorne describes her as an “adventuring businesswoman” (309) who did not shrink from making “an open statement of her […] desire for adventure” (323)� Laura Moakler even grants her “a life filled with adventure” (371) and Angelia Poon speaks of her deliberately seeking out “fluid sites” - like Panama and the Crimea - that are simultaneously “carnivalesque space[s]” (506), while both Poon (506) and Sara Salih (“Gallant Heart” 176) evoke Pratt’s “contact zones” to describe Seacole’s appetite for locations that were in flux. Jessica Howell calls Seacole a “war-time heroine” (121), Pramod Nayar claims her as one of the black writers who “use travel as a means of constructing selfhood” (45), while Corry Staring-Derks, Jeroen Staring, and Elizabeth Anionwu speak of her “penchant for globetrotting” (514)� The situation is similar when it comes to the late-Victorian travelling spinster Mary Henrietta Kingsley� Kingsley-scholars have no problem with the label ‘adventure’ either� Birkett titles her biography Imperial Adventuress (1991), while Sara Mills finds 5 “My most favourite form of literature, I may remark, is accounts of mountaineering exploits […]�” ( TWA 213) Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 325 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 parallels between Kingsley and conventional “adventure heroes” (158), arguing that Travels both shares characteristics of “the adventure narrative” (164) and mocks them in return (ibid�)� This latter point is seconded by Karen Lawrence when she stresses that Kingsley “both used and transformed male models of adventure” (152)� Laura Ciolkowski claims “Kingsley’s adventures […] emerge in Travels in West Africa as the site of a series of female subject-making narratives” (340) and draws attention to the fact that Kingsley likes to dwell on her scientific failures, narrating them as “tales of ‘feminine’ adventures in science” (341), while her successes (the discovery of several formerly uncategorised species of fish) “go unmentioned” (ibid.). Lawrence, who refers to Kingsley as a “woman writer of adventure” (124), not only points out that Virago’s edition of Travels refers to her as “one of the most intrepid adventurers” (qtd� in Lawrence 127) but argues that Kingsley, “[i] nsofar as she identifies with the ethos of masculine adventure, […] appropriates conventions of adventure” (130)� In fact, Lawrence connects Kingsley to adventure in two further ways: to “the root meaning of ‘adventure’” (131) as ‘venture’ (risking money) and ‘future’ (French: l’avenir) on the one hand and to Kingsley’s “representing proper ethnography as movement and adventure” (141) on the other� There is little doubt, in other words, that the two Maries saw their exploits as adventures� Neither is it contested within the academic community that their books belong to adventure writing� Rather, Seacole’s and Kingsley’s texts sit a little uncomfortably inside the genre of ‘adventure fiction’ because of their claims to factuality. Both Seacole’s memoir and Kingsley’s travel account position themselves unequivocably on the authenticity-side of the blurry line between fiction and life-writing and draw on witnesses, letters, and cited authorities for their truth claims� But I would argue that there are four reasons why it is legitimate to discuss Wonderful Adventures as well as Travels in a volume of articles dedicated to adventure fiction. First, though both books are autobiographical, there can be little doubt that autobiography contains fictional elements, first and foremost embellishments� Brisson speaks of Kingsley’s borrowing from “secondary sources” (333), that is, other travel writers� Birkett, while discussing her “misreporting and exaggeration”, points out that she “interwove what she saw with the impressions drawn from earlier published accounts” (Adventuress 41) but also diagnoses that “Kingsley was becoming, in real life, a character in her own book” (76) and presented to her readers an “idealised image of West Africa and [a] hyped-up account of her experiences” (82)� That at least one of Kingsley’s contemporary readers, in fact her editor, confronted with what he called her “Logorrhea of Kingslese, combined with artistic and vividly coloured imagination”, wondered “whether I was intended to 326 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 believe” it all (Guillemard, qtd� in Birkett, Adventuress 42), seems to point in a similar direction� Second, although what Kingsley and Seacole write might be factual, what is not told cannot help distorting ‘the whole truth’ (whatever that may be), and both books contain great gaps, especially as far as their authors’ private selves are concerned� Pouchet Paquet calls Wonderful Adventures “a narrative of extraordinary silences and omissions” (657), referring mostly to the fact that Seacole’s life in Jamaica remains untold� Seacole compresses her marriage of eight years into seven lines and, as Nicole Fluhr has pointed out, she “remains silent about the biological daughter who appears to have accompanied Seacole to the Crimea” (96)� And while it is accurate that not telling ‘the whole truth’ does not suffice to make an account fictional, refusing to mention a daugher - when Seacole’s self-fashioning as a mother to the British soldiers in the Crimea is at the center of her claim to a nation’s gratitude - does have a warping effect� Third, both books demonstrate an acute awareness that identity is a question of performativity rather than ontology� Seacole plays many roles in Wonderful Adventures: that of the “skilful nurse and doctress” (16), that of “the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine” (31), and, most importantly, that of the “motherly yellow woman” who offers “to go to the Crimea and nurse her ‘sons’ there” (72)� Rhonda Frederick has drawn attention to how Seacole “promotes herself as other than ‘other’ […], as a Creole woman” (493, italics in original)� Donghee Om argues that she, as “Mother Seacole” (16), unites “Victorian tropes of domesticity and race as performance”, which in effect “reinterprets blackness as a marker of cultural instead of racial heritage” (80)� Having thus established the “performativity of blackness” (95), Seacole then uses it to her own advantage� Kingsley not only shared the sense of identity as performance but exploited it even more successfully than Seacole did� Her parents’ death freed her from the obligations of their “Nurse and Dutiful Victorian Daughter” (Birkett, Adventuress xxiii), but she remained a “loyal sister” (Blunt, Travel 46) to her brother throughout, which was the only other mould Victorian society had at the ready for an unmarried woman� In addition, however, she discovered a whole series of roles she could occupy: as “coaster” (Kingsley, CCC 550), as a “naturalist” (Birkett, Adventuress 19) and a “fearless traveller” (Blunt, Travel 46), and - most surprisingly, perhaps, and as long as she “stayed away from other white people” - that of a “white man” (Birkett, Adventuress 49)� Not only does Kingsley make use for herself of the grammatical universal masculine, misunderstandings based on expectations of gender roles also lead to her being addressed, at least once in a letter, as Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 327 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 “old Man” (TWA 288) by a European who has not met her yet� 6 In the first few months after the publication of her “intrepid adventures amongst dangerous peoples in supernatural landscapes” (Birkett, Adventuress 43), Kingsley struggled to find her feet as a public speaker. Accordingly, she was known to ask obliging gentlemen to take the respective podium and read out, in her presence, the papers she had penned on her “ethnological bush-work” (Kingsley, “Fetish View” 151)� Eventually, however, she found her public voice and, in a process of rapid professionalisation, added to her roles as “African Explorer”, “Bestselling Travel Writer Representative of Her Britannic Majesty in Africa”, and “Imperialist” those of “Political Campaigner, Journalist”, and “Popular Lecturer” (Birkett, Adventuress xxiii)� Fourth, the use of literary tropes and genres adds an element of fictionalisation to both Wonderful Adventures and Travels� In Seacole’s case, this is already part of the scholarly discourse� As Cheryl Fish has demonstrated, Seacole draws on generic conventions of the slave narrative and, more importantly, of the travelogue, “a genre with episodic discourse that tends to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction” (479), and Frederick adds “the war memoir” (489) to Seacole’s immediate genre models� As far as Kingsley is concerned, Lila Marz Harper evokes the “caricature” as influential for the creation of her narrative persona (186), and Gérard Gâcon even refers to Kingsley herself as a “metaphor” (174)� By and large, however, Travels is not being discussed in relation to any other genre than that of travel writing, 7 although Robert Pearce has described Kingsley, anachronistically, as “alternately Wooster and Jeeves in the jungle” (187, qtd� in Kennedy 157)� But then, travel writing as such has always been precariously placed on the thin and eminently penetrable line between fact and fiction and has frequently been accused of unreliability. On top of this, it has been remarked upon that satire and parody are two of Kingsley’s favourite ways of positioning herself in relation to her male predecessors, fellow-authors, and models (Kennedy 153)� In the following, I am going to argue that the anecdote is a (persistently semi-literary) genre that plays a hitherto underestimated role in Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures and Kingsley’s Travels� 6 “I have given in to the temptation and am the third Englishman to ascend the Peak and the first to have ascended it from the south-east face. The first man to reach the summit was Sir Richard Burton” ( CCC 550)� This seems to indicate that to Kingsley it is more important to be able to put herself in a line with Burton than it is to claim her place as ‘first (white) woman’ to climb Mount Cameroon. 7 See, for example, Mills; Blunt, Travels; Ciolkowski� 328 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 Anecdotal Theory A form of short, self-contained narrative, the anecdote has been dismissed both as the “dime-story” (Gossman 152) and the “scrapheap” (Hénaff 97) of history� But it has also been cherished as a “dynamic” form of entertainment (Gross xi) and praised, when at its best, as “an art form” (xii)� The latter is a label that at least some of Seacole’s and Kingsley’s anecdotes rightly deserve� Scholars have ascribed to the anecdote the potential to act as “a levelling device” (van Manen 246), but they have also described it as “aporetic” (Fineman 62), “essentially disruptive and disorienting” (Loveless 29), awarded it the power to act as “counter-history” (Gossman 152), and invested it with epistemological sway� On this spectrum, most of the anecdotes delivered by the two Maries are on the supportive side, though one, the last to be analysed below, certainly has the subversive potential necessary to foster a counter-history� Often approached as the contrasting ‘other’ of history’s grands récits, understood as a petit fait social (165) - and thus a close relative to “fabliaux, riddles and jokes” (Hénaff 97) -, the anecdote is a small form of considerable reach� Both Seacole and Kingsley make the most of their petite histoire[s] (Fineman 61) by using them, for instance, to inscribe themselves humorously into the masculine genres of adventure writing and, at the same time, thereby changing the way adventure is written� Etymologically, anecdotes are ‘things unpublished’� 8 As (originally oral) reports of “striking, disturbing or perplexing event[s] or behaviour” (Gossman 168), anecdotes also have as long a history of association with the private, the secret, the “confidential and often scandalous” (Gross vii) as with “the unflattering close-up[]” (x), “the ludicrous or disreputable” (ibid.), the “interesting, original, odd or even exemplary” (Hénaff 98), the superficial, and the unreliable (“anecdote, n�”)� In cultural settings that privilege the public, the prolix, and the elaborate, this leads to characterisations of the anecdote, with its attention to detail, as of “the moment” (Galopp 3), as the “marginal” (7), as “circumstantial, trivial, unimportant” (Hénaff 97); as “too plain, too everyday, too vernacular, too low-bred, too mundane” (van Manen 232)� Especially within the Victorian sex-gender system, all of these are not infrequently associated with, and all too easily translated into, the feminine� In the context of academic discourse, the anecdote was decried for the longest time as “an impressionistic and naïve form of human science discourse” (van Manen 233) until, at the end of the 1980s, it began to fascinate scholars 8 The syllable an in Greek denotes negation, and ekdota are ‘published items’ (“anecdote, n�”)� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 329 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 in the humanities� 9 It is not unreasonable to assume that this has something to do with the enhanced status bestowed on the anecdote by its link to microhistory (Levi 97), the “evidentiary paradigm” (Peltonen 45), and New Historicism (Hénaff 107, footnote 4 refers to all of Carlo Ginzburg’s major work)� And although Gossmann states that “scholars cannot even agree where there is anything definable” (147), attempts at definition of the anecdote’s “nature, form and function” (148) have, of course, been made� 10 That the anecdote, as a (literary) genre, is a ‘small form’ is not disputed� According to the OED, the word entered the English language in the mid-seventeenth century� Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary from 1785 gives it the updated meaning of “a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life” (152, my italics), which the first edition had not yet contained. Both Seacole’s and Kingsley’s anecdotes, especially the former’s, clearly form part of this tradition� As Gossman informs us, the term ‘anecdote’ “was widely used during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to designate a species of historical writing that deliberately eschewed large-scale ‘narrativization’” (150)� Steering clear of the grand récit, Seacole’s anecdotal accounts of camplife behind the front, as microhistories, supplement both W� H� Russell’s daily reporting for The Times and the retrospective historical accounts of the Crimean War� The description that Benjamin Disraeli - born a year before Seacole - offers of anecdotes, namely “minute notices of human nature and of human learning” (Fadiman, qtd� in van Manen 247, my italics), resonates with those of Kingsley’s anecdotes that are, at core, ethnographic accounts that shed light on both nineteenth-century African customs and their Victorian perceptions as well as Kingsley’s distance to the latter� More complex, because it can differ from case to case, is the anecdote’s relation to truth and factuality� Much depends on whether one agrees with Marcel Hénaff that “the anecdotal does not come under fiction but under fact” (98)� If one does not, then it is possible to claim for the anecdote what is true for other forms of literature: that simply because a text is fictional - and factual accuracy, therefore, is not the point -, it does not necessarily mean that it cannot contain or give rise to insights that are true, beyond and apart from factuality� If one does share Hénaff’s assessment, one has to embrace what he calls the anecdotal’s “dual relationship to the question of truth” and distinguish between “1) truth as it relates to what is verifiable” and “2) truth understood as a revelation of what was concealed and a manifestation 9 The most recent study that testifies to this persistent interest - Anecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History, edited by Dorson et al� - was not yet available as my article was being prepared for typesetting� 10 Gossman’s footnote (148n10) offers an extensive list of works� 330 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 of something beyond mere appearance” (Hénaff 98)� This second, revelatory element refers to what I called above ‘true, beyond and apart from factuality’, a dimension that is fully available to literature� But whether what is told in an anecdote is invented or not, it is “always unverifiable” (Gossman 159, my italics)� More than that, it is in fact “fundamentally unverifiable” since “if it were verified, vetted, it would cease to be an anecdote” (Loveless 24, my italics)� Accordingly, John J� Gross opens up a whole spectrum: some anecdotes are “as accurate as an honest legal deposition”, while those at the other end “have been deliberately manufactured” and the ones in the middle “have been to a greater or lesser degree improved in the telling” (xii)� Since it is, by definition, impossible to know which is which, Loveless is right to stress that “[t]he anecdote is a slippery knowledge maker, its politics suspect” (24), as unverifiability infects the authority of first-hand witnessing. As is the case with most other anecdotes, Seacole’s and Kingsley’s are framed by gestures of truth-telling� This is very much part and parcel of the genre’s conventions, as the anecdote, according to Hénaff, is “always given as reporting something that actually happened” (97)� But because there is no way of telling if or to what extent they are made up, anecdotes are permanently suspended in the space between complete factuality, embellished fact, and complete invention� Both Seacole and Kingsley make strong truth claims� To a certain extent, the whole apparatus of testimony Seacole installs in Wonderful Adventures - starting with Russell’s Preface, enhanced by the series of letters written by grateful ex-patients up and down the ranks, and ending with a list of names of people who knew her well during their time in the Crimea - is meant to protect against accusations that her stories might be made up� In Kingsley’s case, as her biographer has stressed, “first-hand knowledge was the key to her professional qualification” (Birkett, Adventuress 92)� She founded her post-travel career as a public speaker about matters West African on the authority of “having been there” (Kingsley, qtd� in Birkett, Adventuress 115) and only speaking of “what I had seen” (101) and used this authority masterfully to delegitimise opponents in debates on African imperial policy� Interestingly, neither Seacole nor Kingsley seems worried that the necessarily precarious status of their anecdotes might inadvertently displace their whole accounts from fully authorised life-writing towards adventure fiction. The anecdote in general also has an intimate and complex relation with history� Ivo Kamp lists its possible functions as “a corrective of, or supplement to, existing historical narratives (164)� Gossmann agrees that anecdotes “have always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history”, either “in a supportive role” as “examples and illustrations” or “in a challenging role”, which is why he refers to them as “the repressed of Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 331 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 history” (143). This already implies that anecdotes - fictional or not - are a part of history, yet Gossman goes further in claiming that “the fictional anecdote serves an unequivocably historical function” (160)� Both Seacole’s and Kingsley’s books fill in some of history’s blanks and supply new perspectives that are repressed, or at least missing, in Victorian discourse on war and on travel in remote regions� In Kingsley’s case, the new perspective is that of the first white woman to travel the Congo (rather than work in one place as a missionary); in Seacole’s it is that of a mixed-race and middle-aged widow closely attached to the British Army during a military campaign� Scholars debate whether the anecdote is best understood as a “specific literary genre, with peculiar literary properties” (Fineman 50), which at the same time “exceeds its literary status” (56), as a “historeme, […] the smallest unit of the historiographic fact” (57, italics in original), or as “a methodological device” (van Manen 232)� In 1989 van Manen, coining a verb, claims that “to anecdote is to reflect, to think” and that “anecdotes form part of the grammar of everyday theorizing” (232)� In the same year, Joel Fineman puts forward his claim that the anecdote - as a “hole” in the “whole” of history - “is the literary form that uniquely lets history happen by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end” (61, italics in original)� Having created this “opening of narrativity” (ibid�), however, the anecdote, about which “there is something […] that exceeds its literary status” (56), is then typically “plugged up by a teleological narration” (61) until “a further anecdotal operation” occurs (ibid�)� This is a looped process of “dilation and contraction” (ibid�) on which Jane Galopp, building on Fineman, later comments: “The logic here is circular; or rather, it is a knot” (86)� In her anecdotal theory, Galopp, steeped, like Fineman, in psychoanalysis and operating “at the intersection of deconstruction and feminism” (4), demonstrates that it is not only possible to “think through anecdote” (2) but rewarding to use the genre that is simultaneously small and excessive for what she calls “exorbitant theorizing” (7)� How radical a departure this is for scholarship, which used to despise the ‘merely’ anecdotal, is most clearly stated by van Manen as he reminds readers that anecdotes used to be considered of “low status in scholarly writings because […] they rest on dubious factual evidence” (2)� Although neither Mary Seacole nor Mary Kingsley are much given to what we would call ‘theorising’, I contend that at least two of the anecdotes I have chosen transcend the traditional divide - described by van Ryssen as that between the humorous / special/ trivial (on the side of the ‘short’ anecdote) and the serious / general/ overarching / grand (on the side of ‘grand’ theory)� And by doing so they make themselves available, precisely in the way that van Manen, Fineman and Gallop envisage, to 332 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 “fertilize theory-making” (van Ryssen 408) and help us think through larger issues at hand than the anecdotes’ surface first seems to imply. Anecdotal Adventures Three times in Wonderful Adventures does Mary Seacole use the word “anecdote / s” (95,133, 138) to describe elements of her own narrative, thus signalling that she is aware of the genre and also suggesting, perhaps, that she knows its rules and the readerly expectations it creates, such as an “anticipation about novelty” (Conley 7)� Mary Kingsley, by contrast, alludes to anecdotes only once and not even in the body of Travels but only in the introduction, where she refers to second-hand stories she is told en route to West Africa without actually re-telling them (TWA 9)� Although Kingsley, unlike Seacole, does not imply that anecdotes are important narrative vehicles in her book, Travels packs them even more densely than Wonderful Adventures� Most of the anecdotes Seacole relates fall into one or more of the following categories: biographical incidents that tend to be embarrassing due to Seacole’s naiveté, 11 disasters narrowly averted, 12 moments of (her or other people’s) bad luck, 13 demonstrations of wit� 14 The more generic (sometimes even anonymous) anecdotes in Wonderful Adventures tend to be memorable moments based on someone’s unusual reaction or great coincidence, either 11 For instance, when she spoils her “light-blue dress” ( TWA 20) during the ascent of a clayey river-bank in Panama or when - while she is trying to cut a figure in the French camp on the Tchernaya - the flour with which she had desperately tried to conceal the skin-disease of her only available horse comes off on her dark riding habit ( TWA 109)� Om reads the “artificial whitening of the grey mare” as a comment on “the ridiculousness of racial performance as well as an attempt to convert a burlesque performance of race into a burlesque performance on race” (92)� 12 Examples include her jumping into the water to retrieve a box of possessions that is being carried away by a flood and having to be dragged out ( TWA 97) or the time when, bringing provisions to the soldiers at the front, she comes “under fire”, is told to take cover, “and with a very undignified and unladylike haste […] had to embrace the earth, and remain there until the same voices would laughingly assure me that the danger was over” ( TWA 136)� 13 Trying to reclaim something of value from a Russian merchant in her debt, whom she finds absent from home, Seacole takes a raven as compensation but the bird is sat on within the hour by a soldier who had accompanied her on her errand ( TWA 163)� 14 The best example is Seacole’s “pointe”, a classical feature of the anecdote (Gossman 149), after having confessed “my prejudice against the Yankees” ( TWA 154) - whose racism upsets her throughout Wonderous Adventures - to a polite and friendly French Prince� She amuses him by retorting to his reminder that he is proud of his partly American ancestry: “I should never have guessed it, Prince! ” (ibid�)� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 333 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 in the comic 15 or the tragic register� 16 Those belonging to the first two types have an effect that has been described as “self-deflation” (Fish 489), or they are perceived as “self-deprecating” (Om 91) as they sometimes come “at the expense of her [Seacole’s] own dignity” (ibid�)� Illustrating beautifully that anecdotes are “social products” (van Manen 243) and an “essentially popular or communal creation” (Gossman 159), many of the tales related in Wonderful Adventures lead to the intradiegetic audience’s expression of mirth (WA 64, 104, 105, 106, 109, 136, 143, 158)� One could argue that the humour in Seacole’s historical anecdotes functions as “a corrective of, or supplement to, existing historical narratives” (Kamps 164), in this case the dire accounts - journalistic or otherwise - of the Crimean war� Seacole explicitly voices her expectation that her readers will join her in “laughing heartily” (WA 24)� This runs counter to Jane Robinson’s verdict that Seacole’s book as a whole is “a glorious advertisement” for its author (Black Nurse 173) or to Howell’s even more critical assessment that “Seacole’s main goal is self-glorification” (122). In fact, presenting herself as someone able to laugh at herself and willing to be laughed at by others is an effective strategy to prevent the audience - whom Seacole is, after all, courting - from resenting her proud celebration of her own good qualities� Framed by an overarching narrative that announces its content as Wonderful Adventures from the start, not all of Seacole’s anecdotes are in themselves adventurous or, for that matter, wonderful� In fact, many of them are rather run-of-the-mill� The two I have chosen as objects of analysis draw on classical topoi of adventure literature and, moreover, share the feature of the double twist, which needs to be seen as a direct product of the anecdote’s “strikingly dramatic three-act structure” (Gossman 149)� The double-twist in both examples invites readers to have two successive laughs: one after the exposition has led to a crisis and the other after the crisis has been resolved or re-framed� Seacole, who reports to have been called (unflatteringly, in her view) “quite a female Ulysses” (WA 11) by her contemporaries, has also been characterised by late twentieth-century scholars as a “‘yellow’ picara” (Fish 486)� That my first example, the hen-coop anecdote, plays with two classical topoi of the heroic as well as the picaresque - the shipwreck and the heroine’s practical cleverness - is thus quite typical of Seacole’s book� I shall be arguing, however, that this anecdote also departs from the conventions that govern picaresque 15 One example is the English soldier who - having been mercilessly taunted by a French ally about the British army’s recent defeat before Sebastopol - happily retaliates with a reference to Waterloo ( TWA 158)� 16 For instance, the two British sergeants who used to be schoolmates, had lost contact, meet again in the trenches, and are killed by the same Russian bullet ( TWA 133)� 334 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 adventure fiction with respect to both topoi� On her way home to Jamaica from her second visit to London, a fire breaks out on board: I dare say it would have resisted all the crew’s efforts to put it out, had not another ship appeared in sight; upon which the fire quietly allowed itself to be extinguished. Although considerably alarmed, I did not lose my senses; but during the time when the contest between fire and water was doubtful, I entered into an amicable arrangement with the ship’s cook, whereby, in consideration of two pounds, which I was not, however, to pay until the crisis arrived - he agreed to lash me on to a large hen-coop� (WA 13-14) Shipwrecks are no rare occurrence in the context of the heroic, both in the Homeric tradition and in the picaresque, but in Wonderful Adventures such a catastrophe does not actually occur� Instead, the narrated self narrowly avoids disaster, and the near-miss is subsequently exploited by the narrating self for comic delivery (“the fire […] allowed itself to be extinguished”). As a heroine, Seacole displays a typical, Roxana-like coolness (“I did not lose my senses”), a way with people, and an ever-open eye for money (“amicable arrangement”; “not […] to pay until the crisis arrived”), all classical features of the picara as a stock character� Yet, her initially smart-sounding idea to use a floating object to save herself from drowning - perhaps in imitation of Ishmael on Queequeg’s waterproof coffin at the end of Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) - might, quite literally, not have held up� Since the shipwreck does not happen, Seacole is never “lashed” to the coop� But, had she been tied to a cage big enough to support her weight, even a small wave could have flipped her over, in which case the coop that was meant to lift her out of the water would have held her under� In staging an almost-but-not-quite shipwreck that displaces the heroic into the comic, and by displaying a near-cleverness that contrasts with true Ulyssean brilliance, Seacole’s hen-coop anecdote draws on two registers of maritime adventure with a difference� In doing so, it facilitates the white British reading public’s acceptance of Seacole� I am not making the claim that she consciously evokes these literary intertexts with her hencoop-anecdote; even less am I suggesting that she made it up to be able to evoke them� But her inclusion of this anecdote into her memoir makes it possible for her audience to believe that she shares their literary canon of adventure fiction as part of the British cultural imaginary. The fact that this happens in an unthreatening manner offers her white audience a sense-making perspective that can conceive of a Creole woman as a full British subject� My second example from Seacole needs to be read against the history of the nineteenth-century gold rush, which inspired people by the tens of thousands to leave behind whatever they had and take up an unconventional life with- Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 335 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 out comforts in the hopes of making their fortunes� Given that, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the gold rush gave rise to its own subgenre of adventure fiction. Early in 1850, during its first wave, Seacole’s brother Edward Grant left Kingston for Panama to make some money on “the great high-road to and from golden Canada” (WA 17)� After her husband’s death, Seacole joined her brother on the isthmus where the Fort Bowen Gold and Silver Mining Company was beginning to exploit the land’s natural resources� During her time in Panama, Seacole came into contact with miners and individual prospectors� I often used to watch them at their work; and would sometimes wander about by myself, thinking it possible that I might tumble across some gold in my rambles� And I once did come upon some heavy yellow material, that brought my heart into my mouth with that strange thrilling delight which all who have hunted for the precious metal understand so well� I think it was very wrong; but I kept the secret of the place from the alcalde [the mayor] and every one [sic! ] else, and filled some bottle with the precious dust, to carry down to Navy Bay� I did not go for some time; but when I did, one of my first visits was to a gold-buyer; and you can imagine my feelings when he coolly laughed, and told me it was some material (I forget its name) very like gold but - valueless� The worst part of it was that, in my annoyance and shame, I threw all I had away, and among it some which I had reason to believe subsequently was genuine� (WA 64) Four more topoi of the picaresque tradition of adventure are activated in the gold anecdote: the heroine’s peripatetic life style (“wander”, “rambles”), the lucky find (“tumble across”, “did come upon”), the enjoyment of personal good fortune overruling moral concerns (“it was very wrong; but”), and the outwitting of others (“kept the secret […] from the alcalde and every one else”)� Yet, as was the case with the hencoop example discussed above, these topoi only provide the anecdote with its point of departure. A first twist takes Seacole, with the realisation of her own ignorance (“coolly laughed”), to disappointment (“annoyance”, “shame”) at having mistaken yellow mica for gold� The second twist moves her even further down this road when she retrospectively realises that she might have thrown away genuine gold because she had been trusting enough to believe the gold-buyer when she should have questioned his judgment and / or motive for declaring her dust “valueless”� According to Clifton Fadiman, “[b]iographers and historians value anecdotes for their power to reveal the true character of persons or times which are hard to capture in any other manner” (xxi)� Seacole, again as part of the endeavour to charm her audience, expertly uses this genre characteristic� On the one hand, she captures the phenomenon ‘gold rush’ as a time and place where one cannot trust anyone� On the other hand - and this, I would claim, is the 336 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 gold anecdote’s “sense-making perspective” (Loveless 26) -, she exploits the anecdote’s generic ability to carry“symbolic value” (Gossmann 157)� In doing so, she stages herself as someone not only easily troubled even by minor breaches of honourable behaviour but also - due to her “love to be of service” and her desire to lead a life of “usefulness” (WA 32) - as someone unfit for this type of adventurer’s life� In a nutshell, in the hen-coop anecdote, the double twist’s first laugh acknowledges Seacole’s un-Ulyssean would-be cleverness, the second is a product of relief, as it could have cost her her life but, due to the unheroic almost-shipwreck, it did not come to that� The laugh in reaction to the gold-anecdote’s first twist is a reaction to Seacole’s naiveté and the second a reaction to this naiveté’s turning out to be even greater than previously exposed� Mary Kingsley’s Travels is not only more than twice the length of Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures, it also contains far more anecdotes, most of them funny� A few of them are told to Kingsley by others and repeated by her, 17 but in most of them she stars personally� If it is true that “Kingsley invented her narrating scientific persona as ‘caricature,’ as ‘a caricature she formed for her own purposes’” (Harper 186), then the anecdote plays a pivotal role in this construction� There are anecdotes in Travels that poke fun at Kingsley’s clumsiness, which surprises 18 and / or entertains 19 the Africans she meets, others that emphasise how she escapes a potentially lethal situation through luck 20 or pluck, 21 some in which her shrewdness or insight into the psychology of others is being showcased, 22 others in which she reacts with remarkable 17 A good example of this is the tragic anecdote of the young agent newly arrived in Africa who is shocked back to Europe by finding his predecessor’s corpse being consumed by “a considerable quantity of rats. And most of the flies in West Africa” (Kingsley, TWA 53)� 18 An example would be Kingsley’s literal “dropping in” through the roof of a hut ( CCC 134)� 19 One anecdote describes how some African villagers gather in anticipation, “seeing we were becoming amusing again” ( TWA 90), and are rewarded by Kingsley’s sliding, head-first, off a rock and landing in a shrub. At another occasion, her teaching herself how to steer a canoe first has some French missionaries and their African charges fear for her life and then in stitches ( TWA 111-113)� 20 The most famous example is probably when Kingsley falls into an elephant trap and, thanks to “the blessing of a good thick skirt” ( TWA 167), is caught on the sharpened poles rather than impaled� 21 The account that begins “I never hurt a leopard intentionally” ( TWA 319) ends with Kingsley’s scaring off the wild cat which had attacked a village dog by throwing a wellaimed jug that hits it right between the eyes� 22 For instance, when Kingsley insists that her translator tell a proud chief that she had heard his village was known as a “thief town” ( TWA 176-77) but was willing to suspend judgment until she had formed her own opinion� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 337 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 sang-froid, 23 and again others that are built around a misunderstanding� 24 The first of Kingsley’s anecdotes I have chosen for analysis belongs to the category ‘saved by luck or pluck’. It is taken from “Voyage Down Coast”, chapter five of Travels, and tells of Kingsley’s adventure in a tidal mangrove swamp where her small dug-out canoe has been trapped by the receding waters� If you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me, you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your attention is directed to dealing with an ‘at home’ to crocodiles and mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime around you� What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of absurdity, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose, by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps� Twice this chatty little incident, as Lady MacDonald would call it, has happened to me, but never again if I can help it� On one occasion, the last, a mighty Silurian, as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance� I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled to the very middle of the lagoon, hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance� Presumably it was, for no one did it again� I should think that crocodile was eight feet long; but don’t go and say I measured him, or that this is my outside measurement for crocodiles� I have measured them when they have been killed by other people, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty-one feet odd� This was just a pushing young creature who had not learnt manners� (CCC 89) By combining heroic deed with anti-heroic description, by evoking the ideal of Victorian femininity and then removing one of its supporting pillars (passivity / helplessness), and by insisting, in unusual circumstances, on the importance of a stiff upper lip and manners, this anecdote stages an irresistibly funny scene of considerable theatricality, which “tells something particular while really addressing the general or the universal” (van Manen 246)� Animals described as humans (“no one”) are its principal actors - the crocodile, who makes such a dramatic entry, is helped to a comic exit and gives an ex- 23 For example, when Kingsley, hosted for the night by a Fan village, finds a tied bag suspended inside her hut, opens it, curiously tips the contents into her hat and, finding human toes, eyes, ears, and a hand, laconically comments “the hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled” ( TWA 170)� 24 The lack of grammatical gender in many African languages (and the Victorian presumption that a traveler in Africa would be male) inspire an agent, who has heard of a European’s arrival, to write: “Dear Old Man, you must be in a deuce of a mess after the tornado� Just help yourself to a set of my dry things […] and then come over here” ( TWA 288)� 338 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 ample to “his friends”, who decide not “to repeat the performance” - while Kingsley, with gusto, delivers her own supporting role in this scene as ‘lady out of place’� Several interesting devices are at work here� By employing the second person, the narrating self invites her readers’ identification with the narrated self. Despite it being quite clear that Kingsley is anything but “a mere ordinary person”, she then confirms the common ground (which her use of ‘you’ asserts) by adding, in an ethos-building gesture, “like me”� A metaphor follows comparing the swamped canoe, visited by “mangrove flies and crocodiles” that “endeavour[] to improve our acquaintance”, to a drawing room in which one is “at home” to callers� By anthropomorphising animals that are most likely to inspire annoyance, disgust, or fear, Kingsley, building further on her invitation to readers to identify, offers a conceit that comments critically on London society’s pestering blood-suckers and poikilotherms but also on “what little time you have over” as a lady once everybody has been attended to� Next, the narrating self expands the circle of the allegedly like-minded by suggesting that “Lady MacDonald” - wife to the first Commissioner and Consul General of the Niger Coast Protectorate (Birkett, Adventuress 27) - would concur that “this chatty little incident” was, if mildly amusing, perfectly common-place� Yet, the whole assumption that heroine, reader, and the incarnation of colonial society all share the same euphemistic assessment of this scene is ironically undercut because Kingsley’s narrating self is well aware that hardly any Victorian lady’s life-choices ever brought her nose-tosnout with a crocodile� In the Silurian anecdote, humour derives both from what happens and from how it is told� Obviously, things are going wrong: not only is Kingsley stuck in an unwholesome environment, and not only will this situation continue for hours until the tide frees her� As Kingsley, the narrator, reproaches Kingsley, the heroine, she builds pathos by drawing on one of her audience’s possible opinions of her journey in general, this adventure in particular, and her person especially (West Africa? ! Why? Mangrove swamp? Avoid� Crocodiles? How frightful! Kingsley? Fool�)� Even worse: as the narrating self lets on, this is happening for the second time� She should have known better and the fact that she got it wrong again prompts her to paint herself as “a colossal ass”, thus momentarily denying herself the status as a human and - due to her use of slang - as a lady� This judgment of herself as someone who blunders because she goes far beyond what is called for also finds expression in her idiosyncratic addition to an established idiom� According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘to paint (or to guild) the lily’ means “to embellish excessively, to add ornament where none is needed” (“lily, n� and adj�”)� While others prone Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 339 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 to hyperbole stop there, Kingsley keeps going� While the transitive ‘to adorn’ means “to provide with an ornament or ornaments; to decorate or embellish (with something)” (“adorn, v�”, my italics), ‘adorning the rose’ is not idiomatic� Yet the newly coined phrase - since it adds further to what is already considered excessive - is not the worst metaphor for what Kingsley does in general by narrating her two voyages� Some of the Silurian anecdote’s power comes from Kingsley’s subtle use of a topos of adventure to which she gives a comic twist by switching the hero’s gender in her rendition of the mytheme ‘knight slaying the dragon’: paddle instead of lance, clip instead of goring, stand-off instead of domination, “pushing young creature” instead of an emblem of sin, teaching “manners” instead of destruction (all the dead and measured crocodiles “have been killed by other people”), a lesson (for Kingsley as much as for the crocodile) instead of death� Yet, this parody of a heroic stock scene does not, and therein lies the genius of this anecdote, come at the cost of losing the association with individual courage� Even though the heroic and the anti-heroic are inextricably linked here, and even though Kingsley draws on her talent for outrageous understatement throughout, the Silurian anecdote still conveys a sense of remarkable nerve� As a genre, anecdote has a connection to myth (Gossmann 159), and evoking the myth of St George in this particular example ensures, not just for a Victorian audience, that the individual courage Kingsley’s narrated self displays comes with nationalist overtones� Kingsley’s use of “slang vocabulary” and her generally “racy style” (Birkett, Adventuress 82), which attracted some contemporaries’ criticism 25 while making her “vivid, entertaining and evocative” prose famous (xxiv), can both be seen to advantage in the Silurian anecdote. Yet for the delivery of her climax, Kingsley - quite fittingly for a scene that borrows ironically from the heroic âventiure - chooses metre� At the same time, the type of metre for which she opts also subverts or rebels against the evoked genre’s rules since Kingsley does not go for iambic heroic couplets in her supreme moment of oratio vincta - “and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle” - but arranges three perfect dactyls that are ushered in by an anacrusis and followed by a trochee� Again, if on the syntactic level this time, this is a not a bad pars pro toto to stand in for Kingsley’s employment of the anecdote in her overall narrative strategy� Perhaps Birkett is right in surmising that Kingsley made people laugh “to counter future criticism” (Adventuress 19)� Both comical self-reproach and 25 An anonymous review in the Dial from 16 th March 1897 judged Travels to be “marred by course flippancy and jocular smartness of a low masculine type” (cited in Birkett, Adventuress 82)� 340 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 anticipating a critical audience’s possible reaction would fit this impulse to protect herself� In any case, tensions between conventions of genre, gender, and style are responsible for a number of comic effects in the Silurian anecdote, which can only unfold its potential because Kingsley, the adventurer, survived the encounter so that Kingsley, the narrator, could tell the tale� Were one to position the four anecdotes analysed here on a spectrum between “raw, unpolished” and “already been worked over and made into literature” (Gossman 163), Seacole’s hen-coop would be closest to the former end, followed by her gold anecdote and Kingsley’s encounter with the Silurian� My fourth and final anecdotal example is closest to what one might call ‘the literary’ end of the spectrum, although its oral pedigree seems still intact and there is no indication that it was lifted from a collection� It also has the strongest claim to being used as a “methodological device” used by the text as a whole “to reflect, to think” (van Manen 232). Even though “[b]orrowed” (Gossman 163) anecdotes are rather rare in Kingsley’s Travels, my last specimen, taken from chapter XII on “Fetish”, belongs to this type. It plays out against the background of a specific topos of colonial adventure, namely ‘hunting for big game’� In contrast to Baroness Blixen a generation later, Kingsley - perhaps for class-related reasons as much as due to personal aversion - never mentions having herself been a member of a shooting party� It is therefore both unsurprising and in line with her general attitude to animals that the only hunting anecdote she offers is second-hand: I heard an account the other day of a representative of Her Majesty in Africa who went out for a day’s antelope shooting� There were plenty of antelope about, and he stalked them with great care; but always, just before he got within shot of the game, they saw something and bolted� Knowing he and the boy behind him had been making no sound and could not have been seen, he stalked on, but always with the same result; until happening to look round, he saw the boy behind him was supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular, by steadfastly holding aloft the consular flag. Well, if you go hunting the African idea with the flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over you, you will similarly get a very poor bag� (Kingsley, TWA 235) As mentioned above, among the anecdotes in Travels, this hunting scene is unusual because Kingsley herself does not feature in it� It is less uncommon that she draws an explicit moral from the tale� The anecdote proper (what happens) and Kingsley’s narration (how it is told) should be discussed separately, and I shall start with the latter� In her function as narrator, Kingsley opens the narrative frame with the generic formula “I heard an account the other day”� This serves three functions: Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 341 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 it signals that this anecdote is an (at least) twice-told tale; it suggests that it is not authorised by Kingsley in quite the same manner as the anecdotes based on events she experienced herself; and it keeps Kingsley’s source in the dark� Kingsley closes the narrative frame by offering, in a metaphor that compares the failure of two colonial practices, her own interpretation� Hunting for exotic animals (which Kingsley herself does not practice) is like hunting for “the African idea” (which she does)� And their tertium comparationis, a “very poor bag” - that is, a meagre yield to the respective endeavour -, is only to be expected if hunters (of one or the other) go about their business in a fundamentally flawed manner. In the case of the unsuccessful stalking of game, it is the “consular flag”, presumably fluttering in the wind, that disperses the antelope� In the case of unsuccessful ethnographical research, it is “the flag of your own religion or opinions”, displayed in a manner perceived as dominating, superior, perhaps frightening, that chases away informants who might otherwise provide insights into African customs, beliefs, practices etc� for which the somewhat obscure ‘idea’ seems to stand� That the anecdote’s protagonists are kept anonymous helps to prepare this secondary reading, since depersonalising leads to abstraction, which in turn makes it easier to see how a concrete event that happened to specific individuals can stand in for a general and much bigger problem of colonial hierarchies. While the real flag is “held steadfastly aloft” and the metaphorical one is “floating ostentatiously”, both are symptoms of the tension between colonisation and successful communication� Kingsley’s metaphor suggests that success in ethnography (the parallel to shooting and killing antelope in game-hunting) would be to learn first-hand from Africans about themselves and their cultures� But matters are more complicated because in the anecdote proper there are not just a European hunter (who stands for the ethnographer), his flag (which represents European religion / opinions), and the antelope (which stands for “the African idea”) since - in addition to these - the anecdote proper also sports an African� For the boy, however, there is no structural equivalent in Kingsley’s metaphorical reading� This is not the anecdote’s fault, of course� Instead, failing to provide a complement for the boy in her metaphor is all the more remarkable because it erases from Kingsley’s own interpretation exactly what she prides herself on delivering to her reading public in general - a consideration of the African point of view - and thus points to a true blind spot of the ‘telling’ rather than the ‘told’� While the protagonists of the hunting anecdote are anonymous, they are still marked by function and ethnicity, which suggests their relation to each other� It is clear that “a representative of Her Majesty in Africa” - one of many, the indefinite article suggests, to whom this could have happened - is white. 342 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 It is also implied that the servant he brings with him on this adventure is not� “[B]oy” could be a marker of racist discourse’s refusal to acknowledge that a male African servant could be a full adult, or it could simply denote young age as well as male sex. In the first case, it is impossible for the “boy” to be white; in the second, it is highly unlikely that a white child or youth would join an unrelated Victorian colonial official on a hunting expedition on his own� It is equally clear that, in the context of colonialism, the two characters occupy two very different positions and that their relationship is structured by several hierarchies� The imperialist framework is also suggested by the fact that the boy is always “behind” the man, signifying his supportive capacity� These hierarchies of age (man / boy), race (white / black), social position (colonial employer/ colonised servant), and function (hunter/ assistant) are further underlined by the fact that the anecdote’s opening half, in its use of pronouns, suggests that the white man is alone (“he stalked”, “he got within shot”, “knowing he”, my italics), which has the effect of (falsely) establishing him as the undisputed protagonist. That the word “boy”, first used at the end of line four, sits at the anecdote’s exact centre - preceded and followed by 56 words (from “I” to “the” and from “behind” to “flag”) - might seem like a weak argument for claiming him the true hero of the tale, since it depends on excluding Kingsley’s comment from the anecdote proper� But even if exact symmetry is discarded as a stylistic device that might suggest the boy’s importance also on the semantic level, his first mention is without a doubt the turning point. Here, the explanation for the anecdote’s enigmatic first half (why do the antelope flee? ) begins to unfold - not, however, without introducing new mysteries� Everything, in this adventure gone awry, hinges on the questions ‘who sees what? ’ and ‘why? ’. The colonial official understands that the antelope see “something” that makes them run� Although uncertain of what they “saw”, he knows that “he and the boy […] could not have been seen”, presumably because they are crouching in high grass� When he decides to “look round”, he “sees” the flag and understands what scared the animals. Yet, a few things remain ambiguous to the end� And this is the point at which reading this anecdote, I contend, profits from the fundamental shift practiced by Jane Galopp and described by Nathalie Loveless, since anecdotal theory “offers a displacement from a practice of reading for the known (answers) to a reading that takes as its charge the mark of the unknown (that is, one that is drawn towards the interesting questions)” (Loveless 35). In the specific case of the game-hunting anecdote, the interesting questions are: Why does the boy hold up the flag? What can his act imply? Who is the story’s source? And what are the implications of the two possible answers to that third question? Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 343 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 At first glance, the anecdote seems to narrate the moment of a ‘cultural misunderstanding’� This is based on the assumption that the boy holds up the flag because he thinks it his duty and believes to be serving his colonial master (whose culture does betray a penchant for flags, after all) by announcing his status at all times� This reading is informed by the interpretation of the boy’s action that forms part of the anecdote (“supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular”) and that could be the official’s, or that of the person who told the anecdote to Kingsley, or Kingsley’s own� If the anecdote tells a tale of ‘cultural misunderstanding’, two different answers to the question about the act’s implications present themselves� 1) That, in the eyes of the colonised, the colonisers do so many absurd things (i� e� seemingly putting value where clearly there is none or causing harm without need) that flying a flag during a hunt does not seem especially puzzling or silly� 2) Since status is equally important in African and European societies, the boy understands that the consular flag signifies his master’s status and that his only mistake is to assume (incorrectly) that the official would rather have his status announced to the natural world (i� e� without an audience that counts) than hunt successfully� It is also possible, however, to read this anecdote as a story about an act of ‘deliberate resistance’. After all, the boy could have held up the flag with the clear intention of scaring the antelope away, in an attempt to sabotage the official’s hunt and thus, ultimately, to thwart the mighty colonial master. If this were the case, a completely different implication would present itself, namely that the boy could not have picked a better tool for his act of rebellion against the Empire’s agent. The ingenious element in choosing the flag is that the very instrument of insurgence itself will most likely protect the culprit� After all, punishing a colonial subject for flying the British consul’s flag would mean admitting that there are things more important than representing “Her Majesty in Africa”� In fact, conceding that there might be situations in which “supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular” is not the first priority would run counter to imperialism’s grand récit altogether� According to van Manen, an anecdote can be used as a methodological device “to describe something indirectly when this phenomenon resists direct description” (243)� Above, I also touched upon the point that the anecdote, as a genre, is by definition ineluctably unverifiable. To end my analysis, I would now like to connect these two points in order to try and further think through the game hunting anecdote as a story about colonial relations of power. Kingsley’s re-told tale stages unverifiability on the level of histoire in a scene that permanently suspends the attempt to determine whether the 344 s ylvia M ieszKowsKi 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 boy’s action is deliberately subversive or not� This is mirrored on the level of discours since it is equally impossible to tell where the origin of this story lies� Ultimately, there are only two possible sources of origin for the game-hunting anecdote: the British official and the African servant. For several reasons it seems unlikely that the anecdote originates with the latter� Had his act been based on a ‘cultural misunderstanding’, that is, unintentionally disruptive, the story would make him look, at best, lacking in experience or judgment and, at worst, stupid� Neither implicit self-characterisation seems plausible as a motivation for narrativising the event and sharing the anecdote� Had it been a deliberate moment of sabotage, the very énonciation would take away the boy’s brilliant protection against retaliation since using the consular flag as the tool of subversion can only shield him from punishment as long as intentionality is deniable� If the colonial official were the anecdote’s origin, his willingness to put himself at the butt-end of a joke would testify to a sense of humour� Especially since he does not only report himself outwitted as far as histoire is concerned but also with respect to discours. He is, after all, first being put into a position from which he cannot very well punish the boy for frustrating his personal huntsman’s ambition without undermining the ideology that underpins the imperial project (British dignity and its representation is paramount); and he is, then, coaxed by the story’s sheer irresistibility to become the teller of a tale that has him outsmarted by someone he considers his inferior in every sense� This justifies, I think, invoking Fineman’s point that the anecdote has the power to “introduce[] an opening into the teleological […] narration of beginning, middle, and end” (61) and prompts my claim that Kingsley’s hunting anecdote is a paradigmatic “hole” in the “whole” (ibid�) of the logic that underlies imperialism� The event’s “rooted[ness] in the real” (57) is too strongly tied to the colonial imaginary for the story not to be narrativised within the symbolic� At the same time, the anecdote’s beginning (the mystery of the fleeing antelope), middle (the discovered flag-flying), and end (Kingsley’s metaphorical reading) cannot contain its semiosis, which boils over the brim, undermining any notion of British racial superiority to justify colonial exploitation� This has implications for Kingsley’s metaphorical reading of the game-hunting anecdote, which she reads as a story with strong parallels to her own position as a self-proclaimed ethnographer, since her blind spot - which points, I think, to her own racist beliefs - testifies further to the anecdote’s uncontainable nature as well as its epistemological reach� Adventure as Anecdote: The (‘Talling’) Tales of Two Maries 345 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0015 Conclusion Perhaps none of the anecdotes in Wonderful Adventures and only a few of those in Travels are outrageous enough to qualify individually as ‘tall tales’� But the cumulative effect of narrating their adventures anecdotally takes Seacole and Kingsley, who were each in their own right travelling by choice as “an unprotected female” (WA 40), well off the beaten track also in terms of their narrative projects� That Seacole struck out for various frontier locations before making for a war zone and that Kingsley headed straight for African territory unchartered by Europeans adds to their humorous anecdotal adventures’ ‘talling’ effect� I illustrated which topoi of different strands of adventure literature and which genre characteristics of the anecdote the two Maries activate and to what effect� I further hope to have shown that the “ethnographic gaze” (Hawthorne 316) which Hawthorne grants to Seacole is not only shared by Kingsley but that both writers’ anecdotes also have strong “auto-ethnographic dimensions” (Pratt, “Arts” 35)� While Om might be right in claiming that Seacole’s account is more a figuration of exceptionality than of transgression (78), analysis of her anecdotes lends weight to Hawthorne’s claim that the combination of humour and hubris “creates a unique voice that disrupts the ‘master narratives’ of both the literary and imperial authority systems” (315-316)� While there is no denying that Kingsley had no interest in bringing down British colonial rule in Africa and thought it justified by racist theories, at least one of her anecdotes rather undermines these theories by pointing to some of Kingsley’s own blind spots� Both Wonderful Adventures and Travels in West Africa are replete with anecdotes, most of which are (flatly) humorous accounts of specific and sometimes trivial events (van Rhyssen 408). 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New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004� ---, editor� Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1994� Salih, Sarah� “‘A gallant heart to the empire’: Autoethnography and Imperial Identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures�” Philological Quarterly, vol� 83, no� 2, 2004, pp� 171-195� ---� “Chronology�” Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands� London: Penguin, 2005, pp� ix-xiii� Seacole, Mary� Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands� London: Penguin, 2005� Staring-Derks, et al� “Mary Seacole: Global Nurse Extraordinare�” Journal of Advanced Nursing, vol� 71, no� 3, 2014, pp� 514-525� “To the Royal Geographical Society�” Punch, vol� 104, 10 June 1893, p� 269� https: / / archive� org/ details/ punchvol104a105lemouoft/ page/ n309/ mode/ 2 up� Accessed 25 Sept� 2020� van Manen, Max� “By the Light of Anecdote�” Phenomenology + Pedagogy, vol� 7, 1989, pp� 232-253� van Rhyssen, Stefaan� Review of Anecdotal Theory, by Jane Galopp� Leonardo, vol� 37, no� 5, 2004, pp� 407-408� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 M arTina K übler Life as Adventure: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road Calling Zora Zora Neale Hurston’s call to adventure comes in the form of “an old sow-hog” that “taught [her] how to walk” (22)� When her mother leaves baby Zora alone on the kitchen floor with a piece of corn bread in hand, an undetected pig enters the house to nuzzle for breadcrumbs and other delicacies� The animal’s arrival convinces sedentary baby Zora - who, at one year old, still “would not get on with the walking business” - that she “really ought to try” (ibid�)� The movement sparked by the sow subsequently instills in Zora a lifelong yearning for the open road and the adventures that beckon in the distance: With no more suggestions from the sow or anybody else, it seems that I just took to walking and kept the thing a’going� The strangest thing about it was that once I found the use of my feet, they took to wandering� I always wanted to go� I would wander off into the woods all alone, following some inside urge to go places� This alarmed my mother a great deal� She used to say that she believed a woman who was an enemy of hers had sprinkled “travel dust” around the doorstep the day I was born� 1 (22-23) Most familiar from her second novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), African American author, anthropologist, and ethnographer, is known today as a major voice in American modernism and one of the most prominent representatives of the Harlem Renaissance� During her lifetime, however, much of her work was not recognized by her contemporaries as her writing focused more on African American folk traditions and “the complex social systems of rural black society than on the influence or oppression of white culture” (“Hurston” n. p.). Her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road was written at the height of her career, but, ever since its publication in 1942, readers and critics alike have puzzled over its form and genre� For one, it features a two-part organization into personal history and ethnography: after the first nine chapters detailing her childhood, youth, and 1 I refrain from marking nonstandard spelling and punctuation in Hurston’s autobiography� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 350 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 education as an anthropologist, her autobiography turns to seven chapters of what can best be described as analytical essays on general topics such as love and religion� Other unusual attributes of Hurston’s autobiography include its mix of orality and literacy - she mixes Black folklore and erudite analysis - and its lack of confessions of her inner selfhood: she conspicuously omits any mention of certain stereotypical rites of passage - first love, for instance - and gives relatively little insight into the turmoil of personality development apart from her intellectual growth� Most notable, and most controversial, however, is her complete reticence on all incidents of personal or systemic racism, an omission so blatant that Hurston’s autobiography has notoriously been discredited as being untruthful - a question to which I return later on� 2 Strikingly, a number of critics have touched on Dust Tracks’ use of topoi familiar from adventure writing, but none have done so explicitly� Ann L� Rayson, for instance, in her evaluation of Hurston’s place in the tradition of African American life writing, points to medieval grail adventures when she observes that, “more than any other black autobiographer, [Hurston] sets herself up for special mention among men” (42) in that “she portrays herself as a reincarnation of the Melvillian isolato on a continual search for an unknown kind of holy grail” (42-43)� Other critics have referred to Hurston’s autobiographical persona as a picara, stressed the theme of wandering, and called her life a quest or even a mythical journey� 3 It is in this vein that my contribution ventures to take the perspective of adventure writing seriously� In the first part of what follows, I will attempt to identify tropes of adventure in Dust Tracks on a Road, and I will inquire about the benefits of this proposed kinship for our reception of Hurston’s exceptional autobiography� Indeed, taking into account Hurston’s own training as an anthropologist and renowned ethnographer, it is, I suggest, no surprise that she would turn to the tropes of mythological intertexts, thus ultimately modelling her own life on the hero’s journey. As Rayson confirms, “[t]here is […] an overt mythic framework built into her autobiography”, with “[h]er chapter titles suggest[ing] something of this mythic, questing element in her prose, the first few being ‘My Birthplace’, ‘My Folks’, ‘I Get Born’, ‘The Inside Search’, ‘Figure and Fancy’, and ‘Wandering’” (40). To me, Hurston’s affinity to myth and her profession as an anthropologist suggest a reading of her autobiography with special attention to Joseph Campbell’s explication of the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a text which posits adventure as a central struc- 2 For a discussion of the ‘truthfulness’ of Dust Tracks on a Road, see, for instance, Fox- Genovese and Walker, for questions relating to genre, see Robey� 3 See Robey 670-671, and Rayson, who notes: “In her autobiography, like Hughes and McKay, Hurston becomes another version of the traditional picaro” (41)� The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 351 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 tural element of myth� In spite of adventure’s complex history as a term and as a concept, and in spite of Campbell’s disputed structuralist simplification of diverse material, it is nevertheless remarkable how many of Campbell’s mythical archetypes operate in Hurston’s autobiography� In a second step, I inquire into the relationship between autobiography and adventure writing in general in order to ask what its reliance on tropes of adventure means for Hurston’s text, particularly with respect to its place in the canon of African American autobiography� The Heroine’s Journey When the sow is on the loose and shifts baby Zora’s life from sedentary to “a’going”, from the kitchen inside to the woods outside, the heroine’s adventure story begins by invoking an essential topos of adventure writing� The coming of the sow and Zora’s long-awaited, fateful first steps represent the beginning of Zora’s adventure; her inclination to wander is a veritable “call to adventure” (Campbell 53) initiating the heroine’s journey that is to become her life� Following Campbell, Zora’s “always want[ing] to go” indicates that “destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his [sic] spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (ibid�)� In an important distinction between narratives of adventure and the more goal-driven quest romance, von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher note that quests pursue a predetermined goal whereas the hunt for adventure is characterized by an indeterminate longing for an exceptional experience (5)� An aimless departure driven by the presumed potential for adventure and a cursory desire for unknown, faraway places is precisely what Hurston’s mother refers to when she laments her daughter’s having been sprinkled in “travel dust”� It is this starting point from which I shall begin to examine the tropes of adventure writing in Dust Tracks on a Road� But how does Zora’s adventure continue after the porcine “herald” (Campbell 47) inspires her wandering at an early age? In addition to the sow, Hurston also endows the mystic power of her own exceptional mind with a heralding function: at no more than seven years old, Zora foresees twelve predicaments awaiting her over the course of her lifetime: “I don’t know when the visions began� […] Like clearcut stereopticon slides, I saw twelve scenes flash before me, each one held until I had seen it well in every detail, and then be replaced by another� […] I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come” (Hurston 41)� Thus, by showcasing the most harrowing events of her life, Zora’s visions work as a preview of the challenges she must overcome on her adventurous path� Just like Odysseus’s, Zora’s trials are twelve in 352 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 number, and the fact that they are revealed to her beforehand testifies to the fact that adventures are usually simultaneously contingent and, as Susanne Gödde argues, providential (37)� This is also a typical adventure motif in Bakhtin, who - referring to the Greek romance as the origin of the “adventure chronotope” (100) - summarizes that “[m]eetings with unexpected friends or enemies play an important role, as do fortune-telling, prophecy, prophetic dreams, premonitions and sleeping potions” (88)� Campbell furthermore adds that the herald usually “mark[s] a new period, a new stage, in the biography” (61), adding that “[t]hat which has to be faced, and is somehow profoundly familiar to the unconscious - though unknown, surprising, and even frightening to the conscious personality - makes itself known; and what formerly was meaningful may become strangely emptied of value” (ibid�)� This effect of alienation and defamiliarization is likewise picked up in Dust Tracks when Zora muses that her “childhood ended with the coming of the pronouncements” and that subsequently, even though she “played, fought and studied with other children”, she “always stood apart within” (Hurston 43)� When she adds that a “cosmic loneliness was [her] shadow” (44), she indicates that to follow the call to adventure is henceforth no longer merely an option but a necessity, a burden, and a task that must be fulfilled by the valiant heroine� Zora asks herself “why me? Why? Why? ” (ibid�) and admits: “Oh, how I cried out to be just as everybody else! But the voice said no� I must go where I was sent� The weight of the commandment laid heavy and made me moody at times” (43)� Nevertheless, in spite of Zora’s archetypal “refusal of the call” (Campbell 54), set forth she must� Thus, in a combination of an active hunt for the unknown and supernatural providence, the autobiographical persona’s propensity for adventure is established early on, and Hurston begins to paint herself as a stereotypical adventurer� It is therefore no wonder that other features of adventure writing are evoked throughout Dust Tracks� Elements underscoring Zora’s strong call to adventure are particularly striking and can be found in many scenes from Zora’s childhood days� When Campbell ascertains that “[t]ypical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny” (47), for instance, it is not only Zora’s visions that come to mind� Notably, the dark forest as a space particularly suited for all things adventurous is also mentioned when Zora recalls that she “would wander off into the woods all alone” (Hurston 22)� In an uncanny resemblance to Campbell’s archetype, a great tree also plays an important role in Zora’s journey: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 353 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 I had a stifled longing. I used to climb to the top of one of the huge Chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate, and look out over the world� The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon� Every way I turned, it was there, and the same distance away� Our house then, was the center of the world� It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like� The daring of the thing held me back for a while, but the thing became so urgent that I showed it to my friend, Carrie Roberts, and asked her to go with me� She agreed� (Hurston 27) Reminiscent of the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Zora’s evocation of the horizon is likewise an adequate representation of her desire for adventure as an indeterminate, ever-fleeting thing: just like the horizon that can never be reached, Zora chases adventure for the sake of adventure� Importantly, however, Zora’s “urge to go places” and her dream of chasing the horizon are brought back to earth with a jolt once Christmastime draws near� One night at the dinner table, their father asks Zora and her siblings what they want for Christmas, and Zora hopes to leverage her Christmas wish so that her “present could take [her] to the end of the world” (29)� When it is Zora’s turn to speak, she boldly tells her father: “I want a fine black riding horse with white leather saddle and bridles” (ibid�), a demand so immodest that her father replies furiously: “It’s a sin and a shame! Lemme tell you something right now, my young lady; you ain’t white” (ibid�)� Her father’s last utterance is marked with an asterisk� At the bottom of the page, the reader finds a note by Hurston, the author and ethnographer of African American folklore, explaining: “That is a Negro saying that means ‘Don’t be too ambitious� You are a Negro and they are not meant to have but so much�’” (ibid�)� This exchange between young Zora and her father is indicative of the additional questions that must be addressed in a contribution that attempts to read an autobiography by a Black woman as a tale of adventure: Does Hurston’s account, by interrelating autobiography with adventure, implicitly engage with race? If the active hunt for adventure is a constitutive element of adventurous heroes, does this primacy of agency preclude people that “ain’t white”, i� e� African American heroes and heroines, from adventure, especially in a time of rampant racism such as the Jim Crow US? And, if so, what are the implications of writing a Black woman’s life as an adventure nevertheless? I will return to these questions in the second part of this contribution� Despite her initial refusal of the call - she would prefer to be like everybody else - and her father’s caution against being too ambitious, Zora accepts the call when her visions occur� She learns that to wander, err, and struggle is her special providence� It is no wonder, then, that Dust Tracks continues to 354 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 mythologize Hurston’s life story, making use of further typical adventure topoi� Following Campbell’s structural analysis of the hero’s journey, we learn that “[f]or those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass” (63). As it happens, Hurston’s story introduces just such a figure but, as her autobiography stages her entire life as a heroine’s journey, Zora’s first helper enters the scene at her earliest trial possible: at the time of her birth� When her mother gives birth in their remote house, “there was no grown folks close around when Mama’s water broke” (Hurston 20)� With Zora’s father off at work and “Aunt Judy, the mid-wife, […] gone to Woodbridge” (ibid�), her mother gives birth with no help whatsoever� After the delivery, she is weak and barely conscious, lying on the floor with the newborn Zora, desperate for help. Out of nowhere, Zora’s first unlikely helper appears: Help came from where she [Hurston’s mother] never would have thought to look for it� A white man of many acres and things, who knew the family well, […] was there a few minutes after I was born� […] He followed the noise and then he saw how things were, and being the kind of a man he was, he took out his Barlow Knife and cut the navel cord, then he did the best he could about other things� When the mid-wife […] arrived about an hour later, there was a fire in the stove and plenty of hot water on� I had been sponged off in some sort of a way, and Mama was holding me in her arms� (20-21) In a noticeable similarity to the “old man” type in Campbell’s monomyth, Zora’s first helper is likewise a “robust, grey-haired, white man” (Hurston 30). More important than his age, however, is the fact that he is white, and thus his visiting and helping a Black family would have been decidedly unlikely in the late nineteenth-century US under common circumstances� Nevertheless, that the beginning of Zora’s life-adventure is aided by a well-meaning white man is not only typical for Hurston’s famously conciliatory attitude toward race relations; the ensuing unlikely mentorship between the white man and the Black girl also endows the heroine with the sense “that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world” (Campbell 66)� In other words, Zora’s being brought into the world by a white man contributes to her status as “a chosen, highly favored child” (Harris 182), to her role as an extraordinary heroine destined for adventure� When Campbell writes that “[w]hat such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny” (ibid�), this is mirrored in the fact that the old The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 355 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 white man keeps protecting Zora throughout her early years, teaching her a number of valuable lessons that will remain with her for the rest of her life� For instance, when Zora is about nine years old, he prepares her for adverse circumstances by enhancing her resilience, as “he would come by and tease [her] and then praise [her] for not crying” (Hurston 30)� The old white man soon gives young Zora more explicit advice on how to deal with enemies� He instructs her “not to let your head start more than your behind can stand” and to never “fight three kids at a time” (31). He offers more of his rules of combat by reminding Zora to “never let nobody spit on you or kick you” and “never threaten nobody you don’t aim to fight” (ibid.). With these words of fistfight wisdom, the old man once again acts as a helper, as he, as it were, “suppl[ies] the amulets and advice that the hero will require” (Campbell 66)� The helper also instructs Zora - whom he affectionately calls Snidlits - with respect to her particular position as a young Black girl: “Snidlits, don’t be a [n-word],” he would say to me over and over�* “[N-words] lie and lie! Any time you catch folks lying, they are skeered of something� Lying is dodging� People with guts don’t lie� […] Truth is a letter from courage� I want you to grow guts as you go along� So don’t you let me hear of you lying� […]” (Hurston 30-31) Even though Hurston has once again furnished the white man’s statement with an asterisk, explaining in the footnote that the n-word “used in this sense does not mean race� It means a weak, contemptible person of any race” (30), it is nevertheless remarkable that the use of the racist n-word as a synonym for “weak” and “contemptible” is in stark contrast with the ideal hero or heroine as strong, honorable, and extraordinary� This is an indicator, then, that adventurousness seems to include the marker of whiteness and that to be able to be a brave, sturdy, and smart hero conversely means to be less Black� Rayson stresses that Hurston’s autobiographical persona is “an individual who refuses to be typecast in any Negro or intellectual role” and that “she is taken up, as figures in myth often are, by a series of influential benefactors” (41)� Throughout her life adventures, Zora associates with and receives help predominantly from white people� Especially in her early years, when she has not yet left the familiar sphere of her town and family home in pursuit of the unknown, Zora is prepared for her eventual crossing of the threshold into the unknown space of adventure by a number of white helpers� Next to the old white man, she also encounters two white women who visit her village school, presumably to find a Black child in need of philanthropy. When she impresses the two women with her impeccable reading skills, Zora is given a cash prize of one dollar and later receives “a huge box packed with clothes 356 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 and books” (Hurston 30)� As “the books gave [her] more pleasure than the clothes” (39), Hurston subsequently describes young Zora’s reading material in more detail, noting that “[i]n that box was Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and, best of all, Norse Tales” (ibid�) and adding that later on she would read books by Hans Christian Anderson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling� Many of these texts can clearly be assigned to the genre of adventure fiction, and all of young Zora’s childhood reading centers on male heroes� Zora even remarks explicitly that “[t]here were other thin books about this and that sweet and gentle little girl who gave up her heart to Christ and good works” (ibid�), yet excitement and adventure are unequivocally marked as male, inciting Zora to identify with the white, male adventurers instead� Especially Hercules, with his dexterity to solve difficult tasks, arouses Zora’s admiration and imitation, causing her to announce: “I resolved to be like him” (ibid�)� These books consequently take on an important role in uncoupling her from the conventional gender norms and in propelling her, at least mentally, further and further away from her familiar surroundings: In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and adolescence� My soul was with the gods and my body in the village� […] Raking back yards and carrying out chamber pots, were not the tasks of Hercules� I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle� (41) Fittingly, in her own story, Zora’s first, tentative attempts at “stretching her limbs” and traversing the spatial barrier between the known and the unknown occur once again with the involvement of white helpers� When white travelers pass by her house en route to Orlando, she hails them and asks “Don’t you want me to go a piece of the way with you? ”, subsequently “rid[ing] up the road for perhaps half a mile, then walk[ing] back” (34)� In spite of Zora’s adventurousness, Dust Tracks still contrasts this desire with the ludicrousness of a Black child being so unapologetically proactive in her demeanor towards white people, and we learn that her “grandmother worried about [her] forward ways a great deal� She had known slavery and to her, [her] brazenness was unthinkable” (ibid�)� Hurston thus depicts her autobiographical persona as a daredevil rehearsing for what Campbell calls “the crossing of the first threshold” (71), and, in so doing, she already crosses the threshold of race and gender: she ventures outside of what behooves a young Black girl� As she accompanies the white travelers and briefly traverses the spatial boundary between the known and the unknown and then returns, Zora’s short forays are a testing ground for the great leap yet to come� Again, however, spatial transgressions are coded as white, a challenge Zora overcomes by adhering The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 357 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 to white role models instead of listening to her Black family members, for example her father who thinks “[i]t did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit” and that “white folks were not going to stand for it� [Zora] was going to be hung before [she] got grown” (Hurston 13)� When Zora finally crosses the threshold and leaves her family and her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, this decisive movement comes not as a leap but as an expulsion: after her mother’s death and with her father “away from home a great deal” (69), Zora, the youngest of the Hurston children, is sent to school to Jacksonville� So, when the day of her departure has come, and “[t]he midnight train had to be waved down at Maitland for [her]” (ibid�), Zora knows that her adventure is about to start because she sees the first picture of her visions realized: “I had seen myself upon that curve at night leaving the village home, bowed down with grief that was more than common� […] I was on my way from the village, never to return to it as a real part of the town” (69-70). Campbell illustrates that beyond the first threshold lie “darkness, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the member of the tribe” (71), and it is just this absence of safety and parental care which characterizes Zora’s passage� With this departure starts Zora’s real heroine’s journey, an adventure with several trials in store for her� Overcoming the first foreseen trial - being cast away from her family and having to adapt to a new environment at a strange school in a foreign town - is described as relatively easy for the young heroine� Always willing to learn and readjust, Zora’s first trial once more has to do with negotiating the disadvantage of being Black and female� On the one hand, “Jacksonville made [her] know that [she] was a little colored girl” and “[t]hings were all about the town to point this out to [her]” (Hurston 70), an ostracization Zora overcomes by being more cautious and less forward in her dealings with white people� The gender roles Zora faces are a more difficult obstacle, especially the feminine demureness that is expected of her� Unlike her more well-behaved female classmates, Zora is “rated as sassy” (ibid�) and has “to talk back at established authority”, even though “that established authority hated back talk worse than barbed-wire pie” (ibid�)� After collecting “a licking or two” (71), however, Zora finally masters this trial and gets along well at the school. According to Campbell’s monomyth, the crossing of the first threshold is followed by the hero’s passage along the road of trials: Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the mythadventure� It has produced a world literature of miracu- 358 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 lous tests and ordeals� The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region� Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage� (89) Underlining Hurston’s close adherence to mythical intertexts, the same is true for Zora, and it is no coincidence that her autobiography refers to the spatial passage via the metaphor of ‘the way’ or ‘the road’ already hinted at in its title� After her father fails to pay her school tuition and indifferently offers Zora up for adoption, the school sends her back to her hometown where her new stepmother refuses to take her in� With this, Zora’s second vision picture fulfills itself. She reflects: My vagrancy had begun in reality� I knew that� There was an end to my journey and it had happiness in it for me� It was certain and sure� But the way! Its agony was equally certain� It was before me, and no one could spare me the pilgrimage� The rod of complement was laid to my back� I must go the way� (Hurston 85-86) Thrown out of school and out of her father’s house, Zora’s ensuing vagrancy ensures her movement across space as an important constitutive feature of adventure writing. At first, she “shift[s] from house to house of relatives and friends, [finding] comfort nowhere” (87), until at fourteen years old she starts working as a domestic worker to a rich white family� Once again, Zora’s emancipated personality is an obstacle to her fitting in: “I did very badly because I was interested in the front of the house, not the back” (88)� Eventually, she joins a traveling theater troupe as a maid to one of the female performers, and she tours with her for eighteen months� Yet, even though she enjoys the performers’ company, the time with the theater group is presented as a test to Zora because her actual aim of being in school, reading, and learning is moved all the more out of sight in her need to make a living� At the same time, even Zora’s preceding years at the Jacksonville school are determined with the imagery of geographical movement� Having stood a number of emotional tests - for example when nobody pays for her tuition or when her father does not pick her up from the Jacksonville school (81) -, Zora describes her emotional challenges in geographical terms: “I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice� I found the cold, the desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered that all that geography was within me” (85)� By metaphorizing her emotional loneliness and her disappointment with her loved ones in geographical terms or, conversely, by admitting that the barren landscape is within her heart, Dust Tracks on a Road also displaces adventure writing’s characteristic move- The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 359 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 ment across space onto the psychological plane - and vice versa� With this, autobiography and adventure writing dovetail in Hurston’s account� Hers is a literal, spatial move beyond the threshold of the known into the unknown, but it is also simultaneously an intrapersonal journey, with trials and tests all of its own. In an appropriate conflation of these internal and external components of Zora’s adventures, she finds that strength and the readiness to fight are likewise motivated from within� Before she leaves the theater troupe to begin a new episode in her adventures, Zora takes stock of her abilities and reflects: “Now, I was to take up my pilgrim’s stick and go outside again. […] I took a firm grip on the only weapon I had - hope, and set my feet” (119). Thus, Zora’s wandering journey leads her, via many a detour, back to high school and, finally, to Howard University and then to Barnard College. For the readers asking, “How did I get back to school? ”, Zora answers “I just went” (122), and even though the odds are once more stacked against the heroine, providence again helps her succeed: “Being out of school for lack of funds, and wanting to be in New York, I decided to go there and try to get back in school in that city. So the first week of January, 1925, found me in New York with $ 1�50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope” (139)� As Bakhtin posits in his description of the “adventure chronotope”, one basic feature of adventure writing is a certain “random contingency” within the adventure, consisting of “chance simultaneity (meetings) and chance rupture (nonmeetings), that is, a logic of random disjunctions in time” (92, italics in original), i� e� the succession of events as ostensibly random but crucially coincidental� This characteristic is also true for Zora’s progress from one opportunity, one meeting, one offer, one enabler to the next, always seemingly spontaneously deciding on her next move, never planning far ahead, yet always being in the right place at the right time� Once she arrives at Barnard College in New York City, she summarizes her life’s journey in a most fitting manner: So I came to New York through Opportunity, and through Opportunity to Barnard� I won a prize for a short story at the first Award dinner, May 1, 1925, and Fannie Hurst offered me a job as her secretary, and Annie Nathan Meyer offered to get me a scholarship to Barnard� My record was good enough, and I entered Barnard in the fall, graduating in 1928� (Hurston 139, italics in original) This passage is an apt résumé of the contingencies and coincidences that characterize Zora’s life story: not only is she “offered” things on a regular basis, she is also awarded prizes and opportunities� The fact that “Opportunity” is repeated twice here underlines this strong sense of contingency - even though the specific Opportunity italicized in the above passage is the name of a magazine for which Zora begins to write - but also a certain favorable providence 360 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 bestowed upon our heroine� As Bakhtin summarizes, “[i]n this [adventure] chronotope all initiative and power belongs to chance” (100), and Zora is indeed the chosen recipient of rare opportunities, the one to whom things happen by accident, but the one to whom these accidents are most likely to happen� Life as Adventure By modeling Zora’s journey on an archetypal hero’s journey familiar from adventure writing, Hurston blends autobiography and adventure writing, and, as I argue in what follows, it is crucial to inquire into the affinities and differences between the two modes of writing in order to understand Hurston’s text� On a first glance, autobiographies and adventure stories share a number of commonalities� Both usually describe a series of events in their hero’s or protagonist’s life, some of which appear as challenges that must be overcome� In doing so, both types of stories also frequently feature elements familiar from the picaresque novel or the Bildungsroman, but to include an in-depth analysis of these features would exceed the scope of the present chapter� In spite of their similarities, however, adventure and life writing differ significantly in the fact that, while adventure stories are usually placed squarely in the realm of fiction, autobiographies come with at least a certain claim to materiality. As Depkat notes, “[t]he problem of fact and fiction forms the epistemological core of autobiography” (280), but autobiography scholars nowadays take “the constructedness of autobiography for granted” (281) in that it “necessarily contain[s] fictional elements” (ibid.) and uses “patterns and elements of fictionalization” (282) in order to narrate the life portrayed. At the same time, however, and in spite of poststructuralist analyses of autobiography that emphasize its textual and rhetorical effects, 4 “theoreticians of autobiography have not given up on the idea of referentiality” (283) as it remains vital that autobiography is “tied to the realities of a lived life and the subjective experience of it” (ibid�)� It is my contention that in Dust Tracks on a Road, this fictionalization of the life lived functions via the incorporation of the adventure topoi, which is perhaps also why scholars and readers have often criticized Hurston’s account as “reviews show that from its inception, Dust Tracks confused readers by its label as ‘autobiography’, particularly in regard to personal testimony” (Pietka 100)� For readers expecting internal action and confessions of Hurston’s ‘inner self’, Dust Tracks lacks emotional insight or personal reflection. Instead, it all too often amounts to an externally focalized stringing together of anecdotes illustrating hardships, surprising events and 4 See, most notably, de Man� The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 361 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 encounters, and challenging circumstances, conventions that are much more reminiscent of plot-driven adventure stories� The work’s title, Dust Tracks on a Road, likewise hints at the combination of life and adventure writing contained in its pages, especially due to the invocation of the metaphor of ‘the road’, a frequently used trope both in adventure writing and in life narratives� Next to ‘the road of trials’, ‘the road’ is also a common metaphor for ‘life’ in idioms such as ‘life journey’, ‘the road of life’, etc� Furthermore, “The Life and Adventures of …” has long been a popular title for all kinds of life writing - including autobiographies, biographies, autobiographical novels, and novels masquerading as autobiographies -, most notably The Life and Strange Surprizing [sic] Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, itself in turn an archetypal piece of adventure writing� In addition, both life and adventure writing are characterized by a complicated relationship with suspense: while both often depict gripping and risky episodes, the reader of both types of stories already tends to know their outcome� The fact that autobiographies are written already gives away the result that their protagonists will have lived to tell the tale, much like readers are unlikely to fear the adventurer’s early failure or return home if the story is to continue for the book’s remaining number of pages� Indeed, when scholars of adventure writing posit that adventure only emerges as an effect of a narrator who establishes connections between events so that contingencies are retrospectively turned into tests or trials (Gödde 59) 5 , this proposition is reminiscent of autobiography’s most well-known definition as a “retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (Lejeune 4)� Both perspectives emphasize retrospectivity and the constitution of a coherent sense of how past events have led to the present state, a bona fide hero or heroine in adventure writing or a Self in autobiography, both crucially constructed in and through narration. Schnyder confirms with respect to stories of medieval adventurers’ trials that adventure does not exist without its narration (370) 6 , and Hurston perhaps similarly notes that “people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be” (26), asking: “What if there is no me like my statue? ” (ibid�)� With this, she also alludes to the possibility that the self might only just emerge in the process or as an effect of its representation - whether 5 In the German original: “eine Erzählinstanz, die den Zusammenhang herstellt, in dem jene Kontingenz sich als Probe oder Prüfung erweist” (Gödde 59)� 6 In the German original: “Es gibt keine âventiure, die nicht erzählt ist” (Schnyder 370)� 362 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 it be a statue or an autobiography -, just like adventures become adventures through their narration� 7 I hold that Hurston’s incorporation of adventure into her autobiography - or, put another way, the fictionalization of her autobiography via the tropes of adventure writing - is a deliberate discursive choice� With this, Hurston makes recourse to three types of intertexts, the effects of which I will expound in what follows� First, I argue, Hurston’s application of the adventure structure alludes to the tradition of African American autobiography and its foundation in the slave narrative� Thus, I show how Zora’s heroine’s journey reclaims tropes of the fugitive slave and turns them into a tale of active adventure� Second, I demonstrate how Hurston’s life story told from the perspective of a young, Black heroine also writes back to the strand of adventure writing propagated by white, male European ‘explorers’ to the American continent� And, third, I claim that Hurston’s adventure autobiography also relates to her position as a black, female scientist, an anthropologist conducting research in the field. Adventure and the Slave Narrative Strikingly, many of the adventure topoi in Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography are at the same time structural elements familiar from slave narratives and the tradition of the early African American autobiography� Especially Zora’s movement away from home - her crossing the threshold from the familiar into the unknown - is a movement parallelized not only by slaves in their forced migration via the Middle Passage and their dislocation from one slaveholder to another but also by the typical flight from the plantation and subsequent journey North chronicled in many slave narratives or African American autobiographies from the era of the Great Migration� Alexandra Ganser notes that “geographical mobility, tied to social ascent, has always had a high symbolic value, shaping distinctly American idea(l)s of freedom and national identity” (15)� But while mobility and Americanness are closely 7 Interestingly, Cesareo makes a more general but similar observation when he remarks upon the structural analogy of travel and writing� We could say that travel is also an important aspect of adventure writing and writing is part of the autobiographical act, which is why this quote is well worth noting here: “In this respect, travel and writing are similar practices structurally situated between self, other, and discovery, the last of these constructs understood as the production of a certain knowledge, the opening up of a practical and / or theoretical space in which the self is recreated and repositioned in a new configuration” (Cesareo 101). The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 363 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 linked, this decidedly American kind of mobility has always been inextricably connected to whiteness: American myths of mobility, however, largely reflect the historic perspective of the White (male) Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and rest on a construction of alterity and hegemonic spatial politics which, for a number of Americans, has produced territorial confinement: the slave quarter, the Native American reservation, the internment camps for Japanese-Americans� (16) In spite of this determination of mobility with whiteness, many slave narratives appropriated the mobility narrative in an effort to align the Black subject with the values of a white supremacist society� As Cesareo notes, “the survival-aesthetic of the eighteenth-century slave narrative places its most striking effect upon its audience in the realm of the adventure of an individual’s will to power, focusing upon the individual and his adventures to highlight his independence, daring, and curiosity” (109), ultimately vindicating the slave as a human being� With their focus on capture, enslavement, escape, and freedom, early slave narratives obviously evoked adventure tales which, due to their association with white bourgeois masculinity, agreed well with the intended effect of the humanization of Black people� Correspondingly, a number of popular slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth century made explicit use of the currency of adventure, for example - note even the author’s name! - Venture Smith’s 1798 A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, the 1849 Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, or the 1837 Slavery in the United States, fittingly subtitled A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man� While these titles related to patterns familiar from adventure writing, the advancement of the abolitionist cause eventually shifted the tone of the slave narratives� They now intended to not only prove Black people’s humanity but also to expose the squalor of plantation life and the atrocities of white society in order to advocate abolition� Thus, toward the mid-nineteenth century - and most notably in narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s of 1845 -, slave narratives stressed exemplary hardships and emphasized the collective experience of racism and white tyranny instead of individual skill and adventures, a cluster of themes that remained with the African American autobiographical project well into the twentieth century with narratives such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)� Twentieth-century texts in the slave narrative tradition continued to speak of mobility, but with an inflection distinct from white mobility stories: as a consequence of the stifling and inhospitable environment of the Jim Crow South, many African American autobiographies routinely culminate in their persona’s migration to one of the North’s urban centers, most often New York City 364 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 or Chicago. African American autobiographies of the first half of the twentieth century therefore map the Great Migration in just the same way as traditional slave narratives typically depicted the slaves’ escape north a century earlier, and Hurston’s is no exception� However, both the slave narratives and the succeeding African American autobiographies are characterized by a relatively narrow margin of agency on the part of their persona, whose life is determined by hardship and flight - the necessitated movement into the unknown. While this movement appears similar to the adventurer’s crossing of the threshold, these genres notably differ in the fact that the slave or oppressed Black person is running from something while the adventurer is venturing toward something, actively seeking adventure and deciding to follow the call of the beckoning unknown� Nichols observes a similar shift with respect to the Black picaro, who is likewise characterized by a lack of agency and the necessity of restlessness: For the black picaroon never can escape the iron ring of his caste status� His alienation and struggle for survival are more intensely felt� He must be capable of playing numerous exacting roles, for he is the victim of accident, chaos and irrational caprice� His world conspires to oppress and unsettle him� The maxim of the society is summed up in the directive: “Keep this [n-word] running�” 8 (292) Written by a black author in the early twentieth century and tracing the familiar migration to the North, Hurston’s autobiography invariably stands in this tradition of African American autobiography originating from the slave narrative� Yet, Hurston employs topoi from adventure writing, a genre that, in spite of a number of similarities - the move away from home, the struggle, the road of trials and tribulations - differs from the slave narrative tradition precisely in the presence or absence of agency on the part of the protagonist: flight from oppression, slavery, or racialized violence, I argue, is not an adventure, even if followed by number of trials or quests� Even though Olney describes individual passages in slave narratives “that as to style might well come from an adventure story, a romance, or a novel of sentiment” (49), the defining difference between the two genres is that in adventure fiction, adventure is an exceptional state whereas for the slaves and, later, for the oppressed Black population of Jim Crow America, humiliation, arduous tests, and hazardous situations are the dire quotidian norm� Hence, the desires that characterize the protagonists of slave narratives and those that equip the heroes of modern adventure are, as it were, contrary: while fugitive slaves and Black autobiographical personae in search of a better life aim for the (white) normality of “freedom, equality, 8 For a detailed discussion of the slave narrative’s generic kinship with the picaresque novel, see Nichols� The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 365 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 and citizenship” (Harris 184), adventurers commonly desire exceptionality, novelty, thrills, fame, or fortune� The tests and trials faced by fugitive slaves and adventurers are likewise opposite in nature: whereas fictional adventurers usually face minor obstacles that are actually possibilities to prove and showcase their strength and ingenuity - the reader knows they must survive for the story to continue -, fugitives must endure rather than triumph, submit to tyranny and bondage for messy survival rather than for the sake of demonstrating mastery� The fact that many slave narratives and early African American autobiographies start with the typical “I was born” formula further runs counter to the adventurer’s active search: a slave or oppressed Black person is born into an oppressive system, and hazards, challenges, and hardships are their reality and not an exciting exception to a bourgeois lifestyle� Yet, significantly, Hurston withholds any mention of racism or discrimination and frames her life story as an adventure� Instead, even the typical “complex of literacy-identity-freedom that we find at the thematic center of all of the most important slave narratives” (Olney 49), though present in her text, is framed as a quest to complete� Indeed, the course of Zora’s adolescence is a perpetual quest for books and education, for example when Zora mentions that she “was without books to read for most of the time, except where [she] could get hold of them by mere chance” (Hurston 87)� In another instance, Zora voices her “frustration” because “[t]here was to be no school for [her] right away” (100), explaining that “the wish to be back in school had never left [her]” (119)� In the end, as mentioned, Zora succeeds in going back to school and completes perhaps the biggest quest of all, graduating from Barnard College and finally becoming a research assistant to the acclaimed Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas� It is striking that, while Hurston draws on the literacy-identity-freedom theme, whose successful completion results in her living an independent, intellectual life and being able to attest to it by writing her autobiography as well as many works of fiction and ethnography, the way she does so heavily relies on markers of adventure writing� This incorporation of adventure into her life story is precisely where the subversive potential of Hurston’s text resides� She depicts her struggle for education as a series of trials to overcome� Whether it is a cumbersome menial job that Zora has to take on - she admits at one point that time after time “[she]’d get tangled up with their reading matter, and lose [her] job” (88) - or whether it is an actual physical fight that has to be fought against her evil stepmother (76-77) whose power over Zora’s father makes him refuse to pay for her tuition, most of the adventures on Zora’s road of trials seem to have to do with the endeavor, and the political quasi-impossibility, to attain an education� In a way, then, her call to adventure is 366 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 not luring her into the unknownbut into the known - in other words, knowledge is the “ultimate boon” (Campbell 159) that must be won in Zora’s adventure story� In her unwavering efforts invariably geared towards learning, Hurston also redefines the African American northern migration from passive flight into active “wanderings” (67) out of her own volition� Conversely, though, by structuring her life story with adventures, Hurston also refers back to African American autobiography’s historical ties to the slave narrative and the conflict between agency and adventure on the one and disenfranchisement and racism on the other hand, reimagining both in an interesting combination of adventure and mobility as cornerstones of American citizenship� In other words, Hurston uses adventure topoi to participate in the national mobility narrative and, without losing sight of her autobiographical forebears, to reclaim agency� By portraying her struggle for education as an adventure, she appropriates and subsequently dismantles the white privilege of adventure� Failed Explorers In addition to her rewriting of the conventions of African American autobiography, Hurston’s blending of autobiography and adventure writing disrupts yet another important cultural intertext: the specifically American myth of exploration� More than perhaps any other nation, American identity is steeped in a self-understanding as the very product of an adventure: if ‘explorers’ such as Christopher Columbus had not ventured across the ocean to chart ‘virgin’ territory and ‘discover’ America and if brave pioneers had not pushed the frontier ever further west, the national myth goes, the United States would not have come into existence� Hurston is well aware of this grand national narrative and engages with these explorers early on. The very first chapter, entitled “My Birthplace”, starts with the following announcement: Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me� Time and place have had their say� So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life� (1) The “material that went to make” her, it soon turns out, is not only physical but textual as well: Hurston relates the story of how her hometown of Eatonville, Florida was ‘discovered’ and came to be one of the first self-governing all-black municipalities in the United States: Eatonville is what you might call hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick� The town was not in the original plan� It is a by-product of something else� It all started The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 367 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 with three white men on a ship off the coast of Brazil. They had been officers in the Union Army� When the bitter war had ended in victory for their side, they had set out for South America� Perhaps the post-war distress made their native homes depressing� Perhaps it was just that they were young, and it was hard for them to return to the monotony of everyday being after the excitement of military life, and they, as numerous other young men, set out to find new frontiers. But they never landed in Brazil� Talking together on the ship, these three decided to return to the United States and try their fortunes in the unsettled country of South Florida� No doubt the same thing which had moved them to go to Brazil caused them to choose South Florida� This had been dark and bloody country since the mid-1700’s� Spanish, French, English, Indian, and American blood had been bountifully shed� (ibid�) The founding of her hometown, Hurston claims here, was the (inadvertent) result of an explorers’ adventure - and a rather unsuccessful, anticlimactic one at that� In addition, Eatonville is also the product of chance when, “[t]wo years after the three adventurers entered the primeval forests of Mosquito County, Maitland had grown big enough, and simmered down enough, to consider a formal government” (5), and the black candidate surprisingly wins the first mayoral election and founds a new town. Consequently, “on August 18, 1886, the Negro town, called Eatonville, after Captain Eaton, received its charter of incorporation from the state capital at Tallahassee, and made history by becoming the first of its kind in America, and perhaps in the world” (6)� A descendant of this fortuitous chain of events and well aware of the national significance of the adventure story in the American collective memory, Hurston chooses to preface her life story with a reference to this exploration adventure� With this double intertext comes a sense of agency� Not only does Hurston appropriate a prestigious script imparted to her by the American national sense of origin, but she also writes back to the cultural narrative of adventure as male and white: she appropriates adventure, claims to spring from it, and subsequently endows it with her own, black and female, history� By claiming the power and prestige associated with the privilege of adventure, Hurston absolves herself of victimization: an adventurer who sets out for climes unknown is a far cry from the inherited lot of the Black person forced to migrate due to oppression, poverty, and racial violence� It may be for this reason that Hurston, though writing back to white, male notions of adventure, renounces narratives of victimhood and shows the reconciliatory attitude towards race relations that she has often been criticized for� 9 By leaving out incidents of systemic or individual racism, Hurston’s autobiography 9 See, for instance, Spencer, Trefzer, Rayson, or Robey� 368 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 gains impact as a discursive statement establishing her as an autonomous agent� What is more, her opening allusion to the exploration expedition is also presented in her characteristic ironic tone and with a decidedly anti-climactic delivery� By portraying the founders of her hometown as bored ex-soldiers, accidental settlers, and failed, underachieving explorers, Hurston simultaneously invalidates the grand American myth of colonialism� In order to do so, and rather than starting her autobiography with the hardships of a Black life begun under precarious circumstances, Hurston refuses to mark herself as disenfranchised or discriminated against and instead opens with the failed adventure of three white men� Her twelve visions, by contrast, align her with not just any average Victorian adventurer but with Odysseus and his twelve trials� She thus inscribes herself into a lineage of world-renowned adventurers and honors her mother’s encouragement to aim high and “jump at de sun” (Hurston 13), not just to set sail for Brazil and land in swampy South Florida instead� Research as Adventure Once Zora arrives in New York and enrolls at Barnard College, her quest for knowledge seems to have reached its ending� Conventional adventure stories, however, typically feature a cyclical structure, terminating with the hero’s eventual return home� The author Zora Neale Hurston, by contrast, was to spend the next few years in New York City, where she became one of the prime representatives of the artistic and literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance� Campbell notes, however, that [w]hen the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source […], the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy� The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds� (179) Upon closer examination, this description also fits Zora’s life’s journey quite perfectly: “Two weeks before I graduated from Barnard, Dr� Boas sent for me and told me that he had arranged a fellowship for me� I was to go south and collect Negro folk-lore” (Hurston 141)� Zora, who has reached her goal of being granted the opportunity to learn and grow intellectually, quite literally takes Campbells “runes of wisdom”, her anthropological education, back to the South in order to conduct her research in the very place from which her journey started� It is precisely what Campbell calls “the ultimate boon” (159) The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 369 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 that Zora has obtained in the North - insight, wisdom, scholarship, science - and with which she now returns ‘home’� I put ‘home’ in inverted commas because Hurston’s attitude toward her native South seems to have changed over the course of her journey and within the pages of her autobiography: whereas she still describes Eatonville and Florida as “my birthplace” (1) at the beginning, her quest for knowledge seems to have transformed her� Once she has gained enough knowledge to apply it as an ethnographer, she intends “to go out and find what is there” (143, my italics), referring to her home state as “the field” (141), signaling her shift from studied object to observant subject of anthropological research� It is in light of this transformation and Campbell’s return of the boon that the often criticized and indeed perplexing bipartite organization of Hurston’s autobiography may be read. When, after the first nine chapters, Zora’s life’s journey concludes with her arrival in New York, Hurston uses the remaining seven chapters for a number of ethnographical essays on topics such as “Research”, “Love”, and “Religion”� Thus, in this second part, we encounter Hurston not as an autobiographical persona but as a professional anthropologist who imparts to us readers the knowledge she has struggled to gain in the first part. Among the variety of essay topics to which Hurston dedicates the second part of her book, the chapter entitled “My People! My People! ” stands out� In it, Hurston turns explicitly to the matter of race relations, a topic which the first part notoriously eschews. While critics have puzzled over Hurston’s conservative attitudes and internalized racism, what interests me are the implications of the chapter’s discursive decision to provide ethnographic research on Black people� 10 bell hooks importantly notes that, even though there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and / or ethnographers whose central project is the study of whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared with one another in conversations ‘special’ knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people� (338) 10 Puzzling attitudes include Hurston’s unwillingness to recount episodes of racial violence or prejudice in her autobiography, and statements that disregard systemic racism such as: “I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things� Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be in the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks� It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between� It has never happened with anybody else, so why with us? No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else� It is up to the individual� If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it” (192)� 370 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 While the chapter “My People” would be the opportunity for Hurston to rectify this discursive imbalance, to provide the formalized, codified Black perspective on whiteness that is so crucially lacking, her anthropological essays do just the opposite and add to the already existing - white - knowledge on Blackness a decidedly Black angle� With this, Hurston does not simply mirror white knowledge production on the Black racial Other, but she appropriates, enhances, and corrects the white gaze, thus ultimately commanding the historiography of her own race� Keeping in mind the race of her readership as predominantly white, Hurston furthermore revises established power hierarchies to a certain extent: in an interesting inversion of her own mentorship by mostly white patrons, she now imparts her knowledge and explains her own race to her predominantly white readers� At this point, our heroine Zora has received and followed the call to adventure, has accepted the aid of helpers and embarked on the road of trials, has mastered the previously divined trials, reached her goal, obtained the sought-after elixir of knowledge, and brought it back to her home pastures both in the form of ethnographical research and as the very autobiography we are reading� We could therefore assume that the variety of ways in which topoi of adventure manifest in Dust Tracks on a Road ends at this juncture� Yet, the adventure theme in fact continues into the essayistic second half of Hurston’s autobiography� Julika Griem notes that public discourse on science and research is increasingly characterized by the topos of the adventurous (“Topos des Abenteuerlichen”, 17)� She explains that, upon closer examination, many of the themes and motifs with which research is described are familiar from adventure writing, especially when researchers are said to embark on a journey (“Fahrt”) or an exploration expedition (“Entdeckungsreise”) toward knowledge (18)� This charismatization of research, especially in the humanities (Griem 30), is parallelized in Hurston’s narrative when she writes that “[r]esearch is formalized curiosity� It is poking and prying with a purpose� It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein” (143)� More than just functioning as a metaphor for scientific insight, however, it is an important distinction from Griem’s argument that Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork is actually adventurous as her inquiring mind and bold methods put Zora in a dangerous situation more than once: My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and adventures� My life was in danger several times� If I had not learned how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several days of my research work� Primitive minds are quick to sunshine and The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 371 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 quick to anger� Some little word, look or gesture can move them either to love or to sticking a knife between your ribs� (Hurston 146) In contrast to the sedentary researcher described by Griem, whose adventures remain ever metaphorical, Zora’s actual physical adventures come with the anthropological practice of participant observation� Moreover, as Langston Hughes recounts in The Big Sea, Hurston was known for her brave and daring scholarly spirit� He remembers that “[a]lmost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting, and measure it” (Hughes 239)� Correspondingly, her autobiography comprises a number of anecdotes in which Zora the researcher-adventurer actually gambles with her own life for the sake of anthropological insight� Perhaps the most venturesome situation occurs in an episode in ‘the field’ - i. e. the US South - where Zora is collecting African American folk songs: “This is the primeval flavor of the place, and as I said before, out of this primitive approach to things, I all but lost my life� It was in a saw-mill jook in Polk County that I almost got cut to death” (Hurston 152)� She subsequently recounts how a local woman called Lucy tries to attack her because she disapproves of Hurston’s spending time with her ex-partner - “a valuable source of material to [Hurston]” (ibid�)� When Zora moreover befriends Lucy’s town nemesis Big Sweet, the jealousy turns into a proper bar fight, and Big Sweet urges Zora to escape. Zora “really ran, too� [She] ran out of the place, ran to [her] room, threw [her] things in the car and left the place” (156)� Thus, even though the path to knowledge is routinely depicted as a series of tests to pass and obstacles to overcome, eventually leading to the holy grail of knowledge, the narrative formula of the research adventure turns from metaphor to actuality when Hurston runs for her life as “Lucy strode in, knife in hand” (155)� With the help of wits, aides, and luck, Zora vanquishes her adversary and escapes, only to set out for new frontiers: “When I left Louisiana, I went to South Florida again, and from what I heard around Miami, I decided to go to the Bahamas” (157)� Hurston employs the trope of ‘research as adventure’ but outperforms sedentary, metaphorical researchers by getting into actual physical danger� The Adventure of a Narrated Life Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, we have seen, masterfully evokes topoi familiar from mythological adventure stories� We have also seen that, while her account draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and the African 372 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 American autobiography, it also rejects many of its conventional themes in favor of elements familiar from classic stories of white, male adventure� In so doing, Hurston frequently shows herself as challenging and outperforming typical white, male bastions of adventure such as exploration and research� With this, I argued, Hurston claims agency and establishes herself as anything but an oppressed and displaced Black woman struggling for a voice� The term ‘adventure’ generally has a dual nature: as event or experience on the one hand and as a narrated plot (element) on the other� It is my contention that autobiography is precisely the point where these two meanings overlap as autobiographies such as Hurston’s incorporate adventurous episodes and topoi to fictionalize their lived experience. It is thus no coincidence that life writing and adventure writing are historically interlaced� In their standard work on autobiography, Smith and Watson note that “some wellknown patterns for presenting processes of self-knowing are linked to other genres of literature”, notably the “quest or adventure narrative, [in which] a hero / heroine alienated from family or home or birthright sets forth on a mission to achieve elsewhere an integration of self that is impossible within the constraints […] imposed in a repressive world and to return triumphant” (70)� Smith also points to adventure tales as early instances of life writing: Adventurers, those sailors and soldiers who set out from European ports to traverse the globe, understood themselves as dauntless men unbound by insular tradition, men unwilling to be contained by the world as it was contemporaneously mapped, men willing to defy the superstitions and fixed itineraries of earlier travelers. […] These heroes mapped seas, traced coastal lands, and recorded the daily rhythms of their journeys� Through both technologies of knowledge production known to them - mapping and writing - they gathered the newly known world, transported that world back to Europe, and then reassembled it� (2-3) Isn’t it precisely this combination of “mapping and writing” - grounded in the topoi of adventure writing - that Hurston’s Dust Tracks performs? Half writing (her life) and half mapping (“the field”), her autobiography stages the very balancing act of an explorer, ultimately transporting and assembling a story of a place, time, and heroine hitherto unknown� By thus conceiving of herself as an adventurer in her own right, Hurston naturally presents her life as an adventure� In an important differentiation from Campbell, whose adventures remain ever textual, and in contrast to a critical tradition which casts romance - to which adventure writing is commonly assigned - and reality as opposites (Duncan 2), Hurston claims that adventures are real and that they happen in real life, all the time� And even if they do not actually happen, Zora tells us, a good writer is ready to find a way: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 373 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 Since Papa would not buy me a saddle horse, I made me one up� No one around me knew how often I rode my prancing horse, nor the things I saw in far places� Jake, my puppy, always went along and we made great admiration together over the things we saw and ate� We both agreed that it was nice to be always eating things� (Hurston 29) By thus appropriating the cultural narrative of adventure characterizing the world’s great myths, Hurston proves that, rather than remaining a privilege limited to mythological characters, a heroine’s journey can be embarked upon by anyone, even and especially by a young, poor Black girl� She shows that a Black female author and scientist can experience, narrate, and, if need be, make up adventures, and as she does so, she also counters established notions of knowledge production� Unlike Campbell and the self-glorifying exploration adventures by brave heroes who, full of hubris and self-aggrandizement “understood themselves as dauntless men unbound by insular tradition, men unwilling to be contained by the world as it was contemporaneously mapped”, Hurston recounts her adventures with a casual distance from her own story, using humor and an ironic, often self-mocking tone, always challenging the authority of her own or anyone’s story� Hurston thus refuses to acknowledge the conservative adventure story’s masculine tradition, in which women are either nondescript maidens or severely punished for their valor (Bruzelius 36)� In this way, by writing her autobiography instead of a novel with a female hero, by making up adventures where possibly there were none and furthermore positing them as her autobiographical truth, she certifies a black woman’s capacity for two simultaneous acts of world-making: plot-making and story-telling� Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M� “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics�” Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist� Austin, TX : U of Texas P, 1981, pp� 84-258� Bruzelius, Margaret� Romancing the Novel: Adventures from Scott to Sebald� Lewisburg: Bucknell UP , 2007� Campbell, Joseph� The Hero with a Thousand Faces, commemorative edition� Princeton: Princeton UP , 2004� Cesareo, Mario� “When the Subaltern Travels: Slave Narrative and Testimonial Erasure in the Contact Zone�” Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romreo-Cesareo� London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp� 99-134� 374 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 de Man, Paul� “Autobiography as De-facement�” Comparative Literature, vol� 94, no� 5, 1979, pp� 919-930� Depkat, Volker� “Facts and Fiction�” Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction, edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, pp� 280-286� Duncan, Ian� Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1992� Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth� “Myth and History: Discourse of Origins in Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou�” Black American Literature Forum, vol� 24, no� 2, 1990, pp� 221-235� Ganser, Alexandra� Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000� Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009� Gödde, Susanne� “Abenteuer avant la lettre� Kontingenz und Providenz in Epos und Roman der griechischen Antike�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019, pp� 35-60� Griem, Julika� “Wissenschaft als Abenteuer? ” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019, pp� 17-33� Harris, Trudier� “African American Autobiography�” The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, edited by Maria DiBattista and Emily O� Wittman� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2014, pp� 80-194� hooks, bell� “Representing Whitness in the Black Imagination�” Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg et al� London: Routledge, 1992, pp� 338-342� Hughes, Langston� The Big Sea� New York: Hill and Wang, 1993� “Hurston, Zora Neale�” ProQuest Biographies, 2009, https: / / search-proquest�com�emedien� ub� uni-muenchen�de / lion / docview / 2 137 895 022? accountid=14 596#� Accessed 27 Jan� 2021� Hurston, Zora Neale� Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography� New York: Harper Perennial, 2006� Lejeune, Philippe� On Autobiography, edited by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989� Nichols, Charles H� “Slave Narrators and the Picaresque Mode: Archetypes for Modern Black Personae�” The Slave’s Narrative, edited by Charles T� Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr� Oxford: Oxford UP , 1985, pp� 283-297� Olney, James� “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature�” Callaloo, vol� 20, 1984, pp� 46-73� Pietka, Rachel. “There Is No Me Like My Statue: Life and Text in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road�” Pacific Coast Philology, vol� 49, no� 1, 2014, pp� 99-111� Rayson, Ann L� “Zora Neale Hurston and the Form of Black Autobiography�” Negro American Literature Forum, vol� 7, no� 2, 1973, pp� 39-45� Robey, Judith. “Generic Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road�” Black American Literature Forum, vol� 24, no� 4, 1990, pp� 667-682� Schnyder, Mireille� “Sieben Thesen zum Begriff der âventiure�“ Im Wortfeld des Textes. 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Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2001� Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson� Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives� Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001� Spencer, Stephen� “The Value of Lived Experience: Zora Neale Hurston and the Complexity of Race�” Studies in American Culture, vol� 27, no� 2, 2004, pp� 17-33� Trefzer, Annette� “‘Let Us All Be Kissing-Friends? ’: Zora Neale Hurston and Race Politics in Dixie�” Journal of American Studies: JAS , vol� 31, no� 1, 1997, pp� 69-78� von Koppenfels, Martin, and Manuel Mühlbacher� “Einleitung�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019, pp� 1-16� Walker, Pierre A� “Zora Neale Hurston and the Post-Modern Self in Dust Tracks on a Road�” African American Review, vol� 32, no� 3, 1998, pp� 387-399� Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8476-2 Volume 37 (2021) The Pleasures of Peril Rereading Anglophone Adventure Fiction Edited by Tobias Döring and Martina Kübler Adventure fiction often seems embarrassing. Sophisticated readers may dismiss it as a juvenile indulgence, full of clichés, silly heroes, and cheap thrills, i.e., formulaic genre fiction which literary culture and academic discourse leave behind. And yet, this volume demonstrates, adventure has never really left the scene. The pleasures of adventure tales may be perilous but carry on - and are being carried, not just into adult life, but also into modern and contemporary literature where they serve, sometimes in secret but often rather openly, as forceful drives and forms to work with. This volume takes a decidedly literary interest, focussing on the residues, rewritings and/ or reappropriations of adventure tales in anglophone literature since their eighteenth-century heydays, through Victorian and modernist times up to present-day realisations in postmodern and postcolonial writing. 37