oxford research in english - WordPress.com

--

-- ¦ - —— ---- --¦--- ¦¦| −|

oxford research in english

issue 11, autumn 2020

destinations

Oxford Research in

EnglishGraduate Research Journal

Faculty of English Language and LiteratureUniversity of Oxford

volume xi

Destinations

oxford research in english

Graduate Research JournalFaculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

https://oxfordresearchenglish.wordpress.comissn: 2397-2947

Editor-in-Chiefann ang

Editorial Committee 2019–20 megan griffiths, secretary

zachary garber, submissions editorllewelyn hopwood, peer review facilitator

lucy fleming & charlotte hand, production editorskim hyei jin, features editor

gavin herbertsonanna saroldi

camille stallings

Peer Reviewersdaniel abdalla, archie cornish, angelica de vido, jenyth evans,

zachary garber, cosima gilhammer. gavin herbertson, alice huxley, holly johnston, benjamin klein, tara lee, natalia quiros-

edmunds, anna saroldi, audrey southgate, benjamin westwood

Founding Members camille pidoux callum seddon

jennie cole

Contentsi Foreword

DestinationsANN ANG

1 The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s Journey: Romantic and Gothic Destinations in Edward Lear’s Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c (1851)EMILY TOCK

23 Is Arrival Still Possible? Frances Burney’s The Wanderer and the New Cartography in the Long Eighteenth CenturyMITCHELL GAUVIN

43 Labouring Destination: A Poetics of Inheritance in Donald Hall’s Life WorkLUCY CHESELDINE

62 ‘Unwavering, to sea’: Departure and Destination in Causley’s Secret DestinationsROSEMARY WALTERS

85 From the Graeco–Roman Underworld to the Celtic Otherworld: The Cultural Translation of a Pagan DeityANGANA MOITRA

107 Special Feature Who Makes World Literature?: UNESCO’s

Collection of Representative Works HYEI JIN KIM

113 Review Hope Allen’s “Writing Ascribed to Richard

Rolle”: A Corrected List of CopiesTIMOTHY GLOVER

116 Review World Literature in Motion

HYEI JIN KIM

121 Review Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

ANN ANG

125 Notes on Contributors

Foreword

Destinations

ann ang

In our call for papers for this issue, we delved into the etymology of ‘Destinations’, only to find out that far from being a terminus, the word itself is suggestive of onward travel. Deriving from the Latin dēstināre,

which may be variously parsed as ‘to resolve’, ‘to determine’, or ‘to destine’, the word itself holds futurity with its suggestion of the infinitive aspect. From Latin, destination as a noun has a prior life in French before arriving in English. Writing this during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in the wake of the George Floyd protests that have led to the renewed scrutiny of race and racialisation in many societies, the notion of assuming that we know, in advance, what we are destined for this year seems presumptuous, to say the least. If 2020 has taught us anything so far, it is not that planning ahead is futile, but that our days hold unexpected futurities. Hence the plurality of this issue’s theme, which indicates that we are not governed by a teleology linked to a final destination. Instead, Destinations allows for a horizontal and rhizomatic imagining of new possibilities and alternative, hitherto un-thought-of collectivities.

Issue 11 is the second of two issues that Oxford Research in English has published during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Call for Papers was devised by the journal team in better times, but since then, the trajectory of the entire publication process has spanned continental and time-zone divides, several plane escapades and much kind forbearance from all as we con-tinued as best as we could with the work. Certainly we did not expect the issue’s research articles and contributions to be submitted, peer-reviewed and typeset under such circumstances. Unable to seek out destinations elsewhere, we found ourselves re-oriented in place, going deep into the minutiae of our current locations while the hours dragged on and be-came leavened, much like the suddenly-omnipresent baking. A virus and an illness that happened to others came to roost uncomfortably close to home, and our very bodies seemed suspect, liable of an invisible betrayal. Meanwhile the incessant barrage of news updates amidst the storm of so-cial media reactions left precious little breathing room for those seeking the necessary updates.

Despite the claustrophobia of the pandemic, the research articles in this latest issue negotiate, in their own ways, what it means to be ontologically reoriented in place. While some feature actual physical journeys, others

ii

foreword

inscribe lines of flight through time and other worlds. In ‘The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s journey: Romantic and Gothic Destinations in Edward Lear’s Journals of a landscape painter in Albania &c (1851)’, Emily Tock discusses how Lear, renowned for his nonsense poems, bring his panache for dark humour to his travel writing. In his trek through Albania, Lear’s work melds Byronic influence and Balkan gothic, allowing literary genealogies to mingle, much like guests at a wayside inn. By contrast, Mitchell Gauvin’s piece explores border thinking in the context of the long eighteenth cen-tury in British writing. In ‘Is arrival still possible? Frances Burney’s The Wanderer and the New Cartography in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Gauvin examines how Juliet’s true origin, in crossing the border between England and France, is alternately obscured and revealed through frames of race and nationality. The question of arrival, then, for the traveller, like the immigrant in more recent times, is dependent on the politics of cul-tural difference.

The articles in the second half of the issue have as their unifying theme questions of temporal and spiritual destiny. We are privileged to have two articles on poetry and one on translation in cultural anthropology. In ‘Labouring destination: a poetics of inheritance in Donald Hall’s Life Work’, Lucy Cheseldine presents a nuanced analysis of the American poet’s agrarian poetics. Everyday images of farming labour, when saturated with loss and death through the lens of memory, perform a journey through time that allows Hall to inscribe a temporal locus as the source of his per-sonal inheritance. In ‘“Unwavering, to sea”: Departure and Destination in Causley’s Secret Destinations’, Rosemary Walters discusses the work of Charles Causley, who is usually read as a local Cornish poet, in terms of the poetics of identity in postwar Britain. Through a reading of four po-ems, Walters considers journeys into language, war and away from home as part of the mature poet’s retrospective on his life from the summit of Launceston Castle. Finally, Angana Moitra conducts an extensive study of how medieval Ireland became the final destination of the Graeco-Roman Hades in the figure of Midir, through the process of cultural translation.

We end the issue with a feature article by Hyei Jin Kim, who discuss-es recent publications in the field of world literature studies, concerning UNESCO as a literary institution. How books get to their readers, as a des-tination, and how the hegemonic pressures of the literary marketplace are mediated and diverted through the institution’s attempts to construct a canon or collection of world literature are matters that require due con-sideration, at a time when the ‘world’ is a place overwhelmingly shaped by ethnonationalist borders and the priorities of capital. More than ‘What Makes World Literature’, we could perhaps meditate further on the world(s) that we inhabit as destinations of our own making.

The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s Journey: Romantic and Gothic Destinations in Edward Lear’s Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c (1851)

emily tock

Through the silent-roaring ocean Did the Turtle swiftly go; Holding fast upon his shell Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò. With a sad primæval motion Towards the sunset isles of Boshen Still the Turtle bore him well.

—Edward Lear, ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ (1888)1

Edward Lear manifests his life-long focus on the journey to the next horizon, to the next destination, in the leaves of his books. He suffuses his nonsense stories with ocean journeys and travellers

in works like ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ and ‘The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World’, as well as in his other nonsense and visual work. As James Williams writes in Edward Lear (2018), the Bó describes ‘a story which is about the double life of the traveller, always looking or belonging elsewhere’.2 Lear’s important theme, the journey, is axiomatic in his six travel books. Extended to his posthu-mous travelogues, Lear’s travel writing encompasses wide geographical coverage (the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and India) and an extend-ed timestamp (1841–1875).

Lear published six travel journals, two of which were primarily collec-tions of lithographic prints: Views in Rome and Its Environs Drawn From

1 Vivien Noakes, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse by Edward Lear (Oxford: Pen-guin Classics, 2006), pp. 324–27.2 James Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work (Liverpool: Liverpool Univer-sity Press, 2018), p. 104.

2

the yonghy-bonghy-bò’s journey

Nature and on Stone (1841) and Views in the Seven Ionian Islands (1863). In addition to publishing these art books, Lear published four longer narrative travelogues: Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846), Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c (1851), Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, &c (1852), and Journals of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870). The majority of Lear’s narrative travel literature presents accounts of his journeys in the Mediterranean and conforms to tropes of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature. Excursions, Southern Calabria, and Corsica offer readers an engaging combination of two tropes: the pursuit of the picturesque in landscape and the acquisition of scientific and socio-political knowledge.3 This paper analyses Lear’s de-parture from this type of travel literature in his Albanian travelogue, with a concomitant purpose of establishing a critical practice of exploring the narratives of his journeys throughout the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Middle East as travel literature, rather than as corollaries to the non-sense for which he is more commonly known.

Lear’s nonsense work has understandably received the bulk of literary criticism, but scholarly explorations of his travel literature and natural history illustrations have been published with the recent renaissance of Lear scholarship. Even earlier than the current ascendency in Lear studies, however, in 2005 Peter Swaab addressed Lear’s travel writing in the intro-duction to his critical edition Over the Land and Over the Sea: Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings. Swaab links Lear’s nonsense and his travel journals closely, writing:

But what, after all, is nonsense poetry if not a poetry of departures, always departing from our usual norms, often in stories of voyaging and questing? And what is travel writing if not a series of encounters with the extraordinary and often absurd?4

Similarly, the most recent critical work has interrogated Lear’s travel liter-ature in the context of its relationship to his nonsense, his work as a land-scape painter, or both. For instance, Jenny Uglow definitively connected

3 Daniel Carey, ‘Compiling Nature’s History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Ear-ly Royal Society’, Annals of Science, 54.3 (1997), 269–92 (pp. 272–75; 285–92) <https://doi.org/10.1080/00033799700200211>; Thompson, Carl, The Suffering Traveller and the Roman-tic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 32–34; 38–40; 46–52.4 Peter Swaab, Over the Land and over the Sea: Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2005), p. ix.

3

emily tock

Lear’s travel literature with his picturesque landscapes in Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (2017), writing that

He wanted readers to travel with him not as a political commentator but as a painter, following his hunt for a good view, his dashes to sketch before sunset, his penning-out of drawings at night. His judgements were painterly, often referring back to his favourite artists, Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa and Pouissin.5

More recently, Sara Lodge in Inventing Edward Lear (2019) argues that Lear’s travel writing was linked to his landscape artistry, that ‘The business of his landscape painting and writing was travel, but it was also a poten-tially infinite process of revisiting himself ’.6 She then explores the relation-ship between Lear’s landscapes, travelogues, and nonsense, noting that ‘Lear’s nonsense works bring his painter’s eye to bear on language; they are unusually full of words describing colour’.7 Lodge, however, also discusses Lear’s vivid imagery, which was inspired by the ethnomusicology that Lear included in his travel literature with transcriptions of folksongs: ‘Each re-gion had its own soundscape, which Lear tried to record—as he recorded the landscape—in words and images’.8

James Williams also links Lear’s nonsense and landscape to his travel literature in Edward Lear. He writes of Lear’s Romantic tendencies, as well as the thread of doubt—of ‘characteristically Learical ambivalences’—in Lear’s relationship with the Romantic, connecting the ambivalences to both Lear’s nonsense songs and his landscape painting via his travel ex-periences.9 Regarding Lear’s landscape, The Rocks at Kasr as Saad (1865), Williams writes:

The vastness of this ‘rocky shore’ embodies a grandly Byronic rapture without apparent self-doubt, and speaks to Byron’s sense of profound loneliness, but it is also imbued with characteristically Learical ambiv-alences. The early morning sun makes the Egyptian stone glow a deep honey colour, or is it the late evening sun?—an ending or a beginning? Are the birds coming in to land or, more likely perhaps, taking off?10

5 Jenny Uglow, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (New York: Faber & Faber, 2017), pp. 167–68.6 Sara Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 263.7 Lodge, p. 289.8 Lodge, p. 21.9 James Williams, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work (Liverpool: Liverpool Univer-sity Press, 2018), p. 89–91.10 Williams, p. 89.

4


Williams applies this ambiguity to the frequent double meanings of Lear’s neologisms, the conflicted desires of The Bò, and Lear’s other travellers both to escape and remain with the familiar. Williams, however, also in-terrogates the timeline of Lear’s adoption of nonsense words—dating it to after the beginning of Lear’s extensive travels, arguing that Lear’s encoun-ters with different languages were the true foundation of the neologisms that appear in the later nonsense songs.11

Secure in the knowledge provided by these well-argued critiques of the relationship between Lear’s nonsense, landscapes, and travel literature, this article explores Lear’s Albanian travelogue, as well as one particular landscape painted on this Balkan journey, with a different focus than that of Lear as a nonsense poet who also wrote travel literature. That being said, interrogating Lear’s travel work in a vacuum would, most certainly, be complete nonsense. Therefore, references to the more nonsense-focused critical work described above are both constructive and inevitable in my exploration of Albania as travel literature.

Sandwiched between Italy and Southern Calabria, Lear’s Albanian nar-rative is an anomaly. Albania was Lear’s attempt to expand his practice of travel writing beyond that used in his other travelogues. With this Balkan journal, Lear proffers a Romantic journey through the Albanian land-scape, following in the footsteps of Byron and his route through Greece and Albania. The work proffers, too, an exercise in Balkan Gothic story-telling. This travel journal, I contend, was a literary experiment for Lear in which he stretches the boundaries of his travel literature and his role as a travel author and artist into a sampler of a Romantic trek through the little-known Balkan peninsula. Combining threads of Romantic travel; a pastiche of the peoples, places, and events in Byron’s travels; and Gothic storytelling, Lear weaves these different threads into patterns reflective of his own travels in the Balkans and his complicated relationship with Romantic literature.

Criticism of Romantic elements in Lear centre on his nonsense. Michael O’Neill, in his chapter ‘ ‘One of the Dumms’: Edward Lear and Romanticism’ in Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (2016) writes that Lear’s ‘rework-ing of Romanticism fulfils what was latent or overt in it already, as well as exceeding, subverting, and departing from it’.12 Furthermore, O’Neill argues that Lear’s nonsense worlds ‘occupy the territory they shape for

11 Williams, pp. 91–93.12 Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, ed. by James Williams and Matthew Bevis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 54.

5

emily tock

themselves with a quiet refusal to be co-opted by the dominant discourses of his time’.13 Uglow notes, several times, the influence that many Romantic poets had on the young Lear, including Byron. Uglow writes:

He was throwing off his family’s chapel-going zeal, and as a fan of Byron and Shelley, he was scathing about political corruption and attempts to ‘christianize the nation’. At fourteen, he wrote an accomplished parody, part radical drinking song, part spoof evangelical hymn: ‘Ye who have hearts – aloud REJOICE, / For Oligarchy trembles’.14

While Williams discusses the Tennysonian aspects of ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’, he also analyses different types of Romantic despair in ‘There was an old person so silly’: ‘Despair is connected for Lear with roots and rootlessness, and beneath the limerick’s pleasurable non-sense is the dark hint that it is an all-too-human desire for groundedness that makes an old person ‘so silly’ ‘.15 Lodge argues for the same type of conflicted intent in Lear that Williams discusses:

Is nonsense in essence a parodic mode, or does its nearness to pure sound in fact bespeak a relationship with psychological truth? These contemporary reviews alert the modern reader to the range of ech-oes that nineteenth-century readers heard in Lear’s work, and their competing identifications of him as a master of genre fusion, whose ‘pervading melancholy’ was Byronic, and as a comic showman, whose work was posed between that of the Smith brothers (who also wrote songs) and W. S. Gilbert.16

Vivian Noakes also discusses Lear in a Byronic context, writing in Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (2004) that ‘Byron’s death affected him in an extraordinary way’.17 Noakes continues: ‘The poet-idol, the so-cial outcast, the figurehead of Greek independence—it was a mature hero for a boy of eleven’.18 Educated at home by two elder sisters on a Rousseau-like diet of natural history, music, drawing, and Romantic poetry, Lear’s personal reaction to the death of this Romantic poet is not wholly unsur-

13 Williams and Bevis, p. 56.14 Uglow, p. 23, 25, 37.15 Williams, pp. 99–106, 118.16 Lodge, p. 83.17 Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, revised edition (Stroud, Glouces-teshire, UK: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2004), p. 10.18 Noakes, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse by Edward Lear, p. 10.

6


prising.19 It was not until almost 40 years later that Lear wrote in a diary entry dated 18 September 1861 about his feelings upon learning of Byron’s death:

Pale cold moon, yet now as in 1823 – ever strangely influencing me. Do you remember the small yard & the passages at——in 1823, & 1824—when I used to sit there in the cold looking at the stars, &, when I heard that Ld. Byron was dead, stupefied & crying.20

A certain scepticism might be applied to the eleven-year-old Lear’s re-action; however, it seems that Noakes’ comment may be justified in that Lear probably felt a certain empathy for Byron, considering the biograph-ical congruencies of their ambiguous sexuality and bouts of depression.21 Additionally, both struggled with physical disabilities—Byron with his congenital talipes equinovarus and Lear with his epilepsy. Lear would mark his diary entries with an ‘X’ to denote an epileptic attack, which he referred to as ‘the Demon’.22 Some entries contained an astounding number of at-tacks for one day; the mark ‘X6’ was not a rare occurrence.23 Struggling with their sexual orientation, Romantic despair, and physical challenges, both authors imposed exile on themselves, which led to extensive travels in the Mediterranean and the Balkan peninsula.24

In 1847, Lear travelled to Italy and prepared notes for Southern Calabria. He had to leave the country suddenly because of revolution, but in April 1848, he was invited to join the British consulate’s retinue travelling to Istanbul, where he met Charles Church (1823—1915). Church was the neph-ew of Sir Richard Church (1784—1873), the man who led the Suliot War of 1803 against Ali Pasha and served in the independent Greek government.

19 Uglow, pp. 16–22; J. Oelkers, ‘Education: Phenomena, Concepts, and Theories’, in In-ternational Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), pp. 4234–39 <https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/02324-X>.20 ‘Edward Lear’s Diaries’ <https://leardiaries.wordpress.com/2011/09/page/2/> [ac-cessed 28 March 2018].21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 83–86. For more on Lear’s sexuality and depression, see Noakes pp. 8, 12, 31, 32, 111, 113, 115-16, 189, 202, 237; Uglow pp. 64, 129, 383; Swaab ‘ ‘Some Think Him . . . Queer’: Loners and Love in Edward Lear’ from Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry pp. 89–97; Lodge 8–9, 55, 113, 126, 189–93, 313, 359, 363–64.22 Uglow, pp. 16–17.23 Uglow, pp. 16–17.24 Lodge, p. 80; Williams, p. 93.

7

emily tock

Lear and Church agreed to travel to Mt. Athos and Thessaloniki together.25 Following in the fashion of Carl Thompson’s The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (2007), the trip was marred by various illnesses and injuries; Lear was eventually stricken with a life-threatening bout of malaria and had to recuperate at the consulate. While there, he arranged to meet up with Church near Mt. Athos.26 When Lear arrived at the port in Salonika to start the overland journey to Mt. Athos, however, he was pre-vented from travelling on to the legendary mountain because of a cholera quarantine; it was then that Lear opted for the circuitous overland route through Albania to meet up with Church in Corfu.27 Lear was an avid reader of travel works like W Martin’s Travels in Northern Greece (1835) and thus had long desired to travel and paint his way through the penin-sula.28 Did the opportunity of following in the footsteps of a favoured poet from childhood also inspire in Lear the idea of capitalising on the suc-cess of Byron’s travel verse, by mimicking the poet in his own travelogue? Regardless of motive, it was there, at the port in Salonika, that Lear began the patterns of his experimental Albanian sampler.

The first pattern appears in Lear’s references to Byron himself. In his other travel works, Lear often quotes poems without attribution; in Corsica there are many unattributed quotes from Tennyson—another of Lear’s fa-vourite poets. However, these unattributed quotes are absent in Albania, in which Lear instead experiments with mentioning Byron specifically by name or title:

The sun was sinking as I sat down to draw in what had been a great chamber, below one of the many crumbling walls—perhaps in the very spot where the dreaded Ali gave audience to his Frank guests in 1809—when Childe Harold was but twenty-four years old, and the Vizir in the zenith of his power. * The poet is no more;—the host is beheaded, and his family nearly extinct;—the palace is burned, and levelled with the ground.29

Additionally, Lear frequently mentions Ali Pasha and the Albanian Suliots, with whom Byron was closely associated through his role in the Greek uprising. Lear echoes Byron’s admiration of Ali Pasha, mentioning

25 Uglow, pp. 173–77.26 Uglow, pp. 173–77; Thompson, Carl, pp. 4–17.27 Uglow, pp. 173–77.28 Noakes, pp. 10, 37, 291; Uglow, pp. 21, 25, 193, 250, 251, 292, 328, 336, 356, 366, 433, 450.29 Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c (London: R. Bentley, 1851), p. 306 https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044015568579.

8


him by name nine times. Lear references him here, writing of Zuliki, an Albanian leader who led a revolt against the Turks in 1846:

Their rebellion under Zuliki seems to have been the last convulsive struggle of this scattered and disarmed people, and the once proud territory of Ali Pasha is now ground down into a melancholy insignif-icance, and well nigh deprived of its identity.30

Lear alludes to Byron’s association with the revolutionary struggles against Ali Pasha and the Ottomans in the following description of the mountainous area of Mitzikeli in Jannina:

I would take a boat and cross to the little island, and visit the monas-tery, where that wondrous man Ali Pasha met his death: or sitting by the edge of the lake near the southern side of the kastron [fort], sketch the massive, mournful ruins of his palace of Litharitza, with the peaks of Olytzika rising beyond. For hours I could loiter on the terrace of kastron opposite the Pasha’s serai, among the ruined fortifications, or near the strange gilded tomb where lies the body of the man who for so long a time made thousands tremble!31

Byron and Ali Pasha were clearly prevalent in Lear’s mind in Albania, and he brings readers’ attention to the two with deliberate references. Additionally, Lear mentions Byron in a private diary entry of 1 June 1848 when he writes of discussing the poet and his verse with the British consul on a boat to Istanbul, as well as referencing Byron’s death in a 19 April 1848 letter to his sister, Ann. Both of these correspondences were written during his Balkan journey. 32

Elements from the text of the Balkan travelogue relating to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan constitute another pattern in the sampler of Lear’s literary experiment, including references to British and Balkan historical figures, places, and events. This experiment is animated by an earlier British traveller, William Martin Leake (1777—1860). Thompson in The Suffering Traveller describes Byron’s grudging admission that only one Englishman had explored Albania: ‘he recalls how his journey to Albania in 1809 took him to regions unvisited by Englishmen (with the sole excep-

30 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, pp. 303–304.31 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, pp. 382–83.32 Edward Lear, Edward Lear: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 70; Edward Lear in the Levant: Travels in Albania, Greece and Turkey in Europe 1848-1849, ed. by Susan Hyman (London: John Murray, 1988), p. 43.

9

emily tock

tion, Byron acknowledges, of a Major Leake)’.33 Lear frequently referenc-es Leake’s trek in Albania.34 Coincidentally, Leake had also served as the British representative to Ali Pasha’s court in 1807.35 The mention of Leake and his activities in the affairs of Greek independence lends a factual cred-ibility to Lear’s account and might point to another possible source of in-spiration for a successful Balkan travel publication.36 Again, regardless of motive, Lear writes in the introduction that he was ‘the only Englishman who has published any account’ particularly of Acroceraunia, Scanderbeg, and Lake Okhrida.37 Lear thus presents himself as an intrepid traveller of Albania, surpassing even Byron’s and Leake’s mishaps and adventures.

Lear’s oblique appeals to events of the Greek rebellion, however, are not confined to citations of Leake’s work and continue the pattern of referenc-es to places and events from the period. In the second half of the journal, Lear seems to compare his own narrative to aspects of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan via the Suliot War against Ali Pasha in 1803. In the Second Canto, Stanza XIII of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron writes:

What! shall it e’er be said by British tongue, Albion was happy in Athena’s tears? Though in thy name the slaves her bosom wrung, Tell not the deed to blushing Europe’s ears; The ocean queen, the free Britannia, bears The last poor plunder from a bleeding land: Yes, she, whose gen’rous aid her name endears, Tore down those remnants with a harpy’s hand, Which envious Eld forbore, and tyrants left to stand.38

Here, Byron refers to Britain’s political activity in the Balkan peninsula in the early nineteenth century. This is echoed in Albania when Lear writes about Britain’s sale of Suliot Parga to Ali Pasha during Corfu’s liberation

33 Thompson, Carl, p. 148. See also Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Second Canto, Stanzas XLVIII-LV. 34 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, pp. 2, 3, 10, 23, 28, 30, 37, 50, 81, 187, 219, 234, 275, 304, 380, etc.35 Peter Cochran, ‘The Sale of Parga and Isles of Greece’, Keats-Shelley Review, 14.1 (2000), 7 (p. 7).36 Thompson, Carl, p. 164.37 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 4.38 George Gordon Byron, Child Harold’s Pilgrimage, Second Canto, accessed April 5, 2018, http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Byron/charoldt.html.

10


from the Ottoman Empire in 1815.39 Lear discusses the fate of the Suliots at the rock of Zalongo in Epirus during the Suliot War:

This was the scene of one of those terrible tragedies so frequent during the Suliote war with Ali. At its summit twenty-two women of Suli took refuge after the capture of their rock by the Mohammedans, and with their children awaited the issue of a desperate combat between their husbands and brothers, and the soldiers of the Vizir of Ioannina. Their cause was lost; but as the enemy scaled the rock to take the women prisoners, they dashed all their children on the crags below, and join-ing their hands, while they sang the songs of their own dear land, they advanced nearer and nearer to the edge of the precipice, when from the brink a victim precipitated herself into the deep below at each recur-ring round of the dance, until all were destroyed. When the foe arrived at the summit, the heroic Suliotes were beyond his reach.40

Lear further writes, ‘I felt anxious to leave Parga. The picture, false or true, of the 10th of April, 1819, was ever before me, and I wished with all my hear that I had left Parga unvisited.41

The date, 10 April, refers to the actual sale and transfer of Parga to Ali Pasha, which Lear underscores as an echo to Byron’s earlier renunciation of the British betrayal and later abandonment of Parga.42 Byron himself refers to this incident specifically in Don Juan, Cantos III/IV in The Isles of Greece, when he writes not to trust the Franks:43

On Suli’s rock, and Parga’s shore, Exists the remnant of a line Such as the Doric mothers bore; And there, perhaps, some seed is sown, The Heracleidan blood might own. Trust not for freedom to the Franks— . . . 44

39 Robert Cecil, ‘The Cession of the Ionian Islands’, History Today; London, 1 September 1964, 616–26 (pp. 616–17).40 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, pp. 346–47.41 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 374.42 Cochran, p. 1.43 Eva Johanna Holmberg, ‘In the Company of Franks: British Identifications in the Early Modern Levant c.1600’, Studies in Travel Writing, 16.4 (2012), 363–74 (pp. 363–69) <https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2012.723863>; Carolyn C. Aslan and Göksel Sazci, ‘Across the Hellespont: Maydos (Ancient Madytos), Troy and the North-Eastern Aegean in the Late Eighth to Early Sixth Century Bc’, The Annual of the British School at Athens, 111 (2016), 121–62 (p. 123) <http://dx.doi.org.libgate.library.nuigalway.ie/10.1017/S0068245415000180>. The English were referred to locally as ‘Franks’ and in Byron’s and Lear’s works.44 George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, Third and Fourth Canto Isles of Greece, accessed

11

emily tock

Another pattern of Lear’s Albanian sampler includes a mimicry of the devices used by the Romantic poets, but in prose form. Lear describes his encounters with sites associated with Byron’s legacy in Albania, dis-playing a conflicting emotionality. For example, Thompson comments on Stanza I in the First Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Regarding a visit to Delphi, he notes that for Byron:

what emerges from his travel experience is a growing understanding that all such sites, and the systems of belief built around them, have only a provisional or partial usefulness. Sometimes this is explicitly the result of an inadequacy in the supposedly sacred site.45

Following is Byron’s stanza:

Oh, thou! in Hellas deem’d of heavenly birth, Muse! form’d or fabled at the minstrel’s will! Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth, Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill: Yet there I’ve wander’d by thy vaunted rill; Yes! sigh’d o’er Delphi’s long deserted shrine, Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still; Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine To grace so plain a tale—this lowly lay of mine.46

Lear, too, finds disappointment in one of the sites of his own travels, di-rectly citing Byron’s ‘Monastic Zitza’ and its immortalisation in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in a 5 November 1848 entry.47 Here is Byron’s ode to this monastery that he had visited in Ali Pasha’s Jannina:

Monastic Zitza! from thy shady brow, Thou small, but favour’d spot of holy ground! Where’er we gaze, around, above, below, What rainbow tints, what magic charms are found!48

April 5, 2018, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm.45 Thompson, Carl, pp. 241–42.46 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, First Canto.47 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 326. Zitza is the site of the mon-astery described in Childe Harold, Second Canto, Stanza XLVIII.48 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Second Canto, Stanza XLVIII; Byron, George Gor-don, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. Marchand, Leslie A. (London: Random House, 1993), 29. Byron wrote to his mother Catherine Gordon Byron (1770-1811) of the beauty of the Greek monastery at Zitza.

12


Following is Lear’s deflated reaction to Zitza:

Making due allowance for the bad weather, I cannot but feel disap-pointed in Zitza: the surrounding scenery, though doubtless full of var-ied beauty, does not seem to me sufficient to call forth such raptures of admiration, even if selected as a spot where an imaginative poet, repos-ing quietly after foregone toils and evils, might exaggerate its charms. But after traveling through the daily-remarkable beauties of Albania, the view from Zitza, to speak plainly disappointed me.49

In contrast to Lear’s earlier delight in the view of Mt. Athos’s ‘great beauty’ and other majestic Balkan sites, the disappointment with Zitza is notewor-thy, especially compared to another passage about Zitza.50

On the way to the same monastery, Byron had been caught in a raging thunderstorm, which inspired his ‘Stanzas composed during a thunder-storm’ (1809):

Chill and mirk is the nightly blast, Where Pindus’ mountains rise, And angry clouds are pouring fast The vengeance of the skies.51

Storm imagery is a common trope in Romantic literature, and Lear con-jures up similar storm-laden vocabulary when he writes about a reckless gallop near Lake Lapsista (which is near the Zitza monastery) in Jannina for that 5 November entry of 1848:

Thenceforth relentless torrents poured down, and the lake Lapsista was only dimly seen through intervals of shifting dark cloud—conveying a sensation of water and mountain, rather than an ocular conviction of their presence; and so amid rolling thunder and flashing lightning did I gallop on, across the treeless level . . . 52

This reckless galloping of horses through a thunderstorm is extremely uncharacteristic for Lear (who had been thrown from a horse and severely injured not six months previously and had written a picture story satiris-ing his own questionable horsemanship).53 He seemingly abandons verisi-

49 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, pp. 327–28.50 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 411.51 George Noel Gordon Byron, The Complete Works of Lord Byron (Paris: Baudry Euro-pean Library, 1835), ii, p. 403.52 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 328.53 See Lear in Sicily (1847) http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/LiS/lis01.html).

13

emily tock

militude for a Romantic emulation of the storm-obsessed Byron and other Romantic poets in this uncharacteristic night gallop through a storm after his personal disappointment with Zitza, the site of Byron’s monastery.54

These scenes are remarkable for their contradiction and bring to mind Lodge’s discussion regarding the parodic aspects of Lear’s work, as well as Williams’ ambivalences, when compared to other scenes in the narrative. For instance, throughout the journal, Lear relates comedic episodes, often with himself as a figure of fun to the local people. Early in the journal, on 14 September, he describes a scene in which he awkwardly trods on and breaks a pipe-bowl while having coffee with a local post-master.55 Near the middle of the narrative on 17 October, Lear comments wittily on the lack of ‘borrowing’ in Albania: ‘if you hired fifty horses of fifty men in this part of the world, you would have all the fifty owners for company, because in Albania nobody lends anything to anybody’.56 Near the end of the journal, in a November entry, Lear relates his delight on finding and feasting on water-cress, ‘an act which provoked the Epirote bystanders of the village to ecstatic laughter and curiosity’. He continues:

Every portion I put into my mouth, delighted them as a most charming exhibition of foreign whim ; and the more juvenile spectators instantly commenced bringing me all sorts of funny objects, with an earnest request that the Frank would amuse them by feeding thereupon forthwith.57

Amongst these typically comic Learical entries, the contrasting emo-tive qualities of the episode at Zitza and the galloping ride through the thunderstorm are suggestive of Lodge’s discussion of parody in Lear. She writes: ‘It explores the hyperbolic and hopeless nature of emotion itself, via a consciousness of genre that teeters between sincere echo and parody, exposing the nature of reprise as always potentially melancholy and funny at the same time’.58 Such a mix of melancholia and risibility as Lodge de-scribes could also be applied to the final pattern that Lear inscribes on his Albanian sampler—Gothic storytelling.

54 Thompson, Carl, pp. 232–71. Thompson discusses the topic of storms in Romantic travel literature extensively. See also the chapter in the same work ‘Wordsworthian Scripts’ pp. 186–230.55 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, pp. 33–34.56 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 197.57 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, p. 321.58 Lodge, p. 84.

14


This thread, based on two anecdotes in Albania and a corresponding landscape, is a link from Lear to the Balkan Gothic and has enjoyed only two mentions in biographical accounts of Lear: Angus Davidson’s Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet, 1812—1888 (the 1938 and 1968 editions) and Susan Chitty’s That Singular Person Called Lear (2002 edi-tion). Davidson writes that ‘Here, he [Lear] told Church, he ‘lived on rugs and ate with gipsies and unclean persons and performed frightful dis-crepancies for 8 days’.59 Davidson then describes and quotes the anecdote from Albania without providing a citation. He leaves the reader to assume this is a tale that Lear related to Church, rather than a direct quote from Lear’s journal.60 This link with the Gothic in Lear’s travel literature was also noted by Uglow, who writes about Calabria: ‘As a sop to Gothic tastes, Lear includes a couple of tales of mad aristocrats, murdered lovers and crumbling castles.’61 The Gothic elements in Albania, however, relate an-ecdotes in which Lear himself is an active participant, rather than relating second-hand descriptions of local histories and long-dead actors.

Lear’s dip into the Gothic in Albania aligns with the shift from the Italian Gothic that Vesna Goldsworthy traces in the migration from the Mediterranean to the Balkans in Inventing Ruritania: Imperialism of the Imagination (1998).62 With the increasing frequency of European travel, Italy became too much a part of the standard Grand Tour and was there-fore unable to present the exotic setting necessary for the Gothic that Goldsworthy discusses. Thus, she writes that Byron’s travel in the Balkans offers an inroad from Italy into the establishment of the Balkans as a scene for the Gothic tale:

The Gothic is itself, as in John Polidori’s work The Vampyre (1819)—whose hero, Lord Ruthven was modelled on Byron – frequently a dark-er expression of the Byronic myth. . . . The desire to escape the dullness of civilised life . . . and immerse oneself in the ‘unspoilt’ world of other peoples—a more primitive and more cruel world—is accompanied by a fantasy of threat and a fear of being ‘sucked in’ and losing one’s identity.63

59 Angus Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet (1812—1888) (London: John Murray, 1938), 61.60 Davidson, p. 61.61 Uglow, p. 170.62 Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Ha-ven [Conn.] ; London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 74–75.63 Goldsworthy, p. 75.

15

emily tock

This description is akin to the following anecdote from Albania and is another glimpse into Lear’s experimentation in this travel narrative. While traveling in the Khimara district of Epirus on the Greek-Albanian border, Lear relates his own ‘darker expression of Byronic myth’ in Albania:

. . . we proceeded to a house, where, in a dark room of great size, a mat and cushions were spread for me, and there was no lack of compa-ny. A very aged man, more than a century old, occupied a bed in one corner; a screaming baby in a cradle on the opposite side, illustrated another extreme point of the seven ages of the family; two or three women, retiring into the obscurest shade, seemed to be knitting, while circles of long-haired Khimariotes thronged the floor.

Many of these, both outside and in the house, extended their hands for mine to shake, I supposed from being aware of Frank modes of salutation; but among them, three or four gave me so peculiar a twist or crack of my fingers, that I was struck by its singularity; though it was not until my hand had been held firmly for a repetition of this manoeu-vre, accompanied by a look of interrogation from the holder, that the thought flashed on my mind that what I observed was a concerted sig-nal. I shortly became fully aware that I was among people, who, from some cause or other, had fled from justice in other lands.

One of these was one who, with his face entirely muffled except-ing one eye, kept aloof in the darker part of the chamber, until having thoroughly scrutinized me, he came forward, and dropping his capote, discovered to my horror and amazement, features which, though dis-guised by an enormous growth of hair, I could not fail to recognize. ‘The world is my city now’, said he; ‘I am become a savage like those with whom I dwell. What is life to me?’ And covering his face again, he wept with a heart-breaking bitterness only life-exiles can know.

Alas! henceforth this wild Alsatia of the mountains—this strange and fearful Khimara—wore to my thoughts a tenfold garb of mel-ancholy, when I considered it as the refuge, during the remainder of a weary life, of men whose early years had been passed in far other abodes and society.64

Only after he has passed the interrogation and been accepted into their circle, is Lear approached by the cloaked figure, this ‘life-exile’. Lear pro-vides no further information regarding this ‘muffled’ character. Davidson

64 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, 276–77. See also Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Second Canto, Stanzas XLVIII-LV. This term is ‘Chimaera’ in Byron’s work. Lear uses both ‘Khimariot’ and ‘Khimariote’ in Albania.

16


links this passage to Byron’s The Giaour (1813), questioning the possible identity of the figure:

Unhappily Lear gives us no clue to the identity, or even the nation-ality of this mysterious figure—a notorious swindler? A murderer? An Italian revolutionary leader? A disgraced royalty—who, from his appearance, his behaviour, his surroundings, might be taken straight from the pages of Mrs. Radcliffe or some other of the Tales of Terror of fifty years before—or from Byron’s Giaour:

Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl. The flash of that dilating eye Reveals too much of times gone by; Though varying, indistinct, its hue, Of will his glance the gazer rue.65

Perhaps a more pertinent question would be: Why did Lear included this anecdote? It could be that, with this scene, Lear was experimenting with a brief story of the undead, similar to Byron’s ‘A Fragment’ (1819) that inspired Polidori’s Vampyre (1819). I contend this is a likely motive for Lear, especially given the concordance of the spectre, ‘muffled excepting one eye’, which is similar to the second and third lines of Byron’s vam-pire in The Giaour stanza above (as Davidson implies).66 Additionally, that strange term, ‘life-exile’. points in this direction. Here, to what, exactly, is ‘life’ referring? This mysterious figure’s previous life amongst society, or an actual physical life with its flowing blood and beating heart? Returning to my thesis that Albania was a literary experiment for Lear, I argue that this fragment of a tale was an attempt to mimic the efforts of Byron’s ghost story challenge at the villa in Geneva in 1815 with his own offering of the Balkan Gothic.67 With its strangely compelling cloaked figure and vampir-ic elements, it is as if Lear were deliberately mimicking Byron’s short story or The Giaour.68

This anecdote, moreover, is not the only brush with the Gothic that Lear includes in the text of Albania. Earlier in the journal he writes:

I am awakened an hour before daylight by the most piercing screams. Hark!—they are the loud cries of a woman’s voice, and they come near-

65 Davidson, p. 62.66 Davidson, pp. 61–62.67 Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (London: Pimlico, 1993), p. 243.68 Marchand, p. 243.

17

emily tock

er—nearer—close to the house. For a moment, the remembrance of last night’s orgies [Roma entertainment with screaming and howling], the strange place I was lying in, and the horrid sounds by which I was so suddenly awakened, made a confusion of ideas in my mind which I could hardly disentangle, till, lighting a phosphorus match and candle, I saw all the Albanians in the room, sitting bolt upright, and listening with ugly countenances to the terrible cries below. In vain I ask the cause of them: no one replies; but one by one, and Anastasio the last, all descend the ladder, leaving me in a mystery which does not make the state of things more agreeable; for though I have not ‘supped full of horror’ like Macbeth, yet my senses are nevertheless ‘cooled to hear so dismal a night shriek.’

I do not remember ever to have heard so horrid and deadly a sound as that long shriek, perpetually repeated with a force and sharpness not to be recalled without pain; and what made it more horrible, was the distinct echo to each cry from the lonely rocks around this hideous place. The cries, too, were exactly similar, and studiedly monotonous in measured wild grief. After a short time, Anastasio and the others returned, but at first I could elicit no cause for this startling the night from its propriety. At length I suppose they thought that, as I was now irretrievably afloat in Khimara life, I might as well know the worst as not; so they informed that the wailings proceeded from a woman of the place, whose husband had just been murdered. He had had some feud with an inhabitant of a neighbouring village (near Kudhesi) nor had he returned to his house as was expected last night; and just now, by means of the Khimariot dogs, whose uproar is unimaginable, the head of the slain man was found on one side of the ravine, immediately below the house I am in, his murderers having tossed it over from the opposite bank, where the body still lay. This horrid intelligence had been taken (with her husband’s head) to his wife, and she instantly began the public shrieking and wailing usual with all people in this singular region on the death of relatives.69

With the Gothic horror of this decapitation anecdote, Lear may be set-ting the scene for his later tale with the veiled, undead figure. The darkly comedic elements—‘This horrid intelligence had been taken (with her hus-band’s head) to his wife’—may nevertheless have a purpose beyond Lodge’s genre-teetering between the melancholic and the comedic. Decapitation as a method of preventing vampirism or as a method of disposing of a vampire is a common element in Balkan folklore.70 Goldsworthy discusses

69 Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c, 243–45.70 Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven [Conn.] ; London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 61.

18


the burgeoning publication of translations of Balkan poetry, music, and folklore, including works by Mérimée, Scott, and Karadžić; thus, it is pos-sible that Lear would have been aware of Balkan folk knowledge associated with vampires.71 Is this scene serving two purposes, a typically Learical subversion of Romantic Gothic horror (as in O’Neill’s discussion of Lear’s ‘Romantic reworking’) and a signalling of Lear’s knowledge about Balkan vampirism to legitimise the subsequent fragmented story of the ‘muffled’ figure?

This ‘muffled’ figure might well have been revisited in one of Lear’s Albanian landscapes. Uglow, Lodge, and Williams all discuss the link between Lear’s travel-writing and his landscape artistry, and how an ex-ploration of one of the landscapes that Lear painted on his Balkan trav-els suggests another shadowy foray into the Gothic. In Lear’s other travel literature, which focuses on the picturesque aspects of European travel, he provides numerous images of ruined architecture framed by the wild beauty of the Mediterranean, reflective of his use of the picturesque in the texts. I argue that Lear also infused one of his Balkan sketches with a Gothic element. Note this sketch (Figure 1) from one of Lear’s Balkan im-ages, a watercolour wash of Gallipoli held at Harvard’s Houghton Library.72 In the centre foreground is a ghost-like image (Figure 2).

Unlike the rest of the sketch, this face has not been coloured. Lear often includes tiny elements in his landscapes, often birds, as Matthew Bevis discusses in his article, ‘Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight’ (2013), as well as instructions for colour and shading.73 This spectre in the Gallipoli image is clearly not a note on colour, nor is it one of Lear’s typical birds. The image is spectral, containing neither defined eyes nor a discernible mouth. Why did Lear leave this spectral image floating in the water of the port of Gallipoli? Was this another experiment with the Gothic for Lear, just as in the prose of his journal? Is it a visual link, perhaps, to Ali Pasha, Byron’s The Giaour, or the ‘muffled’ figure in his own Gothic fragment?74 Perhaps

71 Goldsworthy, p. 24. Additionally, Mérimée was a friend of Lear’s. See Jenny Uglow, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (London : Faber & Faber, 2017), 389. 72 Edward Lear, Gelibolu [Galipoli] 10 September 1848. MS-Typ-55.26-497.Jpg, 1848, Har-vard University Houghton Library <https://i0.wp.com/blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/files/2013/03/MS-Typ-55.26-497.jpg> [accessed 30 January 2020].73 Matthew Bevis, ‘Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight’, Journal of the British Academy, 1 (2013), 31–69 (pp. 52–53; 63–67) <https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/001.031>.74 Andrew Allport, ‘The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance of Form’, Stud-ies in Romanticism, 51.3 (2012); Leif Weatherby, ‘A Reconsideration of the Romantic Frag-ment’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 92.4 (2017), pp. 407–25. Addition-

19

emily tock

Figure 1. ‘Gelibolu [Galipoli] 10 September 1848’. Harvard University, Houghton Library.

Figure 2. ‘Gelibolu [Galipoli] 10 September 1848’ (closeup). Harvard University, Houghton Library.

20


it is at once both one and all of these—one of Williams’s ‘characteristically Learical ambivalences’.

Gothic storytelling fragment, Romantic journey, ghostly landscape: all are woven together in the Albanian sampler and expanded Lear’s travel literature beyond the informational and picturesque patterns he used in Excursions, Southern Calabria, and Corsica. With Albania, Lear expanded his travel writing in an experiment to describe his journey through the Balkans, infusing his journal with names, places, and events evocative of Byron’s and Leake’s treks, but also infusing the narrative with a definitive attempt at Gothic storytelling that nevertheless contains an ambiguous subversion of his own horrific tales with a typically Learical dark humour. This experimental expansion in his travel writing conformed to Lear’s life-long preoccupation with journeys and the analogous life-long quest for the literary or artistic sensation that would bring him the money and acceptance he perennially sought. Unfortunately for Lear, this acceptance always seemed to him just out of reach on the next horizon, in the next painting, in the next book, in the next destination.

ally, Elizabeth Cheresh Allen discusses the Romantic quest for wholeness versus integrity in her discussion of literary fragments in A Fallen Idol Is Still a God: Lermontov and the Quandaries of Cultural Transmission (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 2007) pp. 22–58. In it, she discusses Schlegel’s part to whole argument, which is a topic in Lear schol-arship explored by Anna Henchman: See Henchman’s chapter in Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry ‘Fragments Out of Place: Homology and the Logic of Nonsense in Edward Lear’ pp.183–201 and her earlier article ‘Edward Lear Dismembered: Word Fragments and Body Parts’. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35.5 (2013),pp. 479–87.

21

emily tock

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Byron, George Gordon, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage <http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Byron/charoldt.html> [accessed 5 April 2018].

———, Don Juan <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm> [ac-cessed 5 April 2018].

Byron, George Gordon, Lord Byron: Selected Letters and Journals, ed. by Marchand, Leslie A. (London: Random House, 1993).

Byron, George Noel Gordon, The Complete Works of Lord Byron (Paris: Baudry European Library, 1835), ii.

‘Edward Lear’s Diaries’ <https://leardiaries.wordpress.com/2011/09/page/2/> [accessed 28 March 2018].

Lear, Edward, Edward Lear: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).———, Gelibolu [Galipoli] 10 September 1848. MS-Typ-55.26-497.Jpg, 1848, , Watercolour

wash, 2280 x 1535, Harvard University Houghton Library <https://i0.wp.com/blogs.law.harvard.edu/houghton/files/2013/03/MS-Typ-55.26-497.jpg> [accessed 30 January 2020].

———, Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania &c (London: R. Bentley, 1851) <https://archive.org/details/journalsoflands00learuoft>.

Secondary

Allport, Andrew, ‘The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance of Form’, Studies in Romanticism, 51.3 (2012) <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A315369786/AONE?u=nli_ttda&sid=AONE&xid=3ef76fac>.

Aslan, Carolyn C., and Göksel Sazci, ‘Across the Hellespont: Maydos (Ancient Madytos), Troy and the North-Eastern Aegean in the Late Eighth to Early Sixth Century Bc’, The Annual of the British School at Athens, 111 (2016), 121–62 <http://dx.doi.org.libgate.library.nuigalway.ie/10.1017/S0068245415000180>.

Barber, Paul, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven [Conn.] ; London: Yale University Press, 1988).

Bevis, Matthew, ‘Edward Lear’s Lines of Flight’, Journal of the British Academy, 1 (2013), 31–69 <https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/001.031>.

Carey, Daniel, ‘Compiling Nature’s History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society’, Annals of Science, 54.3 (1997), 269–92 <https://doi.org/10.1080/00033799700200211>.

Cecil, Robert, ‘The Cession of the Ionian Islands’, History Today; London, 1 September 1964, 616–26.

Cochran, Peter, ‘The Sale of Parga and Isles of Greece’, Keats-Shelley Review, 14.1 (2000), 7.Davidson, Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet (1812-1888)

(London: John Murray, 1938).Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven

[Conn.] ; London: Yale University Press, 1998).Holmberg, Eva Johanna, ‘In the Company of Franks: British Identifications in the Early

Modern Levant c.1600’, Studies in Travel Writing, 16.4 (2012), 363–74 <https://doi.org/10.1080/13645145.2012.723863>.

Hyman, Susan, ed., Edward Lear in the Levant: Travels in Albania, Greece and Turkey in Europe 1848-1849 (London: John Murray, 1988).

22


Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

Lodge, Sara, Inventing Edward Lear (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018).Marchand, Leslie, Byron: A Portrait (London: Pimlico, 1993).Noakes, Vivien, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, revised edition (Stroud, Gloucesteshire,

UK: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2006).———, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse by Edward Lear (Oxford: Penguin Classics,

2006).Oelkers, J., ‘Education: Phenomena, Concepts, and Theories’, in International Encyclopedia

of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Pergamon, 2001), pp. 4234–39 <https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/02324-X>.

Swaab, Peter, Over the Land and over the Sea: Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2005).

Thompson, Carl, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Uglow, Jenny, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (New York: Faber & Faber, 2017).Weatherby, Leif, ‘A Reconsideration of the Romantic Fragment’, The Germanic Review:

Literature, Culture, Theory, 92.4 (2017), 407–25.Williams, James, Edward Lear, Writers and Their Work (Liverpool: Liverpool University

Press, 2018).Williams, James, and Matthew Bevis, eds., Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2016).

Is Arrival Still Possible? Frances Burney’s The Wanderer and the New Cartography in the Long Eighteenth Century

mitchell gauvin

The present analysis considers the literary representation of coerced migration at the fraught historical and political juncture between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—a period when

modern political arrangements began to emerge in Europe and North America owing to developments in documentary controls like passports and the forging of nation-based citizenship regimes. The novelist Frances Burney seems like an odd candidate for this analysis given her celebrity, thematic interests, and privilege relative to other women of the period (she achieved a level of financial independence owing to her novels and plays that was exceedingly rare). At the same time, however, Burney’s biography and literary output invite examination owning to her celebration of cultur-al hybridity (she was herself both ‘Fanny Burney’ and ‘Madame d’Arblay’) and multiple encounters with transnational movement. The literary text that centres this analysis is her last full-length novel The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814), a work which intimates in its very title a con-cern for travel, albeit travel that is existential as well as literal. The novel’s opening scene involving the protagonist’s irregular arrival to England will be analyzed alongside Burney’s own harrowing emigration under circum-stances of war, which she experienced during the novel’s gestation. Before exploring the relationship between Burney and the continued relevance of nineteenth century statecraft, I begin first in our contemporary peri-od by outlining what Ayelet Shachar terms the ‘new cartography’, which is constituted by fluid border enforcement that moves with the refugee to deny lawful arrival prior to the act of physically crossing a national boundary. This first section considers post-Soviet U.S. immigration policy as emblematic of a particular politics of arrival that I suggest is prefigured in Burney’s The Wanderer (despite the geographic and historical distance

24

is arrival still possible?

between the two). In the second section, my analysis will turn to Burney and in the last section I elaborate more fully the politics of arrival.

The New Cartography

In 1996, the United States made a seemingly innocuous reform to its Immigration and Nationality Act that portended profound and striking legal consequences for anyone wishing to cross the U.S. border. The re-form was a lexical and legal distinction between ‘entry’ and ‘admission’, the former referring to physical entry and the latter to lawful admission.1 In casual use, entry and admission operate as synonyms, but U.S. policy began making a meaningful distinction between the two as a means for recognizing only some movements to the country as legitimate, namely by legally constructing (through an act of wordplay) two different types of arrival. The result? One could conceivably enter the country without being admitted, or in other words one could be in the U.S. without having any constitutional rights. Despite United Nations protocol dictating that all persons possess inalienable rights which every nation ought to recognize, just as the 1789 Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen did in France at the beginning of the revolution, rights can be rendered unavaila-ble to persons at the border who are not technically within the country. As Hannah Arendt bluntly put it, there are no human rights without national rights, a point revealed most clearly in the figure of the stateless person or refugee. ‘The whole question of human rights’, Arendt notes, referring to the Déclaration, ‘was quickly and inextricably blended with the question of national emancipation’.2 A particular ‘stage of civilization’ needed to be reached, a stage of ‘popular and national sovereignty’, for a people to lift itself from a condition of oppression into a condition of emancipation.3 The refugee thus poses for Arendt a defining paradox: the figure meant to boldly signify the inalienable rights of the human being is likewise the one most in need of protection.

A strengthened resolve on the part of successive U.S. administrations to prioritize national sovereignty and tough border security has, somewhat ironically, led to U.S. policy that actively positions the American border

1 Ayelet Shachar, ‘The Shifting Border of Immigration Regulation’, Michigan Journal of International Law, 30, 1 (2009), pp. 809–39 (p. 815).2 Hannah Arendt, ‘Perplexities of the Rights of Man’, in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013) p. 843 Arendt, p. 84.

25

mitchell gauvin

as robust and fluid rather than static and immobile. The ‘location of the border is shifting’, Shachar writes in 2009, ‘at times penetrating into the interior, in other circumstances extending beyond the edge of territory.’4 The motivation behind this shifting border has essentially been to deny immigrants access to constitutional rights they would legally be afforded if they were in the United States. This narrowing of the possible legiti-mate means of movement treats the non-citizen present in the country as if they had never really crossed the border—the border moved with them, constantly denying them admission wherever they went. The practical significance of this lexical and rhetorical reform cannot be understated: a non-citizen, migrant, refugee, or stateless person who had physically en-tered the U.S. could be removed under grounds of inadmissibility instead of deportation, a significant legal distinction.5 In a sense, they’re not being deported because they (legally) were never admitted to the U.S. to begin with. The implication for the possibility of arrival is clear: certain persons, namely the undocumented or the unauthorized migrant, can never arrive in the United States even when they physically enter the country. In fact, so versatile is the U.S. border, some may never actually depart their own country in order to be denied admission thanks to the presence of U.S. pre-clearance facilities in airports around the world, which can deny entry before a traveller has even technically encountered the border.

The immigration landscape today involves countries like the U.S. seek-ing to meet the traveller or migrant at the border well before they can claim rights, which has the effect of altering both a country’s interior, where ‘il-legal’ immigrants can be captured and deported, and the spaces beyond the edge of national territory: conceivably anywhere is a space that a trav-eller or migrant can be denied rights, not just at the traditional border or port-of-entry. ‘This shifting border of immigration regulation’, Shachar continues, ‘is selectively utilized by national immigration regulators to re-gain control over their crucial realm of responsibility, to determine who to permit to enter, who to remove, and who to keep at bay’.6 The border is, in other words, a liquid demarcation open to manipulation by national legis-latures and regulatory agencies, ‘bleeding it into the interior or extending it beyond the territory’s exterior’.7 Shachar refers to these border practices as the new cartography, a form of remapping conducted and facilitated by

4 Shachar, p. 810.5 Shachar, p. 816.6 Ibid., p. 811.7 Ibid., p. 818.

26


changes in the rhetoric of citizenship and immigration. The consequence of this new cartography is the nation-states’ capacity to redraw themselves in novel and innovative ways such they may meet particular persons at the border before any rights may be claimed or may move with the citizen as they ostensibly cross borders. Rather than Arendt’s refugee being a figure whose status results from a lack of laws or legal apparatus, shifting borders like those of the U.S. ensure the refugee is everywhere bounded by laws that enclose them in the liminal space of neither arrival nor departure.

For decades scholars from a host of fields have argued that borders bounding the modern sovereign state are contrived, contingent, historical inventions—a point which popular audiences and some politicians have failed to grasp or appreciate, preferring national mythologies where bor-ders either naturally arise from shorelines or emerge divinely from provi-dential declaration. The development of a globalized economy dependent on the smooth exchange of both people and currency has likewise seemed an undeniable confirmation of borders as unstable distinctions perceived as a nuisance, if not redundant. The result, however, has been far from what scholars and the general public probably envisioned: the U.S. accept-ance of the mutability of its own border has led to the border’s weaponi-zation against immigrants. This new cartography owes its emergence to a two-hundred-year-old confrontation between states’, individuals, and or-ganizations like the church over the authority on human movement with-in and across national borders. Despite short periods of relaxed controls in the nineteenth century, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen xenophobic legislation in both Europe and North America that bars specific racial, ethnic, and religious minorities from admission. Far from being new, it is rather a cartography embedded in the post-Enlightenment imaginings of the nation and the citizen, the development of the passport, and revolutionary decrees on human rights. Attempts to liquify the bor-der are not strictly a contemporary phenomenon but discernable at the historical juncture of the nation-state. It is a transnational and transgen-erational strategy for the transformation of persons into unwanted figures who possess no civic or legal recourse for admission, and are dispossessed of their rights.

While these examinations of statecraft where it concerns immigration and citizenship are easy enough to elaborate in broad theoretical terms, they fail to articulate the inherently personal and embodied dimensions of the politics of arrival. It is here that the relevance of reading Frances Burney’s The Wanderer arises. Burney offers a rich novelization of the French Revolution from a position of cultural hybridity that prioritizes the personal experience of immigration and tyranny over a generalized

27

mitchell gauvin

critique of revolutionary politics. In particular, the new cartography em-blematic in U.S. immigration policy is prefigured in her own experience as an émigré, which she recounts in her journals and letters, and in her novel The Wanderer, which fictionalizes an émigré’s return to England under an intensified anti-immigrant political climate. An analysis of Burney’s work can illuminate both the dynamics of border liquidity and the refugee as the central figure of modern politics, if not modernity itself.

One Hot Summer in 1812

Burney relates in her journal the months of July and August of 1812, which began with a ‘sad’ trip from Paris to Dunkirk—sad ‘from the cruel sepa-ration which it exacted, and the fearful uncertainty of impending events’.8 The plan, while not necessarily dangerous, was nonetheless consequential: a rare chance to escape for England to see family and friends for the first time in ten years and to shed some of the encroachments on liberty insti-tuted by the Napoleonic regime. The plan was to board a ship in Dunkirk with her son Alex and sail for Dover, but due to the state of war between the two countries a vessel could not (legally) travel between England and France, meaning a ship and its passengers wishing to cross the channel had to disguise their intentions. Burney’s husband, decorated French gen-eral Alexandre d’Arblay, had managed to find such a ship, which would alight in Dunkirk ‘under American colours, and with American passports and License’9 with the allusion of returning to the United States but would instead make a stopover in England. The prohibited journey, if successful, meant Burney would finally return to her native country after ten years of exile in France and see her father, who was sick and whose condition was worsening (he would die two years later), but it likewise meant ‘cruel separation’10 from her husband who would stay behind, the reason for her initial sadness at leaving Paris. General d’Arblay had himself been an exile in England during the revolution but his favour had been restored tempo-rally under Napoleon, leading the couple to move to Paris where Burney subsequently became an exile in France.

Now at Dunkirk with a chance to escape, Burney wrote that she was ‘compelled, through the mismanagement and misconduct of the Captain

8 Frances Burney, Journals and Letters, ed. by Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 884.9 Burney, Journals and Letters, p. 88410 Ibid.

28


of the Vessel to spend the most painfully wearisome – though far from the most acutely afflicting – 6 Weeks of my Life’.11 The weather was uncomfort-ably hot and with the captain looking for more passengers to ferry, Burney was left to wander for weeks in the liminal space of neither arrival nor departure. She could not return to Paris to wait out the six weeks, lest the captain decided for a speedy exit, nor feel secure that at least her entry to England was assured: capture at sea by French authorities was a prospect. With very little to do but wait, Burney requested some unfinished docu-ments left in Paris be sent to her in the hopes that her severe boredom and anxiety waiting to leave could be tempered. The documents in question happened to be the incomplete manuscript of The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, her last full-length novel and most critically panned (it ended up garnering less-lasting attention relative to her other more celebrated works, Evelina, Camilla, and Cecilia; in fact, after its initial editions in 1814, The Wanderer remained out of print until 1988).12 If Burney’s own illicit travel was not enough, even the migration of a simple manuscript from Paris to Dunkirk was laden with risk of discovery. Documents, specifical-ly of a political nature, could not simply be exported out of the country. Permission to transport them required disguising that England was the ul-timate destination for both Burney and her luggage. Additionally, Burney had to affirm ‘that the Work had nothing in it political, nor even National, nor possibly offensive to the Government’, which she did, and thanks also to d’Arblay, the manuscript managed to make it to Burney without being thoroughly examined.13

In truth, The Wanderer is deeply political despite a title and preface that prefigure the work as apolitical romanticism. A novel of manners as well as historical fiction, the novel opens with upper-class English travellers escaping Robespierre’s France owing to the increased climate of terror and political persecution. These travellers continually comment on the rev-olution from a safe geographic distance, although sometimes ignorantly (most of the characters never seem able to pronounce ‘Robespierre’ cor-rectly). The French Revolution figures the plot, the tide of general suspi-cion cast upon the protagonist (Juliet), and the sensibilities of the British, although in her preface addressed to her father she writes that any readers

11 Ibid., p. 885 12 Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Note on the Text’, in Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, ed. by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Ox-ford University Press, 1991), pp. xxxviii-xxxix (p. xxxix).13 Burney, Journals and Letters, pp. 887–8.

29

mitchell gauvin

‘who expect to find here materials for political controversy; or fresh food for national animosity; must turn elsewhere their disappointed eyes’ for all they will instead find is a ‘composition upon general life, manners, and characters’.14 Burney’s disclaimer of being apolitical or non-political in her writing is perplexing, not only from the revolutionary events which haunt the work but the explicit British class-politics she targets: the female difficulties in the subtitle are a reference to Juliet’s struggles as a woman to gain financial independence in a patriarchal society without resorting to traditional feminine roles. Juliet’s attempts to contest the financial ob-stacles to a distinctly feminine liberation have been the primary focus of contemporary scholarly interest renewed by the work’s republication in 1988, but The Wanderer is also arguably one of the earliest literary English works to depict a recognizably modern form of immigration circum-scribed by competing foreign policy, custom checks, cultural and racial hybridity, emphasis on individual documentation, and the figure of the nation-bound refugee fleeing state-based political violence or persecution against the backdrop of two modern European citizenship regimes. Even though this opening scene only occupies a few of the opening pages, it pre-figures all of Juliet’s exploits over the course of the work. Yet because her border crossing is so singular (as in the extraordinary experience of one person) the act of immigration is portrayed as a personal adventure rather than emblematic of an emerging form of politicized existence.

Perhaps Burney sought to cast her work as apolitical to protect against expected criticism regarding the work’s depiction of the British up-per-classes; or to appeal to readers of the etiquette novel, who may be dissuaded by the work’s explicit reference to contentious political events. Burney was also keenly aware that one’s personal success or failures could not be read as sanctions or indictments for the prevailing political climate. For reasons that will soon become clear, irrespective of Burney’s disclaim-ers regarding the non-political nature of her writing, we can nonetheless read a distinctive politics of arrival in the character of Juliet.

Despite the manuscript’s safe arrival to the French coast in the summer of 1812, this was far from the end of Burney’s journey. The manuscript subsequently had trouble clearing the customs house at Dunkirk; Burney writes that a French police officer ‘began a rant of indignation and amaze-ment, at a sight so unexpected and prohibited, that made him incapable

14 Frances Burney, The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, ed. by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 4.

30


to enquire, or to hear the meaning of such a freight’15. Thanks to a local English merchant, and with the help of forged American licenses, what would become The Wanderer was cleared to travel with Burney, but the event led her to remark in her journal on ‘such unexampled strictness of Police Discipline with respect to Letters or Papers’ between England and France.16 She was aware that along with the passports for herself and son, her passage across the channel was remarkably lucky and doubts that had Napoleon been in Paris at the time (instead of at war on the Russian front), Burney would not have secured the necessary documentation to return to England.17

After six weeks ‘consumed in wasteful weariness’, the voyage involved a ‘sickening Calm’ in which their ship ‘could make no way, but lingered two days and two nights’.18 Burney remained bedridden almost the entire jour-ney, but the ship would not land at Dover under its own authority. Instead, a few miles from shore the vessel was apprehended by British authorities: the War of 1812 had broken out against the United States while Burney was waiting for passage to England, and the ship as an American vessel was seized. Burney and her son, who was initially accused of being born in France, were technically captured rather than rescued, prisoners in their own country albeit temporarily.

We move now to The Wanderer, which was published two years after Burney’s harrowing emigration from France. The shared difficulties in crossing borders for Burney and her manuscript were re-articulated in The Wanderer, a work which, as previously mentioned, announces itself as concerned with travel in its title, and not just any travel but specifi-cally ‘wandering’, a ‘quintessential Romantic activity’, as Margaret Doody remarks, ‘as it represents erratic and personal energy expended outside a structure and without progressing to a set objective’,19 The act of wandering that Burney refers to in her title is spiritual and symbolic, involving seeing and traversing cartographies that are not purely geographic, although the physical act of wandering may nonetheless contribute to the inner voyage the wanderer undertakes. Juliet is easily identifiable as the wanderer of the

15 Burney, Journals and Letters, p. 889.16 Burney, Journals and Letters, p. 890.17 Burney he mentions this encounter with French customs in the preface of the novel but for some reason leaves out the officer’s indignant rant, choosing instead to relate the manuscript’s initial troubles as merely a minor hiccup in its conveyance to England. 18 Ibid., p. 904.19 Margaret Doody, ‘Introduction’ in The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties, pp. vii-xxxvii (p. vii).

31

mitchell gauvin

novel’s title, both by the reader and the characters, yet the Romantic ideal does not seem to bring with it any sort of respect or deference. In fact, Juliet’s practice of wandering invites expressly negative assessments: she is referred to as an ‘illegitimate stroller’,20 a ‘frenchified stroller’, a ‘vagabond’, and a ‘needy travelling adventurer’21—rhetoric which suggests that while the Romantic ideal of wandering may still be possible in theory, in practice the act also invites accusations of vagrancy and itinerancy, especially in a modern geography bounded by political borders.

The work opens in 1790s with a perilous escape across the channel as several British travellers flee Robespierre’s Reign of Terror under cover of darkness intending to return to ‘that blessed shore!’22 Just before depar-ture, however, a mysterious figure beckons in French for permission to join them. There is initially some confusion, but its soon determined that the agonized voice belongs to a woman. As a sea officer already onboard exclaims, ‘A woman, a child, and a fallen enemy are three persons that every true Briton should scorn to misuse’.23 The woman is allowed onboard despite continued consternation from other travellers, a small bit of light revealing only that she is dressed in ‘ordinary attire’.24 Upon reaching safer waters, passengers speak more freely without fear of alerting French au-thorities and address the unknown late arrival. In a deliberate narrative move from Burney, we find out much later that her name is Juliet, but both the reader and the characters within the novel mostly know the protago-nist as Incognita and Ellis. A fed-up passenger on board calls her ‘dulcin-ea’,25 the imagined love-interest of Don Quixote. Later she will be given the name Ellis after trying to collect letters addressed to ‘L.S.’, which is clearly an additional pseudonym and which further ensconces her in disguise. Margaret Doody reasons part of Burney’s choice in naming her L.S. may involve the first two letters of L.s.d. (or £sd), the Latin abbreviation for the currency pounds, shilling, pence.26 The difficulty for women to become financially self-sufficient involves confrontation with an economic world that treats women as currency, as the means of exchange. Juliet’s exchange between two countries becomes part of a series of transactions she will have to overcome in order to achieve some level of independence.

20 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 86.21 Ibid., p. 75.22 Ibid., p. 22.23 Ibid., p. 12.24 Ibid.25 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 13.26 Doody, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi.

32


When the day finally dawns, daylight reveals the Incognita to be dressed in tattered clothes and heavily bandaged around the face and hands, but the others in the boat continue to try and place her socially and religiously. While Juliet does speak English, it is remarked that she speaks with a ‘for-eign accent’.27 Mrs. Maple soon demands an extensive itinerary of Juliet’s origins. Another passenger remarks that ‘Her dress is not merely shabby; ‘tis vulgar. I have lost all hope of a pretty nun. She can be nothing above a house-maid’28 and a moment latter that ‘If […] she has one atom that is native in her, how will she be choaked by our foggy atmosphere!’29 The question of Juliet’s nationality occasions a political discussion regarding the ongoing revolution in France, at which point, ‘the stranger, having tak-en off her gloves, to arrange an old shawl, in which she was wrapt, exhib-ited hands and arms of so dark a colour, that they might rather be styled black than brown’; moreover, a ‘closer view of the little that was visible of the muffled up face, perceived it to be of an equally dusk hue’.30 Juliet appears to be a black woman and her apparent racial identity ignites a fury of interrogation, whether she is from ‘West Indies’ or ‘somewhere off the coast of Africa’.31 The passengers do not as yet know the multiple levels of concealment with which she has dressed herself, initially under darkness of night, then clothing, and now blackface.

Once landed in England, some of the fellow travellers continue to pester Juliet, hectoring her with questions regarding her real name (still unknown at this point), her origins, and her reasons for travelling to England. Mrs. Maple desires the landlord of the inn to which the passengers are tem-porally residing to take notice ‘that a foreigner, of a suspicious character, had come over with them by force’,32 an obviously misleading retelling of how Juliet had arrived onboard their vessel. Harleigh, a later love interest, refuses to take on Mrs. Maple’s suspicions, to which she responds that she will inform the magistrates herself. At the possibility of having the au-thorities arrive, Juliet proclaims ‘I am no foreigner,—I am English!’33 Her initial status as a political refugee dissolves as her admission suggests that while perhaps French-sounding, Juliet is in another sense returning home. Soon, however, her other layer of disguise unravels. Juliet’s ‘dark hue’ ap-

27 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 17.28 Ibid.29 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 18.30 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 19.31 Ibid.32 Ibid., p. 26.33 Ibid.

33

mitchell gauvin

pears to be ‘smeared and streaked’ and a day later ‘to be of a dusky white’.34 The next day, the metamorphosis is complete, as Juliet’s skin has ‘changed from a tint nearly black, to the brightest, whitest, and most dazzling fair-ness’.35 This causes Mrs. Ireton to remark ‘for ‘twas but an hour or two since, that you were the blackest, dirtiest raggedest wretch I ever beheld; and now—you are turned into an amazing beauty!’36 Juliet had entered the vessel ostensibly black and arrived in England white.

It is tempting to read Burney’s turbulent relationship with France into the character of Juliet: both are culturally French Englishwomen who are forced to escape the country due to political turmoil or instability—for Juliet this is initiated by Robespierre and for Burney by Napoleon, but when this opening scene was written remains uncertain. By the time the manuscript had arrived at Dunkirk to travel with Burney to England in the summer of 1812, she had been working on the manuscript inconsistently for over a decade and had already written three of the eventual five vol-umes, although it is not certain which sections composed these volumes.

Regardless of Burney’s biography, the opening of the work is peculiar to say the least—a white woman appropriates a racialized persona os-tensibly to hide her own identity and assist in her escape from France. Burney seems not to have been concerned or aware that a racialized per-sona would compound movement rather than expatiate it. But how are we to read Juliet’s racial appearance knowing later that she will shed it? How are we to even describe it? Sara Salih calls Juliet’s temporary com-plexion a ‘racial cross-dressing’,37 a phrasing which intimates a sort of dramatic disguise or theatrical costume. Salih’s terminology aligns with The Wanderer’s depiction of gendered performance and amateur theatre, which constitutes a major subplot and which would place Juliet’s racial appearance along a thematic continuum of recitals, routines, and acting, with questions of where the essential Juliet resides, what aspects of char-acter are inherent and which performative. Coupled with the novel’s genre as a conduct-book focusing on gender and class-bound social etiquette, Burney seems to subsume Juliet’s initial appearance as a person of col-our as one among many roles or temporary dressings that Juliet acquires to escape France, as a disguise among a host of other disguises used to

34 Ibid., p. 43.35 Ibid.36 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 43.37 Sara Salih, ‘Camilla and The Wanderer’, in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Bur-ney, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) pp. 39–53 (p. 48).

34


smuggle herself out of a dire situation. Indeed, quoting Salih again, ‘Her appearance in racial drag in the first scene of the novel is only the first in a series of transformations (narrated and represented) from white to black, from female to male, from aristocrat to working class – and back again’.38

For those who witness Juliet’s multiple changes, the shedding of what at the time would have been read as essentialist categories of race and gender is destabilizing, although Salih suggests readers of the era likely ‘would have been relieved that a gleaming white heroine – albeit culturally French – emerges from the ‘stained’ skin that the heroine wears in the novel’s opening pages’.39 Indeed, many characters comment positively on Juliet’s new appearance when she does eventually emerge as white, having taken her previously black skin as a sign of dirtiness and vulgarity. Even characters like Elinor, Mrs. Maple, and Mr. Ireton, who cause Juliet the most consternation, seem at least relieved to know Juliet is not a person of colour. Additionally, the use of racial persona as a metaphor for the oppression she faces as a woman in the late-eighteenth century would be a familiar trope for readers of proto-feminist writings which were attract-ed to the language of slavery as conduits for discussions of feminine sub-jugation going back to Judith Drake and Mary Astell in the late-1600s.40 Astell in particular used raced-based slavery as a convenient analogy for the strictures of marriage.

Yet the obviously racial overtures of the work remain frustratingly un-explored within the novel itself as the issue of race is quickly discarded by Burney once Juliet has been revealed as white. Her whiteness is depict-ed as essential to Juliet; there is nothing else beneath her white skin to reveal. While so many other aspects of her character remain contingent and negotiable—her class and social standing, for example—ultimately her race is presented as ontologically secure. The characters and readers of The Wanderer initially discomforted by the intimation that race may in part not be determining of essence or virtue are instead affirmed in their belief that their own whiteness is inalienable, in turn leading to particular privileges and social status. In other words, Burney instrumentalizes race as a convenient form of disguise for her protagonist to appear more mys-terious, to obscure Juliet’s origins wrapped up in revolutionary politics. It seems for Burney—a writer acutely aware of British class distinctions

38 Salih, ‘Camilla and The Wanderer’, p. 50. 39 Ibid., p. 51. 40 Sara Salih, ‘‘Her Blacks, Her Whites and Her Double Face!’: Altering Alterity in The Wanderer’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 11, 3 (1999), 301–15 (p. 304).

35

mitchell gauvin

and the assumptions casted upon ‘low society’—the eventual revelation of Juliet’s artistic talent and high standing acquires more force and profundity if we are initially misled by her persona as the most disenfranchised, most invisible figure in late-eighteenth century France and England, which for Burney and her audience is the black woman.

While Burney’s witty undressing of the British upper classes might acquire more poignancy if the person they falsely derided and interro-gated ended up being a figure farthest from her initial appearance, the instrumentalizing of race for literary purposes cannot be ignored in crit-ical assessment of The Wanderer. Juliet’s shedding of disguises results in a political volatility as her fellow émigrés, who are British citizens return-ing to the comfort of their middle to upper-class lives, jockey to ascer-tain precisely how she relates to the rest of them (citizenship is, after all, fundamentally relational). Her initial appearance as a foreigner, refugee, or stateless person—a racial refugee from either the West Indies or Africa as Mr. Riley surmises41—leads Mrs. Maple to threaten alerting the ‘mag-istrates’ to Juliet’s presence, at which point she exclaims that she is in fact English and not French, at least by nationality. Throughout these open-ing passages, references to the shore alludes at not just a geographic point where land meets sea but as a figural or metaphorical configuration to distinguish between the liberty and morally superior air of Great Britain and the dangerous and ideological space of France. Yet despite alighting on physical land, Juliet continues to be treated by some of the other trav-ellers as if the shore had moved with her, as if she had never really exited the ship. The disguises add to her predicament, but as she sheds them they likewise eliminate the successive borders Juliet must cross in order to nat-uralize, or rather re-naturalize, in the eyes of her fellow Britons, who are comforted that Juliet has revealed herself as not a foreigner or a refugee but instead a talented, humble, intelligent, white woman of modesty, good character, and (crucially) British citizenship. After Ellis/Juliet is overheard playing the harp with tremendous skill in the home of Mrs. Maple, the reader learns of the surprise that her fellow travellers experienced:

All, except Harleigh, remained nearly stupefied by what had passed, for no one else had ever considered her but as a needy travelling adventurer. To him, her language, her air, and her manner, pervading every disadvantage of apparel, poverty, and subjection, had announced her, from the first, to have received the education, and to have lived the life of a gentlewoman.42

41 Burney, The Wanderer, p. 19.42 Ibid., p. 86.

36


The lesson they have learned from the experience (save for Harleigh) is not the hubris of their relentless and unjustified suspicion casted upon foreigners and vulnerable human beings—the seemingly obvious lesson to be gathered from this episode—but rather that their own positions of privilege are secure. The implication is that for those who cannot so easily shed their racial identity, the shore shall move with them, denying them the unfussed movement afforded to Juliet once she is revealed as white, although Juliet remains a convenient Other even as details of her identity slowly emerge. ‘She is at the same time alterity’, Debra Silverman writes, ‘otherness even to herself ’.43 With Juliet’s various costume changes, how-ever, her alterity is ‘altered’ during the course of the work, ‘so that by the time the novel concludes’, writes Salih, ‘the unfathomable ‘other’ has been converted into a reassuringly ‘native’ subject, who may assume her rightful place in the upper echelons of English society without disturbing existing social or racial structures’.44 Juliet’s alterity intimates that the otherness that denies her a smooth channel for arrival is contingent and inscribed from without rather than from within, yet this fact remains unseen by the other characters who continue to treat Juliet as a suspicious foreigner whose political dispossession and shady allegiances render her a potential enemy to the British nation.

Burney happens to capture in both her novel The Wanderer and her own lived experience as an émigré a point in which arrival is no longer literal, but which is nonetheless smoothed owing to her privilege and ce-lebrity. The manifest singularity of Juliet’s exodus derives from the fact it was successful, for any other person of presumed racial and lower-class background would likely not have had the opportunity to convey them-selves into English society the way Juliet does. A distinctly modern politics of arrival defined by networks of custom checks and interrogative gaz-es emerges to catch Juliet, and it is only by inexplicably becoming white does she avoid worse. Burney herself is explicitly thankful that her own celebrity (even Napoleon knew of her) and personal connections could soften the trouble of bypassing border enforcement, while also keen-ly aware that post-revolutionary Europe in imposing draconian custom checks is flirting with a new type of control that threatens to hamper the sort of transnational movement so integral to her disposition as a cultur-al hybrid of English and French. It is no wonder Burney thought of the

43 Debra Silverman, ‘Reading France Burney’s The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties: The Politics of Women’s Independence’, Pacific Coast Philology, 26, ½ (1991), 68–77 (p. 72).44 Salih, ‘Altering Alterity in The Wanderer’, p. 302.

37

mitchell gauvin

French Revolution as an event impossible to ignore, just as the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had been for writers a century earlier, but it is not just the act of migration and the threat of restrictive customs that Burney so interestingly decides to inaugurate her novel The Wanderer with—Juliet’s fellow émigrés take it upon themselves to enact strict immigration control in the absence of authorities for reasons that are racial, class-based, and grounded in hearsay.

A culture of anti-immigrant sentiment familiar to twenty-first centu-ry readers informs their ruthless interrogation of Juliet. In the absence of identifiable magistrates with which to conduct deportations, Juliet’s fellow citizens take it upon themselves—under the banner of national interest—to racially profile and cross-examine the assumed foreigner, whose alterity is manifest. They persist in asking for her name and their interrogations are sustained even as Juliet’s identity becomes clearer and characters move away from England’s shore. These interrogations are in part hypocritical: the ‘ship of fools’45 that Juliet boards is patronised by British tourists leav-ing France who fail to extend hospitality or even indifference to Juliet, who is decidedly not a tourist to either country. Her cultural duplicity gives her essentially claim to both shores but this is read by Mrs. Maple and others as a sign of shifting allegiances, if not a spy.

In choosing to focus on a political refugee with her novel, Burney like-wise depicts the forces of stereotype and personification that others attach to Juliet in the absence of a name or identity—and the name she is initially given, Ellis, being contrived, carries no social weight and as such cannot protect her from the continued suspicions of others.46

The Politics of Arrival

Burney’s difficulty escaping France, along with Juliet’s, portrays the degree to which national sovereignty is not purely horizontal. Shorelines make poor substitutes for political borders because shores cannot move the way national dimensions can, nor can shores reflect all the invisible walls which make arrival an insurmountable elevation. The relative ease in plac-ing boundaries onto a flat representation of territory belies all the other mechanisms of border enforcement, of governmental or colonial opera-tion, or the technologies for the exercise of power. The cartographic make-

45 Doody, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi.46 Silverman, p. 70.

38


up of a state is not just horizontal but layered and three dimensional. In the case of Juliet and The Wanderer, her arrival is initially stalled by being unable to pay her way across the English Channel. When she does manage to reach England, she is routed between spaces as her stay at the inn and her attempts to hire a stage-coach or post-chaise are hindered by her reli-ance on the charity of fellow travellers, whose arrival is smoothed owing to their wealth. For Juliet, however, her financial predicament essentially immobilises her at the shore and renders her a dependent to whomever is willing to underwrite her stay.

Juliet faces borders embedded in racial and class relations where cat-egories of alterity are enforced. In the absence of robust infrastructural arrangements like border security or police officers, characters like Mrs. Maple attempt to steer Juliet into the recesses of belonging where no claim of arrival can be made and where the category of foreigner reflects not merely a political status but a pejorative laden with intimations of untrust-worthiness and the impossibility of truly belonging to England. Various conceptual paradigms, such as categories of alterity, are erected to slow, imbed, stifle, and ultimately halt Juliet’s possibility of arrival. Alongside them is the limited economic infrastructure available for women: Juliet requires charity from her fellow travellers to initially survive in England; in fact her passage across the Channel was not self-funded but spontane-ously and voluntarily paid for by Harleigh, one of the other passengers. Juliet may move physically across the channel and through the mists of darkness, but she is in this opening scene immobilised—immobilised by financial difficulty, by her fellow travellers, by the text, by the persona of the wanderer.

The multiple methods for immobilising the immigrant means that ar-rival is never purely geographic—it might also mean that arrival is never really possible. To arrive physically at a location is to do so in terms of only one of several cartographic arrangements, and while one level may be reached, other successive ones may not. Juliet arrives to the territory of Great Britain, but her initially black skin and French persuasion is treated by some of her fellow travellers as a sign that culturally and socially she has yet to truly enter the country.

In contrast to the era of Juliet and Burney—when custom checks were fraught and unorganized, when nations’ ambitions for border control could not match what was physically or administratively possible, when passports listed merely a name and no description—in the present day, these cartographies have been successfully systemized into the bureau-cratic machine of contemporary statecraft. The insistence on controlling movement to the point of having borders cross oceans to meet the travel-

39

mitchell gauvin

ler prior to departure is a technology embedded in the political juncture of revolution (hence the focus of this paper on a novel that expressly ad-dresses France in the 1790s). John Torpey argues that the defining feature of modern statecraft from the eighteenth century onwards has been the nation-states’ successful monopolization of authority on the ‘legitimate means of movement’—an authority which they have ‘successfully usurped [from] rival claimants such as churches and private enterprises—that is, their development as states has depended on effectively distinguishing between citizens/subjects and possible interlopers, and regulating the movements of each’.47 Human affairs since the French Revolution have seen the laborious construction of a bureaucratic and administratively complex international passport system where human movements can be smoothly and effectively governed (most of the time), to the extent that the contemporary passport is now wholly legitimized as an expression of national origin and as a reflection of states’ exclusive right to assert control over the legal means of movement. States restrict or narrow the legitimate channels for physical and political mobility to those in possession of re-quired documentation (i.e.: a passport) usually conditional on some sort of landed status, such as citizenship. However, the functional significance of the passport should not detract from the fact that it is likewise a political document—it tells a story, ostensibly apolitical and scientific, but in truth a narrative laden with the scaffold of ideology. Passport ownership mi-grates the issuer away from the margins of social or political recognition towards a national centre where the outsider may be wholly ignored and the passport holder may travel within the territory relatively unmolested and outside the territory with relative ease, depending on the geopolitical climate and strength of one’s passport.

Torpey’s central thesis is that the invention and history of the passport extending back to the eighteenth century reveals an unrivaled concern by nation-states for controlling the movement of their subjects—not neces-sarily restricting it, but rather to monopolize the authority of movement. While such a system of passports allows for relatively seamless, temporary migration across borders once administrative structures are in place, it also results in the formation of an entire underclass of movement. Torpey

47 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 2.

40


explains how this underclass arises specifically in relation to the authority that states’ wield over movement:

The point here is obviously not there is no unauthorized (internation-al) migration but rather that such movement is specifically ‘illegal’; that is, we speak of ‘illegal’ (often, indeed, of ‘undocumented’) migra-tion as a result of states’ monopolization of the legitimate ‘means of movement’.48

The wide acceptance of the notion that some movements can be legal and illegal reflects the success of the nation-state in monopolizing the legit-imate means of movement. These sorts of ‘illegal’ movements prefigure the refugee and the stateless person as existential threat to nation-states because they constitute movement outside their sphere of embrace and penetration—or more accurately, refugees and stateless persons are a con-sequence of a worldwide collective endeavour by nation-states to embrace and penetrate their respective populations. Burney in 1812 successfully skirted France’s attempt at embrace through her unauthorized emigration from the country, only to then face additional obstacles while immigrating to Britain owing to the American licenses and passports she had used to escape from France. In turn, the opening scene of The Wanderer depicts a political refugee overcoming successive obstacles to movement under a climate of war and revolution that had accelerated efforts by states to exer-cise authority over movement—an authority that states did not necessarily relinquish even during relative peace.

Immigrants, whether stateless or not, ‘are seen as the vanguards in test-ing ‘the new world order’’, Shachar notes, ‘their authorized (or more so, unauthorized) movement across borders symbolizes the impossibility of enforcing strict immigration controls over access in an increasingly inter-dependent world’.49 Rhetoric regarding immigration in many Westernized countries may intimate a concern for national or territorial integrity if borders are unfortified and shores unguarded, but one source of govern-ment consternation over ‘illegal’ immigration is deeply embedded in a longstanding desire by nation-states to exercise full authority over move-ment, especially the movement of visible, religious, and ethnic minori-ties, or the movement of the stereotypical outsider and foreigner, rhetoric which carries extensive cultural purchase in an era in which persons are more or less forced to possess documentary evidence of personal identity.

48 Torpey, p. 11.49 Shachar, p. 813.

41

mitchell gauvin

As such, successive governing administrations across the globe (regardless of differences in geography or ideology) deem irregular immigration as a secession of authority and the purpose of the nation as closely aligned with restrictions on movement.

The linguistic/lexical development of deeming some movements ‘ille-gal’ (and some persons as ‘undocumented’) implies the invention of a new type of mobility—a mobility that is inherently handicapped; a mobility that while perfectly literal in a geographic sense can never result in arrival. The person that moves ‘illegally’ has in fact never left from the point in which their journey began. Arrival becomes an impossibility, movement becomes a chaotic choreography between differing legal, political, and cul-tural boundaries for the traveller, migrant, wanderer, or stranger. Arrival is therefore never purely a literal act. Every arrival is regulated to ensure geographic relocation is only the first in a series of restrictions applied unequally upon persons based off any number of arbitrary distinctions and intimations of alterity. Immigration and emigration are siphoned through legitimate channels for mobility that are intended to inhibit ar-rival rather than smooth its facilitation, as governments erect successive impediments to citizenship or permeant residence or some other contract of stay, including temporary visas that simply redefine arrival as a form of delayed departure or deportation. For Burney and Juliet, both of whose movements were technically ‘illegal’, their capacity to arrive was constantly contested, but their respective successes at overcoming the infrastructural arrangements impeding or slowing movement, the personal toil on those who are not able to shed their alterity the way Juliet does, reveals the de-gree to which arrival remains an impossibility for many.

42


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Burney, Frances, Journals and Letters, ed. by Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (London: Penguin Books, 2001)

—. The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, ed. by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Secondary

Arendt, Hannah, ‘Perplexities of the Rights of Man’, in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 82–97.

Doody, Margaret Anne, ‘Introduction’ in The Wanderer: or, Female Difficulties by Frances Burney, ed. by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. vii-xxxvii.

— . ‘Note on the Text’ in The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties by Frances Burney, ed. by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

Salih, Sara, ‘Camilla and The Wanderer’ in The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney, ed. by Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 39–53.

—, ‘‘Her Blacks, Her Whites and Her Double Face!’: Altering Alterity in The Wanderer’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 11, 3 (1999), 301–15.

Silverman, Debra, ‘Reading France Burney’s The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties: The Politics of Women’s Independence’, Pacific Coast Philology, 26, ½ (1991), 68–77.

Torpey, John, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Labouring Destination: A Poetics of Inheritance in Donald Hall’s Life Work

lucy cheseldine

Donald Hall was instrumental in sustaining literary representa-tions of rural New England. After a string of academic positions, he met his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, and in 1975 the cou-

ple moved to his ancestral farm, Eagle Pond, in Wilmot, New Hampshire. But he had no intention of becoming another ‘farmer-poet’ alongside other American influences and contemporaries such as Robert Frost and Wendell Berry. Hall returned to his grandparents’ small holding with the singular intention to write. Thus, rather than an inheritance that married writing to a practical philosophy of the land, his oeuvre reflects a life-long commitment to exploring language’s role in place-making. In this paper, through a close reading of the prose text Life Work, I argue that his com-parisons between agricultural labour and the labour of writing, ground-ed in particular topography, create a ‘poetics of inheritance’. This poetics evaluates the past’s place in the present by a re-conceptualisation of the oscillating nexus that captures the self between history, memory, and text.

Soon after moving to Eagle Pond farm, Hall wrote to poet Robert Bly, ‘it is the lack of future dreams which I find continually such a startling change in my life’.1 His comment implements the farm as a final destina-tion, one for which he articulates a teleology of arrival in lines such as this from his poem ‘Flies’: ‘I planned long ago I would live here, somebody’s grandfather’.2 But the logic of a determined inheritance—which is still a ‘startling change’ in its manifestation—is troubled by Hall’s comment that New Hampshire ‘fulfilled the sense of loss I already had’.3 His mention

1 [Letter to Robert Bly, March 30th, 1997], [B4], Donald Hall Papers, 1928-2018, MC53, Milne Special Collections and Archives, University of New Hampshire Library, Durham, NH. 2 Donald Hall, Kicking the Leaves (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979), p. 34.3 Hall, Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1970-76 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1978), p. 8.

44

labouring destination

of distinct prior feeling pitches inheritance not as a direct line of succes-sion, but as a process underpinned by reciprocal relations. While he illu-minates the rural world’s losses—of agricultural labour, of landscape, and of belonging—he simultaneously orients his individual elegiac disposition towards future creative work. This work rests on an interaction between the fragile, imagined memory of material life and what Pierre Nora calls the ‘spectacular bereavement’ of a text that vitalises loss in its present.4 In loss, Hall finds a sufficient gap between himself and his ancestors to re-ar-ticulate their image and mobilise the affective value of their crafts, while increasing the expression of his written legacy. This labour of perpetuation and disavowal strains towards greater sociability with the past’s scattered means of communication through craft, oral tradition, archival resources, and conversation to stimulate ways to experience, investigate, and accom-modate present attachments to inherited places.

Perpetuating Presence

Hall’s inheritance could have gone one of two ways. Both sets of grand-parents owned farming establishments on the East Coast, but of very dif-ferent kinds. While his mother’s family kept a self-sufficient holding at Eagle Pond, his father’s owned a large mechanised dairy in Whitneyville, Connecticut. Beyond their material status as places he might return to per-manently, the act of writing these two destinations into imaginative con-structs of arrival allows Hall to explore their creative resources. The move is characteristic, demonstrating the increasingly performative agency he lends to language; his use of poetics as experiment and future-finding is a version of Walt Whitman’s ecstatic improvisations of American identi-ty, grounded in genealogy. Such dexterity is most pronounced in his later collections which move from an early preoccupation with metre to free verse. These poems, particularly in his 1978 collection Kicking the Leaves written just after moving to Eagle Pond, explore the use of a semi-auto-biographical lyric subject and a regional attention to the value of work. But they depart from the broad environmental concerns of Berry’s poetry and Bly’s Jungian notion of accessing a collective consciousness through nature by shifting the focus to what Hall calls the rural world’s ‘middle distance’.5 Closer in perspective to poets like Thomas Hardy and Seamus

4 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26 (1989), 7-24 (p. 24). 5 Hall, ‘Stone Walls’, in Kicking, p. 42.

45

lucy cheseldine

Heaney, Hall uses his middling position between binaries to re-orientate the intimate networks between people and place which are mediated by the physical and psychological localities of agricultural labour.

The poem ‘Traffic’, which appears in Kicking, envisages his paternal in-heritance in the exhausted landscape of Whitneyville’s Brock-Hall Dairy. Here, Hall applies the eerie existential aftermath of Frost’s New England narratives in North of Boston to the industrialised suburbs. The scene is a dystopian-style future in which the factory’s façade has become ‘cov-ered with ivy like a Mayan temple,/like a pyramid grown over with jungle vines’ — an exotic generality or tourist spot.6 Far from appearing alluring or accommodating however, something in this scene jeopardises the na-ture of human subjectivity. The poem’s epitaphic stanzas read like a series of tombstones inscribed with names of dead workers and the machinery they operated:

They have gone into graveyards, who worked at this loading dock wearing brown uniforms with the pink and blue lettering of the Brock-Hall Dairy: Freddie Bauer is dead, who watched over the stockroom; Agnes McSparren is dead, who wrote figures in books at the yellow wooden desk; Harry Bailey is dead, who tested for bacteria wearing a white coat; Karl Krapp is dead, who loaded his van at dawn, conveyor belt supplying butter, cottage cheese, heavy cream, and left white bottles at backdoors in North Haven and Hamden for thirty years; my father is dead and my grandfather.7

Deathlessness is those who ‘have gone into graveyards’, perhaps still able bodied, until everyone—even father and grandfather—is included in the noun ‘dead’. The refrain ‘who’ after each death affirms individual status while posing subjectivity as a question. Brock-Hall is full of activity, but nobody is definitively present. Bottles are filled by ‘another machine/that turned them instantly white, as if someone said a word/that turned them white’.8 They disappear into the colour’s ambiguous visibility, as do words. Speech is absent in the factory. The poem has no dialogue; it lies on the

6 Hall, ‘Traffic’, in Kicking, p. 28.7 Ibid., pp.100-101.8 Ibid., p. 102.

46


page ‘as if ’ to mark death by its silent deathlessness, and so fails to conjure affective memories. At its close, the speaker waits ‘for the traffic to pause, shift’ and then enters it himself. He is going nowhere, nor are the workers ‘who walked their lives/into brick’.9 Perhaps in ‘a week or a year’ a trailer will stop the traffic ‘and brick will collapse, and dump trucks take clean fill/for construction’.10 But while they are taken to ‘a meadow ten miles in the country’ for re-building, the map is vague; the meadow could be any-where, in any direction, and the traffic makes access ultimately indefinite.

In a sense, ‘Traffic’ is a crude elegy to the critique of mechanised lifeless-ness which Hall spearheads when he writes to Berry on the ‘deathlessness’ of machines.11 The poem articulates a grey area between life and death in which work, worker, and poetic resources are entombed in a repetitive non-existence, amplified by industrial agricultural processes. Farmers in 1940s US society, the years of Hall’s youth, met the oncoming force of mechanisation ambivalently, and at first through the introduction of electricity. On the one hand, such progress promised to ease dangerous and arduous work, while on the other it threatened debt and livelihoods. Companies were reluctant to provide electricity in rural areas for fear it compromised their investment in urbanisation. As Robert Caro writes, they were unpersuaded still, by farmers moving closer to the lines them-selves. One spokesman said: ‘Who knew how many farmers would try to move near electricity? Where would it all end?’12 His comment, as well as dismissing agriculture as a sustainable economy, unwittingly evokes the real and imaginative role death played at the heart of agrarian progress. Exploring this further, Hall turns to Eagle Pond farm’s manual labour and autonomous economy, which supplant Brock-Hall’s deathlessness by the material certainty of an end and thus an unexpected chance for renewal.

Historically, New England’s agricultural topography has not offered a particularly desirable future. The region suffered from a real and mythic identity of decline stretching back to a time when settlers headed further West in quest of new land for settlement. As Dona Brown notes, when the agricultural depression began in 1890, it was characterised by ‘a nebulous sense of looming crisis compounded of longstanding economic difficul-ties, a shifting population, and a gloomy social analysis’.13 For Hall, as for

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 [Letter to Wendell Berry, 10th January, 1984], [B14], Donald Hall Papers.12 Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Vol. 1, The Path to Power (London: Pim-lico, 1992), p. 518.13 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century

47

lucy cheseldine

other poets, however, a vision of ruined farming life still held a fragile imaginative currency. One example of such currency appears in a passage from his 1961 work String Too Short to be Saved, which documents sum-mers spent working at Eagle Pond. Written from across the Atlantic dur-ing his time at Oxford, the text swings between pastoral idyll and images such as the following that touch explicitly on agriculture’s brittle reality:

In the first years of haying, when Anson was with me, there was a part of me that assumed I would spend the rest of my life haying. I could see clearly the three of us in the same fields of summer until the end of time, with the same bony Riley pulling the same frail hayrack—old man, half-wit, horse and boy, locked in a scene where they repeated the same motions under the same skies. The tableau existed alongside the knowledge of death, that perpetual elegy which began earlier than I can remember, and which grew into the colour of everything I saw on the farm. The two feelings contradicted one another, but lived together like old brothers who had not spoken for years.14

The static ‘tableau’ is locked in laborious reiterations whose movements are mirrored by the almost repeated refrains ‘with the same’, ‘the same’ ‘which began’, ‘which grew’. Each replaces progress with a stuttering sim-ulacrum that threatens generational lines. As it stands, the subjects risk mirroring the dairy’s production line. But, crucially, the passage’s phrases also hint at a more sustainable literary resource in the ‘the perpetual elegy that began earlier than I can remember’. Its scene offers the writer an as yet untapped means of elegiac labouring in language and form, and a glimpse of the utility of the past in creating a poetics.

The poet claims to see ‘clearly’, which reveals the historical richness and singularity of his grandparents’ labour. Their work, saturated in loss and death, is capable of becoming memory-work which vivifies affective forms of absence, thus a ‘knowledge of death’ in life is precisely what produces conditions for writing. Death for Hall is what Gregory Orr calls an ‘ingath-ering’: ‘not a scattering of the objects and meanings of life, but a centripe-tal funneling of them’.15 Its mode, in Nora’s words, ‘is a history that, in the last analysis, rests upon what it mobilizes: an impalpable, barely express-ible, self-imposed bond; what remains of our ineradicable, carnal attach-

(Washington: Smithsonion Institution Press, 1995), p. 135.14 Donald Hall, String Too Short to be Saved (London: The Country Book Club, 1963), p. 59.15 Gregory Orr, ‘A Reading of Donald Hall’s Kicking the Leaves’, The Iowa Review, 18.1 (1988), 40-47 (p. 47).

48


ment to these faded symbols’.16 Such a knowledge of death can ‘anchor, condense, and express … the exhausted capital of our collective memory’.17 But the elegiac centre is not static. Death enters into what Nora further describes as the lieu between memory and history. Here material and im-aginative compartments collide to communicate and embellish past loss-es. Agriculture’s ‘frail’ relics that creak intermittently in a delicate, fraying recollection, are as yet unmoving. By attempting to channel limited means into the mobile space of text, two crafts—agriculture and writing—come to overlap in their processes of production. In this version of creation, Hall uses Nora’s lieu to outline an inheritance.

Fourteen years after String, Hall moves to the farm permanently. In 1993, he writes Life Work, a text which measures the relationship between experience and expression, prompted by his living and writing in the same place he takes as subject. Despite his intention not to farm, Berry writes to Hall with advice on how to live off the land: ‘[d]on’t depend on the farm economically and don’t do too much too fast’.18 His misconception of Hall’s intention speaks instead to his poetics which relies on a gesturing between language and materiality. ‘Don’t depend’ echoes William Carlos Williams’ well-known lines from ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, ‘so much de-pends’, in which language proports a materiality it can never fully realise.19 Yet the sensory world offers prompts that might otherwise go ignored. As Bill Brown notes, to neglect the things which populate material life ‘is an account of how our ideas prohibit our senses from offering access to new knowledge’.20 The materiality of Eagle Pond within Hall’s ideas, which is nurtured by his actions there, forms the unexpected shape of a sensi-tive lineage in this text. Writing, as it elides with farming’s past, produces new ways of using left-over resources to increase affective expression. The objects of an agrarian world are absorbed by a linguistic succession that shuttles between memory and history, losing and finding itself again, in an attempt to restore and progress the farm’s activity.

16 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p. 24.17 Ibid.18 [Letter from Wendell Berry, 8th September, 1974], [B14], Donald Hall Papers. 19 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Volume 1 1909-1939, ed. by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000), p. 224.20 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 2.

49

lucy cheseldine

Inheritance’s Labours

Life Work is a dialogue between agricultural and writerly labour. The text situates Hall alongside other politically and socially minded rural American poets such as Thomas McGrath and Wesley McNair. Like them, he challenges economic structures by extracting the emotional value and relational bonds latent in tasks and tools. Hall’s particular interest is the re-liance on, and reuse of, waste as built into quotidian routine. Waste makes itself and other things visible by disrupting normalised boundaries. He utilises this characteristic by converting the waste products of farming into equivocal waste products of language, and in doing so both emulates his grandparents’ thrift and preserves a sense of loss in the memory of their craft. This work, which relies on the productivity of mistakes and revision, also echoes the techniques of Modernist poets Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, who Hall interviewed years earlier for The Paris Review. Their con-cern with textual waste became, for him, an answer to more philosophical questions about the problematic continuation of agrarian life and writing’s place within it. One such answer is suggested by the foundation for the successive bond between Hall’s grandfather, Wesley—the farmer—and Hall himself—the writer:

When I emulate his habits, I can take storytelling literally; but I must go metaphoric about mucking out the tie-up, and substitute my cross-ing-out of failed language for his disposal of bovine feces.21

In this passage, contrary to actual farming practices, Wesley does not reuse bovine feces on his fields; the excrement disappears entirely as its visibility is adopted by the writer. Metaphors and crossing out can be seen; as can the work of grammar on the page. The semi-colon after ‘literally’ cordons off psychological habits from physical ones, so that the writer’s desire to emulate Wesley is grounded in storytelling over bodily move-ment. By using the farmer’s waste, he momentarily makes a clear distinc-tion between roles, taking his role as storyteller literally by explicitly doc-umenting the writer’s mundane and localised tasks. But he goes one step further. To ‘emulate’ is to equal or pass; it pulls past, present, and future chronologies into contention, and so, absorbing the farmer’s habits, after the semi-colon Wesley is Hall’s shadow to play with. The pattern of emu-lation then develops from a scene of agricultural to cultural production.

21 Hall, Life Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), p. 28.

50


The writer ghosts the farmer’s temporal constraints in his verb use. Obligation (‘must’) and interchangeability (‘substitute’) unearth and re-veal the demanding and unethical structures of industrial capitalism that loomed beneath agricultural labour. Their implication counters the farm-er’s stereotype as timewaster, idling away in fields and keeping obscure working patterns, not unlike the poet.22 In fusing the farmer with the ide-ological imperatives of mechanical progress, and passing those mechanics onto language, the writer insinuates capitalism’s means in merging and mobilising an ‘idle’ economy. Grammar and lexis pull both figures back from an obscuring web of industrialization while promoting their alleged crime—wasting—as the means of production. Archival materials from University of New Hampshire Special Collections present a drafting of this reading. In an earlier version, the first lines read ‘I took storytelling literally and forgot mucking out the tie-up. I know I would put in no acres’. Hall substitutes ‘took’ for ‘take’, ‘forgot’ for ‘but when it comes to’, and ‘I know’ for ‘I go metaphoric, thinking of revision’.23 In the final version he adds ‘must’ to the clause. Actions are present tense, memory is enacted in real time (future action substitutes forgetting), and contemplation re-places knowledge. The revisions extract experience and feeling from stale economic determinism. They gesture too, towards the meaning of must as a noun: a fermenting fruit. Such fruit marks both the goodness of con-nections to the past and the text’s maturing, which re-aligns its internal economy by etymology’s mirror to the rural world.

Hall works through an exchange with the past by taking responsibility for the methods, constraints, and ideas that transition between writer and farmer. Through language’s waste, shadow-play, and revisions, the farm-er’s hand and humanity linger in the text so that seeing something disap-pear can also be understood as an act of integration. It gives inheritance an accumulative possibility by imbuing losses with temporal and spatial reverberations. In another scene, these threads are picked up by Hall’s grandmother Kate’s handiwork. As with Wesley, interpenetrating labours disrupt economic and mythic structures through the writing-as-work:

On weeknights she sewed or darned while Wesley read, and her work was never done. She darned socks and stitched torn shirts and under-wear. If her basket of repair-work was empty, then she knitted mittens for winter, or made socks, or did some fancywork, crocheting and tat-

22 See E.P. Thompson, ‘Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 38 (Dec., 1997), 56-97.23 [Life Work drafts], Donald Hall Papers.

51

lucy cheseldine

ting. It kept her hands busy, a form of recreation, and whilst she worked she kept on thinking; sometimes her lips formed words. Every five or ten minutes she would say something out loud—while my grandfather and I were reading - and we could follow the geography of her thought. “It does seem to rain a lot in Connecticut,” she would say, and I would know that she was remembering a postcard from my mother. (“Mmm”, my grandfather and I would respond in chorus.)24

Kate evokes New England’s colonial revival version of domesticity which Brown describes as ‘an epoch of continuity, stability, self-sufficiency, and cultural homogeneity’.25 A craft-centred home promised ‘the imagined sta-ble age of home spun’. But the scene unsettles stability in a crucial way, pulling ‘home’ with it. Its past tense verbs describing handicraft signal continuity’s façade. Shifting emphasis to the second half of the phrase, and to the translation between generations, ‘spun’ makes a double move on both Kate’s actions and the writer spinning a text. The scene’s centre on repair-work’s empty basket negotiates the distance between waste and gain, and from it comes a surplus of production rather than Wesley’s dis-appearing feces. As such, Kate’s bodily habits begin to engage with the lan-guage describing them. Her mind works over thoughts as they reach the threshold of articulation; the passage slows down her process of thinking and formulating speech at the moment it coincides with her craft. As this happens, ‘work’ becomes indistinguishable from the ‘recreation’ of hand-iwork and its resulted thinking. ‘[W]hilst she worked’ is a phrase that sets a limit and a confluence between the two.

As work meets word, Kate’s movement, like Wesley’s, is loosened from ideological obligation to service imaginative and human endeavour. Her particular labour has a poetic history stretching back to ancient weaving practices and their association with memory. As Reginal Gibbons writes, the ‘weaving song might be a mnemonic enactment of, a memorized set of instructions for, the pattern or part of a pattern of the weaving itself ’. 26 It is a confluence, which Hall provides not as an enactment of a previous-ly memorised pattern, but as an unpicking and re-stitching of memory’s processes in time. Kate’s thinking body is articulated fully by his double presence as child and writer, and his joining Wesley—who reads a book—

24 Hall, Life, p. 98.25 Brown, Inventing New England, p. 229.26 Reginald Gibbons, How Poetry Thinks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 158.

52


in linguistic labour.27 This series of reflections, embedded dualistically in handiwork and language by an effort of collective labour, elucidates mem-ory-making as action. The specific image of Hall’s mother’s postcard is arrived at via the seemingly constitutive (‘does’) language of Kate’s vague and unverifiable (‘seem’) recollection. This plotting between what might have been and what the object world tells is so then leads to a ‘chorus’. Kate momentarily escapes domestic confinement, while the passage undercuts temporal determinisms of stability and capitalism’s consumer rendering of ‘anticipation over operation’.28 Her world is determined only in so far as its memory is predicated on the subject’s position inside time. From within temporal operations language can return as a song both recalled and imagined by a proactively remembering and richly available present.

The writer weaves a pattern as it goes along, performing the process of its weaving while moving images as memory-making communications. He postures temporal texture as penetrable, subject to shifts, improvi-sations, and re-arrangement. Despite a departure from memorising, the text’s complexity resembles weaving’s ‘positional interrelationship’ as a se-ries of knots and clusters that develop and change direction.29 These fabrics absorb the present when their popular motifs change during times of so-cial shift. Thus language happens as a funnelling through its agents, rather than as articulation from a single source. The nature of such a fabric is not to provide a final object, and this is where Hall’s work both absorbs and de-parts from Kate’s which does not appear as finished objects. The moment recalls Sappho’s relentlessly riddling fragment 39: ‘the feet/by spangled straps covered/beautiful Lydian work’.30 Enfolding one another, it is never clear whether the overview of scale and place beheld by the foot, or the strap’s intricate local pattern, covers the ‘beautiful work’. But interpenetrat-ing play with perspective’s availability is precisely the point. Memory’s vast language engages Kate in Sappho’s linguistic stepping games as it trips over her ‘fancywork’ in time. But unlike Sappho’s ‘covered’ work, Hall’s stepping on, which is also a stepping over, is the ‘beautiful work’, made by the integ-rity of its dual components in enacting design. As these textures of labour move outwards towards other places, they remain intensely connected to a reciprocally interdependent past while making themselves visible.

27 In drafts, Hall replaced the passive ‘geography of her mind’ with the active ‘geography of her thought’. [Life Work drafts], Donald Hall Papers.28 Richard Sennett, Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 110.29 Anthony Tuck, ‘Patterned Textiles and the Origins of Indo- European Metrical Poetry’, American Journal of Archaeology, 110. 4 (Oct., 2006), 539-550 (p. 542).30 Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2002), p. 79.

53

lucy cheseldine

In the handiwork passage, the present, in Hall’s own words, is made ‘an ever-shifting prologue’.31 It attempts to hold fast to the status of Kate’s incessant ‘rain’ which ‘seems’ to fall in the wordless hum of elsewhere. This resource, at its most fluid, offers an endless destination for poetic inspira-tion. As a temporal springboard, it also has the capacity to negotiate Eagle Pond’s future, which the writer explores through remembered scenes of his suburban and academic life. An evaluation of these inheritable parts of the self is led by his participation in farming practices and so demonstrates the subject’s integration of previous generational encounters:

My Grandfather taught me scythe mowing, which is a rhythmic mo-tion like dancing or lovemaking. It is a studious sweeping crescent in which the trick is to keep the heel (where blade joins snath) close to the ground, an angle that tilts the scythe point-up, preventing it from catching in the ground. I no longer mow with a scythe—a certain rec-ipe for lower-back muscle spasms—but remember it the way the body remembers weights and leanings: riding a bicycle, skiing, casting flies. Finding a meter, one abandons oneself to the swing of it; one surren-ders oneself to the guidance of object and task, where worker and work are one: There is something ecstatic about mowing with a scythe.32

At the heart of scything is a tension between the muscle’s slow retrospective aching and manual labour’s alertness to future outcome. Yet when ‘worker and work are one’, multiple versions of the self in time are revealed: tools, as Hannah Arendt says, ‘multiply far beyond’ natural measures. 33 Whether this is desirable or not, it resonates with the sheer variety of activities and places provoked by the scythe. Hall is scything, mowing, sporting, and writing in three landscapes at once: Eagle Pond, his home in Connecticut, Ann Arbor’s suburbs, and Life Work. What is ‘ecstatic’ about scything then, is not the illusion of work’s singularity and absorption, but the ‘something’ beyond, when thinking starts to produce myriad directions. Mowing, like writing, is ‘studious’ as it relies on the attentive, onerous, yearning pursuit of knowledge that amounts to a solid foundation for unconscious intui-tion. The adjective suggests too, that one craft might read the other to gain new insight.

31 Hall, Eagle Pond (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 2007) p. 59.32 Hall, Life Work, p. 86.33 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 140.

54


Arresting the scythe’s tacit knowledge via skill is to grasp—physically and psychologically—the ‘heel (where blade joins snath)’.34 Here language’s ‘rhythmic motion’ is almost consumed by rural jargon. Yet rather than meeting his grandparents, the writer, almost violently, surrenders to and abandons himself. Wary of memory’s ideological ‘recipes’ and Proustian ‘spasms’, self-reflection in this state of accumulated inheritance yields fi-nally to a strange image of the land which amid all the activity gets away untouched. One reading of its preservation is as an allusion to the text’s own inheritable trace. It challenges the grain of agriculture as a scar on the landscape by restoring an untouched image of farmed land. American history has come up with various rhetorical ‘tricks’ to protect its national landscape, one such narrative being the virgin land. But this image of rap-turous scything plays with touch in an attempt to take stock of agricultural labour, and offers it up as a resource for the psyche. This textual protection, I argue, is Life Work’s elegiac labour.

On Thin Ice

The text’s attempt to conserve agriculture’s affective resources becomes in-creasingly pronounced in the dangerous work of ice-farming. Symbolically, ice embodies Eagle Pond’s elegiac properties by keeping a precarious equi-librium between surface and depth. Hall writes in a poem titled ‘At Eagle Pond’ that when ‘[i]n April ice rots’,35 death and memory return. While ice holds at bay, it also restricts creative pools. For McNair, ice is the substance between speech and silence. In his poem ‘Mute’, when a boy falls through the ice after the last day of hauling, his mother listens for his absent cries from the water, speechless, for the rest of her life. The ambivalence of the ice in matters of communication problematises Hall’s attempt to find a textual counterpart that mobilises his memory. In Life Work farm and lan-guage slip further away from one another and back towards a tableau of perpetual elegy:

After woodchopping, probably the next most difficult task of the year was carting ice from Eagle pond to store in the ice-house behind the tie-up’s watering trough. Neighbours worked together taking ice from the pond, often in February when the ice was two feet thick. First, they scraped snow off, then with horse-drawn cutters scraped long lines

34 See Sennett, Craftsman, p. 26. 35 Hall, ‘At Eagle Pond’, in Poetry (Oct., 1983), p. 25.

55

lucy cheseldine

onto ice, back and forth making a checkerboard of ruts, then split the ice into great oblong chunks, then floated ice-slabs to shore, making watery channels for more slabs. Ice-farming, hazards were the cold and the wet, slipping into the freezing water, even drowning dragged down by heavy winter clothes. 36

The land’s ‘checkerboard of ruts’ evokes a pastime ridded of labour’s com-plexity and incompatible with memory’s integrity. Events are presented in a child-like sequential manner and the superfluous comma after ‘ice-farm-ing’ calls the entire sequence into question. So far, labour’s reflections have served Hall well, but here they start to erode. There is literally nothing except a downward spiral that threatens death’s in-gathering. The scene echoes Henry David Thoreau’s ice-farming in Walden, in which reflection is deflection (agriculture mirrors industry, ice mirrors capitalism, people mirror nature). 37 Meanwhile, Thoreau’s ‘double shadow’ tries out the self ’s solitude in nature as Transcendentalism.38 His images are a counterpart not only to Hall’s absence from the ice-farming passage but also to his totalising reflections which take deflection to its extreme. No one side can see itself or another as self, community, and text are pulled apart by ice’s threat of fracture.

The image of New England’s ice also recalls Frost’s twice perishing in fire or ice, summoning a world of human drama: of desire and hate.39 There is little emotion in Hall’s deadpan passage, which suggests only tomb-like ‘ice-slabs’ couched in flat description. Its lack of affectivity weakens a ge-nealogy that thus far has relied on bonds of loss, death, and memory, to shape succession. His archives tell a different story. Early drafts of the pas-sage did include a human drama that contributes to a reading of the final text. Hall leaves a significant detail out of the passage’s printed version: the moment the workers ‘scraped snow off, to reveal ice’.40 The second clause communicates labour’s fruit by the experience of affective visibility and collective satisfaction. The omission’s damage is visible in the ‘long lines’ that mark the land. Its absence reflects work as a ‘form of non-living, of non-existence, of submergence’41 rather than ‘an extension of human con-

36 Hall, Life, p. 81.37 Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden, 150th Anniver-sary Edition, ed. J. Lyden Shanley (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 294.38 Ibid., p. 293.39 Robert Frost, The Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win-ston, 1948), p. 268.40 [Life Work drafts], Donald Hall Papers.41 D.H. Lawrence, D.H Lawrence: A Selection, ed. by Roger Poole and Peter Shepherd

56


sciousness’.42 Yet another way to read Hall’s exclusion is as a reflection of totalised empathy: the writer emulates the farmer in his continued pursuit of failed language. And by omitting the revelation that turns farm work into text, the text fails in such a way that emulates its subject.

The passage’s flat description can be re-inscribed as participating in, rather than merely observing, the labourers’ unspeakable suffering at the hands of economic change and work’s crushing mental duress. In this sce-nario, opaque description is regenerated as an empathetic link between past and present pains. Its ornamentation and potential for arbitrariness are mirrors of a fading local world, momentarily brought into collusion with the writer’s. By the same token, description’s potential for conceit clarifies the text’s project. Willard Speigelman argues that ‘description completes’ and ‘reveals … only through figuration’.43 Going a step further, Roland Barthes takes adjectives—‘great’, ‘watery’, ‘long’ to name a few from the passage—as ‘funereal’.44 Their bond with the world, he claims, is delu-sional. Within that fallacy is the text’s recognition of what delusion means for inheritance as elegiac labour. Not everything is carried forward; some parts are simply lost. The ice-farming passage reflects on how to leave those things behind while elegising them. Refrigeration’s answer to dan-gerous and highly romanticised labour is desirable but it does not remove the imaginative and affective texture of ice-farming. This texture inhabits properties that move the text to work at elegy’s outer limits.

Ice also includes metaphysical properties. As it appears and disappears, something—that something after ecstasy—is ‘revealed’. The suggestion el-evates past labour towards the sacred, for ice’s smoothness resembles the image of Christ’s seamless robes. Barthes re-invents this image of Christ’s clothing for the mechanised world in his ‘phenomenology of assembling’. 45 He suggests that technology too is made seamless by a society that wants to transcend the welded lines of manual labour. Hall adapts the logic of such a phenomenology to agriculture. Ice’s surface is labour’s seams of assembling that tether man to soil. In his version, technology’s revision to surfaces also promotes manual labouring with the land. He supplies

(New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1970), p. 135.42 Hall, Life, p. 37.43 Willard Spiegelman, How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 24.44 Ibid., p. 5.45 Roland Barthes, ‘The New Citroen’, in Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1957), p. 88.

57

lucy cheseldine

inheritance’s ‘wonderous shape’ 46 by keeping the friction between labours in balance—the ‘long lines’—while disputing the mythic scale of an un-touched landscape by the local proportions of human touch. Touch in-volves the pressure of stillness and the motion of sensing in and over time. The writer attempts to make Eagle Pond touchable in the text, while re-maining curiously preserved along the seams of archival discovery.

Beyond mourning for a lost agricultural world, Hall also mourns text itself. Life Work’s subject is constantly self-referential in its repeated de-scriptions of writing routine. It also unfolds the collective effort of writ-ing, one dependent on a network of typists and researchers who prop up the notion of a singular writer or textual locale. In other words, the text discloses its enmeshing in a climate of production. Its diminishment is a challenge to the familiar story of printing presses as fixing devices and copyright laws that, as Modernists argued, freeze a text’s ‘protean develop-ment’.47 Life Work’s acknowledgement of fluidity resembles the condition of oral poetic traditions that memorised and changed poems—one work with multiple texts—to becomes one text with multiple works. Such think-ing thus also reclaims the text’s place in a larger cycle of creation—in oral traditions, crafting labour, and archival resources—and scatters memory amid a holistic plateau of potential recovery-sites. The act of remember-ing, which a fixed text negates, is arrested as action between these sites. To continue with ice’s properties, this is not an unfreezing or melting of the text. Memory works here as an eccentric refraction in which each of its modes hold their own while reflecting one another to condition new forms of clarity. The process mirrors the strange and estranging solidity of frozen water in its moveable, useable ‘oblong chunks’.

In one way the text’s elegiac labour is a recognition of language and form’s unsettlement. Life Work creates its own smoothness—its legitimacy as a singular object—only by handling, being handled by, and being a part of, other modes of communication and arrangement. Hall inherits such notions from a tradition of New England poetry that concerned itself with various mnemonic sources. In ‘Huswifery’, Edward Taylor wants ‘memory’ spun from the ‘Loome’.48 While Lydia Sigourney wills her ‘shred of linen’ to

46 Ibid.47 George Bornstein, Material Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 4.48 Edward Taylor, The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. by Donald E. Stanford (Chapel Hill:

58


emerge from the ‘paper-mill’, renovated, ‘[s]tainless and smooth’ as a shiny token reflecting the past.49 The work’s loosening of these tightly woven designs lends itself to Taylor’s call: ‘My Conversation make to be thy Reele/And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele’.50 Conversation’s etymolo-gy yokes the Latin cum, meaning together, with versus, a row or furrow of earth. Its place-binding roots in community and land forge a connection with the text’s threaded themes by the suggestion of increased sociability. In one example of a conversation in Life Work, Hall remembers an Indian CEO asking him, ‘what is contentment’. ‘He told me that story’ he says, ‘to bring up a subject’.51 The text too brings up many subjects from the past, raising them to a level of possible conviviality, and in doing so invites fur-ther dialogue.

As Gibbons writes, poems are ‘abstract artefacts’; they are ‘cultural en-tities that depend on the intentions of those embedded in their cultures to come into existence, and to continue in existence’.52 But as inheritance’s elegiac tone implies, there is no guaranteeing their continuity. Hall titles his 2006 selected poems White Apples and the Taste of Stone. Its ambigu-ous hope is alluded to in the ‘ice-slabs’. Stone, as he writes in Life Work, has a nature to ‘press downwards’ like a reposing soul.53 But it shifts with the stonemason’s hands which solve ‘problems that change with every stone’. 54 Its smoothness is in flux: it forms a solid, tactile yet oddly ineffable and plaintive (for a stone is also a grave or tomb) connection to the past. And like speech, it is fleeting as well as sedimented, geological, genealogical. 55 If Eagle Pond is Hall’s destination as a writer, then the text’s destination is a social infiltration of the place between memory and history. This is an el-egiac place filled with the past’s communicative methods which are avail-able for reuse and transformation. Operating at a negative, Life Work both mourns and envisages the place of language in the material attachments between people and place. At least in part, its labour of talking about the

University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 343.49 Lydia Sigourney, Poems: by Lydia H. Sigourney (University of Michigan: Humanities Text Initiative, 1999), p. 57.50 Taylor, The Poems, p. 343. 51 Hall, Life, p. 23.52 Gibbons, How Poems Think, p. 140.53 Ibid., p. 122.54 Ibid., p. 32.55 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 170.

59

lucy cheseldine

past, in the present’s voice, offers the glimmer of a possible destination for future communities.

60


bibliography

Primary

Hall, Donald, ‘At Eagle Pond’, in Poetry (Oct., 1983).—. Eagle Pond (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 2007).—. Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry, 1970-76 (Ann

Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1978).—. Kicking the Leaves (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979).—. Life Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). —. String Too Short to be Saved (London: The Country Book Club, 1963).—. White Apples and the Taste of Stone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006).

Secondary

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1957).

Bornstein, George, Material Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Brown, Bill, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2003).Brown, Dona, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century

(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).Buell, Lawrence, New England Literary Culture from Revolution through Renaissance

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Caro, Robert A., The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Vol. 1, The Path to Power (London: Pimlico,

1992).Carson, Anne, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage, 2002).Frost, Robert, The Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,

1948).Gibbons, Reginald, How Poetry Thinks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).Lawrence, D.H., D.H. Lawrence: A Selection, ed. by Roger Poole and Peter Shepherd (New

Hampshire: Heinemann, 1970).Nora, Pierre, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations, 26

(1989).Orr, Gregory, ‘A Reading of Donald Hall’s Kicking the Leaves’, The Iowa Review, 18.1

(1988), 40-47.Sennett, Richard, Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).Sigourney, Lydia, Poems: by Lydia H. Sigourney (University of Michigan: Humanities Text

Initiative, 1999).Spiegelman, Willard, How Poets See the World: The Art of Description in Contemporary

Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).Stewart, Susan, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2002).Taylor, Edward, The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. by Donald E. Stanford (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1989).Thompson, E.P., ‘Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present, 38, (Dec.,

1997), 56-97.

61

lucy cheseldine

Thoreau, Henry David, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden, 150th Anniversary Edition, ed. J. Lyden Shanley (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Tuck, Anthony, ‘Patterned Textiles and the Origins of Indo-European Metrical Poetry’, American Journal of Archaeology, 110.4 (Oct., 2006), 539-550.

Williams, William Carlos, The Collected Poems, Volume 1 1909-1939, ed. by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000).

‘Unwavering, to sea’: Departure and Destination in Causley’s Secret Destinations

rosemary walters

‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.’1

—Martin Buber

The poet Charles Causley published his collection Secret Destinations in 1984.2 Causley, a lifelong resident of the north Cornish town of Launceston, died in 2003. Both in his lifetime and afterwards, his

poetry has usually been categorised as ‘Cornish’, ‘Christian’, or ‘for children’. This paper asserts an alternative approach. It claims that, in relation to Martin Buber’s enigmatic quotation above, which prefaces the collection, Causley’s Secret Destinations can be located within the critical engagement with the exploration of self-identity in post-war British poetics. Causley’s use of a quotation from Buber places this engagement within the latter’s journey of the self from the objectifying and static ‘I-It’ relationship, rel-egating people and the material world to mere objects, to the energies of perception and imagination released in the ‘I-Thou’ of holistic, fluid and relational consciousness.3 In the second half of the twentieth century when Causley was publishing, critical inquiries into the possibility of establish-ing self-identity within a unified ‘I’ voice were challenged by the fluidity of

1 Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man ed. and trans. by Maurice Friedman (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 47. 2 Charles Causley, Secret Destinations (London: Macmillan, 1984).3 See Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); Martin Buber, The Writings of Martin Buber, ed. by Will Herberg (New York: Meridian Books, 1958); Zachary Braiterman and Michael Zank, ‘Martin Buber’, The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, forth-coming URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/buber/ [accessed 1 Feb-ruary 2020] especially chapter 1.

63

rosemary walters

the postmodern concept of the self and the increasingly prominent issues of power, gender and exploitation in literary representation.

This paper focuses on poems that contextualise four journeys and their destinations, claiming that these journeys can be interpreted in relation to Buber’s quotation in the preface to Secret Destinations. These journeys are: the journey into language in early childhood, the journey into war in adolescence, journeys away from Cornwall in retirement, and finally the poet’s journey in his sixties to the summit of Launceston Castle, from which he reflects on the physical landscape of his lived experience spread out before him. All these journeys had destinations which Causley could not have foreseen at their beginnings; destinations, which, in his old age, Causley realised that he could never fully comprehend. The poems in this study probe identity through language from experiences of childhood, through survivor’s guilt after conflict, through displacement in travel and through reflection on place in old age. In his sixties, Causley struggled to articulate how perception, language and imagination in his poetry might finally yield a sense of who he was and had become. Journeying towards ‘secret destinations’, Buber viewed perception, language and imagination as emancipatory in the search for integrity. The four contexts of Causley’s journeys in the collection, as in all his work, are encompassed by the shad-ows of existential guilt arising from the effect of two world wars. The con-sequent loss of humanity’s innocence, and its rejection of love, was amply demonstrated for him in these wars. These shadows are accompanied by the relentless passage of time leading to the inevitability of death.

Buber looked to the potential of creativity in all language. He empha-sised creativity as one sign of the search for authentic living relationships with the self and others.4 Reading this in tandem with Causley, the latter articulates his journeys in poetry in order to probe further his sense of personal integrity amidst the fluidity of various identities, using the agen-cy of poetic form to impose order on language, memory and experience. Donald Moore quotes Buber’s argument: ‘We help to convey truth to each other, and in doing so we are confirmed.’5 In the introduction to his an-thology of Christian verse, The Sun, Dancing, Causley asserted that ‘poetic truth’ goes beyond the empirical: ‘What is of the greatest value here is po-etic truth: something, hopefully, ever more salutary and meaningful as we

4 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), p. 100.5 Donald J. Moore, Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), p. 99.

64

‘unwavering, to sea’

reflect on the mysteries of human experience than a mere recital of factual evidence.’6

For Causley, the articulation of the mysteries of identity and reality through poetic truth constituted an attempt to discover his own identity and the possibility of forming relationships through language. The confir-mation of a sense of self and the ordering of experience through language leading to the realisation of meaning in personal wholeness and profound interpersonal relationships are implied by Buber’s dialogic principle. Causley’s poems in Secret Destinations bear witness to his search for the confirmation of the value of his identity through the ordering of his ex-perience in the content and structure of the verse and for a realisation of meaning in those experiences.

Buber’s writings on education may well have influenced Causley’s train-ing as a teacher.7 His Jewish heritage resonated with Causley’s admiration for the Old Testament stories with which he grew up as a child and his horror, after the Second World War, at the revelation of the Holocaust. He admired the Jewish poet Karen Gershon and included her work in his anthology, The Sun, Dancing.8 Causley had been brought up in an environ-ment shaped by both Church of England and Methodist liturgy and ethics. The distinction between Judaism and Christianity according to Buber in Two Types of Faith has been summarised by David Flusser as ‘one kind of faith, trust in God, characterises Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike, […] while the second kind of faith, a salvific believing in Jesus, is peculiar to Christianity’.9

Causley lost any orthodox faith during adolescence. In middle age, he returned towards a sense of transcendence in nature and the arts rath-er than a doctrinal, institutionalised faith that would emphasise solely Christian interpretations of incarnation and salvation.10 The introduction

6 The Sun, Dancing: Christian Verse, ed. by Charles Causley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 16. 7 Buber, Between Man and Man, especially chapters 3 and 4.8 The Sun, Dancing , pp. 64, 66.9 David Flusser, ‘Afterword’, in Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. by Norman Goldhawk (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), see R. W. L. Moberly, ‘Knowing God and Knowing About God: Martin Buber’s Two Types of Faith Revisited’, Scottish Jour-nal of Theology, 65:4 (2012), 402–440 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/scot-tish-journal-of-theology/article/knowing-god-and-knowing-about-god-martin-bubers-two-types-of-faith-revisited/F43F9FD195F96FEB9AE69A1C42214567> [accessed 20 June 2020]10 Rosemary Walters, On the Border: Charles Causley in 20th Century Poetics (unpub-lished master’s thesis, University of Kent, 2015).

65

rosemary walters

to The Sun, Dancing, describes his openness to a variety of world views in expressing this sense of transcendence and his conviction that creative activity in the arts is a response by the artist to the ‘divinely mysterious and wholly unidentifiable imaginatively creative element within them’.11 That this creative element is ‘mysterious’, ‘wholly unidentifiable’ and ‘within’ resonates with Buber’s ‘secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware’.

Throughout his publishing history Causley remained outside the cat-egorisations that emerged in British poetry during the second half of the twentieth century. He lacked the academic and journalistic networks of The Movement literary group, the rebellious disposition of the under-ground, or an impetus towards the experimental. In 1968, P. J. Kavanagh described Causley as a poet of ‘ballad-type doggerel, spiced with surpris-ing words.’12 The critic Christopher Ricks was scathing towards Causley’s task of returning to previous poetic tradition and his ability to mould past conventions into any degree of meaning for the second half of the twenti-eth century:

his poetry embarks upon a task which is beyond its talents […] it is beyond talent to tap again the age-old sources which have become clogged, cracked, buried. But in Causley’s poetry, the past each time becomes the pastiche time.13

The prevalent critical verdict on Causley during his lifetime and be-yond can be summed up in David Mason’s rather less blunt appraisal of him as a ‘marginal curiosity rather than a writer of significant impor-tance’.14 However, Secret Destinations received critical attention in Poetry Magazine, the London Review of Books and in newspapers.15 It was also a Poetry Book Society recommendation. In a review in The Times Literary Supplement it was hailed by critic Simon Rae as ‘a radical departure’.16 Rae

11 The Sun, Dancing, p. 15.12 P. J. Kavanagh, ‘Diseases and Complaints’, The Guardian, 15 March 1968, p. 7. 13 Christopher Ricks, ‘Charles Causley: Collected Poems 1971–1975’, The New York Times, 11 January 1976.14 David Mason, ‘Causley’s Wild Faith’, Able Muse (Summer 2009) <www.ablemuse.net/v7/essay/david-mason/causleys-wild-faith> [accessed 5 March 2020].15 J. D. McClatchey, ‘Amid the Groves, Under the Shadowy Hills’, Poetry (August 1991), 280–295 (pp. 280–282); Jonathan Bate, ‘Players Please’, London Review of Books, 6:22 (6 De-cember 1984),< https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n22/jonathan-bate/players-please> [accessed 8 August 2020].16 Simon Rae, ‘Escaping Time’, The Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1985, p. 470.

66


referred to Causley’s departure from the ballad form and a ‘greater sense of the numinous’.17 In The Observer, Peter Porter remarked on ‘powerful images of disquiet’.18 Both the numinous and the disquiet are present in the departures, journeys and destination of the poems in Secret Destinations. Causley’s voices in Secret Destinations emerge from inward reflections, expressed in this case in a move away from the narrative voice of the sto-ryteller so prominent in his earlier work. The less formal rhyme and metre indicate an openness to alternative modes of expression in the articulation of ‘poetic truth’.

Causley returned to Launceston to teach after his Second World War naval service and lived there for the rest of his life. His poetic preoccu-pations remained rooted in a childhood dominated by the death of his father from the effects of gas in the First World War, his mother’s subse-quent struggle with poverty, and the survivor’s guilt which arose from his own experiences and return home from the Second World War. In terms of content, Secret Destinations includes some new autographical material in which memory is rooted in family characters and events, the coming of war, reflections on travels away from Cornwall following retirement, and an expression of his emotional anchor in Launceston. These points of departure arise from deeply personal recollections of childhood and ado-lescence and from a physical location that remained important to Causley throughout his life. ‘In the beginning’, says Buber, ‘is relation.’19 The four journeys, into language, guilt, displacement and place, powerfully explore Causley’s relationship with himself, others, and the world around him.

The journey into language: identity and childhood

The first struggle to establish the relationship that Causley the poet had with his own sense of reality and hence his relationships with those around him, was in conquering the potentially chaotic medium of language. The struggle is set in early childhood. Language, as Buber argued, is only ‘a sign and a means for it all’.20 ‘The Boot Man’ pictures the young Causley

17 Ibid.18 Peter Porter, ‘Sleeping Beauties’, The Observer, 2 June 1985, p. 22.19 Buber, I and Thou, p. 13.20 Martin Buber, ‘Community and Environment’ in A Believing Humanism 1st edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), pp. 93-95 (p. 94), quoted in Maurice Friedman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue 1st edn (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955, p. 98.

67

rosemary walters

being sent on an errand by his mother.21 He is to take some worn soles to the Boot Man for repair.

Causley’s mother was a determining influence on his life. Following his father’s death, his mother cleaned and took in laundry and lodgers to keep the household afloat. In her sacrifices on his behalf lay the first stirrings of Causley’s guilt, brought about in this instance by the family’s circumstanc-es originating directly from the results of the First World War. His mother looms over the start of this childhood experience through the ominous and violent comparison of the soles to sliced bacon. There is an atmos-phere of menace in the child’s panic, not just in being potentially unable to articulate the purpose of his journey when he reaches his destination, but in the reflections of his failure to master speech and reading at school:

She didn’t know That given speech, to me, refused to come. I couldn’t read aloud in class; sat dumb In front of howling print;

His tongue is worried by the phrase, italicised in the poem, ‘Please, soled / And heeled by Saturday.’ It is the ‘given speech’, the imposed communi-cation of both his mother’s words and the ‘howling print’ he encounters in the classroom which is a violation of his sense of self. The Boot Man himself reinforces this estrangement. The description of their encounter implies that the effort to create meaning and reach out through language corresponds to unpleasant physical symptoms such as retching, associated with extreme internal disorder:

Somehow the Boot Man stanched my speeches more Than all the rest. He’d watch me as I tried To retch up words

In the course of the poem, pauses provided by commas and full stops midway through lines provide a pace which mirrors the child’s reluctant progress towards his goal. As he makes his way there the layout of the text moves with him through the winding journey to Crab Lane by means of the simple device of beginning the second and fourth verses midway through the first lines of each.

The consciousness of the child in the poem, mercilessly analysed by the adult poet through the lens of memory, expresses the suppressed fears

21 Causley, ‘The Boot Man’, Secret Destinations, p. 12.

68


of his identity as it fails to establish a relationship with those who peo-ple the world the poem is set in. There is a hint of hesitant and nervous communication in the alliteration of the ‘s’ sound in ‘Somehow’, ‘stanch’ and ‘speeches’. Language is the only medium that seems able to forge this relationship and language is what the child finds impossible to manipulate. To add to the horror, the violence of his childhood world, communicat-ed through his mother’s comparison of the thin soles to the product of slaughtered animals, is reinforced with the comparison of the Boot Man with his gassed father:

Once again my dead Father stood there... Offering me a hand as colourless As phosgene.

The everyday circumstance of a journey to the Boot Man, so much a part of the material poverty of Causley’s childhood where shoes must be repaired time and time again, is transformed into a testimony of his lifelong wrestling with ‘The irresolute tongue’. This conflict remains with him as he journeys through life and is still present when he reaches the ‘secret destination’ of sixty years later and is writing the poem. The final lines make it clear that he has continued to ‘meet again upon the faithless, sly /And every-morning page, the Boot Man’s eye.’ ‘The child’, as Maurice Friedman argued in his survey of Buber’s thought, ‘establishes what is “ob-jective” reality for him through the constant comparison of his percep-tions with those of others.’22 Causley’s childhood encounter with the Boot Man, as portrayed in the poem, implies that the ‘secret destination’ of his struggle to achieve a voice remains in a lifelong lack of confidence in his own ability to use the signification of language to relate to the other and move beyond Buber’s ‘I-It’.

This same vein of lifelong vulnerability surfaces in the poem ‘Richard Bartlett.’23 Bartlett was Causley’s grandfather and he was killed in an ac-cident in the local stone quarry when he was ‘About to split a stone, try-ing to find / A place to insert the wedge’. The account of his grandfather’s death was a family story familiar to Causley from childhood. At the start of the poem, Causley the adult is reading an account of the accident in ‘the ninety-year old paper singed / By time’. At the end, he closes the pa-per and bends over the poem ‘Trying to find a place to insert the wedge.’

22 Friedman, Martin Buber, p. 165.23 Causley, ‘Richard Bartlett’, Secret Destinations, p. 6.

69

rosemary walters

Throughout his life, Causley was trying to find the place of language as the wedge which moulded and sustained his identity by bringing togeth-er the emotional consequences of his childhood, his naval service in the Second World War and his life in Launceston. The effect of two world wars, the sacrifices made by his mother for his material benefit and his own survivor’s guilt at returning from active service when others whom he knew never came back, reinforced his sense of existential guilt. Such guilt violates the unified self, imposing elements of self-doubt and anxiety on the individual consciousness which impede the possibility of ‘I-Thou’ re-lationships. In ‘Richard Bartlett’, Causley describes how, after the accident,

Richard Bartlett Never spoke after he was struck. Instead Of words the blood and brains kept coming.

In ‘The Boot Man’ and ‘Richard Bartlett’ these temporal, historical circum-stances with the suggestion of human or natural violence, are a wedge that block rather than heal division. The child wants to speak and make his voice heard in ‘The Boot Man’. The blood and brains overcome the words in ‘Richard Bartlett’.

Strangely, the formidable Aunt Dora, who ‘Held / Life at arm’s length’ instigates an ‘I-Thou’ encounter with the child. With her ‘winter’s eye’ she is dying and has no need to protect her identity or ignore her destiny with artifice or pretence. ‘My last Aunt, Dora Jane, her eye shrill blue,’ sees through the inevitable destination which finally thwarts all attempts to foster relationship and identity through language:

Our only death, said Dora, is our first. And she turned from me. But her winter’s eye Spoke every word that I had left unread.24

Although she turns away from the child, he can apprehend what has been ‘left unread’ in the language of her eyes. The profound interaction of the child and his dying aunt witnesses the human destiny which super-sedes all communication and all categories of subjectivity or objectifica-tion. The secret destination remains hidden and the words will always be left unsaid.

Buber’s description of the failure of the lifeless form of the ‘I-It’ encoun-ter as it reduces the other to an object to be manipulated, is the fear behind

24 Causley, ‘Aunt Dora’, Secret Destinations, p. 8.

70


the young child’s desperation for a destination which forges deep relation-ships through language and interaction. Causley realises many years after his departure from childhood that he has spent, and is still spending his life seeking, to use poetry as the transition towards making sense of the experiences which constitute his various selves. Buber’s theoretical stance suggests that it is only in this search and in its recognition in others that ‘I-It’ is transformed to ‘I-Thou’.

The journey into war: identity and guilt

The shadow of war haunted Causley’s journeys from his past and into his future. Moore identified the ‘dread of abandonment’ and ‘the foretaste of death’ in Buber’s thinking.These elements are persistently present in Causley’s poetry, even in his Collected Poems for Children.25 The tension between distancing and relating is part of Buber’s process of the concept of realisation.26 In Causley, this tension is intensified by the sense of guilt brought about by the historical events of his generation, which had pro-found effects on his family, childhood and adolescence, and was further intensified by his father’s death and his own survival. He needed to dis-tance himself from these horrors yet relate to his own grief and that of others, including his mother’s, and to himself as a survivor. For Causley, humanity had learnt no lessons from the two world wars. His personal innocence had been violated. He had lost any hope that the lessons of the consequences of rejecting love, symbolised for him in the Christian narrative, would be learnt. Buber expressed similar fears during the Cold War when he warned that the potential for real human dialogue had been destroyed by a lack of trust.27

The adult Causley continued the struggle to reach out in relationships and come to a sense of his own integrated self, but the innocence in that pursuit was lost at an early age in the presence of death and cannot be reversed. This innocence continued to be violated for Causley by the adult experience of war, no matter what may be promised by the refuge of poet-

25 Moore, Martin Buber, p. 99; Collected Poems for Children, ed. by Charles Causley (Lon-don: Macmillan, 2000). Rosemary Walters, Zig Zag: Cultures in Common and the Poetry of Charles Causley (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Kent, 2020), especially chapter 6.26 Friedman, Martin Buber, p. 34.27 Moore, Martin Buber, p. 102.

71

rosemary walters

ry, upon which he focused during his five year naval service in the Second World War. He knew he wanted to write. It was in the Navy that he realised

being on a small ship or in a shore establishment somewhere meant that you had a job to do and that you could not write a novel or a play, you simply didn’t have the time or the physical space. But poetry can be written in the head, without anyone having the faintest idea of what’s going on, and I’ve gone on writing my poems in my head like that ever since.28

The privacy and reticence which were to characterise the tone of much of Causley’s verse and his frequent use of ‘I’ voices as reflections addressed to himself, are hinted at in his ‘writing my poems in my head’. They are ‘my’ poems in ‘my’ head. The restrictions on space, time and privacy led directly to Causley’s decision to write poetry. Much of his poetry of war is experience in recollection. In this way, life-changing experiences are re-moved from the immediacy of pain, once the passage of time has enabled deep and personal reflection. That the privacy of this internal conscious-ness was shared with his readers in poetry illustrates that, for Causley, a vital part of any ‘I-Thou’ relationship was essentially one between himself and that poetry, with the reader listening in on this dialogue. The adjective ‘Secret’ in the title of the collection is an indication that the essential pri-vacy of poems written ‘in my head’ remained.

The journey to war was a journey to a ‘secret destination’ for Causley. He could have no idea of the outcome. The poem ‘1940’, is explicitly dat-ed and timed as ‘June 13th, nine forty-five’.29 It chronicles Causley leavin home for the first time, apprehensive of an unknown destiny. Boarding the train at Launceston station as a twenty-three-year-old, neither he nor his fellow conscripts had any idea what was in store for them. They are, as he comments, ‘Glassed in the space between two lives’ as they ‘Wait for / The land to move; the page of war to turn’. The poem exemplifies the use of the sonnet in the context of the personal and global circumstances of the time. Causley describes the beginnings of the journey into violence that will include, for many, the horrors of physical suffering and the anguish of its aftermath. The events that will shatter lives start quite prosaically as the

28 A Certain Man: Charles Causley In His Own Words ed. by Simon Parker, (Callington: Scryfa Books, 2017), p. 20. 29 Causley, ‘1940’, Secret Destinations, p. 13.

72


train pulls out of Launceston Station. He describes the everyday elements of the community he is about to leave behind as they are swallowed up in the movement of the land; the train playing its part in turning the page of war.30

The basic sonnet construction of fourteen lines, here addressing the experience of war, is disrupted by short, jagged descriptive phrases with irregular rhyming patterns, and with a divide in content midway as the observed, seemingly impersonal impressions give way to the subjective and inclusive ‘we’ of the last eight lines. The communal subjects, estab-lishing a bond with the reader and inviting self-identificationare in the middle of this turmoil, are travelling due to circumstances entirely beyond their control. They are second class passengers and have third class cases. They have no possibility of determining the course of events. The function of the conscripted combatants, whose lives are ‘glassed in’ as the prospect of any privacy and a life untouched by external events recedes, is solely to learn robotically what has been designated for them on their Travel Warrant. In the railway compartment they see each other only as objects swept along by the force of circumstance. They are joined through a com-mon destination but make no attempt to form a common bond through language or relationship.

Published in 1984, ‘1940’ portrays, at a later period, the dislocation Causley experienced in his consciousness, during the war years. The elapse of a significant period between event and articulation in circumstances dealing with his personal life is Causley’s characteristic distancing device for diluting the pain of the moment while expressing that it has remained with him, albeit in a less acute degree. ‘1940’ combines personal experi-ence with identification as a participant in conflict against a background of external public events. This journey was to prove one whose effects stayed with him throughout his life and consolidated the childhood traumatic ex-perience of loss and vulnerability which arose from the death of his father. War took away innocence and replaced it with the loss of family, friends, and colleagues. The outcome of this journey as a force in his personality and its profound effect on his sense of self and emotional life is the key to the hermeneutic of all his poetry. When he boarded the train in 1940 this outcome was indeed a ‘secret destination’.

30 For a fuller analysis of ‘1940’, see Walters, Zig Zag: Cultures in Common and the Poetry of Charles Causley, especially chapter 2.

73

rosemary walters

The journey from home: identity and displacement

Survivor’s guilt and the existential dilemma of justifying one’s own right to exist which came with it, influenced not only the retrospective poems from wartime but the travel poetry, written much later, which Causley in-cluded in Secret Destinations. The poetry inspired by the more extensive travels he was able to undertake following his retirement from employ-ment as a primary school teacher provides the third context for Causley’s reflection on the elements which forged his identity. These particular trav-els came late in middle age, but departure from Cornwall was always an ambiguous venture. In the poem ‘Returning South’, he records the time that has passed since his departure in the very first line: ‘Five days since I left Cornwall.’31 There is never a comfortable time to depart and seek a new destination, as he comments on take-off from Heathrow: ‘Am launched too late, too soon / At forty-five degrees against the moon.’ The wrench of travelling out of Cornwall is a severe disruption to his sense of self. As he unpacks in Singapore, he ends the poem with the question, ‘Dear Christ, what’s this? Myself.’ In one sense he is ‘Returning South’ to the locations which he was familiar with in the Second World War. But the destinations of this literal flight away from the precarious security he has found in his life in Launceston after the war only prompt a sense of alienation from himself in the form of fear. In travelling away from Cornwall Causley is brought uncompromisingly up against two fears from which he cannot escape by retreating to the security of the known and the familiar. These fears prevent the unity of past and present which Buber sees as the goal of self-realisation.

The first fear is centred on the ever-present threat of death and extinc-tion. The effects of his exposure to death in childhood and active service in war can be neither erased nor accommodated. This emerges in Causley’s travel poems as he meticulously dissects his impressions and experiences. In recording this fear, he uses the imagery which underpins all his work: burning sun, freezing snow, and the constantly timeless and indifferent sea, which announces the arrival and inevitability of death. The sun ostensibly brings light and life but also burns. In Australia in ‘Glen Helen’, ‘It glows in fifty shades of red. The day ignites.’32 Ironically for a location of cultural significance, the sky has a ‘heavy light’ in ‘Hussar’, the ‘Cultural Centre of

31 Causley, ‘Returning South’, Secret Destinations, p. 40.32 Causley, ‘Gen Helen’, Secret Destinations, p. 54.

74


Western Canada’.33 Death is foretold by the presence of snow with its ‘first frail leaves’ in the Canadian setting of ‘Bankhead’.34 The sea is always a malign presence for Causley. Water frightened him as a small child when the cottage he lived in was threatened by flooding.35 Despite this, he joined the navy rather than the army in Second World War because of the legacy of his father’s slow death from lung disease after the First World War.36 As he writes the poems in Secret Destinations sixty years after his childhood and forty years after the end of the Second World War, the imagery of the sinister implications of the power of water is still a potent force.

Sinister forces are not confined to water. Causley reveals a terrifying experience in his travels in retirement. He visits Beechworth in Australia, a town preserved as witness to the gold rush.37 The verse abruptly describes the physical elements of the location and the poet’s reactions with short impressionistic phrases running into each other. Seemingly innocuous ar-tefacts give way to the set-piece of the town prison. During this attempt to fossilise the past for tourists, Causley comes across a prison cell, familiar in its granite construction to the physical materials of his home in Cornwall. Here he reads that Ned Kelly was first imprisoned at Beechworth, aged sixteen. Kelly was eventually hanged in Melbourne. To Causley’s horror the prison in Beechworth conjures up:

A presage innocent, unspoken, Of the death-mask, and how the rope Squirmed tight-shut underneath an ear: ‘The bulge shows where the neck was broken’:

This scene is too much for Causley. He leaves the prison and ‘Quietly re-sumes the sun’. He rushes around the rest of the visit. He imagines Kelly’s final moments. The risen Ned finally declares to him, ‘Such / Is life. But knows that it is not.’ The journey to Beechworth has proved an all too intrusive reminder of the instinctive desire for life in the face of the fear of cruelty, death and extinction. This fear continually shakes the foundations of Causley’s hold on his identity. It is the prison which confines and yet splits apart his precarious sense of self. The prison setting reappears in

33 Causley, ‘Hussar’, Secret Destinations, p. 37.34 Causley, ‘Bankhead’, Secret Destinations, p. 3535 Worlds: Seven Modern Poets, ed. by Geoffrey Summerfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 19. 36 The Poetry of War 1939–45, ed. by Ian Hamilton (London: Alan Ross, 1965), p. 158.37 Causley, ‘Beechworth’, Secret Destinations, p. 41.

75

rosemary walters

‘Pinchgut’.38This was a convict island near Sydney. Causley missed seeing it during his war service but thirty-six years later it comes into view as a ‘punishing lump’, and he imagines the scene

where convicts Putrefied or, attempting to escape, Were shark snapped or strangled By ropes of water.

Although he is able in both ‘Beechworth’ and ‘Pinchgut’ to look with hor-ror at the suffering inflicted by human beings on their fellow humans in these places, the result of this empathy is to drive him deeper into the fragmentation which isolates his own being from reaching out.

During his travels, Causley’s second fear emerges. He suspects that oth-ers can see what he really is, and just like Aunt Dora and The Boot Man’ realise his desperation, his thirst, to centre himself and overcome his vul-nerability. The Gypsy from the Trianas in ‘Flying’

Rubs through me with brilliant and uncasual glance Sees me for what I was, for what I am. Offers a cup. Having observed my thirst.39

The ‘what I was, for what I am’ relates powerfully to Buber’s call for the integration of ‘historically and biologically given situations’, and an end to self-contradiction.40 Causley has a thirst for a resolution to the nihil-istic panic of guilt, disintegration and death brought on by his journeys into memory and experience, but runs away from the implications it brings every time it surfaces. In ‘Beechworth’ it is the story of the hanged Australian outlaw Ned Kelly which prompts Causley to:

...pick a smash of mirror up. It shows me who I’m not: hides what’s To be

He can see who he is not, others can see who he is. He is continually ask-ing the question he posed to himself in ‘Returning South’: ‘what is myself?’.

38 Causley, ‘Pinchgut’, Secret Destinations, p. 43.39 Causley, ‘Flying’, Secret Destinations, p. 32.40 Kaare Torgny Pettersen, ‘Buber’s Theory of Existential Guilt and Shame’,<https://www.kaaretorgnypettersen.blogspot.com/2012/03/bubers-theory-of-existen-tial-guilt-and.html> [accessed 18 February 2020].

76


This is Buber’s central question and for Causley travel has revealed the uncomfortable instability of the answer, away from the security of ‘home’ in Launceston. He is still hiding from his fears and the secret destination of wholeness still eludes him.

The journey into self: identity and place

The final destination, which continually haunted Causley, was death. Moving towards this destination, he struggled for an awareness of the influences which would integrate the identities of childhood, war, travel and rootedness. Secret Destinations moves from his early life to the person standing on Launceston Castle some sixty years later. In ‘On Launceston Castle’, Causley attempts to confront his fears in the security of his home-town.41 He does not have to physically journey far to reach the summit of Launceston Castle.42 Although it was written almost twenty years be-fore his death, this is the poem in which Causley brings together all the elements of a life’s struggle to encounter and impose some order on his thoughts about the reality of who he was and has become. By 1984, Causley is aware that the precarious hold which he has on his sense of his own identity, whatever this search for identity reveals, will be extinguished at death, so he must search for it urgently. As old age comes nearer, he jour-neys to and locates the destination of this lifetime quest on the summit of Launceston Castle. The poem is an articulation of his use of the locality to combine both the written placing of the verse in a physical location and what James Chandler, referring to Wordsworth, describes as the ‘unwrit-ten text which comprises the mind itself ’, read through the lens of that second nature where the past survives into the present to become more than just history.43 The ‘present scene and the scenes remembered’ link memory with the subliminal.44 In a sense, space and time are irrelevant in themselves but are the agents holding together intense experiences of past and present consciousness through the structure of language. This exemplifies Buber’s two concepts of ‘ordering’ and ‘realising’: ‘realisation refers to that enhanced meaning of life which springs from moments of

41 Causley, ‘Launceston Castle’, Secret Destinations, p. 14.42 See Walters, On the Border: Charles Causley in 20th Century Poetics, especially chapter 3.43 James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), p. 173.44 John Beer, Wordsworth In Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p. 25.

77

rosemary walters

intensified existence and intensified perception. This is what it means to realise: to relate experience to nothing else but itself.’ 45

Historically, the Castle began as a symbol of the power of the invad-ing Normans over the surrounding countryside. It later continued as a place of imprisonment and execution. It was the executioner’s bell from the Castle Green which became the school bell at Causley’s childhood primary school. The Castle both squats over the town and reveals from its summit views of the patchwork of buildings, streets, hedges and fields which make up the material constructs in which human consciousness and relationships are lived out. Causley’s life has been lived out against the background of the Castle, the remaining motte, keep and bailey still a towering physical expression of conquest by the Normans. Its size and position dominated the lives of all who lived in the small town which had grown up around the ruins, just as the two world wars also dominated his life. Buber argued that the phenomenon is always the gateway to the noumenon, just as the noumenal cannot be encountered other than in and by way of concrete phenomena.46 Causley chooses a viewpoint to scan his conscious experiences of life in the town, sums up and puzzles over the outcome of his post-war struggles with loss, separation and the end of in-nocence from the literally phenomenal viewpoint of the Castle’s summit:

Winded, on this blue stack Of downward-drifting stone, The unwashed sky a low- Slung blanket thick with rain[.]

Causley has climbed to the top of Launceston Castle; the effort of the climb, rather than any experience of spiritual elevation, exhausts him. His vision is drawn downwards and inwards as he searches through the dense cloud and rain for the key to the interpretation of his lifetime’s daily experience of ‘being’ in this place. The wider context of the scene is the unyielding granite of the moor and the inevitable destination of the stream. Against these harsh elements are contrasted the gentler wood, water and rocks with the vernacular clay, suggesting his writings slowly being washed away. The summit of the Castle is a typical setting for the Romantic tradition of the mountain as the definitive place for visions, where the mind can confront nature. It is an image for the ascent of life’s journey to its resting place.47

45 Friedman, Martin Buber, p. 36.46 Breiterman and Zank, ‘Martin Buber’.47 Meyer Abrams, ‘The Design of The Prelude: Wordsworth’s Long Journey Home’, in

78


But Causley’s solitary resting place at the summit engenders only a sense of bewilderment and even the terror is muted, primarily with a weari-ness of resignation. The use of lines flowing from one to another in every second line draws the eye down to the scene below. The tone is one of restrained rationality and sober reflection, despite the dramatic location and heightened perspective.

Herbert Lindenberger argued that, in Romantic imagery, fog may cut off the location from an earthly sphere before a higher vision is attained and that a sense of solitude is a precursor for a visionary mood.48 Despite choosing the setting of the Castle summit for his reflection on nature, inte-riority and mortality, Causley is unable to reconcile the tropes of romantic poetry with the alienation and destruction from the legacy of his experi-ences of childhood poverty and two world wars. He is both affirming yet transitioning away from the impulses of romantic imagination in the same way that the works of essayist Charles Lamb moved towards the more earthy contexts of Dickens.49 Furthermore, in contrast to Tintern Abbey as the location for Wordsworth’s ‘dwelling place of memory’ where the mind is ‘above the flow of time’, Causley cannot escape the destructiveness of time at his location.50 The memories stimulated by looking downward from the mound of the keep do not provide a dwelling place, a place to be, which provide him with a ‘spot in time’ that transcends the fear of loss, separation and mortality which has haunted his past and present since the war. He is still struggling in his ‘winded’ state, unsuccessfully as he himself admits, to make sense of his meditation on the powerful perspective from the crown of the castle

From there he can see the significant physical elements of his whole life; moor, granite, stream and woods spread out before him. These are set among the environment that has featured in his life: the town hall, the quarry, the school, and the allotments. There is no movement in the

William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and recep-tion, recent critical essays, ed. by Meyer Abrams, Stephen Gill, Jonathan (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 585-598 (p. 593).48 Herbert Lindenberger, ‘Images of Interaction in The Prelude’, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical es-says, ed. by Meyer Abrams, Stephen Gill, Jonathan Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 1979), pp. 642-663, (pp. 653–4).49 Charles Lamb, A Complete Elia: The Essays of Elia Together with the Last Essays of Elia (New York: Heritage Press, 1943); see John Beer, ‘Lamb and Dickens: The 2002 Toast’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin: The Journal of the Charles Lamb Society, 118 (2002), pp. 30-31, (p. 30).50 James Hefferman, The Re-creation of Landscape (London; Dartmouth College: Univer-sity Press of New England, 1985), p. 59.

79

rosemary walters

verse towards ‘the imagination as a creative sensibility which alters the landscape’.51 To external perception, the landscape remains as it is but is altered from what it was in Causley’s youth, not by enchantment, but by the passage of time which brings decay and change in various forms. The town’s carousel of figures and bells, which marked the regular passage of time from the town hall clock, has stopped. The peaceful dove and the bullying jackdaw vie for supremacy, the quarry is long dry, and filled with brambles, the school he taught at is torn by ivy and lichen. There is natural decay around the allotments with symbols of death from nature; the pop-py and the sinister valerian ‘bleed by the lean lake side.’ Despite the blanket obscurity of the sky, from his vantage point Causley can see the decay of those features of his life which seemed once to indicate permanency and significance. Finally, ‘The shut pond slowly dies.’

The list of decay finishes and the movement of the poem stops dramat-ically with the presence of the sun. This could be a healing and a turning point. However, the sun in Causley’s poems usually indicates an intense indifference to the scenes it is witness to. ‘The hour is alchemised. / The hurt sun mends. It shines.’ Here, there is the possibility that this indif-ference and hurt can be mended and turned into gold. But this potential resolution does not occur. There is no emotional healing as an outcome of the potentially numinous experience rooted in landscape. Causley dis-plays the vulnerability of the child confronting the Boot Man. Metaphor, as Ronald Gaskell comments, is a way of seeing and feeling in which sim-ilarity is expressed through dissimilars.52 Causley is still ‘too unsure’ to read the ‘hard metaphor’ of the town, which is the oppressive dominating presence of the Castle in juxtaposition with benign leaf and hard stone and the joy of ‘summer play’ in childhood. He senses the inexorable progress of time towards what he is unsure of and may or may not turn out to be a transcendent reality which will validate and resolve his struggle with all those insecurities which have permeated his life: ‘I cannot read between / The lines of leaf and stone.

In the final verse, Causley admits that there is no restitution of the ‘sum-mer’ of childhood assurance of immortality, when ‘time was far away’; no resolution of his fear of death and oblivion now that the passage of time is only too obviously leading to one outcome. Childhood remains a fable and the ‘swift light’, any sense of freshness of vision, has gone. The ingredients

51 Ronald Gaskell, Wordsworth’s Poem of the Mind: An Essay on The Prelude (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 100. 52 Gaskell, Wordsworth’s Poem of the Mind, p. 51.

80


of the grandeur of nature and memory, combined with this significant mo-ment, are all present, but he is still obsessed by the incessant sense of time moving to a climax of what may be oblivion. There is no sense of his expe-rience on the Castle leaving behind a lasting redemptive power. He is faced with the movement of unstoppable water, breaking free from the ‘moored’ wall and running from his birthplace, therefore from the beginning of his life, to its final destination, the sea:

By my birth-place the stream Rubs a wet flank, breaks free From the moored wall; escapes, Unwavering, to sea.

The final destination: unwavering, to sea

Buber’s philosophy implied a search for an integrated destination of the human personality:

the holding on to new, humble knowledge that the person one once was, is identical to the person one is now. The goal must be to restore oneself by using one’s capacity to work within historically and biologi-cally given situations.53

Through the lens of childhood memory, service in the Second World War, travel abroad and the attempt to find some integration of the self, prompt-ed by the physical landscape, in Secret Destinations, Causley gave voice to his unfulfilled aspirations towards this goal of restoration of wholeness.

But where Causley ends is not where Buber’s vision leads in two re-spects. Firstly, although poet and reader can be active participants in the act of interpretation, Causley remains essentially solitary as creator in these journeys. He makes claims upon himself to journey towards a sense of self but makes no existential demands of his readers. This impedes the potential of a fulfilled ‘I-Thou’ existence. The reader cannot personally re-ciprocate. The poems remained the ‘Thou’ to which Causley related. In his translator’s preface to Buber’s I and Thou, Ronald Gregor Smith describes ‘a kind of directness which lays a special claim upon the reader’.54 The claim in these journeys is primarily on Causley himself and the reader is

53 Pettersen, ‘Buber’s Theory of Existential Guilt and Shame’.54 Buber, I and Thou, p. xi.

81

rosemary walters

witness. Secondly, in contrast to Buber’s dimension of a relationship with God, the sea is a symbol of extinction for Causley. Gregor Smith expected that a reading of I and Thou would prompt the reader to consider Buber’s central question: ‘how may I understand my experience of a relation with God?’.55 The possibility of an eternal ‘Thou’, is the final destination of being in a relationship for Buber. ‘Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou.’56 This destination is not explicitly apparent in Causley. Jason Cowley commented that ‘Causley has been rightly called a religious poet but his is an inchoate theology, in which redemption appears end-lessly deferred, transcendence endlessly out of reach’.57 Applying Cowley’s analysis to Secret Destinations allows for the potential of this deferment and an openness to reaching this transcendence, but its realisation is not apparent in this collection.

Despite these two caveats, the journey to the sea may be ‘unwavering’ in Causley, but Buber’s assertion in the preface that the traveller is unaware of his destination hints that, even for Causley, there may yet be a resolution to this mystery. Cowley argued of Causley that ‘his words, his particular flesh are his immense gamble against death, imperishably carrying his name into the future’.58 The struggle for identity through language, guilt, displacement and location and the ‘secret destination’ of the individual self are illuminated by Buber’s dialogic principle.

In the four types of journey found in Causley’s poetry in Secret Destinations are the rationale for his choice of a quotation from Buber. In his introduction to Buber’s Between Man and Man, Maurice Friedman comments that ‘the genuineness of man’s existence is seen as dependent upon his bringing all his separate spheres of activity into “the life of di-alogue”’.59 The struggle to confirm a sense of self, to achieve the quality of relationship implied by Buber’s ‘I-Thou’, and the attempt of poetry to orientate experience and realise an eventual sense of meaning beyond the individual are variously present in the selection of poems chosen for this paper. Causley struggles to find an integration of personality and to sus-tain his sense of humanity in relationship through language and poetry, to live with the despair of the effects of war, to face his sense of identity through travel and to search for the significance of his life from the van-

55 Ibid.56 Buber, I and Thou, p. 53.57 Jason Cowley, ‘The Cornish balladeer’, The Times, 30 December 1997, p. 28. 58 Ibid. 59 Maurice Friedman, ‘Introduction’ in Buber, Between Man and Man, pp. xi–xx (p. xvii).

82


tage point of the Castle. Causley’s achievements in probing the identity of self, so often belittled by critics obsessed with his seeming indifference to more experimental approaches to post-war poetry, are clearly shown in the collection Secret Destinations.

note

The copyright to Causley’s work belongs to his literary estate. Anyone wishing to reproduce his work should contact David Higham Associates, 6th Floor, Waverley House, 7–12 Noel St, London W1F 8GQ; T +44 (0)20 7434 5900; www.davidhigham.co.uk.

83

rosemary walters

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Buber, Martin, Between Man and Man, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002).

—. ‘Community and Environment’, in A Believing Humanism: My Testament 1902=1965 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), pp. 93–95.

—. Hasidism and Modern Man, ed. and trans. by Maurice Friedman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

—. I and Thou, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)Causley, Charles, Secret Destinations (London: Macmillan, 1984).—, ed., The Sun, Dancing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).—, ed., Collected Poems for Children (London: Macmillan, 2000).

Secondary

Abrams, Meyer, ‘The Design of The Prelude: Wordsworth’s Long Journey Home’, in William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical essays, ed. by Meyer Abrams, Stephen Gill, Jonathan Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 1979) pp. 585–598.

Bate, Jonathan, ‘Players Please’, London Review of Books, 6:22 (6 December 1984), < https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n22/jonathan-bate/players-please> [accessed 8 August 2020].

Beer, John, ‘Lamb and Dickens: The 2002 Toast’, The Charles Lamb Bulletin: The Journal of the Charles Lamb Society, 118 (2002).

– – Wordsworth In Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).Braiterman, Zachary, and Michael Zank, ‘Martin Buber’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta, forthcoming. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/buber/> [accessed 1 February 2020].

Chandler, James, Wordsworth’s Second Nature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984).Cowley, Jason, ‘The Cornish balladeer’, The Times, 30 December 1997, p. 28.Flusser, David, ‘Afterword’, in Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. by Norman

Goldhawk (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue 1st edn (London: Routledge and

Keegan Paul, 1955).Gaskell, Ronald, Wordsworth’s Poem of the Mind: An Essay on The Prelude (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1991).Hamilton, Ian, ed., The Poetry of War 1939–45 (London: Alan Ross, 1965).Hefferman, James, The Re-creation of Landscape (London; Dartmouth College: University

Press of New England, 1985).Herberg, Will, ed. The Writings of Martin Buber (New York: Meridian Books, 1958).Kavanagh, P. J. ‘Diseases and Complaints’, The Guardian, 15 March 1968, p. 7.Lamb, Charles, A Complete Elia: The Essays of Elia Together with the Last Essays of Elia

(New York: Heritage Press, 1943).Lindenberger, Herbert, ‘Images of Interaction in The Prelude’ in William Wordsworth, The

Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: authoritative texts, context and reception, recent critical essays, ed. by Meyer Abrams, Stephen Gill, Jonathan Wordsworth (New York: Norton, 1979) pp. 642-663.

84


McClatchey, J. D., ‘Amid the Groves, Under the Shadowy Hills’, Poetry (August 1991), 280–295.

Moberly, R. W. L., ‘Martin Buber’s Two Types of Faith Revisited’, Scottish Journal of Theology 65:4 (2012), 402–420 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/scottish-jour-nal-of-theology/article/knowing-god-and-knowing-about-god-martin-bubers-two-types-of-faith-revisited/F43F9FD195F96FEB9AE69A1C42214567> [accessed 20 June 2020].

Moore, Donald J., Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996).

Parker, Simon, A Certain Man: Charles Causley In His Own Words (Callington: Scryfa Books, 2017) .

Pettersen, Kaare Torgny, ‘Buber’s Theory of Existential Guilt and Shame’, <https://www.kaaretorgnypettersen.blogspot.com/2012/03/bubers-theory-of-existential-guilt-and.html> [accessed 18 February 2020].

Porter, Peter, ‘Sleeping Beauties’, The Observer, 2 June 1985, p. 22.Rae, Simon, ‘Escaping Time’, The Times Literary Supplement, 26 April 1985, p. 470.Ricks, Christopher, ‘Charles Causley: Collected Poems 1971–1975’, The New York Times,

11 January 1976.Summerfield, Geoffrey, ed., Worlds: Seven Modern Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).Walters, Rosemary, On the Border: Charles Causley in 20th Century Poetics (unpublished

master’s thesis, University of Kent, 2015).—. Zig Zag: Cultures in Common and the Poetry of Charles Causley (unpublished PhD the-

sis, University of Kent, 2020).

From the Graeco–Roman Underworld to the Celtic Otherworld: The Cultural Translation of a Pagan Deity

angana moitra

Medieval narratives and literary texts are outfitted with text-worlds inhabited by figures who are as diverse and complex as they are numerous in number. Although many of these figures

represent unique artistic creations, some constitute prototypes with echoes in other literary and textual cultures. Although the narrative trajectories of medieval texts demarcate intended (or unintended) destinations for its cast of characters, it is important to note that the mere act of appearance within the narrative text-world is itself the destination for many of these figures, a destination that is often reached via a circuitous cultural pere-grination. As reflections of cultural attitudes which are dynamic, protean, and in a state of constant flux, literary figures are effervescent and contin-uously adapting to contextual specificities. But although discrete literary cultures have their own defining and unique characteristics, they do not exist in a vacuum, hermetically sealed off from developments in religious, political, and sociocultural life. On the contrary, textual cultures and lit-erary figures often demonstrate patterns of continuity (albeit in different forms) as the cultural systems of which they are a part interact with each other. Although such intercultural communication is typically viewed as a necessary by-product of an increasingly globalised world, it is not an invention of the modern age. Medieval cultures have all too frequently been negatively viewed as insular, monolithic systems frozen in time as fossilised blocs, which constitutes a reductive and totalising approach that overlooks how the social, political, literary, and religious systems of the Middle Ages actively mingled with each other in many contexts. It is the aim of this paper to chart the influence of a specific figure from Graeco-Roman mythology—the pagan god of the Underworld—on the figure of Midir, the ruler of the elfmounds of Brí Léith in the medieval Irish saga Tochmarc Étaíne (The Wooing of Étaín) via a two-pronged process of liter-ary-textual and cultural transmission. Such transmission, which straddled pathways of both geospatial and chronological transport via networks of

86

from the graeco–roman underworld to the celtic otherworld

trade and political conquest, can be more accurately described as a process of ‘cultural translation,’ and it is to an exploration of this translatory para-digm that this paper is dedicated.

The Greeks, broadly speaking, distinguished between two categories of gods—the chthonians (Gr. chthon = earth) who dwelled on earth and the ouranians (Gr. ouranos = heaven) who belonged to the bright regions of the upper air beyond the clouds and whose abode was at the summit of Mount Olympus. The chthonioi were spirits who lived in the dark recesses of the earth.1 The ouranic gods usually trafficked with the living whereas the chthonians had jurisdiction over the dead. The earth was both the bear-er of life (the realm of fertility and germination) as well as the receptacle of death (the place of interment of the dead). By virtue of this dual character of their abode, the chthonic gods also performed a double function—they ensured the fertility of the land and acted as guardians of the souls of the dead.2 The name Hades, typically used to denote the Underworld of Greek religious imagination, was also applied to the lord of the chthonioi, thereby indicating that there was often no distinction made between the god and his dwelling-place.3 As the deity tasked with the lordship of death, a state both unknowable by virtue of the mystery and uncertainty surrounding it, as well as terrifying by virtue of its finality, Hades was seemingly feared more than he was worshipped. Reluctant to risk disrespecting a god wield-ing such dreadful power, the Greeks used the euphemism Plouton—the Rich One—to refer to Hades, preferring through this attribution to as-cribe greater importance to his role as a spirit of the earth’s fertility rather than to his function as the god of the dead.4 His task was to maintain the line of demarcation drawn between life and death, ensuring that the living did not stray into the land of the dead and the dead did not escape back into the world of the living. In tandem with socio-political and histori-cal changes which necessarily shape cultural evolution and consequently literary representation, the Greek conception of the Underworld evolved from a location situated across the ocean in the earliest recorded account

1 Ken Dowden, ‘Olympian Gods, Olympian Pantheon’, in A Companion to Greek Reli-gion, ed. by Daniel Ogden (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 41–55 (p. 47).2 D. Felton, ‘The Dead’, in A Companion to Greek Religion, ed. by Ogden, pp. 86–99 (p. 90).3 Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 294. For a detailed account of the various ways in which Hades—both the god as well as the location—was conceived by the Greeks, see Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 48–76.4 Felton, ‘The Dead’, pp. 90–91.

87

angana moitra

(as evoked in Homer’s Odyssey) to the gloomy underground portals which had become a stock feature of literary descriptions of the Underworld by the fifth century bce.5 This idea of a god dwelling in the nether regions of the earth and associated with both fertility and death was borrowed by the Romans from Hellenic mythology, although in later representations his position as a fertility god declined in importance whereas his lordship of the dead gained precedence.6

Moving away from mainland Europe to the British Isles, a different body of mythology is encountered, formed by the cultural efforts of a dif-ferent set of peoples and shaped under different socio-religious and his-torical circumstances. The appellation ‘Celtic’ is usually used to refer to the inhabitants of this part of the world as well as their practices and beliefs, although the proper application of the term is linguistic rather than soci-ological.7 Classical sources reported how the civilisations of Greece and Rome encountered the Keltoi (or the Galli, as the Romans called them) within the context of political and territorial expansion.8 The Hellenic world also interacted with the Celts through the medium of trade, par-ticularly through the city of Massalia (present-day Marseille) which, by virtue of its geographical position and status as trading intermediary, was

5 Felton, ‘The Dead’, p. 92. 6 Deities, cults, and religious ideas filtered into Rome from the Hellenic world between the third and sixth centuries bce through the influence of the Etruscans, Roman commer-cial relations with Cumæ, and the Pyrrhic War, among other factors. Indeed, by 249 bce, during the period of the First Punic War, Pluto and Persephone had been introduced into Rome as the deities Dis and Proserpina. See Jesse Benedict Carter, The Religious Life of Ancient Rome: A Study in the Development of Religious Consciousness from the Foundation of the City until the Death of Gregory the Great (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), pp. 39–43.7 The area extends from Ireland and Spain in the west and Scotland in the north to the Czech Republic in the east and northern Italy in the south, with forays beyond Europe into Asia Minor. See Miranda J. Green, ‘Introduction: Who were the Celts?’ in The Celtic World, ed. by Miranda J. Green (Oxford: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3–7. The idea of a common Celtic or insular heritage has been called into question by scholars, especially since although the speakers of the Celtic languages certainly shared common elements of belief, cultural fea-tures were also shared with non-Celtic speakers in north-western Europe. Although I use the terms ‘Celt’ and ‘Celtic’ in keeping with standard scholarly practice, perhaps, as Patrick Sims-Williams points out, ‘Indo-European’ or ‘indigenous’ would be a more appropriate umbrella term. See Sims-Williams, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 4–8. 8 For a concise account of early Greek and Roman interactions with the Celts, see David Rankin, ‘The Celts through Classical Eyes’, in The Celtic World, ed. by Green, pp. 21–33. For a more detailed account of the precise references to the Celts in classical literature, see Rankin, Celts and the Classical World (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–33.

88


influenced by a blend of Hellenic, Roman, and Celtic cultural character-istics.9 Celtic contacts with the Roman world are, however, of greater cul-tural significance in view of the pervasiveness of Latin influence on the Celts, a process which has ubiquitously come to be known as ‘romaniza-tion.’ Visible traces of this Romano-Celtic interaction, found not only in literature and art but also in the emergence during the third and second centuries bce of urban centres stretching from southern Gaul to north-ern Britain, have led Barry C. Burnham to note that ‘interaction with the Roman world, directly or indirectly, before the conquest, via diplomacy and trade, provided a vital infrastructure upon which romanization could be built.’10 Through trade and military routes, the Celtic world thus came into contact with Greece and Rome, an interaction which was not simply economic and political, but also social and religious. This cultural inter-mingling had a decisive impact on the religious beliefs of the Celts which began to incorporate elements of Graeco-Roman paganism.

Cultural Translation between Religious Systems

Current scholarship seems to indicate that as the Celtic and Graeco-Roman worlds encountered each other through martial and mercantile contacts, the native faith was modified as new beliefs were exchanged and assimilated to the old religion.11 This modification was less of a replace-

9 Rankin, Celts and the Classical World, p. 42.10 Barry C. Burnham, ‘Celts and Romans: Towards a Romano-Celtic society’, in The Celt-ic World, ed. by Green, pp. 121–41 (p. 129).11 At this point, it is important to bear in mind that almost all of our knowledge about the gods of the Iron Age peoples has been derived from the writings of the Romans and is therefore necessarily one-dimensional. This strategy of interpretatio Romana—the Ro-man cultural project of identifying foreign or unknown gods with those of Greece and Rome—was typically practised by high-ranking members of the Roman army and civ-il administration. The Celtic world’s encounter with Rome did not happen on an equal footing. The Celtic peoples were politically subjugated by a militarily superior force, and the resultant amalgamation of religious ideas occurred within a matrix of unequal power relations. The reshaping of indigenous divinities was thus a ‘controlling strategy,’ influenced as much by reasons of political expediency as it was by the forcible erasure of cultural dif-ference exercised by a dominating power upon a colonised nation. Archaeological sourc-es too are not entirely reliable because the majority of the epigraphic and iconographic evidence dates from the Romano-Celtic rather than the free Celtic (that is, pre-Roman) period. These facts should not, however, detract us from making observations about Celtic religion; much valuable information can still be obtained bearing in mind the proviso that the evidence available is both incidental and subjective. For a more detailed discussion, see

89

angana moitra

ment than a fusion, as parallels and congruencies were noticed between the different strands of socio-religious and cultural practice. In the case of the British Isles, though it is difficult to accurately determine the date of arrival of the Celts, archaeological evidence seems to suggest the presence of a Celtic population in the island by the third century bce.12

However, archaeological evidence can at best offer only indirect evi-dence to endorse the possibility of the figure of Dis/Pluto having trav-elled from the Graeco-Roman to the Celtic worlds. Where tangible and empirically verifiable evidence is not forthcoming, a helpful metaphor for the transference of ideas across spatial, temporal, geopolitical, and cul-tural boundaries can be found in the concept of translation, especially in the way the term is employed in the fields of ethnography and social anthropology. In its simplest, most obvious sense, the primary meaning of the term ‘translation’ is linguistic where it usually refers to the act of mediating between different language systems by an individual interloc-utor (or groups of interlocutors, called translators) or an institution for the purpose of exchanging ideas and mutual comprehension.13 However, the recent critical turn in the fields of both linguistic and literary theory has expanded the semantic range of the term to include within its remit not only the question of language but also a variety of other applications. In fact, translation is now properly viewed as a complex, translingual act of communication tasked with the transcoding of cultural material.14 Etymologically, the word ‘translation’ means ‘carried from one place to another,’ a kind of border-crossing that does not necessarily have to be

Jane Webster, ‘A Dirty Window on the Iron Age? Recent Developments in the Archaeology of Pre-Roman Celtic Religion’, in Understanding Celtic Religion: Revisiting the Pagan Past, ed. by Katja Ritari and Alexandra Bergholm (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 121–54.12 Rankin, Celts and the Classical World, p. 12.13 Scholarship on translation studies is vast. For accessible overviews of the field, see Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), Jeremy Munday, Introducing Translation Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), and Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (Lon-don and New York: Routledge, 2008). Perhaps the most famous theorisation of the linguis-tic bases of translation was offered by Roman Jakobson who distinguished between three types of translation: interlingual (or translation proper), intralingual (or rewording), and intersemiotic (or transmutation). See Jakobson, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in On Translation, ed. by R. A. Brower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 232–39. 14 Douglas Howland, ‘The Predicament of Ideas in Culture: Translation and Historiogra-phy’, History and Theory, 42 (2003), 45–60 (pp. 45–6).

90


limited to the linguistic field, but one which can transcend the barriers erected by the passage of time, spatial constructs, as well as sociocultural systems. Viewed in this way, a work can be said to be ‘translated’ when it has been displaced, transported, or carried across contexts, even when it is read in its original language by someone who belongs to another country or another culture and follows another discipline.15

A particular subset of this broader domain of translation is the concept of ‘cultural translation,’ a term which has especial currency in the fields of ethnography and social anthropology. Narrowly defined, cultural transla-tion (as opposed to ‘linguistic’ or ‘grammatical’ translation) refers to those practices of literary translation that mediate cultural difference, convey extensive cultural background, or seek to represent another culture via the act of translation. More generally, however, cultural translation can be simply defined as a translation between discrete cultural contexts.16 One of the most potent workings of such cross-cultural translation occurs in the domain of religion and within the context of the translatability or carrying over of gods and deities between different religious systems.17 As one of the most important and characteristic components of culture, when different socio-cultural systems encounter one another in contexts which can range from commercial and economic to political and military, there is usually a concomitant impact on the religious beliefs of both cultures. This kind of religiously-orientated cultural translation crucially involves the notion of ‘translatability,’ generally defined as involving specific equations or iden-tifications of deities across cultures and the larger recognition of the dei-ties of other cultures in connection to one’s own pantheon of divinities.18

15 J. Hillis Miller, ‘Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stan-ford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 207–23 (p. 207). 16 See the entry on ‘cultural translation’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia on Translation Studies, 2nd edn, ed. by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (Oxford and New York: Rout-ledge, 2009), pp. 67–70. 17 For an overview of different arguments tackling the question of the interpenetration of religion and translation, see the essays contained in Translating Religion, ed. by Anita Houck and Mary Doak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013).18 Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), p. 6. A broader definition of the term is offered by Wolfgang Iser who views translatability as ‘an umbrella concept that allows us to inspect the interpenetration of different cultures and intracultural levels without necessarily or-ganizing these encounters. Furthermore, translatability covers all kinds of translation, as it refers to a range of conditions that are only selectively realized in any one specific trans-lation. The complete set of conditions comprised by this concept can never be brought to

91

angana moitra

The centrality of religion as a promoter of inter-cultural translatability has been intensively studied by Jan Assmann who has noted the practice of equating comparable deities across cultures, particularly within the context of the religious systems of the Ancient Near East.19 Hailing this inter-religious translatability as one of ‘the major cultural achievements of the ancient world,’ Assmann observes how, despite external differences between ancient cultures—differences of language, nomenclature, ico-nography, ritual, and so on—there were some fundamental similarities in their formulations of divinities as well as elements of religious belief. According to Assmann, this essential commonality makes religion a pow-erful counterfoil to the process of ‘pseudo-speciation.’ Borrowing the term from the psychologist Erik H. Erikson who used it to refer to the forma-tion of artificial sub-groups within the same biological species, Assmann applies ‘pseudo-speciation’ to denote the process of cultural differentiation in the human world. Although the creation of a unique cultural identity—the usual outcome of cultural pseudo-speciation—is not necessarily a bad thing, at its most harmful extreme it can result in absolute strangeness, isolation, avoidance, otherisation, and even abomination.20 However, such effects can be mitigated by factors promoting intercultural communica-tion and translation. One such factor was the establishment of political and commercial relations between cultures through trade and foreign pol-icy. According to Assmann, cross-religious translation (which included the practice of translating foreign pantheons) as a corrective to cultural pseudo-speciation must be regarded within the context of this general emergence of a common world with integrated networks of commercial, political, and cultural contact.21

The transference of myths, ideas about death, afterlife, burial practice and the jurisdiction of the gods, and figures (in particular, the pagan god of the Underworld) from the Graeco-Roman to the Celtic world can be better understood with the application of translation theory, both the concept of cultural translation as well as, more specifically, cultural trans-

bear in any actual translation, but it will enable us to discern which conditions govern the latter. Thus translatability opens up awareness of what each translation privileges and of the extent to which assumed references shape the positions that are transposed into one another.’ See Iser, ‘Coda to the Discussion’, in The Translatability of Cultures, ed. by Budick and Iser, pp. 294–302 (p. 295).19 Jan Assmann, ‘Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translatability’, in The Translatability of Cultures, ed. by Budick and Iser, pp. 25–36.20 Assmann, ‘Translating Gods’, p. 27. 21 Assmann, ‘Translating Gods’, p. 28.

92


latability in the sphere of religion. As an instance of cultural translation, the Graeco-Roman Dis/Pluto may be said to have been translated into the Celtic world where it subsequently appeared in textual culture in a slight-ly modified form. This kind of divine translatability also occurred within the context of mercantile contact (trade relations between the Celts and Greeks) and political arbitration (the Celtic world was militarily subjugat-ed by the Romans), as part of a larger cross-cultural transaction between distinct political, economic, and socio-religious systems in which Greek language and Hellenic heritage played a central part. Although translat-ability of divinities was not a unique achievement of the Graeco-Roman world, having existed at least as early as the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age, in the Graeco-Roman period translatability was built into the very fabric of cultural discourse, appearing in multilingual texts and treatises, blessings and curses, historiographical writing, as well as philosophical tracts. Graeco-Roman translatability saw the passage from the implic-it interpretation of deities characteristic of earlier periods to the explicit translation of divinities in which older, indigenous information about de-ities was correlated with newer methods of interpretation.22 This type of Graeco-Roman translatability was transferred on to the Celtic world when the two cultures encountered each other within commercial and political networks via a form of cultural translation that arranged itself according to assimilationist principles. This inter-religious cultural translation was at once horizontal—taking place across contemporaneous cultures—as well as vertical—having taken place through time—and thereby occupies the distinction of being simultaneously synchronic and diachronic in charac-ter.23 However, in tracing the translation of the Dis/Pluto figure from the Graeco-Roman to the Celtic world, it must be remembered that this move-ment was not a one-time trade-off isolated at a particular point in time, but a sustained process of chronological transport, one which perhaps

22 One such method was the practice of euhemerism (associated with the name of the fourth-century figure Euhemerus of Messene) which viewed deities of traditional mythol-ogy as human beings accorded divine honour after their deaths because of their achieve-ments or benefactions to humanity.23 Smith, God in Translation, pp. 272–73. Translation along lines both vertical and hori-zontal has also been discussed by Karlheinz Stierle in the context of the etymological evo-lution of the word ‘translation’ itself, from transferre/translatio in the Middle Ages to its various linguistic ramifications in the Romance languages in the early modern period (dis-tinction between translation/traduction and traslazione/traduzione in French and Italian respectively). See Stierle, ‘Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation’, in The Translatability of Cultures, ed. by Budick and Iser, pp. 55–67.

93

angana moitra

most significantly witnessed the radical transformation of the dominant religious system from paganism to Christianity. Rome’s transition from polytheism to monotheism and the gradual emergence of Christianity as the dominant religious system, particularly in the wake of the efforts of Constantine (the Edict of Milan of 313 ce decriminalising Christian wor-ship and the separation of the Western Roman Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church after 380 ce), had far-reaching effects on all subsequent cultural translatability. Cultural translation between the Graeco-Roman and the Celtic world, which had formerly been both assimilatory (the translation of Celtic divinities with the aid of Roman cultural apparatus in view of Rome’s military dominance over the Celts) as well as mutual (reciprocal relations between Greece and the Celtic world in the context of cross-national commerce) in nature, began to assume the form of cos-motheistic monotheism (translation of the gods not only into each other but also into a third, overarching Biblical register) with the introduction and consolidation of Christianity.24 This process can be fruitfully illustrat-ed with the example of Ireland.

At this point, it is important to bear in mind that Ireland constituted a somewhat distinct linguistic and socio-religious subset of the British Isles. The idea of Ireland as ‘Celtic’ is a relatively recent phenomenon and can be traced back to ‘sixteenth and seventeenth-century perceptions of the original affinity between the Gaelic and Brittonic languages on the one hand and, on the other, of the linguistic and cultural similarities between the early Britons and the Continental peoples known to the ancient world as Celts.’25 Moreover, Ireland occupies the unique position of never having been politically subjugated by the Romans. There has, however, been a tendency to exaggerate the extent to which Ireland was regarded as an isolated and discrete cultural unit, and the singularity of the Irish literary tradition has sometimes been overemphasised. Despite its political inde-pendence, the country did come into contact with Rome directly through the proselytising efforts of the missionaries Patrick and Palladius in the early fifth century ce and indirectly by means of trade through the in-termediation of Britain as its closest neighbour.26 Although there is scant

24 This classification of the three main types of religiously-orientated cultural transla-tion—syncretistic translation or cosmotheistic monotheism, assimilatory or competitive translation, and mutual translation—is Assmann’s. See Assmann, ‘Translating Gods’, pp. 34–6.25 Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, p. 4.26 For details about the Irish acquisition of romanitas supported by such archaeological evidence as the discovery of votive offerings, amphorae, vessels, and numismatic remains,

94


evidence of the survival of manuscripts, it is reasonable to conjecture that texts from the continent reached Ireland through routes both commercial and ecclesiastical, a transmission which undoubtedly encouraged the de-velopment of (among other kinds) classical learning on the island.27 Irish scholars’ engagement with classical material, although initially limited, was to receive an unprecedented boost from the ninth century onwards, a development encouraged both by the emergent literary practice of sa-ga-writing as well as by the attempt on the part of authors to construct an Irish national lineage which would parallel the illustrious genealogies of the classical Greeks and Romans. With an upsurge in the composition of sagas and vernacular historiographies and mythographies on Irish topics, scholars were motivated to try their hand at adapting foreign material.28 The adaptation of Greek and Latin classics into narratives written in Middle Irish was also an attempt to configure Irish identity politics along literary and genealogical lines, a plurilinguistic project which itself mirrored the cultural ambitions of the Romans several centuries earlier to mould their self-image in the fashion of Hellenic Greece.29 Irish engagement with clas-sical literary tradition found its embodiment in textual culture through a process that was, however, more than just a facile exercise in translation. Irish scholars produced a series of narrative texts which retold stories from Graeco-Roman antiquity in vernacular Irish prose through a process of

see Jonathan M. Wooding, ‘Trade as a factor in the transmission of texts between Ireland and the continent in the sixth and seventh centuries’, in Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission, ed. by Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 14–25 and Edel Bhreathnach, Ireland in the medieval world, AD400–1000: Landscape, kingship and religion (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 152–156.27 On the unavailability of medieval Irish manuscripts of classical authors acting as neg-ative evidence of classical influence, Brent Miles adds the helpful rejoinder that the ‘ab-sence of surviving medieval Irish manuscripts of classical authors says nothing about the deficiencies of medieval Irish libraries. Their absence speaks only of the deficiencies of our own.’ See Miles, Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge: D. S. Brew-er, 2011), pp. 21–22. Medieval engagement (particularly in England) with classical learning is also the subject of the essays gathered in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume I (800–1558), ed. by Rita Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), to which the reader is referred. 28 Ralph O’Connor, ‘Irish Narrative Literature and the Classical Tradition, 900–1300’, in Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative, ed. by Ralph O’Connor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 1–22 (p. 9).29 Pádraic Moran, ‘Greek Dialectology and the Irish Origin Story’, in Early Medieval Ireland and Europe: Chronology, Contacts, Scholarship, ed. by Pádraic Moran and Immo Warntjes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 481–512 (pp. 508–509).

95

angana moitra

creative adaptation that remoulded Latin epics and legendary histories in the light of their sustained knowledge and awareness of the commentary and glossatorial tradition of the scholastic curriculum. Thus, while it is certainly true that the existence of the Gaelic vernacular as well as the country’s political independence from Rome gave Ireland a certain dis-tinctiveness of status, it is also true that the religious, cultural, and literary practices of the Irish were influenced by developments elsewhere on the continent. The combination of ecclesiastical and secular learning (espe-cially the knowledge of classical texts and authors) in Irish literary centres testifies to the existence of a shared sociocultural tradition which variously imbibed the tenets of Graeco-Roman paganism, indigenous mythology, and insular Christianity. This common cultural domain functioned as the conduit through which ideas (and, by extension, figures such as Dis/Pluto) were translated into the literary milieu of the British Isles.

The Textuality of Ireland’s Pagan Past

Native Irish divinities were akin to localised spirits associated with specif-ic places, peoples, and aspects of the natural world.30 The earliest written traces of the pagan divinities of Ireland date from around the beginning of the eighth century.31 Scriptural dispensation mandated that divinity in the Biblical sense could not be ascribed to the pagan gods; in order to ensure their survival in a Christian world, pagan deities had to be invest-ed with new kinds of significance through such strategies as association with the ideology of kingship or with native systems of knowledge. This kind of secular retrofitting often produced properties which were mutu-ally exclusive and incompatible—hence the bewildering complexity in the literary representation of the Irish gods.32 Despite the confusing variety

30 My discussion of the Irish divine and mythological canon draws heavily upon Mark Williams’ examination of the subject in Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 3–71. 31 For a fuller discussion of the early Irish literary scene, see Elva Johnston, Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013). 32 Williams offers the example of Manannán mac Lir in Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran), a figure whose representation evoked multiple ontological registers. As the god of the sea, Manannán is reminiscent of pagan water deities, and the description of his first appearance seems to contain echoes of the introduction of the Roman sea-god Neptune at the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid. However, Manannán is also made to discuss such decid-edly Christian matters as the Fall of Man and the Incarnation, and his superior knowledge is interpreted by Williams as an instance of wish-fulfilment by clerical men of learning.

96


in characterisation, what united these figures was their abode or dwelling place—the síde or hollow hills. These supernatural residences were unique to Irish paganism and typically denoted a hill, a megalithic tumulus, or a pre-Celtic grave-hill.33 Their inhabitants resembled human beings but were superior to humanity—not only were they more beautiful, but they also possessed magical powers and could usually outlive ordinary mortals; indeed, they were frequently immortal. Síd-mounds were usually synon-ymous with the Otherworld (or multiple otherworlds) which stood for an intermittently accessible parallel dimension in the Irish imagination.34 Viewed as the remnants of a primordial past, síd-mounds were believed to represent a spiritual connection to the land, a kind of ancestral belong-ing which was both perpetual and immanent, and which thus became the locus of ritual practice as well as the site of veneration of the spirits of the departed.35 For Christian authors, such síd-mounds, together with their human-like residents, their associations with a collective memory that was simultaneously primeval and regional, as well as their ritual significance as loci of ancestor worship and burial, offered fertile ground for utilisation as the dwelling-place of non-Christian divinities without running the risk of explicitly describing them as gods. In early literary productions, these lim-inal figures—supernatural entities who were neither entirely human nor wholly divine—frequently appeared within the context of Christian alle-gory. With the passage of time, however, the nature of literary composi-tion changed, bringing with it changes in the portrayal of pagan divinities. The years which initially followed the island’s conversion to Christianity were marked by a theological anxiety whereby the indigenous deities of Ireland’s pagan past needed to be accommodated within a new radically different religious order. In the realm of literature, this anxiety channelled itself into the production of allegorical texts with a distinctively monastic flavour. Once the situation had stabilised and Ireland had begun to settle into a newly configured religious, cultural, economic, and political system, these anxieties largely dissipated. As social conditions changed, so too did

For a fuller discussion of Manannán in this text and the multiple modes of signification embodied by the figure, see Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 56–68. 33 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, p. 30. 34 The síd was at once the Otherworld, its inhabitants, as well as the earthly portals which led to such spaces. The range of signification of the term ‘síd’ is reminiscent of Hades which denoted both the underworld deity as well as his kingdom in Greek religious imagination.35 Tok Thompson, ‘Hosting the Dead: Thanatopic Aspects of the Irish Sidhe’, in Com-municating with the Spirits, ed. by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (Budapest & New York: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 193–203 (p. 200).

97

angana moitra

the motivations behind literary endeavours, a transformation which was mirrored in the movement from allegorical composition to saga-writing. Politically, as Ireland encountered the Vikings and the Normans (the late eighth and the late twelfth centuries mark the initiatory points for the Viking raids and the Norman incursions respectively), a need was felt to champion indigenous history and native Irish legacy against the genealog-ical credentials of the outsiders. The literary form of the saga furnished the ideal training ground to rehearse such nationalist aims. Whereas the atti-tude of literary authors towards the pagan gods elsewhere in Europe fre-quently vacillated between viewing them either as merciful angels sent be-fore the coming of Christianity to announce the advent of a new religious order, as half-fallen angels who by failing to take sides in the rebellion of Satan against God were stuck in a sort of limbo, or as diabolical forc-es deserving of outright condemnation, in Ireland the dominant strategy seems to have been one of euhemerism by which the ancient gods were reclaimed either as unfallen human beings or as neutral angels.36 Since the practice of construing gods as mortal men who had been elevated to divinity by virtue of their renown had no scriptural warrant whatsoever, it is also an eloquent testimony to the creative powers and imaginative potential of medieval Irish saga-writers.

The conception and characterisation of the figure of Midir in Tochmarc Étaíne, an Old Irish saga conjectured to have been composed sometime around the seventh or eighth century, seems to hark back to the mythog-raphy and insular folklore of the Celtic lands.37 Occupying an ontologi-cally interstitial space where he is both supernatural being and euhemer-ised hero, the character of Midir shows the influence of both indigenous Celtic deities as well as their counterparts in Graeco-Roman mythogra-phy. Generally regarded as belonging to the Mythological Cycle of tales, Tochmarc Étaíne is divided into three sub-tales, all of which involve the figure of Midir, lord of the síd-mounds of Brí Léith.38 The first sub-tale re-

36 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 78–83. For a detailed, albeit dated, discussion of the practice of euhemerism, see John Daniel Cooke, ‘Euhemerism: A Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical Paganism’, Speculum, 2 (1927), 396–410. 37 The textual history of Tochmarc Étaíne is enormously complicated, with different man-uscripts preserving different sections of the story. For an account of the tale’s manuscript history, see Osborn Bergin and R. I. Best, ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, Ériu, 12 (1938), 137–141 and for a brief summary, see T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Tochmarc Étaíne: a literal interpretation’, in Ogma: Essays in Celtic Studies in honour of Próinséas Ní Chatháin, ed. by Michael Richter and Jean-Michel Picard (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 165–181 (pp. 165–166).38 Scholars have tended to divide the Irish sagas into four categories—the Ulster, Feni-

98


lates how Midir comes to foster Aengus, the illegitimate son of the Dagda, king of the Tuatha Dé, how he uses Aengus to demand the hand of Étaín, daughter of the king of north-eastern Ireland and the fairest lady in the country, in marriage, and how his jealous wife Fuamnach turns Étaín into a pool of water whereupon (through a combination of heat and evapora-tion) she turns first into a worm and then into a purple fly, is blown off-course by a gust of wind conjured by Fuamnach, and eventually falls into the cup of Étar’s wife where she is swallowed and reborn as the daughter of Étar one thousand and twelve years later. The second sub-tale relates how the reborn-Étaín is married to Eochaid Airem, the king of Ireland, how Eochaid’s brother Ailill is filled with love-sickness for Étaín who, in order to cure her brother-in-law’s sickness, agrees to his (implicit) proposition of sexual union, but how every night she is hoodwinked into interacting with a mysterious man impersonating Ailill. At the conclusion of the second tale, it is revealed that it is none other than Midir who had orchestrat-ed Ailill’s love-sickness so that his clandestine meetings with Étaín could be arranged. Introducing himself to Étaín as her husband, he asks her to come away to Brí Léith with him, but she refuses to do so until Eochaid himself gives his permission. The third sub-tale relates how Midir appears to Eochaid at Tara in the guise of a warrior, challenging him to a game of chess. Eochaid is victorious during the first two games and extracts re-wards from Midir. However, Midir is victorious the third time and, when asked what he would like as a reward, asks for a kiss from Étaín, which a reluctant Eochaid agrees to grant him a month hence. On the appoint-ed day, Eochaid surrounds Tara with soldiers but Midir appears in the middle of the room, embraces Étaín, and transforms both of them into swans whereupon they escape through the skylight. As Eochaid and his men pursue the company to the elfmounds of Síd Ban Find, Midir appears and asks him to go home, promising him that Étaín would be returned to him on the morrow. The following day, fifty women all in the likeness of Étaín are sent to Eochaid who makes a choice on the basis of the elegance with which they pour a drink. Midir later visits Eochaid and informs him that he had actually chosen his daughter since Étaín had been pregnant with his child when Midir took her away. Eochaid is inflamed with rage and tries to dispose of his illegitimate daughter by throwing her into the

an, King, and Mythological Cycles—on the basis of content. These divisions are, however, arbitrary and are primarily for the purpose of academic convenience. The Irish authors themselves showed an inclination towards arranging stories thematically, such as ‘wooings,’ ‘cattle raids,’ ‘violent deaths,’ ‘elopements,’ and so on. See Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 73–74, footnote 7.

99

angana moitra

fireplace, but she is rescued by a kindly herdsman who takes her in and she subsequently grows up to be the mother of Conaire, a legendary Irish king.

The figure of Midir in Tochmarc Étaíne is a curious amalgam of oppos-ing personality traits and features—at times his divinity shines through with peculiar force whereas at other times he seems to act with the kind of obsession that usually characterises fallible human characters; his sudden infatuation with and enduring dedication to Étaín are unexplained and appear to have no concrete motivation, as is his rather unjust behaviour towards his own wife Fuamnach; while his devoted, relentless pursuit of Étaín is evidently meant to paint him as a steadfast lover unwavering in his loyalty and affection, he has no qualms about resorting to trickery and deceit to achieve his aims (such as his orchestration of Ailill’s love-sickness and hoodwinking Eochaid into choosing his wife incorrectly and there-by committing the crime of incest). Midir is thus represented as a hybrid figure whose personality and temperament combines the fickleness, un-predictability, and dishonesty that is typically characteristic of pagan gods with the kind of constancy, fidelity, and devotion that were regarded as the traits of a good Christian. Such a contradictory picture is fully in keeping with a culture that witnessed its pagan heritage being overlain with a new theological dispensation and deific system.

In the first sub-tale, Midir’s friendship with the Dagda—who is ex-plicitly identified as one of the Tuatha Dé—seems to ally him with the race of the god peoples.39 In the third sub-tale, however, he is described as one who appears in the fashion of a warrior, an account which is more closely reminiscent of stock descriptions of heroes in romances. This identification is further borne out by the fact that for the rest of the story, Midir’s primary role is that of loyal lover of Étaín—his divine potential is largely subsumed by the force of his passionate devotion to his earthly consort. A similar observation is made by Mark Williams who notes a shift in the ontological status of the divinities between the first sub-tale and the third. Pointing out the sexual profligacy of the Dagda in the first sub-tale, Williams discerns a parallel between the Dagda and Zeus/Jupiter of the Graeco-Roman pantheon, adding that the two were not only re-

39 Another episode from the story would seem to reinforce the view that Midir has qua-si-divine associations. His escape from Eochaid’s palace at Tara with Étaín in the guise of a swan seems to be in keeping with the avian disguises frequently adopted by the áes síde or the magical deities of the síd-mounds. See Lisa Bitel, ‘Secrets of the Síd: The Supernatural in Medieval Irish Texts’, in Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom, ed. by Michael Ostling (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 79–101 (p. 95).

100


flexes of the reconstructed Indo-European deity the ‘Sky-Father,’ but that they would also have been known to the Irish through Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. In particular, a parallel can be discerned between Midir and the Graeco-Roman Dis/Pluto in their shared role as abductors. Whereas the classical Dis/Pluto had kidnapped Proserpina/Persephone, daughter of the goddess of agriculture and fertility Ceres/Demeter, Midir snatches away Étaín, herself interpreted by many scholars as the embodiment of the Sovereignty Goddess who is the totemic safeguard of the land’s fertility.40 By contrast, Midir, who as a friend of the Dagda’s is also to be read as a god in the first sub-tale, describes himself as belonging to the tribe of unfallen human beings in the courtship song related in the third sub-tale.41 This poem, though a possible interpolation, offers a crucial glimpse into Midir’s world and is therefore worth quoting in full:

40 See Charles-Edwards, ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, pp. 172–174 and Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, p. 88. 41 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, pp. 86–87.

A Bé Find, in ragha lium.a tír n-ingnadh i fil rind.is barr sobairci folt and.is dath snechta for corp slim.

Is ann nád bí muí na tuígel ded and dubai a brai.is lí sula lín ar sluag.is dath síon and gach gruadh.

Is corcair muighi cach muín.is lí sula ugai luin.cidh cain deicsiu Muighe Fail.anam iar ngnais Muigi Mair.

Cidh caín lib coírm Insi Fail,is mescu cuirm Thiri Mair. amrai tíre tír asber.ni théid óc ann ré sén.

Srotha téith millsi tar tír.rogha dé midh 7 fín.daine delgnaide cen ón.combart cen pecadh cen chol.

Atchiam cach for cach leath.7 nícon aice nech.

O Bé Find wilt thou come with meto the wondrous land wherein harmony is,hair is like the crown of the primrose there,and the body smooth and white as snow.

There, is neither mine nor thine,white are teeth there, dark the brows.A delight of the eye the number of our hosts,every cheek there is of the hue of the foxglove.

A gillyflower is each one’s neck,a delight of the eye are blackbirds’ eggs,Though fair the prospect of Mag Fáil,‘tis desolate after frequenting Mag Már.

Though choice you deem the ale of Inis Fáil,more intoxicating is the ale of Tír Már. A wondrous land is the land I tell of;youth departs not there before eld.

Warm sweet streams flow through the land,the choice of mead and wine.Stately folk without blemish,conception without sin, without lust.

We see everyone on every side,and no one seeth us.

101

angana moitra

teimel imorbuis Adaimdodonarcheil ar araim.

[A ben día ris mo thuaith tindis barr oir bias fort chind U.]mil fín laith lemnacht la lindrod bia lium and, a Bé Find.

It is the darkness of Adam’s transgressionthat hath prevented us from being counted.

[O Woman, if thou come to my proud folk,a crown of gold shall be upon thy head]honey, wine, ale, fresh milk, and drink,thou shalt have with me there, O Bé Find.

There is an unusually strong parallel between Midir’s description of Fairyland and Pluto’s description of his own domain of the Underworld in Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae (The Rape of Proserpine):

“Desine funestis animum, Proserpina, curis et vano vexare metu. maiora dabuntur sceptra nec indigni taedas patiere mariti. ille ego Saturni proles, cui machina rerum servit et inmensum tendit per inane potestas. amissum ne crede diem: sunt altera nobis sidera, sunt orbes alii, lumenque videbis purius Elysiumque magis mirabere solem cultoresque pios; illic pretiosior aetas, aurea progenies habitat, semperque tenemus quod superi meruere semel. nec mollia desunt prata tibi; Zephyris illic melioribus halant perpetui flores, quos nec tua protulit Henna. est etiam lucis arbor praedives opacis fulgentes viridi ramos curvata metallo: haec tibi sacra datur fortunatumque tenebis autumnum et fulvis semper ditabere pomis. parva loquor: quidquid liquidus complectitur aër, quidquid alit tellus, quidquid maris aequora verrunt, quod fluvii volvunt, quod nutrivere paludes, cuncta tuis pariter cedent animalia regnis lunari subiecta globo, qui septimus auras ambit et aeternis mortalia separat astris. […]”

“Cease, Proserpine, to vex thy heart with gloomy cares and causeless fear. A prouder sceptre shall be thine, nor shalt thou face marriage with a husband unworthy of thee. I am that scion of Saturn whose will the framework of the world obeys, whose power stretches through the limitless void. Think not thou hast lost the light of day; other stars are mine and other courses; a purer light shalt thou see and wonder rather at Elysium’s sun and blessed habitants. There a richer age, a golden race has its home, and we possess for ever what men win but once. Soft meads shall fail thee not, and ever-blooming flowers, such as thy Henna ne’er produced, breathe to gentler zephyrs. There is,

102


moreover, a precious tree in the leafy groves whose curving branches gleam with living ore—a tree consecrate to thee. Thou shalt be queen of blessed autumn and ever encircled with golden fruit. Nay more; whatsoe’er the limpid air embraces, whatever earth nourishes, the salt seas sweep, the rivers roll, or the marsh-lands feed, all living things alike shall yield them to thy sway, all, I say, that dwell beneath the orb of the moon that is the seventh of the planets and in its ethereal journey separates things mortal from the deathless stars. […]”42

Both Midir’s courtship song as well as Pluto’s description of his own realm portray Fairyland/the Underworld as an arboricultural pleasance, expansive domains blessed with nature’s bounty as well as holding the promise of unfettered wish-fulfilment. Whereas Pluto’s account, clearly intended to both demonstrate his kingly might and largesse and impress Proserpina, presents an altogether more salutary and wholesome picture of the Underworld than was usually found in standard classical depic-tions, Midir’s description of Brí Léith has been interpreted as a liminal paradisiacal space intermittently accessible to human beings which could nonetheless be localisable on a map (Ardagh Hill in Co. Longford).43 It is difficult to proffer concrete evidence to show that the De Raptu was known in medieval Ireland, especially because the reception history of Claudian in the early Middle Ages is hopelessly fragmentary and patchy at best. He was known to such fifth- and sixth-century Gallic poets as Venantius Fortunatus and Sidonius Apollinaris as well as such poets at the court of Charlemagne as Alcuin, Angilbert, and Theodulf, thereby suggesting that his works had some currency within the wider continental literary-his-torical scene.44 However, there is some evidence to show that the Pluto-Proserpina story was part of the canon of Irish classical studies by the early eighth century, since the English scholar Aldhelm makes a reference to it in his letter to Wihtfrith where he laments about the cultural preoccupa-tion with pagan mythology that he saw as a characteristic of medieval Irish scholarship.45 Furthermore, the Sanas Chormaic (Cormac’s Glossary), an

42 ‘De Raptu Proserpinae’ (‘Rape of Proserpine’), in Claudian: Volume II, trans. by Mau-rice Platnauer, Loeb Classical Library 136 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922; repr. 1956, 1963, 1972, 1998), pp. 338–41.43 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, p. 89. 44 Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 419 and J. B. Hall, ed., Claudian: De Raptu Proserpinae, Cam-bridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 67.45 Miles, Heroic Saga, p. 17.

103

angana moitra

early Irish glossary containing etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words, contains entries not only on ‘Cera,’ connected to the root KAR and, by extension, to the Latin Ceres, but also ‘Plutad,’ explained as a refer-ence to ‘Pluto, Smith of Hell.’46 Although neither of these facts can be taken as incontrovertible evidence of the knowledge either of Claudian or of the De Raptu in medieval Ireland, it seems reasonable to conjecture that some version of the Pluto-Proserpina story—whether Claudian’s treatment of it or other accounts of Pluto, Proserpina, and the Underworld found in the works of such Latin poets as Virgil, Ovid, and Boethius—would have been known to the Irish, given the circulation of the story elsewhere on the con-tinent, the pervasive intertextuality of the commentary and glossatorial traditions of the monastic schoolroom, as well as the robust influence of classical antiquity upon medieval Irish literature in general and the sagas in particular.

The concept of cultural translation can thus help to explain how a spe-cific religious figure originating within a particular cultural context and given literary embodiment in a distinct linguistic milieu could have trav-elled across time, space, and radical shifts in religious orientation and so-cial organisation to emerge within a wholly different mythic system and literary-textual culture. Midir in the Tochmarc Étaíne can be interpreted as a translation of the Graeco-Roman Dis/Pluto, a cross-cultural transla-tion (read through the lens of Jan Assmann’s postulation) triggered by the interaction of two distinct social and religious systems within contexts of economic trade, political conquest, and an evolving literary-textual cul-ture. As a translated figure, Midir is not an exact simulacrum of his pagan forbear but a hybrid figure who resembles certain features of his classical counterpart while simultaneously anticipating a unique literary creation of the Middle Ages. Viewed in this way, Midir becomes a ‘tilting’ or ‘re-versible’ image, a figure capable of suggesting multiple perspectives not so much because of changes in formal constitution, but because of differenc-es in audience and socio-cultural context.47 This inter-cultural migration

46 Sanas Chormaic (Cormac’s Glossary), trans. by John O’Donovan, ed. by Whitley Stokes (Calcutta: O. T. Cutter, 1868), p. 47 (‘Cera’) and p. 139 (‘Plutad’). 47 The term ‘tilting’ or ‘reversible’ image is that of Moshe Barasch. In a discussion of religious syncretism as evidenced in iconographic representation, Barasch points out how a particular image or sculpture, its shape unchanged or only slightly modified, could be viewed in different ways by different cultures. A figure, viewed in a certain way by one religious culture, will be seen through an entirely different set of customs, practices, and traditions by the adherents of a different religion, even when there is no outward difference in form. This kind of semiotic transfer requires only a shift in reading and entails a ‘tilting’

104


is, however, not only a journey of diachronic transport, but also one whose destination has an ever-shifting horizon. Insular Celtic mythography was just a temporary destination for the Graeco-Roman Dis/Pluto. As cultur-al systems continue to evolve and interact with each other in new ways shaped by historical contingencies and contextually-specific currents of development, literary figures too are transported from one destination to another. Literary destinations are not unchanged fixities but dynamic signifiers with an actively-negotiated referent. To this end, the pagan Dis/Pluto which mingled with his Celtic equivalent to appear as a cognate de-ity in the textual culture of the British Isles was to be eventually ferried to a novel ontological and literary destination—that of the medieval fairy.

or ‘reversal’ of meaning while the form remains unchanged. See Barasch, ‘Visual Syncre-tism: A Case Study’, in The Translatability of Cultures, ed. by Budick and Iser, pp. 37–54.

105

angana moitra

bibliography

Primary

‘De Raptu Proserpinae’ (‘Rape of Proserpine’), in Claudian: Volume II, tr. by Maurice Platnauer, Loeb Classical Library 136 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922; repr. 1956, 1963, 1972, 1998), pp. 292–377.

‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, ed. by Osborn Bergin and R. I. Best, Ériu, 12 (1938), pp. 137–196.

Secondary

Assmann, Jan, ‘Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translatability’, in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 25–36.

Baker, Mona, and Gabriela Saldanha, eds, Routledge Encyclopedia on Translation Studies, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2009).

Barasch, Moshe, ‘Visual Syncretism: A Case Study’, in Budick and Iser, Translatability of Cultures, pp. 37–54.

Bassnett, Susan, Translation Studies, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).Bhreathnach, Edel, Ireland in the medieval world, AD400–1000: Landscape, kingship and

religion (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014).Bitel, Lisa. ‘Secrets of the Síd: The Supernatural in Medieval Irish Texts’, in Fairies, Demons,

and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom, ed. by Michael Ostling (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 79–101.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, tr. by John Raffan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1985).

Burnham, Barry C, ‘Celts and Romans: Towards a Romano-Celtic society’, in The Celtic World, ed. by Miranda J. Green (Oxford: Routledge, 1995), pp. 121–141.

Cameron, Alan, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

Carter, Jesse Benedict, The Religious Life of Ancient Rome: A Study in the Development of Religious Consciousness from the Foundation of the City until the Death of Gregory the Great (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2001).

Charles-Edwards, T. M., ‘Tochmarc Étaíne: a literal interpretation’, in Ogma: Essays in Celtic Studies in honour of Próinséas Ní Chatháin, ed. by Michael Richter and Jean-Michel Picard (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 165–181.

Cooke, John Daniel, ‘Euhemerism: A Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical Paganism’, Speculum, 2 (1927), 396–410.

Copeland, Rita, ed., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume I (800–1558) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Dowden, Ken, ‘Olympian Gods, Olympian Pantheon’, in A Companion to Greek Religion, ed. by Daniel Ogden (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 41–55.

Felton, D., ‘The Dead’, in Ogden, Companion to Greek Religion, pp. 86–99.Garland, Robert, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,

1985).Green, Miranda J., ‘Introduction: Who were the Celts?’ in Green, The Celtic World, pp. 3–7.Hall, J. B., ed., Claudian: De Raptu Proserpinae, Cambridge Classical Texts and

Commentaries 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

106


Houck, Anita and Mary Doak, eds., Translating Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013).

Howland, Douglas, ‘The Predicament of Ideas in Culture: Translation and Historiography’, History and Theory, 42 (2003), 45–60.

Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Coda to the Discussion’, in Budick and Iser, Translatability of Cultures, pp. 294–302.

Jakobson, Roman, ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,’ in On Translation, ed. by R. A. Brower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 232–239.

Johnston, Elva, Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland, Studies in Celtic History XXXIII (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013).

Miles, Brent, Heroic Saga and Classical Epic in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011).

Miller, J. Hillis, ‘Border Crossings, Translating Theory: Ruth’, in Budick and Iser, Translatability of Cultures, pp. 207–223.

Moran, Pádraic, ‘Greek Dialectology and the Irish Origin Story’, in Early Medieval Ireland and Europe: Chronology, Contacts, Scholarship, ed. by Pádraic Moran and Immo Warntjes (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 481–512.

Munday, Jeremy, Introducing Translation Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).O’Connor, Ralph, ‘Irish Narrative Literature and the Classical Tradition, 900–1300’, in

Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative, ed. by Ralph O’Connor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 1–22.

Rankin, David. ‘The Celts through Classical Eyes’, in Green, Celtic World, pp. 21–33.———. Celts and the Classical World (London: Routledge, 1996). Sanas Chormaic (Cormac’s Glossary), tr. by John O’Donovan, ed. by Whitley Stokes

(Calcutta: O. T. Cutter, 1868). Sims-Williams, Patrick, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2011). Smith, Mark S., God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World

(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).Stierle, Karlheinz, ‘Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal

Translation’, in Budick and Iser, Translatability of Cultures, pp. 55–67.Thompson, Tok, ‘Hosting the Dead: Thanatopic Aspects of the Irish Sidhe’, in Communicating

with the Spirits, ed. by Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2005), pp. 193–203.

Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).

Webster, Jane, ‘A Dirty Window on the Iron Age? Recent Developments in the Archaeology of Pre-Roman Celtic Religion’, in Understanding Celtic Religion: Revisiting the Pagan Past, ed. by Katja Ritari and Alexandra Bergholm (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), pp. 121–154.

Williams, Mark, Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Wooding, Jonathan M., ‘Trade as a factor in the transmission of texts between Ireland and the continent in the sixth and seventh centuries’, in Ireland and Europe in the early Middle Ages: texts and transmission, ed. by Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 14–25.

Special Feature

Who Makes World Literature?: UNESCO’s Collection of Representative Works

Hyei Jin Kim

When the United Nations (UN) declared 1986 as the Interna-tional Year of Peace to mark the fortieth anniversary of its es-tablishment, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization (UNESCO), one of the UN’s specialised agencies, featured its various programmes in its periodical, the UNESCO Courier, throughout the year. Significantly, the first January issue was dedicated to its literary translation project called the Collection of Representative Works (hereafter referred to as the Collection), which was established in 1948 to translate literatures that were largely from its member states dom-inantly into English and French. The cover of the issue showcased a variety of writing instruments, including a computer keyboard, a quill dipped in inkwell, Chinese calligraphy brushes, a typewriter, and pens, each repre-senting the East and West, the traditional and modern. Surrounded by, and perhaps uniting, these different items was a hardbound book that bore the title of the issue, UNESCO Collection of Representative Works: Treas-ures of World Literature.1 As symbolised by this centrepiece, the Collection brought together diverse literary cultures across time and space in print form to create what the Courier editorial called ‘a library of world litera-ture’.2

The cover prompts us to consider UNESCO as a maker of ‘world literature’, that much-debated term in recent literary studies. As Stefan

1 ‘UNESCO Collection of Representative Works: Treasures of World Literature.’ UNESCO Courier, January 1986, p. 1.2 ‘Editorial.’ UNESCO Courier, January 1986, p. 3.

108

who makes world literature?

Helgesson and Pieter Vermuelen contend, the ‘recent and ongoing institu-tional entrenchment’ of the field means that the term refers to more than just a body of literatures or a theoretical concept.3 It now points to ‘a set of disciplinary protocols and institutional contexts’ wherein the ‘meaning and substance [of the term] differ…depending on who is using it, in which contexts, and for what purposes’.4 This broader understanding of the term not only enables us to rethink “David Damrosch’s seminal question ‘What is world literature?,’” which widely revived the term in Anglo-American literary studies, but shifts our focus to the various actors in and of these institutions.5 Two recent publications, Miriam Intrator’s Books Across Bor-ders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 (2019) and Sarah Brouillette’s UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (2019), extend this emphasis on institutional contexts to UNESCO and investigate how this multi-state body endeavoured to shape cultural, po-litical, economic, and intellectual discourses and how it has, in turn, been shaped by them. Arguing for its relevance in literary and cultural fields, the two critics examine UNESCO’s numerous policies in the realms of books and literature at different moments of its long history. Although their methodologies and scope differ greatly, both Intrator and Brouillette posit the Collection as a significant book programme that intervened in the international literary market and sought to introduce its own values of translation, literature, and reading. Intrator’s and Brouillette’s critiques of the Collection, which examine its beginning in the 1940s and 50s, thus raise a new question ‘Who makes world literature?’ via UNESCO’s own in-terpretations and uses of the term.

Drawing on archival research, Intrator provides much insight into the complex inner workings of UNESCO’s translation programme. Books Across Borders was published as part of a Palgrave Macmillan series called New Directions in Book History and, as implied by the series title, inves-tigates the social, material, and intellectual dimensions that shaped the realm of books, particularly UNESCO’s Library Section and the libraries, during the reconstruction years in Europe. While Intrator does not engage with world literature studies, she insightfully illustrates the Collection’s early history when UNESCO became increasingly invested in translating

3 Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeulen, ‘Introduction’, in Institutions of World Liter-ature: Writing, Translation, Markets, ed. by Helgesson and Vermeulen (New York: Rout-ledge, 2016), pp. 1-20 (p. 1).4 Helgesson and Vermeulen, p. 2, (emphasis mine).5 Ibid.

109

hyei jin kim

and disseminating (literary) books worldwide as a means to build world peace. She traces these ideas to the Conference of Allied Ministers (CAME) in the late 1940s, which aimed to ‘improve the quality of translations’ and ‘expand the circulation of translated works’.6 UNESCO accordingly cre-ated a Committee on Translation to address the issues, which it saw ‘as a tool to overcome the barriers’ of ‘[i]ntellectual, cultural, and linguistic isolation’ caused by the war and to promote ‘intercultural understanding and, by extension, international relations’.7 Literatures, particularly the na-tional classics ‘representative of other cultures and ways’, were ideal for the purpose as these books would enable the readers to understand and sympathise with each other despite political differences.8 While the term ‘classics’ at this point was not exclusively literary, this early policy-making implicitly defined the ‘library of world literature’ as a body of translated and acclaimed literary writings aimed at restoring harmonious interna-tional relations based on mutual understanding.9

Turning this apparently simple ideal into a programme was a daunt-ing task and Intrator foregrounds precisely this intricate process as she examines ‘the minutiae’ of numerous debates involving the Secretariat, National Commissions, and various external advisors who endeavoured to establish a viable translation project.10 These debates ranged from defin-ing the term ‘classics’, selecting titles and genres for translation, addressing the linguistic hierarchy, and representing ‘smaller, less-known cultures’.11 Although Intrator does not discuss the dominant Euro-American powers within UNESCO in depth, she indicates the ‘cultural imperialism’ behind the initial selection of Dante and Homer as exemplary classics.12 Aside from these literary and cultural questions, UNESCO encountered various material challenges, including the existing ‘commercial and demand-driv-en market’.13 The translation project was intended to counter such market

6 Miriam Intrator, Books Across Borders: UNESCO and the Politics of Postwar Cultural Reconstruction, 1945-1951 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 109.7 Intrator, p. 107. 8 Intrator, p. 111.9 ‘Editorial.’ UNESCO Courier, January 1986, p. 3.10 Intrator, p. 113.11 Intrator, p. 119.12 Ibid. 13 Intrator, p. 113.

110


forces and instead introduce ‘content and quality-driven production’ that would address the issues pointed out by CAME.14 However, it could not ignore the essential ‘need to produce books that would sell’ since the or-ganisation was short on funding and largely relied on the commercial pub-lishers who, despite their genuine interests, had to make reasonable sales.15 The resulting Collection managed to address some of these concerns but fell short in other areas. It translated a considerably large body of liter-atures that represented non-Anglo-American cultures and disseminated these texts mainly in the United States, Britain, and France. The market, however, proved to be a formidable force as UNESCO could not change the existing model and failed to significantly ‘transform the way in which different cultures are shared with others through translated works’.16 As Intrator illustrates, UNESCO endeavoured to ‘translate’ its lofty aim into a concrete programme but its making was fraught with political and cultur-al tensions as well as practical difficulties, yielding mixed results.

In contrast to Intrator, Brouillette concentrates on the broader imperi-alist underpinnings of this policy that forwarded the Western agenda. As part of Standford’s Post-45 series, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary ex-amines the evolution of the literary and book programmes within UNESCO from its postwar beginnings to the present day. This study can be traced to her call elsewhere for a ‘contemporary sociology of world literary produc-tion’ that will highlight ‘how labour, property and ownership work within the literary system’, rather than simply discuss it in moralistic terms.17 She has begun to develop a version of this sociology not only in relation to the cultural industry but also in connection with UNESCO, arguing for its relevance within world literary studies that have so far ignored ‘the realm of national and international policy proscriptions and their embedding in particular institutions and programs’.18 She expands these arguments in this book and utilise three main examples that each encapsulates different historical moments – the Collection during the immediate postwar years,

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Intrator, p. 124.17 Sarah Brouillette, ‘World Literature and Market Dynamics’, in Institutions of World Literature, ed. by Helgesson and Vermeulen, pp. 93-106 (p. 101, 99).18 Sarah Brouillette, ‘UNESCO and the World-Literary System in Crisis’, Amodern, De-cember 2015, https://amodern.net/article/unesco-brouillette/, n.p.

111

hyei jin kim

various book initiatives to satisfy the book hunger in the so-called Third World in the 1970s, and the current The City of Literature programme.19

The Collection here is analysed less as an intervention into the mar-ket or improvement of the state of literary translation at the time than as a Western elitist project. Brouillette situates the initial translation policy within Julian Huxley’s broader progressivist philosophy that envisioned importing obscure national classics from the underdeveloped countries. By reading this literatures, the West would come in contact with ‘pre-capi-talist holism’ while fashioning themselves as a genteel, “imperial ‘partner’” to these countries that they sought to improve.20 As mentioned in Intra-tor’s discussion, the Collection eventually settled for translating non-An-glo-American literatures, which was no less problematic as it “partook of the work of ‘cultural expansion’” that ensured ‘the former imperial pow-ers’…dominant position in anchoring and orchestrating global develop-ment’.21 It was essentially an elitist project that reinforced the consecrating power of English and French as well as the prestige of American, British, and French publishers. Using Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country as a case study, Brouillette illustrates how the multiple actors involved in publish-ing this English translation as well as the translated text itself in varying degrees contributed to ‘the overarching ideological project of enshrining liberal humanist internationalism as the official culture of the US-based development era’.22 While her tendency to reduce the dynamic between UNESCO and literature to neoliberalism and global capitalist relations should be read cautiously, Brouillette’s critique illuminates what Mark Mazower calls ‘imperial internationalism’ at work within UNESCO in its beginning and how such translation projects, or its makings of world liter-ature, reflected and enacted such forces.23

To better understand UNESCO as a maker of world literature, we should combine Intrator’s and Brouillette’s distinct, yet arguably complementa-ry, perspectives. As a book history scholar, Intrator delves into archival records to present the messy reality behind the translation initiative, pri-

19 As part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities network, the City of Literature programme selects a city that demonstrates a strong literary tradition and industry, such as publishing, literary festivals, libraries, bookstores, etc. So far, 39 cities have been selected. 20 Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), p. 34.21 Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, p. 33.22 Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, p. 42.23 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 23.

112


oritising the concrete details of this policy-making. This approach sheds light on the actual process and challenges, including clashing opinions, lack of funding, and the formidable market, but at times risks neglect-ing political and cultural ramifications of UNESCO’s aims that were deeply rooted in Eurocentric understanding of ‘literature’. Brouillette, in contrast, locates the policy making within UNESCO’s preoccupation with cultural development and its fraught relationship with global capitalism. Her cri-tique of the Collection foregrounds the organisation as an instrument of Western forces and a coherent centre of their policy making, which accu-rately identifies an imperial agenda embedded within this seemingly neu-tral project but glosses over UNESCO’s internal tensions and developments that did not always forward or agree with this agenda. A more balanced assessment of the Collection should thus consider not only the dominant intellectual, political, and economic forces that shaped UNESCO’s over-arching ideals but also the inner workings of the organisation that com-plicated these very ideals. UNESCO’s making of world literature altogeth-er underscores its unique nature as a multi-state body that struggles to maintain a sense of autonomy from the global politics and the market but, unfortunately, often fails to do so.

ReviewsA.I Doyle and Ralph Hanna, Hope Allen’s “Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle”: A Corrected List of Copies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019); ISBN: 978-2-503-58481-2, XXI + 102 pages; £54.

Hope Emily Allen’s Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, published in 1927, was a seminal work of medieval palaeography and remains an invalua-ble resource for scholars of Richard Rolle and late medieval manuscripts.1 Allen sought to track down all manuscripts containing the writings of Richard Rolle (the medieval English author whose works survive in the greatest number of copies), and materials pertaining to his biography, as well as references to and citations of his work. From this, she established an authoritative canon of his works on codicological grounds, gave an ac-count of his biography, and offered the first full-length analysis of his writ-ing and spirituality.

Since Allen published her volume, more manuscripts have come to light, new and updated manuscript catalogues have been written, and some manuscripts (especially in private collections) have changed hands. Almost a century after Allen, Ian Doyle and Ralph Hanna’s Corrected List of Copies offers an updated list of manuscripts, increasing Allen’s total by roughly fifty percent, drawing on the extensive experience of both authors with medieval manuscripts. It also provides updated medieval references to Rolle, attested copies, compilations containing Rollean extracts, and in-dexes. It is an indispensable update to Allen’s important reference work.

To allow easy reference, the Corrected List of Copies follows Allen’s (somewhat idiosyncratic) ordering of Rolle’s work. Under each text, it gives any modern editions (only one Rolle edition had been published be-fore Allen), replicates Allen’s list of manuscripts with corrections, and then lists additional manuscripts. For each entry, this is followed by an updated list of attested copies and references in wills (gathering together material scattered in Allen’s arrangement, and adding further entries). In a few cas-es, a brief paragraph of additional notes follows (e.g., on other texts with the same incipit or on canonicity).

After covering the corpus which Allen ascribed to Rolle, Doyle and Hanna move on to compilations containing extracts from Rolle’s work.

1 Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materi-als for His Biography (New York: D.C. Heath, 1927).

114

reviews

Here their approach usefully departs from Allen, reorganising Allen’s confusing discussion into a list of eleven compilations under the titles by which they are now generally known. Under each entry, they give an up-dated list of manuscripts (or references to a recent list) and further dis-cussion, often highlighting how far scholarship on several of these com-pilations has advanced since Allen’s day. Three lists follow. First is a list of ‘general references’ to Rolle, which gathers together witnesses that seem to offer some appraisal of Rolle (beyond mere pseudo-attribution). Second is a list of apparent depictions of Rolle in manuscripts, and third is a list of attested copies of unspecified works by Rolle (and thus not appearing earlier in the volume). After these lists comes a selection of Allen’s dubia and spuria, with brief discussion of the grounds for rejecting Rolle’s au-thorship and a non-exhaustive list of manuscripts (or references to where a list can be found), as well as supplementary comments to Allen’s discus-sion of misattributions in early bibliographies. Finally, the volume ends with a series of indexes: of incipits of Rolle’s works, attested copies, owners, scribes, dated manuscripts, early printed books, and, most importantly, of all known manuscripts containing Rolle’s works (with the exception of some manuscripts containing compilations which cite Rolle, since these are not always listed by Doyle and Hanna in full). This index allows read-ers to quickly check out which specific texts by Rolle are in any manuscript containing at least one of his works.

Doyle and Hanna’s Corrected List of Copies thus affords access to a wealth of information about the dissemination, reception, and manu-script contexts of Rolle’s work. Building on recent editions, catalogues, and their own identifications, they add a substantial number of copies of Rolle’s most well-known works to Allen’s total: for example, eight copies and three fragments of the Incendium amoris, eight copies of Super Can-ticum Canticorum, thirty-one copies of Emendatio vitae, and three copies and seven excerpts of The Form of Living. Amidst the current resurgence of scholarly interest in Rolle, this new information offers a valuable resource for scholars, and is likely to provide fresh and important evidence of his circulation and reception. The Corrected List of Copies balances detail with concision, making it an easy-to-use reference work full of important clar-ifications to Allen’s study and updated scholarship.

Readers must be aware that this volume accepts Allen’s general arrange-ment of Rolle’s texts for pragmatic reasons rather than in affirmation of her reasoning, and thus that in some cases the canonicity of works she includ-ed or rejected from the canon is debateable. Doyle and Hanna helpfully signal this, explaining in notes where recent scholarship has cast doubt on the attribution of certain works accepted (often tentatively) by Allen, such

115

reviews

as the English meditations and the Viridarium. There is also room for de-bate for some of the Latin dubia, especially Super symbolum S. Athanasii, which Allen suggested that Rolle may have copied and abridged (despite herself categorising it under dubia). Readers should also consult Andrew Kraebel’s forthcoming discussion of Super symbolum S. Athanasii, where he argues for its authenticity, identifies two versions, and lists further man-uscripts not included here (where it appears only briefly under dubia).2 In addition, it is not altogether clear (at least, to this reader) why only a selec-tion of works from Allen’s more extensive dubia and spuria are included, and also why (against the overall plan of the volume) three of them have been imported into Allen’s list of miscellaneous English works. Hanna has argued for the authenticity of two of these English texts elsewhere (in his Uncollected Prose and Verse), but an associated prayer (which is in Latin) is also included in this list, which readers may perceive as an implicit claim to its authenticity.3

Having said that, given the enormously complex transmission of Rolle’s works, organising this huge body of evidence systematically is a near im-possible task, and Doyle and Hanna’s reorganisation of Allen’s at times disordered catalogue represents one of its most useful contributions. Al-together, scholars are fortunate to now have access to Doyle and Hanna’s knowledge of Rolle’s transmission in manuscripts, accumulated over the course of their careers. This book will certainly be an indispensable refer-ence work for future scholars working on Rolle or the transmission of late medieval religious literature.

Timothy Glover

2 Andrew Kraebel, ‘Latin Manuscripts of Richard Rolle at the University of Illinois’, Jour-nal of English and Germanic Philology, 119 (forthcoming 2020).3 Richard Rolle, Uncollected Prose and Verse with Related Northern Texts, ed. by Ralph Hanna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. xi-xiii, lvii-lix, lxiv-lxvi.

116

reviews

Flair Donglai Shi and Gareth Guangming Tan (eds.) World Literature in Motion: Institutions, Recognition, Location (ibidem-Verlag Press, 2020); ISBN: 978-3-8382-116-3, 530 pages; £31.

While seemingly the same, ‘World Literature’ and ‘world literature’ can-not be more different. In their scathing criticism of the elite consumer-ism rampant in books, writers, publishing ventures, and other institutions claimed under the term ‘world literature’, the editors of n+1 have insisted on separating capitalised ‘World Literature’ from its lowercase counterpart ‘world literature’. The former is used as a ‘publishing category and object of academic study’ while the latter refers to ‘everything ever written in all languages’.1 In Against World Literature, Emily Apter likewise differentiates ‘World Literature’ as a ‘disciplinary construct’ that has ‘secured its foothold in both the university institution and mainstream publishing’ from ‘world literature’ as a ‘descriptive catch-all phrase for the sum of all forms of liter-ary expression in all the world’s languages’.2

World Literature in Motion: Institutions, Recognition, Location, edited by Flair Donglai Shi and Gareth Guangming Tan, begins with the same premise that World Literature as an institutionalised object of study should be distinguished from world literature as a body of literary writings from diverse cultures and languages. The editors complicate the simple di-vision, however, as they ‘triangulate…this separation’ with ‘critical world literature studies’, a term taken from Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermeu-len’s edited volume Institutions of World Literature.3 For Shi and Tan, ‘crit-ical world literature studies’ can and should take as ‘its object of study the very subject of World Literature itself ’ to avoid the pitfalls in the current debates.4 This ‘meta-academic suspicion’ runs through their review of world literature studies and defines their manifesto as encapsulated in the four motions.5 The term ‘motion’, Shi and Tan contends, signifies both the ‘(inter-) textual movements’ defined by and proposals on the points below:

1 The editors, “World Lite: What is Global Literature?” n+1, Fall 2013, https://npluso-nemag.com/issue-17/the-intellectual-situation/world-lite/#fn1-1348, n.p.2 Emily Apter, Against World Literature (Verso: London, 2013), p. 2.3 Flair Donglai Shi and Gareth Guangming Tan, ‘Introduction: A Manifesto for Critical World Literature Studies’, in World Literature in Motion: Institutions, Recognition, Location, ed. by Shi and Tan (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2020), pp. 12-41 (p. 14).4 Ibid.5 Shi and Tan, p.15.

117

reviews

1. Postcolonial Studies is constructive of, rather than in conflict with, critical world literature studies and the combination of the former’s attentiveness to colonial legacies and neo-colonial power structures and the latter’s ground-level analysis of the institutional structures of a given literary activity can yield illuminating discoveries on the bigger picture of the political, economic, and cultural developments in the world today.

2. The literary prize, as the most important form of institutional recog-nition and consecration for authors and publishers, provides a particu-larly productive research site for case studies on the creation of world literature.

3. The discourse of world literature and its institutionalisation in the literary marketplace and academia can deliver pragmatic benefits by increasing the visibility and accentuating the importance of minor lit-eratures in the field.

4. Translations beyond the Anglophone, that is, between different languages that are not English (or at least between different contexts where English is not the primary linguistic medium), have been one of the blind spots in the current discussions in World Literature; however, combined with comparative criticism, they can be the most indicative object of research for world literature and complicate our understand-ing of how literary centres and margins work in practice.6

The four motions aptly address the aspects that are often neglect-ed and/or discussed in abstract or generalised terms in world literature studies. Significantly, these highlight the ‘materially-grounded specificity of socio-historical contexts’ and call on scholars to reflect on ‘the discipli-nary motivations, theoretical validities, and discursive effects of the vari-ous academic discussions on world literature’.7 The essays in this volume, divided into four sections that each engage with these motions, utilize a wide range of primary and secondary materials, including paratexts, social media, and archives, to concretely and successfully illustrate this interplay

6 Shi and Tan, p.28.7 Shi and Tan, p.15.

118

reviews

between institutional, material, and ideological forces at work in world literary culture.

The ‘Postcolonial Studies’ section seeks to reconcile the fields of postcolonial and world literature by mainly investigating the complex re-lations between British publishers, African writers, and censorship. The essays also raise implicit questions about the role of literary books as eco-nomic or ideological instruments as well as the archive itself as an institu-tion of knowledge. Rivkah Brown first teases out the implicit dichotomy between fiction and non-fiction, or literary and functional books, em-bedded in Zimbabwe International Book Fair and its sponsor, UNESCO’s book development programme. She further traces these complex relations to the colonial times when the book was first and foremost promoted as a medium to ‘enlighten’ the colonised. In the following chapter, Katelyn Edwards minutely examines the paratexts of Athol Fugard’s books pub-lished by Oxford University Press in Africa, interrogating the notion of the regional writer which, uneasily placed between the universal and po-litical, enabled the book to evade South African censorship and helped to promote the book both within Africa and the UK. Censorship is the cen-tral contention in the following chapter, where Meleesha Bardolia, using archival materials, discusses how Penguin initially thought to challenge the apartheid ideology by publishing an anthology that featured diverse African languages but was forced to alter various aspects of the book to ensure the censors’ approval. In the last chapter of the section, Gareth Tan also delves into National Archives to illustrate a broader ideological strug-gle during the Cold War when the UK’s Information Research Department sought to use the (literary) book as a propaganda but ultimately failed to effectively collaborate with British publishers.

The essays in the second section, titled ‘Recognition Through Priz-es’, engage with James English’s Economy of Cultural Prestige, testing his arguments in terms of other cultural prizes situated in the UK, Africa, and Asia. While (international) literary prizes are one of the most established and criticised institutions in what Pascale Casanova calls ‘World Republic of Letters’, not many studies investigate these in detail.8 Here, the essays address this gap as they present concrete case studies, drawing from archi-val sources, paratexts, newspapers, and other social media, to thoroughly examine different, and often problematic, process of literary recognition. Carmen Thong’s discussion on V.S. Naipaul’s award of the Booker Prize in 1971 posits Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition as the crux of the debate

8 Graham Huggans (2002) and Sarah Brouillette (2007) are the exceptions.

119

reviews

among the judges and the consequent labeling of the book as a novel by the prize and the publishers. The following chapter by Lubabah Chow-dhury shifts the attention to how the same prize in 1993 portrayed the winning author, namely Arundhati Roy, as a young woman writer whose image was repeatedly emphasised and reified to affirm the authenticity of the Indian narrative. Sana Goyal’s essay examines the descriptor ‘African’ in The Caine Prize for African Writing, which masks a geographical limit as well as postcolonial legacies and often poses challenges for the (emerg-ing and non-diaspora) African writers. In the final essay, Shi turns to the now defunct Man Booker Asian Prize and contends that while the prize was ambitiously imagined as the literary authority in the region, its lack of accumulated cultural capital and prestige soon rendered it redundant.

If the chapters above predominantly feature well-known postco-lonial authors and regions, particularly Africa, the volume shifts its focus in the third section, titled ‘Minor Locations’, to highlight literary cultures, institutions, and writers that are often neglected in world literature de-bates. While the essays formulate ‘minor literature’ broadly in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, they also counter the common criticism against world literature studies that, as n+1 editors put it, ‘[i]n the English language, World Literature has its signature writers’ and ‘international publishing networks’ by engaging with minor locations, institutions, writers, and mediums.9 Beginning with Mauritius, Rashi Rohatgi introduces two mi-nor prizes within the nation, which despite its efforts to internationalise Mauritian literature, have proved unsuccessful, the failure of institution-alization having eclipsed these writings. Daniele Nunziata’s discussion in contrast examines how writers from Cyprus, another minor location in world literary studies, come to terms with co-existing Turkish and Greek tradition and hegemonies, proposing to consider them as layers instead of simple binaries. The last chapter by Lucy Steeds moves from printed texts to the medium of radio, particularly BBC’s Caribbean Voices, where Caribbean poems were not read as written words but heard and perceived as part of the oral tradition.

The last section, ‘Translations Beyond the Anglophone’, turns to writings that circulate in and out from East Asian languages, mainly Chi-nese, Japanese, and Korean. These literatures are mostly absent from world literature studies as they oftentimes constitute a field of their own. The essays here bring the two field in fruitful conversation to illustrate liter-ary and cultural networks that connect East Asia with arguably non-An-

9 The editors, “World Lite: What is Global Literature?”, n.p.

120

reviews

glophone regions. Yan Jia, for instance, highlights the Chinese-Indian literary exchange that created its own literary world and served Yiwen/Shijie Wenxue’s specific nation-building agenda. Galina Rousseva-Sokolo-va’s essay examines Asian literatures translated and published in Eastern Europe, particularly in Bulgaria, on the decline of Cold War. Wen-chin Ouyang, tracing the publication history of Arabian Nights and examining the paratexts, counters the assumed idea of ‘Orientalism by proxy’ and demonstrates how aesthetics, cultural institutions, and political forces si-multaneously impact the book’s translation. In the last chapter, Yeogeun Kim similarly records the publication history of a Korean classic Kuun-mong, which reveals the government agency’s desire to promote the book in Western languages, and traces the modifications of paratexts, particu-larly the illustrations, to illustrate various cultural appropriations.

The volume is arguably an insightful response to Pheng Cheah’s rather sweeping criticism of ‘all sociological accounts of world literature’ as pre-occupied with ‘market processes’.10 While Cheah accurately shows that the emphasis on the spatial circulation of books within the global market over-shadows other possible ways of constructing the world, Shi and Tan’s vol-ume demonstrates that critical world literature studies, while keenly aware of the global market, interrogate multiple forces behind this very circula-tion and, more broadly, production as well as reception. Foregrounding concrete and material contexts, the case studies in this volume illuminate a unique entanglement of legal, political, economic, and institutional factors that impact a given author or text, and which in turn shape world literary culture in a myriad of ways. World Literature in Motion overall is a refresh-ing intervention in recent debates, prompting us to consider the various, and often invisible, processes of making world literature.

Hyei Jin Kim

10 Pheng Cheah, What is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Dur-ham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 36.

121

reviews

Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (Columbia University Press, 2014); ISBN: 9780231522717, 192 pages; £22.

In this volume of essays, Rey Chow traces the intellectual provenance of what she terms “languaging”. Instead of fixing language to a specific histor-ical or biopolitical locus, in the voice of the subject or within the mechan-ics of writing, Chow chooses “languaging” to enable a broader theorising of coming-to-signify as an act. Yet this seeming de-subjectivisation does not result in poststructuralist philosophising on the relationship between language and postcoloniality, as might be expected. Instead, this series of essays reads as part nuanced survey of key thinkers about language in postcolonial studies at large, and part autoethnography on the postcoloni-ality of Chow’s Hong Kong, where the spoken language, Cantonese, exists in tension with attempts by first the British, then the Chinese, to standard-ise and instrumentalise language.

Stepping back from the oftentimes fraught exchanges regarding the “who” and “how” of speaking, Chow defines language use as “languaging”, “involving shifting series of transitions among different levels of deposits, remains, excavations, and adaptations” as “temporally cumulative”.1 Lan-guage is a historical artifact that bespeaks a grittiness of tactility, which opens it to the fullness of contemporary experience, which may be re-the-orised in its fulsomeness as postcolonial. When we depart from enuncia-tion and performativity as default frames for understanding language use, we open up the possibility of reading postcoloniality beyond the staid po-sitionalities of self-and-other.

The introduction to the book discusses racialisation as a matter of lan-guage. Referring to Frantz Fanon’s well-known articulation of colonial mimicry in Black Skin, White Masks, Chow raises the old postcolonial chestnut of how the black body, in particular, is simultaneously racialised and made to disappear when “hailed” into language. For a person of col-our, the “privilege” of being named in language is a zero sum game, a pres-encing that effects an absence. For the rest of the book, various chapters attempt to make this colonised body appear again, but not in its recurrent displacement onto an assumed history of trauma and grief. Such a discur-sive move permanently locates the subject in his interpellated mode as col-onised. In response, Chow describes such naming as “telephonic”, exterior

1 p.57

122

reviews

and inscribed upon the skin, as an “unequal historical relation”.2 Keeping with the mechanical and the tactile artifact as an imaginary, there is scope, Chow argues, to understand language as a prosthetic affixed onto the body of the colonised. This implies that the colonised subject, in fact, possesses a privileged view into the detachability and exchangability of language. In turn, this exposes the untenability of “proper” or “correct” speech.

Chow’s central thesis is boldly emancipatory and each essay in Not Like a Native Speaker evinces a determination to regard language as a viscer-al, personal experience, while attempting to step outside the prevailing ideologies of language as necessarily institutionalised and politicised. The third chapter, from which the book takes its title, playfully puns on the term xenophobic with the coinage “xenophone”.3 The logic of language as a stable entity employed by a distinct community is necessarily xenophobic, but additionally the monolingual is a language user who is invisible and unmarked by her usage of her native tongue. In a previous chapter, Chow has recourse to Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, deftly analysing how he performs a postcolonial ethics by fore-grounding his discomfort with French as a French Algerian, despite being monolingual. Similarly, in the postcolonial scene of languaging, a colonial uses a language that is never quite his. In place of a model of dispossession, Chow advocates that this emergent languaging domain be seen as a site of linguistic creativity, replete with the found accents and associations of once-colonial languages re-oriented away from their standard or “prop-er” forms—the “xenophone”. While she quotes Chinua Achebe’s famous sentiment that Africans will not use English like a native speaker, Chow’s contribution lies in her perceptive observation that the “xenophone” is also an epistemic break with history. Even English as a global language cannot be endowed with a primacy in its natural state and the celebration of such creative discontinuities makes both the colonialised subject and the monolingual speaker equally visible, dislocating the latter from her place as a subject whose sovereignty of speech depended on an unadulter-ated point of origin. What was previously conceived as an irreparable loss of nativist speech and culture, as compared to the unbroken continuity of history that grants authority to the colonialiser’s tongue, is now revealed as the happy noise of multiplicity and interference.

Chow remains modest in the scope of her claims. While commenting on thinkers as familiar but also as varied as Pierre Bourdieu and Ngugi

2 Ibid., p.93 Ibid., p.58

123

reviews

wa Thiong’o, she introduces their work in a way that is accessible for the non-expert reader, while keeping one eye on the field of postcolonial stud-ies, which has, in recent years, been buffeted by the rising importance of comparative or world literature(s) as a field. While she does not directly name any of critics working in this area, postcolonial literary studies has fought a vanguard historicist effort against accusations that the postcolo-nial is a free-floating signifier that speaks less to its original decolonial mo-ment than the later poststructuralist turn.4 Concurrently, there is an effort to define what is singularly enduring about an aesthetics which defines itself as postcolonial, from the Warwick Research Collective’s attempt to theorise an irrealist poetics according to combined and uneven world-sys-tem,5 to other works that theorise the postcolonial reading experience as centred on tropes such as resistance writing and concepts of exchange.6 Poised against these is growing attention to translation and multilingual-ism to frame cultural difference as an inflexion point in works which would previously be regarded as postcolonial.7

Not Like a Native Speaker engages with these developments with a generosity and a surefootedness that makes Chow’s critical stance seem perceptive rather than combative. Eschewing an attempt to circum-scribe postcolonial language use from a systemic or positivistic perspec-tive, Chow shares snippets from a childhood growing up in Hong Kong, a plurilingual environment that would not be conventionally evoked as postcolonial. While the spoken language is a Chinese dialect, Cantonese, it has been overshadowed by English as a prestige language, and by Man-darin Chinese, with which it shares the same written script but without further sound-character correspondence. Yet as the author evokes her ex-periences in an Anglicised school environment and recounts her mother’s story as one of the first radio play readers in Hong Kong, who had to spon-taneously translate Mandarin script into Cantonese, the organic and om-nipresent status of the dialect cleaves like a troublesome shade to the neo-liberal attitudes towards multilingualism, where languages are regarded as self-contained and interchangeable. Such autoethnography provides not

4 Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge University Press: Cam-bridge, UK), p.12.5 Deckard, Sharae. 2015. Combined and uneven development : towards a new theory of world-literature (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool), p.51.6 Boehmer, Elleke. 2018. Postcolonial poetics: 21st-century critical readings (Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, Switzerland), p. 40, p. 146.7 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2018. ‘Response: World Anglophone Is a Theory’, Interven-tions: The International Journal Of Postcolonial Studies, 20: pp. 361-65, p.362.

124

reviews

only historical specificity, but evokes how the speaker of language variants exercises a form of biopolitical resistance against proprietary efforts to standardise language. Postcoloniality, in Chow’s rendering, departs from national or societal perspectives that dominated the decolonial years, but nonetheless remains centred on a postcolonial ethics. The volume also in-cludes nuanced readings of work by Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan and cultural critic Ma Kwok-ming. Leung’s writing, in particular, speaks to both food and language as consumption—an act that is also a signatory practice where the mouth is a space for the expression of historical differ-ence.

Some may object to how Not Like a Native Speaker refuses to commit to an objective view of language use as a postcolonial effort. But the term that characterises the volume perhaps lies in its secondary title, “on languaging as a postcolonial experience”. All the functions of language, speaking, lis-tening, reading and writing, are by necessity individual but also bodily ex-periences. Whether it is navigating the byways of Hong Kong’s almost-for-gotten food hawker lanes, or the labour of writing Chinese characters by hand, before the writing system was keyboard-automated, Chow brings our attention back to the importance of experience as a locus of sediment-ed histories, where subject and object are not neatly differentiated and as yet, untheorized. Not Like a Native Speaker leads the way in imagining how literary critics can attend to language, not as a universalist instrument for communication, but as a mode in which different cultures meet unequally.

Ann Ang

125

Notes on ContributorsAnn Ang is a DPhil candidate in English at Oxford and researches the postcolonial and transnational Anglophone novel in South and South-east Asia. She is also interested in the evolution of English(es), narrative structures and the theorising of world literature(s). Ann is also the author of Bang My Car (Math Paper Press, 2012), a Singlish-English collection of short stories.

Lucy Cheseldine is an AHRC-funded doctoral candidate at the Universi-ty of Leeds. Her research focus is Donald Hall’s poetics of place. She stud-ied for her B.A. in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, with a Junior Year Aboard at the University of Alabama, and her M.Phil in Liter-ature of the Americas at Trinity College Dublin. She has also undertaken archival research at the University of New Hampshire and the Houghton Library, Harvard.

Mitchell Gauvin is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in the Department of English at York University, Toronto, set to complete his PhD in 2021. A recipient of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2018-19) and the Susan Mann/Provost Dissertation Scholarship (2020-21), his cross-disciplinary teaching and research combines literary studies and political philosophy in examining how literary forms function as technologies of citizenship, with focus on the semiotics of political belonging, transnationalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the long-eighteenth century text.

Timothy Glover is a DPhil student at Exeter College, University of Ox-ford. His research explores the writings of the late medieval hermit Rich-ard Rolle in the context of late medieval books of pastoral care.

Hyei Jin Kim is a DPhil candidate in English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Her research focuses on the relations between ‘world literature’ and inter-national organisations.

Angana Moitra received her B.A. in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata in 2012, and an M.A. in English from Jadavpur Universi-ty in 2014. She was awarded a fellowship on the Erasmus Mundus TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern Europe) PhD programme, a joint-doc-toral programme funded by the European Union, in 2015. Based jointly at the University of Kent and Freie Universität Berlin, her doctoral project

126

charted the evolution and transformation of the figure of the Fairy King between the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Her academic in-terests range from Chaucer, Malory, and the medieval romance to Renais-sance humanism, metaphysical poetry, Shakespeare, and Milton. She is particularly interested in examining the cultural, intellectual, and histori-cal continuities between medieval and early modern literature.

Emily Tock completed a BA in Russian language and literature, and lived and worked in Moscow for four years. She returned to the US to complete an MA in library science, and worked for many years as a librarian and Russian language teacher. She is currently an IRC funded PhD student at NUI Galway. Her research examines Edward Lear’s work in the context of evolutionary theory’s impact on questions of the self and empire’s place in nature. Emily has published articles on the topics of Irish copyright, Nabokov’s publishing history, and Russian-Western relations.

Rosemary Walters completed an M. A. by Research, On the Border: Charles Causley in 20th Century Poetics in the Centre for Modern Poetry, School of English, at the University of Kent. She has just successfully com-pleted a PhD thesis, Zig Zag: Cultures in Common and the Poetry of Charles Causley, interpreting Causley’s own poems and his anthologies alongside Raymond Williams’s cultural studies agenda of ‘culture as ordinary’. Rose-mary is a retired, mature student who was born and brought up in Caus-ley’s hometown of Launceston in Cornwall.

oxford research in english - WordPress.com

Documents

Transcript of oxford research in english - WordPress.com