Across Cultures Across Diferences

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

ARS AETERNA

Across cultures / across centuries – acknowledging the difference

Constantine the Philosopher University Faculty of Arts Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 1

ARS AETERNA Názov/Title ARS AETERNA Across cultures / across centuries – acknowledging the diference Vydavateľ/Publisher Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre Filozofická fakulta Štefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitra tel. + 421 37 77 54 209 fax. + 421 37 77 54 261 email [email protected]

Adresa redakcie/Office Address Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre Dekanát FF UKF Štefánikova 67, 949 74 Nitra Tel.: +421 37 7754 201 Fax: +421 37 6512 570 E-mail: [email protected] Šéfredaktor/Editor in Chief Mgr. Alena Smiešková, PhD.

Redakčná rada/Board of Reviewers Prof. Bernd Herzogenrath (Germany) Doc. PhDr. Michal Peprník, Ph.D. (Czech Republic) Doc. PhDr. Anton Pokrivčák, Phd. (Slovak Republic) Mgr. Petr Kopál, Ph.D. (Czech Republic) Redakčná úprava Mgr. Simona Hevešiová, PhD. Ing. Matúš Šiška

Názov a sídlo tlačiarne/Printing House ŠEVT, a.s. Bratislava Náklad/Copies 150

Počet strán/Pages 101 ISSN: 1337-9291 (c) 2009 Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre

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Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS

A word from the editor Alena Smiešková

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Interview with Halla Beloff Mária Kiššová

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The Old South in Popular Culture Jozef Pecina

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Mary Austin’s Crossing Boundaries Peter Kopecký

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“The Dangers of Foreign Smells”: Olfaction and Immigrant Mobilities in Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran Marzena Kubisz

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Rushdie’s Claim For Hybridity In His Non-Fiction Works Titus Pop

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Exiles on the road: The role of cinematic journeys in the creation of new structures of belonging and cultural knowledge Tanja Franotović

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Multiculturalism and a Search for Identity in Spanish Film Production after the Fall of Francoism Petra Pappová

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Pardoning Unpardonable - “Smiling Discrimination” in Canada Jana Javorčíková

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Relections on Education in a Multicultural Environment José Antonio Ávila Romero

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Cosmas – Across Cultures Petr Kopál

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Reviews

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ARS AETERNA

A word from the editor

Alena Smiešková In the contemporary world the words die easily. They are misunderstood, and then they are reinscribed by others with a greater force. Sometimes they are never uttered and then they die even before they are born. They are misused and then their power disappears next time when they are used. They will forever stand between us and the world and yet we would not know how to speak about and know the world without them. The task of academics is to employ the words to describe what they have observed about the world. We are launching a new academic journal. As such it is going to be filled with words whose ambition is to survive, to endure in the contemporary battle of words, in the world dominated by images that can silence the words easily. The name of the journal speaks in multiple ways. Its Latin opens up in an interpretation full of oxymorons. On the one hand, as a dead language, which no one in the world speaks anymore, on the other hand as the language that still surfaces in a number of disciplines and is traditionally associated with scholarship and science. The word ars delineates the scope of the journal. It is our aim to discuss the questions of art, the way it forms and deforms our experience, our perception of the world, our position in the world. Art here is understood in a broader and more traditional sense as a skill, stratagem, craft or science and therefore allows for the fusion 4

of discussions from various scholarly disciplines. The journal is open to contributions of scholars across various disciplines; we would like to establish a platform where the linguists could interact with historians, literary scholars with art historians, philosophers with mathematicians. There would not be art without creativity and that is also the quality we assume that each individual paper will strive for -- to become intellectually stimulating and illuminating. The word aeterna has been always linked to Art. The works of art not only transgress any time – subjective, seasonal, or mechanical. They have the ability to dislocate their viewers and percipients from a time flow and in that touch the eternity. Therefore discussions, analyses, and interpretations of works of art and other cultural products generate a discourse where the world is dealt with as an eternal idea, which comes to existence in myriad forms through the culture, people, and politics or education. The topic for our first issue is significant. Living and working in the world at the beginning of the third millennium we face the challenges of globalization, IT technologies, the impact of visual culture, new political and economic organization of Europe and the world. On the one hand, we can occupy the space that is easily interconnected, that has shrunk, we trespass the barriers traditionally insurmountable. Are we able

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 to face these challenges? What can we learn about ourselves and our home place living amongst all networks, diversity and diference? Do we see the world diferently as teachers, pedagogues, artists, historians and philosophers? Do we remain bound to our essential humanity or do we adopt multiple selves? Dehumanized, cyborg-like, alienated? How much of a change and rupture can we acknowledge? The word shibboleth, which entered English through Hebrew and the Bible, is used today to distinguish the members of a particular group from the outsiders. Bolivian artist Doris Salcedo used the term to name her installation in the Tate Modern in London in 2007/8. The exposition was staged in the Turbine Hall, monumental entrance of the gallery, which as it is widely known, used to be a power plant built after WWII. As many other expositions presented there within the free admission Unilever Series, this also was not a traditional exposition. The installation touched the very foundations of the building in a long oblique crack that revealed the texture underneath. The concept of the exhibition incorporated the past and the present of London, England and the world. The past, which on the one hand was evolving, developing and opened to progress, for all these qualities the building of the power plant stands for, but which was also colonial, marginalizing and unfair. It spoke about the past, which many times remains hidden and unrevealed, and comes to light only under dramatic circumstances. The past which made the present world so diverse and multiculturally intertwined.

It also reflected on the present when we do respect diversity not “in spite of the diference“ but we learn to respect the “diference.“ This is the thin red line, which we can find in the current issue of Ars Aeterna. All contributions, though written by specialists from various disciplines, explore the questions of contemporary cross culture identities. Whether they deal with the present cultural products or phenomena or they refer to the past, the authors investigate what cracks remain in the mind, in the self marked by the colonial power and thought. Their articles discuss the examples of art, sociology, history or pedagogy where the colonial thinking is defied by the moments of hybridity when the world without frontiers, personal inhibitions and boundaries may rise to exist. The border line between the North and the South of the USA is linked to the most painful chapter of American history. As Jozef Pecina from The University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava in Slovakia points out in his article: “When in 1761 two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, marked out the border between the colonies of Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, they could not suspect that their line will some time later divide the so-called free and slave states of the USA”. The South, the territory of the USA loaded with memories, unaccomplished dreams, and the lost cause battle comes to a new view in his article. He discusses the fascination with the Southern culture and history through the examples of American popular culture: the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1952), the film Birth 5

ARS AETERNA of a Nation (1915) and the novel and consequently film Gone with the Wind (1936, 1939). Pecina discloses to what extent these cultural artifacts shaped the understanding of American South and formed the romanticizing view of Southern mythology. His interpretations analyze stereotyped and even racist representations of the South and its population, he, however, also discusses the role popular culture played in the support of the abolitionist movement. As he quotes Cullen in his article Abraham Lincoln acknowledged the significance of the popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by Harriet Beecher Stowe with these words: “So this is the little lady who made this great war” (1995, p. 14) For Beecher Stowe the recognition of her work together with social and political consequences came almost immediately. But sometimes it takes longer, much longer to canonize works of art. The story of Mary Austin, whose portrait Peter Kopecky from Opava University in the Czech Republic delineates in his article, is a story of an exclusion from the cannon. Her works speak from the past, but her views are very topical. In spite of that, the journey her literary works took to achieve recognition lasted almost 60 years. Her literary voice advocates the unity between the subject and object, human and nonhuman. Using the impersonal narration she erased the borderline between the observer and the observed. She represents an isolated voice that in early 20th century was more suggestive than the language of political banners in the eighties or nineties. She saw the possibilities 6

for the imaginable evolution or revolution in the cultural syncretism of ethnic groups living in the area of Southwest. The cultural coexistence of Hispanics and Native Americans, the social organization of their pueblos was for her the world beyond the boundaries of law, restrictions and inhibitions, which the dominant white culture spread around. The colonial power and the law did not touch these territories completely and she saw in them the hope for the prospect development. Her fruitful and imaginative ideas were, however, left for a very long time aside. She did not fit the literary canon and expectations of her times. Not only that she was a woman, a writer, but also because her works transgressed the limitations of literary studies. As Petr Kopecky in his conclusion asserts: “Only today, thanks to the growth of interdisciplinary studies, can we fully appreciate the deep insights based on her erudition in a host of fields of knowledge.” Marzena Kubisz from Poland and Titus Pop from Romania discuss contemporary literature in their articles. The examples they present, writers Marsha Mehran and Salman Rushdie are wellknown and recognized representatives of what can be called today postcolonial writing in Great Britain. As we have suggested above, postwar Great Britain went through dramatic changes. The colonial empire has become a multicultural country whose present is a mosaic of ethnic varieties. The situation inevitably afects the lifestyle, politics, social habits and manners. The supposed tradition and fixity one associates Great Britain with crumbles and gives way to

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 fluidity, changeability and new sensory perceptions. Marzena Kubisz in her article writes about the cross-cultural encounters and mobilities as we can find them described in the debut of Teheran-born novelist Marsha Mehran Pomegranate Soup (2005), now living in Ireland. Kubisz discusses food as a metaphor, which can be equally revealing to the stories of movement and mixing as in other books these are the stories of growing, alienation, personal struggle and reconciliation. Her interpretation asserts that in the world where the borders are crossed literally in a search for the new beginning, the immigrant culture becomes an inevitable challenge to the normative codices the culture of reterritorialized country represents: “What we witness in Ballinacroagh [the setting of the novel] is the process of becoming: it is the New that is becoming in front of our eyes.” Titus Pop’s contribution brings to the eye of the reader less known side of a renown writer Salman Rushdie. Selecting Rushdie’s non-fiction works as the focus of his interest, Pop discloses the consistent and ultimate efort Rushdie makes, not only as literati but as a public figure, an intellectual and a spokesman for all unheard and silenced voices coming from formerly colonized countries or contemporary immigrant communities. Rushdie’s case is indicative of the situation in the contemporary world. He creates a work of art, which seems to be harmless in comparison with the arms and weapons the world is equipped today. What he employs are only the

words but those words, paraphrasing Václav Havel, become the power of the powerless. No wonder that he has been put to banishment after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). He shatters the established status quo and reveals the fanaticism, manipulation, and the systems of power that restrict and degenerate the free, individual spirit of the Self. He does so not on a national basis but as a literary fantasy, in an imaginary and imaginative world, which unfortunately for him, speaks so openly about the limitations of the real one that there are those who feel to be threatened by it. The case of The Satanic Verses is double indicative; it also reveals the shallowness with which we may approach a literary text. As Milan Kundera has it: everybody speaks about it but no one actually has read it [The Satanic Verses]. It is self-revelatory that our contemporary discourse employs the catchwords, catchphrases, without their appropriate examination. Thus Pop’s article gives the reader a view of Rushdie as an intellectual in progress, on a constant move, whose writing “obstructs any attempt to define a national or literary influence for it. “ But the fluidity of thought, constant reexamination and reconsideration of roots and stability also prevent any ossifications, and a possibility to lapse in status quo. Rushdie, according to Pop, has always questioned historical givens and beliefs and in order to do so employed “the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of rootlessness and hybridity.” As Tanja Franotovic from Croatia says in her article: “No other medium ... 7

ARS AETERNA can capture the issues of travel, mobility and change [...] as poignantly as film.” She and Petra Pappova from Slovakia focus on the examples from the film and examine the concepts of home, nation and identity, through the idea of belonging. While Tanja Frantovic focuses on diasporic filmmaking and discusses the film Exiles (2004), the point of departure for Petra Pappova’s arguments is the imaginative world of Spanish film, which started to flourish after the fall of Franco’s dictatorship. Frantovic advocates the medium of the film, which she believes has the representational tools to depict the fluid, relational Selves. She also deals with the concept of national and transnational identities and suggests that in this respect contemporary Europe should be more humble, less authoritarian. Instead of unifying stories of EU identity, Europe should learn more about the changes and challenges of the multicultural society from smaller, but specific “marginalized stories”. In this respect Europe should learn from being peripheral, which as Frantovic says “opens up a dialogue between the margins.” Frantovic employs the example of the film Exiles (2004) to present “the very opportunity for Europe’s new politics of identity, one which not only insists on diference and specificity but also on movement, articulation and syncretism.” The article by Petra Pappova gives a range of examples, which characterise the contemporary Spanish cinema in the period of “movida”. Appearing in the period without censorship all film examples, Pedro Almodóvar’s films in par8

ticular, question the social and national taboos of the past and reveal new, multiple identities. They cross the boundaries of gender and sexual stereotypes as well as national identity. Therefore the conflict often takes place between the strange and familiar. Such conflict is, in Pappova’s view, inevitable for any multicultural environment, which tries to preserve the individuality. The articles, which describe the process taking place outside of the arena of art, are the texts by Jana Javorcikova from Matej Bel University in Slovakia and José Antonio Ávila Romero from Spain. To discuss the perception of transition in sociological, cultural and educational environments is equally important, because as we have mentioned before all these are interrelated. The changes in art and science condition the changes in society, culture, and education and vice versa. The change takes place in a consciousness and in that respect it is never isolated but related. Jana Javorcikova speaks about the phenomenon of “smiling discrimination”, which is a residuum in the mind and thinking, a concealed form of racism. To remove the colonial power from a certain territory is one gradual step, but the trajectories leading to the removal of colonial thinking can be winding and can take much longer. This is what we have referred to discussing Salman Rushdie. For the western world he represents the courage, enlightenment and fundamental opposition against fanaticism and fundamentalism. But it is only a small fraction of the Western world that can really understand, what Rushdie opposes, contradicts and ridi-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 cules in his book. In fact, the majority of white, Western, enlightened world remains under certain circumstances racist and colonial. In the process of mind transformation the role of teachers and educators is one of the crucial ones. Learning languages is a way to deconstruct and reconstruct one’s mind and identity. The article by José Antonio Ávila Romero investigates the specific strategies that can be used to teach Spanish in a multicultural environment. They are aimed at self-reflection, on the awareness of learning process and self-progress and thus are significant for any kind of consideration about one’s identity. Because learning a foreign language can be a way to know a foreign country but also a way to know oneself and the position of oneself in a dialogue with the Other and the Self, familiar and unfamiliar, unusual and common. The knowledge of who I am and where I belong is closely connected with the place one occupies in a national state. The article by Peter Kopal from the Czech Republic leads the readers on a long journey into the past in order to disclose the significance of the first Czech chronicler Cosmas of Prague for the constitution of the Czech nation, identity and history. His portrait of Cosmas is a complex picture showing what misinterpretations history is a subject to in totalitarian regimes. In spite of all Kopal asserts that Cosmas can be still perceived a man of words, a scholar, an artist, a historian who shaped and formed Czech national identity. As he asserts in the conclusion: “It seems that the Cosmas‘ chronicle speaks even to us

today, like a new source of inspiration, thanks to the most topical and significant element of its ideological content, i.e. thanks to the efort to rationalize the birth, origin and the essence of the national state. Its constitution then started the processes, which at the turn of 11th and 12th C started to accommodate the Czech society slowly to the standards of European countries.” The interview, in which Maria Kissova from Constantine the Philosopher University in Slovakia presents Hall Belof is a fascinating reading. Belof’s training and experience is in psychology, visual art and literature. She understands the primary role identity and culture play in the contemporary world. She, however, also warns that the art works, which employ these concepts as the source of their conflicts, may easily move from their “privileged” peripheral position, in which they have the quality to be on the edge, to the mainstream, and thus loose the cutting edge. Belof has been lured by visual art and culture. One of her books Camera Culture discusses stereotypes in thinking, representation and the way we perceive and comprehend the world through visual images. She says that “stereotypes are a particularly lazy part of conventional thinking. They take for granted traditional imbalances of power and the oppression of vulnerable people. They provide a kind of justification for these.” In this respect she sees the importance of documentary photography, as the form, which should give people the impetus to reform. And she does her share in this. As an atheist, or as she likes to call herself a “militant rationalist”, she works for 9

ARS AETERNA Christian charity organisation, because as she says “I don’t believe in Christianity, but I do believe in aid.” The current issue closes with three reviews. Peter Pecina writes about the book by Michael W. Schaefer on the civil war, Maria Kissova reviews Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Simona Hevesiova discusses the second novel of the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun. Dear readers, we wish the content of the current issue will inspire you to think and discuss further on the ques-

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tions of diversity, and multiculturalism. These directly influence the social organization of the world we inhabit, may change our viewpoints, and interact with our opinions. We believe that the art, history and education are the means to learn about them and ourselves more. In this way we endorse the return to the tradition of scholarship that honors the knowledge that appreciates critical thinking and respects the diference in opinion, attitudes or styles. Works cited: Cullen, J., 1995. The Civil War in Popular Culture. A Reusable Past. Smithsonian Institution Press.

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

Interviewwith Halla Beloff „Our social identity may change and probably therefore also our personal one. It may be painful but it is exciting. The skill in life is to be flexible while maintaining values and a moral core.“

In the first Ars Aeterna interview the social psychologist Halla Beloff speaks about her life decisions, identity, atheism, and passion for the Arts. Born in Stuttgart, she came to England as a refugee in l939. She was educated at Birkbeck College, University of London, the University of Illinois and Queen’s University, Belfast. For many years she taught in the Psychology Department of the University of Edinburgh. Her research and writing have been concerned with social identity, especially women’s positions and visual rhetoric. Her book Camera Culture (Blackwell, l985) discusses the meaning of photography and its social representation in society, changing the social world. Halla Beloff served on many committees of the British Psychological Society (President l983-84), worked as a free-lance reviewer on BBC Radio Scotland and a member of the Scottish Arts Council.

Motivations behind the choice for the professional career often tell a lot about human personality and interests. What ideas shaped your decision towards social psychology? HB Having first aimed for a degree in science, I realised this might be boring. Psychology seemed to have a science base, but promised clear human interest, and would be a new sort of venture in 1949, so that won out. I have never regretted my choice for one minute. You worked as a research assistant at the University of Illinois and at the Department of Psychology at the Queen’s University in Belfast. Do you recall a specific psychological research you conducted which made a definite impact on you?

HB At Illinois I worked at statistical analyses of personality traits that helped one to understand people’s adjustment to the social world. The basic dimensions of introversion and extraversion still hold do tell us something important about individual diferences. Gradually I realised that it was more profitable to bring in culture. What has been called ‘the texture of everyday life’ in a more humble way beckoned me to try to understand how we live, if that is not putting it too highly. Insofar as one could widen such discussions into everyday life itself it would be part of a democratic process in ‘giving away’ psychology. Israel Finkelstein is a professor at Tel Aviv University working at archaeological excavations at Megiddo. Though his research has proved that several Old Testament stories 11

ARS AETERNA considered historically accurate are purely fictitious; it did not change his faith and he says that it is critical for archaeology to separate the convictions about his culture and identity on the one hand and his research on the other. Is that true about psychology as well? To what extent has social psychology been ‘personal’ for you? HB I think my research has certainly been on identity and therefore culture itself. Insofar as I read Sigmund Freud, who was far, far removed from the official scientific psychology curriculum, I came across The Future of an Illusion. His brilliant and succinct arguments against god, crystallised my own position and I was ‘home’ as a non-believer. I believe that little book of his is too little known. His argument that religion is a form of comfort for our helplessness and loneliness, seems to me very hard to refute. And the solution to that problem is rational endeavour, in all branches of science and technology coupled with humanistic values. Having mentioned your research on identity and culture, there is also a great deal of contemporary fiction which discusses the tensions between the culture and one´s identity. Can you comment on that from the psychologist´s point of you? HB The question of culture and identity is obviously central to the whole idea of being a person in the modern world. Here and now we move around, geographically, between statuses and within our culture conceptually. That means 12

we may change country, language, class and in terms of ideas. Latterly this may involve moving from conformity to nonconformity, for example, in terms of political orientation and allegiance. That is surely what makes modernity constantly on the move. Our social identity may change and probably therefore also our personal one. It may be painful but it is exciting. The skill in life is to be flexible while maintaining values and a moral core. Writers have accepted the challenge of such moves and few modern novels miss out on aspects of the fracture. The most central fiction list is surely the post-colonial category. The writers that I think of first are the women in Britain whole family of origin are not English/British. They are not only popular but serious. You should know Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. (By the way, it is fun to know that Smith’s first name is Sadie, but she thought Zadie was more exotic and therefore eye-catching.) Such writers, of course, eventually move into the mainstream, as Hanif Kureishi has done. The danger is then that they will lose their first fire. But they gave and give their socalled host country a powerful stimulus for thought. It must be noted too that such novel-accounts are not painful in terms of the conflicts between the immigrant and the host culture, but more likely ironic and witty in the English style. (On a personal level, I regret that the German Jewish disaspora from the ‘thirties did not produce a novelist of note. My tentative interpretation is

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 that the War meant that our origin was enthusiasticly hidden. And that was that.) Your scholar interest started with psychology, later you turned towards art and published several papers on visual art and literature. What links have you found between the work of a psychologist and your critical study of art?

HB For reasons I can’t fathom I’ve always been attracted to the visual world. As a girl on eleven, I saved my pocket money to buy art postcards when no one I knew did such a thing and I’ve never looked back! More recently, after a more serious interest in art and architecture, I realised that this was a field that psychologists had not in general taken any interest. Perhaps there might be room for me. Then photography was today a universal phenomenon and yet few considered what it was, what it did for us. What was the social representation of photography? One social psychologist encouraged me, the later Henri Tajfel. That was enough. I had a term’s sabbatical from Edinburgh University and I just sat down in my study and wrote the book, Camera Culture. It seemed easy; I somehow had it in my mind. Although it was naïve from the point of view of the sophisticated theorists, it seemed to speak to other psychologists and some of the empirical minded in ‘the trade’. And, of course, because it was well produced and had a lot of reproductions it was intrinsically attractive, which is one of the points I was trying to make. Be-

ing able to look at parts of the world and the people in it is fascinating.

There have been sea changes in development of art in recent years using computer technologies and internet. Is there still place for traditional photography? HB Now there are obviously opened up infinite possibilities, for good and bad. It is easy now to lie in a photograph where before it was a bit more difficult. Leninists could air-brush Trotsky out of that photograph, men and women could always be beautified, but it took a bit of efort. Viewers of a photograph must now be cautious before accepting its truth value. We have to be more cautious, even more cynical and that seems a pity, but we will learn the skill. The traditional image of George Bernard Shaw is that of a bearded, smartly dressed, distinguished and conservatively-looking author. In your Camera Culture the photography in the nude is used to pose a challenging question if the picture reveals more of the true Shaw. Does it?

HB Shaw was an exceedingly clever and witty man. He was not afraid to practice what he said about his peers hiding behind their suits and their whiskers. In posing as Rodin’s Thinker in the nude – he is still not full-frontally naked and the role is highly flattering. So he is still teasing us and having the last laugh. We still don’t know what he’s really like. His social identity is there again, but not his personal one. I like the joke. 13

ARS AETERNA Besides that, the picture shows the great power of photography to change stereotypes and conventional thinking. Why is that important?

and provoke. More conservative audience claims some themes (e.g. pornography) disgusting. What are taboo topics in photography for you?

HB Stereotypes are a particularly lazy part of conventional thinking. They take for granted traditional imbalances of power and the oppression of vulnerable people. They provide a kind of justification for these. The exploitation of children, women and simply ‘diferent’ people, like Roma, then seem part of everyday reality. The whole documentary movement within photography aimed to wake up our consciences. It was designed to show us what poverty, oppression and the horrors of war were actually like and so break the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That has been the moral centre of traditional photography, over and above painting. From the beginning of photography, right until the end of the twentieth, photographers were creating pictures that were hard to look at with care, in both senses of that word. The danger then is that we will end of feeling good because we are feeling bad. The point though is to do something. Reform is a harder job, but that is up to us not the photographer. They just give us the impetus. I remember an exhibition of the work in Africa and Vietnam of Don McCullin at the Victoria and Albert Museum where the large audience moved about in total silence. We were moved. But what could we do? I think that awareness is a good in itself, which is all I can say.

HB As I’ve just suggested some images must shock us. The motive can be good and the outcome at least indirectly positive. But I am not an absolute libertarian. I think that the presentation of women and children in obscene poses for the delectation of a viewer’s sexual obsession is exploitative. It exploits the objects of the photographs show have to appear with their vulva on show and their faces apparently lascivious. Such pictures provide a horrible kind of model for what a woman or a child is supposed to be like. They must be deleterious to positive human relations, and of caring partnerships. The trouble is that the demand is infinite, the gangster marketers’ profits are astronomical and there seems no end to the trade.

Photography often wants to shock 14

In Joseph Roth’s Legend of a Holy Drinker a small gift of a converted Christian changes lives of many. You also do a lot of charity work in which literature plays a major role. Is there any story behind the idea of spreading books? HB We do not live by bread alone. Books are one of the prime foods of the spirit. They help us to think in new ways; they put us in the shoes of others; they can take us away from mundane reality and they entertain. They are a model of currency - small, portable,

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 able to be passed on and are long lasting in material terms, and even longer in the mind. When we read a book we are all equal. It’s a privilege to be part of a book exchange. And in Britain we are especially lucky because there are a whole series of charity shops which are really book exchanges. When one has finished with a book one takes it along to such a shop and it is sold on in aid of a particular charity for very small sums. It is part of the democracy of ideas. You are a proclaimed non-believer in god. What does being an atheist mean to you? HB Yes, I sometimes call myself a militant rationalist. Not because I wish to take away another’s faith, but because I’m ready to state my own independence from supernatural belief and any organised religion. One of the highest functions of women and men is to think, to reason as well as to empathise with others. And as I’ve said, when I evaluate what has gone on in the world and what continues to go on, I cannot believe that there is a presence which in any sense whatsoever is behind this. I rather see religion used to give false consolation and resignation to those sufering. I cannot credit that there will be our reward in some future world. As a thinking person I could advance the argument that there is a devil at work in the world, not a god of the western tradition; a devil or perhaps the gods sitting on Mount Olympus and using us as their playthings. That seems also a possibility.

For more than fifty years I was the wife of John Belof, a scholar and a man of high principles. He too came from a Jewish background and too lost any faith in a presence that was supposedly all knowing, all-powerful and benign. That the presence did not appear to be so and it was all a mystery did not make sense to his valued reason. Although we did not live in each other’s pockets, we did agree on fundamentals and he was a model for me. I think we are indeed alone and must work to comfort each other and to strive to make our community a better place, even if each of us can only do little. Perhaps three good commands to live by are: be kind, be kind, be kind. My friends think it a bit strange that I do work for Christian Aid, but that agency does not press the Christianity at the point of need and that is the important part for me. I don’t believe in Christianity, but I do believe in aid. I guess that as a keen reader there are at least two books which you are reading these days. Could you give us some advice?

HB I like to have one hard book and one diverting one on the go. At the moment I’ve suddenly decided to go back to Elizabeth von Arnim, an Australian/ English proto-feminist novelist of a hundred years ago, who in Elizabeth and her German Garden observed the foibles of mere males and the intelligence of women in a blithe and witty style (and went on to write many bestselling novels). Whenever I re-read her she lifts the heart. 15

ARS AETERNA But I have also got my teeth, at last into Lanark by the great contemporary Scottish writer, Alasdair Gray, who certainly challenges us. It’s a four volume phantasmagoria of Glasgow life and the human condition. Fortunately he does himself sometimes appear on the Scot-

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tish literary scene and so some of us in a position to hear him read it to us in our mind’s ear. But even without that it is worth the struggle to witness such an original, intelligent world-view. If you cannot agree with it, that is your right.

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

The Old South in Popular Culture Jozef Pecina Jozef Pecina teaches American studies at University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia. His main fields of interest are 19th century American history and Popular Culture. He is writing his PhD. dissertation on the image of war in 19th century American novels. He has published articles on Captain John Smith, Stephen Crane, John William DeForest and antebellum sensational novels.

Abstract: The paper deals with American South, one of the most distinctive regions of the United States, and its representation in popular culture. The first part briefly examines the history of the region and origins of Southern mythology and stereotypes, while in the second part I focus on the image of the South as presented in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.

The Old South, similarly to the Old West, is looked back through the spectacles of novels, cinema, television and other fictional sources. While the West is seen as a land of gun duels, desperadoes and lonely men with no name, the South has been portrayed as a land of prosperous plantations and white columned mansions populated by aristocratic chivalrous planters and their beautiful womenfolk with happy slaves singing in the cotton fields during the sunset. Such romantic image is the most accurately expressed in the opening title card of Gone with the Wind, one of the most popular movies of all times: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind..” Both the movie and Margaret Mitch-

ell’s novel are the chief representations of such romantic myth. Not even the counter-image presented for the first time in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been strong enough to drive out this myth. When in 1761 two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, marked out the border between the colonies of Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, they could not suspect that their line will some time later divide the so-called free and slave states of the USA. Until the late eighteenth century, however, both Northern and Southern colonies underwent almost the same historical development, including a rapid expansion to the west, a moving frontier, and the contact with hostile Native Americans. Geographically, there was not any physical obstacle, a river or a mountain range that would separate the region causing its isolated development. The language, religion and law of both North and South were the same and the South hardly difered in cultural 17

ARS AETERNA history as well. However, potential Southern consciousness had been present since the early colonial period. Despite missing geographic or cultural diferences, there always had existed a possibility for distinctive Southern identity. It had existed in a form of a crucial figure in the history of the Old South – the black slave. It was the existence of chattel slavery that provided one common bond, one shared interest that could unify the region of the South and lead it to a war which brought an end to whole institution. (Ranson & Hook, 1989) During colonial period, slavery existed in all English colonies. New England ports of Boston and Newport were not only America’s leading ports of departure for slave ships, they were for the most of the eighteenth century the principal ports for entry for new slaves (Lindsey, 1994, p. 28) In the North, though, it never became as economically important as it did in the South. Slaves in the North were usually held in small numbers and served mostly as domestic servants. Until the nineteenth century, the South’s “peculiar institution” did not arouse much comment. Several of the Founding Fathers were slaveowners and although there is no direct reference to slavery in the Declaration of Independence, it is recognized and accepted by the Constitution. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it was widely believed that slavery would gradually die out. One event changed all hopes for gradual demise of slavery and helped to create distinctive Southern way of life. It was the invention of the cotton 18

gin, patented by Eli Whitney in 1791. Before the invention, short staple cotton was grown in some parts of Georgia and South Carolina, but it depleted the soil and was unprofitable to market. Manual picking out of the cotton seeds proved both labor demanding and time consuming and the cotton could not compete with rice or indigo for commercialization. Eli Whitney’s invention used spikes and later saws to extract the seeds form flowers and its efect was almost instantaneous. By 1804, the cotton crop was eight times greater than it had been decade earlier.2 The demand of textile mills in Britain, where the industrial revolution was under way, made sure that the prices were favorable. The new method of separating cotton lint form cotton seeds made a vast expansion in the production of cotton possible. As a result, economics of slavery was transformed and instead of a gradual decline, the number of slaves began to increase rapidly. American exports in 1850s illustrate how profitable the slave economy was – the cotton accounted for 60 percent of the US foreign earnings. Two thirds of the world’s cotton supplies were from the American South. By 1860, ten of the America’s richest men lived not just in the South but in Natchez district of Mississippi alone.3 Slavery in the South slightly difered from slave systems in other American countries or colonies. In contrast to slaves in most parts of the American continent, those in the South experienced natural population growth. In regions such diverse as Brazil, Jamaica or Cuba, mortality rate exceeded birth rates and growth of the slave popula-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 tion depended on importation of new slaves from Africa. In 1808, the US Congress outlawed slave imports, but the number of slaves grew rapidly. In the next 50 years, slave population in the South tripled; from about 1,2 million to almost 4 million. One of the reasons was that American slaves were treated better than elsewhere in the New World, because they were in short supply and expensive to replace, particularly after the trade was abolished.4 In 1831, two events strengthened the feeling of unity in the South. The first was the publication The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison, which provided a medium through which abolitionist voices were expressed. The other was the slave revolt led by Nat Turner, in which sixty whites had died. These two events electrified the Southerners who felt that only through unity they could face enemies from within and without. In 1830s and 1840, growing sentiments against slavery aroused in the North, mainly in New England and an increasing number of Northerners, including politicians, demanded abolition of slavery. The abolitionists were a heterogeneous group, united only by their idealistic fervor, and there is no doubt that their sometimes fanatic zeal only worsened the relations between the two parts of the country (Ranson &Hook, 1989, p. 93). Great deal of South’s intellectual energy was spent in an attempt to find justification for their “peculiar institution”, as slavery was sometimes called by the Southerners. Pseudo-scientific arguments were produced to prove

that blacks were mentally inferior or specially suited for agricultural work and the Bible and the Constitution were frequently cited as a proof of Southern academic theories. It was in this period when the South gradually became aware of its own existence as a distinctive entity. This was precisely the moment when the romantic image of the Old South was created. In a struggle for preservation of slavery, upon which the economy of the whole region depended, a mythology came into existence. Around a handful of large plantations where a distinctive mode of life was possible, whole sets of theoretical assumptions about the South’s way of life were developed. These soon passed to general circulation and were contrasted with those about the North. The South presented itself as aristocratic, agrarian civilization. On the other hand, the North was portrayed as materialistic, commercial society. The Southerners possessed values such as honor and personal integrity; the Northerners were individualistic, money-minded Yankees. Eventually, a historical basis for the mythology was found in the seventeenth century English Civil War – the Southerners were descendants of gallant, easy-going Cavaliers, the Northerners derived from the frowning and reserved Puritan Roundheads. Since then, it had been not only slavery that provided one common bond for the whole region. The South was defending its way of life, a culture that was widely and passionately believed to be superior to that of the North (Ibid., p. 95). The mythology of antebellum South often seems to be dominated by the 19

ARS AETERNA scenes of plantations worked by gangs of slaves. This image, however, has no basis in reality. Although there were thousands of plantations that produced cotton for export and plantation owners controlled much of wealth and political power in the South, numerically, there were more small farmers that cultivated upland areas. The figures allow us to question whether the Old South should be described as a slaveholding society. In 1860, families that owned more than fifty slaves numbered less than 10,000; those who owned more than 100 slaves numbered less than 3,000 and only a handful owned more than 500. So, out of more than a million white families in the South, only small proportion owned any slaves at all. A typical Southern slave owner possessed one or two slaves and a typical Southern white male owned none. He was either an artisan or, more probably, a small farmer. However, the class of small farmers, constituting the numerically largest single group in Southern society, has traditionally been neglected by this mythology (Engs). In 1850s, several events drew both regions more apart but there were people in both parts of the country who believed that the diferences could be settled in a peaceful way. However, after all compromises passed by the Congress failed, and a Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the extremists in the South saw no other way but to break with the Union. South Carolina was the first state to secede and eventually ten Southern states ensued. The civil war that followed is known by a handful of names, one of them 20

being The War for Southern Independence. The war helped to define the region geographically – eleven seceded states formed their own political entity, the Confederate States of America. The fact is that the war and the defeat had given enormous boost to the romantic image of the South. The courage, bravery and self-sacrifice of Confederate soldiers (vast majority of whom were farmers, not plantation owners) served as an incentive for regional, Southern pride. Final chapter to the mythology of the South was added in the period of Reconstruction that followed the war. The South became a helpless victim of greedy Yankee politicians and businessmen, their pliant Southern minions and black allies. It is no coincidence that the novel that caused tremendous anti-slavery sentiment in the North and radicalized the defense of slavery in the South became one of the most popular American books ever written. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most widely read novel of the nineteenth century, is the first true work of American popular culture. The story was first serialized in the National Era and published in a book form in March 1852. The novel was praised by both secular and sectarian reviewers and in the first week it sold some 10,000 copies. A true Tom-mania ensued and 300,000 copies were sold by the end of the year. The book became America’s first international bestseller, it was translated to several languages including Czech in 1854, and its popularity could be compared only to that of the Bible. The impact it had on abolitionist sentiment in the North is best ex-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 pressed by Abraham Lincoln’s greeting of the author at the height of the Civil War. The president, according to Harriet Beecher Stowe, strode towards her with outstretched hand saying “So this is the little lady who made this great war” (Cullen, 1995. p. 14) The novel was not the first of its kind. Anti-slavery publications had been produced in the North for decades. One of them, David Walker’s pamphlet Appeal… to the Coloured citizens of the World from 1829 is thought to have incited Nat Turner to start his bloody rebellion (Yellin, 1998, p. XIV). In addition to the texts of white opponents of slavery, several testimonies of former slaves were published in 1840s and 1850s. None of them, however, reached the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. By 1861, it had become the most popular book written by an American. The numbers can only suggest the reach of the book. More revealing could be the fury it provoked in the South, where it was widely banned. It was still possible at the beginning of 20th century for a South Carolina teacher to make his pupils raise their right hands and swear that they would never read Uncle Tom (Wilson, 1962, p. 4). A storm of criticism and denial of Stowe’s graphic portrayal of slavery followed the publication of the book, and a wide array of Anti-Tom novels with titles such as Aunt Phillys Cabin; or Southern Life as It Is or The Planter’s Northern Bride appeared (Cullen, 1996, p. 88) “Tom literature”, both pro and anti, became a kind of subgenre of its own. However, as far as antislavery propaganda is concerned, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a devastating blow and

the damage it caused for the Southern cause was irreparable. The South simply could not find any answer. However, according to standards of what followed later, the novel is at least as harsh on the North as on the South. From the viewpoint of Southern criticism, it is ironic that Simon Legree, an archetype of a calculating, ruthless and evil plantation owner is a Yankee from New England, while the slave-owning aristocratic St. Clare is portrayed sympathetically. In her portrayal of the South, Stowe created variety of characters that later became stereotypes. Despite writing the novel about evils of slavery, she did not avoid romanticising the Southern aristocracy in the best tradition of the texts that created Southern mythology. Augustus St. Clare is a Byronic intellectual, who recognizes that slavery is wrong but cannot do anything about it. The Shelby plantation in Kentucky, where the novel opens, is a homely place, and the bourgeois Shelbys are decent and kind people loved by their slaves. On the other hand, Simon Legree’s Red River plantation, to which Tom is sold after his master’s death, is a place of horror, a prison, a place of torture, where Negroes are set to flog other Negroes, and death and punishment are an omnipresent threat. Legree explains the situation to Tom during their voyage to plantation: “Now,” said he, doubling his great, heavy fist into something resembling a blacksmith’s hammer, “d’ye see this fist? Heft it!” he said, bringing it down on Tom’s hand. “Look at these yer bones! Well, I tell ye this yer fist has got as hard 21

ARS AETERNA as iron knocking down niggers. I never see the nigger, yet, I couldn’t bring down with one crack,” said he, bringing his fist down so near to the face of Tom that he winked and drew back. “I don’t keep none o’ yer cussed overseers; I does my own overseeing; and I tell you things is seen to. You’s every one on ye got to toe the mark, I tell ye; quick, - straight, - the moment I speak. That’s the way to keep in with me. Ye won’t find no soft spot in me, nowhere. So, now, mind yerselves; for I don’t show no mercy!” (Stowe, 1998, p. 347) In twentieth century, Stowe was blamed for creation of stereotypical black characters. In the novel we can find minstrel types Sam and Andy, a picanniny showgirl Topsy, animal-like brutal overseers Sambo and Quimbo, and of course, the central character of Uncle Tom, a pious slave whose sinlesness stands as admonition to the slave system. Stowe’s slaves always show their true faces to their masters and they are inevitably subservient. “Mixed race” characters such as Eliza or her husband George Harris combine the sensitivity of their black mothers with strength of their white fathers. The fact is that the only works of twentieth century popular culture that have rivaled the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. Both of them represent an active attempt to disprove the imagery and message of Stowe’s novel (Cullen, 1996, p. 90). The Civil War ended in 1865, but culturally, it was just the beginning. In decades following the war, Southern writers tried to secure ideologically what 22

could not be achieved militarily, and drew on conventions of the antebellum plantation novel. Some writers portrayed the Old South as a lost Eden, others sought to emphasize the future over the past and sought reconciliation with the North. One of the latter was Thomas Dixon, whose novel The Clansman (1905) served as a basis for D.W. Griffith epic movie The Birth of a Nation. Released in 1915, the movie became a landmark of film history. It blended elements of literature, drama and history forging them into something new. It was the first film to be praised as a work of art, it legitimated movie-going for middle-class audiences and finally, it was one of the most racist movies ever produced. It caused controversy even before it was released, provoking censorship and race riots in a number of American cities. Absent from the group of people who expressed concern about the stereotypes and representations of African Americans were, however, professional historians. Though, the movie acquired support from Thomas Dixon’s former classmate Woodrow Wilson, who described it as “history written with lightning”, adding that “my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”. Wilson later officially regretted this statement (Cullen, 1995, p. 25). The movie promotes traditional Southern values, which is evident even from the promotional poster, where a mounted white-hooded Clansman is riding protectively along a Southern lady towards the rising moon. Chivalry, honor and courage are contrasted with rapacity of Northern carpetbaggers and their Negro allies.

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 The South is portrayed in accord with nineteenth century romantic myth. The title card introducing the Cameron family says: “In the southland. Piedmont, SC, the home of the Camerons, where life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more”5 Again, similarly to opening title card of Gone with the Wind, a sentimental feeling of Lost Cause, a lost way of life is created. The audience, together with the Stonemans –family friends from the North who call on the Camerons – are introduced to the plantation. They see white mansion and a handful of smiling slaves leisurely picking cotton. Some of the racial stereotypes already seen in Uncle Tom’s Cabin appear – black mammy, little pickanninies, and what is most notable, comic types performing their minstrelsy for their masters and their Northern friends during the lunch break. However, the stereotypes in the movie are more disturbing and grotesque because the major black roles were played by white actors in blackface. It is the portrayal of African-Americans in the second part of the movie that caused much controversy. Title card introducing the second half says that “This is a historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction period, and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today” and is followed by the quotation from Woodrow Wilson’s History of American People: Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much as the enemies of the one race as of the other, to cozen, to beguile, and use the negroes…in the villages the negroes were office holders, men who knew nothing of the uses of authority,

except its insolences…The policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South…in their determination to ‘put the white South under the heel of the black South’ (emphasis in the title card) The white men were roused by mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”6 The South is defeated and occupied by the Carpetbaggers from the North. Former slaves, depicted as ignorant savages aping white behavior, are given voting rights and are enjoying power they never had. One of the most controversial scenes pictures South Carolina House of Representatives in session. After manipulated elections, the blacks are in 101 to 23 majority to the whites. Black legislators are depicted as lustful, arrogant and idiotic. The speaker is not able to keep order in the room, former slaves are shown shoeless with their feet on the table, eating and drinking whisky. Worth mentioning is also Griffith’s portrayal of mullatos. While in Uncle Tom’s Cabin mullatos are mostly intelligent and strong, treacherous Silas Lynch, a mullato friend of Stoneman, “a traitor to his white patron and a greater traitor to is own people whom he plans to lead by an evil way to build himself a throne of vaulting power”7, is one of the most evil characters of Birth of a Nation. The phenomenal popularity of the movie partially caused the renewal of the Ku-Klux Klan in 1920 and Atlanta became “the imperial city of the Invisible Empire”, the Klan headquarters in 23

ARS AETERNA other words. It is no coincidence that a book, which represented the culmination of almost century-long eforts to dislodge critical depiction of the Southern culture, and which replaced Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the dominant work of American popular culture, was written by an Atlanta native. Stowe’s image of the South continued to haunt the region decades following the Civil War. Until the publication of The Clansman and release of The Birth Of a Nation , the South still figured in popular imagination as a region where slaves are worked to death. The work of Margaret Mitchell distilled Dixon’s and Griffith’s eforts, and whole anti-Tom tradition creating the ultimate romantic vision of the South (Cullen, 1995, p. 25). Similarly to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Margaret Mitchell’s novel became an instant bestseller. Published in June 1936, after almost a decade of research and writing, it sold 50, 000 copies in one day, a million within six months and an average of 3,700 copies for the rest of year. This numbers are more impressive when taking into consideration the fact that, for a 3$ a copy, they were reached in the middle of Great Depression (Cullen, 1996, p. 223). For most people today, Gone with the Wind is a movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It is estimated that 90 percent of the U.S. population have seen the movie at least once. Many of those who have seen the movie are aware that it is based on a novel, relatively few have actually read the book. David O. Selznick, the producer of the movie, paid Mitchell 50,000 dollars – one of the best investments in movie history – for 24

movie rights. When released in 1939, Gone with the Wind became the first blockbuster and from popular work of regionalism, it transformed to worldwide symbol of American culture (Cullen, 1995, p. 74). In several ways, the movie and the novel are in accord. However, the technical and cultural demands of the cinematic form required much of the novel to be either compressed or completely omitted. Certain important characters from the book are missing in the movie. The controversy over The Birth of a Nation (the movie was highly praised, but it had drawn criticism from African American community and a part of white audience) forced scriptwriters to soften novel’s racial politics. Ku Klux Klan is not mentioned at all; instead Ashley and Frank attend a “political meeting”. There is no mention of Rhett’s killing of a black man and the attack on Scarlett was not made by a former slave but by a white man. Mitchell’s portrayal of the South reflects her background and the audience she was writing for. She was a Southerner; she considered her book to be the romance of the South and wrote it for white Southerners. Not for all of them, but those she considered to be ordinary, everyday Southerners, just like those who sent her grateful letters telling her how much they liked the book (Ibid.). The reader can feel author’s hostility towards African Americans and her blacks are often described as animals, which is notable in lines such as “Jeems was their body servant, and, like dogs, accompanied them everywhere” (Mitchell, 1965, p. 14)8 Scarlett’s attacker in

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 Shantytown is “squat black negro with shoulders and chest like gorilla” (p. 657) and even Mammy, a positive character is described as having “the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey’s face” (p.320). The character of Mammy is continuation of a line of stereotypical slave servants which began in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A scene of happy slaves, similar to that from the Birth of a Nation, is also shown to the audience. We can say that the movie romanticises the South more than a book. The best example is the aforementioned title card. Though Mitchell did romanticise the antebellum South, such fantasy as was described in the title card can be found mostly in works of Thomas Nelson Page and other late nineteenth century writers. In the novel, Tara, home of Scarlett O’Hara, is described as “clumsy, sprawling building” (p. 45). By contrast, in the movie, although not as sumptuous as Wilkes’ home Twelve Oaks, it is no modest residence. Huge columns of Twelve Oaks mansion, where county aristocracy meets for a barbecue and ball, may remind huge State Capitols of several American states. The post-war South, similarly to The Birth of a Nation, is portrayed as a victim of vicious white radicals and their black minions. In Mitchell’s presentation, the South is hounded by fanatics,

cornered into defending a way of life, overrun by alien invaders and forced to withstand a harsh occupation (Cullen, 1995, p. 80). Although the racism is not as strong and visible as in Griffith’s movie, it still continues to have negative influence. The myth of the Old South, created by Southerners to prove the region’s existence as a distinctive entity, quickly found the way to popular culture. The fact that the South is a principal setting of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, the most popular works of art of their respective period, is the evidence of America’s fascination with the culture and with the myth of the South. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its portrayal of the evils of slavery, became a crucial work of abolitionist literature. The Birth of a Nation helped to recreate Ku Klux Klan and Gone with the Wind renewed interest in the Civil War. In the depiction of the South, both analysed films share common characteristics - romanticising of the Old South and complacency of slaves, who are portrayed as minor stereotyped characters leading uncomplicated lives. At least in early 20th century, a romantic image of the South had fixed position in minds of millions of Americans. Yellin, J. Introduction. In: Stowe H., 1998. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. OUP.

Endnotes: 1 Gone with the Wind, directed by David O. Selznick, 1939, 00:05:58. 2 Burton, V. - Bonnin, P.: King Cotton, http://www.civilwarhome.com/kingcotton.htm, accessed 25.10.2008. 3 Engs, R.: Slavery in the Civil War Era, http://www.civilwarhome.com/slavery.htm, accessed 25.10.2008 4 Ibid. 5 The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W.Grifith, 1915, 00:05:09. 6 The Birth of a Nation, 01:28:05.

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ARS AETERNA 7 The Birth of a Nation, 01:41:02. 8 All subsequent references in the text are to this edition of the novel. Works cited: Bradbury, M. - Temperley, H., 1989. Introduction to American Studies, Harlow: Longman. Burton, V. - Bonnin, P.: King Cotton, http://www.civilwarhome.com/kingcotton.htm, accessed 25.10.2008. Cullen, J., 1995. The Civil War in Popular Culture. A Reusable Past. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Cullen, J., 1996. The Art of Democracy. Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States, New York: Monthly Review Press. Engs, R.: Slavery in the Civil War Era, http://www.civilwarhome.com/slavery.htm, accessed 25.10.2008. Lindsey, H., 1994. A History of Black America, Secaucus: Chartwell Books, Inc. Mitchell, M., 1965. Gone with the Wind, New York: Pocket Books Inc. Ranson, E. - Hook, A. The Old South. In: Bradbury, M. - Temperley, H., 1989. Introduction to American Studies, Longman. Stowe, H., 1998. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Oxford: OUP. Wilson, E., 1962. Patriotic Gore. Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

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Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

Mary Austin’s Crossing Boundaries Petr Kopecký Petr Kopecký is an assistant professor at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. In 2003-2004, he was based at San José State University as a Fulbright research scholar. His field of expertise is ecocriticism and California studies. Kopecký has authored a number of papers exploring the (deep) ecological dimension of literary works. In 2007, he published a book titled The California Crucible: Literary Harbingers of Deep Ecology, which is a modified version of his doctoral dissertation. He also translated Orwell’s novel Coming up for Air into Czech (Nadechnout se, ODEON 2003).

Abstract: The paper will examine the work of the remarkable Californian woman writer Mary Austin (1868-1934). It will focus on the notion of boundary-crossing/permeating in her writing. To be more precise, it will address the syncretistic nature of her vision that pervades all her publications. Her inclusive approach to life (and literature) resulted in the collapsing of many a barrier between the cultures of the American Southwest. Among other things, she can be credited for showing and formulating a viable route toward the cohabitation of white Americans with Hispanic people and Native Americans. That would not be too original had not it been done at a time when most WASPs showed little, if any respect and understanding for the cultures of other ethnicities.

Introduction Unfortunately, the life and work of Mary Austin is not familiar even to literature scholars both in Czechia and Slovakia. Neither scholars nor translators have taken notice of her voluminous writing. The aim of this paper is not to castigate the local scholarly community for this sin of neglect, but to introduce the multi-faceted writer in relation to the notion of border-crossing. Born Illinois in 1868, Austin moved with her family to homestead in southern California when she was twenty. She was thus transplanted from the fertile and cultivated Midwest to the rough desert environment, which had a profound efect on her psyche. She came to realize the power such an untamed landscape exerted on its inhabitants. Her writing career was prompted by her failed mar-

riage and autistic daughter. She later revisited this period of her life in an essay called “Woman Alone” (1927): “In a way this tragic end of my most feminine adventure brought the fulfillment of my creative desire, which had begun to be an added torment by repression. Caring for a hopelessly invalid child is an expensive business. I had to write to make money” (p. 229). It was indeed writing, and perhaps even more its subject, that redirected Austin’s thoughts. In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, Austin sought her personal salvation in the wildness of her new home region. After years of dwelling in and carefully observing the surrounding land, it took her only a month to write her first and arguably most successful book-length publication, The Land of 27

ARS AETERNA Little Rain (1903). In 1908, after she failed to prevent her community from a megalomaniac water project, she decided to enrich her horizons in another vibrant city, New York. While based there, she made numerous trips to Europe, where she became acquainted with noted writers including George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad. Herbert George Wells even complimented her stating that, “We have no woman in England [who] can write like this . . . no woman in Europe” (qtd. in Fink, 1983, p. 47). Austin was well established in New York, too. As an exceptionally prolific author of both magazine articles and books, she could always find a publisher regardless of the fact that much of her writing was un-eastern. Her subject was very often the Southwest, for instance in California, Land of the Sun (1914) and The Ford (1917). These two books, along with others written between 1912

and 1920, reflect the author’s increasing interest in women’s emancipation. Starting in the late 1910s, Austin traveled widely in the Southwest, especially in New Mexico. She continued her explorations of Native American and Hispanic traditions that had fascinated her since the California years. In 1925, she settled permanently in Santa Fe and built her “beloved house,” which was characterized by simplicity and ecological design. Yet this did not mean Austin’s retirement from public life. On the contrary, Austin’s house served as an asylum for Willa Cather who wrote her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) in it. Austin was also one of the writers who kept coming to nearby Taos following the pertinacious invitations of Mabel Dodge Luhan. In the 1920s and 1930s, Luhan hosted numerous artists in Taos, most importantly the British writer David Herbert Lawrence.

As a matter of fact, it was another famous artist Luhan invited to Taos, photographer Ansel Adams, that articulated the most cogent description of Austin’s reputation: “Seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual and spiritual power and discipline . . . . She is a ‘future person’—one who will, a century from now appear as a writer of major stature in the complex matrix of our American culture” (qtd. in Graulich, p. xi). Almost a century later, Adams’ words seem prophetic. In the 1980s, the process of Austin’s recanonization was started. Several streams within literary criticism have rediscovered Austin as an

innovative writer even by our standards. The streams in question study literature through environmental, feminist and ethnic lens. No wonder she also enjoys a significant status in the umbrella discipline of cultural studies. This field, characterized by its interdisciplinary approach, was able to grasp and appreciate Austin’s multi-generic work that deals with boundaryless subjects. Indeed, Mary Austin was largely preoccupied with boundaries and their transgression as the titles of some of her books reveal (e.g. Earth Horizon, The Land of Journey’s Ending, Lost Borders). Like Thoreau, with whom she is often

Reputation and Inclination

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Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 compared, she had a romantic leaning to the whole. Her work was a more or less conscious response to the prevailing fragmentation of the modern industrial civilization. Her nature was inclusive and its expression in art was a (r)evolutionary conception of holism that viewed the world in its totality. As Austin wrote in Earth Horizon (1932), “I liked the feel

of the roots, of ordered growth and progression, continuity, all of which I found in the Southwest” (p. 349). She sought to integrate rather than separate diferent aspects of life. This approach can be documented on several levels ranging from the polarities within human mind to the dichotomous relationship between nature and culture.

At the individual level, Austin was concerned with the dissociation of mind from body. She was convinced that the gap between the two had turned into an abyss and sought to reconnect them. In the spirit of D. H. Lawrence’s writing, she accentuated the importance of real passions as distinct from ‘cerebral emotions’. In her view, the repression of emotions bred anxiety whose symptoms could be observed in the hectic America of her time. The subdued unconscious, Austin believed, was closely linked with people’s attachment to the natural world. It is therefore not surprising that many of her protagonists are indigenous people who have not wholly abandoned their physicality and animality. It was actually the interrelationship between the human and nonhuman world that Austin was most interested in. She was well-grounded in biology and conceived of the world as a network of organisms sustained by energy flow. Moreover, Austin posits that man’s awareness is (in)formed by “all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources, half noted, or noted not at all except by some sense that lies too

deep for naming” (Austin, 2003, p. 437). It was again the Native Americans on whom she demonstrated that the dark depths of human consciousness had not completely disappeared. The Natives were not alienated because they lived with their land, rather not of it. As she maintains in her remarkable study about the impact of landscape on the artistic expression of its inhabitants titled The American Rhythm (1930), their consciousness was imbued with “a sense of its relation to the Allness”, which is “more important to our social solutions than our far derived culture of the universities has permitted us to realize” (p. 40). In her criticism of the second-hand character of university education, Austin implicitly criticized the growth of numerous branches of science, which, however, lost sight of the actual roots of the tree of knowledge1. What was even worse, the urbanizing America was also losing touch with the land and its vitally important functions. Nature became a mere object of people’s exploitative desires and scientific study. In her lifetime, Austin was one of the few voices that challenged the objectification of nature in all spheres of life.

Me and It

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ARS AETERNA She objected to the dichotomy between subject and object. She held the view that the two could not be separated because they mere intellectual constructs. In reality, there was a continuum, not a strict boundary between the self and the nonhuman forms of life. Human experience was formed through a reciprocal process of communication in which the subject and object approach one another. As the influential American philosopher John Dewey wrote in Art as Experience (1932), “Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that interaction of organism and environment which, when it is carried to the full, is a transformation of interaction

into participation and communication” (p. 22). Unlike many other nature writers, Austin can hardly be accused of colonizing and appropriating nature through her narration. Her style, that is to say, is impersonal. She deliberately foregrounds the observed phenomena rather than her personal voice. As the eminent ecocritic, Lawrence Buell, suggests in his The Environmental Imagination (1995), the author often lets both native people and animals interpret the natural world. That is why, the relationship between the observer and the observed is that of continuity rather than polarity.

White and Other Besides breaking the barriers between humans and the nonhuman realm, Austin also devoted much of her creative energy to what is commonly described as cultural syncretism. As she once remarked, it was the Southwest, “not the cafes of Prague” that promised “the most interesting possibility of social evolution that the world scene at present afords” (Austin, 1925, p. 327). The evolution she had in mind was happening in the frontier region which was still peopled by non-white population, mostly Hispanics and Native Americans. She saw a great potential in the encounter of three distinct cultures in the westernmost sector of America, which had not yet been entirely engulfed by the rule of law, because she believed that “law runs with the boundary, not beyond it” (Austin, Stories, p. 156). In her eyes, the white America’s legislation was discriminato30

ry and restrictive toward other people’s ways of life. It did not leave any room for the old ways of the ancient societies of America. Austin’s assessment of one such a model manifests that social cohesion is interwoven with equality. She argued that the Pueblo represented “the only society in the world in which culture exists as an expression of the whole, unafected by schisms of class and caste, incapable of being rated in terms of power and property” (qtd. in Hall, 1987, p. 365). Austin’s cross-cultural project was non-Eurocentric. She opposed all forms of forced assimilation and advocated cultural diversity. It should be noted that no matter how commonplace these trends appear now, they were quite radical in the America at the outset of the 20th century. Austin’s ideas were in clash with the enormous racial prejudice

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 of the Anglos. Native Americans, in particular, bore the brunt of the assimilationist legislation. Although, in the early 20th century, it was not any more legal to kill a Native, the Native peoples were regarded as inferior. Even the respected president Theodore Roosevelt considered the Natives irredeemable and their conquest necessary. So, Austin’s alternative to the individualism and self-reliance of the white frontiersmen, who were at the forefront of Americanization in the West, was culturally diverse rural communities. As Lois Palken Rudnick claims, women like Austin “held up the folkways of nonwhite, community-oriented peoples whose guardianship of the past and integration of land, work, play, worship, and art could teach modern Anglo-Americans how to overcome the psychological fragmentation and alienating isolation of their modern, industrial society” (1987, p. 19). Yet, in her advocacy of the Natives, Austin occasionally slipped into elitist and overprotective tone. On one hand, she called the new emerging Southwestern race superior and, on the other hand, she was of the opinion that the Native society “must be protected from its own

inexperience” (Austin, 1929b, p. 171). Concerning the actual character of her project in cultural syncretism, it was characterized by the harmonious relationship among the social, economic and environmental concerns2. She was convinced that the sense of community can hardly be maintained in the anonymous urban environment. So, besides organizing Native American and Hispanic associations at a time when there was little, if any interest in these cultures, Austin was also instrumental in setting up village schools with bilingual instruction. It aimed at crossing social and cultural boundaries between the three major ethnic groups in the Southwest. Unlike the vast majority of her contemporaries, Austin did not see the non-white children as less intelligent than the Anglo children. As Thomas Matthews Pearce points out in his biography of Mary Austin, she believed that the Spanish and Native pupils were “merely handicapped by the language factor and also by their environment. Almost no verbal testing could be devised which did not depend upon experience with the objects named and identified” (Pearce, 1965, p. 59).

Another fundamental issue Austin investigated in her work was the dichotomy between nature and culture. She refused to accept the widespread belief that culture, associated primarily with civilization, represented a higher stage in human development than the ancient nature-oriented societies. In fact, she considered nature and culture

as interdependent. Whether consciously or not, she was alluding to the origin of the word culture which is closely tied with the land. 3 Therefore, Austin ruled out the possibility of having an advanced culture without its sustaining a bond with the place where it is based. In Regional Culture in the Southwest, she proposes that “a regional culture

Nature and Culture

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ARS AETERNA is the sum, expressed in ways of living and thinking, of the mutual adaptations of a land and a people … when a people is aboriginal in any land they mutually nurse each other into a relationship of cooperation” (1929, p. 474). Austin believed the uncivilized nature of the Southwest considerably (in)formed the manners of the people who had populated it. The landscape was still raw and unspoiled enough to shape its inhabitants4. It was not “cut of from the physical and emotional experience of the region by a bufer of modern comforts” (Schaefer, 2004, p. 33). Simply stated, it was necessary for any culture to be deeply rooted in place in order to sustain its vitality and uniqueness4. So, in place of a dualistic conception of nature and culture, Austin believed that a culture had to “acknowledge its continuity with the natural environment”, otherwise it would be “bound to remain confused about its place and purpose in the world” and “blind to its nonhuman support system . . .” (Schaefer, 2004, p. 23). This ‘support system’, or simply nature, and its neglect and abuse by human culture are brought onto yet another plane in Austin’s work. The author observed the parallels between the human treatment of nature and men’s treatment of women. In fact, she the first American writer who probed into the affiliation of nature and woman. So, long before the emergence of ecofeminism, she elaborated on the issue of the feminine nature of nature. She saw many analogies between the men’s urge to dominate and control nature and their desire to subjugate women. It is not accidental that Austin began to be aware of these 32

analogies after she settled in California in the 1880s. There and then, that is to say, the great American colonizing thrust, which had moved the frontier to the ultimate West, was just culminating. In literature, this nation-making process was epitomized by narratives of conquest that celebrated the manly manners in which the new lands had been annexed. Austin, for her part, points to the feminized images the landscape had been attributed by the male authors. It is symptomatic that the oppressive behavior of men toward both nature and women is thus described by the same lexical means. What was once a ‘virgin’ land was ‘deflowered’, ‘stripped’ of all the vegetation and turned into a ‘nude’ landscape. In the desert environment of the Southwest, Austin found a territory which could resist the masculine drive because, as she wrote in Lost Borders: “If the desert were a woman, I know well what like she would be: deep-breasted, broad in the hips, tawny, with tawny hair, great masses of it lying smooth along her perfect curves” (Austin, Stories from the Country of Lost Borders, p. 160). In her remarkable study Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre and Geography (2004), Heike Schaefer rightly points out that the writer hoped that the “traditional gender roles may begin to crumble in the arid West” and “more egalitarian gender relations will emerge” (2004, p. 122). Indeed, what Austin envisioned was not a reversal of gender roles, as some feminists do, but their equal status.

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Conclusion There are other areas of life in which Austin broke the boundaries of what was acceptable for the dominant society. Her mindset represented a countercurrent toward the mainstream mode of thinking. Her natural response to the increasing atomization of society was a conscious attempt at restoring the total picture. The common denominator of her eforts was breaking the conventional boundaries or at least making them porous and permeable. Only today, thanks to the growth of interdisci-

plinary studies, can we fully appreciate the deep insights based on her erudition in a host of fields of knowledge. For many decades, the literary scholarship was not ripe to deal with Austin’s original and fruitful work. In the past two decades, however, the scrutiny of her writing has helped cross-fertilize diferent fields and reminded scholars once again that in their analytical dissection of bits and pieces, one should not forget their interdependence and lose the sense of the whole.

Endnotes 1 In fact, Austin literally showed the importance of the roots in her masterpiece The Land of Little Rain where she argued that, contrary to the general opinion, the Death Valley was rich in plants. The fascinating struggle for survival, however, was taking place out of people sight, among the root systems underground. 2 Interestingly enough, her model bears striking resemblance to the concept of sustainable development as it has been implemented across Western Europe in the past years. Its central idea is also equal emphasis on the three major dimension of human life (social, economic and environmental). 3 Originally, the word ‘culture’ meant cultivating/tilling the land. Over time, the began to be used metaphorically denoting the idea of cultivation through education as well as other intellectual achievements. 4 Paradoxically, since Austin’s times, California has developed into one of the most engineered and artiicial landscapes in the world. The term ‘Californication’ is associated with excessive consumerism and materialism. Works Cited: Austin, M., 1930. The American Rhythm. Boston and New York: Houghton Miflin Company. Austin, M., 1991. Earth Horizon. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Austin, M., “The Indivisible Utility.” Survey 55 (1 December 1925), pp. 301-306, 327. Austin, M., 2003. The Land of Journey’s Ending. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Austin, M., “Regional Culture in the Southwest.” Southwest Review 14 (July 1929a), pp. 474-477. Austin, M., “Why Americanize the Indian.” Forum 82 (September 1929b), pp. 167-173. Buell, L., 1995. The Environmental Imagination. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Dewey, J., 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. Fink, A., 1983. I-Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Graulich, M., 1999. Introduction. Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin. Graulich M. & E.Klimasmith (eds.). Reno: University of Nevada Press. Graulich M., 2003. “Introduction: Until Tomorrow—Journey’s Ending and Beginning.” The Land of Journey’s Ending by Mary Austin. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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ARS AETERNA Hall, J. D., 1987. “Mary Hunter Austin.” In: Taylor, J.G. (ed.). A Literary History of the American. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, pp. 359-369. Harwell, A.B., 1992. “Writing the Wilderness: A Study of Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin.” Diss. U of Tennessee . Lowe, C. “Where the Country of Lost Borders Meets Jeffers Country: The Walking Women of Robinson Jeffers and Mary Austin.” Jeffers Studies 4.4 (Fall 2000), pp. 21-46. O’Grady, J. P., 1993. Pilgrims to the Wild: Everett Ruess, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Pearce, T. M., 1965. Mary Hunter Austin. New York: Twayne Publishers. Rudnick, L.P., 1987. “Re-Naming the Land: Anglo Expatriate Women in the Southwest.” In: Norwood, V. & J. Monk (eds.). The Desert Is No Lady. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schaefer, H., 2004. Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Relections on Gender, Genre and Geography. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press. Zwinger, A. H., 1994. Introduction. Writing the Western Landscape. By Mary Austin and John Muir. Boston: Beacon Press, pp. vii-xxvi.

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Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

“The Dangers of Foreign Smells”: Olfaction and Immigrant Mobilities in Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran Marzena Kubisz Marzena Kubisz is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Silesia, Poland where she teaches British cultural studies and contemporary British literature. Her research interests include sociology of the body, theories of space, food in culture and contemporary British fiction. She is the author of Strategies of Resistance. Body, Identity and Representation in Western Culture (2003). She is currently working on representations of speed and slowness in contemporary culture.

Abstract: “The Dangers of Foreign Smells”: Olfaction and Immigrant Mobilities in Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran” explores the issue of multiculturalism from the perspective of the role food plays in the (re)construction of the meaning of place and cross-cultural communication. Based on a sociological study of mobility carried out by Tim Creswell and John Urry on one hand and a sociological study of senses by Anthony Synodd, the article seeks to examine multiculturalism in terms of the diference between “sensory worlds:” such an interpretation of cross-cultural encounter makes it possible to map the space of culinary experience as a significant site of gradual domestication of cultural otherness.

In The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon there is a passage in which changes in London in the 1950s are described from the perspective of culinary taste: “Before Jamaicans start to invade Brit’n, it was a hell of a thing to pick up a piece of saltfish anywhere, or to get thing like pepper sauce or dasheen or even garlic. […] But now, papa! Shop all start to take in stocks of foodstuf what West Indians like, and today is no trouble at all to get saltfish and rice.” (Selvon, 2004, pp. 7677) What the above words highlight, though they do it neither explicitly nor ostentatiously, is the variety of ways in which any cross-cultural encounter can afect an identity of an individual as well as the physical landscape of the city, town and village. In light of Selvon’s description of London the realm of culinary

practices emerges as a significant site of gradual domestication of cultural otherness. Food consumption is a social event the character of which is defined by the presence (or absence) of others. The act of taking Holy Communion is a symbolic representation of an encounter between God and man. In times when the word “encounter” is almost always preceded by an adjective “cross-cultural” food turns out to be a metaphor of an encounter between cultures and that is why Sarah Gibson may be right when she says that “food is good to think mobilities with.” (2007, p. 5) When in 2001 Robin Cook, the (then) British Foreign Secretary, was saying that tikka masala is a “true British national dish”(Yousaf, 2002, p. 27) he was actually proving she 35

ARS AETERNA is right as “[t]he food we think of as characterising a particular place always tells stories of movement and mixing.” (Bell & Valentine quoted by Gibson, 2007, p. 14) London’s story of movement and mixing is told not only by writers such as Sam Selvon, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith or literary critics such as James Procter (Dwelling Places. Postwar black British writing) or Sukhdev Sandhu (London Calling. How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City). It is also told by the menu and the shelves of local groceries. The symbolic potential of food as metaphor has been actively used by many novelists; it is a traditional connection between women and food that is behind the fact that among writers who incorporate the issues of food preparation as well as consumption and nourishment into the worlds of their literary imagination women novelists constitute a significant group. The Mistress of Spices (1997) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Interpreter of Maladies (1999) by Jhumpa Lahiri or Fasting, Feasting by Anity Desai belong to the stream of contemporary fiction which deals, both explicitly and implicitly, with a culinary aspect of cross-cultural encounters showing that food is always at the heart of culture. “Food and what counts as food is a signifier of belonging, cultural identity and home” says Gibson in her analysis of eating on the move, while Marsha Mehran, a Teheran-born novelist now living in Ireland, creates a literary illustration of this claim in her debut novel Pomegranate Soup (2005). This is a story of three sisters who escape Iran to eventually find shelter in the little Irish town of Ballinacroagh where they serve traditional 36

Persian food in a newly opened Babylon Café. This is a story about cultural confrontation and transformation it brings. Ballinacroagh is neither London nor Dublin. It is none of these big cities where anonimity rules and where a hectic rhythm of everyday life is moulded by “people of extraordinarily diferent tastes and backgrounds” who “jostle against each other” (Sandhu, 2003, p. 246) thus generating urban energy of diversity. In the novel the town becomes a space of the first encounter: it is here that anxieties and concerns caused by a disturbing presence of the Other pierce the surface of neighbourhood politeness and reveal a source from which they often stem. Small towns and suburbia always decry change and mobility while they dream about security, safety and endurance. Ballinacroagh is “the sleepy seaside town” (Mehran, 2006, p. 1) whose inhabitants form a real community whose stability is believed to be based on the controlling power of the gaze. Constant monitoring of all forms of social acitivity seems to be a strategy most eager inhabitants of the town employ to resist chaos, disorder and anarchy of social misbehaviour, cultural otherness being one of them. “Mutual watching” (Bauman, 1987, p. 39) in a small town communities is a tool of discipline and control. In Pomegrante Soup the controlling power of the gaze is embodied by Dervla Quigley, “a proud Ballinacroagh native through and through,” who “at most times of the day – except during six o’clock Mass – […] could be found spying out of her bedroom windows,” (Mehran, 2006, p. 35) a self-acclaimed gurdian of the social order whose shoulders have to

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 carry the burden of responsibility for the perseverance and maintenance of the values of the place: “If she wasn’t around to look after things, just imagine what sort of scum could come cruising down her beloved Main Mall!” (Ibid., p. 38) The language of hostility and fear Dervla speaks is translated symbolically to the language of physiology when “[a] th the height of her autumn years, and without warning, Derval Quigley had been stricken with a terrifying incontinence, an embarassing bladder problem that left her housebound and dependent on her long-sufering sister.” (Ibid., p. 36) Unable to move, she is on a permanent watch. It is her beloved street, it is her place that she has to protect from what creates most dangerous form of threat: those on the move. Dervla Quigley is not only the embodiment of the controlling power of the gaze; she is also the embodiment of the essence of what Tim Creswell describes as “a sedentarist metaphysics” at the heart of which is the representation of mobility and displacement as pathology, “a disorder in the system, a thing to control.” (Creswell, 2006, p. 26) What remains central for a sedentarist metaphysics is the “valorization of place” (Ibid., p. 31) which prioritizes the sense of being rooted in a place since a place is “seen as a moral world, as an insurer of authentic existence and as a center of meaning for people.” (Tuan referred to by Tim Creswell, p. 30) For Dervla Quigley an unchanging character of life in Ballinacroagh is an emblem of security which creates a stable vantage point from which to look upon the world. It is the stability of the place, this “center of meaning and field of care” (Creswell,

2006, p. 31) that Dervla Quigley seeks to secure through “spying out of her bedroom window.” From the perspective of a sedentarist metaphysics mobility tends to deconstruct and dismantle meticulously erected structures of social order and cultural continuity. Being on the move suggests inability or unwillingness to grow roots and the sense of atachement and commitemment which are seen as indispensable for the development of culture. The fear aroused by a mobile Other stems from the fear of the loss of the meaning of the place as “mobility is suspicious because it threatens the quite explicit moral character of place – threatening to undo it.” (Ibid., p. 33) The Irish travellers who arrived at Ballinacroagh are seen by Dervla as “[d]irty, disgusting things” (Mehran, 2006, p. 38) and as such require an immediate response in the form of a telephone call to the town council office. They are the scum who, she believes, bring with them the germs of placelesness; their lack of attachement is the factory farm for chaos and pathology. Like minstrels, crusaders and Jews during the Middle Ages they are “unattached individuals.”(Mumford, 1961, p. 269) In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T.S Eliot, whose work Creswell rereads from the perspective of the praise of sedentarism (2006, pp.32-33), sketches a disturbing picture of the world to come in which the rise of universal education is going to “lower […] our standards” and open the gates of Culture to the “barbarian nomads of the future […] in mechanised caravans.” (Eliot, 1948, p. 108) When the three sisters arrive at Ballinacroagh to Dervla they are nothing 37

ARS AETERNA else but the “heathen hippie[s]” (Mehran, 2006, p. 39) who move around in a “mechanised caravan” which, as Dervla knows for sure, is the site of “lewd animal acts and drug use.” (Ibid.) Resorting to a stereotyped image of the Other – in this case this is a stereotype of a hippie as she believes the three sisters to be members of the Flower Power Movement – is an ordering strategy which Dervla vigorously adopts in her attempt to come to terms with novelty and diversity of reality. Stereotypes ofer her a ready-made knowledge which grant her exemption from a burdensome efort of immediate encounter and participation. Being “a particular form […] of the wider process by which any human society, and individuals within it, make sense of that society through generalities, patternings and ‘typifications’” (Dyer, 1993, p. 12) stereotypes arm an individual with absolutness of conviction and ofer a way to validate one’s believes since they are said to be shared by all members of a society. The three Amnipur sisters are neither “heathen hippies” nor “barbarian nomads in mechanised caravans.” Having been brutally deprived of the roots by the Iranian regime they look for a safe place to stay. The paradox is that when viewed from the perspective of metaphysics of sedentarism they pose a threat to the stability of the place while what they desire most is the sense of security a place ofers. They are looking for home and for the conditions in which they would be able to reconstruct, at least partially, the sense of belonging. Suprisingly enough, they seem to have a lot in common with Dervla Quigley, for whom continuity is 38

a supreme value. Nevertheless, what is seen at the surface is that their worlds are informed by diferent types of metaphysics of mobility which are apparently incompatible. The Amnipour sisters are political refugees and migrants and their life experience, though they seek roots and stability, is permeated by a nomadic metaphysics, which as Creswell says, rethinks mobility in terms of progress and freedom. (Creswell, 2006, p. 43) Deterritorialization of the lives of immigrants challenges hegemonic cultural practices: the sisters become the symbols of the change in the way we think about culture. Culture is no longer seen as a sedentary thing whose endurance depends upon tradition, roots and fixity of values. It is a certain shape-shifitng and transformation that is nowadays at the bottom of our understanding of what culture is. Eliot’s stress upon stability and continuity as indispensable conditions for the growth of culture is now dismissed as it is mobility that has become a defining feature of modernity. Dislocation, displacement, migration are all dynamic processes which have recently become “central to critiques of the bounded and static categories of nation, ethnicity, community and state […]”(Urry, 2007, p. 34) and as such emerge as central for redefinition of mechanisms of cultural production. For Dervla Quigley the arrival of the Amnipour sisters to her Ballinacroagh is a challenge as she is forced to confront the lived experience of three exiles who become her neighbours, which enforces upon her the acknowledgement of the fact that “[m]obile lives need nomad thought to make a new kind of sense.”

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 (Creswell, 2006, p. 44) This making of a “new kind of sense” is slow and often happens to be uncomfortable because it endangers well-known and secure paths of cognition, nevertheless it is inevitable in the world in which mobility is recognised as one of the main markers of our time (Ibid.). What we witness in Ballinacroagh is the process of becoming: it is the New that is becoming in front of our eyes. In Mehran’s novel tradition is confronted by novelty. The confrontation is “played out” by means of food the three sisters cook and sell in their restaurant. The symbolic dimension of food preparation and food consumption serves as an illustration of the process of transformation, while the evolution of the taste of the inhabitants of Ballinacroagh is indicative of the change they all undergo. It all starts with the smell. When before the great opening of the restaurant the sisters start preparing food in their kitchen and the smell of cooking reaches Dervla Quigley, she already knows that something has changed: Yes, a nasty reek of foreigness was definitely in the air. It was diferent to the smell she remembered coming from Papa’s Pastries all those years ago. She recognised the same unyielding yeasty scent of rising bread and perky almond intonations, but there was also a vast and unexpected array of undertones she could not name. The wicked, tingling sensation taunted Dervla’s sense of decency, laughing at her as if it knew her deep, datk secrets; as though it had heard all about her dead husband’s wanton ways. (Mehran, 2006, p. 40) Dervla Quigley is not the only inhabit-

ant of the town who feels threatend and confused by the smells coming from behind the door of the old Papa Pastries, an Italian bakery now turned into a Persian restaurant. Thomas McQuire, a local businessmen, is hit by the smell whose “spicy, sinful intonatons reeked of an unknown evil; a godforsaken foreigness that set of alarm bells” in his head and “froze him to his spot.” (Ibid., p. 3-4) In culture whose character is defined by the hegemony of sight the symbolic dimension of the smell is often overlooked regardless of its “powerful social and economic significance.” (Synott, 1997, p. 182) In Pomegrante Soup the smell becomes a mediator of social interaction and it leads to an “olfactory ‘consumption’ of the other.”(Ibid., p. 183) The Italian smell of Papa’s Pastries had already been “tamed” and turned into an integral element of the cultural landscape of Ballinacroagh. The smells the three sisters produce in their kitchen expose the inhabitants of the town to novelty which they “could not name.” Inability to find proper words to describe an array of disturbing smells and the reaction this fact produces point at the role the smell plays in “our moral construction of reality and our construction of moral reality.” (Ibid., p. 190) Unable to cope with the unknown smells, both Dervla and Thomas perform an act of conversion in which physical sensations are transformed into symbolic evaluation and the foreign smells are identified as dangerous. Their reactions to the exotic smells are indicative of the fact that the Amnipour sisters and the inhabitants of the Irish town “inhabit different sensory worlds.” (Hall quoted by Synott, 1997, p. 193) The power of the 39

ARS AETERNA exotic smell turns out to be transgressive when it starts to permeate the familiar smell of the Irishness and when it puts both Dervla and Thomas in a position in which the encounter with the otherness cannot be avoided. “Olfactory intolerance” (Urry, 2000, p. 98) reinforces racial and cultural differences. The foreign smells speak of change and diversity; they are dangerous because they have a power to destabilize a moral construction of reality. The convention of magical realism allows Merhan to show how under the influence of unknown smells and the taste of unknown food people undergo transformations: they rediscover their own dreams, they find their lost selves and they prepare themselves for an inevitable moment of change. When Thomas McQuire talks about “the dangers of foreign smells” (Mehran, 2006, p. 207) he reveals the subversive potential of the smell. From the perspective of sedentarist metaphysics, the foreign smell is negatively coded because it becomes a symbol of displacement and uprootedness, a harbinger of change. In light of the above a change of food habits may be seen as an indication of social and cultural change. The success of Babilon Café helps to tame the fear of the unknown and to arouse curiosity about the exotic. It is the foreign smell that introduces Ballinacroagh to the world of mobility and globalization. A consumerist imperative to try new things is capable of overshadowing established conventions and traditonal practices while awakening curiosity which helps to come to terms with novelty. The Amnipour sisters awaken new desires on 40

the part of the inhabitants of the town and thus become envolved in the reproduction of cultural meanings. The sisters’ participation in the process of cultural production makes us rethink the representation of two metaphysics – a metaphysisc of sedentarism and metaphysics of nomadism – as mutually exclusive. On the basis of Creswell’s analysis, which he concludes in the subchapter entitled “Conclusions: Mobility Against Place,” it seems to be evident that the reconciliation of two perspectives seems hardly possible. Nonetheless, the way the Amnipour sisters influence Ballinacroagh and the way the towns afects their lives reveal mechanisms of cultural reciprocity and exchange. Mobility does not have to be seen in terms of a threat to a spatial order of a place. “All societies need to have relatively stable boundaries and categories, but this stability can be achieved within a context that recognizes the relativity and uncertainty of concepts” says Richard Dyer and points at the fact that the categories of boundaries and opennes are not mutually exclusive much in the same way in which stability and relativity do not exclude one another. “People in this world don’t know how other people does afect their lives” (Selvon, 2004, p. 76) writes Sam Selvon. In its most extreme form the change is brough by revolutions, wars and conquests. It is also brought by the taste of cardamon seeds and the smell of baklava which a culinary alchemy of change empowers with the gift of relativizations of concepts and categories whose fixity is often in the way of cross-cultural encounters and communication. That is

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 why it is the pomegranate, this “flower of fertility, of new things to come and old seasons to cradle” (Mehran, 2006, p. 39) that becomes a symbol of “the new kind of sense” constructed in Ballinacroagh. It is no longer tradition versus novelty nor mobility against place: this time it is a cultural reciprocity that informs the

quality of change. Marsha Mehran has no doubts as to what is the outcome of the alliance between tradition and novelty and mobility and place: it is “that particular sweetness” which is brought by “[t]he myriad seedlings that could only, really, be the flower of new beginnings.” (Ibid., p. 363)

Works cited: Bauman, Z., 1987. Legislators and Interpreters. Oxford: Polity Press. Bell, D. & G. Valentine, 1997. Consuming Geographies. London: Routledge. Creswell, T., 2006. On the Move. Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York London: Routledge. Dyer, R., 1993. The Matters of Images. Essays on representation. London/New York: Routledge. Eliot , T.S, 1948. Notes Towards the Deinition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber. Gibson, S.: “Food Mobilities: Travelling, Dwelling, and Eating Cultures” In: Space and Culture, vol.10, no 1, February 2007 Mehran, M., 2006. Pomegranate Soup. London: Arrow Books. Mumford, L., 1961. The City in History. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Sandhu, S., 2003. London Calling. How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City London: HarperCollinsPublisshers. Selvon, S., 2004. The Lonely Londoners. Harlow: Longman. Synott, A., 1997. The Body Social. Symbolism, Self and Society. London: Routledge. Tuan, Y., 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press. Urry, J., 2000. Sociology beyond Societies. Mobilities for the twenty-irst century. London/New York: Routledge. Urry, J., 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Yousaf, N., 2002: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. New York/London: Continum.

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Rushdie’s Claim For Hybridity In His Non-Fiction Works Titus Pop Titus Pop works at Partium Christian University in Oradea, Romania.

Abstract: The content of this paper is a detailed presentation of Rushdie’s lifelong claim for a hybrid world in his non-fiction work. His non-fictional works, Imaginary Homelands and his more recent essay collection Step Across This Line ofer enough evidence that Rushdie’s lifelong preoccupation is an endless claim for a frontierless, hybrid world. The first non-fiction volume, Imaginary Homelands, brings many of the essays he wrote between 1981-1991 together with the several major statements he has written in the wake of The Satanic Verses to form an extraordinary intellectual autobiography. The deliberately hybrid, mongrel, multireferential nature of the literary and experiential inheritance that Rushdie claims, not just from East and West but from all corners of the world, is an exciting guide for detecting literary footprints in his work but obstructs any attempt to define a national or literary influence for it. Rushdie, whose entire career is based on the questioning of historical givens and beliefs, uses the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of rootlessness and hybridity. His claim for hybridity is even more nuanced in his latest volume of essays entitled Step Across this Line. There are speeches, columns, letters that use a hard-won authority to denounce repression, censorship, fanaticism and, more shakily, religion of all kinds. His fight against fundamentalism and for freedom of expression is a recurrent theme and it is clearly articulated in many essays. Over the course of the collection, Rushdie is a Muslim, Indian, New Yorker, Briton, European, American, trans-nationalist, post-nationalist, internationalist, immigrant and exile.

Salman Rushdie’s non-fictional works, Imaginary Homelands and his more recent essay collection Step Across This Line ofer enough evidence that Rushdie’s lifelong preoccupation is an endless claim for a frontierless, hybrid world. Even before The Satanic Verses provoked international controversy, Rushdie had established himself as one of the most important writers in contemporary Britain. His second novel, Midnight’s Children (1980), was awarded the prestigious Booker prize; his third, Shame (1983), was also highly praised. Throughout the 1980s, Rushdie also wrote journal articles and essays, 42

eloquently and often- about the politics of religion and race in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Indira Gandhi’s India, and Zia ul-Haq’s Pakistan; about writers and books from India and Pakistan, Africa, Britain, Europe, South America, and the United States; about the vocation of the writer and the powers of literature, the potential of the imagination and the dangers of censorship; and, repeatedly, about migration as the archetypal experience of the twentieth century. In his journal articles such as “The New Empire within Britain,” “She [Margaret Thatcher] Has Persuaded the Nation That Everything Which Goes Wrong Is

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 an Act of God,” and “The Council [subsidized] Housing That Kills,” he is clearly concerned with contemporary political issues in Britain such as the problems faced by new immigrants from Commonwealth countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean or by the poor in general who must rely on subsidized housing. Other articles comprise more or less literary, political or religious issues but they are all pervaded by a sense of irony so peculiar to Rushdie. His main non-fiction work consists of three volumes of essay and journal collections and travel writings: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands and Step Across This Line. The Jaguar Smile was published in 1987 and it was written when Rushdie took a break from writing The Satanic Verses the year before and visited Nicaragua as a guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. This visit took place shortly after “the International Court of Justice in the Hague had ruled that US aid to la Contra, the counterrevolutionary army the CIA had invented, assembled, organized, and armed, was in violation of international law. Rushdie is quite severe in his criticism of his hosts over the closure of the opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and is not by any means ready to accept, either face to face or in his subsequent written account, all the justifications they put forward for that and other questionable policies. He is honest, too, about how badly served Nicaraguans are by their government-controlled media and consequently how ill-informed they are about the rest of the world. He reports that, listening to him and a visiting Russian novelist discuss Soljenitzyn’s The

Gulag Archipelago, Nicaraguan writers present were incredulous at what they were hearing. ‘How could such things be’ they asked. (Rushdie, 2000, p. 99) Nevertheless, as one born in a nation that had thrown of the British yoke, Rushdie’s natural sympathies lay with the Nicaraguans. He found that he actually liked and admired the members of the government he met as human beings. “For the first time in my life,” he writes, “I realized with surprise, I had come across a government I could support, not faute de mieux, but because I wanted its eforts (at survival, at building the nation, and at transforming it) to succeed” (70). Imaginary Homelands brings many of the essays he wrote between 19811991 together with the several major statements he has written in the wake of The Satanic Verses to form an extraordinary intellectual autobiography. There are those who find--in his wealthy middle-class Indian family background, his upper-class English education, his very English accent, and even his pale skin--too many barriers to his really understanding or representing the underprivileged, whether from the third or the first world .In between, as this thick book reveals, Rushdie’s pen almost never ceased its frenetic scribbling. His thoughts meandered widely: from migration, religion, esteemed colleagues, travel, India, Pakistan, England, the United States, racism, gambling, and film. The themes he explores in his novels also manifest themselves throughout this book’s twelve sections. The deliberately hybrid, mongrel, multireferential nature of the liter43

ARS AETERNA ary and experiential inheritance that Rushdie claims, not just from East and West but from all corners of the world, is an exciting guide for detecting literary footprints in his work, but obstructs any attempt to define a national or literary influence for it. Rushdie himself is scarcely any help. In the title essay -”Imaginary Homelands,” he suggests that migrancy, either as a literal or literary (imaginative) experience, has marked writers as diverse as Borges, Heinrich Boll, Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, and Machado de Assis. Unarguable as the list is, it becomes disturbing when Rushdie claims similar experiences of displacement and minority status, thus losing the political charge and demographic scale that marks twentiethcentury migration from the periphery to the metropolitan world: Let me suggest that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Rammohun Roy. America, a nation of immigrants, has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation.... it may be that by discovering what we have in common with those who preceded us into this country, we can do the same. (1991, p. 20) Migration—losing one country, language, and culture and finding oneself 44

forced to come to terms with another place, another way of speaking and thinking, another view of reality—is Rushdie’s great theme. Metamorphosis is its metaphor. And reflections on migration and metamorphosis permeate these essays as thoroughly as embodiments of them populate his novels, making many of these pieces essential statements about contemporary urban society’s conflicts. The troublesome issue of race in immigration has been elided entirely by Rushdie in this ode to the pleasures of migrancy. The “freedoms of the literary migrant,” (Ibid., p. 21) as he calls them later in the same essay, scarcely include defining the process of race relations in Britain as a matter of cultural transplantation or the discovery of common cause between an Indian grocer and long-dead lights of English literature. What Rushdie is doing is arrogating to himself a cultural tradition based on an elite education system, both in Britain and India, and using this tradition to speak prescriptively for a very diverse set of people. Even if one discounts some of his pronouncements as so much rhetorical pomposity, it is not untroubling when he compares his situation to Western writers who have been “eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form ... raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Philippines,” and insists that “we must grant ourselves an equal freedom” (20). It is surely no news to Rushdie that artistic eclecticism, as he chooses to call it, was also related to the “raiding” of colonies by Western countries. In this case, the concept of “equal freedom” is not just ideologically repul-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 sive but impossible. While the implicit point of Rushdie’s argument here is the justifiable claim that writers should not have to be held to any literal accounting of national origins and traditions, and that a diverse set of influences shapes a postcolonial writer’s imagination, this argument elides the diferences between migrants. Rushdie, whose entire career is based on the questioning of historical givens and beliefs, invokes the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of rootlessness and hybridity. The book’s title essay discusses exile from country and culture and the alienation of the dislocated writer. The past remains elusive enough, never mind the half-remembered mores and social codes of one’s lost homeland. These themes remain fundamental to Rushdie’s work. After excoriating the murder of Indira Gandhi, adumbrating the Nehru-Gandhi “dynasty”, the discussion moves, briefly, to pros and cons of Pakistan. Resurgence of British imperialist ideology during the Thatcher years disturbs Rushdie in the scathing “Outside the Whale” and “Attenborough’s Gandhi.” On similar lines, “The New Empire Within Britain,” apparently a transcript of a widely distributed videotape, deconstructs British racism (p. 127). The bulk of the book comprises numerous literary reviews, most of which run between two to five pages. While streaming through these, readers will learn that Rushdie appreciates, among other things, Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day,” Calvino’s work in general, Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and Pynchon’s “Vineland.” Also, perhaps more

interestingly, readers will discover that Rushdie was not particularly impressed by Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, Vargas Llosa’s “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta,” Vonnegut’s “Hocus Pocus,” and Naipaul’s “Among the Believers.” The reviews read quickly, but the longer essays require more concentration. One of these, “In God We Trust,” examines voluminous topics, including the religious versus the nationalistic atmosphere of 1990, the emergence of “reality” from imagination, and the creeping malaise of the United States When reading the collection, what one may efortlessly notice is Rushdie’s frequent and recurring claim for multiculturalism and plurality. Thus, in his third essay called ‘The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987, he asserts his view on ideology. Vehemently opposing the ideologies of communalities that dominated the political scene in India after Independence, a position he first nuanced in his masterpiece The Midnight’s Children, he writes:’ My India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity, ideas to which the ideologies of the communalities are diametrically opposed (p. 32). Later, when commenting on the ill-fated Indira Ghandhi, who had been butchered in 1984 by a fundamentalist, he reiterated his view: a nation of seven hundred millions to make any kind of sense must base itself firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance of devolution and decentralization wherever possible. There can be no one way-religious, cultural or linguistic-of being an Indian. Let diference reign. (p. 44) 45

ARS AETERNA In another essay entitled ‘Commonwealth Literature does not exist’ where he arguably opposes the label ‘commonwealth literature’ given to postcolonial literature by the ‘Orientalist’ scholars, Rushdie pleads for the need for the preeminence of hybridity over purity. After rejecting the so-called ‘authenticity’ plea required by the school of ‘commonwealth literature’, considering the quest for national authenticity as rather belonging to religious extremists, he calls for an eclectic cultural enterprise by bringing as an argument in favor of his claim the Indian culture which is a mixed culture: A mélange of elements as disparate as ancient Mughal and contemporary Coca-Cola American. To say nothing of Muslim, Bhudist, Jain, Christian, Jewish, French, Portuguese, Marxist, Maoist, Trotskiist,, Vietnamese, Capitalist, and of course Hindu elements. Eclecticism, the ability to take from the world what seems fitting and to leave the rest, has always been a hallmark of the Indian tradition, and today it is at the centre of the best work being done both in the visual arts and in literature. Yes, eclecticism is not a really nice word in the lexicon of ‘commonwealth literature’. So the reality of the mixed tradition is replaced by the fantasy of purity (p. 67). Arguably, the book’s most memorable piece, the one that will stick to people’s psyches, is “In Good Faith.” In almost twenty pages, the author defends The Satanic Verses against charges of insolence, literary brutality, and heresy Rushdie’s claim for pluralism and hybridity is even more nuanced in his latest volume of essays entitled Step Across 46

this Line .The range of topics covered in these essays, reviews, lectures, and meditations impresses us with the breadth of Rushdie’s knowledge: he moves with ease from contemporary Lebanese novelists to sixteenth-century Indian epic literature, from Vaclav Havel to Bob Dylan. The exuberance with which he engages every topic attests to the wonders he can accomplish with his prose. Rushdie deserves a place alongside Nabokov and Joyce as a pyrotechnic master of twentieth-century English, and one who happily cannonades through many of these pieces. But his gifted prose is, unfortunately, also his curse. Rushdie is a paragon of the postmodern mindset; as engaged by Dorothy in Oz as by the destruction in 9/11, he is willing and able to pass between cultural registers and diverse subjects with an insouciant disregard for the relative value of the insights ofered, the consistency of his arguments, or the durability of his commitments. There are speeches, columns, letters that use a hard-won authority to denounce repression, censorship, fanaticism and, more shakily, religion of all kinds. There are accounts of his life in hiding; also gratitude for Britain’s protection uncomfortably juxtaposed with indignation at her caution in speaking out for him. Rushdie begins this second collection with a brilliant thirty-page take on The Wizard of Oz -”that great rarity, a film that improves on the good book from which it came”, a film “whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults”(2002:4). This is followed by nearly seventy shorter essays on subjects as diverse as censorship, pho-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 tography, rock music, leavened bread and adapting for film. The first section ends with “A Dream of Glorious Return”, a diary of his June 2000 visit to India with his son: ‘This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never really leave.’(p. 226) The dialectic home and away, a recurrent theme in his writing appears once again in the very first essay from the volume called ‘Out of Kansas’ and which is an impressive comment on the film The Wizard of Oz, a film which deeply impressed Rushdie: Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’s notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sickly-sweet as an embroidered sampler-East, West, home’s best-would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice, as her face tilts up towards the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is the tension between these two dreams (p. 14). On the whole, this essay is a charming meditation on ‘’The Wizard of Oz,’’ which the author regards as a movie about the joys of going away, of ‘leaving the grayness and entering the color. (15) In Dorothy and The Wizard he sees the condition if the immigrant: These two immigrants, Dorothy and the Wizard have adopted opposite strategies of survival in the new strange land. Dorothy has been unfailingly polite,

careful, courteously ‘small and meek’; whereas the Wizard has been fire and smoke, bravado and bombast, and has hustled his way to the top-floated there, so to speak on a current of his own hot air. But Dorothy learns that meekness isn’t enough, and the Wizard-as his balloon gets the better of him for a second time-that his command of hot air isn’t all it should be. It’s hard for a migrant like me not to see in these shifting destinies a parable of the migrant condition. (p. 30) Later on, in the same essay, when mentioning the crowning of Dorothy and her becoming actual from imaginary, Rushdie draws a parallel between Oz and his dream world: So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make up our lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home’ but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, of the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place which we began.(p. 33) In other essays, he is preoccupied with the contemporary polemics between the Eurocentrist literary scholars and the defenders of marginality. An interesting standpoint is exposed, in my view, in the essay called ‘In Defence Of The Novel’ where he answers to George Steiner who ,by reiterating Barthes thesis on the death of the novel, criticizes the contemporary novel calling it 47

ARS AETERNA ‘crassly fact|fiction’(p. 54) After quoting Steiner who said that ‘it is most axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America’(p. 56), Rushdie vehemently attacks Steiner ‘s thesis and celebrates the postcolonial, cross-cultural fiction: What does it matter where the great novels come from, as long as they keep coming? What is this flat earth on which the good Professor lives, with the jaded Romans at the centre and frightfully gifted Hottentots and Anthropophagi lurking at the edges? The map of Prof. Steiner is an imperial map, and Europe’s empires are long gone. The half-century whose literary output proves, for Steiner , the novel’s decline is also the first half-century of the post-colonial period. Might it not simply be that a new novel is emerging, a post-colonial novel, a decentred, transnational, inter-lingual, cross-cultural novel; and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation on the contemporary novel’s health than Prof. Steiner’s somewhat patronizingly Hegelian view.(57) Rushdie defends the contemporary novel and celebrates its cross-cultural hybrid form: ’There is, in my view, no crisis in the art of the novel (…) It is part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional. It crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries.’(58) However, he agrees with Steiner on two issues. Noticing that ‘many good writers have blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction’ (p. 58) he exemplifies his point with Milan Kundera, Paul Auster, Tom Wolfe or Ryszard Kapuscsinski. There is another 48

issue on which he agrees with Steinerthe publication and over-publication of everything which replaced the ability to distinguish quality books from bad writing. This approach is, in his view, ‘fabulously self-destructive’(p. 61) Here is his comment: Readers, unable to hack their way through the rain- forest of junk fiction, made cynical by the debased language of hyperbole with which every book is garlanded, give up. …Over-publishing and over-hyping creates under-reading. It is not just a question of too many novels actually chasing too few readers, but a question of too many novels actually chasing readers away.(p. 61) Commenting on the role of influence in literature, he highlights the ‘cultural cross-pollination without which literature becomes parochial and marginal’(76) He makes an impassioned and welcome plea for a return to judgment in evaluating novels and offers a solution to this crisis: ’What we need, however, is the best kind of editorial ruthlessness. We need a return to judgment (p. 61). The second section is a selection of Rushdie’s various statements on the fatwa and its consequences-his forced seclusion, the at times fatal violence directed towards translators and colleagues, the sour undercurrents in British sympathy towards his situation, his devotion to free speech at any cost. Rushdie is defiantly a secular humanist, convinced that religion’s only interest lies in a power-driven, ideological control of believers. Just as he did in Imaginary Homelands , he defends freedom of speech by supporting the literary fig-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 ures such as A.Miller , N.Gordimer, Coetzee or Edward Said. In an essay which was initially a celebration speech on Arthur Miller’s eightieth birthday, he gratifies Miller for supporting him during the fatwa years and highlights the need to re-imagine freedom: When Arthur Miller says that ’we must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially when a certain number of people are always afraid of it’, his words carry the weight of lived experience, of his own profound re-imaginings (p. 53) Moreover, he senses the greatest danger facing literature today-the attack on intellectual liberty. Resorting to Orwell who claimed that today the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions-‘theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism’ and ‘practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy’(Orwell qtd in Rushdie , 2002, p. 61), he writes: The pressures of monopoly and bureaucracy, of corporatism and conservatism, limiting and narrowing the range and quality of what gets published, are known to every working writer. Of the pressures of intolerance and censorship, I personally have in these past years gained perhaps too much knowledge. There are many such struggles taking place in the world today: in Algeria, in China, in Iran, in Turkey, in Egypt, in Nigeria, writers are being censored, harassed, jailed and even murdered. Even in Europe and the United States the stormtroopers of various ‘sensitivities’ seek to limit our freedom of speech. It has never been more important to continue to defend those values which make the art of literature possible (p. 62).

He praises transnational literature for its serving as a ‘means of holding a conversation with the world’ (p. 165) He brings evidence to support his point by considering some great literary names’ travels as essential in their writing style: James Joyce, Henry James, Samuel Becket, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin,Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas LLosa, Jorge louis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Muriel Spark, were or are wanderers, too. Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer’s home address. (p. 166)

In Notes On Writing And The Nation, Rushdie writes that ’good writing assumes a frontierless nation’ because ‘writers who serve frontiers have become border guards’ (p. 67). More than that he concludes :’The frontierless nation is nor a fantasy’(67) He also warns against the writers who write on behalf of a nation calling them ‘new behalfists’: ’Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. This is the New Behalfism….It is the murder of thought. Beware!’(p. 66) His fight against fundamentalism and for freedom of expression is a recurring theme and it is clearly articulated in many essays. The bulk of his claim against oppression of thought and free speech is hosted by the second part of the volume entitled ‘Messages from the Plague Years’ which is a collection of speeches and articles he wrote during the long campaign against his fatwa. In 49

ARS AETERNA these pieces Rushdie both directly campaigns against Khomeini’s fatwa (“the appalling Valentine I was sent in 1989”) (264), and writes eloquently on “a Sarajevo of the mind, an imagined Sarajevo whose present ruination and torment exiles us all”(p. 273). The first speech was delivered at the International Conference on Freedom of Expression in Washington DC in April 2002 and begins with a quoted passage from John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty which applies directly to the controversial novel. Stuart Mill clearly stated that ‘the evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity and the existing generation…of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth’(Mill qtd in Rushdie, 2002, p. 232) Rushdie associates his situation with the examples Mill provides, namely two cases of great figures accused of blasphemy and heresy-that of Jesus and Socrates. Rushdie adds to these two cases a third one, that of Galileo Galilei observing that the three men are, ‘as is plain to everyone, the founders of the philosophical, moral and scientific traditions of the West’ (p. 232) More than that, he logically infers that ‘blasphemy and heresy, far from being the greatest evils, are the methods by which human thought has made its most vital advances’ (p. 232) The speech concludes with an apology of freedom: Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence. Totalitarian societies seek to re50

place the many truths of freedom by the one truth of power, be it secular or religious; to halt the motion of society, to snuf out the spark. Unfreedom’s primary purpose is invariably to shackle the mind.The creative process is rather like the processes of a free society. (p.233)

Later on, by quoting Nasreem Rehman , Rushdie reiterated his appeal to judgement and calmness: ’we must stop thinking in binary, oppositional terms’ (p. 263) In the article ‘The last Hostage’ which is a part of his fatwa diary he calls free speech ‘life itself’(p. 242) In another speech he delivered at King’s College Chapel at Cambridge in 1993, after having been embraced by a Saudi Muslim who told him he had embraced him because he was ‘a free man’ , Rushdie, noticing the irony , remarks:’ He meant that freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, is that freedom which gives meaning to all the others’(p. 251) He takes a stand defending other oppressed writers. In a letter written in support of the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who has been labelled by many critics as ‘the female Rushdie’, Rushdie expresses his appreciation towards the Bengali culture, a culture whose main tenet is freedom of thought: Bengali culture-and I mean the culture of Bangladesh as well as Indian Bengalhas always prided itself on its openness, its freedom to think and argue, its intellectual disputatiousness, its lack of bigotry.(…)Bengalis have always understood that that free expression is not

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 only a Western value. It is one of their great treasures-the imagination and the word. (p. 277)

On the 24th of September 1998, Rushdie tells us, during the UN General Assembly in New York, the foreign ministers of UK and Iran issued a joint statement that efectively brought the fatwa to an end (p. 283). But, as he asks in the next section of these essays, “How can I explain to strangers my sense of violation? It’s as if men wielding clubs were to burst loudly into your home and lay it waste. They arrive when you’re making love, or standing naked in the shower, or sitting on the toilet, or staring in deep inward silence at the lines you’ve scrawled on a page. Never again will you kiss or bathe or write (…) without remembering this intrusion. And yet, to do these things pleasurably and well you must shut out the memory (p. 293).

The brief articles of the third section were syndicated columns in the New York Times. They engage with current issues: political, social and cultural and are, in my view, less relevant as far as Rushdie’s claim is concerned .Still, some of them bring evidence supporting the writer’s plea. A long final section comprising a recent lecture series at Yale displays the gravest and most eloquent writing in the book. ‘’Step Across This Line’’ , the title essay originally delivered as the 2002 Tanner Lecture at Yale University -- turns out to be a long, meandering meditation on the importance of

frontier-crossings in history and the arts. It encapsulates, in my opinion, Rushdie’ unitary vision – his claim for a borderless, hybrid and cross-cultural world. Over the course of the collection, Rushdie is a Muslim, Indian, New Yorker, Briton, European, American, trans-nationalist, post-nationalist, internationalist, immigrant and exile. In each case, he writes in the first-person plural. The theme-essay calls on artists to use their own weapons in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack and its seeming power to change our view of the world. ‘’Murder was not the point,’’(433) he writes. ‘’The creation of a meaning was the point.’’(433) And meaning is the artist’s province, exercised not through the current impulse for cautious muzzling but through a permanent tradition of transgression: The crossing of borders, of language, geography and culture; the examination of the permeable frontier between the universe of things and deeds and the universe of the imagination; the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world’s many diferent kinds of Thought Policemen. These matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circumstances of my life, rather than chosen by me for intellectual or ‘artistic’ reasons. (p. 434)

Freedom means freedom from any form of limitation on how we live in this world (or what we write about). Barriers are to be overcome, borders to be transgressed, rules broken, all in support of the sacrosanct notion of the 51

ARS AETERNA individual liberated from the tyranny of religious and political authority. The essay, which concludes with a plea that the West not become defensive and culturally cautious in the face of terrorist threats, makes a few interesting points, but on the whole, it recapitulates arguments about migration, exile and freedom that Rushdie has dome many times both in his fiction and non-fiction works. To conclude with, Step Across This Line is a celebration of migration, commingling, adaptation, hybridization, cultural mongrelization, issues of boundaries and transgression. ‘’There has never been a period in the history of the world when its peoples were so jumbled up,’’ he writes, adding: ‘’We are so thoroughly shuffled together, clubs among diamonds, hearts among spades, jokers everywhere, that we’re just going to have to live with it.’’(438) His relentless plea is for freedom of

speech, of thought because, as he boldly puts it, ‘Free people cross boundaries; they step across lines (p. 425). More than that, he even proposes a post-frontier thesis:

Time, perhaps , to propose a new thesis of the post-frontier: to assert that the emergence, in the age of mass migration, mass displacement, globalized finances and industries, of this new, permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times, and (…) explains our development as nothing else can (p. 425).

The thesis he proposes is a bridge and it is meant to close gap between opposing religious views, racial diferences and ideologies and to the provide new insights for better mutual understanding among people for, as he puts it, ‘to cross a frontier is to be transformed’ for the better (p. 411).

Works Cited Rushdie S., 1991. Imaginary Homelands, Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 London: Granta Books. Rushdie S., 1989. The Satanic Verses, London:Vintage. Rushdie S., 2002. Step Across This Line. Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002, London: Vintage. Rushdie S., 1981. Midnight’s Children. London: Granta.

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Exiles on the road: The role of cinematic journeys in the creation of new structures of belonging and cultural knowledge Tanja Franotović Tanja Franotović was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1980. After studying English and German Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, she earned a scholarship from the Bavarian Academic Centre for Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (“Bayhost”) to pursue her studies in Germany. She now holds a Masters degree in Literature and Media from Bayreuth University, where she graduated with a Masters thesis “Travel in Contemporary European Cinema: Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand Voyage (2004), Tony Gatlif’s Exiles (2004) and Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000)”. Her research interests include postmodern travel, migration and mobility in connection with cultural production and identity, European identity and contemporary European cinema. She currently lives and works in Zagreb on an EU project at the Croatian Ministry of the Interior as well as a freelance translator and interpreter.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of cinematic journeys in the construction of new identities and modes of relating to diference needed in the ongoing story of European integration and transition to a multiethnic and multicultural way of life. By taking a closer look at a recent example of diasporic filmmaking, Tony Gatlif’s film Exiles (2004), it focuses on the way narratives of displacement told by multicultural filmmakers depict experiences of exile, migration, diaspora and mobility, while at the same time questioning received notions about home, nation, identity and belonging. In its representation of transnational travel and protagonists who experience diferent kinds of mobility, the film interrogates travel as movement between home and away, showing how both entities are highly complex and disputed, rather than sites of fixed meanings. In addition, not only does the film foreground mobile individuals, but also the movement of sounds, images, languages and ideas across national borders. As such, it sheds light on the nature of global interconnectedness and flows, inviting us to reflect on the changing relationship to place and the nature of place-bound identities in our present stage of globalization. Finally, by creating a very personal journey with considerable autobiographic inscription, Gatlif creates a powerful cultural artefact resisting dominant forms of representation, relying on music and the trope of the road as his main discourses and vehicles of discovery.

In today’s globalized world mobility has become the order of the day. Mobility – understood as changing country, nationality, culture as well as one’s identity (Mazierska and Rascaroli, 2006, p. 1) lies at the core of social, economic and geopolitical transformations that took place in Europe in the last two decades. Whether

voluntarily or by force, people from outside and inside of Europe were set into motion, undermining the very idea of Europe as a continent of nation-states and creating the space for some new national and transnational identities to emerge. No other medium, however, can capture the issues of travel, mobility and 53

ARS AETERNA change as well as explore the ongoing European story of integration and identity negotiation as poignantly as film. Film and travel have in fact always been inextricably linked, each of them ofering opportunities for exploration, discovery, transformation and above all, crossing boundaries. More specifically, given their iconography and tropes of displacement, migration and quest as well as its episodic structure and ambiguous symbolism, cinematic journeys not only have the ability to interrogate key issues of our time, but also comment self-consciously upon their own role within them. In light of this immense potential of the medium, this paper seeks to examine how contemporary European cinema has imagined the experience of travel and displacement as well as the clash of diferent cultures and identities in new Europe, as reflected in Tony Gatlif’s Exiles (2004). However, rather than merely focusing on the filmic representation of diverse intercultural encounters taking place, my intention is to investigate the possible role of this cinematic journey in the creation of new identities and modes of being-with-difference needed in Europe’s transition to a multiethnic and multicultural way of life. What exactly would those new sensibilities be? Drawing on Europe’s waning cultural power in the rest of the world, Ien Ang in this sense calls for a cultural renewal in which Europe’s task would be to redefine itself as “particular rather than universal, as located rather than transcendental, specific rather than general” – in short, Europe has to learn how to “marginalize itself” so that Europeans can start relating to others in a more modest, dialogic way (1992, pp. 25, 29). Hence, if 54

a cultural renewal is to be achieved, then it is not through grand unifying narratives of European identity, but by telling smaller, more particular stories that open up a dialogue between the margins. In that context, the aim of this paper is to show how the narratives of displacement told by increasing numbers of exiles, expatriates and migrants represent the very opportunity for Europe’s new politics of identity, one which not only insists on difference and specificity but also on movement, articulation and syncretism. According to Stuart Hall, identity is never complete, is always in process and always constituted within, and not outside representation (Hall, 1990, p. 224). More specifically, this approach regards identity in terms of travel, as the intersection of various histories, journeys and encounters, produced through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth – in short, all the elements that cinematic narratives thrive on. Thus, as European cinema increasingly recognizes, the device of journey with its self-conscious portrayal of movement, change, and the transgression of frontier and frame provides a fitting approach for such an articulation of identity. In this scenario we can thus talk of the filmic image as the very site of identity production, and of cinema “not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak” (Hall, 1990, p. 237). In this paper I will argue that Gatlif’s Exiles (2004) ofers exactly such opportunities for the creation of new subjectivities and forms of cultural knowledge.

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Framing exile Exiles (2004), made by the French filmmaker of Algerian and Gypsy descent Tony Gatlif, adopts the traditional selfdiscovery road movie structure to explore the experience of individuals dislocated from their roots and celebrate life in perpetual motion. In this vibrant travelogue we follow two young Algerian-French lovers, Zano and Naima as they set of on a journey back to Algeria, the country of their ancestors. With apparently little money and lacking a consistent means of transportations, they sneak onto trains, trucks and boats, hitching rides, working where they can, and most often simply walking towards their exotic destination. Significantly, their unusual quest for roots and memories leading through Spanish countryside, Andalusia and Morocco is set against the backdrop of migratory flows to Europe: the fellow travellers they encounter along the way are all in search of a better future, which they hope to find in European metropolitan centres. With its destination, its episodic narrative structure, thematic focus on a counter-cultural couple who responds to the call of the road, with its exploration of cultural identity, and last but not least, evocative use of framing devices, landscape, vehicular perspective and music, Exiles schematically features a number of traits identified in the European road movie variant. However, what distinguishes Exiles from its generic precursors is the fact that it is not that much interested in a sustained narrative line and character development as much as immersing the viewer in the experience of being lost, rootless and uncertain about

one’s identity. Contrary to some of the voiced criticism, Exiles furthermore goes beyond merely portraying cultural difference via illuminating shots and forceful music sequences. In fact, I will argue that Exiles is a road movie stripped to its existential core, inaugurating movement as the key identity principle and mode of being in the world. Finally, the film is not only imbued with the nomadic consciousness characteristic of filmmaker’s life philosophy, but also with his personal experience of exile. By returning to Algiers Gatlif is also retracing his own family steps, revisiting the country of his origins after 43 years of exile. In this paper I will show how by turning to his individual experience shaped by exile, Gatlif has created “a third space of alterity, creativity and insights”, a phenomenon observed among many diasporic filmmakers (Naficy, 2001, p. 82). As Naficy in his comprehensive study of exilic and diasporic cinema Accented Cinema (2001) argued, although there is nothing common about experiences of exile and diaspora, films made by deterritorialized peoples nevertheless share certain features, and these mostly concern their specific modes of production and style. Rather than originating from the accented speech of the diegetic characters, the ‘accent’ of this cinema refers to its position in relation to the dominant cinema, thus signifying the displacement of the filmmakers and their artisanal production modes. In that regard, accented cinema is both “a cinema of exile and a cinema in exile”, as it concerns displaced filmmakers who are producing their 55

ARS AETERNA films in the interstices of cultures and cinematic production practices (Ibid., p. 8). For the analysis of Exiles I will focus on two of its major ‘accented’ features: the autobiographical inscription and the journey narrative. Authors can inscribe themselves into their films in many ways. First, on the level of production, often due to limited budget, independent filmmakers are forced to play various roles in their films, such as write their own script and often act in leading roles. The film Exiles follows this pattern. Tony Gatlif not only directed the film, but also wrote the script and composed the music, which, however, also enabled him to control the film’s vision and aesthetics. In that respect, we may regard Exiles as the performance of the identity of its maker, demonstrated mostly in his choice of mise-en-scène, filming style, themes, editing and music. Second, autobiography is a strong motif of the accented cinema, finding expression in narratives and iconographies of memory, desire, loss, longing and nostalgia. These narratives, however, are only significant insofar as they conjure something new in the very act of looking backward, turning exile into a form of cultural invention. In Exiles Gatlif embarked on a very personal homecoming journey. As he disclosed in an interview, the exile he experienced felt like a rupture, an amputation, forcing him to leave an incredible richness behind (quoted in theage. com.au, 2005) In that respect, Exiles represents not only an attempt to mend that breach and rediscover this richness through storytelling, but by doing so also produces ambiguity and doubt about the absolutes and received notions of home, 56

nation, identity and belonging. The film engages with the theme of exile and migration in multiple ways: through language, the significant importance assigned to music, and through the itineraries of the protagonists, which are presented to go against the flow of a large number of North Africans who are depicted heading for Europe. However, exile is not framed as a generalized condition of alienation and diference; all displaced people do not experience exile equally or uniformly. Thus, far from being a homogenous, unitary and monolithic concept, exile is represented as consisting of multiple variations: external and internal, forced and voluntary, and most importantly, it is freed from its referent – the absent home or the homeland. Originally denoting a strictly political expulsion and banishment from the homeland (Naficy 1999: 9), the form of exile that the film interrogates is a more nuanced, culturally driven displacement. Accordingly, each character in Exiles has a diferent story of exile to tell. As Gatlif explains in an interview, Zano and Naima on the one hand represent all the children of exile who do not know the country of their origins and which they decide to visit after the lapse of a certain period of time, unsure and anxious about what they are going to encounter there. On the other hand, their particular experiences of being both children of exile and, metaphorically speaking, in exile themselves – in terms of their relationship with their roots, the past and themselves – reveal the complex nature of exile in the present day. Hence, it is possible to be exiled in place, that is, to be at home and to

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 long for other places and other times. It is possible to be forced into external exile and be unable or unwilling to return. It is also possible to return and realize that one’s house is not the home that one had hoped for, idealized in the act of memory. Finally, it is possible to tran-

Mobility as form of resistance

sit back and forth – be a nomad and be in exile everywhere – the position that Gatlif personally finds most appealing, rejecting the idea of having a homeland and considering one culture as good as another. (quoted in theage.com.au, 2005)

In its interrogation of mobility into and out of Fortress Europe, the film Exiles primarily depicts the roads of marginality, that is to say, illegal routes and alternative roads through Europe, populated by characters who are all outsiders by the virtue of their mobility, whether exiles, modern nomads, itinerant groups such as Gypsies, illegal workers, immigrants, border crossers or refugees are involved. Gatlif furthermore constructs the road as an alternative space of transformative experiences. There is no more opposition between the centre and the periphery, as the characters move and interact within a transnational universe with no need of a centre. The movement is no longer one that begins with a liberating escape from a restrictive marginal environment and ends with a triumphant settling into whatever is perceived to be the socially or geographically desirable centre. The journey that the characters embark on is not just physical and territorial but also deeply psychological and philosophical: both Zano and Naima have a lot of personal baggage they are carrying with them, and facing up to who they are in a land where the language, customs and religion are alien to them is inevitably bound to be a tumultuous experience. Likewise, as it happens in most accented films, their journey is not sim-

ple or homogenous, but rather composite and evolutionary, entailing elements of homecoming, wandering, exploration, and most significantly, nomadism. Zano’s and Naima’s rejection of being bound and fixed is mostly emphasized by their style of travel, that is, their ‘travelling light’. As far as we can see, they never stop to consider that they have no money at all. While there is never any doubt that they will ultimately reach their destination, they just set out, primarily on foot, and instead of having a fixed itinerary, they let the road lead them, relying on the kindness of strangers. In as far as Zano and Naima dispense with the idea of a fixed home, and we are left to assume that they also avoid the sedentary authority of state and society, their variation of marginality does bear nomadic traits (Peters, 1999, p. 30). They definitely possess the capacity of feeling at ease in various unfamiliar situations, taking their home with them wherever they go. This is achieved primarily through music, which provides them with a site of dwelling and mediates their understanding of space. On the whole, their life philosophy could be described as ‘living one day at a time’, living in the continuous present with frightening intensity, or what Zygmunt Bauman (1996) has described as one of the key characteristics 57

ARS AETERNA of modern life strategy: “Not to get tied to the place (…) to forbid the past to bear on the present” (24). This attitude is further addressed through the character of Naima, who tries to sever the present from the past, finding enjoyment in sensual pleasures instead and experiencing things primarily through the body. For Naima, identity is there only to be played upon, performed, and eventually discarded. However, although her character seemingly celebrates the postmodern nomadism abdicating all responsibility and socio-historical situatedness, there is a latent dark undercurrent to her carelessness that becomes more and more apparent as they approach Algeria. In her darker moments, Naima is jaded, wanton, impenetrable and filled with self-loathing, driving herself into situations that hurt both herself and Zano. Hence, even the body that provides her with shelter bears painful scars and memories she will sooner or later have to account for. Likewise, the couple’s rejection of the idea of home is equally problematic. Even if the two characters do not dream of Algeria as their homeland, it is nevertheless a destination that holds a promise of a truer, more meaningful existence for both of them. In that sense, the idea of home and belonging – even if only imaginary and transitory – does represent a source of imaginative power for both. As much as from the point of view of sedentary society Zano and Naima may enjoy the freedom of nomads, their encounter with other itinerants such as illegal migrants and Gypsies forces us to reconsider and recontextualize their form of nomadism. Obviously, the free58

dom granted by the road radically difers among diferent groups of travellers. Not all characters share the same degree of mobility and their degrees of marginality also difer considerably. In that respect, although Gatlif certainly suggests that the experience of deterritorialization may serve as a binding factor across diferent nationalities, religions and cultures, he is nevertheless careful to distinguish the specificity of each experience of displacement. This diferentiation and careful socio-historical contextualization of each mode of mobility is primarily achieved by the film’s representation of space and place, and more specifically, suggestive framing devices. On this cross-cultural, two-way trek, the nomadic pair first meets an Algerian brother and sister, Leila and Habib, who left Algeria to study in Paris or Amsterdam. In order to finance their trip, they go from place to place, seeking work and living in destitution. When they hear of Zano and Naima’s plan to walk to Algiers, they burst laughing, not believing that anybody would want to leave Paris, the city of their hoped salvation. Although Gatlif establishes that all four characters are dispossessed and marginal, a fact which helps them to bond and interact, the use of spatial representations and framing devices, however, suggests an important diferentiation. More explicitly, I will argue that the double perspective achieved through framing allows the juxtaposition of the inside and the outside. In this manner the travelling couple is always split from other immigrants in the frame, occupying the outside position that signifies freedom of movement. In one such emblematic scene shot from the

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 back of a moving truck, Zano and Naima are shown walking the road, while the truck drives away, taking the immigrants to some other location. Contrasting light and dark, the freedom of the road to the inside of the truck, this long take thus

Homecoming through music Although, according to Naficy, the return to the homeland occupies a primary place in the minds of the exiles and a disproportionate amount of space in their films (2001, p. 229), the return in Exiles, however, is neither glorious, nor does it constitute a classic homecoming. Instead, it reflects the unique and complex position of many displaced persons today, torn between the desire to leave and the impossibility of ever fully and completely returning. The more they approach Algiers, Naima gets more and more anxious and at times truly terrified at having to face a culture which does not hold anything for her except from painful memories from the past. The feeling of encountering a foreign culture is further captured by the changed visual register. Once in Morocco and Algeria, the camera takes in the dusty, austere landscape and the film becomes overwhelmed by people: the overcrowded train, masses of earthquake survivors searching for a safer haven, households with several generations living under the same roof, long queues of Algerians outside shops or at taxi stands and a throng assembled to listen and dance to musicians’ throbbing beats. Ironically, however, the more people fill the frame, the more disoriented the spectator gets, as the desire to match the images with knowledge and

invites reflection on the social diferentiation of experiences of mobility and displacement. In other words, mobility does not have any inherent meaning per se, whereas the road is not occupied by all participants equally. some kind of recognition remains unfulfilled. Hence, instead of familiarizing, idealizing or rendering the Algerian culture exotic, Gatlif’s depiction of Algeria is fraught with the same ambiguity that marked his own return to the country after 43 years of exile. As he admits, he was also scared of going back and after making this film, he knew that Algeria was not his country. While he could appreciate it, he could not understand the land or its people. Consequently, Gatlif’s visual style reflects both the appreciation and the alienation from this culture: refusing to interpret scenes and generally ofering the spectator very few guidelines as to what he/she is seeing, he demonstrates no superior understanding of the culture. Instead he lets the camera roam and randomly dwell on grave faces, inexplicably motionless figures in the street and houses destroyed in the earthquake, creating an unsettling atmosphere of eeriness. In short, we are presented with an impenetrable culture, being equally curious and lost as Zano and Naima themselves, who have to make sense of what they are seeing, matching fragments from their memory and stories with the unfamiliar reality in front of them. If anything, the scenes of the ‘homecoming’, however, allow us to interrogate 59

ARS AETERNA the meaning of home and structures of belonging, as reflected in Zano’s and Naima’s opposing attitudes to home. For Zano, home is connected with memory, with stories his father used to tell him and above all with a rich imagery which enables him to situate himself in the long line of family history. As such, home is only accessible in the form of narratives, which endow it with a sense of mythic unity and harmony. Coming to Algiers, Zano is given the chance to retrace these narratives by visiting his family’s former house. What is articulated in the scene of Zano inspecting the old family photographs and paraphernalia is not only “the semantics of memory” (Naficy, 2001, p. 169), where the lost harmony of home is recreated retrospectively and symbolically, but also the essentially constructed and afective nature of home and belonging. Home, in other words, according to Bachelard, is not only about fantasies of belonging, but is also sentimentalized as a space of belonging (quoted in Morley, 2000, p. 19). The inhabited space of the house thus becomes a palimpsest of emotions, fragmented narratives and histories. For Zano, the paintings on the walls, the piano, still photographs and the preserved original setting of the house come to signify as a pars pro toto the lost harmony and stability of home, tying together to produce a consistent family narrative within which Zano can gain identity anchorage and feel a sense of belonging. In that respect, the return to his family house facilitated both a return to himself and a return home, be it only retrospectively and transiently. Whereas Zano manages to find some connection with the culture surrounding 60

him, which is mainly predicated upon him having found the connection with his family, Naima feels totally lost. Her experience of strangeness and discomfort, however, is felt mostly at the level of the body. After being approached and scolded by a woman in the street for her inappropriate clothing, she is forced to wear traditional Muslim women’s attire, which makes her sufocate. In the house of Leila and Habib’s family she eventually utters: “I feel like a stranger. I am a stranger everywhere” (Gatlif, 2004, pp. 1:06:20). On the one hand, this uneasiness, disjuncture and strangeness that Naima feels in a foreign culture may indicate a state of in-betweenness triggered by a coexistence of various forms of identities characteristic of many displaced persons. However, while Naima certainly feels some of this fragmentation, she is shown as incapable of truly inhabiting any geography. Thus, Naima’s words that she is a stranger wherever she goes can above all be interpreted in terms of being a stranger to oneself, being exiled from oneself and one’s body. Naima is haunted by the past and terrified of facing traumatic family memories she tried to repress all her life. The trauma – signalled by the fact that she cannot talk about it – is represented by the ominous scar on her back underlining the fact that her body had been violated. Although we do not know with certainty what exactly happened in Naima’s family, there are clues to suggest that she had been sexually abused as a teenager. Hence, contrary to Zano’s romanticization of childhood home, her vision of home contains concealed trauma, that is to say, elements of the uncanny or the un-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 heimlich. Far from being a utopian place of safety and shelter for which we supposedly yearn, here home proves to be a place of dark secrets, of fear and danger that we can only inhabit furtively. A visit to a Sufi mystic confirms these doubts: she “reads” Naima, directly addressing her particular condition of exile: “You are here but your spirit is elsewhere. Get back to the ground. You have to find your footing” (Gatlif, 2004, pp. 1:21:20). In Naima’s case, the body as site has become a place of exile. For Naima, far from being an abstract concept, exile is in fact founded in somatic realities, that is to say, in pain. Disassociating the mind from the body, probably as a form of self-protection, Naima willingly exiled herself. In that sense, Naima’s flights into one-night-stands and other intense bodily sensations can be read as her attempts to regain a connection to the body, as it remains the site of a perpetual battle for control. In light of this knowledge, if there is any reconciliation to be made with her past, it is primarily through the body. The film’s penultimate scene featuring a twelveminute Sufi trance provides an opportunity for such a climactic exorcism. Gatlif emphasizes the community character of such an event, where music, dance and song create a space of shared pleasure and confirmation of identity. This scene is also significant as it introduces music as the key therapeutic – and we can freely say dramatic – factor in the film that brings reconciliation, emplacement and helps the person to regain the state of connectedness with the body. It is music that ultimately brings resolution, Gatlif seems to be saying through-

out the film. In the film’s elegiac final scene shot at the city cemetery, Zano in a symbolic act puts the headphones on the tombstone of his grandfather. Music links past and present as the couple moves on, hand in hand. They have both achieved a kind of closure and emplacement necessary for moving on, in whichever direction the road takes them. However, Gatlif does not provide us with the image of some unified subjectivity or the primordial identity recovered at the end of the quest. In fact, if exile facilitates anything, it is the awareness of the essential constructedness of one’s own structures of belonging. Distanced from familiar and familial structures, the exiles are thus in the position to construct, reconstruct and perform their identities. In addition, since there is no place – except the road – where Zano and Naima clearly belong, their homecoming journey represents a form of transit, rather than a return to a real home or homeland they have been estranged from. A home thus conceived primarily in terms of transit becomes a type of porous home-space that can be occupied regularly, but that can never be inhabited in the traditional sense. As Bammer concludes, home in this sense “is a symbolic habitat, a performative way of life and of doing things in which one make’s one’s home while in movement” (quoted in Di Stefano 2002, p. 41). Finally, it is important to distinguish between the earlier mentioned concept of postmodern vagabondage and Gatlif’s vision of nomadism, in what constitutes the kernel of Gatlif vision of the road. Despite the fact that Gatlif’s characters carry the home inside of them and share the 61

ARS AETERNA dream of radical liberty and roaming at will implied in the concept of vagabondage, Gatlif nevertheless acknowledges the fact that they live in a politically, socially and culturally diferentiated world where the ability to roam is based on privilege, where not everybody has the luxury of extravagant identity and where exile remains a fact of life for thousands of displaced people across the world. In other words, he acknowledges that neither the exilic dream of return to an organic connection nor the nomadic celebration of rootless liberty provides the best existential option in a world of difference. In Exiles thus the discourses of exile and nomadism converge, highlighting as much the necessity and perpetual postponement of homecoming as the essentially diasporic nature of all identities, created through travel and in motion. To conclude, for the filmmaker himself, it is primarily through music that he inhabits his ‘home-in-movement’

and inaugurates his vision of the road. However, next to its performative function, music also serves as a powerful film discourse. Having the ability to produce, rather than represent identity, it functions as the primary agent of crosscultural interaction and the vehicle of knowledge in the film. As music travels across countries and gets enriched, inflected and reappropriated along the way, as it sensuously produces places, communities and situations connecting people across their diferences, Gatlif emphasizes the fact that music, just like identity, is always a product of movement and cultural interaction. As such, it is the cultural form best suited not only to cross, but also to question and transcend cultural boundaries. Exile enacts this transcultural potential in two ways: by performing movement as an identity principle and a way of being in the world and by using music to create new forms of cultural knowledge.

Works cited: Ang, I., „Hegemony-In-Trouble. Nostalgia and Ideology of the Impossible in EuropeanCinema.“ In: Petrie, D.(ed.), 1992. Screening Europe. Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema. London: BFI Publishing, pp. 21-31. Bauman, Z. „From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity.“ In: Hall, S. & P. du Gay (eds.), 1996. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage Publications, pp. 18-36. Di Stefano, J., 2002.. „Moving Images of Home.“ Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp.38-51. Gatlif, T., 2004. Exiles. Hall, S. „Cultural Identity and Diaspora.“ In: Rutherford, J. (ed.), 1990. Identity. Community, Culture, Diference. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 222-237. Naficy, H.(ed.), 1999.. Home, Exile, Homeland. Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. NewYork: Routledge. Naficy, H., 2001. An Accented Cinema. Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press. Mazierska, E. & L. Rascaroli, 2006. Crossing New Europe. Postmodern Travel and theEuropean Road Movie. London. Morley, D., 2000. Home Territories. Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge.. Peters, J.D.. „Exile, Nomadism and Diaspora. The Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon.“ In: Naficy, H. (ed.), 1999. Home, Exile, Homeland. Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. New York: Routledge, p. 17-39.

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Multiculturalism and a Search for Identity in Spanish Film Production after the Fall of Francoism Petra Pappová In 2005, Petra Pappová graduated in Spanish language/literature and Aesthetics from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia. She spent the next 3 years as a PhD. student at the Institute of Literary and Artistic Communication. Her field of research includes Spanish literature and film, the problems of feminism, intertextuality and translation. Her dissertation focused on the work of the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez Reverte in the context of postmodern literature and feminist reading. In 2008, she received her PhD. in Aesthetics from Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia and is currently teaching courses on feminism in literature, interpretation and intertextuality.

Abstract The fall of General Franco’s dictatorship and the subsequent opening of the country toward Europe in the 1980s evolved the atmosphere in society and art. The long awaited freedom and the absence of censorship caused a frenetic progress of art and de-tabooing of themes. We are talking about the so called period of “movida” that pre-showed a new movement of art courses and themes. The article deals mainly with a film production and an intersection of universal themes in this area. We perceive in particular a conflict between the influence of media which open the gate to a globalized world and the micro-space of Spain, its specific identity through the works of Pedro Almodovar, Bigas Luna and Gerard Herrer.

A distinguished feature of Spanish film production is an attempt to capture differences of cultures and individuals on the background of intimate stories. The social situation of the last three decades has more than ever put into opposition terms own-strange, which vibrate in all areas of Spanish art production. Art and its development are closely connected with the historical development of the country where it originates. The situation in Spain in the period of years 1936–1979 is specific in many ways. For instance, the Spanish film industry was marked by General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and censorship. In the years 1962-1969, José María García Escudero had control over the Spanish film industry. In 1963 he passed

the Censorship Code which remained valid until 1975. However, in this period cinematography was strongly supported by the state. Films which met requirements and limitations following from the Censorship Code got a financial support and could be presented at international festivals. The conditions and situation of Spanish film producers at that time were very much similar to our (at that time Czechoslovakia) cultural context. Some filiations can also be seen in topics – focus on national motifs, banal love stories narrated by heroines, problems of communication failure and intimate images of family. The social politics of General Francisco Franco presented in its program meant a comeback of traditions and Catholi63

ARS AETERNA cism, and thus in conformity with the Catholic thinking a model of housewife, mother and perfect spouse was created. If we compare the presented situation in the context with cultural and social development in Europe, in the perspective of spreading ideas of feminism, Spain is closing itself into nationalism, refuses the influence of western world and a couple of decades is mentally turning back. The mentioned thematic movement of Spanish cinematography is clearly related to the given social politics and producers’ efort to avoid a topic which can be characterized as antinational or socially critical. Nevertheless, in many cases directors were able to employ precisely these motives in intimate images of Spanish family¹. Carlos Saura, who depicted the Spanish reality through symbols, managed to free himself from the standard pattern of this period and thus he became significantly diferent. The metaphoric aspect and poetics of his work has been misunderstood in Spain until present; however, in the 60s and 70s of the previous century he received an international appreciation. Although his work copies the traditional depiction of national and cultural peculiarities of the nation through the story of individual or smaller group, the inexactness of symbols and the possibility of free interpretation of ofered images run up against problems with censorship². On the other hand, precisely metaphors of the film language mark the movement of Spanish cinematography towards a wider audience searching for a language which would be universal and yet individual. 64

The fall of the dictatorship of General Franco and the consequent opening of the country towards Europe in the 80s liberated the atmosphere in society and art. The long time expected freedom and the absence of censorship caused a frenetic development of art and detabooing of themes. This period known as “movida” marked a new movement of artistic plans and themes. A very distinguished person of this period was Pedro Almodovar. La movida (Spanish: movement), as it name says, represents a huge change, movement into a new direction. The Spanish society has new problems from which it was falsely protected by the inner central dictatorship. The opening of borders, the migration of people from villages to towns and the flow of opinions and thoughts from surrounding countries brought its advantages and disadvantages. Spain, which has always classified itself as one of the countries with the highest number of people reporting themselves as catholic, precisely in this period, could feel a heavy decrease of influence of the church and its power. The reason of this is mainly an old-fashioned opinion about the question of sexual behaviour and the usage of contraception, which does not correspond with the theory of free love coming from the west. In compliance with the possibility of free choice regarding sexual partners or decisions related to maternity, the position of woman changes, so she becomes freer and able to look for her employment out of household. Art becomes free of censorship, which lasted for some decades, and this results in a free depiction of political themes

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 criticizing Francoism, but also the contemporary situation, and above all, nakedness and eroticism are getting into the art, which also becomes an invariant of the artistic language. These aspects appear in all chosen films which we deal with in this paper. The film Kika (1993) boasts with the abundance of colourfulness and individual depictions of opening Spain to universalism. Almodovar with a distance and his individual sarcasm points out the role of woman in society, who becomes even more “colourful”; goes beyond the stereotype of a catholic Spanish woman and comes closer to the universal model of a multicultural and postmodern woman. Sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky defines a modern woman as a third woman. In his book with the same title, which studies the position of woman from sociological, historical and political aspect, he deals with striking changes that have occurred in the last fifty years. The possibility of education, work employment, right to vote, sexual freedom, right to take decisions converted the contemporary woman into a “postmodern” woman. It is impossible to define her accurately, though. Postmodern women have many faces but one common feature - the possibility of any choice. “The third woman managed to reconcile a woman of radical diferences with a woman who constantly begins” (Lipovetsky, 2000, p. 15). The character of Kika is personification of this kind of woman and, at the same time, she maintains the individuality of a nation to which she belongs. She is the owner of a beauty salon and in her, at

first sight, simple life she comes through failures and victories with a smile on her lips. The story of Kika is necessary to perceive from the opposite side of the mirror. Nothing is like it seems at first sight. The poetics of the film is clearly outlined from the first moment: “Kika: Nice. Anna: Lower your head open your eyes... We took out one eyelash so you can see the diference. Eyelashes make the eyes look bigger make them expressive. You cannot compare a woman with shiny eyes with one with her eyes down. Even with an ugly one, with eyelashes she… shines. Let’s hear it for the eyelashes, girls!”³ Mockery of superficiality and refusal of perceiving the reality are the leitmotifs of the film. Almodovar is not just criticizing the previous historical period, but he also realizes the negatives of openness and the flow of consumerism to Spain. The manifestation of consumerism is a phenomenon of advertising which is surrounding us and becomes an omnipresent symbol of the postmodern period. The media play an important role in creating the view on society. Even though they work on the principle of simulacrum, the society takes their view on the world as a rule which is compulsory to keep. Advertising, which has a strong power of persuasion, belongs among the biggest media phenomena. This definition does not cover the influence of advertising on the recipient, though. Advertising is not only a means of communication evoking shopping stimuli in a potential buyer, but it is mainly an efective item for spreading ideologies. Indubitably, it takes the role of cultural value bearer and brings ethic and aesthetic models. Advertising 65

ARS AETERNA not only sells products but it also forms a sociocultural identity of the subject. That is why it is necessary to watch this phenomenon not just from the view of advertising aesthetics, which is closely related to work with the object, but also think about the consequences of work with the subject and the ethics of advertising. Almodovar sets up a mirror to advertising. In the film Kika advertising and another television phenomenon – reality show – play very important role. They are presented by Andrea Scarred, a reporter who builds her career by discovering the scandals. The very character of Andrea is an incarnation of controversy: on one hand, a professional attitude to journalistic profession and on the other hand, the area of interest and the way of presentation or dressing. Her diction is pathetic, through which the director just accents his aim to make a parody from the genre of the investigative journalism present in the modern media. “A woman shot herself because they denied her of a loan. A court member of Seville is accused of embezzlements. Juana T. was a victim of sexual harassment. A famous politician kills his wife and then kills himself. They had an argument about their daughter’s grades. His neighbours said he was a great man. A young girl-rapist committed suicide in prison out of shame because he had been raped in jail. Mogia was convicted for prostitution of mentally handicapped people. Five anarchists killed two people from Morocco and one from Dominica. A porno gang was arrested today at the children’s care station, “Prosperity”. They were forcing six-year olds to film Hard66

core porn. The police is [sic] searching for the child killer X. Garthia also known as Portuguese. Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen. With you Ms. Andrea Scarred. Presenting you the ‘Worst of the day’.”4 Journalism based on discovering the biggest human decays leads in the film to total anesthetizing of reality, pushing the borders of stereotyped social behaviour and losing perception between good or bad. The climax scene is where Kika is raped by brother of her maid, who ran out of prison, and came for help to his sister. The director is connecting the motif of media, which create from raped and tragic events a hyperbolic mockery.. The raping is moved toward the border of comedy where the perception of reality is altered. The story is based in a big city, which at first sight, gives anonymity, but in reality a private place in it is disappearing. The monotony of housing estates characteristic by building blocks of flats is an unpopular sign of the modern period, an efort for the unification of ideas of optimal survival in life. Almodovar uses precisely this place for stressing a contrast between monotony, colourlessness and the variety of people, who share this space. The explicitness of depiction and controversial themes, for which the director became famous, are just a sophisticated game of hidden meanings and messages. Kika is available to a wider audience because its reception is facilitated by means of ambiguous depiction which creates some kind of universal language. As it is clear from the Almodovar production, Spanish identity is always present in his work. Nevertheless, in the area

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 of artistic and aesthetic communication we can see a movement towards the universalism not just in themes, but also in content. The cinematography of the 90s was influenced by thoughts of feminism, which entered Spain a couple of decades later than in the neighbouring countries. The reason of this was the social politics of General Francisco Franco which introduces in its program a comeback of traditions and Catholicism, and it reserved a place at household for the woman. Despite this fact, in the 60s thoughts of woman identity were formed, which thanks to Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas (1908 – 1986)5 found their respond even in Spain and were gradually reflected in literature and cinematography. Thoughts of Simone de Beauvoir resonate already in the 60s mainly in the area of Spanish literature. The problem of the position of woman in society, her mythology, question of maternity – themes also developed by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing and later also Margueritte Duras and Anais Nino – determine the direction of Spanish literature that becomes an inspiration for many directors. The 80s bring a striking change and a relaxation in depicting women characters and picturization of controversial themes. The stereotype of submissive young woman gradually vanishes and is replaced by a young female rebel who refuses to subordinate to the social dictate. A strong representative in the area of literature at the end of the 80s is Almudena Grandes (1960) who was a pioneer in developing erotic novel and

attracted many film producers. Director Bigas Luna (1946) in 1990 filmed his novel Lulu (Las edades de Lulú, 1989) in which he captures the puritan background of Spanish middle class and interfering influence of the western way of life on an adolescent heroine. Through the story situated in Madrid in the period of postfrancoism, we get acquainted with Lulu and perceive the surrounding world through her perspective. The language itself is very open which is reflected also in its film version. Taboo themes of pornography, sadomasochism, voyeurism, and open sexuality, which author develops in the novel, are mainly the metaphor of the censorship of previous period, which is also reflected in this area. In order not to let this idea stay in the background, Bigas Luna had to change some parts of artwork. The director preferred a chronological narration of the story as opposed to the novel which begins from the culminating point of life of the young woman in divorce proceedings. Lulu, retrospectively, is in her memories trying to find an answer to her incomprehensible sexual addiction during the years spent, at first sight, in an ideal family full of fake and suppressed emotions. The incipit of the film is a detailed display of powdered genitals of a newborn girl. This motif is also present later in the relationship of Lulu and Pablo who perceives her as a toy that he can do anything with. Without her awareness he invites her brother to join them in their sexual games. The next day Lulu decides to leave Pablo: “Lulu: I feel insecure. Pablo: Insecure? How? 67

ARS AETERNA Lulu: Because I’m not the same for you anymore. I don’t want to be a child. Don’t you see? If I had said no, you’d have gone to bed with Cristina. Pablo: Does it matter? Lulu: A lot. Pablo: Do you want to wreck it all? Lulu: Listen, I’m leaving. Why can’t you understand? I’m only sure about ...not wanting to be a child any more.“6

Loneliness and freedom bring Lulu to uncertainty which is presented in even more bizarre sexual experiences. Many until then unknown new things surpassing the imagination of society about a young married woman with a child bring her to a never ending circle from which she cannot step out. Only the collision with reality forces her to awake. Controversy of the story and adaptation of the theme itself classify the film as an erotic motion picture, but at the same time it foreshadowed the openness of the Spanish film production to depiction of new themes. In 1995 director Gerardo Herrero was inspired by other Grandes’s novels Malena is the name of tango (Malena es un nombre de tango, 1994). In many aspects the subject of both stories is the same; it is diferent only in a degree of explicitness. The director is much clearer in depicting the place which becomes a formmaking aspect of the story. The heroine Malena lives in the country and town which predetermine a certain type of behaviour. The criticism of closeness of Spanish country, which refuses any kind of otherness from everyday stereotypes, is emphasized mainly in the opposition with urban area, symbol of globalization, 68

ofering freedom and anonymity. The main motif of the story is family treasure - a precious emerald - which grandfather leaves to his twelve-year-old granddaughter Malena. He orders her not to tell anyone about it because one day it will save her life. Malena has a twin sister Reina who personifies an ideal image of woman of the post-war period. She is calm, behaved, humble, patient, and submissive. In contrast with her, Malena disposes with confidence, rudeness and braveness. She lives an intensive life, learns on own mistakes, but she does not regret her decisions. Knowing own personality and accepting own sexuality creates an image of a real woman full of contradictions and emotions. Malena does not fit any stereotype; she is individual but also universal. Relationships with men and her sister, who personifies an ideal woman and mother, gradually become tenser. Rebelliousness of Malena ceases when she realizes that her biggest rebelliousness will not be refusal of life but braveness to live and not to lose oneself. Both adaptations of the novels of Almudena Grandes use motives of body, physical sufering and discovering borders of sexuality, delight and pain. Despite the controversy of the themes and their picturization in both films is present an intellectual view of reality full of irony and sarcasm. The film production of Julio Medem is characterized by a totally diferent poetics. He belongs among few directors who are able to depict contemporary society political and social life without falling into shallowness or politicizing with a very intimate language. He became fa-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 mous in the early 90s with his first feature film The Cows (Vacas, 1991). The latest film by Julio Medem Random Ann (Caótica Ana, 2008) was accepted with enthusiasm; however, it earned some critical reactions from professionals and general public. The film was made as an honour for Medem’s sister Ann who died in a car accident in 2001. The paintings, she made in her entire life, are employed in the last part of the film and they make up the story which is based on the contrast of chaos and destiny. The story is connecting the motif of regression of hypnosis which also determined the conceptual dividing of the film in ten passages. The director put the story in three

diferent places which also determine Ann’s behaviour. She is escapes to her own world and with an intention she refuses to go over the self-knowledge process. Medem often uses psychology and he plays with consciousness and unconsciousness. The repeating motif of chaos and fake painted doors on the walls express fear of something unknown and distant. Ann grows up in a cave with her father whom she sees as the beginning of everything. Ann’s paintings remained infantile also in Madrid where she lives with a group of young artists. She gets acquainted with new people who difer in origin and perceiving the world and through them she begins to know herself.

Medem created a diferent type of hero from those we are accustomed to in his films. Even at the end of the story it is not clear what Ann is like and where her roots are. Through the regression of hypnosis she remembers the lives of many women she has might ever been; however, she refuses to open the door of her unconsciousness and accept this fact which only multiplies the feeling of chaos in her life. The author works with the thought which already Ronald Barthes dealt with in the context – postmodernism definition and the position of an artist in it.

The author in discourse of postmodernism stands in the labyrinth in which one does not diferentiate between past and present and everything seems clear but distant. He stands in front of possibility of any choice which, however, brings problems, too. In 1967 Ronald Barthes introduced his thesis about “the death of an author”. He just followed the active interest of percipient when reading particular works and his freedom in possibilities of interpretation. Medem intentionally does not finish some thoughts but in this created chaos he forces the perceiver to active reception. It is typical

Place Cave Madrid New York

Language Father`s language Art language Language of past/unconsciousness

Culture Patriarchal Multicultural Multicultural x Making a unity

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ARS AETERNA for Medem to depersonalize somehow from depicting typical national themes, something he is often blamed for (especially by local critics). However, in this film it is not the case. Depending on the place where Ann is, it is easy to read its cultural particularities, even though the heroine is escaping from stereotyped depiction connected to a certain nation. We can rather see her relationship with a life in nature and town to which she also tries to match her clothes and appearance. The film is full of contradictions and surprising turnovers what is actually related to period in which the story begins7. The film Random Ann can

be seen as a metaphor about postmodernism, about many of its shapes, about refusing the past which creates it. The chosen interpreted films are just an example of Spanish cinematography of the last twenty years but they clearly outline the movement of the interest of producers to actual questions of global society. The question of a woman’s position in society gains a wider context in the poetics of the mentioned films. A turbulent conflict between own and strange gradually becomes a topical actual theme for every nation that wants to keep the individuality in multicultural environment of the postmodernism.

Endnotes: ¹ E.g. works of directors: Basilio Martín Patino, Mario Camus, Miguel Picazo, Francisco Regueiro ² E.g. metaphorical depiction of the Civil war in ilm – La caza – The Hunt ³ http://www.subtitles-divx.net/d/44383/Kika.html, 13.9.2008 4 http://www.subtitles-divx.net/d/44383/Kika.html, 13.9.2008 5 Simone de Beauvoir is considered to be the representative of liberal – humanistic feminism and in her works she puts an accent on equalization women and men. Now in her already cultish work of feminism literature The Second Sex she offers the complex view on this problem from aspect of psychology, history, anthropology and biology. She is against the gender dividing as natural fact which determines position of person in society on the basis of his/her sex. Woman is considered as cultural product of society, she is always deined through relationship to someone, for example daughter, sister, mother, mistress, etc.: “Woman is explicitly assigned by her relationship to man. Asymmetry of both categories – male and female – shows in one-sided creation of sexual myths. Sometimes we say “sex” and we mean a woman: she is a body and his passion, and also danger: It has never been reported that truth that for woman is man sexual and bodily, too; simply there was no one who would report that. An idea of world and world itself is a creation of men. They describe it through own point of view and this loats together with absolute truth.” (Beauvoir, 1967, pp. 72-73) 6http://www.allsubs.org/subs-download/edades-de-lulu-las-1990-2-5-fps-1-cd-en-divxforever-the-agesof104479/ 12.9.2008 7 According to Jean François Lyotard, the paradox of the term postmodernism itself is in the etymology of this word. The connection of Latin words post (after) and modo (right now) makes by denotation contradicting literal translation “after right now”. The preix post can be interpreted variously thanks to its more meanings. The irst meaning which understands the word post as time sequence deining the end of one period and the beginning of other period. The postmodernism is irst of all the question of expressive forms of thinking. We can perceive it as certain analogy with Freud psychoanalysis, which expresses the process of discovering by free associations; it is searching the hidden meanings of its life in the past. As Lyotard says, the preix post- means: “…certain process which can be marked with words beginning

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Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 on ‘ana-‘, the process of analysis, anamnesis, analogy, anamorphous, which processes initial oblivion.” (Lyotard, 1993, p. 72) Works cited: Beauvoirová, S., 1967. Druhé pohlaví. Praha: Orbis. Grandes, A., 2008. Malena es un nombre de tango. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, S.A. Lyotard, J. F., 1993. O postmodernismu. Praha: Filosoický ústav AV ČR. Morrisová, P., 2000. Literatura a feminizmus. Brno: Host. Nagl-Dočekalová, H., 2007. Feministická ilozoie. Výsledky, problémy perspektivy. Praha: SLON. Nichols, G. C., 1992. Des/cifrar la diferencia (Narrativa femenina de la Espaňa contemporánea). Madrid: Editores S.A. Pohl, B; Türschmann, J., 2007. Miradas glocales. Cine espaňol en el cambio de milenio. Iberoamericana. http://www.subtitles-divx.net/d/44383/Kika.html, 13.9.2008 http://www.hispagenda.com/articulos/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/unknown.jpeg,10.09.2008 http://www.subtitles-divx.net/d/44383/Kika.html,13.9.2008 http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/almodovar/kika/carteles/grandes/cgr3.gif, 13.9.2008 http://klub1001ejszaka.freeblog.hu/iles/movpic/lasedadesdelulu.jpg, 5.9.2008 http://www.allsubs.org/subs-download/edades-de-lulu-las-1990-2-5-fps-1-cd-en-divxforever-the-agesof/104479/, 12.9.2008 http://www.cinemarx.ro/poze/postere/filme/1996/Malena-es-un-nombre-de-tango-28111-724.jpg 12.9.2008 http://www.lashorasperdidas.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/caotica-ana-poster.jpg, 15.10.2008

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Pardoning Unpardonable “Smiling Discrimination” in Canada Jana Javorčíková Jana Javorčíkova is currently teaching at Faculty of Humanities, Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia. She has been teaching American Studies, Canadian Studies, Modern British literature and Modern American and British Drama. In 2002 she participated in FEP-FRP program at Trent University in Petersborough, Canada and in 2005-2006 she was teaching at Minneapolis Community and Technical College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Her field of research interest includes American literature, especially drama and also cultural studies. In 2008, she published a monograph entitled “Parallels of Genres in Eugene O’Neill’s Dramas”.

Abstract The article “Pardoning Unpardonable - Smiling Discrimination in Canada” deals with a recent negative social phenomenon, describing a form of treating people on the basis of a category which might often result in violating their civil and human rights. “Smiling discrimination” is a form of concealed racism when “people do not explicitly broadcast their racially based intentions; instead, they veil them or provide reasons that society will find more palatable reasons”. Therefore, hidden discrimination is difficult to identify, penalize and prevent. The analysis focuses on this covert form of discrimination toward visible minorities and immigrants and its forms in schools, real estate market and criminal justice system. We hope to increase the awareness of this new social phenomenon occurring not only in Canada but in any multicultural and multiracial society.

Some of many features Canada and the European Union share is their multiethnic, multiracial and multicultural social mosaic and various positive and negative social phenomena resulting from such multilayered structure of society. One of them is a relatively new, negative and potentially dangerous social phenomenon called “smiling discrimination”, denominating a concealed form of racism, such as housing and job discrimination, promotion restrictions or greater law enforcement surveillance of visible minorities. For discrimination in any of these fields, the sociologist M. Codjoe suggests the term “smiling” racism and understands it in accordance with Scheurich and Young as “the covert type [of racism when] persons making covert, 72

racially biased decisions do not explicitly broadcast their intentions; instead, they veil them or provide reasons that society will find more palatable.” (1997, p. 5). It is the fact that the racial motivation of “smiling discrimination” is often hidden behind socially acceptable explanations which makes it more difficult to identify, penalize and prevent. Awareness of cultural, social and historical background to this phenomenon will help to develop sensitivity to hidden forms of discrimination in any multicultural society and enhance fair-play rules for all citizens. Many experts point out that Canada is one of the most attractive countries for immigrants in the world. “It is wealthy in resources, rich in talent, secure in strong democratic traditions, renowned as a

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 peacekeeper and prized as a land of opportunity for prospective immigrants,” writes C. Lewitt in his article The Morality of Race in Canada3. As a result, there has been massive immigration to Canada, resulting in its status as a true multicultural and multiethnic society. Canada, according to the 2001 census, has a total immigrant population of 5,448,480. The biggest immigrant populations are those from eastern Asia (730,6000); Southern Europe (715,370); southern Asia (503,895); south-east Asia (469,105); and West-central Asia and the Middle East (285,585), but they also come from Central and South America (304,650); the Caribbean and Bermuda (294,050), and Africa (282,600). The immigrant population from the United Kingdom represents 606,000 immigrants; however, most of them came prior to the 1980’s.4 One of the reasons for the popularity of Canada as a destination for immigrants certainly is that, “compared to the USA, committed to the assimilationist approach, Canada, for those groups of European origin, has traditionally been more tolerant of the continued expression of cultural diferences among diverse groups” (Marger, 1997, p. 456). Moreover, the Canadian Human Rights Act protects anyone living in Canada against discrimination. Under the Canadian Human Rights Act, “…it is against the law for any employer or provider of a service that falls within federal jurisdiction to discriminate on the basis of race, nationality or ethnic origin, color, religion, age, sex (including pregnancy or childbearing), sexual orientation, marital status, family status, physical or men-

tal disability (including dependence on alcohol and drugs) and pardoned criminal conviction”.5 Most importantly, the Canadian attitude to minorities promises an optimistic future. According to the Ethnic Diversity Survey, conducted in 2002, the vast majority of Canadians (86%) aged 15 years and older (about 19 million), said they had not experienced discrimination or unfair treatment in Canada because of their ethnocultural background during the previous five years (18). However, there still exists a number of Canadians who are still exposed to discrimination in Canada, ranging from minor to more severe cases.6 According to the Ethnic Diversity Survey, both visible and invisible minorities still encountered some forms of discrimination: About 20% of visible minorities or 587,000 people, said they had sometimes or often experienced discrimination or unfair treatment during the previous five years because of their ethnicity, culture, race, color, language, accent or religion. An additional 15% of visible minorities reported such treatment occurring rarely (18). The above-mentioned survey does not distinguish between direct and indirect discrimination and to our knowledge, no such reliable research has been conducted. However, there exist a number of partial studies, analyzing the occurrence of “smiling discrimination” among minorities. A study conducted in 2002 among a group of Vietnamese-Canadian youth showed that “smiling discrimination” occurs at schools, even in ESL classes. A student reported that white students get more time and attention than students 73

ARS AETERNA of colour (Phan, 561). Another study, carried out among South-Asian refugees revealed that as many as 39% felt they were subject to subtle discrimination, including unfair treatment and insulting remarks. This percentage is substantially higher that the percentage of those who sufered overt discrimination (9.75%) and discrimination against community (16.8%) and indicates that subtle discrimination might be the most prevalent form of modern discrimination.7 Other frequent form of hidden discrimination occurs in the field of housing and real estate. For example, in 2005, in Ontario, a NIMBY (Not-In-Our-BackYard) initiative opposing afordable housing for Ontarians with disabilities (including mental illness, developmental disabilities and Alzheimer’s disease), families on social assistance, newcomers to Canada, Native and Metis people, ex-ofenders and youth (4) started many heated discussions. Other examples of housing discrimination are mentioned by Sean Best, a young, African-Canadian, who mentions several issues of what he calls “subtle, aversive racism” (Best, 53). Among these are difficulties in finding and renting accommodation, or selling such for a price equal to the price for a non-minority owned one. There are many situations in which smiling discrimination makes the lives of people of color difficult. The one that stands out is greater law enforcement surveillance. W. Scot and J. Tanner, define racial profiling as the situation when “racial diferences in law enforcement surveillance activities cannot be totally explained by racial diferences in criminal activity, traffic violations, calls for ser74

vice or other legally relevant variables” (Scot – Tanner, 2005, p. 584). In their research they noticed the correlation between the frequency of law enforcement among the students of color and their respective participation in outdoor or public space activities (Ibid., p. 591). An alarming number of visible minority students not involved in any prior criminal activities were stopped by the police two or more times and were subjects to questioning and searches (Ibid., p. 589). Visible minority defendants are also less likely to be approved for bail than white ones and sometimes receive longer sentences upon conviction (Ibid., p. 263). All the examples mentioned represent manifestations of far more dangerous discriminatory behavior than the “oldfashioned” discrimination because each of them is committed with a smile on one’s face, and, what is worse; in most cases such behavior is perfectly legal. In that case, can anything be done in order to prevent it? One thing that certainly can be done is to spot and name “the enemy”. People should be aware of this dangerous social phenomenon and be able to identify it. Therefore, several sociologists and anthropologists have tried to coin a term that would capture the nature of this negative phenomenon: “smiling racism”, “quiet racism” (Scheurich, Younge, Codjoe), “color-blind racism” (BonillaDa Silva), or “modern racism” (Waller). The coining of such a term and its legal recognition would undoubtedly be a giant leap toward eliminating the phenomenon in any society. Another step against “smiling discrimination” might be more laws protecting minorities. As for laws preventing discrimination,

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 Canada serves as an example for many other countries. However, “smiling face discrimination” is a tricky hidden phenomenon, which stems mostly from prejudice, stereotyping and a lack of critical thinking. Therefore, citizens of any multicultural society should develop awareness of this subtle form of racism. No

society may be entirely racism-free, but strong laws and an awareness of problems connected with indirect discrimination will certainly help to regulate this phenomenon and protect minorities. For it is the treatment of the powerless and not the powerful that is a sign of a developed and civilized society.

Endnotes: 1 Wilkinson, Derek. Responding to Discrimination: Inluences of Respondent Gender, Target Race and Target Gender. Canadian Ethnic Studies; 2000, Vol. 32 Issue 2, p27, In: http://web21.epnet.com./ 2 Wortley, Scot. A Northern Taboo: Research on race, crime and criminal justice in Canada. Canadian Journal of Criminology; Apr99, Vol. 41 Issue 2, p261-274, In: http://web21.epnet.com./ 3 Lewitt, Cyril. The Morality of Race in Canada. Society; Sep/Oct97, Vol. 34 Issue 6, p 40-47, In: http:// web21.epnet.com./ 4 Statistics Canada, Census of Population. In: http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/demo.25.htm 5 The Canadian Human Rights Act. In: http://www.chrc_ecdp.ca/discrimination/grounds-en.asp 6 Statistics Canada, Ethnic Diversity Survey: portrait of a multicultural society. In: http://www.statcan.ca/ cgi-bin/downpub/freepub.cgi 7 Beiser, Morton; Noh, Samuel; Hou, Feng; Kaspar, Violet; Rummens, Joanna. Southeast Asian Refugees’ Perceptions of Racial Discrimination in Canada. Canadian Ethnic Studies; Jan2001, Vol.33 Issue 1. p 46, In: http://web21.epnet.com./ Works cited: Best, S. Would I Toss a Brick Through a Window? Toronto: The Globe and Mail, 8 May 1992. Bain, Colin M., 1994. Canadian Society – a Changing Tapestry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonilla-Silva, E. The Strange Enigma of Racism in Contemporary America. In: The Touchstone, Vol. XI, No. 2, April/May 2000. Codjoe, H. M. Can Blacks be Racist? In: Pens of Many Colours. Eva C. Karpinski (ed.), 2002. Scarborough: Thomson-Nelson. Marger, Martin N., 1997. Race and Ethnic Relations: American and Global Perspective. Boston: Wadsworth. Phan, Tan. Life in School: Narratives of Resiliency among Vietnamese-Canadian Youths. ADOLESCENCE; Fall 2003, Vol. 38. No. 151, p 555-566. San Diego: Libra Publishers. Reitz, J. G. – Breton, R., 1994. The Illusion of Difference: Realities of Ethnicity in Canada and the United States. Toronto: C. d. Howe Institute. Scot, W. – Tanner, J. Inlammatory Rhetoric? Baseless Accusations? A Response to Gabor’s Critique of Racial Proiling Research in Canada. Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice; July 2005, Vol 47 Issue 3, p581. Scheurich, J. J. – Young, M. D. Colouring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistomologies Racially biased? Educational Research, 26, 4:4-15, 1997. Waller, J., 1998. Face to Face. New York: Plenum.

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Relections on Education in a Multicultural Environment José Antonio Ávila Romero José Antonio Ávila Romero, M.A. in Hispanic Philology and a Master’s in teaching Spanish as a foreign language from the Universities of Granada and Seville, respectively, has an experience of 15 years in teaching Spanish as a foreign language and literature. He has worked as a lecturer at different European universities in countries, such as Spain, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Sweden and Slovakia. Currently he is a titular teacher at Instituto Cervantes of Bucharest (Romania) where he actively participates in the creation of teaching materials.

Abstract: The analysis of the concepts of ‘language’, ‘culture’ and ‘communication’ is often a part of the basis of new and interesting approaches to research and teaching of any foreign language. The concepts mentioned are directly associated with multiculturalism and interculturalism in the field of teaching Spanish as a foreign language in multicultural environments. All these elements are closely interlinked and lead to reflection on several language skills to be developed in teaching-learning as a second language, as well as diferent strategies needed to make them efective.

1. About the concepts ‘culture’, ‘language’ and ‘communication’ If we want to seek definitions of the abovementioned terms, the most practical method is to link them and think of them as part of a whole, so that we may perceive their meanings in a fuller sense. The thread, therefore, can be represented by the transmission of a common good that we call culture, and will be completed through a system of signs created for the purpose defined as language. Culture, in my opinion, can be a term open to varied definitions, considering the interpretations that throughout the history and development of peoples have been assigned. It is, therefore, a common good that we can identify with a community, a common good that combines concepts such as identity groups, peoples and nations. The term can include other 76

notions, such as customs, art, economics, how to construct the story of a community ... and according to some, particular patterns marked by it, a concrete perception of reality. Culture could also observe geopolitical studies of a particular area of the planet, as well as the influence that the weather could have on the emergence and development of various present “cultures”. Communication represents the second link in the chain, following the concept language, in direct dependence on it. For this reason communication is the result of wanting to share some common ideas that mark the patterns and group identity (and what this represents) because we understand the individual as a social being that has to adapt to the environment interacting with others now and

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 also in the future. Communication plays a connector role between language and culture. These are the individuals themselves or users, which provide concrete models of communication in accordance with a set of guidelines, rituals, customs and purposes outlined in terms of knowledge, ideas, certainties, feelings, and so on. Language, according to the foregoing, becomes the primary element that gives a rise to the need for communicating (by making it feasible), so that a group of in-

dividuals, creators of a system of graphics and phonetic signs get to the concept of culture, development of that culture. It can be said that a system of signs is created by the need originated in a group of individuals to shape the idea of culture, cultural identity. The language can also be defined as a product of subjectively created by a community and therefore, is inescapably linked to the defining characteristics (thinking) that have evolved to scafold cultures and the concept of culture.

Because of several ideas and terms that are necessary to define, we can take the article by Gustavo Bueno1, among other reasons because it is imperative to consider the (re)definition of culture when it comes to managing others, such as multicultural and intercultural understanding. According to the conception that the word culture is brought by diferent authors, one could make a small sum which

alludes to the experiential, spatial, individual and relational complexity governing human activity and that is built for the sake of survival, interactivity and willingness to evolutionism presented by these members of society. Therefore, the assumption of interconnection between all these elements is crucial for scafolding that unit “relative” we call culture (culture concerning to the objects, of people who make them, of animals and

Simplifying the thoughts outlined above, we could show them in the following schema:

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ARS AETERNA nature, as well as spiritual, psychological, subjective or material culture). Starting from this anthropological conception of culture, we find it necessary to consider the concept of communication as an elemental instrument of interculturalism. Its basic aim is seen in establishing intercultural communication. We have already defined multiculturalism (Alsina, M.R.)2 as the coexistence of different cultures in a single real or virtual space, understood then as diferent entities. If we think that the basic purpose of multiculturalism is the communication between diferent cultures, we must add a number of mechanisms that it must serve to become efective. We go well in the domain of so-called powers as unavoidable elements for intercultural communication. Alsina has found three: 1. Intercultural Competence, defined as those skills necessary to negotiate the cultural meanings and communicative act efectively to meet participants from multiple identities. The above can be illustrated in the following table:

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2. Cognitive Competence, which begins with the efort-ability to achieve self-awareness of the cultural power as basis. To know yourself as having a culture. 3. Emotional Competence that takes control of knowing the possible reactions of anxiety / aggression generated in a cultural shock. It is the quality of empathy. We assume, therefore, that the communicative competence will enable the deployment of the competences that Alsina lists as elements for intercultural communication. We have to clarify that the basis of communicative competence includes five other communicative skills (Isabel Iglesias cites Hymes)3 grammatical, discursive, strategic, sociolinguistics and sociocultural. These other skills (second competences) become part of the curriculum of a second language teaching. In a practical sense we must bear in mind that in a classroom whit students of diferent nationalities the teacher should try to reach a rapprochement of the cultural areas involved (multicultural) for integration (Concha Moreno)4. This positive approach towards identities of the topics and demystification of masks, will allow analyze stereotypes and at the same time working with the interaction.

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 2. Strategies for teaching a second language Focusing on the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language in a multicultural environment it is possible to devise guidelines that address strategies for multicultural education in the classroom. At the same time curricular implications of concepts relating to the language (culture, cultural values, language, metalanguage, communication, identity (ies) culture (s), integration, competences ...) should be considered. Awareness of this series of concepts will guide the design of an educational curriculum that can hold their units in various types of strategies that will be susceptible to changes. This process depends on educational needs of a multicultural group (levels of language not totally uniform, dispositions, economic and personal situations, etc.). On the basis of the approach mentioned in “Strategies in the teaching of second language,” we ask the following questions: • What kind of procedural strategies (communicative and cultural) have to be taken in a multicultural class in relation to a group of students with a single cultural reference? • Are there any changes in these two areas for taken any changes concerning to the strategies in curriculum design? The response to this approach outlined in two linked questions is “yes”. In my opinion, for acquisition of a second language is essential for students to have a contact from the beginning with a written source (whether or not a multicultural environment). Therefore,

my approach will focus on the essential role of reading comprehension in teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The practice of these strategies is general in both monolingual and multilingual classrooms, with some exceptions, such as the use of translation in a classroom with a single culture (translation into the mother language). In an environment of students with diverse language comprehension the common language must remain so when they need to clarify the semantic content of language expressions. This approach leads us to some basic questions in order to be able to employ this skill: 1. What do you read? 2. Why reading? 3. How to read? 4. In what way are the chosen texts for reading helpful for students’ language acquisition and cultural vision on Spain? 5. What would be the best way to measure success? The first, second and fourth question could lead to an interesting diference when it comes to think of a multicultural group and consequently on the strategies that were more suitable. In those questions is essential to use negotiation as a tool for curriculum design. Another step for the analysis of the first, second and fourth item in a multicultural environment is provided by the following three issues: 79

ARS AETERNA 1. Is it likely/unlikely that students feel interest in the contents of a text? 2. To what degree this content might result in culture shock, denial, silence, apprehension, aggressiveness or possibility of subtle conflict between students of diferent backgrounds? 3. What is the ideal way to explain semantic means of words, phrases, sentences or fragments from a common language without translation into other greater or dominant language? At this point we are entering into a second area of primary strategies that can be studied on the basis of the multicultural factor. So we know the basics of cultural languages in the classroom through the interaction between groups and between group-teaching. Previously it would be interesting to distribute tests that summarize: a) The most important things of each student country, which is known to the world. b) What objects, customs, character of the people…they like in Spain. c) What would they change their countries and what not. d) What would they change in the country of destination and what not. e) What are the interests of second language learning (interest, work, being an immigrant, refugee / a ...) f) How often they read in their country (magazines, books, articles ...) g) Why content is more attractive ...

We could appropriately expand this questionnaire in order to reflect the goals of a desirable curriculum for 80

teachers which should be implemented in their course. The factor of approaching to other cultures is the successful key (among other possible) in making teaching strategies. It’s similar to what would happen in a classroom with a single culture where the teacher is an alien who has to accelerate the process of cultural assimilation and the number of problems/cultural misunderstandings is smaller in the teaching/learning. Mentioning again the use of translation (monolingual groups), reading comprehension for more “efficient”, many experts assert that this issue is a practice that should be avoided because it does not always guarantee the real sense that the author wants to translate in his writing. For this reason it is expected to draw a series of strategies that provide the student with a few tools for reading skill. It follows that a series of activities5 proposed by the teacher will be more suitable than others, although they all must lead: • To develop the ability of practicing lexical relation in a text. • To perceive the main idea in a text. • To continue the thrust although some signs have not come to understand that at all. • To pay attention to the expressions used by the author that relate to the meaning of the text. • That the student gets used to search for specific information and identify the item in question, analyzing the titles, subtitles, leads ... proposing books or magazines.

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 As it has been explained above, there are various factors determining the adoption of diferent strategies for

teaching / learning in a curriculum project that are aimed at developing reading comprehension skills.

Endnotes: 1 Bueno, G., 1978. Sobre la idea de cultura /On the idea of culture. Oviedo: La nueva España, número 4, septiembre-octubre 1978, pp. 64-67. 2 Alsina, M. R. Elementos para una comunicación intercultural/Elements for an intercultural communication. Summaries Afers Internacionals n. 36 3 Iglesias Casal, I., 2000. Diversidad cultural en el aula de e / le: la interculturalidad como desafío y como provocación/Cultural diversity in the classroom of Spanish as foreign Language: multiculturalism as a challenge and provocation. Espéculo. Universidad complutense de Madrid. 4 Moreno García, C., 2000. Conocerse para respetarse. Lengua y Cultura, ¿elementos integradores?/ Know yourself in order to be respected. Language and Culture, integrating elements?. Espéculo. Universidad complutense de Madrid. 5 Activities mentioned in the article The reading in the context of communicative competence/La competencia lectora en el contexto de la competencia comunicativa, of Radiana Drinova (1998). In: Records of International Symposium commemorative for 35th anniversary of creation of the Spanish degree. Soia: University of San Clemente-Ojrid. Embassy of Spain in Bulgaria.

Works cited: Alsina, M. R. Elementos para una comunicación intercultural/Elements for an intercultural communication. Summaries Afers Internacionals n. 36 Bueno, G., 1978. Sobre la idea de cultura /On the idea of culture. Oviedo: La nueva España, número 4, septiembre-octubre 1978, pp. 64-67. Drinova, R., 1998. La competencia lectora en el contexto de la competencia comunicativa, ACTAS SIMPOSIO INTERNACIONA. In commemoration of 35th anniversary of the creation of the Hispanic Studies Department, Sofía, Universidad San Clemente de Ojrid-Embajada de España en Bulgaria. Iglesias Casal, I., 2000. Diversidad cultural en el aula de e / le: la interculturalidad como desafío y como provocación/Cultural diversity in the classroom of Spanish as foreign Language: multiculturalism as a challenge and provocation. Espéculo. Universidad complutense de Madrid. Moreno García, C., 2000. Conocerse para respetarse. Lengua y Cultura, ¿elementos integradores?/Know yourself in order to be respected. Language and Culture, integrating elements?. Espéculo. Universidad complutense de Madrid.

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Cosmas – Across Cultures

(The irst Czech historian as a symbol of the beginning and intersections across cultures, genres, and disciplines)

Petr Kopál Petr Kopál (1975) specializes in the history of Middle Ages and the history of film. His dissertation focuses on Cosmas’ chronicle (2008). Currently, he is working on his second dissertation on film and history. Kopál is the co-author and script editor of an experimental project Film and history (since 2002). He works in The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague and also as an external lecturer at Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of University of West Bohemia in Pilsen.

Abstract: If we think about Czech medieval historiography, we have to point out above all two chronicles, two masterpieces, which belong to European literary treasure: Chronicle of Bohemians (Chronica Boemorum) of early 12th century and Zbraslav Chronicle (Chronicon Aulae Regiae) of early 14th century. Petr Zitavsky surely wrote a unique piece, “the mature work of elder Czech Middle Ages”. However, Cosmas is the first, the founder, “Czech Herodotus” (the name given by František Palacký in Ocenění starých českých dějepisců.) Everyone knows the Chronicle of Bohemians. Everybody was taught about it at the primary school or read Cosmas by Vladislav Vančura. But, what real trace did the first Czech historian leave in the “national memory”? What do the present-day historians think about him? And what can his chronicle tell to Czechs living at the beginning of 21st century? It appears that Chronicle of Bohemians talks to us with a new inspiratory force, namely because of the most actual and most important element of its ideological purport - the efort to substantiate the rise (origin and essence) of Czechs and their national state. The creation of it had subsequently initiated processes which were slowly adapting Czech society to the norms of advanced Western European countries since the end of 11th century. Nowadays, the oldest Czech chronicle should be seen above all through nation and politics.

Historical personalities, events, and epochs survive in national memory mostly as symbols, images of more or less political ideas. It is understandable that they change from time to time under the influence of various actualizations. The substantial semantic shifts happened mainly after 1948 when the Czech history was corrupted to suit the image of class ideology. Jan Hus was burned at the stake in Konstanz because he refused to deny the “truth“. It 82

was not, however, the “truth“ of a religious reformator, but of a social revolutionist. Also the historical portrait of Jan Amos Comenius, the bishop of The Unity of Brethren, went through similar metamorphosis. The bishop was interpreted by the communists as an atheist ... Jan Žižka, Jan Hus and also J.A.Comenius were in short Marxists (notwithstanding that , had been born before Marx). Under these labels we nonetheless more often than less find

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 the reminants of older actualizations. The communists applied Marxism on the extreme historicism of 19th C when the Czech nation was regenerated mainly through its own – famous but at the same time painful – history. As far as the quantity and variety of interpretations goes, one of the most remarkable cases is not (as we could easily expect) a typical “national hero”, that is neither the “Konstanz martyr” nor the “teacher of nations” but Cosmas of Prague († 1125), an almost anonymous author of the oldest Czech chronicle …1 Cosmas’ actualizations – in contrast to the actualizations of Hus, Comenius etc. – include also discredits. The image of the first Czech historian, which appeared in the fifties, viewed him as a reactionary, supporter of the West – Rome – and “bitter man, hating” the “national” Slavonic liturgy – culture. Cosmas was one of “the resolute supporters of the politics of Rehor VII, who wanted to annihilate almost every memory of the Slavonic Christianity in the Czech soul.” The emotive attack written by historian Václav Chaloupecký appeared during the time of so called “monster” processes with the “enemies of the people”, with Roman Catholic religious representatives as well as with the leftist historian, and reporter Záviš Kalandra, as a spy from the West and a “fierce enemy” of his homeland and the USSR. 2 (Chaloupecký, 1950, pp. 65 - 80) The strictly Marxist evaluation from the medievalist František Graus followed. From the point of view of the ‘history of rural people’ Cosmas was above all a clergyman, thus the ideologist of the feudal order: “Cosmas’s chronicle

was a feudal chronicle. The character of the book is most visible in the depiction of the pagan times“, which is the rigorous rewriting of a “folk legend ... about the times when all the people were equal“, whose purpose was, “on the contrary, to strengthen the rule of feudalists, to advocate their government, and to strengthen their power.“ (Graus, 1953, pp. 53nn, 277nn) The portrait from textbooks, in other words, the official portrait consisted mostly of fragments: “As a disciple of western culture ... Cosmas does not mention Slavonic liturgy and education in his chronicle ... he followed a political goal and by his work he wanted to contribute to the power of Czech feudal state. Cosmas’ chronicle is thus also the furthermost source of our knowledge about our oldest legends.“ (Forst, 1985, p. 38) The brief explication from the above, however, does not admit certain contradictions. While Graus claimed that Cosmas rewrote the folk legends substantially, almost violated them to such extent that nothing historical (pagan or folk-like) remained in them, according to Zdeněk Nejedlý, Cosmas levered the legends up and immortalized them and thus “celebrated the creative force of people with no rights and from time to time inadvertently took over also anti-feudal ideology, for example, in the legend about Přemysl“ (pagan origin of the dynasty). “Even in Cosmas’ rewriting the old historical centre of some legends surfaces the same way as it lived in the awareness of the people ... and the production and life forms of the ancient organization of the primitive so83

ARS AETERNA ciety are reflected (for example, primitive tribe collectivism in the legend on golden age, matriarchy in the legend of Libuše and her sisters, the transformation to patriarchy in the legend of Přemysl and the Girls’ war)...” “The old men from the people, some simple folk story tellers” were understandably Cosmas’ source. The representation of the first Czech chronicler as an almost enlightened collector of folk art, which we can find in the works by Z. Nejedlý and his epigones, corresponded with the romantic historicism of the 19th C, moreover it amateurishly imitated and trivialized the famous picture found in fiction and turned it into “scholarship“. 3 (Nejedlý, 1953; Škarka, 1957, p. 154; Škarka, 1959, p. 74n) Undoubtedly, Cosmas significantly contributed to “Old Czech legends” (even though they are mostly associated with Alois Jirásek). Romantic and Marxist interpretation of the chronicle was connected with their folk origin as well as the historical core of Cosmas’ legends, at least of those stories, which were included in the introductory 13 chapters of the chronicle: “Cosmas was the first one who registered and in writing preserved folk art in our country. And, certainly, he drew from it not only knowledge or legends, but also the spirit of a narrator, liveliness and expressivity which his work is attributed with. Of course, Cosmas was closer to the nobility with his position than to simple people, and thus he advocates the interests of feudalists and the church in his chronicle. The power of folk art and the richness of folk experience, however, enrich Cosmas’ Latin sentences. He listened to 84

the folk experience, which proves the wisdom and perceptivity of the chronicler. This is how Vladislav Vančura saw him in the Pictures from the History of the Czech Nation (in Czech: Obrazy z dějin národa českého)…” (Chaloupka, 1989, p. 13n) Marxist historians had rather nostalgic (ambivalent) attitude to the pagan prehistory, “primitive society”. “We uncompromisingly side the people and pagan society, but we cannot and do not want to deny that the progress is on the side of the suppressive state and Christianity…” We can discern it very well also in Vláčil’s “timeless” Marketa Lazarová (1967), which thematically supports the conflict between (“more appealing”) paganism and (“more progressive”) Christianity. Cosmas’ image was to a certain degree influenced exactly by the evaluation of the chronicler’s relation to the folk or pagan culture, mostly to legends. 4 (Kopal, 2005, p. 79) “Kalandra and before him (but no way probably without his influence) Vl. Vančura popularized the representation of Cosmas the chronicler, who at the last minute captures the remnants of pagan traditions in Bohemia – the Prague dean listens breathlessly to Cosmas and old wise men – it is a vision that has been imprinted in the imagination of all readers. Newly, Třeštík tries to present a more realistic understanding of Cosmas’ personality and his chronicle – the chronicler is no longer a medium through which the weakening voices of pagan prehistory speak, it is the medieval man of letters who masters the whole register of stylistic devices.” (Králík, 1976, p. 206)

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 The popularization and Záviš Kalandra, whose works were in the fifties excluded from the libraries, unfortunately, cannot be considered a very realistic connection, it is rather an oxymoron. If we speak about the national memory or national historical awareness, we cannot count seriously on Kalandra’s Czech Paganism.5 (Kalandra, 1947) In addition to this mostly unknown, even though an “excellently written book” (D. Třeštík) we have announced -- through a quotation by literary historian Oldřich Králík, who outlined the sources and development of contemporary popularization of Cosmas, his own vision on the public representations – two other works. We are going to start with the second, actually third, in short the last quotation source. A monograph by Dušan Třeštík was the result of his dissertation work in the sixties (it was published in 1968). Its substantial part presents the analysis of political and ideological content of the book. This time (in contrast to the book of the previous decade – see above) we do not deal here with the ideology about ideology (so much as the Czech society in the sixties lived by the politics and “political thinking” – see the subtitle of the monograph) but with the methodology of research of medieval historical works, which need to be analyzed also (if not primarily) as literary works. The popularized historical version was published earlier than the essential scholarly work on Cosmas and his chronicle (it was published even 2 years earlier). But the general public recognition had been already influenced by a diferent publication:6

Cosmas, as a novella, an extensive chapter from the first volume of Vančura’s Pictures from the History of the Czech Nation (1939).7 It was a monumental project, designed and accomplished under the growing Nazi threat (and subsequently occupation). The author wanted to strengthen the nation and show it its famous history. Thus he highlighted the oldest Czech chronicler Cosmas. He called him his teacher, his predecessor, as well as a comrade.8 (Blahynka, 1978, p. 297nn; Závodský, Brno 1975, pp. 297-302) This particular portrait is, however, not a label. Vančura made his Cosmas “out of various interests“, mistakes and passions (he depicted him with some autobiographical features). He also attributed him materially, Cosmas had a good place to live, but he was presented as quick tempered, which did not change with his status as a clergyman, nor with his older age. All that passion, determination, arguability, coarsiness and clumsiness is a necessary equipment to countrebalance the “man, who is incessantly going to write a chronicle of his country.“ And that cannot be accomplished by “words“ only (they are “suitable for the stories“), but by “a certain enthusiasm, certain flow of emotions and a flow of will that can raise one thing and put it in the place of another and make it prominent and diminish the other one so that the honour of the intentions was preserved and at the same time the intention sounded well in the order of the things.“ Even though Cosmas receives the folk narrators in the capitola dome to listen to their old stories, his relation to the simple people and especially to 85

ARS AETERNA their language is not straightforward (certainly it could not be called admiring). Constant trivial arguments with his beloved and loving wife Božetěcha, who is quarrelsome like her husband, and with his two closest friends, colleagues Šebíř and Bruno, are strangely interlaced with essentail conflicts and contradictions. It is, however, only the conflict between Christianity and paganism, which Cosmas sees as irreconcilable. He is even willing to accept Old Slavonic (Sázava) literature. Right at the beginning Vančura speaks through Cosmas about the “double truth“ and a bit later through the character of Šebíř that “there are two sources of our knowledge“... (Vančura, 1987, p. 7nn) Vančura tried to present a realist image, he, however, worked with a certain degree of idealization. He valued patriotism more than the quarrels. The chronicle was presented as a unifying symbol, the Idea, which can be accomplished under the contribution of all protagonists: the Czechs are in their essence – and in the right moment – the good. Common noble goal can help to forget easily the small doggeries and hatred, fed by the “petty legend bearers who cunningly butt in”. But they also reveal something about the “Czech national character”. Their defamation is of course just an innocent game: it does not destroy anyone’s life, or ruin anybody economically. At the birth of the oldest Czech chronicle they do not play any role. In this way however, Vančura distanced himself from the harsh circumstances of the Cosmas’ period, vividly presented in the chronicle, and at the same time from the reality of the protectorate, 86

where per each rebel existed in average one informer. Such an unfavorable statistics (referring also to the fact that the majority of the nation lived in the grey shell of passive observation), however, Vančura would not have accepted. Even though we know what ideas, and images he had on his mind in the moments of his arrest and during a few days before his execution . . .” 9 (Ibid., p.13nn) Four old wise men, who inform Cosmas, have a share in the narration and contribute to bring the chronicle alive. Their everyday suferings create the second layer of the story. Vančura modeled the book so that Cosmas was closer to them than to earls and magnates. We do not learn anything about the life of the ruling class in the chapter. The point of view, which the author employed, discloses his world view. The history of every nation depends on the masses of unnamed people, degraded but always rising. Marxist’s actualization of the figure of Cosmas could not have been persuasive in total, because it could not be confronted with the content of the chronicle. Cosmas’s classmate Šebíř, who agitated in favor of “shepherds and farmers and various other servants”, served Vančura to bridge the contradiction at least partially. (“I can see all of them together and can say that I like the view!”) (Ibid., p. 33n) The actualization and idealization of Cosmas rests in humanism. Vančura, in this way, also presented Cosmas in a high degree of credibility. He did not present the page from a history text book, but an erroneous and desiring man. The whole chapter does not contain a single character or depiction, which would

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 be flat, purely straightforward. It is as if Vančura would be saying: yes, but . . . His critical perception was heightened because he wrote not only fiction, but also a chronicle, that The Pictures were from the very beginning conceived as a synthesis of art and scholarship. It was exactly Cosmas whom he considered to be his role model, the poet, who wrote the history of the Czech nation. The intention to put together art and scholarly disciplines was on the other hand the main reason why the other writers, who should have contributed to The Pictures in their authorial voice, withdrew from the demanding and extraordinary project very soon. Vančura, as an ideological leader, and after all the only author, wanted the used tools that would correspond with the significance of the whole enterprise. The memorial to the Czech national history came to existence as a “truthful narrative on life, war afair deeds and also the spirit of knowledge” (the subtitle). The poet worked with facts, based “on the background of the most recent examination” and “with the help of young Czech historians” . . . (Blahynka, 1978, pp. 297n, 307n) The people who provided the “historic material” to Vančura were Václav Husa, Jaroslav Charvát and Jan Pachta, young Marxists historians associated in the Historical Group. The writer discussed the facts, including realia, data, names of historical personages and so on during numerous meetings with his professional advisors. The question remains, if Vančura consulted also other historians, for example medievalist Z. Kalandra (official advisors, excluding

probably only Hus, did not specialize in the medieval history), who also claimed to belong to the Historical Group. (Ibid. p. 303nn, Petráň, 1975, pp. 11 - 45) Kalandra’s theories on “Czech paganism” (unpublished in that time) could have had the influence on the understanding of legends by Vančura. The main narrator of the “stories, which took place not only in words, but also in the mind” and which Vančura’s Cosmas does not hesitate to compare with “the beautiful parables” of Jesus Christ, is “the pagan of animal expression, who grew older farming on infertile soil.” It is worth noticing that the folklore mediated in this way is an example of the surprising agreement with Greek mythology, which Cosmas knows intimately from reading classical literature. The situation is even more complicated by a monk from Sázava, another outsider, in contrast probably a young man, providing the old wise men with the stories, which Cosmas could be interested in. (The monk, whose co-operation with Cosmas’s informers is not selfless, represents an interesting figure: even though he unconsciously causes that the letter on the history of the Sázava monastery would not be included in the chronicle, paradoxically . . . he is probably the prospect follower of Cosmas – the Monk of Sázava. . .) (Vančura, 1987, p. 7nn, 26n, 32n, 38n, 46). In short: Cosmas did not have to “borrow” the legends from the world literature and folklore, but literally he could (and very easily) “get” them from the tradition of his own people. What the pagan narrates does not resemble any “old Czech legend”, with the exception of the men87

ARS AETERNA tioning on the Girls’ War. It means that Vančura obviously left a considerable space also for the Cosmas’s knowledge. It is wonderful, how easily the writer managed to put together the contradictions in an impressive unity. The professional historiography usually presents the only “truth”. Positivist historians and folklorists considered the textual parallels with the Bible, Vergil, and so on automatically “borrowings”. It was mainly Václav Tille who disclosed Cosmas’s legends as an unoriginal mosaic of extraneous matters and motives (in 1927 Vančura spend some time with him in Moscow). In addition the postwar historians responded to Vančura anyway (in one way or another), even though they did not admit it openly…10 Also Vančura drew the information from old wise men – through three (four) young men… . But how the poet Jaroslav Seifert wrote: “It is sufficient to read the extensive Vančura’s chapter on Cosmas, the chronicler in the book. What could historians say to the author about this historical figure other than a few rigid data, which the history found? And what witty and funny concert of sentences Vančura could make out of those couple of historical data!” (Seifert, 1992, p. 141) Maybe even more than with the content he was concerned with the form. (Medieval historians worked on a basis of this premise as well.) He wrote poetry in prose (on the other hand he interlaced the prose with verses what some medieval historians, including Cosmas, did before) full of genuine metaphors and oxymorons. In the examined chapter he also selected such expressions, 88

word puns and similes intentionally as they would evoke Cosmas’ stylistics (which he knew through the excellent translation of Karel Hrdina11). This archaic-like stylistics, meant as homage to the great predecessor, was impressively complemented by another procedure, in the essence new, modern and progressive… . The double daring synthesis was accomplished The Pictures: the book is a synthesis not only of an art and scholarship, but also of literature and film. Vančura was also an active film maker, director, and screen writer. And in the complex work built on the factual exactitude he decided to use the film technique, his “great love, in many times unhappy”, very consequentially: “The Pictures . . . are built as a film opus. It is Vancura’s most exquisite, supreme film even though it is accomplished in word, as literature.” The simulation of film images, and sequences in the text was meant to reconstruct historical events and epochs in terms of the “the most authentic and credible” impression. The practice of Barrandov film studios was reflected also in a collective working method or in the employment of professional advisors. Vančura first developed every chapter as a “scenario”, which he consulted with historians. It was no exception that these scenarios had even several versions. That was the preparation of individual parts of a “literary film”. The expert of Vančura’s work Milan Blahynka concluded his treatise on the given topic succinctly: the “turn to film” was caused also by “the awareness that film is the most accessible medium of the time; Vancura‘s aim was to write

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 for the broadest reading audience. “ 12 (Blahynka, 1978, p. 299n, p.302; Bartošek, 1973; Holý, 1991, pp. 69-90; Petráň, 1975, p. 33n) During the adaptation of Marketa Lazarová František Vláčil came out The Pictures, almost unfilmable text, and he used the book as a formal and ideological incentive (the clash between Christianity and paganism).The chapter Cosmas was staged by the Czech television as Cosmas and Lady Božetěcha (directed by Jaroslav Balík, script by Jan Otčenášek – J. Balík). It was screened as a premiere on Christmas Eve, in 1974 at 20.00 on the channel ČT2. Originally it was supposed to be followed by the full length film on Cosmas. Its production, however, was never accomplished and it ended only as a literary adaptation (script by J. Otčenášek – based on the film short story by the historian Dušan Třeštík!).13 Vančura’s representation of Cosmas, in any way, has been written in the national memory. Since 80-ties of 20th C the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences in Washington publishes the journal Cosmas, named after the chronicler Cosmas (the title was explained in the introductory article in the first issue of the journal). Undoubtedly it was especially Vančura’s “image” that inspired the title of the contemporary Internet bookshop, trademark Kosmas s.r.o. (www.kosmas.cz ), the symbol of Czech book as well as the unity of artistic and scholarly literature.14 Everybody knows Cosmas’s chronicle. Students have studied about it at schools, they read Vančura’s Cosmas … What is it that the first historian wrote about actually?

What do the contemporary modern historians think about him? And what can his chronicle say to the Czechs living at the beginning of 21th century? Cosmas is the first, he is the founder, the “Czech Herodotus”. It was how he was called already by František Palacký in his Würdigung der älteren böhmischen Geschichtsschreiber. (Palacký, 1830, p. 11nn; Třeštík, 1968, p. 9nn) This is also the reference used by one of the most renowned world historians Robert Barlett (University of St. Andrews in Scotland): “Bohemia made a spectacular debut in this respect with Cosmas of Prague, whose vivid prose style, gifts of powerful characterization and ability to convey action, and the occasional personal touches he allows (such as the yearning picture of his long-gone student days) make him not only a vital historical source for the Premyslid lands but also one of the great writers of the Middle Ages. He initiated a tradition which continued, with peaks and plateaux, throughout the Premyslid period, and this was important, for a native historical tradition was one of the marks of a Latin Christian society.“ (Bartlett, 2009, p. 16) Dušan Třeštík (†2007), the expert of Cosmas’s chronicle par excellence, would have never dared to write that the first Czech chronicler excelles also in a competition of the best medieval historians. He knew very well that it made a diference if the statement like that was presented by a national or international medievalist. Within the context of the Czech history, however, Třeštík boldly linked his evaluation of Cosmas to Palacký’s Würdigung – when 89

ARS AETERNA he compared Cosmas exactly to Palacký himself (who he personally honored very much, he considered him even the “greatest of the Czechs” of all times): Both were in a way “fathers of the nation”, its “makers”, ideologists. “Cosmas . . .did not only want to present a mirror to his contemporaries, he wanted furthermore to speak to his nation about what it is and where it goes, he also wanted the same what seven hundred years later František Palacký made an efort about.” Or: “Cosmas was like a medieval Palacky. He developed the view of the Czech history, the understanding of the Czech history, which the Czechs appropriated until the Palacký’s times. Palacký did something similar for the modern Czech nation. But otherwise they are colleagues.” (Třeštík, 2005, p. 15, Třeštík, 2007) It seems that the Cosmas‘ chronicle speaks even to us today, like a new source of inspiration, thanks to the most topical and significant element of its ideological content, i.e. thanks to the efort to rationalize the birth, origin and the essence of the national state. Its constitution then started the processes, which at the turn of 11th and 12th C started to accommodate the Czech society slowly to the standards of European countries. It is possible to view the oldest Czech chronicle mostly through the nation and politic… . Cosmas wrote the history of the nation, the Chronicle of the Czechs, learned, entertaining, but also politically engaged work, presenting some kind of a “national programme“. The example is in no way the Czech exception. When we imagine 11th and 12th C Europe we can 90

see a garden of blooming new nations, medieval “spring of nations.” And the first national states, which are no longer only the pure bondages of people, but territorially delineated institutionalized formations, which have their own historians. We would be looking in vain for the historians of the German nation which still remained a dream of the future. In this respect the moment belongs to the smaller, but more hardworking: the historians of Norman states in Normandy and in Sicily appear as the first. Consequently historians in England, which is conquered by Normans, start to write. In Denmark Saxo Grammaticus composes his extensive and rich chronicle and in Norway at the beginning of 13th C Snorri Sturluson contributes in the national language. At the beginning of 12th C the national history is created in our neighbouring countries – in Hungarian Empire and Poland. The author, in either case, is unknown. A Polish chronicler, writing about 1113 is now called Gallus Anonymus. We can add Kiev’s Nestor writing in the national language the history of Russia in the same period. Formally the above mentioned historians relate little. Hungarian Anonymus presents his work in a novelistic form, Gallus’ Gesta15 is the celebration of one ruler and the complicated stylistics of Saxo’s chronicle difers very much from the Cosmas’ way of expression. All these works on the contrary are very similar in their ideological content, the intention to present the history of a nation, formed only by a political representation, ruler and the noble men. The essence of nationalism of 11th and 12th C rests exactly in the emergence of “politi-

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 cal nations” rationalized by history. The created images of the past correspond to the real needs of contemporary nationalism. Because of the love for their homeland, i.e. the nation bound to a certain territory, the old wise men sit in the boats woven of thin parchment and use the quill pen to struggle against the flow of time. The long, hard journey leads to the very beginning of the nation, it means to the inalienable right for the present territory and to the new explication of tribal myths, old legends in Czech, Polish and so on. Historians become the ideologists in the service of the “nation”. The chronicler – the ideologist, defines “all Czechs”, in real the power elite, “political nation”, by a common ancestor, but mostly by their relation to the earl, to the ruling dynasty. Even though the Chronica Boemorum is not barren of xenophobia and ethnocentrism – the Czechs traditionally saw their neighbors from the empire and Poland as enemies – undoubtedly Cosmas did not build the chronicle on a relation to foreign cultural and linguistic ethnic group (regardless of this the Polish were in that time almost identical with the Czechs in terms of the language and culture). (Třeštík, 1968, p. 89nn; Koht, 1947, pp. 265-280; Kersken, 1995) We know that Cosmas studied “in Liège under the master Frank”. The venerable and renown school at the Cathedral of St. Lambert in Liège (at present in Belgium) belonged to the best what the present Europe could ofer to “gifted young men” desiring the education. (Cosmas, 1923, pp. 237-238) It is remarkable that already since 10th C there were lively cultural contacts be-

tween Prague and Liège. Since the times of the bishop Notker, a friend of the second Prague bishop Vojtech, the Liège dioceses was dedicated to st. Vojtech’s cult. Foremost German medievalist Johannes Fried made a remarkable discovery in this respect: the first legend on St. Vojtech, generally attributed to John Canaparius, Aventian abbot, was probably written in the millieu of the above mentioned Notker. During the years of 1008 – 1016, master Hubald taught at the Prague cathedral school, who was Notker’s pupil and cannonic of the Liège capitula. In the Czech lands, however, the cult of St. Lambert was known. We know from Cosmas that the great worshipper of the patron of Liège was the Prague bishop Herman. And Cosmas himsef used Vita Lamberti, written in 10th C by the Liège bishop Stephanus as a stylistic forerunner for some of the extracts in the chronicle. It is also probable that one of the three Cosmas’s readers (friends) was his classmate in Liège. The former partner city, situated on the West border of the Roman Empire, symbolizes today the challenge for the researchers as a potential source of new findings on Cosmas, as a member of the Liège intelligentsia and literati. (Třeštík, 1968, pp. 44n., 57n; Wojciechowska, 1968, pp. 5nn, Fried, 2002, pp. 235 - 279) Their work was more related in the form than in the content.It was characterized by a trendy interest in Ancient writers. Maybe that’s why Cosmas included in the chronicle the legends, so called Czech “Antiquity”. In any way, his writing can be described almost as a Renaissance – vivid and playful – depiction of a number of characters or scenes, 91

ARS AETERNA fancy combination of styles and genres, including poetry, and balanced representation of topics, which should not be intended to educate only but to entertain as well. As a historian, Cosmas proved that he had a sense for the criticism of source literature. He considered the history or the truth (“factum”) that, which he learnt from a “credible tradition” (“vera fidelim relation”). The legend (“fibula”) was according to the learned tradition the same as an invention, fiction (“fictum”), therefore it was not suitable for the history. Cosmas worked out the problem like Solomon: legends, “senum fabulosa relatio”, were included before the chronicle itself, “the credible tradition”, and thus he let the reader to decide what he/ she wants to believe. (Cosmas, 1923, p.

32; Třeštík, 1968, pp. 96nn) The legends are always a problem. Certainly this was not the trivial babbling of some old men, but a collection of topical “pagan” tribal myths, related to the basic rituals of the whole community. Cosmas historicized the myths according to the learned model of the “birth of the nation” (“origo gentis”) while he did not forget to dress them up in the fashionable literary mostly ancient style.16 (Třeštík, 2003) Contemporary medieval studies more or less agree with Vančura. Cosmas is closely connected to the origin of the Czech nation, state and history . . . In his chronicle the cultures, genres and disciplines blend remarkably. Yes, Cosmas is directly the impersonation and symbol of the beginnings and intersections.

Endnotes: 1 Scholarly edition of Cosmas’ chronicle: Cosmas (Bretholz), 1923. Czech translation: Kosmas (Hrdina, Bláhová, Třeštík, Kopal) 2005. English translation: Cosmas (Wolverton) 2009. The essential scholarly work on Comas and his writing: Třeštík, 1968. The extensive literature about the oldest Czech chronicle was complied by Kersken, 1995, pp. 573-582; the latest compilation of information on Cosmas by Kopal, in print (Oxford). 2 Cosmas supposedly kept the Sazava monastery a “secret“. The fact is, that Cosmas‘ interest in the institutions of the Church was generally surprisingly low. 3 Naive opinions (mostly those of Nejedlý) on Cosmas‘ fables were ironized by Karbusický, 1995, p. 13nn. 4 See also www.ilmadejiny.cz (P. Kopal, Velká Morava – pokus o slovenský národní velkoilm). 5 Brabec writes on Kalandra’s life and work, 1994. 6 Třeštík, 1966/1972 came out in 1966 in print of 2400 issues and the second time in 1972 in print of 2000 issues – to compare the dissertation (Třeštík, 1968) was printed in 1500 issues. 7 Vančura, 1981: 11th edition, 20 000 issues (Vančura, 1974: 10th edition, 30 000 issues); Vančura, 1987: a separate edition of the book Cosmas, moreover together with Markéta Lazarová, 12th edition, 19 000 issues. After 1989 Pictures were published twice: in 1995 and 2003. 8 Compare also Hoffmann – Tesaříková, 1988 (3rd edition, 22 000 issues), p. 54nn: The extracts from Cosmas‘ chronicle are introduced by an extensive extract form Vančura’s Pictures (the beginning of the chapter Cosmas), „where the author so nicely depicted our irst and maybe the greatest chronicler“. Tichá, 1984 (15 000 issues), p. 22nn: „The work by a highly educated religious dignitary achieves a European level. V. Vančura presented him to us in a remarkable portrait: “In capitola dome, near the Prague church, 25 canonics stayed. One of them was called Cosmas …‘“ The introductory paragraphs of the chapter are quated and then the extracts from Cosmas‘ chronicle follow. „After reading even that little from Cosmas‘ chronicle

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Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 we cannot but remain in awe how deeply Vančura put himself in the place of Cosmas‘ artistic representation, in his stylistics, in a way he uses rhetorical questions, similes, irony and so on – as if Cosmas himself was writing in Vančura’s work. The past centuries not only went hand in hand with out times but as if they merged together in that patriotic feeling.“ It is necessary to add, however, that Vančura wanted to devote a much bigger space to the author of the irst Czech written chronicle than to Cosmas. Dalimil should have been a link throughout the whole third part of Pictures. 9 V. Vančura depicts the process of conlict concerning the new prior of the Prague capitola (the selected candidates are Šebíř and Bruno, but the ofice is eventually held by someone else.) On the “poet in resistance“, and about a possible treason, that lead to Vančura’s imprisonment in 1942, Blahynka, 1978, p. 308nn. 10 Czech folklore scholar Václav Tille is also known for his intensive research in Cosmas‘ legends: Tille, 1928, pp. 81-111; Tille, pp. 255-263; Tille, 1917, pp. 387-391; Tille, 1906, s. 1-2; Tille, 1905, pp. 425-427; Tille, 1904, pp. 203-206; Tille, 1904, pp. 322-323. It is less known that he was one of the irst ilm theoreticians and aestheticians. He published about 30 essays and articles on ilm (Kinema was the breakthrough study in 1908 ). See Linhart, 1968. Záviš Kalandra, the author of a number of ilm criticism and essays, also did not overlook the ilm studies. 11 Cosmas, 1929. 12 See for example: Vančura, 1987, p. 31n: one of the “ilm“ scenes, Šebíř looks from Mělník, as Cosmas is approaching riding a horse. 13 At present the ambitious project The Chronicle of the Czechs (directed by David Slabý) is in the process of advanced ilm preparations as a planned cycle of seven acted documentary ilms (footage of one part is about 50 minutes) representing the corresponding number of Cosmas‘ stories. Compare: Kopal, 2008, p. 6. 14 Kosmas. Journal of Czechoslovak and Central European Studies. The irst issue came out with the introductory article presenting Cosmas the chronicler: Horecký, 1982, pp. 3-8. 15 Galli Anonymi cronicae et gesta ducum sive principum Polonorum. A parallel Latin and English edition is available: Gallus, 2003. 16 It is necessary to deal with Comsma’s legends on the methodological basis of comparative mythology of Geoges Dumézil (Třeštík, 2003). The legend on girls‘ war was successfully analysed on the basis of this approach by Slovak literary scholar Golema, 2006, pp. 31-100. Works cited: Cosmas, 1923. Cosmae Pragensis Chronica Boemorum. Ed. B. Bretholz (unter Mitarbeit von W. Weinberger, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, Nova series II. Berlin. Cosmas, 1929. Kosmova kronika česká. Ed. (transl.) K. Hrdina. Praha. Cosmas, 2005. Kosmova kronika česká. Ed. K. Hrdina, M. Bláhová (transl.), D. Třeštík (úvod), P. Kopal (komentáře). Praha. Cosmas, 2009. The chronicle of the Czechs. Cosmas of Prague. Ed. (transl., introduction and notes) L. Wolverton, Washington. Gallus, 2003. Gesta principum Polonorum. The Deeds of the Princes of the Poles. Edd. P. W. Knoll, F. Schaer (transl. and notes), T. N. Bisson (introduction). Budapest – New York. Bartlett, R., 2009. „Evropa a stát Přemyslovců“ In: Přemyslovci – budování českého státu. Edd. P. Sommer, D. Třeštík, J. Žemlička. Praha, pp. 15-31. Blahynka, M., 1978. Vladislav Vančura. Praha. Brabec, J., 1994. Intelektuál a revoluce. (Ed. J. Brabec). Praha. Chaloupecký, V., 1950. „Slovanská bohoslužba v Čechách“ In: Věstník české akademie věd a umění 59, 1950, pp. 65-80. Chalopupka, O., 1989. Setkání s českými spisovateli, Praha. Forst, V., 1985. Literatura pro 1. ročník středních škol (Přehled vývoje a směrů). Praha. Fried, J., 2002. „Gnesen – Aachen – Rom. Otto III. und der Kult des hl. Adalbert: Beobachtungen zum

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ARS AETERNA älteren Adalbertsleben“ In: Polen und Deutschland vor 1000 Jahren. Ed. M. Borgolte. Berlin, pp. 235-279. Golema, M., 2006. Stredoveká literatura a indoeurópske mytologické dedičstvo. Prítomnosť trojfunkčnej indoeurópskej ideológie v literatúre, mytológii a folklóre stredovekých Slovanov. Banská Bystrica. Graus, F., 1953. Dějiny venkovského lidu v Čechách v době předhusitské I. Praha. Hoffmann, B., Tesaříková, J., 1988. Literatura pro I. ročník středních škol (pracovní antologie textů), Praha. Horecký, P. L., 1982. „Kosmas (Cosmas)“ In: Kosmas 1, Summer 1982, no 1, pp. 3-8. Kalandra, Z., 1947. České pohanství. Praha. Karbusicky, V., 1995: Báje, mýty, dějiny. Nejstarší české pověsti v kontextu evropské kultury. Praha. Kersken, N., 1995, Geschichtsschreibung im Europa der „nationes“. Nationalgeschichtliche Gesamtdarstellungen im Mittelalter. Köln – Weimar – Wien. Koht, H., 1947. „The Dawn of Nationalism in Europe“ In: American Historical Review, vol. 52, pp. 265-280. Kopal, P. „Cosmas of Prague“ In: The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, in print. Kopal, P., 2008. „Kosmova kronika jako televizní seriál“ In: Dějiny a současnost, vol. 30, no. 12, p. 6. Kopal, P. „Velká Morava – pokus o slovenský národní velkoilm“ In: www.ilmadejiny.cz Kopal, P., 2005. „Za časů Markety Lazarové…?: Filmové obrazy středověku. In: Film a dějiny. Ed. P. Kopal. Praha, pp. 57-83, 353-359. Králík, O., 1976. Kosmova kronika a předchozí tradice. Praha. Linhart, L., 1968. První estetik ilmu Václav Tille. Praha. Nejedlý, Z., 1953. Staré pověsti české jako historický pramen. Praha. Palacký, F., 1830. Würdigung der älteren böhmischen Geschichtsschreiber. Prag. Petráň, J., 1975. „Historická skupina (Komentář k vzpomínkám jejích členů)“ In: Studie z obecných dějin. Sborník prací k 70. narozeninám prof. Dr. Jaroslava Charváta. Praha, pp. 11-45. Seifert, J., 1992. Všecky krásy světa. Praha. Škarka, A., 1957. Kosmas: Literárně historický portrét. Studie k dějinám české literatury In: Česká literatura vol. 5, pp. 152-167. Škarka, A., 1959. (in:) Dějiny české literatury I. Praha. Tichá, Z., 1984. Cesta starší české literatury. Praha. Tille, V., 1928. „Přemysl Oráč“ In: Časopis pro dějiny venkova, vol. 15, pp. 81-111 Tille, V., 1918. „Kristiánův a Kosmův Přemysl“ In: Český časopis historicický, vol. 24, pp. 255-263. Tille, V., 1917. „Přemyslova otka“ In: Český časopis historický, vol. 23, pp. 387-391. Tille, V., 1906. „O panovníkovi od železného stolu“ In: Český lid, vol. 15, pp. s. 1-2. Tille, V., 1905. „K nejstarším českým pověstem“ In: Český časopis historický, vol. 11, pp. 425-427. Tille, V., 1904. „Přemyslovy střevíce a železný stůl“ In: Český časopis historický, vol. 10, pp. 203-206. Tille, V., 1904. „K pověsti o Přemyslovi“ In: Český časopis historický, vol. 10, pp. 322-323. Třeštík, D., 1968, Kosmova kronika. Studie k počátkům českého dějepisectví a politického myšlení. Praha. Třeštík, D., 1966/1972. Kosmas. Praha. Třeštík, D., 2003. Mýty kmene Čechů (7. – 10. století). Tři studie ke „starým pověstem českým“. Praha. Třeštík, D., 2005. „O Kosmovi a jeho kronice“ In: Kosmova Kronika česká. Praha – Litomyšl. Třeštík, D., 2007. „Rozhovor s historikem Dušanem Třeštíkem“ In: Čro 1 – Radiožurnál, 12. 2. 2007. Vančura, V., 1981. Obrazy z dějin národa českého I, Praha. Vančura, V., 1987. Kosmas. Markéta Lazarová. Praha 1987. Wojciecowska, M., 1968. Kosmasa Kronika Czechów, Warszawa. Závodský, A., 1975. „Kronikář Kosmas a Vladislav Vančura“ In: Classica atque mediaevalia Jaroslao Ludvíkovský octogenario oblata. Brno, pp. 297-302.

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Reviews

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

Michael W. Schaefer: Just what war is. The civil war writings of de forest and bierce. The Univesity of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1997. 172 p.

Jozef Pecina Civil War is one of the most traumatic experiences in the history of the American nation and it influenced and changed lives of almost all Americans. Besides producing human and material casualties it also resulted in enormous amount of literary works. Hundreds of novels, short stories, poems, songs, pamphlets or speeches were published during the war and in following years. Several veterans from both Federal and Confederate armies published their memoirs and as many as forty tried to exploit their combat experience in writing novels or short stories. Two of them, John W. De Forest and Ambrose Bierce stand above the rest with their literary achievements. Michael W. Schaefer’s book, as the subtitle suggests, deals with writings of these two representatives of realism in American literature. The title of Schaefer’s book is taken from an article written by De Forest entitled “Our Military Past and Future” and published in Atlantic Monthly in 1879. In the article, De Forest calls for “accurate, detailed accounts” (Introduction X) of what actually happens on the battlefield and criticizes military historians using “rhetorical generalities” (Introduction X) when describing battles. He calls for military histories that are ”not such stuf as the world has had about war from a host of ignorant romancers calling themselves historians; but books which show

just what war is, and what to do amidst its difficulties and perplexities” (Introduction, p. X I) First part of the book, entitled The Components of Realism in Combat Writing, is divided into three chapters. Here, using results of research of foremost British military historians Robert Holmes and John Keegan, Schaefer describes what soldiers actually feel in combat, do in combat and how do they behave in military writings of De Forest and Bierce. He comes to conclusion that for ordinary soldier during the battle a sight of the battlefield is limited and it is impossible to grasp wider strategic perspective. Even when a man can see what is going on around him, he is most likely not able to remember it accurately enough to put it into context. Therefore, he concludes, for a writer describing the battle accurately, it is necessary to supplement his own memories with other sources in order to provide realistic picture. Both Bierce and De Forest managed to capture truthful aspects, adding their own style, which distinguishes their literary works from simple reports from memoirs written by other veterans. John W. De Forest had already published several books before the War started. After the Confederate victory at Bull Run, he raised a company of volunteers in his native Connecticut and later participated in several battles and skir95

ARS AETERNA mishes, mostly in Louisiana and Virginia. His literary fame rests mostly on one novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, published in Harper’s Monthly in 1867 and a collection of Civil War memoirs called Volunteer’s Adventures. Fourth and fifth chapter of the book focus on writings of this pioneer of realistic war fiction. Schaefer returns to Our Military Past and Future, in which De Forest ofers an “articulate theory about what constitutes realism in combat literature” (p. 24). De Forest believes that reading accounts of previous battles is the best way how to prepare prospective soldier for coming under fire and therefore proposes a set of criteria for good military writing. Here, William Schaefer correctly concludes that both fiction and nonfiction De Forest’s military writing meets his own criteria. Although De Forest cites Caesar and his Commentaries, as his chief source of influence and even praises him in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, Schaefer notices several flaws concerning realistic combat descriptions Caesar’s memoirs. He however points out that De Forest was able to avoid similar flaws, mostly through his own battlefield experience and through influence of other military writers. Among them, Schaefer praises Alexander Kinglake, British historian who between 1863 and 1887 published Invasion of Crimea, history of Crimean War in nine volumes. However, De Forest started writing Miss Ravenel’s conversion in 1864 and it is doubtful whether Kinglake was able to influence him. None of the participants who attempted to write about their military experience saw more action than Am96

brose Bierce. He enlisted Federal army at the age of eighteen and participated in almost all important Western Theatre battles. Twenty years after the War he began to write short stories in which he concentrates on men in isolated situations and death on the battlefield seems to be his obsession. On the contrary to De Forest, it is rather difficult to find authors who influenced Ambrose Bierce. He ofers very few clues in his writings, nothing that could be compared to De Forest’s Our Military Past and Future. Schaefer opposes two American literary critics (Larzer Zif and Eric Solomon), who, after failing to find sources that influenced Bierce concluded that he completely invented his own form, and states that Bierce was familiar with works of Walter Scott and William Thackeray that include descriptions of battles. Besides, in twenty years between the end of his military career and his first Civil War short story Bierce must have read several works of military authors. Schaefer correctly concludes that, however, these influences had a negative impact on him and after rejecting them Bierce developed a “vision of combat entirely his own” (p. 130) Analyzing two of Bierce’s Civil War short stories (One Officer, One Man and Son of the Gods), Schaefer ofers comparison between styles of De Forest and Bierce. In De Forest’s writing, “good soldier remains in control of himself by managing battle intellectually, through recourse to his reading of realistic military history and other forms of preparatory training” (p. 127), while in Bierce “such preparation does no good, for battle has no meaning that can be managed

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009 intellectually” and “the good soldier controls himself…because the only alternative is to lose control” (p. 127). The basic diference between two writers is, according do Schaefer, that De Forest entered the war as an established writer and he was able to put his experience to the perspective of his previous reading. On the other hand, Bierce enlisted in the age of eighteen and nothing he has read before or after matched the intensity of

his memories. Michael Schaefer chose interdisciplinary approach and he combines psychology, military history and literary criticism to treat writings of both authors. In concluding chapter, he puts their works to wider perspective of American military literature. The book is substantial material for all historians of literary critics interested in American Civil War literature.

Disturbing Voices in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist Mária Kiššová The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, London: Penguin Books, 2008

Mohsin Hamid’s remarkable book The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been very positively received by critics as well as by the mainstream readers in several countries. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007 and praised both by Kiran Desai: ‘A brilliant book’ and Philip Pullman: ‘Beautifully written… more exciting than any thriller I’ve read for a long time’ the book is currently available in some Slovak bookshops. The author of Moth Smoker is a child of a multi-cultural world. Growing up in the Pakistani Lahiri, Mohsin Hamid moved to the US and after attending prestigious American universities such as Princeton and Harvard Law School he currently lives and writes in London. The story of a young Pakistani Changez would tempt us to seek for Hamid’s own experiences; the idea which the author strongly de-

nied and criticized in several interviews. As a young promising son from a wealthy Pakistani family, Changez wins a scholarship to the US and plans to go on with the bright future. He enters the money culture world in full at 22, as he starts to work for an American financial firm. Successful and widely popular exotic companion for the colleagues, Changez quickly assimilates and enjoys pleasures of the Big Apple: ‘I was, in four and a half years, never an American; I was immediately a New Yorker.’ (p. 37) His initial optimism soon fades and he is disenchanted with both private life and work experience. Sufering the heart break and realizing his own change – so much hated in his later recollections - Changez confesses: ‘I was a modernday janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a 97

ARS AETERNA country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn!’ (p. 173) With a little surprise, after 9/11 followed by other disturbing revelations about the true face of his American colleagues and friends, a disappointed Pakistani returns home. The admirer of America changes into a fundamental Pakistani university lecturer calling for the rights of the Pakistani which makes him a potential terroristic threat for the once befriended culture. Complexity of the narrative tackles various politically sensitive issues, including historical twists and turns: ‘Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.’ (p. 38), political correctness: ‘Two of my five colleagues were women; Wainwright and I were nonwhite. We were marvellously diverse… (…) and not one of us was either short or overweight.’ (pp. 42 – 43) as well as the identity struggles and nationalism. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an ac-

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count of failing attempts for the dialogue. The narrative of Changez is a monologue and his dialogue partner in the novel is never heard. Hamid’s Changez provokes and waits patiently for the response. Fortunately for Changez, his monologue is being listened to/ read and it is the reader who reacts and responds; agrees, nods and seems to understand. The communication flourishes as the story develops and absorbs the reader’s mind fully. Learning Changez’s life story, there is no need to fear his beard and fundamentalism. Irony seems to be the major and most powerful tool of Hamid´s high paced narrative from the very first scene which describes what happens when an American meets a Pakistani in the after-9/11 Pakistan. The opening question: ‘Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.’ (p. 1) is mocking and embarrassing at once. Unjustified cultural prejudices are universal and The Reluctant Fundamentalist skilfully shows it. What is fundamental and what I liked most about the book is that it does not repeat the notorious mantra ‘it is them who are to blame’ but rather hints that culturally and politically colourful world of today just cannot be mistaken for the concept of black and white global society. Once again the uneasy truth of fiction reminds us of the reality.

Vol.1, No.1 / 2009

Civil war and its naked truth: the compelling voice of a new literary talent Simona Hevešiová Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun (2007). London/ New York/ Toronto/ Sydney: Harper Perennial.

The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cannot be regarded as a newcomer to the literary scene any more. Following the international acclaim of her debut novel Purple Hibiscus in 2004, her second book Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) has managed to amaze the world-wide readership as well. Growing up in the former house of one of the greatest African writers, Chinua Achebe, Adichie seems to be predestined to follow the same path bracing against her amazing gift of storytelling. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 but she had left for the United States at the age of nineteen to study communication and political science. After completing her master degree in creative writing at John Hopkins University, the writer has decided to live in Nigeria and United States alternately. Being based on a historical account of the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70, Half of a Yellow Sun recounts the individual narratives and traumas of people involved in the conflict. Adichie, born seven years after the war had ended, wrote the book because she “wanted to engage with [her] history in order to make sense of [her] present” (p. 2 of the P.S.) since she feels it is “still a potent political issue” (p. 3). Even though she has not experienced the conflict herself, Adichie

stated several times that she regarded the war not as a history but as a memory. With the members of her own family being traumatized and haunted by the shadows of the war, Adichie felt an urgent need to reconstruct the destinies of ordinary people in a written form and thus reconcile with the traumatic legacy of her ancestors. What is appealing about the novel is that it does not attempt to romanticize or idealize the past, nor does it provide a simplistic, black-and-white vision of the conflict. The narrative oscillates between the lives of three characters – Olanna, a teacher at Nsukka University; Ugwu, the houseboy of her lover Odenigbo and Richard, a British journalist and a great admirer of Igbo culture. All the characters are engulfed in the war and face almost unbearable situations. None of them is, however, heroized – Ugwu rapes a bar girl, Odenigbo impregnates a young girl and succumbs to drink, Olanna has sex with her sister’s lover and breaks the fragile bond between them, etc. Despite their lapses, the reader does not stop to feel compassion for them. It is the circumstances these characters find themselves in that challenge their very humanity. Apart from the story itself, Half of a Yellow Sun excels in other aspects as well. 99

ARS AETERNA Adichie’s amazing storytelling power results in a wonderfully paced story that combines history with the imaginative world created by the author. The vibrant narrative captures the reader’s attention from the first page to the last one, while

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the constant switches from one narrative perspective to another keep the story dynamic. There is no doubt that the novel has the potential to become a “literary masterpiece and a classic” as the front cover suggests.

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