Category Archives: Caietele Echinox
Once Upon Atrocity. Gothic Music Influences in the First Romanian (Neo)gothic NovelOnce Upon Atrocity. Gothic Music Influences in the First Romanian (Neo)gothic Novel
How a Fantastic Novel Constructs the Enemy Figure The Untamed Other and the Role of Fantasy in Life of PiHow a Fantastic Novel Constructs the Enemy Figure The Untamed Other and the Role of Fantasy in Life of Pi
Adriana Teodorescu
1 December 1918 University,Alba Iulia
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com
How a Fantastic Novel Constructs the Enemy Figure
The Untamed Other and the Role of Fantasy in Life of Pi
Abstract: This study seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure in the fantasy novel entitled Life of Pi by the Canadian author Yann Martel, published in 2001 and screened in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The main focus is on the literary, fantastic, configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character often minimised by literary criticism with reference to its cultural meanings. We posit that even though Life of Pi is a postmodern novel, the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary postmodern paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. Our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields like literary critique, cultural studies or social anthropology.
Keywords: Yann Martel; Ang Lee; Life of Pi; Postmodernism; The Other; Enemy / Foe.
Introduction. The life of Pi, the life of the tiger
The fantasy novel Life of Pi, written by the Canadian author Yann Martel, was published in 2001 and adapted for the screen in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The book portrays the story of an Indian adolescent, Piscine Molitor Patel (whose nickname will become Pi). Pi is the son of an important Zoo owner inPondicherry (French India). Raised a vegetarian Hindi, Pi is very much passionate about religion and he approaches Hinduism, Christianity and Islamism, in order to understand God, by using the benefits of all three religions. He is passionate about the animal life and, from the very first pages, we find out about the fierce and frightening Bengali Tiger, Richard Parker, whose name comes about due to a printing mistake which mixes up the tiger’s name with the owner from which Pi’s family makes the purchase.
Unhappy with the political regime of Gandhi’s wife government, Pi’s father decides to immigrate toCanada, with his entire family and the animals from the Zoo. After travelling for a couple of days aboard a Japanese ship, a powerful storm sinks the ship and Pi loses his entire family (mother, father and brother). Pi is the only one who manages to survive on a lifeboat where 4 other animals get saved as well: a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and Richard Parker. The hyena kills the zebra and then the orang-utan, after which the tiger eats the hyena. Pi will travel with the tiger for 227 days in the Pacific waters. In the beginning, he builds a device, a raft from scraps where he lives and sleeps. The raft is tied to the boat which enables him to keep a distance from the boat proper, so that he should not become the tiger’s food. Taking advantage of the tiger’s seasickness and other domination and communication strategies (whistling, yelling etc), Pi will give up the raft gradually and will live with Richard Parker on the same boat.
Pi fishes and eats tortoise, manages to feed the tiger with fish, and suffers from delirium and intense weakness. They reach an island which is apparently very welcoming, an island full of meerkats. Pi is forced to leave the island, though, because of the carnivorous vegetation growing there and he takes the tiger with him. A couple more days go by and storms unleash, so that both man and animal suffer from severe dehydration until they finally reach Mexican shores. The tiger disappears in the jungle, while Pi is found more dead than alive by locals and rushed to the hospital.
The last part of the novel presents the interviews Pi gives the Japanese officials who arrive to find information on the fate of the ship. The officials do not believe Pi’s story. A different interpretation is given to the entire event, one in which the tiger is Pi’s imaginary projection, the orang-utan the mother and the hyena the cook.
Aims of this study. In search of the enemy
Our research is by no means exhaustive, a goal that would be hard to attain, given the complexity of Martel’s work. Our research seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure. We will thus focus on the literary configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character that literary criticism tends to label as either a fantastic animal[1] or as an element of a shrouded religious allegory[2], therefore limiting its literary outreach to narrative mechanisms and anchoring the character within the fantasy-Realism tension. However, our research is not strictly limited to its literary consequences, a subsequent objective being to identify the social and cultural outreach of the way in which the character of Richard Parker is constructed.
Starting from the observation that the tiger clearly occupies the position of the Other, we set out to show that the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary paradigm scope and aim, namely the drive to diminish the distance between I and You. It is the same paradigm which presupposes a discursive, ideological exaltation of the difference between the two anthropological instances, the same paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. The Postmodern non-typicality of the Other is all the more interesting and investigation worthy from both a literary and cultural perspective, as Martel’s work is clearly anchored in Postmodernism.
On the same line with these research aims, our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields such as literature/literary criticism, cultural studies and social anthropology. The following section will briefly analyse some of the social mechanisms of cultural Postmodernist imagery which lead to the positive portrayal of the Other. The fourth section investigates the unique way in which the enemy figure is articulated, by taking into account the two ways in which the novel can be interpreted. This will show that, despite being different as literary substance, these two views converge towards the same social imagery of the Other, an imagery which will be examined in relation to fantasy in the 5th part of the paper part of the paper. The last section, the conclusions, insists on the positive cultural significance of the untamed Other, frequently portrayed as negative entity.
Some major postmodernist ideological tendencies of configuring the Other. A critical perspective
Despite the fact that diversity is an implicit Postmodernist desideratum, Western contemporary culture stands out in the various discourses about the Other, by massively exorcising the problematic difference that it poses. In this respect, Gary Cox[3] notices how, nowadays, under the politically correct imperative, an individual’s insufficiencies, irrespective of the type, are always motivated by putting the blame on circumstances and the socio-cultural context. Strategies of the “politically correct” type seem to lessen the intensity of the reality according to which the Other cannot be always good. This is because the Other cannot always be credited by their individual existence standing against a social background. The same strategies, of a more culturally discursive, rather than political nature, show that if Postmodernism tries to appease differences it is only in order to accept all differences as qualitatively equal.
However, as Jean-Paul Sartre explains it in multiple ways[4], the true problem lies not in differences but in resemblance. To be more exact, the problem of meeting the Other does not go away by taming differences, as this encounter is an ontological matter. Placing the Other in positive spotlight, a specific Postmodernist technique, is natural or rather explicable up to a certain point. At a certain point, however, it becomes the fundamental underpinning of the social mechanisms which manipulate and discipline individuals. The immediate consequence is that the Other becomes stereotypical. The Other is given a positive portrayal on two layers: at the level of the Other’s content and at the level of engaging with the Other. In the first case, the Other is labelled positive, irrespective of its specificity, while, in the second case, positivity is given by virtue of one’s engaging with the Other, irrespective of the specificity of the two participants. The mere existence of a relationship is a good one, it is desirable and can only be pacifying.
We stop to discuss these aspects for a while. After humanity has finally learned, as a consequence of the two world wars, that the myth of Cain and Abel is valid, on a symbolical level, as the recurring story of inter-human hate, it is no wonder a series of non-discriminatory politics and discourses have flooded commercial and mass-media spaces alike. These types of discourse have moral and philosophical consequences[5], which stress for the need for harmony and brotherhood within a community, as well as for the necessity to accept the Other. Within the fertile soil of victims and victimization, the Other acquires an intrinsic value, leaving aside or discrediting older discourses like the ones of Girard,Hobbs or Sartre, which focused on less favourable aspects of the Other. Pier Paolo Antonello, in his introduction to the dialogue-book between Girard and Vattimo, makes an interesting point:
The entire ideological horizon of contemporary culture is indeed built around the central role victims play: Holocaust victims, victims of Capitalism, victims of social injustice, war victims, politically persecuted victims, victims of ecological disasters, racial/sexual/religious discrimination victims[6].
Postmodernism has the tendency to avenge the evil of Modernism, since Modernism makes intense use of post-Christian portrayals. As Vattimo explains, this Postmodernist tendency adds to the postmodern hyper-consumerism. After all, Vattimo is an Italian philosopher who has contributed, in some degree, to the cultural portrayal of the Other in a positive manner through his concept of ‘weak thought’. Lipovetsky notices, in his work Le bonheur paradoxal (Paradoxical Happiness)[7], that the generalised access to consume weakened the tension of inter-human relations, diminished the force of Nemesis– implicitly contradicting, a portion of the assumptions of La critique de la raison dialectique (The Critique of Dialectical Reason) (specifically Sartre-like in nature) which develops the idea of an inevitable fight for food, resources leading to inter-human conflict. By the same token, Lipovetsky, in Le Crépuscule du devoir (The Dawn of Duty)[8], explains how the Other is more and more easily acceptable since Postmodernist ethics sweetened the idea of sacrifice and self-abandonment for another being. Narcissism means lesser attention to the needs of the Other and no matter how bizarre it would seem, a greater tolerance for it, precisely because the subject is too turned on itself to become truly worried by the problems the Other may have. In addition, Lipovetsky believes that the relationship with the Other steps away from ethics because it enters the zone of a hyper-consumerism show. However, as Lipovetsky also notices, man’s happiness with his own Self and with the Other always leaves traces and eventually generates a feeling of void and emptiness.
The Other seems to pose fewer problems for Postmodernism, at least in some of its areas, alongside its ontological relaxation. The Other, often a tele-visual figure of non-problematic distance, is easier to accept. But it is not a flesh and blood Other which is accepted, but its shadow, precisely because the ontology of the Other is setting, it is coming to an end.
In La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre[9], French psychiatrist Serge Lesourd notices one important feature of Postmodernist imagery and discourse is to get rid of the Other, a fact which has dramatic individual consequences. Disappearance, abandonment, and the destruction of the Other must be understood in a positive sense, even though the author does not use this precise word. The positive view begins by pooling the Others together under the overarching umbrella which Lesourd calls Man, mediator of the I-Other relationship. The author also reveals the way in which the Other, demoted by being reduced to object, becomes a continuous source of jouissance, in the good tradition of a consumerist age, a frustrating sort of jouissance since the subject which is looking for fulfilment cannot go beyond the inherent incompleteness of his being. This is a truth which the great religions understood and translated into morality and narrative, as Lesourd says. Happiness exists, the Other can be good and fully accessible on condition that the individual who is apt at participating in perfect relations be already dead. The Paradisiacal brotherhood images Christianity promises are based on such mechanisms. It is an aspect Postmodernism is intent on playing with its cards in sight, but which it now fails to understand.
The Postmodernist paradigm of portraying the Other in a positive way is a deficient paradigm. And, indeed, it is strange to think that, while we speak of the Other in positive terms, terrorism, intolerance and massive discrimination are just as present, even if it seems like denying them, at first sight[10]. From this point of view, Cyrille Deloro’s words are all the more profound:
The Other has become a commercial slogan: love one another, the Other ‘is good for you’…but this is not true. The more we pacify our relations, the less the Other exists. We have become “human, too human”! We thus see the other break in abstract and terrifying manners, which make the world a place of horror and transform subjectivity in a battle field. And all these others are radical Others: terrorists of the outer world, metastases of the inner world[11].
Deloro describes the way in which schizophrenics are incapable of mentally or imaginarily configuring the concept of Other. There are only Others, too many, too real, impossible to pin down under a theoretical label. Deloro explains that what is damaged in Schizophrenia is the impersonal nature of the Other, leaving the infinite and overwhelming instances of the Other untouched. The paradigm of the positive Other risks to suffer from a sort of anti-Schizophrenia, so that the Other is not portrayed as much happier. By focusing too much on the Other as an inner-impersonal structure and by applying the necessary positive corrections to it, the contemporary world risks to paralyse the free, unpredictable, difficult, cumbersome relationship with the Other. It is the same relationship which has given rise to art, culture. The Other is not an indisputable value since its meaning resides little in morality, but heavily in Ontology.
Starting from the end: two literary constructions of the enemy
We will first tackle the way in which the enemy/foe figure is configured, starting from the fantasy nature of the book, challenged only at the end of the novel by Pi Patel. By the end of the book, Pi Patel demotes the story to a mere figment of imagination by failing to assume it as narrative. If Richard Parker were an animal, a tiger, an aggressive, unpredictable animal, then it would represent not only the Difference (as qualitative diversity) we discussed earlier, but also Distance. In contrast to Piscine, Richard Parker instantiates the Distance which incorporates radical Difference. This Difference is impossible to abolish socially and ontologically, in spite of the entire range of discourses which claim to make it null. Distance is no longer established between an I and a You whose meeting possibilities are socially prescribed. We refer to a Distance type which is poorly assumed by the community. Actually, strictly speaking, community consent would be insufficient, as it would also need the consent of the animal community. The man-animal perspective can only be anthropocentric and, therefore, no matter how well intentioned (which is not always the case), it is flawed, incomplete and unilateral. Diverging a bit, in order to clear some aspects, it must be noted that Hollywood’s boundless appetite for scripts in which men discover their affinities with the animal kingdom are proof not only of the reciprocal desire of getting closer to a fundamentally different Other, but also of an exotic view which produces interest in assimilation and interpretation. Such exotic views, structurally, are nothing more than a subtle, narcissistic self-mirroring[12]. It is why, most of the times, the Animal-Other is a domestic animal, an animal over which man has already shown supremacy and domination.
To return to Richard Parker, we notice that it is the enemy throughout the story. Richard Parker carries death and murder. It is equally empowered and driven to take life. Irrespective of how man-tiger relations develop, Pi is constantly threatened by Richard Parker. This will not change throughout the story, not even after the storm, when the two are thrown at the bottom of the boat and they share a brief, semi-voluntary moment of tenderness. We made reference to the positive portrayal of the Other, which is actually equivalent to its assimilation as friend. Positive portrayal implies the denial of the dual character of any relation and, ultimately, of any human reality. However, a dissipation of the dual register would also occur whenever the Other is fully equated as a negative element. Richard Parker is not the nihilistic enemy/foe type. There is a positive thread which goes across the conflicting relationship of Pi and the tiger, a thread which cannot bring back equilibrium and cannot continually adjust the relationship towards the negative pole[13].
Pi’s relationship with the tiger develops under two contrastive signs on the boat where they manage to survive, namely through socially ontological bonding and through separation. These two means of bonding come in succession, cyclically, from the beginning of the boat experience until the tiger reaches Mexican shores and disappears without a trace. As a result, the bond between the tiger and Pi is partly social, partly ontological. It is social because it is contextually-driven, triggered by the overall social resettlement, from a normal situation in which the animal was locked in a Zoo or on the ship where both Pi and his parents kept a secure, comforting distance from the animals. After this normality is shattered as a result of the boat sinking, the chance cohabitation of Pi and Richard Parker allowed for, or better said led to an atypical form of man-animal social bonding, where the bonding process is not option-based, but context-based and mandatory.
The bonding process is ontological as well (triggered by social factors) because, once social space is reconfigured, there are major changes for the two protagonists: Richard Parker develops a greater tolerance for its urge to devour Pi’s flesh, settling for the fish offered by his boat mate and for the flesh of the fisherman they encounter at large, where the latter, the fisherman, adopts an animal-like behaviour by regressing to a non-cultural, or a cultural, restrictions-free state where survival, feeding and thirst quenching are of the utmost importance. Seen as a structure built on subjective-objective rendering processes, reality[14] becomes diluted. What remains are the things in the nearby proximity which can be touched. It is quite understandable for Pi to keep memories of the more complicated structures of reality, a fact which is very clear when he daydreams, when he thinks of his mother or he remembers symbols or has visual religious glances. When he loses the diary in which he jots down his experiences and activities, he, in fact, loses his cultural Other and sits face to face with the radical, unknown, untamed, non-human Other. Among others, bonding with the tiger illustrates the human need for relations, outside Christian ethics. There is also a slight undermining of this ethics, because the man gets closer to the animal, not to one of his fellow beings. In addition, it does not bond in a paradisiacal afterlife where differences serve a decorative, non-functional purpose, but in a fantastic life, alternative to the real one, where differences do not matter so much anymore since they are contextually-driven (tiger and man live together, eat and sleep together). However, differences are still threatening, tensed, despite being diminished on a first level of interaction.
As far as the tiger is concerned, even before the destruction of the classic man-animal habitation space, the tiger is drawn towards his human side by the Indian boy in several ways (the animal goes through a process of humanization). First, the tiger bears a human name: Richard Parker (even if everything starts from a transcription error). It is worth noting that names and naming are two important aspects for Pi Patel, as the first pages of the book show. In these initial chapters, the character names himself Pi, instead of Piscine. The name is not a simple etiquette, but an extra-personal history which gets attached to personal history, almost becoming an integral part of it. Second, this is highlighted by Pi’s attempt to bond with the tiger, an attempt punished by his father, who teaches him the lesson of the insurmountable difference between man and animal and the inherent evil nature of the tiger. Above all, his father’s lesson refers to the necessity of knowing one’s enemy, as this is a vital issue. The ultimate lesson is to mistake the Other with Another, as this sometimes poses life risks.
In any case, it is quite hard to distinguish between a strict social bond and a strict ontological one. Instead, we can consider that they intermingle as a unity, as a linguistic sign which, in its pragmatic dimension, is simultaneously the expression as well as the expressed content, the signifiant and the signifié, to use a Structuralist framework.
As one can deduce from the issues so far discussed, Distance is the other side of Pi and Richard Parker’s relation. This is present when we notice Pi’s vigilance while being with the tiger on the boat. Pi is always aware of the death the tiger might bring him. Pi, therefore, engages the tiger in domination, befriending and taming strategies[15]. Distance, as a relational mechanism, manifests itself quite strong when the tiger eats the hyena, when the fisherman they meet by chance[16] in the Pacific, is disembodied by the tiger, but even more when Richard Parker disappears without a trace.
That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I’d had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I’d provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then-yes, I know, to a tiger, but still-I wish I had said, “Richard Parker, it’s over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express. I couldn’t have done it without you. I would like to say it formally: Richard Parker, thank you. Thank you for saving my life. And now go where you must. You have known the confined freedom of a zoo most of your life; now you will know the free confinement of a jungle. I wish you all the best with it. Watch out for Man.He is not your friend. But I hope you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you, that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. What is that hiss? Ah, our boat has touched sand. So farewell, Richard Parker, farewell. God be with you”[17].
Practically, the end is proof of the fact that Pi’s relation to Richard Parker could never go beyond the man-tiger matrix relation and that Richard Parker did not become Pi Patel’s friend, despite their bond,. Distance alternates with bonding, as noted earlier, but the first is always stronger, exerting its effects on its counterpart. Pi’s bond with the tiger will never become a full fusion, so that they may be indistinguishable. The distance between the two is irreducible. The tiger leaves without being engaged in gestures which might suggest an anthropomorphic interpretation – the tiger is never aware that the jungle which opens up in front of him brings the freedom he never had, neither at Pondicherry Zoo, or at sea. On the other hand, Pi is too tired to behave in accordance with a typical novel-like manner. Pi does not tell the tiger good-bye, since all the tender words that he addresses the tiger are said after Pi parts with the tiger (“I wish I had said”), which makes these words to be words about the tiger. The true Other, the interlocutor, the one who is the You, is, at this point, the book’s reader. The savage nature of the Animal-Other is highlighted once again. At the same time, this goodbye which is a form of discursive regret and of the “what if” philosophy, is a corollary of Pi’s withdrawal from his relationship with an unknown and uncomfortable Other. On a Freudian note, relational libido is re-cast onto the Similar-Other figure, a situation in which death lurks less. And yet, the one who comes back from the sea voyage is not the same with the one who embarked on the voyage. The untamed Other becomes an integral part of Pi’s self, because it is an element which Pi overcomes and which is reciprocal.
If, however, we take into consideration the interpretation of the two Japanese who interview Pi, and therefore consider the entire story to be Pi’s invention and the tiger his personified Self, an imaginative by-product crated by Pi to cope with the dire life conditions on the ocean, the man-tiger relationship appears to be an internal relationship which has no roots in material reality. Regression is more of a psychical, rather than social nature and brings back a part of the reality which Pi knew until the tragic accident: the fact that there was a tiger called Richard Parker, reticent, by its own nature, to human bonding, a tiger which is tied to the Pi’s father life lesson. According to this lesson, man must not consider all animals as friends, but must, instead, know his enemy, for the sake of personal safety.
There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements. All are instances of that animal equivalent of anthropomorphism: zoomorphism, where an animal takes a human being, or another animal, to be one of its kind. The most famous case is also the most common: the pet dog, which has so assimilated humans into the realm of doghood as to want to mate with them, a fact that any dog owner who has had to pull an amorous dog from the leg of a mortified visitor will confirm[18].
If dogs and domestic animals can function as a childish alter-ego or as a mirror which flatters the one who looks in it, the tiger is not an Idealistic rewriting of the Self, but an identification with and an awareness of their negative sides, namely of those that fear and weakness regulate. No matter how necessary, knowing the tiger imposes distancing oneself from it, according to Pi’s father’s advice. Therefore, if we accept that Pi is closely connected to Richard Parker being a psycho-existential emanation of the first, it would be too simple to reduce Pi to Richard Parker. Despite sharing the same ontological substance, they are separate from one another, as there is an unsurpassable intra-ontological distance. The reason why Richard Parker exists, even if we see it as an image of the Self, is because within one entity there are distances, fractions, there is the enemy. The enemy can be the evil one, the one who saves itself in the detriment of others, the cannibal (the one who ate the hyena/the cook), but also the one which invalidates the expectations about the routine-eroded Self, the one built in accordance to a culture which imprints its traits onto those it subdues. Men are the most dangerous animals from the point of view of animals (“We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man”[19]), but interpreting everything through the same chart, one might say that men are most dangerous, not only for animals, but for men as well. On the same page, Richard Parker articulates the inherently human nature of the enemy[20] on all levels: a generic level, a meta-literary level, in artistic creations and human stories alike.
The untamed other and the role of fantasy. Counteracting death
No matter if we choose the first interpretative key of Pi and Richard Parker’s relationship, according to which the tiger is a flesh and bone animal, or if we accept the second one, according to which Richard Parker is Pi’s untamed other[21], which Pi gets rid of once he ends his voyage at sea, Richard Parker remains a symbol-like figure of the enemy/foe, of the Other which cannot possibly be tamed[22]. In the first case, we speak of a perfectly External Other, whereas, in the second, of an Inner Other which still engages in ongoing tendencies to become external. Critics consider that the first variant is more likely to be chosen by readers with a developed religious spirit, who do not need proof and who do not hesitate to distance themselves from what is considered normal by common sense while the likelihood of choosing the second variant is higher for atheists or agnostics, as these rationalise everything and are more prone to believe in the miracle of a tiger-man sharing the same space for 227 days. From the point of view of the relationship with the Other, aside from the fact that there are only nuanced differences between the two possible enemies, there is a factor which is overlooked. Admitting that Richard Parker died after the boat sank, his place being taken by Pi’s illusory Self, we cannot say that the novel ceases to be a fantasy novel by becoming a realistic one which shares some fantasy elements. Realism, in this case, would be a meta-Realism, a fantasy subordinate element and nothing more. In other words, the fantasy break or rupture gives rise to the possibility of Realism, and not vice-versa. In fact, we might ask ourselves what might go best with Realism, a tiger and a boy that manage to survive together or a boy who resorts to cannibalism, who creates an imaginary enemy, becoming a schizoid, both a good and a bad person, a bad Self for which the character longs unconditionally. It might be the case that the difference between the two possibilities is less severe, especially if we put an equal sign between Realism and Rationalism. At the end of the novel, Pi is quite ironic about the Japanese opting for the Realistic interpretation of the story. “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently”[23].
We ask ourselves how much does such profound doubling meet the reader’s expectations, since it triggers the birth of the enemy/foe from within, it accepts it and admits to the invested love which makes people human. Yet, in the end, whether an animalistic or psychological emanation (criminal and irrational compared to normality) of Pi, Richard Parker is the untamed Other which proves necessary, paradoxically or not, to the character-narrator. Pi stands in front of another enemy, a stronger one, a complete one, an enemy which does not preserve the face of the one he hates (like the tiger does, in any of its two instances, by virtue of the alert state it maintains), but rather destroys and erases it. This enemy is death. Hiding death and stimulating one’s will to live (by virtue of an action-reaction response) are Richard Parker’s main merits and main reasons of the absurd love Pi carries for it, at first sight.
I will tell you a secret: a part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker. He kept me from thinking too much about my family and my tragic circumstances. He pushed me to go on living. I hated him for it, yet at the same time I was grateful. I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story[24].
It is easier to see now that the main fantasy entertained by the novel is that the Other, irrespective of its friend or foe quality, more of a friend rather than foe, can counteract death[25], going beyond ethics. One can even claim that the foe/enemy figure is saved from death, and what saves the foe/enemy from death is fantasy (fantasy as genre, by extension, or even literature, by an even more generous extension), fact which discretely opposes, the entire range of positive discourses regarding the Other.
In Lieu of conclusion: the untamed Other is also good for your health
Life of Pi is proof of the fact that the untamed Other, without being “good” in the ethical sense, may be “good for your health”. In relation to Postmodernist discourses which exalt the intrinsic value of the Other and exorcise problematic differences, Martel’s novel imbues a subtle pedagogy, which can be resumed as follows: literature cannot afford to lose its authentic enemies and cannot, under the imperative of humanistic ideology (drifting from classical and modern humanism), transform the Other exclusively in the friend figure, and tame it till making every tension null. By the two available readings (actually, taking into account that they are revealed at the end of the book, it would be more fair to call it re-reading), the novel praises freedom of interpretation in general, but even more so the story’s freedom which is a religion for itself and on its own, and which manages to overcome any ideological discourse. As James Wood notices, this appraisal is one of the major elements which make the novel a Postmodernist one.
Nothing marks Life of Pi as a contemporary Postmodern novel more strongly than its theological impoverishment (for all that it seems to scream theological richness): instead of being interested in the theological basis of Pi’s soul, it is really interested only in the theological basis of storytelling[26].
It is worth noting that, in spite of everything, the Other, in Life of Pi, is not, in its essence, built on the Postmodernist pattern of positive portrayal and taming. However, it is Postmodernist if we think of it as a consequence of destroying the religious imperative of vision coherence. It should be noted that Pi embraces more than one religion (Hinduism, Christianity, Islamism). An approximate way of explaining the cultural substance of the Other, as represented in Martel’s novel, would be to say that it is Postmodernist, literarily speaking, and anti-Postmodernist, ideologically speaking.
Indeed, fantasy literature and, by extension, literature, might be one of the best (and maybe the last) standpoints where the Other is concealed as a fresh, cruel, authentic, surprising and ontologically reinforced entity. It is the kind of standpoint which might offer the discrete energy that can re-insert the Other in the culture circuit, because stories do not avoid contrast and are based on their own laws. The aesthetic dimension is not a decorative mirroring of ethics necessarily, since ethics is all too often socially manipulated.
This paper received support from the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant number 54/2011 – PNII TE.
Bibliography
Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, N.Y, Doubleday, 1966.
Cox, Gary, Sartre and Fiction, London, New York, Continuum, 2009.
Deloro, Cyrille, L’Autre. Petit traité de narcissisme intelligent, Paris, Larousse, 2009.
Dery, Jeruen, Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, http://blogcritics.org/book-review-life-of-pi-by2/, nov. 2011, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Dumitrache, Silvia, “Supravieţuirea cu sinele sălbatic. Yann Martel Viaţa lui Pi” [Surviving the Savage Self. Yann Martel “Life of Pi”], bookaholic.ro, 2012, http://bookaholic.ro/supravietuirea-cu-sinele-salbatic-yann-martel, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Girard, René and Vattimo, Gianni, Adevăr sau credinţă slabă? Convorbiri despre creştinism şi relativism [Truth or Weak Thought? Conversations about Christianism and Relativism], edited by Pierpaolo Antonello, translated from Italian by Cornelia Dumitru, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche, 2009.
Glucksmann, André, Le discours de la haine, Paris, Plon, 2004.
Greer, W. R., “Life of Pi is a masterful story”, 2002, ReviewsOfBooks.com, http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/life_of_pi/review/, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Jordan, Justine, “Animal magnetism”, in The Guardian, 25 May 2002, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/25/fiction.reviews1, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
Krist, Gary, “Taming the Tiger”, in New York Times, 7 July, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/books/taming-the-tiger.html, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Lesourd, Serge, “La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre”, in Cliniques méditerranéennes, N° 75, 2007/1, p. 13-26.
Lévinas, Emmanuel, La Mort et le temps, Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1992.
Lipovetsky, Gilles, Le bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation [Paradoxical happiness], Paris, Gallimard, 2006.
Lipovetsky, Gilles, Le Crépuscule du devoir [The Dawn of Duty], Paris, Gallimard, 1992.
Proulx, Paul-André, Vision chrétienne de la vie, 2003, http://www.litterature-quebecoise.com/oeuvres/lhistoiredepi.html, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris, Gallimard, 1943.
Wood, James, “Credulity”, in London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No 22, 14 nov 2002, p. 24-25, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/james-wood/credulity, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Notes
[1] Justine Jordan, “Animal magnetism”, in The Guardian, 25 May 2002,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/25/fiction.reviews1, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
[2] Paul-André Proulx, Vision chrétienne de la vie, 2003,
http://www.litterature-quebecoise.com/oeuvres/lhistoiredepi.html, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
[3] Gary Cox, Sartre and Fiction, London, New York, Continuum, 2009, p. 31.
[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 328, p. 336.
[5] Emmanuel Lévinas, La Mort et le temps, Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1992.
[6] René Girard and Gianni Vattimo, Adevăr sau credinţă slabă? Convorbiri despre creştinism şi relativism [Truth or Weak Thought? Conversations about Christianism and Relativism], edited by Pierpaolo Antonello, translated from Italian by Cornelia Dumitru, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche, 2009.
[7] Gilles Lipovetsky, Le bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation, Paris, Gallimard, 2006.
[8] Gilles Lipovetsky, Le Crépuscule du devoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.
[9] Serge Lesourd, “La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre”, in Cliniques méditerranéennes, N° 75, 2007/1, p. 13-26.
[10] Andre Glucksmann, Le discours de la haine, Paris, Plon, 2004.
[11] Cyrille Deloro, L’Autre. Petit traité de narcissisme intelligent, Larousse, Paris, 2009.
[12] For instance, the words uttered by the owner who euthanizes his old dog, at the end of the movie Marley and Me (2008, David Frankel) are memorable: “A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, clever or dull, smart or dumb. Give him your heart and he’ll give you his. How many people can you say that about? How many people can make you feel rare and pure and special? How many people can make you feel extraordinary?” Therefore, the ultimate benefit of one’s relationship with a dog is improving one’s Self image.
[13] Similarly, in the case of friendship, negativity must be surpassed to restore balance.
[14] Petere L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, N.Y, Doubleday, 1966.
[15] Cf. Jeruen Dery, Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, http://blogcritics.org/book-review-life-of-pi-by2/, nov. 2011, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. On the disturbing effect survival tactics may have on the reader.
[16] It should be noted that the fisherman is referred to as brother. Killing the brother indicates once more that the Tiger is an evil, death-bearing Other.
[17] Yann Marte, Life of Pi, Random House LLC, 2009, p. 317.
[18] Ibidem, p. 93. See also: “I learned the lesson that an animal is an animal, essentially and practically removed from us, twice: once with Father and once with Richard Parker. (…) “Tigers are very dangerous,” Father shouted. “I want you to understand that you are never-under any circumstances-to touch a tiger, to pet a tiger, to put your hands through the bars of a cage, even to get close to a cage”.
[19] Ibidem, p. 31.
[20] Cf.: Gary Krist, “Taming the Tiger”, in New York Times, 7 July, 2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/books/taming-the-tiger.html, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. Krist sees the relationship between the tiger and Pi as existential rather than realistic or fantastic. The story seems to be existential because the Other must be accepted in its negative dimension.
[21] Cf.: Silvia Dumitrache, “Supravieţuirea cu sinele sălbatic. Yann Martel Viaţa lui Pi” [Surviving the Savage Self. Yann Martel “Life of Pi”], bookaholic.ro, 2012, http://bookaholic.ro/supravietuirea-cu-sinele-salbatic-yann-martel, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
[22] Cf.: W. R. Greer, “Life of Pi is a masterful story”, ReviewsOfBooks.com,
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/life_of_pi/review/, 2002, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. (“Martel doesn’t allow Richard Parker to be anything more than a dangerous Bengal tiger and Pi never to be more than a desperate boy lost at sea”)
[23] Yann Martel, Life of Pi, p. 336.
[24] Ibidem.
[25] Cf.: Justine Jordan, Animal magnetism. (the tiger “saved his life by coming between him and a more terrifying enemy, despair, leaps ashore and disappears into the jungle, denying him an anthropomorphic goodbye growl”).
[26] James Wood, “Credulity”, in London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No 22, 14 nov 2002, p. 24-25, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/james-wood/credulity, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Adriana Teodorescu
1 December 1918 University,Alba Iulia
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com
How a Fantastic Novel Constructs the Enemy Figure
The Untamed Other and the Role of Fantasy in Life of Pi
Abstract: This study seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure in the fantasy novel entitled Life of Pi by the Canadian author Yann Martel, published in 2001 and screened in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The main focus is on the literary, fantastic, configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character often minimised by literary criticism with reference to its cultural meanings. We posit that even though Life of Pi is a postmodern novel, the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary postmodern paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. Our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields like literary critique, cultural studies or social anthropology.
Keywords: Yann Martel; Ang Lee; Life of Pi; Postmodernism; The Other; Enemy / Foe.
Introduction. The life of Pi, the life of the tiger
The fantasy novel Life of Pi, written by the Canadian author Yann Martel, was published in 2001 and adapted for the screen in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The book portrays the story of an Indian adolescent, Piscine Molitor Patel (whose nickname will become Pi). Pi is the son of an important Zoo owner inPondicherry (French India). Raised a vegetarian Hindi, Pi is very much passionate about religion and he approaches Hinduism, Christianity and Islamism, in order to understand God, by using the benefits of all three religions. He is passionate about the animal life and, from the very first pages, we find out about the fierce and frightening Bengali Tiger, Richard Parker, whose name comes about due to a printing mistake which mixes up the tiger’s name with the owner from which Pi’s family makes the purchase.
Unhappy with the political regime of Gandhi’s wife government, Pi’s father decides to immigrate toCanada, with his entire family and the animals from the Zoo. After travelling for a couple of days aboard a Japanese ship, a powerful storm sinks the ship and Pi loses his entire family (mother, father and brother). Pi is the only one who manages to survive on a lifeboat where 4 other animals get saved as well: a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and Richard Parker. The hyena kills the zebra and then the orang-utan, after which the tiger eats the hyena. Pi will travel with the tiger for 227 days in the Pacific waters. In the beginning, he builds a device, a raft from scraps where he lives and sleeps. The raft is tied to the boat which enables him to keep a distance from the boat proper, so that he should not become the tiger’s food. Taking advantage of the tiger’s seasickness and other domination and communication strategies (whistling, yelling etc), Pi will give up the raft gradually and will live with Richard Parker on the same boat.
Pi fishes and eats tortoise, manages to feed the tiger with fish, and suffers from delirium and intense weakness. They reach an island which is apparently very welcoming, an island full of meerkats. Pi is forced to leave the island, though, because of the carnivorous vegetation growing there and he takes the tiger with him. A couple more days go by and storms unleash, so that both man and animal suffer from severe dehydration until they finally reach Mexican shores. The tiger disappears in the jungle, while Pi is found more dead than alive by locals and rushed to the hospital.
The last part of the novel presents the interviews Pi gives the Japanese officials who arrive to find information on the fate of the ship. The officials do not believe Pi’s story. A different interpretation is given to the entire event, one in which the tiger is Pi’s imaginary projection, the orang-utan the mother and the hyena the cook.
Aims of this study. In search of the enemy
Our research is by no means exhaustive, a goal that would be hard to attain, given the complexity of Martel’s work. Our research seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure. We will thus focus on the literary configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character that literary criticism tends to label as either a fantastic animal[1] or as an element of a shrouded religious allegory[2], therefore limiting its literary outreach to narrative mechanisms and anchoring the character within the fantasy-Realism tension. However, our research is not strictly limited to its literary consequences, a subsequent objective being to identify the social and cultural outreach of the way in which the character of Richard Parker is constructed.
Starting from the observation that the tiger clearly occupies the position of the Other, we set out to show that the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary paradigm scope and aim, namely the drive to diminish the distance between I and You. It is the same paradigm which presupposes a discursive, ideological exaltation of the difference between the two anthropological instances, the same paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. The Postmodern non-typicality of the Other is all the more interesting and investigation worthy from both a literary and cultural perspective, as Martel’s work is clearly anchored in Postmodernism.
On the same line with these research aims, our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields such as literature/literary criticism, cultural studies and social anthropology. The following section will briefly analyse some of the social mechanisms of cultural Postmodernist imagery which lead to the positive portrayal of the Other. The fourth section investigates the unique way in which the enemy figure is articulated, by taking into account the two ways in which the novel can be interpreted. This will show that, despite being different as literary substance, these two views converge towards the same social imagery of the Other, an imagery which will be examined in relation to fantasy in the 5th part of the paper part of the paper. The last section, the conclusions, insists on the positive cultural significance of the untamed Other, frequently portrayed as negative entity.
Some major postmodernist ideological tendencies of configuring the Other. A critical perspective
Despite the fact that diversity is an implicit Postmodernist desideratum, Western contemporary culture stands out in the various discourses about the Other, by massively exorcising the problematic difference that it poses. In this respect, Gary Cox[3] notices how, nowadays, under the politically correct imperative, an individual’s insufficiencies, irrespective of the type, are always motivated by putting the blame on circumstances and the socio-cultural context. Strategies of the “politically correct” type seem to lessen the intensity of the reality according to which the Other cannot be always good. This is because the Other cannot always be credited by their individual existence standing against a social background. The same strategies, of a more culturally discursive, rather than political nature, show that if Postmodernism tries to appease differences it is only in order to accept all differences as qualitatively equal.
However, as Jean-Paul Sartre explains it in multiple ways[4], the true problem lies not in differences but in resemblance. To be more exact, the problem of meeting the Other does not go away by taming differences, as this encounter is an ontological matter. Placing the Other in positive spotlight, a specific Postmodernist technique, is natural or rather explicable up to a certain point. At a certain point, however, it becomes the fundamental underpinning of the social mechanisms which manipulate and discipline individuals. The immediate consequence is that the Other becomes stereotypical. The Other is given a positive portrayal on two layers: at the level of the Other’s content and at the level of engaging with the Other. In the first case, the Other is labelled positive, irrespective of its specificity, while, in the second case, positivity is given by virtue of one’s engaging with the Other, irrespective of the specificity of the two participants. The mere existence of a relationship is a good one, it is desirable and can only be pacifying.
We stop to discuss these aspects for a while. After humanity has finally learned, as a consequence of the two world wars, that the myth of Cain and Abel is valid, on a symbolical level, as the recurring story of inter-human hate, it is no wonder a series of non-discriminatory politics and discourses have flooded commercial and mass-media spaces alike. These types of discourse have moral and philosophical consequences[5], which stress for the need for harmony and brotherhood within a community, as well as for the necessity to accept the Other. Within the fertile soil of victims and victimization, the Other acquires an intrinsic value, leaving aside or discrediting older discourses like the ones of Girard,Hobbs or Sartre, which focused on less favourable aspects of the Other. Pier Paolo Antonello, in his introduction to the dialogue-book between Girard and Vattimo, makes an interesting point:
The entire ideological horizon of contemporary culture is indeed built around the central role victims play: Holocaust victims, victims of Capitalism, victims of social injustice, war victims, politically persecuted victims, victims of ecological disasters, racial/sexual/religious discrimination victims[6].
Postmodernism has the tendency to avenge the evil of Modernism, since Modernism makes intense use of post-Christian portrayals. As Vattimo explains, this Postmodernist tendency adds to the postmodern hyper-consumerism. After all, Vattimo is an Italian philosopher who has contributed, in some degree, to the cultural portrayal of the Other in a positive manner through his concept of ‘weak thought’. Lipovetsky notices, in his work Le bonheur paradoxal (Paradoxical Happiness)[7], that the generalised access to consume weakened the tension of inter-human relations, diminished the force of Nemesis– implicitly contradicting, a portion of the assumptions of La critique de la raison dialectique (The Critique of Dialectical Reason) (specifically Sartre-like in nature) which develops the idea of an inevitable fight for food, resources leading to inter-human conflict. By the same token, Lipovetsky, in Le Crépuscule du devoir (The Dawn of Duty)[8], explains how the Other is more and more easily acceptable since Postmodernist ethics sweetened the idea of sacrifice and self-abandonment for another being. Narcissism means lesser attention to the needs of the Other and no matter how bizarre it would seem, a greater tolerance for it, precisely because the subject is too turned on itself to become truly worried by the problems the Other may have. In addition, Lipovetsky believes that the relationship with the Other steps away from ethics because it enters the zone of a hyper-consumerism show. However, as Lipovetsky also notices, man’s happiness with his own Self and with the Other always leaves traces and eventually generates a feeling of void and emptiness.
The Other seems to pose fewer problems for Postmodernism, at least in some of its areas, alongside its ontological relaxation. The Other, often a tele-visual figure of non-problematic distance, is easier to accept. But it is not a flesh and blood Other which is accepted, but its shadow, precisely because the ontology of the Other is setting, it is coming to an end.
In La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre[9], French psychiatrist Serge Lesourd notices one important feature of Postmodernist imagery and discourse is to get rid of the Other, a fact which has dramatic individual consequences. Disappearance, abandonment, and the destruction of the Other must be understood in a positive sense, even though the author does not use this precise word. The positive view begins by pooling the Others together under the overarching umbrella which Lesourd calls Man, mediator of the I-Other relationship. The author also reveals the way in which the Other, demoted by being reduced to object, becomes a continuous source of jouissance, in the good tradition of a consumerist age, a frustrating sort of jouissance since the subject which is looking for fulfilment cannot go beyond the inherent incompleteness of his being. This is a truth which the great religions understood and translated into morality and narrative, as Lesourd says. Happiness exists, the Other can be good and fully accessible on condition that the individual who is apt at participating in perfect relations be already dead. The Paradisiacal brotherhood images Christianity promises are based on such mechanisms. It is an aspect Postmodernism is intent on playing with its cards in sight, but which it now fails to understand.
The Postmodernist paradigm of portraying the Other in a positive way is a deficient paradigm. And, indeed, it is strange to think that, while we speak of the Other in positive terms, terrorism, intolerance and massive discrimination are just as present, even if it seems like denying them, at first sight[10]. From this point of view, Cyrille Deloro’s words are all the more profound:
The Other has become a commercial slogan: love one another, the Other ‘is good for you’…but this is not true. The more we pacify our relations, the less the Other exists. We have become “human, too human”! We thus see the other break in abstract and terrifying manners, which make the world a place of horror and transform subjectivity in a battle field. And all these others are radical Others: terrorists of the outer world, metastases of the inner world[11].
Deloro describes the way in which schizophrenics are incapable of mentally or imaginarily configuring the concept of Other. There are only Others, too many, too real, impossible to pin down under a theoretical label. Deloro explains that what is damaged in Schizophrenia is the impersonal nature of the Other, leaving the infinite and overwhelming instances of the Other untouched. The paradigm of the positive Other risks to suffer from a sort of anti-Schizophrenia, so that the Other is not portrayed as much happier. By focusing too much on the Other as an inner-impersonal structure and by applying the necessary positive corrections to it, the contemporary world risks to paralyse the free, unpredictable, difficult, cumbersome relationship with the Other. It is the same relationship which has given rise to art, culture. The Other is not an indisputable value since its meaning resides little in morality, but heavily in Ontology.
Starting from the end: two literary constructions of the enemy
We will first tackle the way in which the enemy/foe figure is configured, starting from the fantasy nature of the book, challenged only at the end of the novel by Pi Patel. By the end of the book, Pi Patel demotes the story to a mere figment of imagination by failing to assume it as narrative. If Richard Parker were an animal, a tiger, an aggressive, unpredictable animal, then it would represent not only the Difference (as qualitative diversity) we discussed earlier, but also Distance. In contrast to Piscine, Richard Parker instantiates the Distance which incorporates radical Difference. This Difference is impossible to abolish socially and ontologically, in spite of the entire range of discourses which claim to make it null. Distance is no longer established between an I and a You whose meeting possibilities are socially prescribed. We refer to a Distance type which is poorly assumed by the community. Actually, strictly speaking, community consent would be insufficient, as it would also need the consent of the animal community. The man-animal perspective can only be anthropocentric and, therefore, no matter how well intentioned (which is not always the case), it is flawed, incomplete and unilateral. Diverging a bit, in order to clear some aspects, it must be noted that Hollywood’s boundless appetite for scripts in which men discover their affinities with the animal kingdom are proof not only of the reciprocal desire of getting closer to a fundamentally different Other, but also of an exotic view which produces interest in assimilation and interpretation. Such exotic views, structurally, are nothing more than a subtle, narcissistic self-mirroring[12]. It is why, most of the times, the Animal-Other is a domestic animal, an animal over which man has already shown supremacy and domination.
To return to Richard Parker, we notice that it is the enemy throughout the story. Richard Parker carries death and murder. It is equally empowered and driven to take life. Irrespective of how man-tiger relations develop, Pi is constantly threatened by Richard Parker. This will not change throughout the story, not even after the storm, when the two are thrown at the bottom of the boat and they share a brief, semi-voluntary moment of tenderness. We made reference to the positive portrayal of the Other, which is actually equivalent to its assimilation as friend. Positive portrayal implies the denial of the dual character of any relation and, ultimately, of any human reality. However, a dissipation of the dual register would also occur whenever the Other is fully equated as a negative element. Richard Parker is not the nihilistic enemy/foe type. There is a positive thread which goes across the conflicting relationship of Pi and the tiger, a thread which cannot bring back equilibrium and cannot continually adjust the relationship towards the negative pole[13].
Pi’s relationship with the tiger develops under two contrastive signs on the boat where they manage to survive, namely through socially ontological bonding and through separation. These two means of bonding come in succession, cyclically, from the beginning of the boat experience until the tiger reaches Mexican shores and disappears without a trace. As a result, the bond between the tiger and Pi is partly social, partly ontological. It is social because it is contextually-driven, triggered by the overall social resettlement, from a normal situation in which the animal was locked in a Zoo or on the ship where both Pi and his parents kept a secure, comforting distance from the animals. After this normality is shattered as a result of the boat sinking, the chance cohabitation of Pi and Richard Parker allowed for, or better said led to an atypical form of man-animal social bonding, where the bonding process is not option-based, but context-based and mandatory.
The bonding process is ontological as well (triggered by social factors) because, once social space is reconfigured, there are major changes for the two protagonists: Richard Parker develops a greater tolerance for its urge to devour Pi’s flesh, settling for the fish offered by his boat mate and for the flesh of the fisherman they encounter at large, where the latter, the fisherman, adopts an animal-like behaviour by regressing to a non-cultural, or a cultural, restrictions-free state where survival, feeding and thirst quenching are of the utmost importance. Seen as a structure built on subjective-objective rendering processes, reality[14] becomes diluted. What remains are the things in the nearby proximity which can be touched. It is quite understandable for Pi to keep memories of the more complicated structures of reality, a fact which is very clear when he daydreams, when he thinks of his mother or he remembers symbols or has visual religious glances. When he loses the diary in which he jots down his experiences and activities, he, in fact, loses his cultural Other and sits face to face with the radical, unknown, untamed, non-human Other. Among others, bonding with the tiger illustrates the human need for relations, outside Christian ethics. There is also a slight undermining of this ethics, because the man gets closer to the animal, not to one of his fellow beings. In addition, it does not bond in a paradisiacal afterlife where differences serve a decorative, non-functional purpose, but in a fantastic life, alternative to the real one, where differences do not matter so much anymore since they are contextually-driven (tiger and man live together, eat and sleep together). However, differences are still threatening, tensed, despite being diminished on a first level of interaction.
As far as the tiger is concerned, even before the destruction of the classic man-animal habitation space, the tiger is drawn towards his human side by the Indian boy in several ways (the animal goes through a process of humanization). First, the tiger bears a human name: Richard Parker (even if everything starts from a transcription error). It is worth noting that names and naming are two important aspects for Pi Patel, as the first pages of the book show. In these initial chapters, the character names himself Pi, instead of Piscine. The name is not a simple etiquette, but an extra-personal history which gets attached to personal history, almost becoming an integral part of it. Second, this is highlighted by Pi’s attempt to bond with the tiger, an attempt punished by his father, who teaches him the lesson of the insurmountable difference between man and animal and the inherent evil nature of the tiger. Above all, his father’s lesson refers to the necessity of knowing one’s enemy, as this is a vital issue. The ultimate lesson is to mistake the Other with Another, as this sometimes poses life risks.
In any case, it is quite hard to distinguish between a strict social bond and a strict ontological one. Instead, we can consider that they intermingle as a unity, as a linguistic sign which, in its pragmatic dimension, is simultaneously the expression as well as the expressed content, the signifiant and the signifié, to use a Structuralist framework.
As one can deduce from the issues so far discussed, Distance is the other side of Pi and Richard Parker’s relation. This is present when we notice Pi’s vigilance while being with the tiger on the boat. Pi is always aware of the death the tiger might bring him. Pi, therefore, engages the tiger in domination, befriending and taming strategies[15]. Distance, as a relational mechanism, manifests itself quite strong when the tiger eats the hyena, when the fisherman they meet by chance[16] in the Pacific, is disembodied by the tiger, but even more when Richard Parker disappears without a trace.
That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I’d had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I’d provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then-yes, I know, to a tiger, but still-I wish I had said, “Richard Parker, it’s over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express. I couldn’t have done it without you. I would like to say it formally: Richard Parker, thank you. Thank you for saving my life. And now go where you must. You have known the confined freedom of a zoo most of your life; now you will know the free confinement of a jungle. I wish you all the best with it. Watch out for Man.He is not your friend. But I hope you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you, that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. What is that hiss? Ah, our boat has touched sand. So farewell, Richard Parker, farewell. God be with you”[17].
Practically, the end is proof of the fact that Pi’s relation to Richard Parker could never go beyond the man-tiger matrix relation and that Richard Parker did not become Pi Patel’s friend, despite their bond,. Distance alternates with bonding, as noted earlier, but the first is always stronger, exerting its effects on its counterpart. Pi’s bond with the tiger will never become a full fusion, so that they may be indistinguishable. The distance between the two is irreducible. The tiger leaves without being engaged in gestures which might suggest an anthropomorphic interpretation – the tiger is never aware that the jungle which opens up in front of him brings the freedom he never had, neither at Pondicherry Zoo, or at sea. On the other hand, Pi is too tired to behave in accordance with a typical novel-like manner. Pi does not tell the tiger good-bye, since all the tender words that he addresses the tiger are said after Pi parts with the tiger (“I wish I had said”), which makes these words to be words about the tiger. The true Other, the interlocutor, the one who is the You, is, at this point, the book’s reader. The savage nature of the Animal-Other is highlighted once again. At the same time, this goodbye which is a form of discursive regret and of the “what if” philosophy, is a corollary of Pi’s withdrawal from his relationship with an unknown and uncomfortable Other. On a Freudian note, relational libido is re-cast onto the Similar-Other figure, a situation in which death lurks less. And yet, the one who comes back from the sea voyage is not the same with the one who embarked on the voyage. The untamed Other becomes an integral part of Pi’s self, because it is an element which Pi overcomes and which is reciprocal.
If, however, we take into consideration the interpretation of the two Japanese who interview Pi, and therefore consider the entire story to be Pi’s invention and the tiger his personified Self, an imaginative by-product crated by Pi to cope with the dire life conditions on the ocean, the man-tiger relationship appears to be an internal relationship which has no roots in material reality. Regression is more of a psychical, rather than social nature and brings back a part of the reality which Pi knew until the tragic accident: the fact that there was a tiger called Richard Parker, reticent, by its own nature, to human bonding, a tiger which is tied to the Pi’s father life lesson. According to this lesson, man must not consider all animals as friends, but must, instead, know his enemy, for the sake of personal safety.
There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements. All are instances of that animal equivalent of anthropomorphism: zoomorphism, where an animal takes a human being, or another animal, to be one of its kind. The most famous case is also the most common: the pet dog, which has so assimilated humans into the realm of doghood as to want to mate with them, a fact that any dog owner who has had to pull an amorous dog from the leg of a mortified visitor will confirm[18].
If dogs and domestic animals can function as a childish alter-ego or as a mirror which flatters the one who looks in it, the tiger is not an Idealistic rewriting of the Self, but an identification with and an awareness of their negative sides, namely of those that fear and weakness regulate. No matter how necessary, knowing the tiger imposes distancing oneself from it, according to Pi’s father’s advice. Therefore, if we accept that Pi is closely connected to Richard Parker being a psycho-existential emanation of the first, it would be too simple to reduce Pi to Richard Parker. Despite sharing the same ontological substance, they are separate from one another, as there is an unsurpassable intra-ontological distance. The reason why Richard Parker exists, even if we see it as an image of the Self, is because within one entity there are distances, fractions, there is the enemy. The enemy can be the evil one, the one who saves itself in the detriment of others, the cannibal (the one who ate the hyena/the cook), but also the one which invalidates the expectations about the routine-eroded Self, the one built in accordance to a culture which imprints its traits onto those it subdues. Men are the most dangerous animals from the point of view of animals (“We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man”[19]), but interpreting everything through the same chart, one might say that men are most dangerous, not only for animals, but for men as well. On the same page, Richard Parker articulates the inherently human nature of the enemy[20] on all levels: a generic level, a meta-literary level, in artistic creations and human stories alike.
The untamed other and the role of fantasy. Counteracting death
No matter if we choose the first interpretative key of Pi and Richard Parker’s relationship, according to which the tiger is a flesh and bone animal, or if we accept the second one, according to which Richard Parker is Pi’s untamed other[21], which Pi gets rid of once he ends his voyage at sea, Richard Parker remains a symbol-like figure of the enemy/foe, of the Other which cannot possibly be tamed[22]. In the first case, we speak of a perfectly External Other, whereas, in the second, of an Inner Other which still engages in ongoing tendencies to become external. Critics consider that the first variant is more likely to be chosen by readers with a developed religious spirit, who do not need proof and who do not hesitate to distance themselves from what is considered normal by common sense while the likelihood of choosing the second variant is higher for atheists or agnostics, as these rationalise everything and are more prone to believe in the miracle of a tiger-man sharing the same space for 227 days. From the point of view of the relationship with the Other, aside from the fact that there are only nuanced differences between the two possible enemies, there is a factor which is overlooked. Admitting that Richard Parker died after the boat sank, his place being taken by Pi’s illusory Self, we cannot say that the novel ceases to be a fantasy novel by becoming a realistic one which shares some fantasy elements. Realism, in this case, would be a meta-Realism, a fantasy subordinate element and nothing more. In other words, the fantasy break or rupture gives rise to the possibility of Realism, and not vice-versa. In fact, we might ask ourselves what might go best with Realism, a tiger and a boy that manage to survive together or a boy who resorts to cannibalism, who creates an imaginary enemy, becoming a schizoid, both a good and a bad person, a bad Self for which the character longs unconditionally. It might be the case that the difference between the two possibilities is less severe, especially if we put an equal sign between Realism and Rationalism. At the end of the novel, Pi is quite ironic about the Japanese opting for the Realistic interpretation of the story. “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently”[23].
We ask ourselves how much does such profound doubling meet the reader’s expectations, since it triggers the birth of the enemy/foe from within, it accepts it and admits to the invested love which makes people human. Yet, in the end, whether an animalistic or psychological emanation (criminal and irrational compared to normality) of Pi, Richard Parker is the untamed Other which proves necessary, paradoxically or not, to the character-narrator. Pi stands in front of another enemy, a stronger one, a complete one, an enemy which does not preserve the face of the one he hates (like the tiger does, in any of its two instances, by virtue of the alert state it maintains), but rather destroys and erases it. This enemy is death. Hiding death and stimulating one’s will to live (by virtue of an action-reaction response) are Richard Parker’s main merits and main reasons of the absurd love Pi carries for it, at first sight.
I will tell you a secret: a part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker. He kept me from thinking too much about my family and my tragic circumstances. He pushed me to go on living. I hated him for it, yet at the same time I was grateful. I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story[24].
It is easier to see now that the main fantasy entertained by the novel is that the Other, irrespective of its friend or foe quality, more of a friend rather than foe, can counteract death[25], going beyond ethics. One can even claim that the foe/enemy figure is saved from death, and what saves the foe/enemy from death is fantasy (fantasy as genre, by extension, or even literature, by an even more generous extension), fact which discretely opposes, the entire range of positive discourses regarding the Other.
In Lieu of conclusion: the untamed Other is also good for your health
Life of Pi is proof of the fact that the untamed Other, without being “good” in the ethical sense, may be “good for your health”. In relation to Postmodernist discourses which exalt the intrinsic value of the Other and exorcise problematic differences, Martel’s novel imbues a subtle pedagogy, which can be resumed as follows: literature cannot afford to lose its authentic enemies and cannot, under the imperative of humanistic ideology (drifting from classical and modern humanism), transform the Other exclusively in the friend figure, and tame it till making every tension null. By the two available readings (actually, taking into account that they are revealed at the end of the book, it would be more fair to call it re-reading), the novel praises freedom of interpretation in general, but even more so the story’s freedom which is a religion for itself and on its own, and which manages to overcome any ideological discourse. As James Wood notices, this appraisal is one of the major elements which make the novel a Postmodernist one.
Nothing marks Life of Pi as a contemporary Postmodern novel more strongly than its theological impoverishment (for all that it seems to scream theological richness): instead of being interested in the theological basis of Pi’s soul, it is really interested only in the theological basis of storytelling[26].
It is worth noting that, in spite of everything, the Other, in Life of Pi, is not, in its essence, built on the Postmodernist pattern of positive portrayal and taming. However, it is Postmodernist if we think of it as a consequence of destroying the religious imperative of vision coherence. It should be noted that Pi embraces more than one religion (Hinduism, Christianity, Islamism). An approximate way of explaining the cultural substance of the Other, as represented in Martel’s novel, would be to say that it is Postmodernist, literarily speaking, and anti-Postmodernist, ideologically speaking.
Indeed, fantasy literature and, by extension, literature, might be one of the best (and maybe the last) standpoints where the Other is concealed as a fresh, cruel, authentic, surprising and ontologically reinforced entity. It is the kind of standpoint which might offer the discrete energy that can re-insert the Other in the culture circuit, because stories do not avoid contrast and are based on their own laws. The aesthetic dimension is not a decorative mirroring of ethics necessarily, since ethics is all too often socially manipulated.
This paper received support from the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant number 54/2011 – PNII TE.
Bibliography
Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, N.Y, Doubleday, 1966.
Cox, Gary, Sartre and Fiction, London, New York, Continuum, 2009.
Deloro, Cyrille, L’Autre. Petit traité de narcissisme intelligent, Paris, Larousse, 2009.
Dery, Jeruen, Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, http://blogcritics.org/book-review-life-of-pi-by2/, nov. 2011, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Dumitrache, Silvia, “Supravieţuirea cu sinele sălbatic. Yann Martel Viaţa lui Pi” [Surviving the Savage Self. Yann Martel “Life of Pi”], bookaholic.ro, 2012, http://bookaholic.ro/supravietuirea-cu-sinele-salbatic-yann-martel, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Girard, René and Vattimo, Gianni, Adevăr sau credinţă slabă? Convorbiri despre creştinism şi relativism [Truth or Weak Thought? Conversations about Christianism and Relativism], edited by Pierpaolo Antonello, translated from Italian by Cornelia Dumitru, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche, 2009.
Glucksmann, André, Le discours de la haine, Paris, Plon, 2004.
Greer, W. R., “Life of Pi is a masterful story”, 2002, ReviewsOfBooks.com, http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/life_of_pi/review/, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Jordan, Justine, “Animal magnetism”, in The Guardian, 25 May 2002, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/25/fiction.reviews1, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
Krist, Gary, “Taming the Tiger”, in New York Times, 7 July, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/books/taming-the-tiger.html, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Lesourd, Serge, “La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre”, in Cliniques méditerranéennes, N° 75, 2007/1, p. 13-26.
Lévinas, Emmanuel, La Mort et le temps, Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1992.
Lipovetsky, Gilles, Le bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation [Paradoxical happiness], Paris, Gallimard, 2006.
Lipovetsky, Gilles, Le Crépuscule du devoir [The Dawn of Duty], Paris, Gallimard, 1992.
Proulx, Paul-André, Vision chrétienne de la vie, 2003, http://www.litterature-quebecoise.com/oeuvres/lhistoiredepi.html, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris, Gallimard, 1943.
Wood, James, “Credulity”, in London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No 22, 14 nov 2002, p. 24-25, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/james-wood/credulity, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
Notes
[1] Justine Jordan, “Animal magnetism”, in The Guardian, 25 May 2002,
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/25/fiction.reviews1, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
[2] Paul-André Proulx, Vision chrétienne de la vie, 2003,
http://www.litterature-quebecoise.com/oeuvres/lhistoiredepi.html, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.
[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 328, p. 336.
[6] René Girard and Gianni Vattimo, Adevăr sau credinţă slabă? Convorbiri despre creştinism şi relativism [Truth or Weak Thought? Conversations about Christianism and Relativism], edited by Pierpaolo Antonello, translated from Italian by Cornelia Dumitru, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche, 2009.
[7] Gilles Lipovetsky, Le bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation, Paris, Gallimard, 2006.
[9] Serge Lesourd, “La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre”, in Cliniques méditerranéennes, N° 75, 2007/1, p. 13-26.
[12] For instance, the words uttered by the owner who euthanizes his old dog, at the end of the movie Marley and Me (2008, David Frankel) are memorable: “A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, clever or dull, smart or dumb. Give him your heart and he’ll give you his. How many people can you say that about? How many people can make you feel rare and pure and special? How many people can make you feel extraordinary?” Therefore, the ultimate benefit of one’s relationship with a dog is improving one’s Self image.
[14] Petere L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, N.Y, Doubleday, 1966.
[15] Cf. Jeruen Dery, Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, http://blogcritics.org/book-review-life-of-pi-by2/, nov. 2011, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. On the disturbing effect survival tactics may have on the reader.
[16] It should be noted that the fisherman is referred to as brother. Killing the brother indicates once more that the Tiger is an evil, death-bearing Other.
[18] Ibidem, p. 93. See also: “I learned the lesson that an animal is an animal, essentially and practically removed from us, twice: once with Father and once with Richard Parker. (…) “Tigers are very dangerous,” Father shouted. “I want you to understand that you are never-under any circumstances-to touch a tiger, to pet a tiger, to put your hands through the bars of a cage, even to get close to a cage”.
[20] Cf.: Gary Krist, “Taming the Tiger”, in New York Times, 7 July, 2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/books/taming-the-tiger.html, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. Krist sees the relationship between the tiger and Pi as existential rather than realistic or fantastic. The story seems to be existential because the Other must be accepted in its negative dimension.
[21] Cf.: Silvia Dumitrache, “Supravieţuirea cu sinele sălbatic. Yann Martel Viaţa lui Pi” [Surviving the Savage Self. Yann Martel “Life of Pi”], bookaholic.ro, 2012, http://bookaholic.ro/supravietuirea-cu-sinele-salbatic-yann-martel, last time consulted in 05.02.2014.
[22] Cf.: W. R. Greer, “Life of Pi is a masterful story”, ReviewsOfBooks.com,
http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/life_of_pi/review/, 2002, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. (“Martel doesn’t allow Richard Parker to be anything more than a dangerous Bengal tiger and Pi never to be more than a desperate boy lost at sea”)
From Cinema Myths to Science Fantasy: Contemporary Hybrid Cinema and Sci-Fi “Avatars”From Cinema Myths to Science Fantasy: Contemporary Hybrid Cinema and Sci-Fi “Avatars”
I’d Rather Be a Pig than a Fascist: How Ideology Works in Fantasy FilmsI’d Rather Be a Pig than a Fascist: How Ideology Works in Fantasy Films
Science Fiction, Fantasy and Oneiro-Fantastic in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the WorldScience Fiction, Fantasy and Oneiro-Fantastic in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
A Journey through FantasticaA Journey through Fantastica
Toma Monica Alina
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
toma_monica_alina@yahoo.com
A Journey through Fantastica
Abstract: This study concerns Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. The first part of it is dedicated to the presentation of this fantastic epic novel, taking into consideration metafictive devices, name symbolism, character and situation archetypes, plot, the moral of the story.The second part of the work is trying to find the answer to questions like: “What is Fantastica?”, “How is it related to the human realm?”, “What does the concept of “nothing” represent?”, “What is the role of imagining in our life?”
Keywords: Michael Ende; The Neverending Story; Fantasy; Metafiction; Archetype; Quest; Myth; Psyche.
Originally published as Die unendliche Geschichte in 1979, Michael Ende’s brilliant, kaleidoscopic fantasy work The Neverending Storywas translated into many languages, sold millions of copies and was even made into a film in 1984.The protagonist of this famous work is ten-year-old Bastian Balthazar Bux, an apparently ordinary schoolboy who has the gift of making up “names and words that do not exist” and whose passion for books makes him steal The Neverending Story.
The novel uses common metafictive devices: it is a book about a reader reading a book whose characters are aware that they are part of it, a fiction containing another work of fiction within itself, a book in which the book itself seeks interaction with the reader and also a story about a writer creating a fictional world.
While we are reading a book called The Neverending Story, Bastian is also reading it and, ashe reads further, it becomes obvious to him that his reality and the fictional kingdom of Fantastica are intertwined. By the end of the first part of the novel, after the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain re-reads the Neverending Story from the start[1], Bastian enters the fantasy world. Once in Fantastica, he rebuilds the kingdom with his own imaginative powers.
The names of characters and places that appear in the story are symbolic, illustrative for what they represent, according to the principle that the name of a thing and the thing itself are one: The Neverending Story, Fantastica, the Childlike Empress, the Great Quest, the Magic Mirror Gate, the Mountain of Destiny, the House of Change, Uyulala(ululare means in Latin to howl), Dame Eyola (aiuola means flower-bed in Italian), etc.
Many of the characters represent archetypes: the hero (Atreyu, Bastian), the damsel in distress, the virgin (the Childlike Empress), the wise (the Childlike Empress, Morla, The Old Man of Wandering Mountain, the Many-Colored Death Grograman), the aged one (Morla, The Old Man of Wandering Mountain), the friendly beast (Artax, the luckdragon Falkor), the creature of nightmare (Gmork), the psychopomp, the gatekeeper(the man in the old book store, the Childlike Empress, Gmork, the two snakes, the two sphinxes), the temptress (Xayide: “My will can control anything that’s empty.”)), the mother (Dame Eyola), the group of companions (Atreyu and Falkor), etc.
The situations are also archetypical: the father-son conflict, the Great Quest for the saving of Fantastica, the task of finding a cure for the Childlike Empress, the initiation into the adult life of both Atreyu and Bastian, the journey that demands the full responsibility of the hero, the fall (Bastian’s loss of innocence and bliss), death and rebirth (the rewriting of the neverending story, the destruction and the rebirth of Fantastica, the falling to sleep and the awakening of the Lord of the Desert of Colors, Dame Eyola, who blossoms and dies again and again, the silvery white and the black snakes who hold each other prisoner, encircling the great fountain of the Water of Life), the battle between good and evil (Fantastica triumphs against its destruction), there is a magical weapon (the AURYN), etc.
The first twelve chapters of the work revolve around the quest of Atreyu, seen by the critics as an alter ego, a projection of Bastian into a fantasy world, while the second part of the novel concerns the transformation undergone by Bastian. Atreyu’s quest is pure fakery, for the Golden-eyed Commander of Wishes already knows what’s wrong with her. She only needs an adventure, a spectacle to find a reader, for the only person who can fix the situation is the human child who reads the book.
Still, Atreyu doesn’t know this in the beginning, so he gives up his initiation as a hunter to leave on a “much greater hunt” that implies an even higher stake: it is the Great Quest of saving Fantastica. His only weapon for this demanding task is AURYN, the talisman containing the power and the guidance of the Childlike Empress. The journey takes him through various places (the Silver Mountains, the Singing Tree Country, the Glass Tower of Eribo, the broad plateau of the Sassafranians) until, on the seventh day of his trip, in the Howling Forest, he gets of glimpse of the mysterious disease that is destroying Fantastica.
Continuing his quest, Atreyu gets through the Swamps of Sadness where Morla, the Aged One, lives, arrives in the deep chasm of the Dead Mountains, the dwelling place of the horror of horrors Ygramul the Many, in order to finally reach the Southern Oracle, where Uyulala, the voice of silence, reigns in the Palace of Deep Mystery. Uyulala tells him that the only being who can give the Childlike Empress a new name and thus save Fantastica is a child of man from the Outer World.
With the purpose of finding this child, Atreyu tries to get beyond the borders of the kingdom, only to hear from Gmork, the shadow creature of darkness, that fantasy has no borders and that only a human creature can come to Fantastica, not the other way around. Disappointed at the thought of having failed in his quest, Atreyu goes to the Childlike Empress, but she tells him that he has brought the child of man with him, revealing the true meaning of his journey.[2]
Since the savior of the kingdom holds off his coming, the Golden-eyed Commander of Wishes is forced to look for the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, who chronicles in his book everything that happens in Fantastica. The Old Man re-reads the Neverending Story from the start and narrates himself reading it, then, when he reaches the present again, he starts to narrate himself narrating himself re-reading the story.
The only one who can break this infinite loop is Bastian, who finally enters Fantastica and who is told that he can rebuild the kingdom by the use of his imaginative powers and of the AURYN, which represents the authority of the Childlike Empress. Still, the temptation of “DOING WHAT YOU WISH” that the Golden-eyed Commander lays before the hero’s eyes contains in itself the greatest danger, which is the one of losing oneself. It is Grograman, the Many-Colored Death, who warns him of the true problem he’s facing:
“Bastian had shown the lion the inscription on the reverse side of the Gem.” What do you suppose it means?” he asked. “’DO WHAT YOU WISH.’ That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don’t you think so?” […]
“It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult.”
“What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?”
“It’s your own deepest secret and you yourself don’t know it.”
“How can I find out?”
“By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want.” […] “It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there’s no other journey on which it’s so easy to lose yourself forever.”
“Do you mean because our wishes aren’t always good?” Bastian asked. […]
“What do you know about wishes? How would you know what’s good and what isn’t?”[3]
The exercise of absolute power changes Bastian and he quickly becomes unrecognizable. First, he makes himself attractive, then strong, then brave, then loved, but with every granted wish he loses a part of himself. His attempts to change the kingdom only lead to the same mixture of beauty and ugliness as before, Fantastica itself being founded on the co-existence of contraries.[4]The “hero” realizes the mistakes he has made when he gets to the City of the Old Emperors, which is full of madmen who tried to produce a better world, and yet they have ended up completely destitute after making the same kind of Fantastica as the one they replaced.
By the end of the novel, Bastian has stopped regarding himself as an arbiter of justice or a divine ruler and he no longer wants to improve the kingdom by force, but he has learned to acknowledge himself and to treasure his personal relationships. After giving up all self-importance, ambition and tyranny, he realizes that the things that really matter to him are the sense of belonging to a community among the Yskalnari, the unconditional affection of Dame Eyola and the ability to love others, like his father or his friends, Atreyu and Falkor. The moral of the work is thatwhat truly shapes the world is the joy of living, of being ourselves, and the love and inspiration we give to the people around us:
“But then he jumped into the crystal-clear water. He splashed and spluttered and let the sparkling rain fall into his mouth. He drank till his thirst was quenched. And joy filled him from head to foot, the joy of living and the joy of being himself. He was newborn. And the best part of it was that he was now the very person he wanted to be. If he had been free to choose, he would have chosen to be no one else. Because now he knew that there were thousands and thousands of forms of joy in the world, but that all were essentially one and the same, namely, the joy of being able to love.
And much later, long after Bastian had returned to his world, in his maturity and even in his old age, this joy never left him entirely. Even in the hardest moments of his life he preserved a lightheartedness that made him smile and that comforted others.”[5]
But what is Fantastica? What does it represent?
In order to find that answer, we need to consider Jung’s theory on imagination and archetypes. According to him, the autonomous activity of the psyche is a continual creating of reality, every psychic process being “an image and an imagining.” Thus, the psychic instincts of the human species appear in the form of images and symbols in dreams or in more complex forms that have known conscious elaboration like religious beliefs, myths or fairytales.
These preexisting psychic forces, of which the subconscious mind consists of, are not predetermined in content but are rather possibilities of representation that can be actualized in different ways. Archetypes become images only when they are activated by a stimulus, being shaped by the individual consciousness or by the group in which they appear.
Structuring the conscious content and influencing motivation and behavior, they are considered great formative powers that determine the way we perceive the world and act, coming with both power of transformation and destiny. As Jung says, “the secrets of the soul are set in glorious images, which are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower us. “Thus, the experience of these archetypal expressions develops man’s highest values, guiding him in the search of his soul, of completeness.
When mythical creatures, which constitute the very basis, the prima materia of our psychic life, are experienced “in their true form”, they participate in the process of “soul-making”. By giving them “the right name”, by recognizing them for what they are, these figures can enrich our being. In the context of The Neverending Story, this idea appears in the words of the Childlike Empress, who stretches the interconnectedness of the two realms of consciousness:
“When humans, children of man, come to our world of their own free will, that’s the right way. Every human who has been here has learned something that could be learned only here, and returned to his own world a changed person. Because he had seen you creatures in your true form, he was able to see his own world and his fellow humans with new eyes. Where he had seen only dull, everyday reality, he now discovered wonders and mysteries. That is why humans were glad to come to Fantastica. And the more these visits enriched our world, the fewer lies there were in theirs, the better it became. Just as our two worlds can injure each other, they can also make each other whole again.”[6]
As it is implied in the paragraph, the imaginal[7] realm of the psyche possesses the character of “necessity”, idea which was also stretched by Hillman in his poetic psychology. In an attempt to deepen the Jungian insight into the essential nature of the soul, James Hillman implied that human nature is primarily imaginal, images in their manifest content being fully meaningful. His archetypal psychology considered that images are not in the psyche as in a container but are the psyche, they are what they mean and mean what they are.
A fundamental tenet of this type of psychology was that we cannot imagine without the mythical characters and patterns that inhabit our soul, for they are preconditions of our imagination. If we invent them, then we invent them according to patterns they lay down. This interesting idea also appears in the Neverending story, when Bastian is wandering how much of what he has created is really his creation, and what was already there:
“But does all this exist only after I’ve wished it? Or was it all there before?”
“Both,” said Grograman.
“How can that be?” Bastian cried almost impatiently. “You’ve been here in Goab, the Desert of Colors, since heaven knows when. The room in your palace was waiting for me since the beginning of time. So, too, was the sword Sikanda. You told me so yourself.”
“That is true, master.”
“But I — I’ve only been in Fantastica since last night! So it can’t be true that all these things have existed only since I came here.”
“Master,” the lion replied calmly. “Didn’t you know that Fantastica is the land of stories? A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.”
“Then Perilin, too, must always have been there,” said the perplexed Bastian.
“Beginning at the moment when you gave it its name,” Grograman replied, “it has existed forever.”[8]
Just as in Hillman’s vision, which has many things in common with Corbin’s mystical perspective, man exists in the midst of psyche and there is much of the soul that extends beyond the nature of a singular human being. The world of the dream is a cosmos in itself, distinct from but not entirely unrelated to the day world. Dream must be met on its own ground, which is that of unfathomable depth and polyvalence.
If the images of the psyche are what they mean, if the figures of myth possess their own consistency, we must simply let dream imagery be, for it is precisely then that it will begin to speak for itself and eventually alter our life. Dreams shape our ways of being into a poetic work, process during which our life itself is transformed into a work of art.
That is precisely why an adequate and meaningful connection between the conscious and the imaginal realm is seen as a correction of the inevitable one-sidedness of the rational mind, which usually concentrates on a few contents to the exclusion of all others. A symbolic compensation is considered necessary to prevent a dissociation of consciousness that facilitates a separation of one part of the mind from the rest, which may lead to a narrowing of mental horizons, to a diminution of personality (“loss of soul”) or to its falsification through the force of the separated part, to a serious impoverishment of human experience and possibly to listlessness and losing of will.
Since the correct use of imaginative powers gives beings and things their reality, making them a part of the real, of the truth of being, denying the importance of imagination or the misuse of it makes everything unreal, transforming things into lies, alienating them, depriving them of their true purpose and meaning. The concept of “nothing” that appears in The Neverending Story refers exactly to this loss of imaginatio vera, which keeps man in connection with his true soul. The destruction of Fantastica takes away the hopes and dreams of humanity, depriving man of his freedom, which is replaced by delusions, fears, desires for vain, hurtful things and thoughts of despair.
To summarize, man is primarily an image maker and his psyche is made of images. To live is to imagine things, to be in the soul is to experience the imaginal in all realities and the basic reality of the imaginal. As Hillman says, “we are indeed such stuff as dreams are made of.”
Bibliography
Books
Carl Gustav Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Princeton University Press, 1968.
Gilbert Durand, Exploring the Imaginal, New York, Spring Publications, 1971.
Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of lbn Arabi, Princeton, University Press,1968.
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, Harper & Row, 1979.
Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, Garden City, Doubleday & Company, 1983.
Sandra Beckett, Crossover Fiction, New York, Routledge, 2009.
Papers in journals
Corin Braga, “Imagination”,”imaginaire”, “imaginal”. Three concepts fordefining creative fantasy”, in JSRI no. 16, spring 2007, p. 59-68.
Roberts Avens, “James Hillman: Toward aPoetic Psychology”, inJournal of Religion and Health, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 1980, p. 186-202.
Sites
http://www.stjohnkarp.net/the-neverending-story/
Notes
[1] “As Bastian read this and listened to the deep, dark voice of the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, a roaring started up in his ears and he saw spots before his eyes.
Why, this was all about him! And it was the Neverending Story. He, Bastian, was a character in the book which until now he had thought he was reading. And heaven only knew who else might be reading it at the exact same time, also supposing himself to be just a reader.” Michael Ende, The Neverending Story, Garden City, Doubleday & Company, 1983, p. 94.
[2] “All your sufferings were necessary. I sent you on the Great Quest — not for the sake of the message you would bring me, but because that was the only way of calling our savior. He took part in everything you did, and he has come all that long way with you. You heard his cry of fear when you were talking with Ygramul beside the Deep Chasm, and you saw him when you stood facing the Magic Mirror Gate. You entered into his image and took it with you, and he followed you, because he saw himself through your eyes. And now, too, he can hear every word we are saying. He knows we are talking about him, he knows we have set our hope in him and are expecting him. Perhaps he even understands that all the hardship you, Atreyu, took upon yourself was for his sake and that all Fantastica is calling him.” Ibidem, p. 84-85.
[3] Ibidem, p.113.
[4] Even the Childlike Empress “never interfered with anyone … In her eyes all her subjects were equal … every creature, whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly, merry or solemn, foolish or wise — all owed their existence to her existence.”Idem, p.14.
[5] Ibidem, p. 204.
[6] Ibidem, p. 83.
[7] Corbin defines the imaginal as the mediating ground where the literal is dissolved and the spiritual imaginalized.
[8] Ibidem, p. 111.
Toma Monica Alina
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
toma_monica_alina@yahoo.com
A Journey through Fantastica
Abstract: This study concerns Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. The first part of it is dedicated to the presentation of this fantastic epic novel, taking into consideration metafictive devices, name symbolism, character and situation archetypes, plot, the moral of the story.The second part of the work is trying to find the answer to questions like: “What is Fantastica?”, “How is it related to the human realm?”, “What does the concept of “nothing” represent?”, “What is the role of imagining in our life?”
Keywords: Michael Ende; The Neverending Story; Fantasy; Metafiction; Archetype; Quest; Myth; Psyche.
Originally published as Die unendliche Geschichte in 1979, Michael Ende’s brilliant, kaleidoscopic fantasy work The Neverending Storywas translated into many languages, sold millions of copies and was even made into a film in 1984.The protagonist of this famous work is ten-year-old Bastian Balthazar Bux, an apparently ordinary schoolboy who has the gift of making up “names and words that do not exist” and whose passion for books makes him steal The Neverending Story.
The novel uses common metafictive devices: it is a book about a reader reading a book whose characters are aware that they are part of it, a fiction containing another work of fiction within itself, a book in which the book itself seeks interaction with the reader and also a story about a writer creating a fictional world.
While we are reading a book called The Neverending Story, Bastian is also reading it and, ashe reads further, it becomes obvious to him that his reality and the fictional kingdom of Fantastica are intertwined. By the end of the first part of the novel, after the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain re-reads the Neverending Story from the start[1], Bastian enters the fantasy world. Once in Fantastica, he rebuilds the k
Parabolic Narrative Mechanisms and Fictional Structures in Petru Cimpoeşu’s NovelsParabolic Narrative Mechanisms and Fictional Structures in Petru Cimpoeşu’s Novels
Réélaboration du mythe dans la prose initiatique de A. E. Baconsky, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiriThe Re-elaboration of Myth in A. E. Baconsky’s initiatic prose work, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri (“The Madmen’s Equinox and Other Stories”)
Danilo De Salazar
Université de la Calabre – Rende (CS), (Italie)
danilo.desalazar@gmail.com
Réélaboration du mythe dans la prose initiatique
de A. E. Baconsky, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri /
The Re-elaboration of Myth
in A. E. Baconsky’s initiatic prose work,
Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri (“The Madmen’s Equinox and Other Stories”)
Abstract: According to most critics, it is possible to recognize in A. E. Baconsky’s prose work, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri, an initiatic aspect, mirrored in the very structure of the ten short stories comprising the volume. Our hermeneutical excursus aims to show the elements referable to rite – in particular, to man’s reintegration with Mythical Time and to the reconciliation of being with the great cosmic cycles, to which Mircea Eliade paid much attention. The author adopts and re-elaborates these myths, embedding them, more or less explicitly, in the narrative plot. This is the case of the Zalmoxis, Orestes, Icarus and Ulysses myths – finely recalled by Baconsky in his references to sirens and to the Cyclops Polyphemus. Our study of the revival of myth within Baconsky’s short stories is accompanied by an accurate analysis of Baconskyan imagery that, on the basis of the researches led by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand and Jean Libis, reveals itself particularly fertile as regards the aerial element and, above all, the watery one. In this perspective, we seek to further focus on the passage from myth to complex, discovering its extreme vitality on the level of imaginative dynamism in the figures of Jonah and Charon.
Keywords: A. E. Baconsky; Myth; Rite; Initiatic Prose; Water; Sea; Wind.
En procédant à l’exploration du cogito du rêveur, auquel est dédié un chapitre entier de La Poétique de la rêverie, Gaston Bachelard propose une analyse du je et reconnaît trois catégories selon le niveau de conscience maintenu : “Le « je » du sommeil – s’il existe ; le « je » de la narcose – s’il garde valeur d’individualité ; le « je » de la rêverie, maintenu dans une telle vigilance qu’il peut se donner le bonheur d’écrire”[1]. Selon l’épistémologue français, l’homme, à travers la rêverie, pénètre dans une sorte de région des ombres[2], à mi-chemin entre l’être et le non-être, un espace qui sert de “« médiateur plastique » entre l’homme et l’univers”[3]. La compréhension du rapport entre l’homme et le cosmos, ou plus en général du mystère de la vie, constitue le thème essentiel d’Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri (L’équinoxe des fous et autres récits)[4] d’A. E. Baconsky, comme le met déjà en évidence la structure narrative du volume entier, qui se fonde sur le sens insaisissable de réponses longtemps poursuivies. Il n’est permis au lecteur que de pressentir quelques signes (le message indéchiffrable transmis par les oiseaux en vol, les fresques énigmatiques retrouvées dans une maison dans les marais, une lettre qui annonce un meurtre…), pour partager ensuite avec le protagoniste un sentiment d’anxiété et de frustration, provoqué par l’impossibilité d’en saisir le signifié profond, par l’incapacité précisément de dévoiler le mystère de son existence[5].
Le schéma narratif magistralement construit autour du protagoniste des dix récits qui composent le volume se déroule dans une atmosphère fuyante et riche en références symboliques, où le lecteur plonge en s’associant au jeu de substitution et de renversement de rôles des personnages et en percevant une sensation d’égarement spatio-temporel, typique du rêve ou plus précisément du cauchemar. De plus, nous considérons que le choix de l’auteur d’abolir ou de dissimuler l’identité des actants (en négligeant les noms ou parfois en employant des moyens spécifiques comme la mise en abyme, l’inversion des rôles ou encore en utilisant une description énigmatique des visages) a comme but principal la dé-subjectivité du personnage, ce dernier étant le protagoniste d’une histoire qui va bien au-delà des pages du livre, une histoire qui précipite dans le temps mythique[6]. Echinoxul nebunilor est l’histoire universelle de l’homme, soumise à la loi des grands cycles, dont le récit se fait rite et célébration : “Depuis longtemps je l’avais oublié moi-même [mon nom, n.d.t.], depuis que, sous le signe imposé par l’intersection des grands cycles qui se croisaient dans ma biographie, je m’étais débarrassé de tout ce qui pouvait me souvenir de moi-même”[7].
Traces homériques dans l’exploration gnoséologique
« Autrefois j’ai abandonné ma maison, en suivant un mendiant aveugle qui parcourait le monde avec son chien – et je n’ai plus regardé en arrière »[8]. Ainsi commence le voyage périlleux du protagoniste de Farul (Le phare), récit qui ouvre Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri. Le voyage doit être entendu ici comme la métaphore d’une recherche existentielle proprement dite, comme la tentative de dévoiler ce mystère qui, comme un linceul, s’étend de la première jusqu’à la dernière page du volume, enroulant et impliquant le lecteur dans une entreprise cognitive dont on découvre bientôt l’impossibilité. Comme la plupart des critiques l’ont relevé, le personnage principal des dix récits qui composent le livre est toujours le même[9] et nous approuvons ce que Nicolae Creţu a observé : « Le héros des proses de Echinoxul nebunilor (il n’existe sans doute qu’un héros que nous redécouvrons toujours derrière ses masques successifs) est l’Homme, un Ulysse du mythe total, ontique, se débattant avec les défis fondamentaux de la vie »[10]. L’analogie est encore plus appropriée si l’on considère aussi des passages du livre où la référence au poème homérique est explicite. Nous remarquerons l’assimilation, qui n’est certainement pas aléatoire, du phare au cyclope Polyphème (« Je voyais dans son œil de Polyphème pétrifié un monde de vide et de mort propagée »[11]) et surtout l’évocation des sirènes : « Et il n’y aura plus aucune sirène qui mettra fin au jeu sombre et qui annoncera la mort à travers son chant, la seule à laquelle je me sentais condamné »[12]. Jean Libis, dans L’Eau et la mort, consacre un chapitre entier à l’érotisme de l’eau et s’arrête sur le mythe des sirènes, en y apercevant non seulement le réseau symbolique unissant l’eau, la féminité et la mort, mais en en saisissant un aspect encore plus profond :
Pourtant, d’un autre côté, le mythe reste étonnamment vivace et fécond, pour peu qu’on se donne la peine […] de relire attentivement l’épisode homérique. Les sirènes y apparaissent détentrices d’un savoir : non seulement elles connaissent tous les maux endurés par les héros de la guerre de Troie, mais elles savent aussi « tout ce que voit passer la terre nourricière ». Quel est donc le contenu de ce Savoir, si radical, si essentiel, qu’il a besoin du plus beau chant pour prendre forme, et qui est à ce point inaudible par les mortels qu’il les égare et les détruit ? […] Qu’est-ce donc que nous désirons entendre à ce point qu’il y va de notre existence même et qu’il nous faille nous boucher les oreilles avec de la cire pour que soit continué le Périple, qui est aussi le retour au bercail ?[13]
Ce « savoir essentiel », ce que le protagoniste « désire entendre à ce point qu’il y va de son existence », est l’existence même : chaque voyage pour en découvrir le sens le plus profond n’est qu’une Odyssée ; l’Ithaque coïncide irrémédiablement avec l’origine et avec la destination vers laquelle se dirige, dans le texte, l’alter ego de l’écrivain. La conscience intime de la caducité engendre chez les hommes une angoisse qui pénètre toute l’atmosphère où les histoires racontées s’inscrivent. Cette angoisse est liée aussi au sentiment de frustration provoqué par l’impossibilité concrète d’un retour à un état idéal de joie authentique (« Je vivais heureux dans un monde fantastique, peuplé par des créatures grandes et généreuses, masques de certains idéaux de plus en plus brumeux »[14]), concevable seulement comme rupture tragique avec la situation immanente. C’est exactement dans cette condition d’inachèvement que Libis – en se référant aux méditations de Maurice Blanchot – repérera l’élément commun à l’homme et au roman[15].
Perspectives cosmologiques du mythe
« A. E. Baconsky écrit une prose au caractère initiatique, où l’initiation du lecteur-néophyte se déroule parallèlement à celle du narrateur-témoin acteur »[16] : en nous référant aux études de Mircea Eliade sur le mythe, nous nous concentrerons sur l’importance particulière que ce dernier revêt dans les récits contenus dans Echinoxul nebunilor, œuvre où Laurenţiu Ciobanu remarque un passage « naturel de l’existence dans le mythe et du mythe dans l’existence »[17]. Parfois le mythe est évoqué de façon explicite, comme dans le cas d’Orphée et Eurydice, auquel est consacré un récit entier, le cinquième, tandis que, d’autres fois, la référence est implicite : le passage suivant ne se réfère-t-il pas à l’épopée sanglante des Atrides? « Il s’agira d’une tragédie sur le jeune fils d’un roi, qui a tué sa mère, sur une vengeance héritée de génération en génération entre frères, une vengeance inachevée, qui traverse le temps comme une flamme empoisonnée et sacrée, nourrie par des vestales inconnues »[18]. Nous pourrions peut-être même percevoir dans le personnage d’Oreste ce sentiment de culpabilité obscure auquel Nicolae Creţu se réfère lorsqu’il écrit :
Dans un espace intérieur incertain, qui suggère l’aventure onirique, se passent les expériences fondamentales de la vie ; tous les chemins qui semblent mener vers quelque chose d’autre, vers un salut de soi-même sont explorés, l’homme seul, en proie à ses obsessions, rongé par le sentiment d’une culpabilité obscure[19].
La même atmosphère étouffante pénètre aussi les pages finales du récit Înceţoşatul Orfeu (Orphée le brumeux) où l’Ade trouve son correspondant dans le « bordel » (« la maison peinte de bleu »), lieu où le protagoniste n’arrivera pas à sauver son Eurydice et où il semble être spirituellement piégé :
Parfois je suis avec moi, délivré d’un monde dont à l’improviste je suis devenu prisonnier, je reste les yeux ouverts, les prunelles dilatées et tourmentées par les vérités qui se dévoilent à ceux qui sont capables de transformer les souffrances en cristaux de glace. Mais trop souvent je me réveille accablé de nouveau par les nuits fétides qui m’ont conquis – et toutes les horreurs s’élèvent devant moi, colonnes tyranniques de la perdition, entre lesquelles je passe à l’aveuglette vers mon horizon écroulé. Alors je reviens à ma vie de la maison peinte en bleu. Je suis peut-être toujours là. Je ne l’ai jamais peut-être abandonnée[20].
Nous voudrions interpréter la référence de l’écrivain au personnage d’Icare selon une perspective différente : un renvoi qui semble bien loin des valeurs superficielles et moralisantes qui ont étés très souvent attribuées à l’histoire racontée dans ce mythe. Dans le passage en question, tiré du récit Cel-mai-mare (Le-plus-grand), on peut lire : « Nous avions appris seulement que nous aurions dû le rencontrer une nuit sur la rive, à côté des vagues monotones, qui lavaient le sable, sur lequel se dessinaient sans cesse leurs ailes d’Icares tombés et enterrés dans le jaune de la plage »[21]. Jean Libis observe qu’on n’a pas suffisamment remarqué que « le personnage d’Icare parcourt une trajectoire typiquement cosmologique »[22] et ajoute avec perspicacité :
Il s’évade de la complexité tellurique, symbolisée par le labyrinthe, épouse dans un second temps la plénitude de l’espace aérien, puis tente de s’approcher du feu suprême. Son immersion funeste dans le sein de la mer constitue donc le quatrième moment d’une pérégrination successivement dédiée aux quatre Eléments. En d’autres termes, l’investigation imaginaire du monde prend fin dans l’engloutissement thalassal[23].
Dans cette perspective, le passage de Baconsky gagne une énergie nouvelle : ses Icares deviennent le reflet du caractère cyclique et universel, soutenu par l’aspect presque messianique du récit. En analysant le texte avec attention, nous pouvons en effet repérer le schéma cyclique dans le mouvement répétitif et monotone des vagues (l’élément aquatique) qui, sans cesse, tracent des ailes (l’air) sur la plage (la terre). Le quatrième élément, c’est-à-dire le feu, est représenté par la couleur jaune, que l’on peut directement associer au soleil. La présence d’une plage jaune à l’intérieur d’une scène qui se situe dans l’obscurité ne fait qu’encourager la nécessité d’une approche analytique capable de porter l’attention de l’image de la réalité à la réalité de l’image : « L’imagination n’est pas, comme le suggère l’étymologie, la faculté de former des images de la réalité ; elle est la faculté de former des images qui dépassent la réalité, qui chantent la réalité »[24]. La richesse des images condensées dans une page de Baconsky et le soin avec lequel chaque phrase a été ciselée réclament une lecture profonde, vu qu’il s’agit d’un véritable poème des éléments.
Finitude et souvenir d’un autre soi
S’il y a un récit qui met en lumière l’impossibilité de saisir le sens de la vie, c’est sans doute Aureola neagră (L’auréole noire) où à la fin le protagoniste constate, non sans stupeur et désillusion, la disparition de l’autel de Zalmoxis, retrouvé sous le sable apporté sur le rivage par la Mer Noire. En nous arrêtant sur le récit qu’on vient de citer et en analysant attentivement le passage où est décrite la découverte d’un mur (l’auteur nous laisse entendre qu’il s’agit d’un fragment d’autel), nous découvrirons quelques éléments qui ne peuvent être négligés et qui, au contraire, sont fondamentaux pour notre parcours herméneutique : « On entendit un sifflement comme d’un serpent, mais nous ne pûmes comprendre d’où il venait – et sur les pierres découvertes un tourbillon de cendre légère parut, qui s’éleva et disparut dans l’atmosphère »[25]. Déjà au premier abord nous reconnaissons deux symboles qui vont vers la même direction thématique évoquée par la figure de Zalmoxis, associé selon la tradition au salut et à l’immortalité de l’âme : en effet le serpent[26] et le tourbillon[27] de cendre, grâce à la conformation en spirale qui en marque les formes sur le plan de l’imagination, renvoient inévitablement à ce que Gilbert Durand définit comme « la permanence de l’être à travers les fluctuations du changement »[28]. Ces deux « images » s’inscrivent aussi dans la constellation symbolique centrée sur le vent, une présence constante dans les dix récits composant le volume. Le vent, porteur d’un message mystérieux, amorce un double changement : le premier est celui du milieu où l’action se déroule qui, tout à coup, prend des couleurs et des sonorités nouvelles ; le second – dont le premier est selon nous un reflet et non pas une cause – se déroule à l’intérieur du personnage principal. Le vent est, dans sa nature, une manifestation du mystère et cette caractéristique a des précédents dans plusieurs traditions culturelles : il suffit de penser à la tradition biblique selon laquelle le vent est associé à l’esprit de Dieu ou au Vâyu indien. Dans les récits de Baconsky, le mystère, dont le vent se fait l’épiphanie, est le mystère de l’existence individuelle projetée dans le cosmos, en rapport avec le caractère cyclique de l’univers, un processus auquel l’homme participe en cherchant d’en comprendre les lois[29] :
L’auberge paraissait déserte, elle paraissait plus grande, plus élancée, comme un chasse-esprits planté au carrefour de certains temps renversés qui n’auraient succombé à aucun crépuscule. Elle semblait le squelette d’une autre auberge, plus ancienne, déterrée par la phalange éolienne et construite pour accueillir des pèlerins fous et des fugitifs[30].
Ce passage d’Aureola neagră stimule encore notre analyse, en nous poussant à concentrer notre attention sur l’image de la « phalange éolienne » en tant qu’évocatrice de la chasse infernale, un thème que Bachelard définit comme « le conte naturel du vent hurlant, du vent aux mille voix, aux voix plaintives et aux voix agressives »[31]. La réponse immédiate à cette réflexion nous est donnée après quelques lignes, à la fin du cinquième chapitre du récit : « Je vis courir dans le champ, à travers l’obscurité, des torches allumées et j’entendis le piaffement d’un galop lointain »[32]. En continuant le parcours proposé par Bachelard, nous n’hésiterons pas à assimiler la chasse infernale à l’image mythologique des Érynnies, les poursuivantes d’Oreste[33], en attribuant ainsi à l’élément la capacité de manifester des sentiments plus profonds, comme le regret, la vengeance et, surtout, le souvenir d’un temps perdu. À ce propos, le philosophe cite un passage de Gabriele D’Annunzio tiré de Contemplazione della morte: « Et le vent était comme le regret de ce qui n’est plus, était comme l’anxiété des créatures non formées encore, chargé de souvenirs, gonflé de présages, fait d’âmes déchirées et d’ailes inutiles »[34]. On distingue ici une certaine affinité avec l’imaginaire éolien de Baconsky : « Tous les sons qui naissaient [du vent] pendant le jour et la nuit m’étaient proches et chers, parce que le murmure, le bruissement, le souffle, le soupir perdu m’amenaient des échos d’un monde invisible et fabuleux, vers lequel mes années, comme un triangle de dix-huit grues sans destination, volaient »[35]. Les dix-huit ans – moment caractérisé par une forte valeur initiatique, en tant que passage de l’adolescence à l’âge mûr – sont ici associés à un triangle de grues qui émigrent pour faire retour à un monde inconnu dont l’écho retentit dans le vent.
Entre la mer et le marais : sur le quai de l’existence
Si, d’un côté, le riche et suggestif imaginaire éolien domine l’atmosphère des récits de A. E. Baconsky, qui réussit ainsi à imprimer une tonalité de mystère et d’angoisse à son texte, de l’autre, l’élément aquatique, loin d’être insignifiant, constitue au contraire une véritable matrice fabulatrice de l’œuvre. Analysant le rôle de l’élément aquatique dans le texte littéraire, Jean Libis reconnaît : « Chez certains écrivains, l’eau est un véritable cosmos d’écriture. Il semble alors qu’elle devienne un objet romanesque à part entière, et accompagne le destin d’une œuvre »[36]. Echinoxul nebunilor est une œuvre totalement empreinte d’eau : les vagues retentissent tout au long de ses pages et un destin de mort et renaissance est inscrit dans leur mouvement. Ainsi, à la fin du volume, s’annonce un cycle nouveau : le printemps arrive et, avec lui, arrivent aussi des hommes transportés par la mer, pour construire de nouveau la ville. Le récit trouve sa mort juste au moment où une nouvelle vie s’ouvre à l’intrigue. Nous observons le même processus dans Artiştii din insulă (Les artistes de l’île) où des branches et des surgeons naissent sur les corps des femmes gravés dans les troncs d’arbres : le printemps, en négligeant la forme, donnera une vie nouvelle à ceux qui n’étaient plus que des monuments funèbres (« Je tressaillis à la vue des statues réveillées pour une vie qui était leur mort »[37]). Nous pensons qu’à la source de cette attention insistante sur le thème de la renaissance il y a une exigence ontologique de l’homme. En effet, comme l’a écrit Jung : « Jamais la Vie n’a pu croire à la Mort ! »[38]. C’est peut-être pour cette raison que le protagoniste du récit Farul pénètre dans le marais avec obstination, bien que ce lieu soit de plus en plus présage de mort[39]. Du point de vue de l’imaginaire, le marais représente le fidèle contrepoint de la mer : si l’élément aquatique avec sa dimension thalassale et infinie met l’être humain en contact avec une réalité cosmique qui répond aux lois des grands cycles universels, le marais, grâce à la contamination avec l’immanent (avec l’élément tellurique), se charge de connotations négatives et permet à l’homme de découvrir l’inexorabilité de la mort, en le soumettant à la loi du devenir. « La mer […] conduit l’imagination aux limites de son extensibilité »[40] tandis que le marais captieux évoque l’anéantissement définitif : l’imagination est projetée vers le bas, vers la profondeur insondable de l’enfer et l’être humain ressent la même frustration qui est produite par le rêve où la pesanteur interdit le mouvement. Les rêveries qui concernent le marais ne peuvent que rappeler à l’homme sa condition d’impuissance, sa finitude : « Dans tous les cas, l’indétermination et la viscosité désignent la condition infernale, à savoir la nostalgie de la forme fixe »[41]. On comprend alors la profondeur de la réflexion suivante : « Je me sentais prophète et mage aux yeux étoilés, sans douleur, sans désirs, sans âge, comme ce phare se sera peut-être senti, exilé sur une côte perdue entre une époque qui devait être passée déjà depuis longtemps et une autre qui n’arrivera jamais »[42].
Deux époques, toutes les deux insaisissables comme, d’un côté, la mer vers laquelle l’imagination est toujours ouverte et comme, de l’autre, le marais qui active des rêveries centripètes en projetant l’être humain vers un temps tellement proche qu’il devient insondable. Comme un phare, l’homme ne réussit à éclairer que la surface d’une petite partie de l’infini vers lequel il est projeté, mais est en même temps incapable d’éclairer la partie la plus profonde de lui-même. Comme l’affirme Bachelard, « La connaissance de l’essentiel a pour contrepartie la mort »[43]. En effet, dans les récits de Baconsky, le protagoniste peut seulement apercevoir l’essentiel, mais il ne peut pas en avoir une confirmation[44]. L’itinéraire de l’homme baconskyen ne finit pas par une défaite, mais par un appel cruel à constater sa finitude irrémédiable, dont le refus condamnerait l’être à un tourment implacable : « Ton âme est le serpent qui t’étrangle […]. Il ne te laisse jamais tourner le regard. Tu cherches toujours le chemin au-delà des choses, tu veux toujours en voir l’autre face, celle vers laquelle seuls les yeux aux paupières fermées à jamais regardent »[45].
Jean Libis, dans le chapitre dédié à la létalité de l’eau, développe le concept d’ »abolition du principe d’individuation »[46] :
Le processus d’individuation est d’emblée, dans sa phase active, un processus d’intégration, et donc de soumission ontologique : […] en s’individualisant la matière s’inscrit autant que possible dans l’ordre universel de la forme. Tant et si bien que la croissance de l’individu, aussi bien que sa décroissance, sont frappées chacune à leur manière du sceau de la « dilution »[47].
Après les réflexions de Mircea Eliade sur le mythe de l’éternel retour, le critique trace un parcours que nous suivrons pour l’analyse des valeurs qu’acquiert, dans la prose de Baconsky, l’élément aquatique par rapport à la mort :
La mort est d’abord la sanction d’une émancipation ontologique, la nécessité d’un retour à l’ordre ; ensuite elle est l’abolition de la contingence, et ce qui sauve la pensée dans ses prétentions à l’universalité. En d’autres termes il faut que l’individu soit sacrifié à la substance ; ou, plus exactement, qu’il s’y résorbe[48].
C’est seulement dans cette optique que nous réussirons à saisir l’importance réelle des mots que le protagoniste du récit Farul utilise pour justifier l’union profonde de son être avec l’élément thalassal : « Je suis fait pour la mer. Une folie ou une maladie étrange m’avait amené sur ses rivages, dans la solitude où chaque chose semblait se dissiper dans son non-être »[49]. Selon une expression célèbre de Gaston Bachelard, nous pouvons définir le protagoniste des récits comme un être « voué » à l’eau, « un être en vertige »[50], prêt à s’abandonner à l’élément qui, plus que les autres, « exerce sur les formes individualisées une sorte d’attraction mortifère »[51] et qui, grâce à ses propriétés purifiantes et régénératrices, annonce une renaissance et associe le destin de l’homme au destin des cycles cosmiques qui trouvent en lui la garantie de renouvellement[52]. Dans le récit Echinoxul nebunilor, le personnage principal se rend compte de sa participation à ce caractère cyclique universel, comme dans le passage suivant, où se révèle une allusion directe à la métempsychose :
J’avais toujours l’impression d’être ressuscité d’une mort qui autrefois, il y a des siècles, avait été chantée par des bardes vagabonds et d’avoir en moi-même l’âme immense et désolée de certaines races passées l’une dans l’autre, métamorphosées dans la succession des années et dans le rythme capricieux de certains cycles terminés toujours en avance. Mon identité se perdait en se dissipant en milliers, en centaines de milliers d’hommes[53].
Du mythe au complexe : Caron
À cette dispersion de l’identité (« Il me semblait être condamné à souffrir, en les vivant, toutes les souillures de certaines biographies étrangères, de certaines existences exilées des temps, afin qu’elles se purifient à travers le filtre de ma vie même »[54]), répond, au niveau cosmique, la dilution de la nuit (« En dehors, l’obscurité continuait à se diluer »[55]) qui doit être considérée comme la régression vers un temps dont on ne se souvient pas (« Troublée, la mémoire restait prisonnière d’un ossuaire immense »[56]). Il semble qu’il s’agisse ici du retour in illo tempore, c’est-à-dire l’époque mythique où les « espèces […] n’étaient pas encore fixées et les formes étaient fluides »[57], un processus symboliquement provoqué par le cycle lunaire. Dans son Traité d’histoire des religions, Mircea Eliade évoque les hiérophanies lunaires, considérées comme des « révélations […] d’une sacralité fondamentale sous-jacente au Cosmos »[58] et qui permettent, pour cette raison, de marquer le temps du rite. C’est dans ce sens qu’il faut interpréter aussi le choix de l’équinoxe, en tant que moment favorable pour célébrer le rituel d’une vengeance dont le protagoniste – dans le sixième récit – sera, en même temps, victime et bourreau[59]. Cet événement fait toujours partie du schéma cyclique des morts et des renaissances qui représente le fondement de chaque rite[60]. À propos des cérémonies d’initiation, Eliade reconnaît :
Si le symbolisme aquatique et lunaire a joué un rôle si important dans la vie spirituelle de l’homme archaïque, c’est justement parce qu’il rendait évidents et transparents l’abolition et le rétablissement ininterrompus des « formes », la disparition et la réapparition cyclique, l’éternel retour (en fait l’éternel retour aux origines). Sur tous les plans – depuis la cosmologie jusqu’à la sotériologie –, l’idée de régénération est liée à la conception d’un temps nouveau, c’est-à-dire à la croyance en un commencement absolu auquel l’homme peut parfois accéder[61].
C’est le contact avec la matière qui assure cet accès : dans notre cas, le retour à “l’eau matricielle et principielle, d’où sourd la totalité des êtres, et vers quoi elle retourne”[62]. Si la mort est “l’absolument réel, l’ananké à l’état pur”[63], ajoutons qu’“au bout de chaque travail de l’imaginaire, l’enjeu est encore et toujours la mort, le lien inséparable et insupportable avec ce point de non-retour, qu’on doit modérer, soutenir, vaincre, ou dissiper”[64]. À cette nécessité typiquement humaine se relie l’image de la barque des morts[65], où est mise en évidence la dimension thanatologique[66] de l’eau et, en même temps, sa puissance régénératrice[67]. L’image, présente très souvent en littérature, est l’expression de ce que Gaston Bachelard a appelé le “Complexe de Caron” :
L’imagination profonde, l’imagination matérielle veut que l’eau ait sa part dans la mort ; elle a besoin de l’eau pour garder à la mort son sens de voyage. On comprend dès lors que, pour de telles songeries infinies, toutes les âmes, quel que soit le genre de funérailles, doivent monter dans la barque de Caron[68].
Retrouver une trace plus ou moins explicite de ce complexe ne sera pas difficile pour le lecteur des récits de Baconsky. Nous nous arrêterons seulement sur deux cas où l’évocation de la barque des morts est la plus manifeste. Dans le premier passage, la scène est décrite dans les détails et revêt le caractère d’une véritable cérémonie rituelle:
Nous l’embarquâmes en l’étendant sur le fond plein d’eau de la barque et après avoir pris les rames nous nous éloignâmes rapidement vers le Sud, où l’eau était plus profonde […]. Comme dans un rêve j’entendis la voix du gardien qui me disait de laisser les rames. Lorsque je me retournai vers lui, je le vis debout au bout de la barque, occupé à entailler une branche de peuplier à l’aide d’un petit couteau […]. En quelques instants, une petite croix en bois, liée avec une ficelle, pendait au cou du mort. Puis nous le jetâmes dans la mer et, alors que nous retournions, le soleil émergeait obliquement, couronnant nos têtes comme si nous étions les samaritains du crime[69].
Relevons le caractère éminemment religieux de certains éléments, tels que la croix et la référence à la parabole du Bon Samaritain (Évangile de Luc: 10, 25-37), celle que Jésus utilise pour expliquer comment on peut conquérir la vie éternelle[70]. Baconsky, en se référant au cadavre, avait mis en évidence un aspect important : “Il semblait être un homme robuste, entre deux âges, brûlé par le soleil et tanné par l’eau de la mer, qui allait l’accueillir en lui donnant pour toujours les transparences du néant”[71], en accord avec la pensée de Bachelard, qui considère la mort dans l’eau comme une transformation de l’élément même en un néant substantiel[72].
Le second passage met en évidence une autre valeur spécifique de la mort en mer, pour en dévoiler l’aspect maternel[73] : “Les pêcheurs se signèrent tournés vers l’Orient et en le soulevant le placèrent dans une barque, pour le ramener vers le sommeil migrateur dont ils l’avaient réveillé”[74]. Pour comprendre le sens réel de ces mots, nous devons penser au sommeil comme mort euphémisée et saisir l’analogie symbolique entre l’image de la barque et celle du berceau qui, à son tour, est isomorphe au ventre maternel[75]. Il s’agit d’une correspondance confirmée ultérieurement par le sens de repos, de protection et de régénération que ces images suggèrent et dont l’auteur est pleinement conscient lorsqu’il écrit : “La mer savait me récompenser de tout”[76] ; “Avec un bain de mer je serais guéri complètement”[77] ; “La mer m’accueillit tendrement comme toujours”[78].
Jonas et la réintégration dans le temps cosmique
Il faut réussir à pénétrer l’image lorsqu’on parle de maternité de l’eau, en en explorant la profondeur, pour en saisir le sens limite, c’est-à-dire le retour à l’origine : on apercevra alors ce que Bachelard, dans La Terre et les rêveries du repos, décrit comme le Complexe de Jonas[79], un processus lié aux rêveries intimes et déterminé par les images d’avalement[80]. C’est un avalement auquel la nuit participe aussi et qui, avec son obscurité, rend possible la dissolution des formes : “Nous les regardâmes en silence, un à côté de l’autre comme deux obélisques pétrifiés sur le rivage, jusqu’à ce que la nuit et l’horizon les engloutirent”[81] ; “Ils se dirigèrent vers la mer, sautèrent dans la barque, et la nuit engloutit tout de suite leurs silhouettes ainsi que l’embarcation qui les avait amenés”[82]. Comme dans l’histoire biblique où le prophète revoit le jour, le Complexe de Jonas bachelardien envisage toujours une renaissance :
La sortie du ventre est automatiquement une rentrée dans la vie consciente et même dans une vie qui veut une nouvelle conscience. On mettra facilement cette image de la sortie de Jonas en rapport avec les thèmes de la naissance réelle – avec les thèmes de la naissance de l’initié après l’initiation – avec les thèmes alchimiques de rénovation substantielle[83].
Le schéma cyclique, qui constitue le cœur des récits de Baconsky, se relie alors à ce regressus ad uterum, dont l’image du dauphin[84] est, d’après nous, une expression ayant une valeur symbolique évoquée par l’auteur même : “Des brises intermittentes avaient soufflé la cendre du vieil établissement des pêcheurs où, un matin, comme un symbole, un dauphin mort apparut sur la plage”[85]. Qu’il s’agisse d’une dissolution dans le néant substantiel ou d’un retour à l’archétype maternel, la destination de ce voyage par mer semble ainsi être toujours la réintégration dans l’ordre cosmique[86]. Elle est rendue possible, selon l’auteur, par la communion avec l’élément thalassal, garant de la participation de l’homme à la régénération cosmique, dans une alternance perpétuelle de morts et de renaissances : “Je pensais sans cesse au parcours des mers, le seul, le triple, le fou, aux côtes lointaines où en arrivant on renaît, à chaque fois autre que soi”[87].
Bibliographie
Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2001.
Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie, Paris, P.U.F., 2005.
Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, Paris, Corti, 2004.
Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2001.
A. E. Baconsky, Opere, II. Proză. Versuri, București, Academia Română, Fundaţia Naţională pentru ştiinţă şi Artă, 2009.
Crina Bud, “Literatură şi ziduri”, in A. E. Baconsky, Biserica neagră, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri, préf. Crina Bud, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011, p. 15–26.
Jean Chevalier et Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris, Robert Laffont / Jupiter, 2008.
Laurenţiu Ciobanu, “A. E. Baconsky : «Echinoxul nebunilor»”, Cronica, 1967, a. II, n. 42 (89), p. 8.
Nicolae Creţu, “A. E. Baconsky : «Echinoxul nebunilor»”, Iaşul literar, 1968, XIX, n. 2, p. 54-57.
Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris, DUNOD, 1992.
Mircea Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris, Éditions Payot et Rivages, 2011.
Gheorghe Glodeanu, “Poetica fantasticului”, in Dimensiuni ale romanului contemporan, Baia Mare, Editura Gutinul, 1998, p. 98–102.
Jean Libis, L’Eau et la mort, Dijon, Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique de Bourgogne, 1996, p. 182.
Paolo Mottana, “Introduzione all’edizione italiana”, in J. Libis, L’acqua e la morte, Bergamo, Moretti & Vitali, 2004.
Notes
[1] G. Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie, Paris, P.U.F., 2005, p. 146.
[2] Gaston Bachelard précise : “L’être du rêveur envahit ce qui le touche, diffuse dans le monde. Grâce aux ombres, la région intermédiaire qui sépare l’homme et le monde est une région pleine, et d’une plénitude à la densité légère. Cette région intermédiaire amortit la dialectique de l’être et du non-être”, Ibidem, p. 144.
[3] Ibidem, p. 144.
[4] A. E. Baconsky, Opere, II. Proză. Versuri, Bucureşti, Academia Română, Fundaţia Naţională pentru Ştiinţă şi Artă, 2009.
[5] À ce propos, il nous semble pertinent de citer ce que Crina Bud a observé, en expliquant que “Le moment de découverte de certains motifs synergiques […] est suivi d’un sens d’illumination. Il s’agit de ce que A. E. Baconsky a nommé – en ne se référant pas à lui-même, mais à Ion Ţuculescu – une illumination contemplative, « une recherche fiévreuse des matrices originaires, […] un sens de l’âge de ceux qui n’ont pas d’âge, frénésie du contemplatif mélancolique, ascète ravagé par la somptuosité ». Le personnage-narrateur est accoutumé à toutes ces combinaisons paradoxales et il se présente très souvent comme une victime de certaines révélations, parce que les conditions de l’illumination se produisent malgré son apathie”, C. Bud, “Literatură şi ziduri”, in A. E. Baconsky, Biserica neagră, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri, préf. C. Bud, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011, p. 21.
[6] Cette expression doit être entendue selon le sens eliadien (cf. M. Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris, Éditions Payot et Rivages, 2011, p. 384-404).
[7] “Eu însumi îl uitasem de mult, de când, sub zodia impusă de răspântia marilor cicluri ce se încrucişau în biografia mea, mă lepădasem de tot ce putea să-mi aducă aminte de mine”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 87.
[8] “Odată am dispărut de acasă, luându-mă după un cerşetor orb care umbla prin lume în tovărăşia câinelui său – şi nu m-am mai uitat înapoi”, Ibidem, p. 13.
[9] Dans l’introduction à l’édition de 2011, Crina Bud souligne : “La migration des images d’un texte à l’autre donne l’impression de certaines cartes juxtaposées, qui révéleraient un même but spirituel. Le lecteur qui s’obstine à en saisir la signification risque de s’irriter et de se sentir, en quelque sorte, découragé devant le labyrinthe de sens, encore plus lorsque, de temps en temps, il croit en avoir découvert le code. Les récits ressemblent aux fragments d’une mosaïque immense dont les pièces ne peuvent pas être utilisées dans leur ensemble, mais, puisant çà et là, la composition des fragments crée une représentation cohérente, qui suggère la totalité” (C. Bud, Op. cit., p. 20). Les éditeurs de l’édition de l’Académie Roumaine, Pavel Ţugui et Oana Safta ont, avec Teodor Baconsky, relevé l’existence de deux manuscrits concernant l’œuvre en question, dont les datations révèlent une contiguïté temporelle étonnante, comme si l’auteur y avait travaillé parallèlement : “Il semble que l’auteur a commencé à travailler à ce cycle de récits pendant la première partie de l’année 1965. Il existe parmi ses manuscrits un cahier à la couverture jaune […]. En 1986, avec Teodor Baconsky, le fils de l’écrivain, nous avons établi que ce manuscrit est la première variante du volume des récits […]. Ce Cahier-manuscrit est daté : « 17. VII. 1966 ». On dirait que Baconsky a travaillé à ses proses sur des pages « en parallèle », parce qu’il existe un second manuscrit […] qui a comme date : « 18. VII. 966 ». Ce manuscrit représente la forme définitive du livre Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri” (A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 771).
[10] N. Creţu, “A. E. Baconsky : « Echinoxul nebunilor »”, Iaşul literar, 1968, a. XIX, n. 2, p. 54.
[11] “Vedeam în ochiul lui de Polyphem pietrificat o lume de vid şi de moarte iradiată”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 38.
[12] “Și nici o sirenă nu se va mai găsi să pună capăt sumbrului joc şi să vestească moartea prin cântec, singura la care mă simţeam condamnat”, Ibidem, p. 73.
[13] J. Libis, L’Eau et la mort, Dijon, Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique de Bourgogne, 1996, p. 182.
[14] “Hălăduiam într-o lume fantastică, populată de fiinţe înalte şi generoase, măşti ale unor idealuri din ce în ce mai înceţoşate”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 53.
[15] “Cet inachèvement radical, qui implique une déficience ontologique et qui constitue la signe même de la mortalité, est au cœur de la méditation de Maurice Blanchot […]. Écrire un roman, c’est avouer implicitement que le monde est incompréhensible, que l’homme est seulement voué à son destin temporel, sexuel et mortifère”, J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 34.
[16] G. Glodeanu, “Poetica fantasticului”, in Dimensiuni ale romanului contemporan, Baia Mare, Editura Gutinul, 1998, p. 100.
[17] L. Ciobanu, “A.E. Baconsky : « Echinoxul nebunilor »”, Cronica, 1967, II, n. 42 (89), p. 8.
[18] “Va fi o tragedie despre fiul tânăr al unui rege, care şi-a ucis mama, despre o răzbunare moştenită din neam în neam între fraţi, o răzbunare neîmplinită, ce străbate prin timp ca o flacără otrăvită şi sacră, alimentată de vestale necunoscute”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 86.
[19] N. Creţu, Op. cit., p. 54.
[20] “Uneori sunt cu mine, eliberat de lumea căreia pe negândite i-am devenit prizonier, sunt cu ochii deschişi, cu pupilele lărgite şi mistuite de adevărurile ce se dezvăluie celor capabili să treacă suferinţele în cristale de gheaţă. Dar prea adesea mă trezesc iaraşi copleşit de nopţile fetide ce m-au cucerit – şi toate ororile se ridică în faţă, tiranice columne ale pierzaniei, printre care trec în neştire spre orizontul meu prăbuşit. Atunci îmi reiau existenţa din casa zugrăvită în albastru. Poate că sunt acolo mereu. Poate că n-am părăsit-o niciodată”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 81.
[21] “Aflasem doar că ne va fi dat să-l întâmpinăm într-o noapte pe ţărm, lângă valurile monotone, ce spălau nisipul, desenându-şi întruna aripile de Icari prăbuşiţi, îngropaţi în galbenul plajei”, Ibidem, p. 56.
[22] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 32.
[23] Ibidem.
[24] G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2001, p. 25.
[25] “Un fluierat ca de şarpe se auzi, dar nu ne-am putut da seama de unde vine – şi pe lespezile descoperite se iscă un vârtej de cenuşă subţire, înălţându-se şi pierind în văzduh”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 67.
[26] Voir : J. Chevalier et A. Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris, Robert Laffont / Jupiter, 2008, p. 867-879.
[27] Au début du chapitre « Le Vent », contenu dans L’Air et les songes, Gaston Bachelard affirme : “Le vent, dans son excès, est la colère qui est partout et nulle part, qui naît et renaît d’elle-même, qui tourne et se renverse. Le vent menace et hurle, mais ne prend une forme que s’il rencontre de la poussière […]. Et le premier être créé par cette colère créante, c’est un tourbillon. L’objet premier de l’homo faber dynamisé par la colère, c’est le vortex”, G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Librairie Générale Française, 2001, p. 292.
[28] G. Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris, DUNOD, 1992, p. 361.
[29] Nous percevons l’intensité de cette recherche dans les pages de Cel-mai-mare (Le-plus-grand), un récit où à l’attente du Messie est associée une sensation profonde d’impuissance humaine : “Toate încercările de răspuns erau neputincioase conjecturi, păreri efemere şi goale, ce nu făceau decât să sporească nedumeririle tuturora” (“Chaque tentative de trouver une réponse était une conjecture vaine, un avis éphémère et vide, qui servait seulement à accroître la perplexité de tous”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 56).
[30] “Hanul părea pustiu, părea mai mare, mai deşirat, ca o sperietoare de duhuri împlântată la răspântia unor timpuri întoarse, pe care nici un amurg nu le mai putea îndupleca. Părea scheletul unui alt han, de demult, dezgropat de falanga eoliană şi ridicat să întâmpine pelerini nebuni şi fugarii”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 70.
[31] G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Op. cit., p. 299.
[32] “Prin intuneric văzui peste câmp alergând torţe aprinse şi auzii ropotul unui galop îndepărtat” A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 70.
[33] Citant Schwartz, Bachelard affirme : “Aux images de chasse infernale, Schwartz associe l’image des « chasseresses à la chevelure de serpents ». L’analyse « imaginaire » de la notion d’Érynnies peut partir de ce rapprochement. […] Comme la chasse infernale, l’Érynnie totalise le poursuivant et le poursuivi”, G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Op. cit., p. 301.
[34] Trad. : “E il vento era come il rammarico di ciò che non è più, era come l’ansia delle geniture non formate ancora, carico di ricordi, gonfio di presagi, fatto d’anime lacere e d’ali vane”, G. D’Annunzio apud G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Op. cit., p. 298.
[35] “Toate sunetele ce se năşteau [din vânt] ziua şi noaptea îmi erau apropiate şi dragi, pentru că murmurul, foşnetul, răsuflarea, oftatul pierdut îmi aduceau ecouri dintr-o lume nevăzută şi fabuloasă, către care zburau anii mei ca un triunghi de optsprezece cocori fără ţintă”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 34.
[36] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 190.
[37] “Am tresărit la vederea statuilor trezite la o viaţă care era moartea lor”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 108.
[38] C. G. Jung apud G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Op. cit., p. 87.
[39] À ce propos, il nous semble que le passage où le protagoniste trébuche sur le corps d’un cheval mourant dans le marais peut servir d’exemple. Dans les yeux de l’animal (qui est psychopompe) on découvre un présage de mort très clair : “Înecat într-o baltă de sânge, agoniza sfâşiat de dureri, ce-l făceau să zvâcnească şi să-şi întunece şi mai mult ochii plini de luciri ciudate ; în oglinzile lor negre fulgeră o clipă imaginea capului meu hirsut, purtând drept aureolă ştreangul pretimpuriu legănat veşnic deasupra lui” (“Noyé dans une mare de sang, il agonisait tourmenté par la douleur, qui le faisait tressaillir et qui assombrissait de plus en plus ses yeux remplis de scintillements étranges ; dans leurs glaces noires, l’image de ma tête hirsute resplendit, sur laquelle, comme une auréole, la corde prématurée oscillait perpétuellement”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 24.
[40] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 51.
[41] Ibidem, p. 90.
[42] “Mă simţeam profet şi mag cu ochi înstelaţi, fără dureri, fără dorinţe, fără vârstă, aşa cum se va fi simţit şi farul acela, exilat pe o coastă pierdută între o vreme care ar fi trebuit să treacă de mult şi alta ce nu va veni niciodată”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 35.
[43] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 69. L’italique est un choix de l’auteur.
[44] Nous citons, à titre d’exemple, non seulement le passage tiré d’Aureola neagră, mais aussi le récit Farul (Le phare), où l’identité de la femme du marais, avec laquelle le protagoniste a passé la nuit, reste inconnue. De plus, dans le même récit, après la découverte de l’identité réelle de son oncle, le jeune homme n’aura plus la possibilité de prendre contact avec lui.
[45] “Sufletul tău e şarpele ce te sugrumă […]. Nu te lasă niciodată să-ţi întorci privirea. Cauţi mereu drumul de dincolo de lucruri, vrei mereu să vezi faţa lor cealaltă, aceea spre care privesc numai ochii cu pleoapele pe totdeauna închise”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 102. L’italique est un choix de l’auteur.
[46] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 35-45.
[47] Ibidem, p. 36-37.
[48] Ibidem, p. 36.
[49] “Pentru mine era marea. O nebunie sau o boală ciudată mă adusese pe ţărmul ei, în acea solitudine unde toate păreau că se mistuie în propria lor nefiinţă”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 12.
[50] G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Op. cit., p. 13.
[51] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 38.
[52] Dans le paragraphe Symbolisme de l’immersion, Mircea Eliade observe : “Dans l’eau, tout se « dissout », toute « forme » est désintégrée, toute « histoire » est abolie ; rien de ce qui a existé auparavant ne subsiste après une immersion dans l’eau, aucun profil, aucun « signe », aucun « événement ». L’immersion équivaut, sur le plan humain, à la mort, et sur le plan cosmique, à la catastrophe (le déluge) qui dissout périodiquement le monde dans l’océan primordial. Désintégrant toute forme et abolissant toute histoire, les eaux possèdent cette vertu de purification, de régénération, et de renaissance ; parce que ce qui est immergé en elle « meurt », et, se relevant des eaux, est pareil à un enfant sans péchés et sans « histoire », capable de recevoir une nouvelle révélation et de commencer une nouvelle vie « propre »”, M. Eliade, Op. cit., p. 203-204.
[53] “Mi se părea mereu că am înviat dintr-o moarte pe care demult, cu secole în urmă, o cântaseră barzi rătăcitori şi că port în mine sufletul mare şi nemângâiat al unor neamuri trecute unul în altul, metamorfozate în succesiunea anilor şi în ritmul capricios al unor cicluri încheiate întotdeauna înainte de timp. Identitatea mi se pierdea risipită în mii, în sute de mii de oameni”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 88.
[54] “Mi se părea că sunt blestemat să suport, trăindu-le, toate ordurile unor biografii străine, ale unor existenţe exilate din timpuri, ca să se purifice trecând prin filtrul propriei mele vieţi”, Ibidem, p. 79-80.
[55] “Bezna de afară se dilua mereu”, Ibidem, p. 55.
[56] “Derutată, memoria rămânea captiva unui imens osuar”, Ibidem, p. 83.
[57] M. Eliade, Op. cit., p. 390.
[58] Ibidem, p. 385.
[59] Cf. A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 82-90.
[60] Il y a beaucoup d’éléments, disséminés dans les textes, qui pourraient renvoyer à la cérémonie rituelle : par exemple, nous pensons aux autels sacrificiels, aux formules prononcées dans des langues mystérieuses, au choix jamais accidentel des nombres, et ainsi de suite. En outre, nous pourrions associer le livre entier à un rite. À l’apui de cette idée, nous pensons, par exemple, à la fin ouverte du dernier récit, où le recommencement est symbolisé par l’arrivée du printemps et par l’accostage d’un navire avec des hommes à bord venus pour reconstruire la ville.
[61] M. Eliade, Op. cit., p. 400-401.
[62] J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 30.
[63] Ibidem, p. 11.
[64] Trad. : “Al fondo di ogni lavoro dell’immaginario, la posta in gioco è ancora e sempre la morte, il legame inscindibile e intollerabile con questo punto di non ritorno, che si tratta di temperare, sostenere, sconfiggere, o dissolvere”, P. Mottana, “Introduzione all’edizione italiana”, in J. Libis, L’acqua e la morte, Bergamo, Moretti & Vitali, 2004, p. 11.
[65] En ce qui concerne cette image, Jean Libis affirme : “Il se pourrait en effet que la barque des morts trouve un point d’ancrage dans le réel sous la forme d’une pratique rituelle effective. Les observations anthropologiques attestent que, dans certaines cultures, le mort est exposé sur l’eau dans une pirogue, et parfois abandonné au gré des eaux”, J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 77.
[66] “L’eau est bel et bien ce « cosmos de la mort », où s’abîment les tensions imaginatives de l’être humain”, Ibidem, p. 35.
[67] Dans le paragraphe dédié à l’analyse du déluge, Libis remarque : “Si l’eau contient en germe une capacité considérable de destruction, elle ne représente certes pas la mort absolue. Elle demeure un principe ontologique, un lieu d’éclosion qui cuve aussi une surpuissance secrète”, Ibidem, p. 95.
[68] G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Op. cit., p. 90-91.
[69] “Îl urcarăm lungindu-l pe fundul plin de apă al bărcii şi luând vâslele ne-am îndreptat repede spre sud, unde apa era mai adâncă […]. Ca prin somn auzii glasul paznicului îndemnându-mă să las vâslele. Când m-am întors spre el, stătea în picioare la capătul bărcii, cioplind cu un cuţit scurt o creangă de plop […]. În câteva clipe, o cruce mică de lemn atârna legată cu sfoară la gâtul mortului. Apoi îl prăvălirăm în apă, şi în timp ce porneam înapoi, se ivea pieziş soarele, încununându-ne creştetul ca unor samariteni ai fărădelegii”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 15–16.
[70] Jean Libis, en analysant un passage tiré de L’enfant de la haute mer de Jules Supervielle, note : “[On donne, n. d. t.] forme poétique à un axiome fondamental de notre imaginaire : celui qui meurt par l’eau acquiert le don de sempiternité, fût-ce au prix d’un changement de substance”, J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 159.
[71] “Părea un bărbat voinic, între două vârste, ars de soare şi tăbăcit de apele mării, care aveau să-l primească în sinea lor, dându-i pe totdeauna transparenţele neantului”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 15.
[72] Cf. G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Op. cit., p. 108.
[73] Pour un approfondissement du thème de la maternité de l’eau, voir : G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Op. cit., p. 132-152.
[74] “Pescarii se închinară spre răsărit şi ridicându-l îl aşezară într-o barcă, pornind să-l ducă spre somnul migrator din care îl treziseră”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 90.
[75] Cf. G. Durand, Op. cit., p. 237 et sqq.
[76]“Marea ştia să mă răsplătească pentru toate”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 14.
[77] “O baie în mare avea să mă înzdrăvenească pe de-a-ntregul”, Ibidem, p. 20.
[78] “Marea m-a primit tandră ca totdeauna”, Ibidem, p. 29.
[79] Pour un approfondissement de ce thème, voir le chapitre que Bachelard lui dédie dans La Terre et les rêveries du repos (G. Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, Paris, Corti, 2004, p. 147-204).
[80] Gilbert Durand précise : “Le Jonas est euphémisation de l’avalage puis antiphrase du contenu symbolique de l’avalage”, G. Durand, Op. cit., p. 233.
[81] “I-am privit în tăcere, alături amândoi ca nişte obeliscuri încremenite pe ţărm, până când orizontul şi întunericul i-au înghiţit”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 45.
[82] “Porniră spre mare, săriră în barcă, şi în curând noaptea înghiţea deopotrivă făpturile lor şi nava ce-i adusese”, Ibidem, p. 77.
[83] G. Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, Op. cit., p. 171-172.
[84] “Symbolique liée à celles des eaux et des transfigurations. […] Le dauphin est devenu le symbole de la régénérescence. On en voyait l’image auprès du trépied d’Apollon, à Delphes”, J. Chevalier et A. Gheerbrant, Op. cit., p. 338.
[85] “Brize intermitente măturaseră scrumul fostei aşezări a pescarilor, în dreptul căreia, ca un simbol apăru într-o dimineaţă un delfin mort”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 39.
[86] Cf. J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 77-78.
[87] “Mă gândeam întruna la drumul mărilor, singurul, întreitul, nebunul, la coastele îndepărtate unde ajungând te naşti din nou, de fiecare dată altul şi altul”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 20.
Danilo De Salazar
Université de la Calabre – Rende (CS), (Italie)
danilo.desalazar@gmail.com
Réélaboration du mythe dans la prose initiatique
de A. E. Baconsky, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri /
The Re-elaboration of Myth
in A. E. Baconsky’s initiatic prose work,
Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri (“The Madmen’s Equinox and Other Stories”)
Abstract: According to most critics, it is possible to recognize in A. E. Baconsky’s prose work, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri, an initiatic aspect, mirrored in the very structure of the ten short stories comprising the volume. Our hermeneutical excursus aims to show the elements referable to rite – in particular, to man’s reintegration with Mythical Time and to the reconciliation of being with the great cosmic cycles, to which Mircea Eliade paid much attention. The author adopts and re-elaborates these myths, embedding them, more or less explicitly, in the narrative plot. This is the case of the Zalmoxis, Orestes, Icarus and Ulysses myths – finely recalled by Baconsky in his references to sirens and to the Cyclops Polyphemus. Our study of the revival of myth within Baconsky’s short stories is accompanied by an accurate analysis of Baconskyan imagery that, on the basis of the researches led by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand and Jean Libis, reveals itself particularly fertile as regards the aerial element and, above all, the watery one. In this perspective, we seek to further focus on the passage from myth to complex, discovering its extreme vitality on the level of imaginative dynamism in the figures of Jonah and Charon.
Keywords: A. E. Baconsky; Myth; Rite; Initiatic Prose; Water; Sea; Wind.
En procédant à l’exploration du cogito du rêveur, auquel est dédié un chapitre entier de La Poétique de la rêverie, Gaston Bachelard propose une analyse du je et reconnaît trois catégories selon le niveau de conscience maintenu : “Le « je » du sommeil – s’il existe ; le « je » de la narcose – s’il garde valeur d’individualité ; le « je » de la rêverie, maintenu dans une telle vigilance qu’il peut se donner le bonheur d’écrire”[1]. Selon l’épistémologue français, l’homme, à travers la rêverie, pénètre dans une sorte de région des ombres[2], à mi-chemin entre l’être et le non-être, un espace qui sert de “« médiateur plastique » entre l’homme et l’univers”[3]. La compréhension du rapport entre l’homme et le cosmos, ou plus en général du mystère de la vie, constitue le thème essentiel d’Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri (L’équinoxe des fous et autres récits)[4] d’A. E. Baconsky, comme le met déjà en évidence la structure narrative du volume entier, qui se fonde sur le sens insaisissable de réponses longtemps poursuivies. Il n’est permis au lecteur que de pressentir quelques signes (le message indéchiffrable transmis par les oiseaux en vol, les fresques énigmatiques retrouvées dans une maison dans les marais, une lettre qui annonce un meurtre…), pour partager ensuite avec le protagoniste un sentiment d’anxiété et de frustration, provoqué par l’impossibilité d’en saisir le signifié profond, par l’incapacité précisément de dévoiler le mystère de son existence[5].
Le schéma narratif magistralement construit autour du protagoniste des dix récits qui composent le volume se déroule dans une atmosphère fuyante et riche en références symboliques, où le lecteur plonge en s’associant au jeu de substitution et de renversement de rôles des personnages et en percevant une sensation d’égarement spatio-temporel, typique du rêve ou plus précisément du cauchemar. De plus, nous considérons que le choix de l’auteur d’abolir ou de dissimuler l’identité des actants (en négligeant les noms ou parfois en employant des moyens spécifiques comme la mise en abyme, l’inversion des rôles ou encore en utilisant une description énigmatique des visages) a comme but principal la dé-subjectivité du personnage, ce dernier étant le protagoniste d’une histoire qui va bien au-delà des pages du livre, une histoire qui précipite dans le temps mythique[6]. Echinoxul nebunilor est l’histoire universelle de l’homme, soumise à la loi des grands cycles, dont le récit se fait rite et célébration : “Depuis longtemps je l’avais oublié moi-même [mon nom, n.d.t.], depuis que, sous le signe imposé par l’intersection des grands cycles qui se croisaient dans ma biographie, je m’étais débarrassé de tout ce qui pouvait me souvenir de moi-même”[7].
Traces homériques dans l’exploration gnoséologique
« Autrefois j’ai abandonné ma maison, en suivant un mendiant aveugle qui parcourait le monde avec son chien – et je n’ai plus regardé en arrière »[8]. Ainsi commence le voyage périlleux du protagoniste de Farul (Le phare), récit qui ouvre Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri. Le voyage doit être entendu ici comme la métaphore d’une recherche existentielle proprement dite, comme la tentative de dévoiler ce mystère qui, comme un linceul, s’étend de la première jusqu’à la dernière page du volume, enroulant et impliquant le lecteur dans une entreprise cognitive dont on découvre bientôt l’impossibilité. Comme la plupart des critiques l’ont relevé, le personnage principal des dix récits qui composent le livre est toujours le même[9] et nous approuvons ce que Nicolae Creţu a observé : « Le héros des proses de Echinoxul nebunilor (il n’existe sans doute qu’un héros que nous redécouvrons toujours derrière ses masques successifs) est l’Homme, un Ulysse du mythe total, ontique, se débattant avec les défis fondamentaux de la vie »[10]. L’analogie est encore plus appropriée si l’on considère aussi des passages du livre où la référence au poème homérique est explicite. Nous remarquerons l’assimilation, qui n’est certainement pas aléatoire, du phare au cyclope Polyphème (« Je voyais dans son œil de Polyphème pétrifié un monde de vide et de mort propagée »[11]) et surtout l’évocation des sirènes : « Et il n’y aura plus aucune sirène qui mettra fin au jeu sombre et qui annoncera la mort à travers son chant, la seule à laquelle je me sentais condamné »[12]. Jean Libis, dans L’Eau et la mort, consacre un chapitre entier à l’érotisme de l’eau et s’arrête sur le mythe des sirènes, en y apercevant non seulement le réseau symbolique unissant l’eau, la féminité et la mort, mais en en saisissant un aspect encore plus profond :
Pourtant, d’un autre côté, le mythe reste étonnamment vivace et fécond, pour peu qu’on se donne la peine […] de relire attentivement l’épisode homérique. Les sirènes y apparaissent détentrices d’un savoir : non seulement elles connaissent tous les maux endurés par les héros de la guerre de Troie, mais elles savent aussi « tout ce que voit passer la terre nourricière ». Quel est donc le contenu de ce Savoir, si radical, si essentiel, qu’il a besoin du plus beau chant pour prendre forme, et qui est à ce point inaudible par les mortels qu’il les égare et les détruit ? […] Qu’est-ce donc que nous désirons entendre à ce point qu’il y va de notre existence même et qu’il nous faille nous boucher les oreilles avec de la cire pour que soit continué le Périple, qui est aussi le retour au bercail ?[13]
Ce « savoir essentiel », ce que le protagoniste « désire entendre à ce point qu’il y va de son existence », est l’existence même : chaque voyage pour en découvrir le sens le plus profond n’est qu’une Odyssée ; l’Ithaque coïncide irrémédiablement avec l’origine et avec la destination vers laquelle se dirige, dans le texte, l’alter ego de l’écrivain. La conscience intime de la caducité engendre chez les hommes une angoisse qui pénètre toute l’atmosphère où les histoires racontées s’inscrivent. Cette angoisse est liée aussi au sentiment de frustration provoqué par l’impossibilité concrète d’un retour à un état idéal de joie authentique (« Je vivais heureux dans un monde fantastique, peuplé par des créatures grandes et généreuses, masques de certains idéaux de plus en plus brumeux »[14]), concevable seulement comme rupture tragique avec la situation immanente. C’est exactement dans cette condition d’inachèvement que Libis – en se référant aux méditations de Maurice Blanchot – repérera l’élément commun à l’homme et au roman[15].
Perspectives cosmologiques du mythe
« A. E. Baconsky écrit une prose au caractère initiatique, où l’initiation du lecteur-néophyte se déroule parallèlement à celle du narrateur-témoin acteur »[16] : en nous référant aux études de Mircea Eliade sur le mythe, nous nous concentrerons sur l’importance particulière que ce dernier revêt dans les récits contenus dans Echinoxul nebunilor, œuvre où Laurenţiu Ciobanu remarque un passage « naturel de l’existence dans le mythe et du mythe dans l’existence »[17]. Parfois le mythe est évoqué de façon explicite, comme dans le cas d’Orphée et Eurydice, auquel est consacré un récit entier, le cinquième, tandis que, d’autres fois, la référence est implicite : le passage suivant ne se réfère-t-il pas à l’épopée sanglante des Atrides? « Il s’agira d’une tragédie sur le jeune fils d’un roi, qui a tué sa mère, sur une vengeance héritée de génération en génération entre frères, une vengeance inachevée, qui traverse le temps comme une flamme empoisonnée et sacrée, nourrie par des vestales inconnues »[18]. Nous pourrions peut-être même percevoir dans le personnage d’Oreste ce sentiment de culpabilité obscure auquel Nicolae Creţu se réfère lorsqu’il écrit :
Dans un espace intérieur incertain, qui suggère l’aventure onirique, se passent les expériences fondamentales de la vie ; tous les chemins qui semblent mener vers quelque chose d’autre, vers un salut de soi-même sont explorés, l’homme seul, en proie à ses obsessions, rongé par le sentiment d’une culpabilité obscure[19].
La même atmosphère étouffante pénètre aussi les pages finales du récit Înceţoşatul Orfeu (Orphée le brumeux) où l’Ade trouve son correspondant dans le « bordel » (« la maison peinte de bleu »), lieu où le protagoniste n’arrivera pas à sauver son Eurydice et où il semble être spirituellement piégé :
Parfois je suis avec moi, délivré d’un monde dont à l’improviste je suis devenu prisonnier, je reste les yeux ouverts, les prunelles dilatées et tourmentées par les vérités qui se dévoilent à ceux qui sont capables de transformer les souffrances en cristaux de glace. Mais trop souvent je me réveille accablé de nouveau par les nuits fétides qui m’ont conquis – et toutes les horreurs s’élèvent devant moi, colonnes tyranniques de la perdition, entre lesquelles je passe à l’aveuglette vers mon horizon écroulé. Alors je reviens à ma vie de la maison peinte en bleu. Je suis peut-être toujours là. Je ne l’ai jamais peut-être abandonnée[20].
Nous voudrions interpréter la référence de l’écrivain au personnage d’Icare selon une perspective différente : un renvoi qui semble bien loin des valeurs superficielles et moralisantes qui ont étés très souvent attribuées à l’histoire racontée dans ce mythe. Dans le passage en question, tiré du récit Cel-mai-mare (Le-plus-grand), on peut lire : « Nous avions appris seulement que nous aurions dû le rencontrer une nuit sur la rive, à côté des vagues monotones, qui lavaient le sable, sur lequel se dessinaient sans cesse leurs ailes d’Icares tombés et enterrés dans le jaune de la plage »[21]. Jean Libis observe qu’on n’a pas suffisamment remarqué que « le personnage d’Icare parcourt une trajectoire typiquement cosmologique »[22] et ajoute avec perspicacité :
Il s’évade de la complexité tellurique, symbolisée par le labyrinthe, épouse dans un second temps la plénitude de l’espace aérien, puis tente de s’approcher du feu suprême. Son immersion funeste dans le sein de la mer constitue donc le quatrième moment d’une pérégrination successivement dédiée aux quatre Eléments. En d’autres termes, l’investigation imaginaire du monde prend fin dans l’engloutissement thalassal[23].
Dans cette perspective, le passage de Baconsky gagne une énergie nouvelle : ses Icares deviennent le reflet du caractère cyclique et universel, soutenu par l’aspect presque messianique du récit. En analysant le texte avec attention, nous pouvons en effet repérer le schéma cyclique dans le mouvement répétitif et monotone des vagues (l’élément aquatique) qui, sans cesse, tracent des ailes (l’air) sur la plage (la terre). Le quatrième élément, c’est-à-dire le feu, est représenté par la couleur jaune, que l’on peut directement associer au soleil. La présence d’une plage jaune à l’intérieur d’une scène qui se situe dans l’obscurité ne fait qu’encourager la nécessité d’une approche analytique capable de porter l’attention de l’image de la réalité à la réalité de l’image : « L’imagination n’est pas, comme le suggère l’étymologie, la faculté de former des images de la réalité ; elle est la faculté de former des images qui dépassent la réalité, qui chantent la réalité »[24]. La richesse des images condensées dans une page de Baconsky et le soin avec lequel chaque phrase a été ciselée réclament une lecture profonde, vu qu’il s’agit d’un véritable poème des éléments.
Finitude et souvenir d’un autre soi
S’il y a un récit qui met en lumière l’impossibilité de saisir le sens de la vie, c’est sans doute Aureola neagră (L’auréole noire) où à la fin le protagoniste constate, non sans stupeur et désillusion, la disparition de l’autel de Zalmoxis, retrouvé sous le sable apporté sur le rivage par la Mer Noire. En nous arrêtant sur le récit qu’on vient de citer et en analysant attentivement le passage où est décrite la découverte d’un mur (l’auteur nous laisse entendre qu’il s’agit d’un fragment d’autel), nous découvrirons quelques éléments qui ne peuvent être négligés et qui, au contraire, sont fondamentaux pour notre parcours herméneutique : « On entendit un sifflement comme d’un serpent, mais nous ne pûmes comprendre d’où il venait – et sur les pierres découvertes un tourbillon de cendre légère parut, qui s’éleva et disparut dans l’atmosphère »[25]. Déjà au premier abord nous reconnaissons deux symboles qui vont vers la même direction thématique évoquée par la figure de Zalmoxis, associé selon la tradition au salut et à l’immortalité de l’âme : en effet le serpent[26] et le tourbillon[27] de cendre, grâce à la conformation en spirale qui en marque les formes sur le plan de l’imagination, renvoient inévitablement à ce que Gilbert Durand définit comme « la permanence de l’être à travers les fluctuations du changement »[28]. Ces deux « images » s’inscrivent aussi dans la constellation symbolique centrée sur le vent, une présence constante dans les dix récits composant le volume. Le vent, porteur d’un message mystérieux, amorce un double changement : le premier est celui du milieu où l’action se déroule qui, tout à coup, prend des couleurs et des sonorités nouvelles ; le second – dont le premier est selon nous un reflet et non pas une cause – se déroule à l’intérieur du personnage principal. Le vent est, dans sa nature, une manifestation du mystère et cette caractéristique a des précédents dans plusieurs traditions culturelles : il suffit de penser à la tradition biblique selon laquelle le vent est associé à l’esprit de Dieu ou au Vâyu indien. Dans les récits de Baconsky, le mystère, dont le vent se fait l’épiphanie, est le mystère de l’existence individuelle projetée dans le cosmos, en rapport avec le caractère cyclique de l’univers, un processus auquel l’homme participe en cherchant d’en comprendre les lois[29] :
L’auberge paraissait déserte, elle paraissait plus grande, plus élancée, comme un chasse-esprits planté au carrefour de certains temps renversés qui n’auraient succombé à aucun crépuscule. Elle semblait le squelette d’une autre auberge, plus ancienne, déterrée par la phalange éolienne et construite pour accueillir des pèlerins fous et des fugitifs[30].
Ce passage d’Aureola neagră stimule encore notre analyse, en nous poussant à concentrer notre attention sur l’image de la « phalange éolienne » en tant qu’évocatrice de la chasse infernale, un thème que Bachelard définit comme « le conte naturel du vent hurlant, du vent aux mille voix, aux voix plaintives et aux voix agressives »[31]. La réponse immédiate à cette réflexion nous est donnée après quelques lignes, à la fin du cinquième chapitre du récit : « Je vis courir dans le champ, à travers l’obscurité, des torches allumées et j’entendis le piaffement d’un galop lointain »[32]. En continuant le parcours proposé par Bachelard, nous n’hésiterons pas à assimiler la chasse infernale à l’image mythologique des Érynnies, les poursuivantes d’Oreste[33], en attribuant ainsi à l’élément la capacité de manifester des sentiments plus profonds, comme le regret, la vengeance et, surtout, le souvenir d’un temps perdu. À ce propos, le philosophe cite un passage de Gabriele D’Annunzio tiré de Contemplazione della morte: « Et le vent était comme le regret de ce qui n’est plus, était comme l’anxiété des créatures non formées encore, chargé de souvenirs, gonflé de présages, fait d’âmes déchirées et d’ailes inutiles »[34]. On distingue ici une certaine affinité avec l’imaginaire éolien de Baconsky : « Tous les sons qui naissaient [du vent] pendant le jour et la nuit m’étaient proches et chers, parce que le murmure, le bruissement, le souffle, le soupir perdu m’amenaient des échos d’un monde invisible et fabuleux, vers lequel mes années, comme un triangle de dix-huit grues sans destination, volaient »[35]. Les dix-huit ans – moment caractérisé par une forte valeur initiatique, en tant que passage de l’adolescence à l’âge mûr – sont ici associés à un triangle de grues qui émigrent pour faire retour à un monde inconnu dont l’écho retentit dans le vent.
Entre la mer et le marais : sur le quai de l’existence
Si, d’un côté, le riche et suggestif imaginaire éolien domine l’atmosphère des récits de A. E. Baconsky, qui réussit ainsi à imprimer une tonalité de mystère et d’angoisse à son texte, de l’autre, l’élément aquatique, loin d’être insignifiant, constitue au contraire une véritable matrice fabulatrice de l’œuvre. Analysant le rôle de l’élément aquatique dans le texte littéraire, Jean Libis reconnaît : « Chez certains écrivains, l’eau est un véritable cosmos d’écriture. Il semble alors qu’elle devienne un objet romanesque à part entière, et accompagne le destin d’une œuvre »[36]. Echinoxul nebunilor est une œuvre totalement empreinte d’eau : les vagues retentissent tout au long de ses pages et un destin de mort et renaissance est inscrit dans leur mouvement. Ainsi, à la fin du volume, s’annonce un cycle nouveau : le printemps arrive et, avec lui, arrivent aussi des hommes transportés par la mer, pour construire de nouveau la ville. Le récit trouve sa mort juste au moment où une nouvelle vie s’ouvre à l’intrigue. Nous observons le même processus dans Artiştii din insulă (Les artistes de l’île) où des branches et des surgeons naissent sur les corps des femmes gravés dans les troncs d’arbres : le printemps, en négligeant la forme, donnera une vie nouvelle à ceux qui n’étaient plus que des monuments funèbres (« Je tressaillis à la vue des statues réveillées pour une vie qui était leur mort »[37]). Nous pensons qu’à la source de cette attention insistante sur le thème de la renaissance il y a une exigence ontologique de l’homme. En effet, comme l’a écrit Jung : « Jamais la Vie n’a pu croire à la Mort ! »[38]. C’est peut-être pour cette raison que le protagoniste du récit Farul pénètre dans le marais avec obstination, bien que ce lieu soit de plus en plus présage de mort[39]. Du point de vue de l’imaginaire, le marais représente le fidèle contrepoint de la mer : si l’élément aquatique avec sa dimension thalassale et infinie met l’être humain en contact avec une réalité cosmique qui répond aux lois des grands cycles universels, le marais, grâce à la contamination avec l’immanent (avec l’élément tellurique), se charge de connotations négatives et permet à l’homme de découvrir l’inexorabilité de la mort, en le soumettant à la loi du devenir. « La mer […] conduit l’imagination aux limites de son extensibilité »[40] tandis que le marais captieux évoque l’anéantissement définitif : l’imagination est projetée vers le bas, vers la profondeur insondable de l’enfer et l’être humain ressent la même frustration qui est produite par le rêve où la pesanteur interdit le mouvement. Les rêveries qui concernent le marais ne peuvent que rappeler à l’homme sa condition d’impuissance, sa finitude : « Dans tous les cas, l’indétermination et la viscosité désignent la condition infernale, à savoir la nostalgie de la forme fixe »[41]. On comprend alors la profondeur de la réflexion suivante : « Je me sentais prophète et mage aux yeux étoilés, sans douleur, sans désirs, sans âge, comme ce phare se sera peut-être senti, exilé sur une côte perdue entre une époque qui devait être passée déjà depuis longtemps et une autre qui n’arrivera jamais »[42].
Deux époques, toutes les deux insaisissables comme, d’un côté, la mer vers laquelle l’imagination est toujours ouverte et comme, de l’autre, le marais qui active des rêveries centripètes en projetant l’être humain vers un temps tellement proche qu’il devient insondable. Comme un phare, l’homme ne réussit à éclairer que la surface d’une petite partie de l’infini vers lequel il est projeté, mais est en même temps incapable d’éclairer la partie la plus profonde de lui-même. Comme l’affirme Bachelard, « La connaissance de l’essentiel a pour contrepartie la mort »[43]. En effet, dans les récits de Baconsky, le protagoniste peut seulement apercevoir l’essentiel, mais il ne peut pas en avoir une confirmation[44]. L’itinéraire de l’homme baconskyen ne finit pas par une défaite, mais par un appel cruel à constater sa finitude irrémédiable, dont le refus condamnerait l’être à un tourment implacable : « Ton âme est le serpent qui t’étrangle […]. Il ne te laisse jamais tourner le regard. Tu cherches toujours le chemin au-delà des choses, tu veux toujours en voir l’autre face, celle vers laquelle seuls les yeux aux paupières fermées à jamais regardent »[45].
Jean Libis, dans le chapitre dédié à la létalité de l’eau, développe le concept d’ »abolition du principe d’individuation »[46] :
Le processus d’individuation est d’emblée, dans sa phase active, un processus d’intégration, et donc de soumission ontologique : […] en s’individualisant la matière s’inscrit autant que possible dans l’ordre universel de la forme. Tant et si bien que la croissance de l’individu, aussi bien que sa décroissance, sont frappées chacune à leur manière du sceau de la « dilution »[47].
Après les réflexions de Mircea Eliade sur le mythe de l’éternel retour, le critique trace un parcours que nous suivrons pour l’analyse des valeurs qu’acquiert, dans la prose de Baconsky, l’élément aquatique par rapport à la mort :
La mort est d’abord la sanction d’une émancipation ontologique, la nécessité d’un retour à l’ordre ; ensuite elle est l’abolition de la contingence, et ce qui sauve la pensée dans ses prétentions à l’universalité. En d’autres termes il faut que l’individu soit sacrifié à la substance ; ou, plus exactement, qu’il s’y résorbe[48].
C’est seulement dans cette optique que nous réussirons à saisir l’importance réelle des mots que le protagoniste du récit Farul utilise pour justifier l’union profonde de son être avec l’élément thalassal : « Je suis fait pour la mer. Une folie ou une maladie étrange m’avait amené sur ses rivages, dans la solitude où chaque chose semblait se dissiper dans son non-être »[49]. Selon une expression célèbre de Gaston Bachelard, nous pouvons définir le protagoniste des récits comme un être « voué » à l’eau, « un être en vertige »[50], prêt à s’abandonner à l’élément qui, plus que les autres, « exerce sur les formes individualisées une sorte d’attraction mortifère »[51] et qui, grâce à ses propriétés purifiantes et régénératrices, annonce une renaissance et associe le destin de l’homme au destin des cycles cosmiques qui trouvent en lui la garantie de renouvellement[52]. Dans le récit Echinoxul nebunilor, le personnage principal se rend compte de sa participation à ce caractère cyclique universel, comme dans le passage suivant, où se révèle une allusion directe à la métempsychose :
J’avais toujours l’impression d’être ressuscité d’une mort qui autrefois, il y a des siècles, avait été chantée par des bardes vagabonds et d’avoir en moi-même l’âme immense et désolée de certaines races passées l’une dans l’autre, métamorphosées dans la succession des années et dans le rythme capricieux de certains cycles terminés toujours en avance. Mon identité se perdait en se dissipant en milliers, en centaines de milliers d’hommes[53].
Du mythe au complexe : Caron
À cette dispersion de l’identité (« Il me semblait être condamné à souffrir, en les vivant, toutes les souillures de certaines biographies étrangères, de certaines existences exilées des temps, afin qu’elles se purifient à travers le filtre de ma vie même »[54]), répond, au niveau cosmique, la dilution de la nuit (« En dehors, l’obscurité continuait à se diluer »[55]) qui doit être considérée comme la régression vers un temps dont on ne se souvient pas (« Troublée, la mémoire restait prisonnière d’un ossuaire immense »[56]). Il semble qu’il s’agisse ici du retour in illo tempore, c’est-à-dire l’époque mythique où les « espèces […] n’étaient pas encore fixées et les formes étaient fluides »[57], un processus symboliquement provoqué par le cycle lunaire. Dans son Traité d’histoire des religions, Mircea Eliade évoque les hiérophanies lunaires, considérées comme des « révélations […] d’une sacralité fondamentale sous-jacente au Cosmos »[58] et qui permettent, pour cette raison, de marquer le temps du rite. C’est dans ce sens qu’il faut interpréter aussi le choix de l’équinoxe, en tant que moment favorable pour célébrer le rituel d’une vengeance dont le protagoniste – dans le sixième récit – sera, en même temps, victime et bourreau[59]. Cet événement fait toujours partie du schéma cyclique des morts et des renaissances qui représente le fondement de chaque rite[60]. À propos des cérémonies d’initiation, Eliade reconnaît :
Si le symbolisme aquatique et lunaire a joué un rôle si important dans la vie spirituelle de l’homme archaïque, c’est justement parce qu’il rendait évidents et transparents l’abolition et le rétablissement ininterrompus des « formes », la disparition et la réapparition cyclique, l’éternel retour (en fait l’éternel retour aux origines). Sur tous les plans – depuis la cosmologie jusqu’à la sotériologie –, l’idée de régénération est liée à la conception d’un temps nouveau, c’est-à-dire à la croyance en un commencement absolu auquel l’homme peut parfois accéder[61].
C’est le contact avec la matière qui assure cet accès : dans notre cas, le retour à “l’eau matricielle et principielle, d’où sourd la totalité des êtres, et vers quoi elle retourne”[62]. Si la mort est “l’absolument réel, l’ananké à l’état pur”[63], ajoutons qu’“au bout de chaque travail de l’imaginaire, l’enjeu est encore et toujours la mort, le lien inséparable et insupportable avec ce point de non-retour, qu’on doit modérer, soutenir, vaincre, ou dissiper”[64]. À cette nécessité typiquement humaine se relie l’image de la barque des morts[65], où est mise en évidence la dimension thanatologique[66] de l’eau et, en même temps, sa puissance régénératrice[67]. L’image, présente très souvent en littérature, est l’expression de ce que Gaston Bachelard a appelé le “Complexe de Caron” :
L’imagination profonde, l’imagination matérielle veut que l’eau ait sa part dans la mort ; elle a besoin de l’eau pour garder à la mort son sens de voyage. On comprend dès lors que, pour de telles songeries infinies, toutes les âmes, quel que soit le genre de funérailles, doivent monter dans la barque de Caron[68].
Retrouver une trace plus ou moins explicite de ce complexe ne sera pas difficile pour le lecteur des récits de Baconsky. Nous nous arrêterons seulement sur deux cas où l’évocation de la barque des morts est la plus manifeste. Dans le premier passage, la scène est décrite dans les détails et revêt le caractère d’une véritable cérémonie rituelle:
Nous l’embarquâmes en l’étendant sur le fond plein d’eau de la barque et après avoir pris les rames nous nous éloignâmes rapidement vers le Sud, où l’eau était plus profonde […]. Comme dans un rêve j’entendis la voix du gardien qui me disait de laisser les rames. Lorsque je me retournai vers lui, je le vis debout au bout de la barque, occupé à entailler une branche de peuplier à l’aide d’un petit couteau […]. En quelques instants, une petite croix en bois, liée avec une ficelle, pendait au cou du mort. Puis nous le jetâmes dans la mer et, alors que nous retournions, le soleil émergeait obliquement, couronnant nos têtes comme si nous étions les samaritains du crime[69].
Relevons le caractère éminemment religieux de certains éléments, tels que la croix et la référence à la parabole du Bon Samaritain (Évangile de Luc: 10, 25-37), celle que Jésus utilise pour expliquer comment on peut conquérir la vie éternelle[70]. Baconsky, en se référant au cadavre, avait mis en évidence un aspect important : “Il semblait être un homme robuste, entre deux âges, brûlé par le soleil et tanné par l’eau de la mer, qui allait l’accueillir en lui donnant pour toujours les transparences du néant”[71], en accord avec la pensée de Bachelard, qui considère la mort dans l’eau comme une transformation de l’élément même en un néant substantiel[72].
Le second passage met en évidence une autre valeur spécifique de la mort en mer, pour en dévoiler l’aspect maternel[73] : “Les pêcheurs se signèrent tournés vers l’Orient et en le soulevant le placèrent dans une barque, pour le ramener vers le sommeil migrateur dont ils l’avaient réveillé”[74]. Pour comprendre le sens réel de ces mots, nous devons penser au sommeil comme mort euphémisée et saisir l’analogie symbolique entre l’image de la barque et celle du berceau qui, à son tour, est isomorphe au ventre maternel[75]. Il s’agit d’une correspondance confirmée ultérieurement par le sens de repos, de protection et de régénération que ces images suggèrent et dont l’auteur est pleinement conscient lorsqu’il écrit : “La mer savait me récompenser de tout”[76] ; “Avec un bain de mer je serais guéri complètement”[77] ; “La mer m’accueillit tendrement comme toujours”[78].
Jonas et la réintégration dans le temps cosmique
Il faut réussir à pénétrer l’image lorsqu’on parle de maternité de l’eau, en en explorant la profondeur, pour en saisir le sens limite, c’est-à-dire le retour à l’origine : on apercevra alors ce que Bachelard, dans La Terre et les rêveries du repos, décrit comme le Complexe de Jonas[79], un processus lié aux rêveries intimes et déterminé par les images d’avalement[80]. C’est un avalement auquel la nuit participe aussi et qui, avec son obscurité, rend possible la dissolution des formes : “Nous les regardâmes en silence, un à côté de l’autre comme deux obélisques pétrifiés sur le rivage, jusqu’à ce que la nuit et l’horizon les engloutirent”[81] ; “Ils se dirigèrent vers la mer, sautèrent dans la barque, et la nuit engloutit tout de suite leurs silhouettes ainsi que l’embarcation qui les avait amenés”[82]. Comme dans l’histoire biblique où le prophète revoit le jour, le Complexe de Jonas bachelardien envisage toujours une renaissance :
La sortie du ventre est automatiquement une rentrée dans la vie consciente et même dans une vie qui veut une nouvelle conscience. On mettra facilement cette image de la sortie de Jonas en rapport avec les thèmes de la naissance réelle – avec les thèmes de la naissance de l’initié après l’initiation – avec les thèmes alchimiques de rénovation substantielle[83].
Le schéma cyclique, qui constitue le cœur des récits de Baconsky, se relie alors à ce regressus ad uterum, dont l’image du dauphin[84] est, d’après nous, une expression ayant une valeur symbolique évoquée par l’auteur même : “Des brises intermittentes avaient soufflé la cendre du vieil établissement des pêcheurs où, un matin, comme un symbole, un dauphin mort apparut sur la plage”[85]. Qu’il s’agisse d’une dissolution dans le néant substantiel ou d’un retour à l’archétype maternel, la destination de ce voyage par mer semble ainsi être toujours la réintégration dans l’ordre cosmique[86]. Elle est rendue possible, selon l’auteur, par la communion avec l’élément thalassal, garant de la participation de l’homme à la régénération cosmique, dans une alternance perpétuelle de morts et de renaissances : “Je pensais sans cesse au parcours des mers, le seul, le triple, le fou, aux côtes lointaines où en arrivant on renaît, à chaque fois autre que soi”[87].
Bibliographie
Gaston Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2001.
Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de la rêverie, Paris, P.U.F., 2005.
Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, Paris, Corti, 2004.
Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2001.
A. E. Baconsky, Opere, II. Proză. Versuri, București, Academia Română, Fundaţia Naţională pentru ştiinţă şi Artă, 2009.
Crina Bud, “Literatură şi ziduri”, in A. E. Baconsky, Biserica neagră, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri, préf. Crina Bud, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011, p. 15–26.
Jean Chevalier et Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris, Robert Laffont / Jupiter, 2008.
Laurenţiu Ciobanu, “A. E. Baconsky : «Echinoxul nebunilor»”, Cronica, 1967, a. II, n. 42 (89), p. 8.
Nicolae Creţu, “A. E. Baconsky : «Echinoxul nebunilor»”, Iaşul literar, 1968, XIX, n. 2, p. 54-57.
Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris, DUNOD, 1992.
Mircea Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris, Éditions Payot et Rivages, 2011.
Gheorghe Glodeanu, “Poetica fantasticului”, in Dimensiuni ale romanului contemporan, Baia Mare, Editura Gutinul, 1998, p. 98–102.
Jean Libis, L’Eau et la mort, Dijon, Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique de Bourgogne, 1996, p. 182.
Paolo Mottana, “Introduzione all’edizione italiana”, in J. Libis, L’acqua e la morte, Bergamo, Moretti & Vitali, 2004.
Notes
[2] Gaston Bachelard précise : “L’être du rêveur envahit ce qui le touche, diffuse dans le monde. Grâce aux ombres, la région intermédiaire qui sépare l’homme et le monde est une région pleine, et d’une plénitude à la densité légère. Cette région intermédiaire amortit la dialectique de l’être et du non-être”, Ibidem, p. 144.
[4] A. E. Baconsky, Opere, II. Proză. Versuri, Bucureşti, Academia Română, Fundaţia Naţională pentru Ştiinţă şi Artă, 2009.
[5] À ce propos, il nous semble pertinent de citer ce que Crina Bud a observé, en expliquant que “Le moment de découverte de certains motifs synergiques […] est suivi d’un sens d’illumination. Il s’agit de ce que A. E. Baconsky a nommé – en ne se référant pas à lui-même, mais à Ion Ţuculescu – une illumination contemplative, « une recherche fiévreuse des matrices originaires, […] un sens de l’âge de ceux qui n’ont pas d’âge, frénésie du contemplatif mélancolique, ascète ravagé par la somptuosité ». Le personnage-narrateur est accoutumé à toutes ces combinaisons paradoxales et il se présente très souvent comme une victime de certaines révélations, parce que les conditions de l’illumination se produisent malgré son apathie”, C. Bud, “Literatură şi ziduri”, in A. E. Baconsky, Biserica neagră, Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri, préf. C. Bud, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011, p. 21.
[6] Cette expression doit être entendue selon le sens eliadien (cf. M. Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris, Éditions Payot et Rivages, 2011, p. 384-404).
[7] “Eu însumi îl uitasem de mult, de când, sub zodia impusă de răspântia marilor cicluri ce se încrucişau în biografia mea, mă lepădasem de tot ce putea să-mi aducă aminte de mine”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 87.
[8] “Odată am dispărut de acasă, luându-mă după un cerşetor orb care umbla prin lume în tovărăşia câinelui său – şi nu m-am mai uitat înapoi”, Ibidem, p. 13.
[9] Dans l’introduction à l’édition de 2011, Crina Bud souligne : “La migration des images d’un texte à l’autre donne l’impression de certaines cartes juxtaposées, qui révéleraient un même but spirituel. Le lecteur qui s’obstine à en saisir la signification risque de s’irriter et de se sentir, en quelque sorte, découragé devant le labyrinthe de sens, encore plus lorsque, de temps en temps, il croit en avoir découvert le code. Les récits ressemblent aux fragments d’une mosaïque immense dont les pièces ne peuvent pas être utilisées dans leur ensemble, mais, puisant çà et là, la composition des fragments crée une représentation cohérente, qui suggère la totalité” (C. Bud, Op. cit., p. 20). Les éditeurs de l’édition de l’Académie Roumaine, Pavel Ţugui et Oana Safta ont, avec Teodor Baconsky, relevé l’existence de deux manuscrits concernant l’œuvre en question, dont les datations révèlent une contiguïté temporelle étonnante, comme si l’auteur y avait travaillé parallèlement : “Il semble que l’auteur a commencé à travailler à ce cycle de récits pendant la première partie de l’année 1965. Il existe parmi ses manuscrits un cahier à la couverture jaune […]. En 1986, avec Teodor Baconsky, le fils de l’écrivain, nous avons établi que ce manuscrit est la première variante du volume des récits […]. Ce Cahier-manuscrit est daté : « 17. VII. 1966 ». On dirait que Baconsky a travaillé à ses proses sur des pages « en parallèle », parce qu’il existe un second manuscrit […] qui a comme date : « 18. VII. 966 ». Ce manuscrit représente la forme définitive du livre Echinoxul nebunilor şi alte povestiri” (A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 771).
[10] N. Creţu, “A. E. Baconsky : « Echinoxul nebunilor »”, Iaşul literar, 1968, a. XIX, n. 2, p. 54.
[11] “Vedeam în ochiul lui de Polyphem pietrificat o lume de vid şi de moarte iradiată”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 38.
[12] “Și nici o sirenă nu se va mai găsi să pună capăt sumbrului joc şi să vestească moartea prin cântec, singura la care mă simţeam condamnat”, Ibidem, p. 73.
[13] J. Libis, L’Eau et la mort, Dijon, Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique de Bourgogne, 1996, p. 182.
[14] “Hălăduiam într-o lume fantastică, populată de fiinţe înalte şi generoase, măşti ale unor idealuri din ce în ce mai înceţoşate”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 53.
[15] “Cet inachèvement radical, qui implique une déficience ontologique et qui constitue la signe même de la mortalité, est au cœur de la méditation de Maurice Blanchot […]. Écrire un roman, c’est avouer implicitement que le monde est incompréhensible, que l’homme est seulement voué à son destin temporel, sexuel et mortifère”, J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 34.
[16] G. Glodeanu, “Poetica fantasticului”, in Dimensiuni ale romanului contemporan, Baia Mare, Editura Gutinul, 1998, p. 100.
[18] “Va fi o tragedie despre fiul tânăr al unui rege, care şi-a ucis mama, despre o răzbunare moştenită din neam în neam între fraţi, o răzbunare neîmplinită, ce străbate prin timp ca o flacără otrăvită şi sacră, alimentată de vestale necunoscute”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 86.
[20] “Uneori sunt cu mine, eliberat de lumea căreia pe negândite i-am devenit prizonier, sunt cu ochii deschişi, cu pupilele lărgite şi mistuite de adevărurile ce se dezvăluie celor capabili să treacă suferinţele în cristale de gheaţă. Dar prea adesea mă trezesc iaraşi copleşit de nopţile fetide ce m-au cucerit – şi toate ororile se ridică în faţă, tiranice columne ale pierzaniei, printre care trec în neştire spre orizontul meu prăbuşit. Atunci îmi reiau existenţa din casa zugrăvită în albastru. Poate că sunt acolo mereu. Poate că n-am părăsit-o niciodată”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 81.
[21] “Aflasem doar că ne va fi dat să-l întâmpinăm într-o noapte pe ţărm, lângă valurile monotone, ce spălau nisipul, desenându-şi întruna aripile de Icari prăbuşiţi, îngropaţi în galbenul plajei”, Ibidem, p. 56.
[25] “Un fluierat ca de şarpe se auzi, dar nu ne-am putut da seama de unde vine – şi pe lespezile descoperite se iscă un vârtej de cenuşă subţire, înălţându-se şi pierind în văzduh”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 67.
[26] Voir : J. Chevalier et A. Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris, Robert Laffont / Jupiter, 2008, p. 867-879.
[27] Au début du chapitre « Le Vent », contenu dans L’Air et les songes, Gaston Bachelard affirme : “Le vent, dans son excès, est la colère qui est partout et nulle part, qui naît et renaît d’elle-même, qui tourne et se renverse. Le vent menace et hurle, mais ne prend une forme que s’il rencontre de la poussière […]. Et le premier être créé par cette colère créante, c’est un tourbillon. L’objet premier de l’homo faber dynamisé par la colère, c’est le vortex”, G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Librairie Générale Française, 2001, p. 292.
[29] Nous percevons l’intensité de cette recherche dans les pages de Cel-mai-mare (Le-plus-grand), un récit où à l’attente du Messie est associée une sensation profonde d’impuissance humaine : “Toate încercările de răspuns erau neputincioase conjecturi, păreri efemere şi goale, ce nu făceau decât să sporească nedumeririle tuturora” (“Chaque tentative de trouver une réponse était une conjecture vaine, un avis éphémère et vide, qui servait seulement à accroître la perplexité de tous”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 56).
[30] “Hanul părea pustiu, părea mai mare, mai deşirat, ca o sperietoare de duhuri împlântată la răspântia unor timpuri întoarse, pe care nici un amurg nu le mai putea îndupleca. Părea scheletul unui alt han, de demult, dezgropat de falanga eoliană şi ridicat să întâmpine pelerini nebuni şi fugarii”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 70.
[32] “Prin intuneric văzui peste câmp alergând torţe aprinse şi auzii ropotul unui galop îndepărtat” A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 70.
[33] Citant Schwartz, Bachelard affirme : “Aux images de chasse infernale, Schwartz associe l’image des « chasseresses à la chevelure de serpents ». L’analyse « imaginaire » de la notion d’Érynnies peut partir de ce rapprochement. […] Comme la chasse infernale, l’Érynnie totalise le poursuivant et le poursuivi”, G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Op. cit., p. 301.
[34] Trad. : “E il vento era come il rammarico di ciò che non è più, era come l’ansia delle geniture non formate ancora, carico di ricordi, gonfio di presagi, fatto d’anime lacere e d’ali vane”, G. D’Annunzio apud G. Bachelard, L’Air et les songes, Op. cit., p. 298.
[35] “Toate sunetele ce se năşteau [din vânt] ziua şi noaptea îmi erau apropiate şi dragi, pentru că murmurul, foşnetul, răsuflarea, oftatul pierdut îmi aduceau ecouri dintr-o lume nevăzută şi fabuloasă, către care zburau anii mei ca un triunghi de optsprezece cocori fără ţintă”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 34.
[37] “Am tresărit la vederea statuilor trezite la o viaţă care era moartea lor”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 108.
[39] À ce propos, il nous semble que le passage où le protagoniste trébuche sur le corps d’un cheval mourant dans le marais peut servir d’exemple. Dans les yeux de l’animal (qui est psychopompe) on découvre un présage de mort très clair : “Înecat într-o baltă de sânge, agoniza sfâşiat de dureri, ce-l făceau să zvâcnească şi să-şi întunece şi mai mult ochii plini de luciri ciudate ; în oglinzile lor negre fulgeră o clipă imaginea capului meu hirsut, purtând drept aureolă ştreangul pretimpuriu legănat veşnic deasupra lui” (“Noyé dans une mare de sang, il agonisait tourmenté par la douleur, qui le faisait tressaillir et qui assombrissait de plus en plus ses yeux remplis de scintillements étranges ; dans leurs glaces noires, l’image de ma tête hirsute resplendit, sur laquelle, comme une auréole, la corde prématurée oscillait perpétuellement”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 24.
[42] “Mă simţeam profet şi mag cu ochi înstelaţi, fără dureri, fără dorinţe, fără vârstă, aşa cum se va fi simţit şi farul acela, exilat pe o coastă pierdută între o vreme care ar fi trebuit să treacă de mult şi alta ce nu va veni niciodată”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 35.
[44] Nous citons, à titre d’exemple, non seulement le passage tiré d’Aureola neagră, mais aussi le récit Farul (Le phare), où l’identité de la femme du marais, avec laquelle le protagoniste a passé la nuit, reste inconnue. De plus, dans le même récit, après la découverte de l’identité réelle de son oncle, le jeune homme n’aura plus la possibilité de prendre contact avec lui.
[45] “Sufletul tău e şarpele ce te sugrumă […]. Nu te lasă niciodată să-ţi întorci privirea. Cauţi mereu drumul de dincolo de lucruri, vrei mereu să vezi faţa lor cealaltă, aceea spre care privesc numai ochii cu pleoapele pe totdeauna închise”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 102. L’italique est un choix de l’auteur.
[49] “Pentru mine era marea. O nebunie sau o boală ciudată mă adusese pe ţărmul ei, în acea solitudine unde toate păreau că se mistuie în propria lor nefiinţă”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 12.
[52] Dans le paragraphe Symbolisme de l’immersion, Mircea Eliade observe : “Dans l’eau, tout se « dissout », toute « forme » est désintégrée, toute « histoire » est abolie ; rien de ce qui a existé auparavant ne subsiste après une immersion dans l’eau, aucun profil, aucun « signe », aucun « événement ». L’immersion équivaut, sur le plan humain, à la mort, et sur le plan cosmique, à la catastrophe (le déluge) qui dissout périodiquement le monde dans l’océan primordial. Désintégrant toute forme et abolissant toute histoire, les eaux possèdent cette vertu de purification, de régénération, et de renaissance ; parce que ce qui est immergé en elle « meurt », et, se relevant des eaux, est pareil à un enfant sans péchés et sans « histoire », capable de recevoir une nouvelle révélation et de commencer une nouvelle vie « propre »”, M. Eliade, Op. cit., p. 203-204.
[53] “Mi se părea mereu că am înviat dintr-o moarte pe care demult, cu secole în urmă, o cântaseră barzi rătăcitori şi că port în mine sufletul mare şi nemângâiat al unor neamuri trecute unul în altul, metamorfozate în succesiunea anilor şi în ritmul capricios al unor cicluri încheiate întotdeauna înainte de timp. Identitatea mi se pierdea risipită în mii, în sute de mii de oameni”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 88.
[54] “Mi se părea că sunt blestemat să suport, trăindu-le, toate ordurile unor biografii străine, ale unor existenţe exilate din timpuri, ca să se purifice trecând prin filtrul propriei mele vieţi”, Ibidem, p. 79-80.
[60] Il y a beaucoup d’éléments, disséminés dans les textes, qui pourraient renvoyer à la cérémonie rituelle : par exemple, nous pensons aux autels sacrificiels, aux formules prononcées dans des langues mystérieuses, au choix jamais accidentel des nombres, et ainsi de suite. En outre, nous pourrions associer le livre entier à un rite. À l’apui de cette idée, nous pensons, par exemple, à la fin ouverte du dernier récit, où le recommencement est symbolisé par l’arrivée du printemps et par l’accostage d’un navire avec des hommes à bord venus pour reconstruire la ville.
[64] Trad. : “Al fondo di ogni lavoro dell’immaginario, la posta in gioco è ancora e sempre la morte, il legame inscindibile e intollerabile con questo punto di non ritorno, che si tratta di temperare, sostenere, sconfiggere, o dissolvere”, P. Mottana, “Introduzione all’edizione italiana”, in J. Libis, L’acqua e la morte, Bergamo, Moretti & Vitali, 2004, p. 11.
[65] En ce qui concerne cette image, Jean Libis affirme : “Il se pourrait en effet que la barque des morts trouve un point d’ancrage dans le réel sous la forme d’une pratique rituelle effective. Les observations anthropologiques attestent que, dans certaines cultures, le mort est exposé sur l’eau dans une pirogue, et parfois abandonné au gré des eaux”, J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 77.
[66] “L’eau est bel et bien ce « cosmos de la mort », où s’abîment les tensions imaginatives de l’être humain”, Ibidem, p. 35.
[67] Dans le paragraphe dédié à l’analyse du déluge, Libis remarque : “Si l’eau contient en germe une capacité considérable de destruction, elle ne représente certes pas la mort absolue. Elle demeure un principe ontologique, un lieu d’éclosion qui cuve aussi une surpuissance secrète”, Ibidem, p. 95.
[69] “Îl urcarăm lungindu-l pe fundul plin de apă al bărcii şi luând vâslele ne-am îndreptat repede spre sud, unde apa era mai adâncă […]. Ca prin somn auzii glasul paznicului îndemnându-mă să las vâslele. Când m-am întors spre el, stătea în picioare la capătul bărcii, cioplind cu un cuţit scurt o creangă de plop […]. În câteva clipe, o cruce mică de lemn atârna legată cu sfoară la gâtul mortului. Apoi îl prăvălirăm în apă, şi în timp ce porneam înapoi, se ivea pieziş soarele, încununându-ne creştetul ca unor samariteni ai fărădelegii”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 15–16.
[70] Jean Libis, en analysant un passage tiré de L’enfant de la haute mer de Jules Supervielle, note : “[On donne, n. d. t.] forme poétique à un axiome fondamental de notre imaginaire : celui qui meurt par l’eau acquiert le don de sempiternité, fût-ce au prix d’un changement de substance”, J. Libis, Op. cit., p. 159.
[71] “Părea un bărbat voinic, între două vârste, ars de soare şi tăbăcit de apele mării, care aveau să-l primească în sinea lor, dându-i pe totdeauna transparenţele neantului”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 15.
[73] Pour un approfondissement du thème de la maternité de l’eau, voir : G. Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves, Op. cit., p. 132-152.
[74] “Pescarii se închinară spre răsărit şi ridicându-l îl aşezară într-o barcă, pornind să-l ducă spre somnul migrator din care îl treziseră”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 90.
[79] Pour un approfondissement de ce thème, voir le chapitre que Bachelard lui dédie dans La Terre et les rêveries du repos (G. Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries du repos, Paris, Corti, 2004, p. 147-204).
[80] Gilbert Durand précise : “Le Jonas est euphémisation de l’avalage puis antiphrase du contenu symbolique de l’avalage”, G. Durand, Op. cit., p. 233.
[81] “I-am privit în tăcere, alături amândoi ca nişte obeliscuri încremenite pe ţărm, până când orizontul şi întunericul i-au înghiţit”, A. E. Baconsky, Op. cit., p. 45.
[82] “Porniră spre mare, săriră în barcă, şi în curând noaptea înghiţea deopotrivă făpturile lor şi nava ce-i adusese”, Ibidem, p. 77.
[84] “Symbolique liée à celles des eaux et des transfigurations. […] Le dauphin est devenu le symbole de la régénérescence. On en voyait l’image auprès du trépied d’Apollon, à Delphes”, J. Chevalier et A. Gheerbrant, Op. cit., p. 338.
On the Nature of Portals in Fantasy LiteratureOn the Nature of Portals in Fantasy Literature
Marius Conkan
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
mariusconkan@yahoo.com.sg
On the Nature of Portals in Fantasy Literature
Abstract: This paper aims to analyze the nature of portal in fantasy literature. The portal is at the heart of mapping and building imaginary objects, creatures and situations that configure the alternative space. The symbolic journey a character makes through the portal is the matrix of fantasy fictions. Beyond the arguments that aim at revealing the structures of imaginary worlds, there are some questions that still need answers: What is a portal? A frontier, a process or maybe both? Are we talking about physical space, or rather about an internal and abstract dimension?
Keywords: Fantasy literature; Imagination; Portal; Border; Secondary world.
What is a portal? What role does it play in fantasy literature? Using the portal as a theoretical lens, could we access a new perspective on this kind of literature? What is the rabbit hole through which Alice descends in Wonderland, or the wardrobe where the Pevensie brothers enter Narnia? Can these intermediary spaces take on a conceptual and cultural importance, beyond their thematic function of transporting characters into alternative worlds?
I tackled this issue, as a first step, in my study entitled “Intermediary Spaces in Fantasy Literature”[1]. There I focused on tracing some of the main directions from which one can start conceiving a morphology of space in fantasy literature, despite not having analyzed the entire theoretical nature of the portal. On the one hand during the Renaissance scarred by a tromendous censorship of the imaginary, the magical thinking was a metaphorical portal towards the ocult world of the spirits. On the other hand the concept of portal was refined in Romanticism by transferring the fantastic from the methaphysical to the psychological level. Hence, the romantic double is a symptomatic portal opening the human spiritual abyss and the unconscious[2]. In the same study, I showed how the portal can display a metaphorical and conceptual function next to a thematic and literal one. The metaphorical and conceptual trait is showcased in the way in which researchers like C. N. Manlove, Gary K. Wolfe, Brian Attebery etc. have defined fantasy literature as a territory of the impossible that violates and restructures the laws of reality[3].
In the radical dichotomy between a consistent (possible) reality and alternative worlds (supernatural and impossible) we encounter a theoretical border, a red thin line, that can be difficult to cross. But what if we were to understand such a frontier as a metaphorical portal? Why should the perceived reality and the impossible one be opposed to one another and what is the structure of this settled frontier between them? Aren’t thematic portals in fantasy fiction a mirror and a sign of the limits that researchers touch upon when dealing with this type of fiction? I am convinced that if we were to take the thematic portals (id est intermediary spaces) as a starting point, we can find more arguments for a complex understanding of fictional worlds (fantastic or not). These worlds are related and at the same time separated from the actual world by a metaphorical portal. In other words, a close analysis of the passages towards the fantastic world will not only ensure the proper concepts that enable a different perspective on the frontiers (and passages) between actuality and fiction, but also assure a better understanding of the relationship between the actual world and the imaginary constructions inside of it (heterotopias).
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, is the second book[4] in The Chronicles of Narnia and contains one of the most famous portals in fantasy literature: the wardrobe (maybe only the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can surpass in fame this well-known piece of furniture). The novel tells the story of the Pevensie brothers (Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter), that enter Narnia through a wardrobe and are guided by the lion Aslan. They all join forces in order to destroy the dystopia imposed by Jadis, the White Witch, and, thus, to reestablish the paradisiac nature of Narnia. Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies, is the first to enter the land of Aslan and this is how C. S. Lewis describes the scene:
Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up — mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in — then two or three steps — always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. […] Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. “Why, it is just like branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. […] A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air[5].
C. S. Lewis does not offer any rational explanations that would decrypt and trace this miraculous crossing through the wardrobe. We encouter such rational explanations especially in science fiction, a literature that sets the stage for a distant future and depicts alternative worlds as a product of technological progress. These worlds are mapped and accessed through scientifical portals, after the latter’s rational mechanism is deciphred. But this is not the case in the scene described by C. S Lewis. There is a brief and mysterious account of the moment in which Lucy enters Narnia and thus turning the wardrobe from an ordinary object, with a specific utility in the actual world (see the image of the mothball), into a magical portal. Hence, the sense of wonder, in this case, is obtained through overlapping two distinct features of the wardrobe: the first nature is the rational one, characterizing an object of domestic utility, while the other attribute is magical and irrational, turning the wardrobe into a point of passage towards Narnia. The narrative perspective and Lucy’s reaction display the way in which the two antithetic traits of the wardrobe interact and communicate with one another. Lucy crosses and opens the wardrobe like any other known space. Throughout the novel, Lucy is the only character that exhibits a fundamental magical thinking and never questions the existence of Narnia or that of the lion Aslan. The passage through the wardrobe is narrated like a meaningless account. What we witness in fact is how Lewis enhances the miraculous feature of the portal. There is a symmetry in the images that hallmark the contradictions of the two worlds intertwined by the portal, because the rational (actual) nature of the wardrobe is mirrored and reversed in its irrational (magical) part: the moth powder (an image of a rather aged order) is replaced in Narnia by snow; the fur coats (images of death) disappear in Narnia to become living and fabulous creatures; the tree turned into the wardrobe is actually a symmetrical image of the pine tree; in the room left behind by Lucy, daylight appears while Narnia is already engulfed by night. Hence, I will focus on three stategies that generate the sense of wonder and recreate the magical feature of the portal.
The first is the narrative strategy and serves C. S. Lewis to recount, from a familiar and rational point of view, a miraculous happening (the path through the wardrobe, towards another world). The magic of the wardrobe persists, as the narrator describes Lucy’s journey toward Narnia, without turning it into an extraordinary voyage. The second strategy consists of turning an object that has a precise utility into a vehicle that carries one into the Other World. This „becoming” of the wardrobe is depicted authentically by juxtaposing its two main features (a simple object, but also a passage towards an unknown world). The third strategy enables a symmetry of images that show a reverse/mirroring of the initial space in the alternative world. Such symmetries provide a slow and imperceptible crossing (for reader and character alike) into Narnia. Being similar from a denotative point of view (see the moth powder versus the snow), these images either recieve radical and antithetic connotations (the fur coats versus the creatures of the lion Aslan), or compose a symbolical and common map of the two worlds, related solely through the wardrobe (the moth powder is a sign of a rational and enclosed world, and can be placed in Narnia on a symbolic level with the eternal winter created by Jadis the witch).
Therefore, all these narrative and imaginary strategies turn the wardrobe into a magical portal and mediate, using a familiar framework, the way in which characters enter and connect to the alternative world. Thus, the sense of wonder appears through rational and precise structures that grant to an object (wardrobe) unreal functions (the wardrobe as a passage towards the Other World). But the object will take on these imaginary traits in such a natural manner and will ultimately reproduce the illusion of reality. Hence, characters and readers alike believe that the wardrobe really opens an alternative world. In other words, a possible object (wardrobe), having a clearly defined meaning in the actual world (we do keep clothing inside), recieves an imaginary meaning (the wardrobe is the pathway towards Narnia). Moreover, these two meanings do not appear in contrast or in an antithetical relation, but rather display continuity and dialogue (the wardrobe can also be a vehicle towards other worlds). This strategy characterizes the entire production of imaginary objects in fantasy literature and is, in fact, a two-step action.
Firstly, the possible object recieves an imaginary meaning or one is transferred from an other possible object (the wardrobe turns into a vehicle). At this level, the effort of producing imaginary objects is purely combinatorial, as the sentence Lucy enters through the wardrobe into Narnia lacks a context to be credible. Fantasy literature is not a figment of the imagination and does not chaotically combine possible structures (as it is the case in surrealist literature, for e.g.). The initial meaning and the newly aquired one will enter a dialogue, through a proper narrative context and after the possible object recieves an imaginary meaning. On this second level, the wardrobe is at the same time a piece of furniture and a gateway towards an unknown realm. Furthermore, Lucy and the reader are persuaded that the wardrobe will keep both its meanings (see how C. S. Lewis describes the passage towards Narnia suggests this). To be more precise, the way in which an object recieves imaginary meanings is told as an ordinary and veridical fact, but we actually witness a subtle subversion of logical reality. This is how magical portals are created in other famous fantasy novels, like the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the picture in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), by C. S. Lewis. These are portals that overlay, in a credible narrative context, the possible object (the rabbit hole and the picture) and their imaginary meanings (the rabbit hole and the picture are gateways to Wonderland and Narnia), so that ordinary objects are transformed into structures with fantastic traits. The magical feature of portals does not solely involve ascribing to a rabbit hole or a picture the quality of being a passage towards the alternative world, but also how such familiar objects of reality are percieved as vehicles towards other worlds. Such an effort awards consistency and autonomy to the alternative worlds that, despite containing imaginary objects, inexistent in the actual world, can be built on a system of veridical relationships between these particular elements.
George MacDonald, one of the first fantasts, showcases a similar understanding of the consistency and the autonomy of fantasy worlds: “[the] world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be a harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by this laws. The moment he forgets out of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible”[6]. Just as reality functions according to rigorous laws that deliver and nurture its consistency, the fantasy world must be woven and guided by its own internal laws that make it credible and not merely a product of fancy. By mentioning these laws that deliver the bone structure of fantasy fiction, MacDonald comes close to the way in which imaginary objects are created by juxtaposing their multiple possible meanings. Hence, the internal law of fantasy fiction generates familiar frameworks for impossible objects and events. The latter feeds on possible structures that are transformed, combined and continued into new scenarios, without altering their original meaning. To quote, in this respect, Brian Attebery: “Fantasy invokes wonder by making the impossible seem familiar and the familiar seem new and strange. When you put a unicorn in a garden, the unicorns gains solidity and the garden takes on enchantment”[7].
The internal law of fantasy fiction enters a reciprocal and direct relationship with the production of imaginary objects, as I previously mentioned. In portal-quest fantasy fiction[8], the first imaginary object to display such laws is, of course, the portal. Nothing seems to disturb the quasi-realist narration, that is until one of the characters goes through a portal. But, in the moment in which an ordinary object is turned, in a credible manner, into a portal, the internal laws of the fantasy world is put into action. Hence, for example, Tumnus the fawn with his umbrella, the first creature Lucy meets in Narnia, will look normal to her. The law of the fantasy world is, therefore, reflected in the way in which an ordinary object becomes a magical portal. This path is also contained in the relationship between the primary and the secondary imagination, as Coleridge has shown. The secondary imagination will reshape the creation of the primary one:
The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead[9].
The secondary imagination involves a process that enables the recreation of a possible object (as an element of the ‘real’ world) in fantasy literature as an imaginary object (and, thus, impossible). The secondary imagination, through a conscient and deliberate creative act, “dissolves,” “diffuses,” and “dissipates” the primary functions of objects. Coleridge sees in the secondary imagination the process through which all literature is created. How secondary imagination operates in the portal-quest fantasy fiction is visible, first and foremost, in building the magical portal. As an agent of human perception, primary imagination maps the existing nature of the object, even before its rendering as a portal towards other worlds. While hiding in the wardrobe, Lucy’s perception on the piece of furniture is filtered by the primary imagination that integrates the meaning and the nature of the wardrobe in the system of her known reality. Afterwards, the primary imagination is continued and overtaken by the secondary one that will award the wardrobe a previously inexistent nature, without severing the meaning given by the primary imagination. This meaning will enter a dialogue with the wardrobe’s second nature (vehicle carrying towards an unknown world) and will create the sense of wonder. Hence, the wardrobe is the place where the primary imagination and secondary one interfere, so that the portal reflects the neccessary mechanism that delivers imaginary objects in fantasy literature. In other words, the way in which an ordinary object turns into an imaginary one depends on the manner in which a wardrobe, a rabbit hole and a picture become magical portals, without ever losing their primary meaning. On the contrary, the primary and secondary meaning of the object become one and contribute decisively to the emergence of the sense of wonder. The shadow of Peter Pan[10], for example, despite being coiled up and placed by Mrs. Darling in a drawer, does not showcase a sense of wonder through the loss of the practical meaning of what a shadow really is, but rather through the way in which the depiction of a familiar context attaches the meaning of another possible object (a fabric that can be coiled up). Furthermore, despite knowing it is a shadow (on the level of primary imagination), Mrs. Darling percieves Peter Pan’s shadows as a piece of clothing and puts it into the drawer (on the level of the secondary imagination) and, thus, constructing a credible irreality.
That is how fantasy literature spawns the sense of wonder. Fantasy literature transfers on objects and things extrinsic traits, but keeps their primary (possible) nature in consubstantiality, verosimilitude and familiarity with their second (impossible) nature. Hence, fantasy literature does not oppose reality, but overlays in a rational manner multiple forms of reality and numerous, incompatible functions of objects. Fantasy is reality as a broken mirror finding its coherence and consistency in this sort of fragmentation. The fantast will not remake the broken glass in order to solve a puzzle, while trying to recreate an original image, but will suture all incompatible and incongruent pieces together, in order to concieve new structures that have their own essence, as it is the case for the imaginary objects, creatures and situations. Such fictional worlds, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s own words, are a product of the Sub-creation that reassambles images and concepts of the real world[11]. Tolkien sheds a different light on the relationship established by Coleridge between primary and secondary imagination, especially by distinguishing between the primary world – as a product of the divine creation – and the secondary world – built by the Sub-creator (these concepts are often used and discussed by researchers of fantasy literature). Close to George MacDonald’s arguments, that touch upon the necessity of an internal law granting consistency and credibility to the fantastic world, Tolkien argues that the Sub-creator must build the secondary world as such, that it can be percieved as real. This perception is linked to the Secondary Belief and presupposes that the reader believes in the fantastic world, as he or she believes in the primary one.
All these standpoints above can be brought together if we peel off any mystical shell and investigate the poetics of fantasy fictions. The latter is synthesized in the way in which objects, characters and their connections in the secondary world are created, animated and activated by an initial crossing through portals – aspects I discussed in the current paper. Such a perspective places the portal at the heart of mapping and building imaginary objects, creatures and situations that configure the alternative space. The symbolic journey a character makes through the portal (from the primary imagination to the secondary one, from the ex-nihilo creation to the Sub-creation, from a primary to a secondary world) is the matrix of fantasy fictions. Beyond these arguments that aim at revealing the structures of imaginary worlds, there are some questions that still need answers: What is a portal? A frontier, a process or maybe both? Are we talking about physical space, or rather about an internal and abstract dimension?
Potential answers can be found in Thomas Pavel’s theory on possible worlds. Despite not having used and analyzed the concept of portal, per se, or the manner in which such a term can help redefine imaginary world, Thomas Pavel offers a theoretical framework that can be extendend, reshaped and reformed, if we apply the concept of the portal. His paper “The Borders of Fiction”[12], that was later modified an integrated in his book Fictional Worlds[13], exhibits the distinction between profane reality and the mythical world by:
[Describing] the ontology of societies which use myths, one needs at least two different ontological levels: the profane reality, characterized by ontological paucity and precariousness, and a mythical level, ontologically self-sufficient, unfolding in a privileged space and in a cyclical time. Gods and heroes inhabited the sacred space; but this space was not seen as fictional; if anything, it was ontologically superior, endowed with more truth[14].
Fantasy literature contains imaginary worlds created through revisiting and recycling classical myths. These worlds are, on the one hand, complex and sophisticated constructions, built on the narrative structures of the fairy tale. On the other hand, they forge new myths (starting with old ones) and reach a form of sacrality. For example, the land of Narnia is a hybrid, a mixture of ancient greek, celtic and christian myths that manufacture an original myth, the one of the lion Aslan – and all characters firmly believe in the truth and in the functionality of this myth. Furthermore, the relationship Thomas Pavel identifies between the profane reality that is ontologically precarious, and the mythical level, ontologically superior and having more truth, is similar to the connection between the primary and the secondary world Tolkien thackles in “On Fairy Stories.” The secondary world (accessed through magical thinking) is charged with a higher degree of ontology then the primary world. The latter is temporary abandoned by the characters with the main purpose of taking a journey of initiation towards other realms. Thomas Pavel calls the crossing from a profane reality to a mythical level – in Tolkien’s words from the primary to the secondary (sacred) world – mythification:
The transferring of an event across the border of legend can be labeled mythification. The distant kinship between mythification and what the Russian formalists called defamiliarization is worth noticing: for what else is it to project an event into a mythical territory if not to put it into a certain kind of perspective, to set it at a comfortable distance, to elevate it into a higher plane, so that it may easily be contemplated and understood?[15]
From this point of view, the portal is the actual process of mythification, as it transferrs the primary world into the secondary (sacred) one. For example, the wardrobe as an imaginary space is the projection of an internal portal that mythifies characters. The Pevensies, ordinary pupils in the primary world, are mythified in the land of Aslan. Hence, the mythifying portal is a pathway towards accessing higher planes of consciousness[16] and portal-quest fantasy fiction involves crossings, transitions, negotiation and experience[17] – stages present in a journey of initiation into the imaginary world.
The portal is not only the mythification process itself, but also an open border between rational and magical thinking, between I and non-I, and between conscious and the unconscious. The portal designates but also erases all disjunctions and contradictions that exist between two worlds different in nature, as it will dismantle any similar manifestations between the characters’ primary and imaginary identity. On the level of building secondary worlds, the manner in which normal objects and spaces are turned into a magical portal uncovers the way in which all imaginary objects, characters and situations are shaped in fantasy literature. But as an internal structure, the portal carries all characters into secondary worlds that are internalized through magical thinking. These worlds guide, on a mythical level, unconscious fears and reformulate characters. The wardrobe is, in the end, a projection of an internal portal Lucy has to approach and enter, in order to find the land of Narnia hidden inside of her.
Bibliography
Attebery, Brian, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980.
Braga, Corin, 10 studii de arhetipologie, Polirom, 2006.
Campbell, Lori M., Portals of Power, Jefferson, McFarland & Company, 2010.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2004.
Hume, Kathryn, Fantasy and Mimesis, New York, Methuen, 1984.
Lewis, C. S., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, HarperCollins e-books, 2008.
MacDonald, George, “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), Introduction from The Light Princess and other Fairy Tales. Web: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/ortsx14.htm, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
Manlove, C. N., Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Mendlesohn, Farah, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Pavel, Thomas, “The Borders of Fiction,” in Poetic Today, Vol. 4, No. 1/1983, pp. 83-88.
Pavel, Thomas, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1986.
Tolkien, J. R. R., “On Fairy Stories,” Web: http://public.callutheran.edu/~brint/Arts/Tolkien.pdf, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
Wolf, Mark J. P., Building Imaginary Worlds, New York, Routledge, 2012.
Wolfe, Gary K., Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986.
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.
Notes
[1] Marius Conkan, “Intermediary Spaces in Fantasy Literature,” in Iulian Boldea (ed.), Studies on literature, discourse and multicultural dialogue, Târgu-Mureş, Arhipelag, 2013.
[2] See Corin Braga, 10 studii de arhetipologie, Polirom, 2006.
[3] See Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980, p. 2: „Any narrative which includes as a significant part of its make-up some violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law – that is fantasy.”; Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis, New York, Methuen, 1984, p. xii: „By fantasy I mean the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal.”; C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975; Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 38-40.
[4] The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) is the first published book in The Chronicles of Narnia series; following the storyline this book is the second part, being anticipated by The Magician’s Nephew (1955) where the genesis of Narnia is described.
[5] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, HarperCollins e-books, 2008, p. 6-7.
[6] George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), Introduction from The Light Princess and other Fairy Tales. Web: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/ortsx14.htm, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
[7] Brian Attebery, op. cit., p. 3.
[8] Farah Mendlesohn, in Rhetorics of Fantasy, identifies and discusses four types of fiction present in fantasy literature: portal-quest, immersive, intrusive and liminal. Portal-quest fantasy fiction (a concept taken from Medlesohn for this study) relies on portals in order to access fantastic world.
[9] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2004, p. 194.
[10] See J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan şi Wendy, Translated by Ovidiu Constantinescu and Andrei Bantaş, Chişinău, Prut Internaţional, 2008.
[11] See J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” Web: http://public.callutheran.edu/~brint/Arts/Tolkien.pdf, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
[12] Thomas Pavel, “The Borders of Fiction,” in Poetic Today, Vol. 4, No. 1/1983, p. 83-88.
[13] Idem, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1986.
[14] Idem, “The Borders of Fiction”, p. 85.
[15] Idem, Fictional Worlds, p. 77.
[16] See Lori M. Campbell, Portals of Power, Jefferson, McFarland & Company, 2010, p. 6: the portals are „all those living beings, places, and magical objects that act as agents for a hero(ine) to travel between worlds and/or to access higher planes of consciousness.”
[17] See Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Marius Conkan
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
mariusconkan@yahoo.com.sg
On the Nature of Portals in Fantasy Literature
Abstract: This paper aims to analyze the nature of portal in fantasy literature. The portal is at the heart of mapping and building imaginary objects, creatures and situations that configure the alternative space. The symbolic journey a character makes through the portal is the matrix of fantasy fictions. Beyond the arguments that aim at revealing the structures of imaginary worlds, there are some questions that still need answers: What is a portal? A frontier, a process or maybe both? Are we talking about physical space, or rather about an internal and abstract dimension?
Keywords: Fantasy literature; Imagination; Portal; Border; Secondary world.
What is a portal? What role does it play in fantasy literature? Using the portal as a theoretical lens, could we access a new perspective on this kind of literature? What is the rabbit hole through which Alice descends in Wonderland, or the wardrobe where the Pevensie brothers enter Narnia? Can these intermediary spaces take on a conceptual and cultural importance, beyond their thematic function of transporting characters into alternative worlds?
I tackled this issue, as a first step, in my study entitled “Intermediary Spaces in Fantasy Literature”[1]. There I focused on tracing some of the main directions from which one can start conceiving a morphology of space in fantasy literature, despite not having analyzed the entire theoretical nature of the portal. On the one hand during the Renaissance scarred by a tromendous censorship of the imaginary, the magical thinking was a metaphorical portal towards the ocult world of the spirits. On the other hand the concept of portal was refined in Romanticism by transferring the fantastic from the methaphysical to the psychological level. Hence, the romantic double is a symptomatic portal opening the human spiritual abyss and the unconscious[2]. In the same study, I showed how the portal can display a metaphorical and conceptual function next to a thematic and literal one. The metaphorical and conceptual trait is showcased in the way in which researchers like C. N. Manlove, Gary K. Wolfe, Brian Attebery etc. have defined fantasy literature as a territory of the impossible that violates and restructures the laws of reality[3].
In the radical dichotomy between a consistent (possible) reality and alternative worlds (supernatural and impossible) we encounter a theoretical border, a red thin line, that can be difficult to cross. But what if we were to understand such a frontier as a metaphorical portal? Why should the perceived reality and the impossible one be opposed to one another and what is the structure of this settled frontier between them? Aren’t thematic portals in fantasy fiction a mirror and a sign of the limits that researchers touch upon when dealing with this type of fiction? I am convinced that if we were to take the thematic portals (id est intermediary spaces) as a starting point, we can find more arguments for a complex understanding of fictional worlds (fantastic or not). These worlds are related and at the same time separated from the actual world by a metaphorical portal. In other words, a close analysis of the passages towards the fantastic world will not only ensure the proper concepts that enable a different perspective on the frontiers (and passages) between actuality and fiction, but also assure a better understanding of the relationship between the actual world and the imaginary constructions inside of it (heterotopias).
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, is the second book[4] in The Chronicles of Narnia and contains one of the most famous portals in fantasy literature: the wardrobe (maybe only the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can surpass in fame this well-known piece of furniture). The novel tells the story of the Pevensie brothers (Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter), that enter Narnia through a wardrobe and are guided by the lion Aslan. They all join forces in order to destroy the dystopia imposed by Jadis, the White Witch, and, thus, to reestablish the paradisiac nature of Narnia. Lucy, the youngest of the Pevensies, is the first to enter the land of Aslan and this is how C. S. Lewis describes the scene:
Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up — mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in — then two or three steps — always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. […] Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. “Why, it is just like branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. […] A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air[5].
C. S. Lewis does not offer any rational explanations that would decrypt and trace this miraculous crossing through the wardrobe. We encouter such rational explanations especially in science fiction, a literature that sets the stage for a distant future and depicts alternative worlds as a product of technological progress. These worlds are mapped and accessed through scientifical portals, after the latter’s rational mechanism is deciphred. But this is not the case in the scene described by C. S Lewis. There is a brief and mysterious account of the moment in which Lucy enters Narnia and thus turning the wardrobe from an ordinary object, with a specific utility in the actual world (see the image of the mothball), into a magical portal. Hence, the sense of wonder, in this case, is obtained through overlapping two distinct features of the wardrobe: the first nature is the rational one, characterizing an object of domestic utility, while the other attribute is magical and irrational, turning the wardrobe into a point of passage towards Narnia. The narrative perspective and Lucy’s reaction display the way in which the two antithetic traits of the wardrobe interact and communicate with one another. Lucy crosses and opens the wardrobe like any other known space. Throughout the novel, Lucy is the only character that exhibits a fundamental magical thinking and never questions the existence of Narnia or that of the lion Aslan. The passage through the wardrobe is narrated like a meaningless account. What we witness in fact is how Lewis enhances the miraculous feature of the portal. There is a symmetry in the images that hallmark the contradictions of the two worlds intertwined by the portal, because the rational (actual) nature of the wardrobe is mirrored and reversed in its irrational (magical) part: the moth powder (an image of a rather aged order) is replaced in Narnia by snow; the fur coats (images of death) disappear in Narnia to become living and fabulous creatures; the tree turned into the wardrobe is actually a symmetrical image of the pine tree; in the room left behind by Lucy, daylight appears while Narnia is already engulfed by night. Hence, I will focus on three stategies that generate the sense of wonder and recreate the magical feature of the portal.
The first is the narrative strategy and serves C. S. Lewis to recount, from a familiar and rational point of view, a miraculous happening (the path through the wardrobe, towards another world). The magic of the wardrobe persists, as the narrator describes Lucy’s journey toward Narnia, without turning it into an extraordinary voyage. The second strategy consists of turning an object that has a precise utility into a vehicle that carries one into the Other World. This „becoming” of the wardrobe is depicted authentically by juxtaposing its two main features (a simple object, but also a passage towards an unknown world). The third strategy enables a symmetry of images that show a reverse/mirroring of the initial space in the alternative world. Such symmetries provide a slow and imperceptible crossing (for reader and character alike) into Narnia. Being similar from a denotative point of view (see the moth powder versus the snow), these images either recieve radical and antithetic connotations (the fur coats versus the creatures of the lion Aslan), or compose a symbolical and common map of the two worlds, related solely through the wardrobe (the moth powder is a sign of a rational and enclosed world, and can be placed in Narnia on a symbolic level with the eternal winter created by Jadis the witch).
Therefore, all these narrative and imaginary strategies turn the wardrobe into a magical portal and mediate, using a familiar framework, the way in which characters enter and connect to the alternative world. Thus, the sense of wonder appears through rational and precise structures that grant to an object (wardrobe) unreal functions (the wardrobe as a passage towards the Other World). But the object will take on these imaginary traits in such a natural manner and will ultimately reproduce the illusion of reality. Hence, characters and readers alike believe that the wardrobe really opens an alternative world. In other words, a possible object (wardrobe), having a clearly defined meaning in the actual world (we do keep clothing inside), recieves an imaginary meaning (the wardrobe is the pathway towards Narnia). Moreover, these two meanings do not appear in contrast or in an antithetical relation, but rather display continuity and dialogue (the wardrobe can also be a vehicle towards other worlds). This strategy characterizes the entire production of imaginary objects in fantasy literature and is, in fact, a two-step action.
Firstly, the possible object recieves an imaginary meaning or one is transferred from an other possible object (the wardrobe turns into a vehicle). At this level, the effort of producing imaginary objects is purely combinatorial, as the sentence Lucy enters through the wardrobe into Narnia lacks a context to be credible. Fantasy literature is not a figment of the imagination and does not chaotically combine possible structures (as it is the case in surrealist literature, for e.g.). The initial meaning and the newly aquired one will enter a dialogue, through a proper narrative context and after the possible object recieves an imaginary meaning. On this second level, the wardrobe is at the same time a piece of furniture and a gateway towards an unknown realm. Furthermore, Lucy and the reader are persuaded that the wardrobe will keep both its meanings (see how C. S. Lewis describes the passage towards Narnia suggests this). To be more precise, the way in which an object recieves imaginary meanings is told as an ordinary and veridical fact, but we actually witness a subtle subversion of logical reality. This is how magical portals are created in other famous fantasy novels, like the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the picture in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), by C. S. Lewis. These are portals that overlay, in a credible narrative context, the possible object (the rabbit hole and the picture) and their imaginary meanings (the rabbit hole and the picture are gateways to Wonderland and Narnia), so that ordinary objects are transformed into structures with fantastic traits. The magical feature of portals does not solely involve ascribing to a rabbit hole or a picture the quality of being a passage towards the alternative world, but also how such familiar objects of reality are percieved as vehicles towards other worlds. Such an effort awards consistency and autonomy to the alternative worlds that, despite containing imaginary objects, inexistent in the actual world, can be built on a system of veridical relationships between these particular elements.
George MacDonald, one of the first fantasts, showcases a similar understanding of the consistency and the autonomy of fantasy worlds: “[the] world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be a harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by this laws. The moment he forgets out of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible”[6]. Just as reality functions according to rigorous laws that deliver and nurture its consistency, the fantasy world must be woven and guided by its own internal laws that make it credible and not merely a product of fancy. By mentioning these laws that deliver the bone structure of fantasy fiction, MacDonald comes close to the way in which imaginary objects are created by juxtaposing their multiple possible meanings. Hence, the internal law of fantasy fiction generates familiar frameworks for impossible objects and events. The latter feeds on possible structures that are transformed, combined and continued into new scenarios, without altering their original meaning. To quote, in this respect, Brian Attebery: “Fantasy invokes wonder by making the impossible seem familiar and the familiar seem new and strange. When you put a unicorn in a garden, the unicorns gains solidity and the garden takes on enchantment”[7].
The internal law of fantasy fiction enters a reciprocal and direct relationship with the production of imaginary objects, as I previously mentioned. In portal-quest fantasy fiction[8], the first imaginary object to display such laws is, of course, the portal. Nothing seems to disturb the quasi-realist narration, that is until one of the characters goes through a portal. But, in the moment in which an ordinary object is turned, in a credible manner, into a portal, the internal laws of the fantasy world is put into action. Hence, for example, Tumnus the fawn with his umbrella, the first creature Lucy meets in Narnia, will look normal to her. The law of the fantasy world is, therefore, reflected in the way in which an ordinary object becomes a magical portal. This path is also contained in the relationship between the primary and the secondary imagination, as Coleridge has shown. The secondary imagination will reshape the creation of the primary one:
The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead[9].
The secondary imagination involves a process that enables the recreation of a possible object (as an element of the ‘real’ world) in fantasy literature as an imaginary object (and, thus, impossible). The secondary imagination, through a conscient and deliberate creative act, “dissolves,” “diffuses,” and “dissipates” the primary functions of objects. Coleridge sees in the secondary imagination the process through which all literature is created. How secondary imagination operates in the portal-quest fantasy fiction is visible, first and foremost, in building the magical portal. As an agent of human perception, primary imagination maps the existing nature of the object, even before its rendering as a portal towards other worlds. While hiding in the wardrobe, Lucy’s perception on the piece of furniture is filtered by the primary imagination that integrates the meaning and the nature of the wardrobe in the system of her known reality. Afterwards, the primary imagination is continued and overtaken by the secondary one that will award the wardrobe a previously inexistent nature, without severing the meaning given by the primary imagination. This meaning will enter a dialogue with the wardrobe’s second nature (vehicle carrying towards an unknown world) and will create the sense of wonder. Hence, the wardrobe is the place where the primary imagination and secondary one interfere, so that the portal reflects the neccessary mechanism that delivers imaginary objects in fantasy literature. In other words, the way in which an ordinary object turns into an imaginary one depends on the manner in which a wardrobe, a rabbit hole and a picture become magical portals, without ever losing their primary meaning. On the contrary, the primary and secondary meaning of the object become one and contribute decisively to the emergence of the sense of wonder. The shadow of Peter Pan[10], for example, despite being coiled up and placed by Mrs. Darling in a drawer, does not showcase a sense of wonder through the loss of the practical meaning of what a shadow really is, but rather through the way in which the depiction of a familiar context attaches the meaning of another possible object (a fabric that can be coiled up). Furthermore, despite knowing it is a shadow (on the level of primary imagination), Mrs. Darling percieves Peter Pan’s shadows as a piece of clothing and puts it into the drawer (on the level of the secondary imagination) and, thus, constructing a credible irreality.
That is how fantasy literature spawns the sense of wonder. Fantasy literature transfers on objects and things extrinsic traits, but keeps their primary (possible) nature in consubstantiality, verosimilitude and familiarity with their second (impossible) nature. Hence, fantasy literature does not oppose reality, but overlays in a rational manner multiple forms of reality and numerous, incompatible functions of objects. Fantasy is reality as a broken mirror finding its coherence and consistency in this sort of fragmentation. The fantast will not remake the broken glass in order to solve a puzzle, while trying to recreate an original image, but will suture all incompatible and incongruent pieces together, in order to concieve new structures that have their own essence, as it is the case for the imaginary objects, creatures and situations. Such fictional worlds, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s own words, are a product of the Sub-creation that reassambles images and concepts of the real world[11]. Tolkien sheds a different light on the relationship established by Coleridge between primary and secondary imagination, especially by distinguishing between the primary world – as a product of the divine creation – and the secondary world – built by the Sub-creator (these concepts are often used and discussed by researchers of fantasy literature). Close to George MacDonald’s arguments, that touch upon the necessity of an internal law granting consistency and credibility to the fantastic world, Tolkien argues that the Sub-creator must build the secondary world as such, that it can be percieved as real. This perception is linked to the Secondary Belief and presupposes that the reader believes in the fantastic world, as he or she believes in the primary one.
All these standpoints above can be brought together if we peel off any mystical shell and investigate the poetics of fantasy fictions. The latter is synthesized in the way in which objects, characters and their connections in the secondary world are created, animated and activated by an initial crossing through portals – aspects I discussed in the current paper. Such a perspective places the portal at the heart of mapping and building imaginary objects, creatures and situations that configure the alternative space. The symbolic journey a character makes through the portal (from the primary imagination to the secondary one, from the ex-nihilo creation to the Sub-creation, from a primary to a secondary world) is the matrix of fantasy fictions. Beyond these arguments that aim at revealing the structures of imaginary worlds, there are some questions that still need answers: What is a portal? A frontier, a process or maybe both? Are we talking about physical space, or rather about an internal and abstract dimension?
Potential answers can be found in Thomas Pavel’s theory on possible worlds. Despite not having used and analyzed the concept of portal, per se, or the manner in which such a term can help redefine imaginary world, Thomas Pavel offers a theoretical framework that can be extendend, reshaped and reformed, if we apply the concept of the portal. His paper “The Borders of Fiction”[12], that was later modified an integrated in his book Fictional Worlds[13], exhibits the distinction between profane reality and the mythical world by:
[Describing] the ontology of societies which use myths, one needs at least two different ontological levels: the profane reality, characterized by ontological paucity and precariousness, and a mythical level, ontologically self-sufficient, unfolding in a privileged space and in a cyclical time. Gods and heroes inhabited the sacred space; but this space was not seen as fictional; if anything, it was ontologically superior, endowed with more truth[14].
Fantasy literature contains imaginary worlds created through revisiting and recycling classical myths. These worlds are, on the one hand, complex and sophisticated constructions, built on the narrative structures of the fairy tale. On the other hand, they forge new myths (starting with old ones) and reach a form of sacrality. For example, the land of Narnia is a hybrid, a mixture of ancient greek, celtic and christian myths that manufacture an original myth, the one of the lion Aslan – and all characters firmly believe in the truth and in the functionality of this myth. Furthermore, the relationship Thomas Pavel identifies between the profane reality that is ontologically precarious, and the mythical level, ontologically superior and having more truth, is similar to the connection between the primary and the secondary world Tolkien thackles in “On Fairy Stories.” The secondary world (accessed through magical thinking) is charged with a higher degree of ontology then the primary world. The latter is temporary abandoned by the characters with the main purpose of taking a journey of initiation towards other realms. Thomas Pavel calls the crossing from a profane reality to a mythical level – in Tolkien’s words from the primary to the secondary (sacred) world – mythification:
The transferring of an event across the border of legend can be labeled mythification. The distant kinship between mythification and what the Russian formalists called defamiliarization is worth noticing: for what else is it to project an event into a mythical territory if not to put it into a certain kind of perspective, to set it at a comfortable distance, to elevate it into a higher plane, so that it may easily be contemplated and understood?[15]
From this point of view, the portal is the actual process of mythification, as it transferrs the primary world into the secondary (sacred) one. For example, the wardrobe as an imaginary space is the projection of an internal portal that mythifies characters. The Pevensies, ordinary pupils in the primary world, are mythified in the land of Aslan. Hence, the mythifying portal is a pathway towards accessing higher planes of consciousness[16] and portal-quest fantasy fiction involves crossings, transitions, negotiation and experience[17] – stages present in a journey of initiation into the imaginary world.
The portal is not only the mythification process itself, but also an open border between rational and magical thinking, between I and non-I, and between conscious and the unconscious. The portal designates but also erases all disjunctions and contradictions that exist between two worlds different in nature, as it will dismantle any similar manifestations between the characters’ primary and imaginary identity. On the level of building secondary worlds, the manner in which normal objects and spaces are turned into a magical portal uncovers the way in which all imaginary objects, characters and situations are shaped in fantasy literature. But as an internal structure, the portal carries all characters into secondary worlds that are internalized through magical thinking. These worlds guide, on a mythical level, unconscious fears and reformulate characters. The wardrobe is, in the end, a projection of an internal portal Lucy has to approach and enter, in order to find the land of Narnia hidden inside of her.
Bibliography
Attebery, Brian, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980.
Braga, Corin, 10 studii de arhetipologie, Polirom, 2006.
Campbell, Lori M., Portals of Power, Jefferson, McFarland & Company, 2010.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, The Project Gutenberg EBook, 2004.
Hume, Kathryn, Fantasy and Mimesis, New York, Methuen, 1984.
Lewis, C. S., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, HarperCollins e-books, 2008.
MacDonald, George, “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), Introduction from The Light Princess and other Fairy Tales. Web: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/ortsx14.htm, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
Manlove, C. N., Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Mendlesohn, Farah, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Pavel, Thomas, “The Borders of Fiction,” in Poetic Today, Vol. 4, No. 1/1983, pp. 83-88.
Pavel, Thomas, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1986.
Tolkien, J. R. R., “On Fairy Stories,” Web: http://public.callutheran.edu/~brint/Arts/Tolkien.pdf, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
Wolf, Mark J. P., Building Imaginary Worlds, New York, Routledge, 2012.
Wolfe, Gary K., Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986.
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.
Notes
[1] Marius Conkan, “Intermediary Spaces in Fantasy Literature,” in Iulian Boldea (ed.), Studies on literature, discourse and multicultural dialogue, Târgu-Mureş, Arhipelag, 2013.
[3] See Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1980, p. 2: „Any narrative which includes as a significant part of its make-up some violation of what the author clearly believes to be natural law – that is fantasy.”; Kathryn Hume, Fantasy and Mimesis, New York, Methuen, 1984, p. xii: „By fantasy I mean the deliberate departure from the limits of what is usually accepted as real and normal.”; C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975; Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986, p. 38-40.
[4] The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) is the first published book in The Chronicles of Narnia series; following the storyline this book is the second part, being anticipated by The Magician’s Nephew (1955) where the genesis of Narnia is described.
[6] George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination” (1893), Introduction from The Light Princess and other Fairy Tales. Web: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/ortsx14.htm, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.
[8] Farah Mendlesohn, in Rhetorics of Fantasy, identifies and discusses four types of fiction present in fantasy literature: portal-quest, immersive, intrusive and liminal. Portal-quest fantasy fiction (a concept taken from Medlesohn for this study) relies on portals in order to access fantastic world.
[10] See J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan şi Wendy, Translated by Ovidiu Constantinescu and Andrei Bantaş, Chişinău, Prut Internaţional, 2008.
[11] See J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” Web: http://public.callutheran.edu/~brint/Arts/Tolkien.pdf, accessed on 20. 02. 2014.