Author Archives: Dan Chira

Diana Câmpan
“1 Decembrie 1918”University of Alba Iulia,Romania
dcampan2002@yahoo.com

The West as an Illusion in the Poetic Imagination of A. E. Baconsky

Abstract: This paper aims at providing an insight into the Romanian society during the first decades after the instauration of the communist regime. The main focus is on the poetry, fiction, journal and memoirs of the writer A. E. Baconsky. Until 1956 (the year when he lived a crucial turn as a poet) and on and off later, the writings of Baconsky propose but a superficial aesthetic expression (an “anti-aestheticization”) of the utopian totalitarianism. Progressively, A.E. Baconsky became aware of the aggressive success of ideology and technology, to which the Romanian artists had been subjected. In his last volumes of poetry he manifested centrifugal tendencies. His revolt is directed towards the standardization of the world, placing the artist under the sign of anti-.

Keywords: Romanian Literature; A. E. Baconsky; Illusion; Identity; Western vs. Eastern Civilization; European topoi.

The dualism Identity vs Otherness, manifested both at an individual level and also at a larger level of cultures, is highly debated today, mainly from the perspective of the theory of mentalities and imagology. The European space, with all its sequences, is to be found with significations and various perspectives in the works of the contemporary Romanian writers, just like their discourse in poetry, novels or memoirs. Our intention is to approach the studies specific to the area of the imaginary in a creative manner, though the approach itself will be related to the sociology of culture and the theory of mentalities, the history of art and religion, the theory of value in culture and of comparative attitude. If the European topoi have always represented a fascination and an undeniable source of inspiration for our writers, then, to the same extent, the European contemporary space must long to intercut  with our values.

Writers’ reactions towards the historic phenomenon of avant-garde took, in some cases, unusual forms. All the more so, the avant-garde as an aesthetic movement, beyond the undeterred structures of a reality appropriate to a cultural time, is accepted as viable in any context of highly innovative movements that begin from what has been naturalized as culture’s crisis. The avant-garde becomes a substitute of the perpetuated negation… We do not have the intention to discuss the dimensions of the Romanian avant-garde – because we do not have the tools used by the great theorists validated as benchmarks for literary theory and history – but, below, we will try to bring into focus an ingenious reaction towards the avant-garde phenomenon (as ingenious as it was the entire being of the one who started it!). We make reference to the masked-disputed gesture of A.E. Baconsky, the poet of great aesthetic experiences, interpreter of the artistic movements of the 20^th century, unequalled in certain matters.

The writings of Baconsky, up to 1956 (the year of great upheavals in the aesthetical consciousness of the poet) and on and off later, propose but the superficial aesthetization formula (anti-aesthetization!) of the code of the utopian totalitarianism. Progressively, the writer A.E. Baconsky would become aware of the aggressive process of “robotisation” to which the Romanian artists had been subject to, manifesting centrifugal tendencies, which started in a spectacular way with his famous speech at the tribune of the Congress of the Writers in June 1956, when he confessed the suffocation of the clichés and revoked his own creation. Then he started his long journey to himself, an initiation for he who had left the so-called utopia to get to the core of a certain reality which would prove, at a deeper analysis, the centre of the anti-utopia. Our utopia/counter-utopia perspective was not a mere pretext. Both the artist and the society were living together the dilemma of the research of the lost identity; only that for the Romanian society of the totalitarian period there had been made a foretelling of the concrete UTOPIA: the Marxist-Leninist ideology and its pseudo-ethical paradigm, the socialist realism.

Under these circumstances, A.E. Baconsky has a curious form of delimiting from the radical structures of avant-garde:  through the subtle practice of essences and their effects. We will not forget that in an initial phase of creation, A. E. Baconsky flirted with surrealist lyrics, therefore with an escape from tradition specific for avant-gardism. Later, Baconsky understood that the surrealism or the other fashionable forms of overturning through the revelation of culture’s crises could not provide him with the necessary freedom and lyrical equilibrium. The poet denied his vague “vanguard” performances and embraced an attitude of ironic overlap of the negation spirit over every motivation of the cultural trauma specific for the 20^th century. In other words, at one point, the poet righteously believed that the rupture from the tradition and logic, the running from models, and the refuse of a good, polished aesthetics enmeshed in a system – all of which are also defining for the “healthy” avant-garde – do nothing but dissolve the art, and the artist, implicitly. At one point, in his essay about Open Work and the Definition of Avant-garde, included in the volume Meridians, A. E. Baconsky mentions that:

(…) the avant-guard is not a poetic art, but a state of mind. (…) The obsession of the radical innovation, of starting a new art, of restructuring the basic artistic principles, the obsession of the novelty, of absolute originality, etc., all these represent an extra-aesthetic phenomenon: they are psychological obsessions, not aesthetic. (Remember I, Baconsky 1977).

In the author’s opinion, the rollercoaster of modernity can be connected with the permanent desire of man to deny everything, to programmatically de-structure a fact, then hurrying to set in its place a false essence, a degraded form of existence that contaminates humanity to its most sensitive structures. Baconskyan revolt, vigorously enhanced in the last volumes of poetry, is principally manifested towards the mechanisms of denial without reason, focused on the structures which have subscribed to the standardization of the world, under the sign of ‘anti’; the writer’s irony has a dramatic tint when he says that:

(…) the disgraceful seems to be conceived as a weapon in the protesting arsenal, associated or not with the sordid, depending on the various features of the drought… anti- is always expanding, annexing more and more fields to itself: after anti-poetry, anti-novel, anti-memories, etc., here are the anti-elegance, anti-costumes, anti-shoes, anti-hair. A dry lemon hanging from the neck like a medallion is just anti-jewelry… everything has its origin in the blessed need of denying… Oh, and there are so many virtual addresses waiting negation… the regret being a student no more in order to believe in the efficiency of that NO they say too often feeling that it will never exceed the acoustic of a glass bell… will they ever understand that?… a beautiful girl look at her reflection from a mirror maddened by the thought that all her attributes will not save her from the terrible curse to remain a beautiful girl… (Remember I, Baconsky 1977).

What scares the traveler-artist most is the disease that has contaminated the art, the unbridled deterioration of the artist’s condition coming from the center of the Fortress and going towards the peripheral hypostasis. The inner mutilation of the artist, forced to subscribe to the metamorphoses of modern humanity, often goes till deformity, the place of inspiring realities being systematically taken by aesthetic surrogates obtained by transforming the most intimate products of human spirituality (especially those in the field of art) into commercial goods. By gaining utility, the art loses its mythic presence, is desecrated through defamatory materialization. At this level, the Baconskyan sadness reaches its peak:

I am bored over my head by the concrete poetry and kinetic art… stingy technocrat freemasonry, words-object, verbal Plexiglas, Taschenrevolution, art of cybernetic robots, sufficiency and dust, huge veils of dust deposit on the words-object, on the amorphous machine of kinetic sculptures that quickly go out of fashion with the factories’ moulds, while in literature and in art giant automobiles graveyards pile up… grin of old scraps exasperated by the rain… on the surface of a water I see Leonardo’s image crumbling in a huge burst of laughter… (Remember, II, Baconsky 1977).

The writer radically denies these aspects of the new art, especially when they are sublimated and come to be extended and adopted as permanent features in the spectacle of everyday life. The subtle irony is directed towards the lamentable obsession of modern man to break down traditional values and place in the vacant space everything that may cause violence and shock the expectances of artistic experiences seeker; the Baconskyan confession is sincere:

I hate many words from the contemporary language and when I have them in my lips I spit them instead of pronouncing them… and so many institutions that have rotten in gold, in blood, in emptiness, and the demagogy of systems and ideals eaten by moths… I will die impugning, perhaps chaotic and undifferentiated, the background on which my own existence was drawn, but for all the filth, parasitism, primitive and sordid hedonism, shocking garb prop, there are mute and pathetic replies… the world today can not be treated with such ingenuous revolts… there are countless social fresheners, social insecticides, grills, protection clothes, glasses, detergents, drugs… and who does not want to have years, may not have them, and who does not want to see, closes the eyes towards the comfortable and ultra-civilized cavern that he has built for himself, the ideal refuge for life-digestion, for visceral exultations… Oh, if I would just have the feeling of a somehow efficiency of your lifestyle, I myself would become the greatest sordid of you all, you poor bookish pithecanthropes… but I rather have a feeling of pointlessness. (Remember, II, Baconsky 1977).

The author of Sebastian’s Ship is scared, perhaps more than anything, by the worsening of the art’s identity crisis, unrecognized by the modern culture.

But behold, the curtain is drawn. The scene is flooded with darkness. A projector lays a circle of light on the floor. Behind the circle, seven naked men with shields and spears come into light. They stand still while the artist stands in the circle. He wears a flowered shirt and yuft boots. He cries. He has an accordion of no great size. He opens it and alternatively presses on two keys. Sol – la, Sol – la, Sol – la. Then, after a few minutes, remains only the note La and it sounds continuously. The seven men imperceptibly withdraw into the shadows until they slowly disappear. The composer’s face gets an expression of revolt. And the sound continues. After fifteen minutes some auditors leave the room quietly. The redoubtable editor strikes the key note. Later, I found out that this was the reaction expected by the artist. After a half an hour the room was empty. I alone remain obstinate. (Corabia lui Sebastian, Baconsky 1990: 382)

It is even worse when the artist’s frondeur-avant-garde intention is replaced by a kitsch-motivation leading to the creation of a pale cultural product, void of Idea, designed by a standard exterior to aesthetic valences, but responding in force to the protocol of the machinist world. Thus, a common experience of the literary man (attending a literary circle) does not become a corollary of the aesthetic labour, but the absurd spectacle of standards, is not an exercise of contemplating the ceremony – once sacred – of artists coming together, but the participation to a rather pagan ritual, that of catharsis annulment:

Tonight, I will finally attend the famous literary circle. (…) A large room with ceiling inclined directly below the roof. Scholarly mess. Instead of chairs, there are old car pillows arranged on four pavement stones. In front, there are beer cases and behind them there is a girl who sells them. There is also a small podium made of cases. Above, we have a chair made of rough boards and a table made from a half of an old door. Oil lamps. Handmade tallow candles. In a corner, a heating stove is smoldering. There is an atmosphere of authoritarian discipline. Heteroclite people. Doubtful youth. Old man with an attitude of juvenile decrepitude. (…) From the group of bonzes, stands up a man; he goes on the podium and sits down. On his neck, he has a book tied with a rope. He opens the book and reads. It is a brief anthology of programmatic literary texts. I listen to extensive excerpts from Marx, Engels, Mehring, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Gorki, Dadeev, Lunacearski. Some participants from the public come next. I was told that it is very important to be seen here. (Corabia lui Sebastian, Baconsky 1990)

It is not by accident that the mixture of avant-gardism and primitivism fills the Baconskyan discourse almost cinematically in terms of stitching the details. With Baconsky, all being’s determinations are claimed from this obsession of the lack of communication, often with tougher shades than with Eugen Ionesco or Samuel Beckett. The unhealthy incapacity of standing by gives birth to people-mask, incapable of favorable metamorphoses, prone to error and suffocated till barbarity by their own frustrations: 

I saw a maniac making injections to the roses

I saw a wooden woman I saw a bourgeois

giving lemons to the giraffe in the zoo

I saw a teacher lurking a breed dog

then came a long pause and an awful wind

gave all vowels

a U-shape and through metal tubes

all things were trying to go back

to their origins (…)

and I have seen nothing else but dead birds, many

countless dead birds around cars

which were making love on Landhausstrasse.  (Volută monotonă, Baconsky 1990)

Therefore, the Abendland is a strange Leviathan body, with attributes that define the decrepitude of humanity, surrogate-fortress, anti-utopian, manipulated by the laws of decline that grinds the elites, as the masses, things, as their reflex in the economy of the imaginary; the transience scares no more, the passing towards pseudo-models, beyond which the perspectives become themselves utopias, was already made: 

dance of the fortresses, red twilight, abend- 

land… the agony of villain nations choked in gold

 (…)

Oh, cathedrals, Quattrocento, Baroque, oh, the future

archaeological excavations in time and in the shadow

of the now vanquished Apostat. (from Corabia lui Sebastian, Baconsky 1990)

In a Prophetic Anatomy we read: “For all of those who were not/ statues will be raised, for those who are/ will have a NO before them…” and we are really tempted to decipher a fictitious paradigm of the world, based on which the non-created, the unborn seem to be the only chance of refusing the rules of the absurd. The upturned sense of history is measured through an aberrant reversal of the executioner with the victim, of the cause with the effect and of becoming with stagnation. 

The burlesque desecration of the world’s paradigms is indispensable for building the negation structures. A.E. Baconsky retains just suggestions from Nietzsche regarding God’s death, as motivation for the deletion of the dividing line between the natural and the unnatural, between the sacred and the profane, between normality and the absurd. Divinity does not seem to exist even as a memory, as denied topos; it no longer exists; its place was usurped by a series of simulacra, ranging from a god-clown, a God of NIHIL:

God, give me again the longing for death of my ancestors

 do no let me accept the weakness, rust and chain (…)

 Give again my eyes the ice crystalline lens

 that they have long lost, poison my arrows

 and remind me the last one

 to keep for me. (The Prayer of a Dacian),

[a hyena-God]

Oh, god of hyenas, give us new laws

 forever have mercy on our stars, descend in things

your fetid spirit! Give to every thing

many, many

COUNTLESS

corpses! (Pestilential Invocation),

[a mortified God]  

God, I would like to cry but I have

no river on whose banks

I can remember Zion(Black Psalm),

[a God of emptiness]  

A huge, unusual sun, seems the begged

god of the fall in vacuum. One by one

magnetic signals in the cities were ignited

lonely wings, lonely limbs, lonely shadows,

the piano with no pianist concerts in a room

with occult presences – the words grow, expending themselves.

 (Electronic Season)

…and reaching, in Sebastian’s Ship, to the hideous image of a modernized deus ex machine or some kind of crazy god for the sake of and then because of the emptiness, a divinity giving credit to the omnipresent chaos:  

God of all dominions, allow

us to handcuff ourselves for no one

knows about us and wants us

as vassals… look, it is very late,

here are a thousand owls with dark-blue eyes

somebody cries or maybe whispers a groundwater

not too deep somewhere and it seems that beat the drums

of some chimerical executions… without dead people

without victims without executioners… the measure of time

is given by a ruin but time is not measured

time passes with the superposed eyes

that never close… (Cosmopolis, Baconsky 1990).

The new gods of Abendland are spasmodic projections of the mind sickened by false glory; the new temples of the modern man are the common places for the desecrated ritual, accidental, random intersections of the civilization’s labyrinth. Hence, the impossible survival and reading in a reverse key the existence which, by defying the habits from Creation, follows the path of immersion into nothingness and not the one of tempting the absolute; life does not end in death but, in an improvised logic, it begins with it. The absence of priests, the cancellation of the state of prayer seen as a crevice of the consciousness, which devoted itself to denying any value, are just steps of the carnival desecration:

God of the dream, the blood

has no venom anymore – the guillotine

beheads bodies.

a NO, maybe a NO,

is left to be voiced

in this empty church

where a magnetic tape

is preaching non-stop (Alleluia, Baconsky 1990).

In fact, the routes of the lyrical Baconskyan discourse sketch the permanent labour of self-search, the poetic finality being nothing else than decoding the gap between civilization and culture, which the poet acutely felt in all his ages of creative destiny. Throughout his creation, the poet indulges himself in defining the non-place, the clear impression being that of location in a permanent space of passage. The dichotomy between the world’s white promontory and black promontory (in the sense given by the end of the Black Church novel) discloses the poet’s problematical consciousness who is not afraid to scrape his poems against the world’s failure, a debunked world, fallen deep into the profane, a source of uncertainty and home to reverse utopia. Certainly, the poetic ego is a valid avatar of the character-sign from the Baconskyan prose, always looking for partial definitions (“You may sometimes see me as a bastard settled among you/ a perverse miracle suddenly appeared..”), rediscovering himself only in the hypostases of the adrift pilgrim, with the being sprayed in anxieties or saving metamorphoses: “Sometimes, in the windy weather, I think/ that the countless roads I walked on/ will all come back to me one night/ strangling me like Laokoon snakes-/ maybe I would deserve such a fate/ since my feet have love/ the eternal drift…”. In A.E. Baconsky’s poetry, the loss of self, alienation, mythic madness, agony, isolation, ritual death through evanescence in elements, aesthetic sleep, assuming the polyvalent time become personal myths, all of them speaking about “the infusion of false” and à rebours religion that characterizes the black utopia spotted in the world which the poet himself claims. In each poem, the author shows a polemic, not just ascertaining aggressiveness. “A wall, a wall everywhere…” warns the poet, as he finds out, concluding his conceptual and symbolic development, that the utopist dream is the fools’ prerogative (“…Let the fools/ walk alone in search of a wither world/ for their death, leave them unpunished and free…”). 

            In an absurd-chaotic world, the poet seems to utter that you can not defend yourself from the rollercoaster, as you can not protect yourself from time or words and enemies you do not know. Mysterious enemies, loneliness and the crisis of communication with the other, inevitably convert in chances of survival through the power of contrast.

            The Baconskyan man is the man of the history; his degradation is concomitant with the degradation of history. One may fall from the individual destiny, just like all humanity falls through its own becoming in negative. Nothing escapes, under the Baconskyan pen, from desecration and denial, however it is interesting that by the desecration and denial of the world, the poet instates it, gives it a permit to go through the conscience and a kind of original, but acidic and bitter-ironic concreteness. 

References

Ainsa, Fernando (2000), Reconstrucţia utopiei, Cluj-Napoca, CLUSIUM.

Antohi, Sorin (1991), Utopica. Studii asupra imaginarului social. Trad. by Corina Mărgineanu, Bucharest, ES.

Baconsky, A.E. (1969). Meridiane. Complete Edition,Bucharest, E.P.L.

Baconsky, A.E., (1977). Remember. Fals jurnal de călătorie, II,Bucharest, Cartea Românească Publishing House.

Baconsky, A.E., (1990). Scrieri I. Poezii.Bucharest, Cartea Românească Publishing House.

Călinescu, Matei (1995), Cinci feţe ale modernităţii. Modernism. Avangardă. Decadenţă. Kitsch. Postmodernism. Trad. by Tatiana Pătrulescu and Radu Ţurcanu, Bucharest, Univers Publishing House.

Ciorănescu, Alexandru (1996), Viitorul trecutului. Utopie şi literatură. Trad. by Ileana Cantuniari, Bucharest, Cartea Românească Publishing House.

Marin, Louis (1973), Utopiques. Jeux d’espaces, Paris, Les Edition de Minuit.

Bako Alina
Université Lucian Blaga Sibiu, Roumanie
alinabako@gmail.com

Les illusions mathématiquement surveillées

dans Les tablettes du Pays de Kuty de Tudor Arghezi /

Mathematically Supervised Illusions

in Novels of the Land of Kuty by Tudor Arghezi

Abstract: The illusions that Tudor Arghezi creates are born within the text, one that changes permanently according to the interest of the reader. From this point of view, Tablets from the Land of Kuty experiments with pamphlet, combining the social with the lack of rules and withsatire. The text becomes the illusion of a ruled society that is devoid of principles. Set free from any constraint, the pamphlet offers its readers the monstrous and trivial element, requesting ex negativo the respect of vital structures. In the Land of Kuty the universe wavers between the impossible and the irregular. The automatisms invade everything. The city where the three arrive is weird; the inhabitants change everything at regular time intervals. The absurd situations define a space of constraints, in which the social element becomes a starting point for a possible construction of a negative utopia.

Keywords: Tudor Arghezi; Illusion; Pamphlet; Society; Imagination; Politics.

Les illusions que Tudor Arghezi crée ou démonte sont nées du tissu très dur du texte. De ce point de vue, Les tablettes du Pays de Kuty expérimentent un style pamphlétaire où le social s’entremêle  à l’absence du modèle, à la satyre. Le texte devient l’illusion d’une société sans principes.

Rapproché à Jonathan Swift, P.L. Courrier, Léon Bloy, L.F. Céline, Tudor Arghezi fonde un espace où ses personnages Mnir, Kuic, Pitak découvrent en Kuty, un pays qui ne se retrouve pas sur la carte, une société primitive. La tentative de civiliser les habitants donne naissance à une parodie de projet utopique. L’absurde du texte contamine les personnages, car l’écrivain réalise la bouffonnerie d’une civilisation superficielle.

Les idées théoriques peuvent être mises en relation avec les idées présentées par Cornelius Castoriadis, le philosophe du social, et sa définition de l’imaginaire qui est justifiée de cette manière: « […] c’est par la notion de l’imaginaire radical que nous comprenons l’autonomie de l’individu et conséquemment sa capacité de changer la société »[1]. Par un passage de l’individu au social, l’être humain se développe comme sujet autonome tout en contribuant  à la transformation de la société. L’imaginaire individuel est cette partie des représentations mentales qui s’élabore dans le temps par une manipulation intérieure consciente et/ou inconsciente de données mémorisées antérieurement, « c’est-à-dire des représentations mentales précédemment imaginées ou surtout induites d’une part au travers de la perception de phénomènes et d’autre part à partir d’idées transmises par la communication interhumaine »[2].

L’être poétique dispose de la capacité de créer ses propres images, figures, symboles qui s’actualisent chaque fois qu’on dispose d’une nouvelle réception du sujet. L’homme devient un homo poeticus qui profite de sa capacité créatrice.

Libéré de toute contrainte, le pamphlet libère l’élément monstrueux et trivial, en demandant ex negativo le respect des structures vitales. Dans le pays de Kuty, l’univers pendule entre l’impossible et l’irrégulier. Les automatismes envahissent tout. La ville est étrange. Les reporters, Mnir et Kuik ne sont pas éblouis par ce qu’ils découvrent, mais ils constatent avec détachement la différence, le fait d’être autre, qu’ils acceptent avec bienveillance, sans curiosité : « amasser au même endroit les édifices qui se ressemblent les églises avec les églises, les jardins avec les jardins »[3].

Une extravagance bizarre qui se situe au domaine de l’absurde pour définir un espace des contraintes où l’élément social devient un point de départ. Il s’agit, en effet, d’une sorte d’utopie négative qui détermine une réévaluation de l’espace politique et social.

La superficialité en tant que normalité – l’absurde

L’œuvre absurde illustre la pensée qui renonce à ses illusions et qui se sert de l’image superficielle des choses. L’absurde s’exprime dans la souffrance profonde, causée par l’impossibilité d’échapper au piège des non-sens, dans un monde chaotique et qui dépersonnalise l’individu. Les éléments du subconscient et de l’absurde ne se confrontent pas, mais ils deviennent des pôles qui ne peuvent exister qu’ensemble. Un personnage de l’œuvre d’Arghezi se demande à un moment donné : « Mais alors, pourquoi l’humanité devient-elle  chauve ?  »[4]. La question constitue le repère de l’absurde de l’existence qui se transforme en illusion collective. Devenir chauve ne signifie plus vieillir, mais un manque qui transgresse le simple fait, car l’être humain appartient au mécanisme universel : « Mon départ s’est fait dans une absence totale du / de la personnalité »[5]. Les trois personnages principaux Mnir, Kuik et Pitak commencent un voyage absurde dans leur monde illusoire. L’univers est artificiellement décrit, comme dans un puzzle immense où les éléments de l’artificiel et de la réalité s’entremêlent, et les situations absurdes sont soumises  moitié aux lois de la réalité et moitié aux lois de l’imaginaire. Au début de leur voyage, les personnages ont l’illusion d’une liberté absolue : « Il nous agace  et nous demande de le jeter de l’avion. »[6] dit Mnir dans un effort de pimenter l’action. Les situations absurdes, au fur et à mesure que l’action se déroule, s’enchaînent : «  Pour qu’ils m’apparaissent plus grands, les mètres étaient carrés ou cubes »[7]. La logique du lecteur vérifie les répliques des personnages, mais le matériel des mots rompt l’étonnement en le transformant dans une sensation tout à fait naturelle. Il s’agit tout à fait d’une allégorie, d’une parabole sur laquelle l’écrivain est averti : « Les choses se sont passées pareillement à l’entrée de Gulliver au pays des nains »[8]. La filiation littéraire est ouvertement avouée par ces références aux textes du même genre.

L’absurde du langage

Au-delà des événements, la saveur du texte vient de l’absurde du langage. Arghezi invente toute une langue, l’idiome kuty devenant une source inépuisable de jeu de mots « Bilifox signifie en traduction libre: “L’épervier à quatre pieds sans paire, sans ongles, qui s’enfuit sur la colline en se trainant, et dans la vallée en roulant et qui vole au-dessus des rives sans ponts” »[9]. Le génie verbal de l’auteur donne naissance aux mots inconnus, mais musicaux, qui rappellent des sonorités latines  ou exotiques : « Lokha repe aldutim, malgré la caractéristique arménienne du i circonflexe signifie  “le salut de l’aube monté dans les cyprès, parmi les singes chanteurs aux les écailles argentées”».[10] Imprévu, énigmatique, le mystère privé de sens parfois détermine une certaine confusion, l’incohérence totale, l’illogique, le hasard. C’est une sorte de protestation, qui donne naissance à la parabole, qui contient un glissage vers l’irrationnel, une dépersonnalisation de l’être humain et de la politique : « Ne pouvant fabriquer que des pots, la terre a été divisée en pays, pour que la nature puisse créer au moins des hommes d’état »[11]. La surprise du lecteur est évidente : le jeu avec les sens du mot terre crée l’illusion d’une direction tout à fait naturelle vers le sujet politique. L’inutilité des hommes politiques est admirablement peinte par la mise en balance des deux actions : le processus de poterie qui a à la base la terre et l’eau et la division de la terre dans des pays avec des hommes d’état. L’enchaînement des événements est entretenu par la perspective du personnage qui passe, par des situations absurdes. Le monde découvert, sans être corrompu par l’usage des lois sociales, devient, finalement, le même modèle social. Le temps a d’autres valeurs qui portent en elles-mêmes un univers absurde : « J’ai attendu 22 ans qu’une souris apparaisse et parce qu’elle ne pouvait pas sortir de son trou à cause du fait que le temps passait, elle était devenue obèse ».

Le sentiment de l’absurde  peut frapper l’homme à tout temps. Dans sa nudité désolante, le sentiment de l’absurde devient une normalité.

L’absurde satirique – illusion du langage

L’absurde satirique a des racines très profondes dans la littérature universelle. De Rabelais, Erasme de Rotterdam, en passant par les romans de Voltaire et Swift jusqu’aux textes contemporains comme Essai sur la lucidité de José Saramago, l’objet d’étude devient la démonstration de l’absurdité de la pensée. Kuik, un des personnages d’Arghezi, conclut : « Mon avis est qu’il vaut mieux réfléchir que penser ». Ainsi, les vices de pensée sont découverts et sont habillés en paradoxes, antinomies, non-sens. 

Dans le même sens de la parodie, de l’absurde, des manières de juger et de s’exprimer, on utilise aussi des clichés verbaux en mettant en évidence ce caractère de cliché. Eugène Ionesco, qui, initié par Arghezi et Caragiale, avouait sa filiation littéraire à l’absurde le définit comme « la dénonciation du caractère dérisoire d’un langage vidé de sa substance, stérile, construit de clichés et de slogans »[12]. Un vrai recueil de clichés et de slogans, d’associations stéréotypées, d’automatismes, d’actes de langage a été réalisé par Flaubert dans le Dictionnaire des idées reçues, comme une annexe au roman Bouvard et Pécuchet – la satire de la stupidité humaine.

De même que l’absurde qui est une sorte de niche, l’humour absurde est fondé sur une incongruence. Les contraintes de la raison sont éliminées, ce qui a comme effet l’invasion du psychique par une sensation euphorique.

Chez Arghezi le pamphlet est mentionné avec satisfaction dans des formules comme : « parce que nous nous retrouvons en Kuty, nous pouvons parler ouvertement ». L’absurde devient la clé pour déchiffrer le texte :

sans raison, le kute recevait un coup  contre à la tête, chaque fois qu’on le rencontrait ; avec raison, c’est-à-dire après un excès, il recevait 25 coups dans  diverses régions du corps, ce qui a développé la notion d’innocence et de culpabilité et, par une connexion logique, le sens de la responsabilité. Deux ministres étaient délégués de tout cela, de surveiller les gens et de les attraper : les ministres des finances. Nous en avons choisi deux, non pas un, parce que l’un devait tenir le kut et l’autre l’opérer, en habituant le peuple à la notion de contribution directe.[13]

Dans Les tablettes du Pays de Kuty (1933), le grotesque est subsumé à la satire basée sur la formule de l’absurde et qui domine les nombreux portraits caricature. Le savant Mya Lak est peint par des touches très fortes. Il est entièrement ridicule, par ces excès de la mythomanie et de mégalomanie.

Tu ne peux pas imaginer à quel point la langue française ressemble à notre langue. Si je n’étais pas allé à Paris, je ne l’aurais pas cru. Quand on franchit la frontière de la France, on dit seulement  merci et bonjour. Nous disons literatură et ils disent littérature. Nous disons universitate et ils disent université.  Nous disons librărie et ils disent librairie. Toute la langue française de l’après-guerre est copiée d’après nous, mais un peu modifiée, pour que cela ne soit pas trop évident, par la dénaturation des consonnes pures. Ils ont renoncé à î et ă. […] toutes nos institutions sont prises en dérision à Paris, même l’Académie. D’autant plus, la littérature française actuelle est volée entièrement, la poésie et la prose aussi. Ce n’est que plus d’une fois que j’ai reconnu mes articles dans la presse parisienne.[14]

L’ironie devient un processus par lequel le lecteur apprend à lire entre les lignes. Armes du pamphlétaire, même les références aux mythologies glissent dans le dérisoire : « Ces  Grecs connaissaient même les choses qu’ils ignoraient »[15].  C’est une raison par laquelle le rôle civilisateur des nouveaux arrivés au pays de Kuty devient extrêmement important. Loin de la civilisation d’ailleurs, des États-Unis et de l’Europe, cet endroit exotique est contaminé de tous les malheurs de la société moderne. Les débits des rivières aussi bien que toutes les actions et toutes les pensées des personnages sont surveillés mathématiquement, tout se retrouve dans un état bien éloigné du paradis d’un commencement de monde : « Avant mon arrivée, le peuple était bien sûr, anarchique : chacun à son gré et ils osaient bêtement penser qu’ils étaient  heureux, que l’homme pouvait être au moins approximativement content sans une organisation et une loi morale »[16].

Les contraintes de la société sont admirablement présentées par une imagination très riche. Les détails futuristes et de science-fiction sont introduits dans le tissu du texte pour résoudre ainsi le possible échec humain :

[…] les devoirs les plus spéciaux des Académies, qu’ils vont supprimer, sans raison évidente, étant en train de découvrir une machine en miniature appelée à répondre automatiquement à toutes les questions, à comprendre un cerveau et la substance de la science totale dans un système de sonneries.[17]

 Le plus haut forum de connaissance est soumis au dérisoire. L’Académie peut être supprimée et remplacée par un hybride techniciste qui devient partie du processus de dépersonnalisation de l’homme et de sa transformation dans un citoyen véritable. Le prosateur amende l’appréciation de la superficialité et de la préoccupation excessive pour le succès littéraire :

Le volume est la carte de visite de l’homme supérieur : sans volume la vie ne vaut pas la peine d’être vécue, et quand on est abandonné par les fonctions inférieures, quand on n’est plus enchanté par le sourire, le cou ou les hanches et quand la pensée oublie de déshabiller les images et les coups de chaleur, concentrés en moralité, le volume, le tome, l’œuvre complète, deviennent les grands produits cosmétiques et un aphrodisiaque pour les expansions tacites de l’orgueil justifié.[18]

Le dérisoire devient une possibilité de se moquer de l’histoire, des personnages, des mythes, de la religion et même de la science : « Vénus sans bras et l’épine de la plante du pied du garçon » ou  « il avait l’âge de 18 ans, toutes les dents et toutes les molaires » ou « Une église vient de passer par dessous comme une chèvre »[19].

Comme dans un scénario postmoderne, le mythe biblique de Noé est réinterprété et amène plus près de la pensée naïve. Le tableau créé ressemble aux peintures naïves du paysan roumain :

Il est certain que Noé avait commis l’erreur de croire que le déluge avait envahi toute la terre à cause du fait qu’à ce moment-là la conception de rondeur manquait entièrement. D’après les dernières données de la science, Noé a été plutôt un fermier, prédécesseur d’Amundsen, qui s’était proposé de lancer à l’eau le premier bateau et qui, pour assurer ses repas réguliers et des œufs, avait emporté des poulaillers, des volailles et des animaux à sacrifier.[20]

Les éléments du mythe trainent dans le dérisoire. Comme dans le théâtre absurde, il n’y a plus de sentiments purs, spirituels, mais des sensations organiques, physiques, comme la faim, la soif. Le mélange des données historiques et mythiques, sans un fil chronologique des évènements, transforme tout : « Noé avait parlé à Dieu qui était présent à toutes les noyades des bateaux de tous les temps »[21]. Dieu devient une instance éloignée, un rocher qui reste là-bas, au début du monde, sans implication dans la vie des êtres humains. Il est froid, il existe comme dans l’univers poétique arghezien sans le rapprochement des hommes. À la pseudo-morale, qui tombe du ciel, qui est imposée par une autorité religieuse ou politique, et qui se révèle, à l’usage, éminemment compressive et liberticide, il convient de substituer une nouvelle science, qui s’élève de la conscience du sujet et qui se propose de chercher. On ne  trouve pas des avantages dans l’accumulation des biens matériels, qui détournent des vraies valeurs et rendent l’homme perpétuellement esclave des nouvelles illusions : «  Eh, alors ! Nous sommes allés chercher le troisième pôle, inspirés par l’idée de la quatrième dimension »[22]. D’une manière plus générale, c’est un argument rationnel, même s’il n’a rien de dogmatique, même s‘il remet en cause la raison  qui renie la lucidité. À l’extrême, il faudrait n’avoir rien à dire, — mais cela serait bien décevant pour des lecteurs en attente, qui se trouveraient confrontés à de simples jeux d’écriture -, ou bien ne recourir qu’à l’écriture automatique, surréaliste, mais bien frustrante pour l’écrivain amoureux de la langue, afin d’échapper totalement à ce risque de rationalisation des matériaux bruts en fonction des objectifs propres à chaque écrivain. Et encore serait-on en droit de se demander, d’une part, à quoi pourrait bien servir la supposée lucidité d’un « auteur » qui se nierait en tant que tel et qui se refuserait à communiquer quoi que ce soit ; et, d’autre part, si des textes bruts, non élaborés, méritent encore d’être considérés comme des créations littéraires, avec ce que cette expression implique de conscience, de volonté et de clairvoyance, « À quel point était-il lamentable mon héroïsme, ma conscience seule le savait. » ou « Mais, savez-vous, l’homme, soit-il historique ou préhistorique, parfois il en a assez »  ou « Le reste de la vie est un vêtement aux boutons sans paire, sans boutons, ou aux boutons déchirés » (le mariage)[23].

Le sens de l’inquiétude détermine une réponse qui surgit de l’absurdité irréductible de la situation face à l’existence humaine : « Peut-être l’homme cherche-t-il plutôt l’inconnu que la béauté »[24] . Il démontre par l’absurde la contingence universelle en confrontant à tout  moment les thèses finalistes, dûment caricaturées, et les faits, fortuits et imprévisibles, qui leur apportent immédiatement. L’homme politique est défini par son absence et son incapacité de gouverner : « Aujourd’hui ?! aujourd’hui personne ne sais plus gouverner. L’autorité souffre de médiocrité et l’incapacité est complétée par la férocité et l’atrocité »[25].

L’illusion

Les écrivains n’ont d’autre choix que de comparer leur utopie à la société pour la critiquer. Dans cette utopie, il existe un gouvernement parfait selon l’auteur, cela peut être une monarchie, une démocratie ou même une anarchie : « Là-bas les enfants n’allaient plus à l’école. Ils jouaient tout le temps, du matin au soir et lançaient des pierres dans toutes les vitres, sans que personne leur en veuille. [….]. Les fenêtres attrapaient les pierres et les jetaient vers eux. Voilà pourquoi les enfants devenaient sages. Pour que les vitres ne cassent leurs têtes »[26].

Mais dans tous les cas, ce gouvernement est parfait, gentil, et le peuple est heureux, cela est fortement mis en valeur dans l’épisode de l’Eldorado dans le Candide de Voltaire, où le souverain embrasse sur les deux joues Candide et Cacambo lorsqu’il les rencontre, et que les habitants sont tellement heureux qu’ils jurent de ne jamais quitter ce lieu. Or, on ne peut pas changer la nature de toute l’humanité, aucune société réelle qui fonctionne n’a des valeurs chevaleresques telles que la vertu, le courage, ou bien même le travail. Dans la prose de Arghezi, le narrateur s’adresse au lecteur : « Voulez-vous qu’on déménage dans Kuty ? Là-bas, les papies dont la bouche et le nez deviennent ridés chez nous et dont les cheveux blanchissent vers les oreilles ne sont plus grands que leurs enfants et les oncles aux joues rouges avancent en roulant, parmi les herbes […] Leurs semelles sentent les jacinthes »[27].

Il existe un bonheur commun, le bonheur individuel étant interdit, l’utopie est une société anti-individualiste et par conséquent communautariste, on ne travaille pas pour soi mais pour le bon fonctionnement de la société comme les Kutys qui travaillent avec une sollicitude commune pour l’intérêt commun. Mais ces utopies littéraires fonctionnent uniquement parce qu’elles n’existent pas, tout peut fonctionner dans un livre, mais la preuve que la réalité est confrontée à une fausse image est que les tentatives d’utopie telles que le national-socialisme ou bien le Stalinisme ont échoué et ont toutes mal fini.

L’utopie littéraire est une société imaginaire dans laquelle tout fonctionne, aussi bien le gouvernement que l’économie, et le peuple y est heureux. Mais elle est souvent comparée aux sociétés réelles malgré le fait qu’elle-même ne le soit pas, elle est basée sur des valeurs qu’il ne pourrait y avoir dans un vrai État, et elle est très souvent, au-delà les apparences, une société totalitariste, même si sa population en est comblée. Le caractère collégial est revendiqué dans beaucoup d’utopies, mais il a, à notre époque, une connotation dépréciative étant donné que nous vivons dans une société individualiste voire asociale.

Il peut encore arriver que l’écriture ne soit qu’un jeu avec les mots, qu’elle n’ait pas d’autre enjeu que de répondre à un désir ludique de l’écrivain, et qu’elle soit prioritairement pour lui, et par conséquent pour ses lecteurs, la source d’un plaisir communicatif. Les mots ne servent plus alors à communiquer une expérience unique, ni à produire du beau, ni à pénétrer dans le mystère des choses, ni à conférer de l’harmonie à la platitude de la vie quotidienne. Ils ne sont qu’un matériau sonore désacralisé, dont la manipulation ne requiert que de la dextérité de la part d’un écrivain dépourvu de toute autre ambition et qui ne court pas le risque de se prendre au sérieux.

Bibliographie

Tudor Arghezi, Tablete din Ţara de Kuty, Bucarest, Maison d’Edition  « Naţională Ciornei » S.A., 1933. 

Tudor Arghezi, Tablete de cronicar, prefaţă de D. Micu, Bucureşti, Editura de stat pentru literatură şi artă, 1960.

Constantin Amăriuţei, Mitică sau logosul parazitar, dans „Caiete de dor”, vol. II, Bucarest, Edition «  Jurnalul literar », 2002.

A.E.Baconski, Caragiale şi Arghezi,Caragialeana, „Viaţa românească”, XV, 1962, nr.6 (iunie), p. 221–222.

Ruxandra Cesereanu, Imaginarul violent al românilor, Bucarest, Edition Humanitas, 2003.

Genette Genette, Palimpsestes. La litérature au second degré, Paris, Edition du Seuil, 1982.

Dorina Grăsoiu, „Bătălia” Arghezi. Procesul istoric al receptării operei lui Tudor Arghezi, Cluj-Napoca, Edition Dacia, 1984.

Leo Kofler, Zur Theorie der modernen Literatur, Neuwied, Luchterhand, 2010.

Nicolae Manolescu, Istoria critică a literaturii române. 5 secole de literatură, Piteşti, Edition Paralela 45, 2008.

Marian Papahagi, Intertextualităţi caragialiene, în volumul Interpretări pe teme date, Bucureşti, Edition Didactică şi Pedagogică, p. 16–24, 1995.

Ion Vartic, Nenea Iancu şi filosoful de la Stagira, „Contemporanul”, nr. 6, 1987, p. 8–9.

Notes

Emilia Ivancu,
Université Adam Mickiewicz, Poznan, Pologne/
Université 1 Decembrie 1918, Alba Iulia, Roumanie
em.chandelier@gmail.com

Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’s Time

in the Novel The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

Abstract: Building on John Berger’s theory regarding the multiple ways of seeing constitutive of a contemporary work of art, the present paper aims to prove that, in the autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul (named after a painting of Georgio de Chirico’s, whose title was given in its turn by Apollinaire), the painting which stands at the centre of the novel is turned into a personal mirror of the narrator’s life. The painting is an illustration of the personal experience of the narrator as regards his relation to the newly discovered territories ofBritain, and the history of the place under the aesthetic experience of the painting and his memory’s time. Under the aesthetic experience of the painting and his memory’s time, the narrator’s life becomes in the end, a prolongation of his own experience of the painting, that is a self-projection onto it, which results in a delusionary experience of space and time, and thus of his own life.

Keywords: V. S. Naipaul; Mirror; Home(ly); the Other; Narrative.

‘To walk is to lack a place’[1] – this proposition expresses all the essence of V. S. Naipaul’s works, particularly of The Enigma of Arrival, a novel full of verbs and phrases denoting movement against a space not empty of meaning, on the contrary, but empty of warmth and shape, a space which could never become a place. Half autobiography, half a novel, The Enigma of Arrival revolves around the errand of a man who is trying really hard to make a connection with the territory he decides to turn into his dwelling place, but all his effort to feel the land, to feel the spirit of the place remains echoless and the shivers of solitude and homelessness become even more acute. The stranger who arrives inEngland comes with an imaginary map in his mind, an imaginary map which was supposed to become real. This imaginary map induced by the literary and historical works the character has fed himself with for years turns out to be cold and deserted, lacking the will to open to the eyes of the stranger except in a form of a decaying illusion, whose taste will turn bitter in the end:

The history I carried with me, together with the self-awareness that had come with my education and ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of glory dead; and in Englandhad given me the rawest stranger’s nerves. Now ironically – or aptly – living in the grounds of this shrunken estate, going out for my walks, those nerves were soothed, and in the wild garden and orchard beside the water meadows I found a physical beauty perfectly suited to my temperament and answering, besides, every good idea I could have had as a child in Trinidad, of the physical aspect of England.[2]

From the point of view of aspect, the stranger’s imaginary map overlaps with the geographical map, but the lands, decayed and under powerful industrial changes, stir emotions. The peaceful feeling at the beginning disappears, while moments of the personal past and of the historical past of Englandoverlap with the slowly but irreversibly changing lands. The text abounds both in chronicity and topology, in chronotopy. But even the multiple historical points which meet in the novel cannot make up for the desolation of being, cannot offer accommodation for the self, and under the dissolutive background of England, which resonates into the melancholic heart of the stranger, and which seems a journey through a painting, and consequently through another story.

The painting, which inspires the title of the novel itself, seems to be both a mirror of the stranger’s destiny, as it speaks about a meeting point between one and the Other. Before transmitting the message of its representation, the painting is first a symbol in itself through the function it has, that of representing, of creating a double of a reality it mirrors. On the other hand, Giorgio de Chirico’s painting is a painting of illusioned limits; it presents two identities, one who has just arrived and another one who discovers the mystery of the seashore, comprising the mystery of a journey, but also the mystery of one’s journey to the Other. Hence, the painting contains the dimensions of identity and alterity and the mystery one lives in the presence of the Other. The arrival is the ultimate end of a journey and Naipaul’s book is a book of a double journey: one is that of a Trinidadian to the East, to become a writer and the other is that of an uprooted person who is striving to find his roots in a land constructed by then only with illusions. The novel The Enigma of Arrival is a representation in frame, it is the personal meaning and experience of the mystery that man carries everywhere he should go:

I felt that in an indirect, poetical way the title referred to something in my own experience; […]. What was interesting about the painting itself, ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, was that – again because of the title – it changed in my memory. The original (or the reproduction in the ‘Little Library of Art’ booklet) was always a surprise. A classical scene, Mediterranean, ancient – Roman – or so I saw it. A wharf; in the background, beyond walls and gateways (like cut-outs), there is the top of the mast of an antique vessel; on an otherwise deserted street in the foreground there are two figures, both muffled, one perhaps the person who has arrived, the other perhaps a native of the port. The scene is of desolation and mystery: it speaks of the mystery of the arrival. It spoke to me of that, as it had spoken to Apollinaire.[3]

The narrator, whose writing is inspired by this painting, manifests the need to get out of himself and transfer to another reality that the painting brings. It is the need that the status of the migrant, which comprises both solitude and unsettlement, urges within with the aim of finding another identity in a limited space to make one’s home. It is the desolation and the mystery that spoke to the narrator from the painting and which mirrored the solitude expressed throughout the novel. The narrator’s identity is, in this way, shaped and coloured by the enigma of the arrival he himself experienced and recreated in his memory time and time again. Only that this meeting in reality never seems to take place and the result will be only a journey of solitude and self-reference, a walk with no place to attach to. The narrator can only identitfy this scenery he meets with the part in himself that spoke to the new location, to the new unhomely home. The narrator tries a transgression of identity, but what he actually accomplishes is an extreme feeling of alterity that the illusion produces. And the cleavage that appears rises from the very attempt of the stranger to adjust to the space he intends to make his home.

In his book Ways of Seeing, John Berger states that the visual arts have always existed within a social preserve, and this preserve was initially magical or sacred[4]. Thus the experience of art was the experience of the sacred, and art was consequently set apart from life so that it could maintain its influence upon it. Together with the arrival of modernism, art was deprived of its sacred, magical function, and became ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. In other words, it became part of the everyday life, and part of the everyday experience. As John Berger puts it, the images of art have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer in themselves have power. One consequence, I would argue, is that man creates and interprets art according to his or her own experience, sometimes even turning the object of art into a mirror in which he or she looks for himself or herself.

De Chirico’s painting, which inspires the novel The Enigma of Arrival, before conveying the message of its representation, is first a symbol in itself through the function it has, that of representing, of creating a double of the reality it mirrors. On the other hand, Giorgio de Chirico’s painting is a painting of illusioned limits; it presents two figures, one who just arrived and another one who discovers the mystery of the seashore, comprising the mystery of a journey, but also the mystery of one’s journey to the Other. Hence, the painting contains the dimensions of identity and alterity and the mystery one lives in the presence of the Other. The arrival is the ultimate end of a journey, and Naipaul’s book is a book of a double journey: one is that of a Trinidadian to the East, to become a writer, and the other is that of an uprooted person who is striving to find his roots in a land constructed up to then only of illusions. The novel The Enigma of Arrival is a frame representation, it is the personal meaning and experience of the mystery embedded in a person’s personality, and carried along inside, no matter where he might go.

The Narrator, whose writing starts from this painting, manifests the need of getting out of himself and relocating to another reality, created by the painting, thus confirming what Sanda Berce opines when analysing the work of art of the Norwegian artist Jeannet Christiansen: “The viewer [here the Narrator of The Enigma of Arrival and the viewer of de Chirico’s painting] sees oneself framed in history, a narrative of passed/past event. It sees oneself as another because such work can live only as a piece of memory and ‘narrative’ about the work as the trace of the recall.”[5]

It is the need implicit in the status of the migrant (which comprises both solitude and unsettlement) that urges the individual to find another identity in a limited space, to make his home. It is the desolation and the mystery that the narrator heard speaking from the painting, and which found an echo in his solitude expressed all over the novel. The Narrator’s identity is, in this way, shaped and coloured by the enigma of the arrival he himself experienced and recreated in his memory time and time again. It is this enigma of arrival that triggers off the frame of a story that will be repeated in both these books about memory several times. The summary of the story that the Narrator in The Enigma of Arrival offers is the following:

My story was to be set in classical times, in the Mediterranean. My narrator will write plainly, without any attempt at period style or historical explanation of this period. He would arrive – for a reason I had not yet worked out – at the classical port with the walls and gateways like cut-outs. He would walk past that muffled figure on the quayside. He would move from that silence and desolation, that blankness, to a gateway or door. He would enter there and be swallowed by the life and noise of a crowded city (I imagined something like an Indian bazaar scene). The mission he had come on – family business, study, religious initiation – would give him encounters and adventures. He would enter interiors, of houses and temples. Gradually there would come to him a feeling that he was getting nowhere; he would lose his sense of mission; he would begin to know only that he was lost. His feeling of adventure would give way to panic. He would want to escape, to get back to the quayside and his ship. But he wouldn’t know how. I imagine some religious ritual in which, led on by kindly people, he would unwittingly take part and find himself the intended victim. At the movement of crisis he would come upon a door, open it, and find himself back on the quayside of arrival. He has been saved; the world was as he remembered it. Only one thing is missing now. Above the cut-out walls and buildings there is no mast, no sail. The antique ship was gone. The traveller has lived out his life.[6]

The story summarised here definitely contains the mystery which surrounds de Chirico’s painting. The Narrator, who is in the end the character of this short story, upon his arrival on the island, will start writing (and we do not know what exactly he will write about). Meanwhile, all his feelings turn into fear, all his life will be lived, the ship which brought him will be gone as the ship will be his beginning, and his end will mean facing the life he has lived, the journey he has made. This will now remain encompassed only in his memory and the narrative that he himself creates in his mind through memory. The most curious thing is that this story created by the Narrator in The Enigma of Arrival is the same story that will later be woven into one of Naipaul’s novels, Half a Life, the story of Willie, who arrives in the heart of Africa at his wife’s family, and realises it is not his life he lives, but another life, that he is a stranger to himself and wants to leave:

[…] Willie was trying to deal with the knowledge that had come to him on the ship that his home language had almost gone, that his English was going, that he had no proper language left, no gift of expression. […] But all this while Willie felt there was another self inside him, in a silent space where all his external life was muffled.[7]

The same narrative frame is to be found in New Clothes. Here the character is a nameless Narrator who is taking a trip into the heart of a country like Guyana on a mission, ‘a carrier of a mischief’. He meets aboriginal people on the island, and feels proud of himself and initially analyses the people and places with detachment. However, after some time, his feelings turn into despair and a sense of meaningless, just like those of the Narrator in the story inspired by The Enigma of Arrival. While accompanied by two local boys as his guides on the way, he starts feeling as follows:

The march begins. The Narrator is no longer at ease, no longer the man he had been. The path moves away from the upland river to the forest. Such beauty there; but something of the safety and wholeness of the previous has left the narrator. Something nags; he never has to search far for reason. As often as he rejects it, as often as he applies his mind to it, unease returns, to come between him and the moment; and below all of this now, and adding to his agitation, there is the idea of his cause, the starting point of the journey. […] He begins to feel, too, that the journey is lasting too long. […] he begins to wonder – at first in a light-headed way, and as though the idea is quite absurd – what would happen if he were to withdraw from what he has undertaken to do.[8]

As we can see, the discourse is similarly constructed, echoing the same sense of loss, the same strangeness, the same sense of not belonging. All these are equally present in the structure of The Enigma of Arrival, the narrative which recounts the story of the Narrator’s (and Naipaul’s) arrival inEngland in order to become a writer:

And it did not occur to me that the story of ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ – a sunlit sea journey ending in a dangerous classical city – which had come to me as a kind of release from the creative rigours and the darkness of my own African story, it did not occur to me that the Mediterranean story was no more than a version of the story I was already writing. [Half a Life][…] So that again, years after I had seen the Chirico picture and the idea for the story had come to me, again, in my own life, was another version of the story of ‘The Enigma of Arrival’.[9]

Painting with V. S. Naipaul, as in The Enigma of Arrival, is a duplication of reality, yet it is not part of the world itself, it is not born in the novel, as a manifestation and thus healing means of the selves of those involved, but appears as an aesthetic object and remains so.

In the book Ways of Seeing, John Berger gives an example in which the view on a painting can be mediated by words and thus the meaning is conveyed through the prism of those words: first we are shown a painting by Van Gogh, entitled Wheatfield with Crows, and on the next page, the same painting sports the following handwritten commentary below it: ‘This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.’[10] Then we are shown how the words influence the way we see the painting, as now ‘the image illustrates the sentence’[11], showing the fact that when we look, ‘We never look at just one thing: we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves’[12] , in this case we relate rather to the knowledge of the fact that the painting was Van Gogh’s last painting before he died. In the same manner, for the narrator in The Enigma of Arrival, the function of De Chirico’s painting is that of illustrating the title it bears – a title added to it by Apollinaire – and the relation he has with the painting, but through the filter of the title and the echo thus created in his mind.

Hence for Naipaul’s narrator, the painting is regarded aesthetically and thus becomes objectified, implying a distance of observation in the relation with the object of art. The narrator can find himself in the painting, yet, there is no direct, organic relationship between him and the painting. In The Enigma of Arrival, the title overlaps the painting itself and is stronger than the message that the painting might have without its title, in this case, the self of the narrator being projected onto the canvas with the desire to see his own experience as reflected on it. Yet, because the meaning is induced, the painting and thus the image itself are barred from continuing to be creative in their own way, the title preventing this, and also the viewer from working on all its other possible meanings. Moreover, when looking at an image, either painted or photographed, the paradox springing from it is, as in the case of a mirror, that it shows the absence of the represented object while bringing it for observance. This is why in the case of Naipaul, the painting accentuates or is a ghostly sign of something that maybe once was or that he wishes it was but is not there (anymore). As compared to the mirror which shows something that is present in its front, as a mirror shows only as long as something is there, the painting or the photograph, though more creative in their potential are the sign of something or somebody that is absent. Through this very function, the reality it projects and the echo of this reality upon the viewer is a prismatic one, but prismatic in the sense of ectoplasmic, a presence that is absent or an absence that is absent. Consequently, the narrator in The Enigma of Arrival looks at the painting through the filter of its title, thus the painting conveying its meaning as disembodied in a way from its possible initial intention and its potential of future meaning revelation, and in consequence the narrator sees in the painting the relation between his own past experience and the possible interpretation offered by the title accompanying it. In this case, the relation between the viewer, in our case, the narrator and the object if his gaze is one which reflects in a rather selfish way the feeling inside him projected on the canvas in this manner. The image projected is ectoplasmic because it does not speak of the painting itself but of a ghostly, lonely feeling the narrator has when looking at the painting, where, unconsciously, he can actually see himself. In this case, the narrator transforms the painting into a mirror, but a false mirror, in the attempt of the viewer to re-establish a connection with his own past. The mystery he can find in it is the mystery of a reconnected past situation, that of his arrival, changed into an object of reflection and forced upon the painting to acquire the attributes of a mirror, which is specular and spectral, but on account of its fake nature, producing ectoplasmic images.

Consequently, the painting which stands at the centre of the novel in order to illustrate the personal experience of the narrator as regards his relation to the newly discovered territories of Britain, and the history of the place is turned into a personal mirror of the narrator’s life. His life becomes in the end, under the aesthetic experience of the painting and his memory’s time a prolongation of his own experience of the painting, that is a self-projection onto the painting, whose result is a delusionary experience of space and time themselves, and thus of his own life. Time and space in the novel are insoluble as is the narrator’s experience of the painting, and consequently his own life, and the novel proves in the end John Berger’s statement that ‘We never look at just one thing: we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves’.[13]

References

Berce, Sanda, Explorations in the hermeneutics of vision: The rhetoric of modernity (Dialogue, difference and the Other) in

http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/getdocument.aspx?logid=5&id=40D98CFF-876A-4E47-AE6B-43AD038A326C, retrieved on March, 22^nd, 2008.

Berger, John et al., Ways of Seeing (Based on theBBC television series with John Berger, London, British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972, p. 32.

Naipaul, V. S., The Enigma of Arrival, London, Penguin Books, 1987.

Naipaul, V. S., Half a Life,London,Basingstoke andOxford, Picador, 2001.

Naipaul, V. S., A Way in the World,London, Heinemann, 1994.

Sharp, Joanne P., A Topology of ’Post’ Nationality: (Re)mapping Identity in The Satanic Verses, ‘Cultural Geographies’, 1994; 1.

Notes

Grazia Sumeli Weinberg
University of South Africa,Pretoria,South Africa
sumeli@mweb.co.za

Cesare Pavese’s ‘Honest Illusion’:

Creating a Personal Myth

Abstract: Among the most influential Italian writers of the 20^th Century, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) had to come to terms with fascism, social disintegration and indeed, the sense of alienation derived from these.  By directing his search for ‘sufficient wholeness’ towards a dimension which he himself called ‘mythic’, and through the creation of a personal mythology, Pavese sought to  bridge the gap between the general and the particular, the past and the present, external and internal experience. His contact with this mythical dimension takes place through the representation of a cluster of ‘fantastic associations’ between the adult present and childhood recollections which in his view have marked his destiny as a man.  To this end he adopts Giambattista Vico’s concept of ‘imaginative universals’ and of myths as pre-rational forms of the mind whereby mythical thought inverts the construction of the real and transposes metaphorically on the outside what is inaccessible to the individual within.

Keywords: Myth; the Irrational; Illusion; Imagination; Fantastic Associations.

Cesare Pavese, poet, novelist, intellectual and translator, is unquestionably regarded as one of Italy’s foremost men of letters in the 20^th Century. Born in 1908 in the north-west province of Piedmont, Pavese spent his early years on his father’s farm in an idyllic environment among the rolling hills of Le langhe, south ofTurin.  As a child, Pavese’s natural reserve and his preference for solitude were enhanced by his love for books and his fascination with unfettered ramblings into the countryside.  Throughout his career as a writer, Pavese was to juxtapose the rural and the urban as two opposing ends of nature and culture.  Unhappy with both his personal life and the political climate of postwarItaly, he committed suicide in 1950 at the age of 42 and at the height of his literary career.

Critics are in agreement, when discussing Cesare Pavese’s works, that there is an intimate association between his life and his art. Indeed, the most autobiographical of all his writings, the entries registered in his diaries, Il mestiere di vivere, are imbued with a sense of loss, of meaninglessness and anguish which urge the author to look inwardly and to translate his malaise artistically onto the page. “Poetry”, which marks as most authentic the lyric-elegiac nature of his inspiration, “is not a feeling but a state, not an understanding but a being”, says Pavese[1].  Literature is thus for the author a metaphorical screen for his own existential condition through which he sought a resolution for his internal conflicts. It is perhaps this self-conscious attitude of Pavese towards his art, his painstaking search for symbolism and myth, which has led critics to describe his works as decadent, that is, confined within the narrow limits of personal concerns rather than affirming shared values. However, opinions abound, often contradictorily, in regard to Pavese’s literary output. Novels such as Il compagno (The Comrade) written in 1947 and La casa in collina (The House on the Hill) in 1948 have, for example, been called neo-realistic for their social and political commitment to an ideological cause in times of instability. Pavese has also earned himself the label as a modernist writer for breaking with the Italian literary past and for flouting of conventions. He adopted, instead, the styles of American writers, especially Whitman and Melville, whom he saw not only as literary models, but guides to ways of living that he did not find in his immediate surroundings which exposed him to the incurable contradictions of modern man in a disaffected society. Nonetheless, whichever stance one might wish to take in his regard, Pavese’s work remains complex and richly suggestive.

All his life Pavese lived in conscious isolation, seen by him as the proper status of the artist. It is this mania for solitude, his awareness of the fragmentation of his own subjectivity, exacerbated by the destruction brought about by war, and his deep affection for the countryside of his birth that leads Pavese to explore his childhood memories in an attempt to affirm the self. There is in Pavese a nostalgic feeling for the earth, for the primeval, and a yearning for a return to the origins wherein to regain wholeness of being. “Life”, according to him, “is not a search for experiences, but of one self. Having once discovered the fundamental layer of being one realizes that it coincides with one’s own destiny and peace is restored[2]”. The images and places of his childhood thus become mythical motifs of his fiction in which the atemporal, cyclical time of nature is opposed to the linear time of man and of history. Pavese explains his mission as an artist: “For every writer mythical is that central image, distinct in its configuration, to which his imagination keeps returning and which has the power to arouse him … This image is mythical because the writer looks upon it as something unique that symbolizes his whole experience[3]”. Thus myth, for Pavese, is associated with distinct recurrences of childhood impressions which keep on resurfacing in adult life and which, in his view, have become an elemental feature of his inner being. In his view, because these central images forge our destinies, the road to self-knowledge, therefore, is to identify and to clarify these constitutive myths. Life and art become inextricably linked for Pavese: “Modern art – if it has any value – is a return to childhood. The enduring motive of art is the discovery of things, a discovery that can take place in its most pure form only in the memories of one’s childhood[4]”. Pavese draws his only true inspiration from the conviction that his myth theory is a sound formula for penetrating the unknown and that art is the means by which he can begin his journey towards the reconstitution of his own identity.

Literary art because of the nature of language, as Pavese was well aware, creates illusions which nonetheless allow the artist to engage in an imaginative play capable of representing the virtual and the possible. If the mythical time of childhood is attainable only through the insubstantial means of memory, that is, through the fleeting grasp of an elusive image, then words have the power to bring to the surface that which by its very nature would remain hidden, incomprehensible. The task ahead of him is challenging and Pavese in his diary reflects on the ephemeral relationship between memories of one’s origins and art, between his own inner self and the means of expressing it:

When one speaks of poetry as rhythm and not as copy, one intends to define its nature. That is why the poetry we write tries to eliminate objects as much as possible. Our poetry tends to impose itself as object, as substance of words. … Our style becomes chaste and bare, finding its rhythm in something more secret than the voice of things…[5].

Further down the page, Pavese, a reader of Freud, clarifies what he means by ‘something more secret’:

Subconscious life. The work one manages to produce is always something other. You keep going, moving from one thing to another, and the deeper “I” always remains intact; if it appears weary, it is because of the effort that shakes and confuses it like murky water, but then it clears up and returns, ambiguous, reappearing unchanged at the bottom. There is no way of bringing it to the surface; the surface is simply and always a play of reflections of other things[6].

It is in this sense that Pavese’s literary endeavours echo Nietzsche’s view, when speaking of artists as ‘free spirits’, that art is honest in its use of illusion. Art or the artist, as Nadeem Hussain in his article on Nietzsche puts it, “understands that its illusions are illusions without the illusions themselves being undermined (2007: p. 165)[7]”. Despite the obscurity of the object of his search, Pavese also understands that his art is a “non-delusive illusion” in that, through its power of evocation, it is able to offer to both reader and author the possibility of imaginatively and emotionally living through an experience that can “achieve truth by correspondence to some possible world” (Walsh, 1983: p. 56).

Pavese, moreover, owes the richness of his artistic vision to the assumptions adopted by eighteenth-century Italian linguist and philosopher, Giambattista Vico, that scientific inquiry, the so-called rational pursuit of full knowledge, defines as illusions all phenomena which cannot be expressed logically or mathematically, and thus excludes them as irrelevant. For Vico, on the other hand, the limitation of scientific thinking, and hence its drawback, precludes the notion of ‘imaginative universals’, of those sensed images which first shaped men’s thoughts. These images, according to Vico, are pre-rational forms of awareness and are manifest primarily in fable, myth, figurative language, specifically metaphors, and religion. Mythical thought, moreover, inverts the construction of the real and transposes metaphorically on the outside what is inaccessible to the individual within.  Pavese’s ‘discovery-memories’ (‘scoperte-ricordo’)[8] of his childhood experiences relate to this primitive awareness of the individual and of the irrational forces which permeate his being:

That our memories hide their head signifies that that they draw from the sphere of the instinctive and the irrational. In this sphere – of being and of ecstasy – there is no before and after, a second and a first time because time does not exist. What lies therein, just is: here the instant is equivalent to the eternal, the absolute.[9]

It is upon this premise based on the atemporality of mythical time that Pavese can build and create new and abstract concepts that will lead him to the discovery of a different mind-space. “The irrational”, he states, “is the enormous rèservoir of the spirit, as myths are of nations[10] ”.

Pavese’s mythical imaginings based on the irrational in his narrative works reveal an animistic perception of nature in which he encounters Dionysian chaos, il selvaggio (the untamed), as he comes to call it. Nature, at its wildest, is inhuman, cruel and brutal, but, as the only path to self-discovery, the untamed is beguiling because it “means mystery, open possibility[11]”. Like Nietzsche before him, Pavese delves into modern man’s predicament by pitting the rational forces against the irrational, the Apollonian against the Dionysian or, as he prefers to define these contrasting features of the mind, the Olympian against the Titanic.  In his writings the illusive landscape of his childhood wherein one finds the primitive, the unspeakable and the unnameable is juxtaposed with life in an urban environment subject to history, to progression, maturity and responsibility. Ironically, ever conscious of his own position, Pavese is faced with the challenge of having to unravel these contrasting inner forces in order to achieve his goal towards self-discovery. “You exalt order by describing disorder”, he wryly muses over the course upon which he has chosen to embark[12].  

At first, Pavese’s endorsement of Vichian tenets of ‘imaginative universals’ enables him to construct his own mythology set chiefly in his narrative works and poetry in a regional and contemporary milieu. With the composition of Dialogues with Leucò, however, the action takes place within the timeless frame of the Greek myths understood, in this case, as repository of a common consciousness.  Published in 1947, the Dialogues include twenty seven short sketches which aim at distilling the contents of his existential myth and at amplifying its symbols. Indeed, most of the titles of these sketches bear a relation to familiar childhood images: ‘the cloud’, ‘the horses’, ‘the flower’, ‘the wild beast’, ‘the road’, ‘the cliff’, ‘the vineyard’, ‘the mother’ and so forth, and linked to themes like love, failure, daring, suffering, sex, death and destiny. In order to achieve an objective correspondence with the personal, Pavese in each chapter uses dramatic dialogue involving two protagonists, figures of classical culture and mythology, who dispute matters concerning man and the actions of the gods. These figures in turn, by becoming projections of the mind, represent opposing views: the voice of reason on the one hand and the imaginative configuration of the irrational on the other. This opposition, as mentioned earlier, is further reflected in the division of the ancient Gods who people the Dialogues, those of the old order, the Titans, who exemplify chaos or the untamed and who belong to the area of the undetermined, and those gods of the new dispensation, the Apollonians, bearers of the law and order.

The dichotomous alignment of the Gods emblematized in the Dialogues reveals a further dimension if related to modern theories on the construction of the subject. In formulating the structure of the psyche Jacques Lacan defines three orders, the Real the Imaginary and the Symbolic (Lacan 1977). These three orders exemplify the development of the subject from a state of undifferentiated oneness with nature, through its identification with the image of the other in the mirror stage, to the entrance into the social world of linguistic communication and of the law and rational power. Moreover, entrance into language marks the subject’s irrevocable separation from the ‘real’, area of the unconscious and of the repressed, and is characterized by a sense of loss or lack. For Lacan, the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic results in a split subject.  In other words, and this is evidenced in Pavese’s quest, if the entrance of the subject into the symbolic is based on renunciation or repression of anything that threatens unity of identity, then unity, in this sense, is lived ambiguously. On the one hand, as idealized consciousness or sublimation of the real the subject is unstable because founded primarily on a linguistic construct. On the other, as lack or loss it is the source from which desire for wholeness erupts.

Linguist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, in discussing the mechanism of the process of signification, revisits Lacanian categories by advancing the concept of a dynamic subject. She proposes a subject situated in the symbolic, a speaking subject to be more precise, that is visited by drives and signs anterior to the phenomenon of language. Accordingly, she distinguishes between two modes of signification which influence the subject: the symbolic and the semiotic (Kristeva 1984: p. 26). While the symbolic which governs subjective unity is the space of representation, defined as the area of the paternal, the semiotic represents the pre-verbal state, the maternal. The semiotic is therefore that anarchic flux linked to emotional and bodily rhythms of language that precedes and goes beyond symbolization. The semiotic, moreover, is evidenced when language is receptive to pulsional shocks causing a breakdown in logic. As such, language, especially poetic language, from the standpoint of deconstruction of meaning, is a revolutionary force capable of destroying the existing order. For Kristeva, it is the task of the great artist to make manifest the dialectical relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic and to expatiate fully on the point of rupture between these two modalities.

Pavese’s adherence in his Dialogues with Leucò to both Lacanian and Kristevan thinking is attested in the explanatory function he gives to these two opposing forces, the semiotic and the symbolic:

Cronus was monstrous but he ruled over the golden age. His defeat gave birth to Hades (Tartarus), theIslandsof the Blessed /Elysium andOlympus, unhappiness and happiness set against each other and institutionalized.

The Titanic era (monstrous and golden) is that of undifferentiated men-monsters-gods. You always regard reality as Titanic, that is, as human-divine chaos (= monstruous) which is the ongoing form of life. You present the Olympian gods as superior, happy, detached, as the spoilsports of this humanity, upon which even the Olympians bestow favours out of Titanic nostalgia, or a whim, or out of pity deeply rooted in that time[13].

Moreover, the Olympians “Are not the source of life nor its end. … They are not one with life which can be found in the beasts, in the currents, in the woods as well as man[14]”.  Pavese is thus sensitive to the split which exists in his vision of the ‘real’, and is reliant on his passion for his art to make him receptive to the creative potential of his medium as an aid to unravel the many riddles with which his personal quest is imbued:  

The interest of a writer in his work – but also of those who understand it –is to see it taking shape amid opposing trends, to formulate and incorporate these trends, to give them a formal direction – and the highest form of contrast is between the unconscious and the conscious… [15]

However, what in fact faces Pavese in his writings is not only to experiment with the limitations of language itself, but with the limitations of his own consciousness, for his is a journey beyond the control of reason and into a world peopled by monstrous presences which threaten the very boundaries of his own identity, shattering the status of the “I” as subject. The experience fills him with awe and abhorrence: “It is necessary that each one of us descends once into his own Hell. The orgy of my destiny has ended up in Hades[16]”. As the place of the irrational, of mystery, and paradoxically of illumination, Hades presupposes the inexorable goal that he must reach to achieve self revelation: “the only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, take its measure and descend into it[17]”. The task of the writer, therefore, he ends by declaring, is “the attempt to look into the vortex of the myth that draws him in”, to penetrate and preserve it and “reduce it to clarity[18]”.

            Clarity, however, is the prerogative of a certitude firmly anchored in a systematized though constructed vision of the real, that is, in the institutionalized setting of the symbolic order. The world presented in the Dialogues, on the other hand, which also hosts the Titans is hostile and elusive. Nevertheless, the motive for the journey into unknown territory, however arduous, remains a firm commitment as Pavese himself admits in a letter to a friend: “Certainly the meaning of this tangle that the Dialogues represents also for me lies in the search of human autonomy[19]”. By placing the emphasis on ‘human autonomy’, with its open allusion to the Kantian precepts of sensibility, understanding and reason, Pavese is convinced that he will succeed in his mission to disclose what lies behind a life driven to capture all that is other. However, by challenging the constraints of language itself to represent the unnameable and by making this effort an integral part of his personal quest, Pavese exposes the fragility of purpose inherent in his undertaking. Human endeavour and artistic vision, that is, life and art, collapse into one and thereby lending a tragic dimension to the task that he has set before him. Yet, it is this heroic yearning of man, his venturing into untrodden paths, which dominates the artist’s mind above all else:

Since it is their demonic nature that, while they captivate one with their uniqueness, with an irreducible absolute, these myths, which ask to be believed…, disturb one’s conscience like an important word that is half remembered, and they engage all the energy of the spirit so that they can be illuminated, defined and possessed in their entirety[20]. 

            The irruption of the semiotic into the symbolic in the works of Pavese is underscored by the dilemma and the anguish registered by the individual when confronting the uncanny. According to Freud (2003) the uncanny refers to a happening or event which provokes an experience of dread[21]. This uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed. Freud, moreover, traces the roots of the uncanny to a disturbing event experienced in childhood associated with the development of the subject, but which, despite its being repressed, surfaces repeatedly to consciousness and acquires fantastically the consistency of material reality. This is true in the case of Pavese’s obsession with his childhood memories. Yet in his drive to bring to light his own myth, he cannot escape the ‘demonic nature’ of its contents. The cause of the unsettling experience, as he shows in the Dialogues, is the monstrous actions of the gods enacted, it appears, by an alien will. Their violent, bloody and hard-hearted deeds inflicted upon humans originate from an unknown source and yield no reasonable explanation.  As emblem of the untamed, this will, embodied by the gods, mirrors nature’s indifference towards man, its arbritariness, as well as its dual power of creating and destroying. Pavese reflects upon these phenomena at their point of convergence in his own art: “Nature, impassive, celebrates a ritual; man, impassive and moved, celebrates his most frightening rituals[22]”.        

If repetition is a distinct property of the uncanny, the other is the double. For Freud, the theme of the double is an invention of the psyche which, in order to ward off the annihilation of the “I” caused by the frightful encounter with the ineffable, considers the object under scrutiny as not part of the self, as a “not I”.  In Pavese’s work, moreover, the forms of the double serve as an artistic device to defamiliarize and objectivise the split that has taken place in the speaking subject now penetrated by strange and ambiguous impulses. The impersonal and monstrous gods in his Dialogues, he muses, have thus become a projection of the other: “The gods for you are the others, the self-sufficient and sovereign individuals, seen from the outside[23]”. The gods, therefore, become reifications of his myth. While the outcome of this exercise on the personal level is to give way to the ecstatic expression of his deeper being and to the liberating discovery of the diverse, on the artistic level, the reconfiguring these internal rhythms finds its justification in the cognitive process itself. It is by considering the dual functions of the personal and artistic that Pavese has assigned himself in his work that the full meaning of the title Dialogues with Leucò is revealed. Leucò, from the Greek leukos, white, is short for Leucothea, also known as the ‘white goddess’, sea nymph of consolation and patron of shipwrecks. But white is also the blank page which the artist fills with his pen.

Despite the fact that unity of language in the Dialogues is constantly broken down, that it is on the surface beyond the reach of logic and reason, Pavese’s persistence to represent the unsaid through the medium of art as the only form of expression capable of capturing the ineffable, is nonetheless an attempt on his part to tap, in Lacanian terms, into the ‘impossible real’ (Lacan 1977). In concrete terms, however, what Pavese recaptures on the page in creating his own myth can only present itself, according to Kristeva, as a “flash”, as “interrupted visions, metaphors of the invisible” (1986: p. 162). The mystery, the secret of his own inner life can never quite reveal itself.  Indeed, by its very nature it cannot ever reveal itself as Pavese himself acknowledges: “You would not be a mortal if you knew your own destiny. But then you live in the world of the gods. And the gods have also taken this away from you. You know nothing and yet you have done everything[24]”. By measuring himself against the will of the gods, Pavese becomes aware of those aspects of our being which remain unpredictable, for it is they, the gods, and not he who ultimately shape the destiny of man. Pavese is thus confronted by the painful recognition of life’s contingency and by the knowledge that the fullness of his own being can never be attained.

If Pavese’s journey into the abyss has opened the door into a void, it has, nonetheless, offered the reader a rich account of his courage and of his acceptance that “the untamed is not picturesque but tragic[25]”.  He has shown, moreover, that when dealing with one’s intimate life, ‘human autonomy’ is a mere illusion born from overbearing pride for, despite the claims of reason, there is no certainty. There is no reconciliation between the symbolic and the semiotic. Man is unknown to himself and alone he has to struggle against his isolation and the spectre of meaninglessness. To explain Pavese’s state of mind it is best to turn to one of his famous dialogue ‘The Wild Beast’ (‘La belva’) in which Endymion, the shepherd, is visited by Artemis while sleeping under the moonlight and falls under the spell of her eyes. Upon waking Endymion begs Zeus to let him sleep eternally making him immortal and forever united with the goddess under her magic charm.  Pavese, on the other hand, inverts Endymion’s seductive dream into a nightmarish vision because his Artemis, with huge transparent eyes, the virgin of the hunt, mistress of wildlife and vegetation, giver and destroyer of life, is unmoved by love. She is the lady of wild beasts who tears apart the flesh of men and whose mere presence fills him with terror. Her scorching gaze makes her untouchable and forbidding, haunting Endymion who henceforth can find no peace in sleep and for whom daily life becomes an extension of the night’s restless fight against sleep.  When recounting his nocturnal encounter with Artemis, it is clear that the experience has sealed forever the fate of Endymion/Pavese:

“When the light came – a livid, veiled light – I looked down on the plain, on this road where we’re walking now, and I knew that my home was no longer among men. I was no longer one of them. I was waiting for the night.” (Dialoghi con Leucò 1947 : p. 41) The ambiguity between magic sleep and restless wake is the same ambiguity that exists between desire for physical contact and the impossibility of any contact. Ultimately, Pavese, like Endymion, is pursued by his own fate and tragically by his own volition to wait for the night.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Pavese, C. (1952, 2^nd ed.). Il mestiere di vivere.Torino: Einaudi.

–          (1947, 2^nd ed.). Dialoghi con Leucò.Torino: Einaudi.

–     (1966 2^nd ed.). Lettere.Torino: Einaudi, 2 vol.

–     (1952). Saggi letterari. Torino: Einaudi.

Secondary Sources

Hussain, Nadeem J.Z., (2007). Honest Illusion:Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits. In B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (Eds), Nietzsche and Morality (pp.157-191).Oxford: Claredon Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1955) The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII. Edited by James Strachey.London: Hogarth Press, p. 217-256.

Kristeva, Julia (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated from the French by Margaret Waller.New York:Columbia U.P.

Kristeva, Julia (1986) Stabat Mater, in The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi.New York:Columbia U.P.

Lacan, Jacques (1977) Ècrits: a Selection.  Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan.  London: Tavistock Publications.

Mondo, Lorenzo (2006). Quell’antico ragazzo. Vita di Cesare Pavese.  Milano: Rizzoli.

Vico, Giambattista. (1977). La scienza nuova, Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, Vol.IV [1744].

Karen Ferreira-Meyers
Université de Swaziland
karenferreirameyers@gmail.com

Autofiction: “imaginaire” and reality, an interesting mix leading to the illusion of a genre?

Abstract: Serge Doubrovsky, author and literary critic, coined the term “autofiction” in 1977 to refer to the type of fiction in which reality and the imaginaire are intertwined. Other writers and thinkers have written about ‘circonfession’ (Jacques Derrida), ‘automythobiographie’ (Claude Louis-Combet), fiction-bilan (Poirot-Delpech), roman-miroir (H. Juin), bi-autographie (Bellman-Noël), prose de mémoire (Jacques Roubaud). Little did Doubrovsky know that the neologism he had marketed would take flight in various directions, at times the fictional being integrated as dominant, at other times, the reality. This article intends to clarify certain theoretical assumptions with regard to autofiction while counterbalancing the theory with practical examples from francophone 20^th and 21^st century literature.

Keywords: Amélie Nothomb; Autofiction; Imaginaire; 20^th and 21^st century Feminine Literature; Literary Genre.

Introduction

Theoretical assumptions of autofiction

The word “autofiction” was officially coined in 1977 by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his novel Fils (Threads/Son). Doubrovsky imagined a genre between fiction and autobiography in which the author, protagonist, and narrator share one identity. He explained the idea on the back cover of Fils:

Autobiographie ? Non, c’est un privilège réservé aux importants de ce monde, au soir de leur vie, et dans un beau style. Fiction, d’évènements et de faits strictement réels ; si l’on veut autofiction, d’avoir confié le langage d’une aventure à l’aventure d’un langage en liberté, hors sagesse et hors syntaxe du roman, traditionnel ou nouveau. Rencontres, fils de mots, allitérations, assonances, dissonances, écriture d’avant ou d’après littérature, concrète, comme on dit musique.

Autobiography? No, that is a privilege reserved for the important people of this world, at the end of their lives, in a refined style. Fiction, of strictly real events and facts; autofiction, if you will; to have entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside of the wisdom and the syntax of the novel, traditional or new. Interactions, threads of words, alliterations, assonances, dissonances, writing before or after literature, concrete, as we say, music.

Doubrovsky’s description of the differences between autobiography and autofiction has inspired debate among literary critics, journalists, and authors inFranceover the past three decades. Many have questioned whether autofiction is in fact different from autobiography, criticizing Doubrovsky’s assertion that autobiography is “reserved for the important people of this world”. Nevertheless, “Fiction, of strictly real events and facts” has become the working definition of autofiction, and the “adventure of language” has come to describe its innovative style. Literary critic and prolific author, Doubrovsky defines his term further: according to him autofiction is

un rêve à la place je mets QUOI a book bien sûr substitut c’est pas le produit d’origine c’est pas du vrai c’est de l’ersatz […] mais un livre c’est jamais RÉEL c’est comme un rêve m’inscrire en livre c’est m’inscrire EN FAUX même si c’est vrai vie qu’on raconte c’est qu’une fiction […] ON Y CROIT ça dit VRAI mais EN FABLE (Doubrovsky 1977 fº1645).

A dream instead I put WHAT a book of course substitute it’s not the original product it’s not real its ersatz (…) but a book is never REAL it’s like a dream to write myself into a book it’s to write myself IN FALSE even if it’s true life we tell it’s only fiction (…) ONE BELIEVES IT SAYS TRUE BUT AS A FABLE

However, the definition also invites further interpretation. It is a paradoxical, complicated explanation of a genre that continues to elude classification. Similarly, other attempts to define autofiction often avoid forming strict boundaries for the genre. Autofiction.org, for instance, defines the genre as:

Notion subtile à définir, liée au refus qu’un auteur manifeste à l’égard de l’autobiographie, du roman à clés, des contraintes ou des leurres de la transparence, elle s’enrichit de ses extensions multiples tout en résistant solidement aux attaques incessantes dont elle fait l’objet. Elle vient en effet poser des questions troublantes à la littérature, faisant vaciller les notions mêmes de réalité, de vérité, de sincérité, de fiction, creusant de galeries inattendues le champ de la mémoire.

Subtle notion to define, tied to the author’s apparent refusal of the autobiography, roman à clés, of the constraints or delusions of transparency, enriched by its many extensions all while solidly resisting the incessant attacks of which it is the object. It comes from posing questions that challenge literature, shaking notions of reality, truth, sincerity, fiction, plowing through the unattended galleries in the field of memory.

Autofiction.org features articles that discuss the genre, specific works of autofiction, and contemporary French authors. The site’s editors call attention to the multifaceted nature of autofiction, its indefinable qualities, and its task of resisting preconceived notions of how to narrate “reality, truth, sincerity, fiction”.

Gasparini (2008) summarizes the criteria Doubrovsky articulates to determine whether a text is autofictional or not: there has to be onomastic identity of the author and hero-narrator as well as the subtitle “novel”. The narrative itself is of primary importance while the author is in pursuit of an “original form”. The writing aims to “immediately articulate” and there is therefore often a reconfiguration of linear time (through selection, intensification, stratification, fragmentation, disorientation). The present tense is used widely in an effort to only tell “strictly real facts and events” and this is linked to the urge to “reveal one’s self truly”. The writing style as a whole can be seen as a strategy that aims to require active engagement from the reader.

The term autofiction was able to translate and crystallise the numerous doubts which since the beginning of the 20th century notions such has subject, identity, truth, sincerity, writing of the Self had brought about. So finding out whether the new concept was able to do all that, and bring autobiography into a new era remains important.

Without going into details of historical-literary concept of autofiction – other critics have done that[1], the concept has to be inserted in the overall context of post-modernity. Autofiction is seen by Doubrovsky (2007) and Genon (2007) as the “renaissance of postmodern autobiographical writing” in that it problematizes the authorial “I”. The subject, as exposed by autofiction, is, according to Genon (cited by Gasparini 2008: p. 274), “a fragmented and piecemeal subject, deconstructed even in its construction, asserting and putting pieces in one movement”. For Linda Hutcheon (1988: p. 3-21), the postmodern novel is characterized by its challenge to the act of writing, its intertextuality and its delirious style of parody. The tendency “to irrepressible fictionalization” is, in the postmodern era, “consubstantial with writing in general and writing the self in particular” (Gasparini, 2008: p. 214). Autofiction shares many characteristics with postmodern writing. Lyotard (1979) speaks of the postmodern condition determined by the development of individualism, the process of personalization (Lipovetsky 1983, Lasch, 1979) related to aesthetics “of the second degree based on the pastiche, the fragment, the formal game, media communication and exhibitionistic narcissism” (Jameson, 1991 and 1998, cited by Gasparini, 2008: p. 219). Postmodern writing is constantly in search of its own rules and categories and will be anchored in a moment in history as “of ephemeral validity” (ibid.: p. 221).Autofiction is not merely self-centered, egocentric, exhibitionist, narcissistic, writing with petty-bourgeois horizons as many critics state. As I will show here, autofiction, in its efforts to search for identity, allows authors, actually requires them, to go to the Other, to find the Other in the Self and so change its Self.

Not terra incognita as it was when Vincent Colonna started his1989 research project, autofiction today is the genre defined by an “oxymoronic pact” and combining two contradictory narratives: it is a story based, as is autobiography, on the principle of the three identities (the author is also the narrator and main character), it is based on claims of fiction in its narrative terms, and peritextual information (title, back cover, …) shows that today autofiction is present in the reading habits and in meta-literary discourse. However, its meaning is neither stable nor unequivocal. The neologism autofiction has no consistent definition in dictionaries: the main French dictionaries, namely Larousse and Robert, provide two contradictory meanings. In addition, synonyms that critics give to the concept of autofiction are endless[2].

In short, an autofiction is a story whose subject matter is strictly autobiographical, as evidenced in theory the nominal identity between author, narrator and character, but the way is to say the organization and work of narrative style is romantic in nature. Several paratextual, intertextual, narrative, stylistic and thematic indices that identify a text as autofictional have been highlighted[3]. In recent Anglophone literary theory, the word “faction” which was first used to translate autofiction, now seems to have been replaced by fiction of the self or autofiction.

The reader and the autofictional pact

The reader suspends, in a volontary way, his wish to believe that what he reads is the truth, reality or what Coleridge in 1817 termed his willing suspension of disbelief. When confronted to literature, the reader has to play the game (or respect the “pact”) and put his incredulity away. The author responds to these somewhat conventional expectations by elaborating texts for his potential readers, the author programs his text through reflexive comments, intertextual dispositions and paratext: “The writer should not encourage a referential reading” is what Colonna said about autofiction in 1989 (Colonna, 1989 : p. 3).

“Imaginaire” and reality

Recognition of autofiction by critics and literary theorists began a few years later. The inclusion of the concept of autofiction in 1982 in La littérature en France depuis 1968 (Vercier & Lecarme, 1982)was followed by a slow process of recognition of the genre, often poorly understood and poorly recognized. Jacques Lecarme was the one of the most ardent defenders of the genre when it first appeared. The concept was inserted in the Encyclopedia Universalis in 1984, as originally conceived, in the way Doubrovsky had first theorized the notion.

It was not until 1989 that a first major deviation from the Doubrovsky interpretation saw the light when Colonna made a different analysis of the term autofiction in his doctoral thesis (published in 2004). According to Colonna, the term autofiction encompasses all the processes of fictionalization of the Self, the other main feature of the autofictional process, insofar as the author is fantasizing his own existence, a project in which imaginary characters are more or less close extensions of his/her Self. For him, it is the exploration of the literary imagination that is valued and the only criterion used is that of identifying the writer as a character of his story, using the first person singular or even by designating his/her Self more indirectly – provided that the identification remains obvious to the reader.

For some, autofiction is either a simple modeling of the autobiographical pact (Lejeune) with strong psychoanalytic inflection (Doubrovsky), or the most recent autobiographical novel (Gasparini), for others, it reflects an already ancient inter-generic practice (Lecarme) that can be taken as an archetype, it then includes the autobiographical form, but is not limited to that form. Based on the work of Lucian, Colonna described sub-generic categories of autofiction: autofictional fantasy, transfiguring the existence and identity of the writer “in a surreal story, indifferent to any likelihood” (Colonna, 2004: p. 75; he cites the example of Jorge Luis Borges’The Aleph); autofictional biography, in which the author“fantasizes his life from real data, remains closer to the likelihood of its text and publishes a form of subjective truth” (Colonna, 2004: p. 93; for example, Serge Doubrovsky or Christine Angot); “mirror” autofiction, in which the work reflects the presence of writer as in a mirror, and intrusive authorial autofiction, requiring a text in the third person with an author-narrator in the margins of the plot. Life is seen as a raw material which should be conferred a specific form: this work of the Self requires an invention of the Self through subjectivation exercises.

In sum, three main approaches of autofiction can be distinguished today. First, the approach advocated by Doubrovsky for which a text is autofictional when reflecting the three basic criteria set by him: onomastics correspondence, literary form and the focus on the (psycho)analytical process. This means that, for Doubrovsky, autofiction is the answer to the classic autobiography made by a literary world trying to solve ontological instability typical of the postmodern age. Secondly, there is the hybrid approach of Gasparini, also adopted by Ouellette-Michalska (she speaks an autofictional flux or flow) and Régine Robin, according to whom autofiction is “a frontier area, where body and writing take on the fantasies, illusions, aspirations, rooted cultural imagery of the writer” (Robin, 1997: p. 47). Under this approach, it is impossible to say whether autofiction is more fiction than autobiography or vice versa. To avoid having to decide this generic issue, to be able to encompass the majority of the production of contemporary texts (of which it is difficult to identify whether they are autobiographical, autofictional, or completely fictional), and to reflect the dynamism of this literary category, Gasparini offers hybridity as its common denominator. The third and last approach, to this date, tips the balance in favor of autobiography. This perspective, which implies an open reading contract, is what Arnaud Schmitt calls “autonarration” (2010: p. 430). In general, consistent with the theory proposed by Stanley Fish and others, “there are the communities of ordinary readers who produce texts and genres through the pressing need to classify them, a need that puts in place Culture and its institutions” (Fish, quoted by Colonna, 2010: p. 401). Is it the ordinary reader who has this need to classify or rather the literary critic? The history of autofiction somehow proves the opposite: autofiction is read and appreciated by readers, without the literary critic being able to agree on its meaning, its definition and its precise field of application.

As stressed by Jauss (1978: 52; quoted by Garcia, 2009: p. 154), “insofar as fictionality and referentiality underlie our perception of the world, how these are articulated in the text is a factor in the reception of a literary work”.  With autofiction, each reader is invited “to position a cursor on an axis of modality” which Colonna (2010: p. 437) represents like this:

                   / = catastrophe point^[4]

Α Reality ————————————–/—————————————–β Fiction

                                                                                  ↑ cursor

Because of the hybridity of autofiction, the reader will change the cursor position during his reading, he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs his own point of catastrophe according to his reading. Alberca (2011: p. 147) refers to this as the “moving space” occupied by autofictions. Saveau Patrick (2011: p. 14), critic of Doubrovsky, confronted by his own reading of autofiction, expressed his sentiments as follows:

as a reader, I can not help but cling to an “I” who says bluntly that he tells “strictly true facts”, facts that refer to a referent outside language. That the women who shared Serge Doubrovsky’s life are people who really existed, that the places he describes in great length can be traversed by the reader as he has done himself […], that the yellow star to which he refers is the star that he himself wore, all these facts change the mode of reception of his literary works, a mode that would be different if they were entirely fictional.

According to Saveau (2010: p. 316), when the reader lets himself be captured, when he falls into “the threats of a patiently woven cloth”, that of autofiction, he feels less alone. This is not a unidirectional movement of the writer to the reader, this is a double movement: “the readers support us, provided we really give ourselves away, they feed on us, we on them, there is transfer, transfusion of life” (Doubrovsky, 1999: p. 47).

Speaking of Arab autofiction M’hamedDahi (Genon, 2009) explains, in an interview, that Abdelkader Chaoui (writer and specialist of autobiography) indicates the term autofiction on the cover of his books is retrospective in nature to qualify his writing (Signe d’amplitude, Qui dit c’est moi!): “this usage of the title invites readers to read these books in another way, to appropriate the tools relevant to understanding their narrative identity, to consider that the factual and the fictional are bound by a unalterable connexion”. Thus, on the reception/readers’ side, autofiction is an invitation to read between the lines, to reveal the puzzle, to participate in more creative and active reading. Readership brings certain expectations on literature based on, among others, the register of the language used. It is not only the editorial distinction between “novel”, “autobiography” and “autofiction”, but also the tone of the author who influences the text’s reception by its audience, its readership.

Practical examples from Amélie Nothomb’s and Nina Bouraoui’s autofictions

Amélie Nothomb was born Fabienne Claire Nothomb, in an ancient family from Brussels, on the 9^th of July 1966, in Etterbeek in Belgium, a Belgian national, she is the daughter of Baron Patrick Nothomb, a Belgian writer and ambassador to Japan. She spent the first five years of her life in Japan and then traveled throughout her childhood, staying in China, Laos, Burma and Bangladesh (all places where her father was appointed Ambassador). Her autofictions Sabotage Amoureux (1993) and Metaphysique des tubes (2000) describe specific moments of her childhood.

At seventeen, Nothomb goes back to Belgiumto study Romance Philology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. As an uprooted teenager steeped in Asian culture, she suffers from the sudden shock of Western culture. She feels a deep sense of loneliness and suffers from various eating disorders which she will relate with a certain humor in her work autofictional, Biographie de la faim (2004): anorexia, bulimia, potomania, alcoholism, etc. At twenty-one, Nothomb returned to Tokyo where she became an interpreter for a large Japanese company. She stayed a year and tells this experience in the world of work as an autofiction Stupeur et tremblements (1999). The aspects of her personal life during this period will be told in the autofiction entitled Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam (2007) and the period of her adult life in France will be told in the last autofiction to date, Une forme de vie (2010).

Métaphysique des tubes (2000), “her true-false autobiography” (Marsan, 2000), is her first fully autofictional story. Nothomb recounts her personal story that takes place between August 1967 and August 1970 with the majority of the narrative devoted to the last six months. The staging of her own birth and some years after that first birth, on the imaginary plane, offers the author the possibility of having several births within the text; it is an opportunity for Nothomb to prove her existence. In Métaphysique des tubes, the most striking fictional feature is surely the use of memories of Nothomb’s early life. There are very few people who can, in their memories, go back to childhood; even fewer are those who can go to the stadium of a baby’s birth. Nothomb said in an interview that “one of [her] rare privileges is that [she has] a very good memory of [her] infancy, it is perhaps the only special thing that [she has]. [She] remembers [her] childhood very well” (Bainbrigge and den Toonder, 2003: p. 194; my translation). In another interview with Stéphane Lambert (1999: p. 24), she had already said more or less the same: “I have a feature that is I remember my very early childhood very well, without remembering the language I was speaking at the time”. In Métaphysique des tubes, the narrator claims the authenticity of her memories as they intersect with (unclaimed) psychoanalysis. But Wronska emphasizes (2007: p. 129) that it is well known that the period narrated is covered by the famous infantile amnesia. In other words, the memory recorded before the oedipal phase became unconscious under the pressure of the superego (morality embodied by the adult child who disavows his incestuous aggressiveness). Only a psychoanalytical cure is likely to lift censorship. The quote referring to the famous primal scene^[5] in the text suggests that the spread of psychoanalytic education has pushed away the boundaries of what is repressed while conceptualizing the memories hereby made guilt-free and therefore double so accessible to autobiography.

This novel, composed of fifteen unnumbered chapters, relates chronologically, in the simple past tense, the life of the narrator in Japanfrom her birth to her third year. There are indications, besides those given by the author herself or by the paraliterature, of the autobiographical inclination of the text. Thus, on page 14, the narrator says that “the parents of the tube were of Belgian nationality”, on page 134 of the novel, Nothomb talks about her parents, brother and sister, the last two by giving them explicitly the names they have in real life: André and Juliette. Between these two, there are obviously other indicators. The fourth chapter of the novel, for example, is the ultimate summary of the different stages of identity that, too, seem to allow identification with the author of the novel. Memory and body are two of these indicators. The tasting of white chocolate is an element of Proustian intertextuality^[6], it allows the narrator to first have an identity and then to receive a memory, “since February 1970, I remember everything” (Métaphysique des tubes: 35). This passage is also important from the perspective of the relationship with the truth which Nothomb holds, which she describes as “fluctuating” (Péplum: p. 179), especially when we add the following sentences: “An assertion also big – ‘I remember everything’ – has no chance of being believed by anyone. It does not matter. Since this is also an unverifiable statement, I see less interest than ever to be credible” (idem).

Without naming them explicitly, Lee (2010: p. 116) points out the autofictional aspects of this text noting that, while Métaphysique des tubes is subtitled “novel” on its title page (page 3 in the paperback edition), even if the narrator articulates the doubts of the reader to believe in such a memory^[7], even though she recognizes the part of invention necessary to her project, she nevertheless invokes in order to support the authenticity of the physical contiguity between the three discursive entities [the character – the child born in Japan – the narrative voice – the adult “I’”narrator who recounts a narrated “I”, the child – and the author – AmélieNothomb] with the “same hand that wrote”^[8], the most perfect instrument for writing.

Nina Bouraoui^[9], whose real name is Yasmin Bouraoui, was born in Rennes, France in July 1967, she lived in Algeria, in Algiers, until her fourteenth year. When she was 14, Nina left with her family for a holiday in France. The return to Algeria was impossible, the family first moved to Zurich, Switzerland, and Paris, France, then to Brittany and Abu Dhabi. She now divides her time between France and Switzerland. Her creative universe is rooted in a phenomenon of mixed worlds, hybridity^[10], the in-between^[11], regarded as the common characteristic of migrant, borderline writing. At a very young age, Nina Bouraoui appreciates the power of writing which will be her refuge from that moment. At 9 she wrote her first novel which turned out to be “a revelation” (www.univers-l.com:personnalite_nina_bouraoui.htm). She finds an outlet, an escape, a way to express herself, to be herself. Uprooted unexpectedly at the age of 14, a real trauma for the girl, becomes a kind of rebirth for her because she discovers a new environment where she learns to live freely her homosexuality. She decides to become a writer and publishes her first text, La Voyeuse Interdite, in 1991. Bouraoui has, since then, produced dozens of literary texts published by Gallimard, Fayard and Stock. Her texts are mostly autofictional stories written in the first person. Thus, they incorporate many features of autofiction, including fragmentation, the fictionalization of the Self, meta-discursivity, short sentences, repetition and anaphora, all this contributing to a sort of breathless urgency. Emphasis on the “I” is pervasive in her writing, subjectivity plays a role in her work, as well as mediation of the textual and sexual Self.

Related to her search for identity and similar to the Nothomb’s work with regard to the Double, the Döppelganger, Bouraoui explores the meaning of a dual personality in many of her texts. Her identity would be – at least – two-fold because of her roots in both Algerian and French daily life. This is also related to very strong sense of the in-between that Bouraoui upholds in her writings (Rey, 1992: p. 63). Her intermediate position is characterized by the body that becomes the center of social demands between Yasmina, the Algerian girl, and Nina, the French woman. Michel Laronde (quoted by Kande, 1999) names this the “schizophrenic representation of the identity of post-colonial subjects”.

Violent duplication, a true “decomposing”of the “I” occurs in several of Bouraoui’s texts. Thus, in La Voyeuse Interdite, the “I” narrative gives way to the third person singular when a split occurs within the narrator’s personality. Azzouz (1998: p. 130) explains that, by disavowing the fate that society imposes on her, the narrator challenges even her own person, her ego and her Self by denying the “I” that characterizes the person she is. It symbolizes somewhat of a departure from the “I” narrative that the narrator can not and does not want to take because she is bearing witness of her degradation and humiliation.

The figure of the “double” is present in most of Garçon Manqué whose narrative proceeds on the principle of the association between body, simultaneously repelled and martyred, and the place where it is located. The narrator aspires, according to Jaccomard (2004: p. 49), to become “a body without a type, without language, without nationality” (Garçon Manqué: p. 9) or as the narrator says further:

I become unclassifiable. I’m not quite typical. “You’re not an Arab like others”. I’m too typical. “You’re not French”. […] My face Algerian. My voice French. I shade my light. I am one against another. I have two aggressive elements. Two jealousies that consume me. (Garçon Manqué: 33)

The attempt to decode a particular literary onomastics, which appears to be related to a quest for identity, made in the preceding paragraphs, and the identification of a prominent narrative polyphony, with some of its effects I tried to decipher, lead to the conclusion that the “practice of complex vocalization” (Colonna, 1989) on the part of the author leads unquestionably to the problem of doubling, duplication flowing from this mismatch of sounds and necessarily implying any writing itself. Binary places – Algeria and France – are closely linked to the quest for cultural identity, and have an echo in the sexual binarism (Nina, receives a male name Brio, who pretends to be Ahmed, and Amine, the boy her age, of mixed race, a little effeminate, serves as the symmetrical figure of Nina). Amine will have his French “double” in the character of Marion, who, according to Lassoued, bears similarities to Amine via the phonemes [a], [m], [i] and [n]. Through these mirror characters, Bouraoui redefines gender.

The fusion of reality and fiction is a prerequisite for the existence of autofiction. I will only give a few examples beginning with her first publication. In La Voyeuse Interdite, the author mixes the real visions of the city ofAlgiers, dilapidated and unmaintained, with hallucinatory and chaotic visions:

Dogs eat garbage, rats eat cats and dogs are bitten by garbage rats, then, the only animals of the illogical ecosystem, the rats, joined to the men, are involved in the massacre of the town. The children fall asleep in paintings with holes as the private parts of their mother, […] urine makes every step smell of ammonia, every remedy, smells of old sheep escape from bloody butcheries, meat oozes. (La Voyeuse Interdite: p. 71)

The sickening reality of this city and the fabulous imagination are inextricably intertwined in this passage, as in other extracts from the Bouraoui’s work. “Nina is Amine’s disease. Brio is the brother of Ahmed. Nina is the mutilation of Yasmina” (GarçonManqué: p. 66): these sentences reflect the three levels of reading. According to Lassoued, these three simple sentences composed of a subject, a verb “to be”, used to describe a state and a complement which refers to a referent, illustrate the tone of the narrative, mainly composed of simple sentences, or even noun clauses. Grammatical simplicity would merely be, according to Lassoued, “a façade to mask a complex psychological situation: the search for the Self as the need to belong to a group passes through the destruction of one’s soul and body in order to accomplish oneself”. The title Garçon Manqué is its sad representation. The expression is aggressive and points to physical mutilation (absence of sexual attributes), mutilation that the narrator will practice by cutting her hair.

The first assertion, “Nina is Amine’s disease”, refers to the imaginary world that the narrator created because it will protect her from the outside world and its conflicts. The second, “Brio is Ahmed’s brother”, refers to the Arab world, in its broadest sense, and its codification. The father nicknamed the narrator Brio because, in the absence of the man in the house, he has the function to protect his mother and sister. The last sentence, “Nina is the mutilation of Yasmina”, represents a certain racistFrancewhich the narrator will have to confront.

The link between the writing of the body and of disease has been repeatedly analyzed. For example, Gail Weiss in “The Body as a Narrative Horizon” or Arthur Frank (1997) in “The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics” emphasize this link. Among the different types of disease stories analyzed by Arthur Frank, one of them is particularly relevant to Bouraoui’s text Garçon Manqué: the history of chaos.

A major feature of stories of chaos is their absence of narrative order. The events are narrated as the narrator experiences them: without visible sequence or causal relationship. The stories of chaos reveal the vulnerability and powerlessness of the narrator destroyed by the overwhelming demands of physical pain; the demands engender what Frank (1997: p. 69) calls a “narrative wreck”^[12] – incessant interruptions of the narrative flow function as a reflection of the constant disruption of the body during everyday experiences.

The “poetic violence” of Garçon manqué follows Frank’s model of the story of chaos at several levels. A fractured syntactic structure, composed of noun phrases or verbal briefs, what Bouraoui calls “sentences of one word”, gives an edge to a style that prevents clear narrative progression and resembles “the staccato rhythm of words that peck the reader” in the story of chaos (Frank, 1997: p. 99). In addition, several sentences contradict each other without clearly indicating what they refer to, as in the following statement noted by Clarinval, from Garçon Manqué (2007: p. 149): “French mother. Algerian Father. I know the smells, sounds, colors. This is wealth. It is poverty. Not choosing is to be wandering”. To what do the smells, sounds and colors refer? What is rich and poor at the same time? The reader, unable to choose a meaning, feels as lost as the narrator.

Another feature of the story of chaos is the use of the present tense which disrupts the construction of a chronological flow from past to future. Most sentences in Garçon Manqué are in the present even when the narrator evokes the past “which requires cross-checking to see what temporal layer(s) time the narrator evokes” (Jaccomard, 2004: p. 44). Jaccomard calls Bouraoui’s paradox of style, “this lapidary style that attempts to control the brooding, as if there is precipitation competing with logorrhea” (ibid.: p. 47). This tension between fragmented scenes but repeated incessantly and obsessively accentuates the impression of a “jagged” narrative, constantly interrupted and without resolution, thus undermining the establishment of a precise purpose of the narrative.

Conclusion

Autofictions are part of anarchi-textuality, of the autobiographical genre, and this is obviously not without consequences for their production, nor for their reading, since generic perception guides and determines to a large extent the horizon of the readers’ expectations, and thus the reception of the text. Autofiction, like any other literary genre, implies a specific dialogism, as the reader is at the same time configured by gender and bounded by its limits and the author plays on these expectations and limits. Autofiction is, in my view, a subgenre of autobiography, because both have similarities in regard to questions their writing raises: how far can the authors be creative and creators? Is this creativity related to freedom? How does the reception from the audience influence the author’s ability to break the literary rules? In how far can their imagination find a place in the reality they are trying to tame? All these questions, much more than the generic belonging of autofiction or the presence of an autofictional contract between the author and the reader, bring together a generation of autofictional writers. And, in general, autofiction defies the rules of autobiography.

References

Alberca, Manuel, “Le pacte ambigu ou l’autofiction espagnole”, in Burgelin, Claude, Grell, Isabelle et Roche, Roger-Yves (dir.), Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy, Lyon : Presses universitaires de Lyon, « Autofictions, etc. », 2010, p. 147-164.

Bainbrigge, Susan et Den Toonder, Jeanette (eds.), Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice,New York : Peter Lang, 2003.

Colonna, Vincent, L’autofiction. Essai sur la fictionnalisation de soi en littérature, Thèse inédite, Paris, EHESS, 1989.

–, « Commentaire de l’article de M. Laouyen « L’autofiction : une réception problématique ». Colloque en ligne Les frontières de la fiction, http://www.fabula.org/forum/colloque99/208.php.

–, Autofiction & autres mythomanies littéraires, Auch : Editions Tristam, 2004.

Doubrovsky, Serge, Fils, Paris : Galilée, 1977, Paris : Gallimard, Collect. Folio, 2001.

Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Gasparini, Philippe, Est-il je ?Roman autobiographique et autofiction, Paris : Seuil, 2004.

–, Autofiction. Une aventure du langage, Paris : Seuil, 2008.

« De quoi l’autofiction est-elle le nom ? »,

http://www.autofiction.org/index.php?post/2010/01/02/De-quoi-l-autofiction-est-elle-le-nom-Par-Philippe-Gasparini.

Genon, Arnaud, « Note sur l’autofiction et la question du sujet », janvier 2007, La Revue des Ressources, www.larevuedesressources.org/article.php3?id-article=686.

Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative,New York :Methuen, 1980.

A Theory of Parody,Urbana,University ofIllinois Press, 2000 [1985].

Jaccomard, Hélène, Lecteur et lecture dans l’autobiographie française contemporaine, Genève: Droz, 1993.

« Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Nothomb », in Esprit créateur XLII, 4, Winter 2002, p. 45-57.

« Self in fabula: AmélieNothomb’s three autobiographical works », in AmélieNothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, ed. Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette Den Toonder (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 11-23.

« Cours, cours, Nina ! : Garçon manqué de Nina Bouraoui », in Essays in French Literature 41 (November 2004), p. 43-61.

Jauss, Hans Robert, Pour une esthétique de la réception, 1975, trad.fr. Paris : Gallimard, 1978, réédition coll. « Tel ».

Kandé, Sylvie (dir), Discours sur le métissage, identités métissées, Paris : L’Harmattan, 1999, p. 143-162.

Lecarme, Jacques, « L’Autofiction : un mauvais genre », in Autofictions & Cie, Doubrovsky, Lecarme et Lejeune, 1993.

–, « Paysages de l’autofiction », in Le Monde des livres, 24 janvier 1997.

Lee, Mark D., « “Amélie Nothomb est un home dangereux”: constructions médiatiques de l’identité », in This ‘Self’ Which is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, Natalie Edwards and Chris Hogarth (eds.),Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010, p. 119-36.

« Amélie Nothomb: writing childhood’s end », in Amélie Nothomb: Authorship, Identity and Narrative Practice, Susan Bainbrigge and Jeanette Den Toonder (eds.),New York: Peter Lang, 2003, p. 143-153.

« Entretien avec Amélie Nothomb », in The French Review, vol. 77, no 3 (février 2004), p. 562-575.

Les Identités d’Amélie Nothomb : de l’invention médiatique aux fantasmes originaires, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.

« L’Étranger chez Amélie Nothomb », in Francographies: Identité et altérité dans les espaces francophones européens, ed. Susan Bainbrigge, Joy Charnley, and Caroline Verdier (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).

Lipovetsky, Gilles, L’ère du vide. Essai sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris : Gallimard, 1983.

–, L’empire de l’éphémère, Paris : Gallimard, 1987.

Lyotard, Jean-François, La condition postmoderne : rapport sur le savoir, Paris : Minuit, 1979.

Marsan, Hugo, « L’enfant-dieu et les monstres », Le Monde, 1 sept. 2000.

Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine, Autofiction et dévoilement de soi: essai, Montréal, Québec : Les Éditions XYZ, 2007.

Rey, Pierre-Louis, Le Roman, Paris : Hachette, 1992.

Robin, Régine, Le Golem de l’Ecriture. De l’Autofiction au Cybersoi, Montréal, XYZ, 1997.

Saveau, Patrick, « L’autofiction à la Serge Doubrovsky : mise au point », in Burgelin, Claude, Grell, Isabelle et Roche, Roger-Yves (dir.), Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy, Lyon : Presses universitaires de Lyon, « Autofictions, etc. », 2010, p. 307-318. 

Serge Doubrovsky ou l’écriture d’une survie, Dijon : Editions universitaires de Dijon, Collection « Ecritures », 2011.

Schmitt, Arnaud, « De l’autonarration à la fiction du réel : les mobilités subjectives », in Burgelin, Claude, Grell, Isabelle et Roche, Roger-Yves (dir.), Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy, Lyon : Presses universitaires de Lyon, « Autofictions, etc. », 2010, p. 417-440.

–, Je réel / Je fictif. Au-delà d’une confusion postmoderne, Toulouse : Presses universitaire du Mirail, coll. « Cribles », 2010.

Weiss, Gail, « The Body as a Narrative Horizon », in Jeffrey J. Cohen and Gail Weiss (eds.), Thinking the limits of the body,Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Bouraoui, Nina, La Voyeuse interdite, Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

–, L’Âge blessé, Paris : Fayard, 1998.

–, Le Jour du séisme, Paris : Stock, 1999.

–, Garçon manqué, Paris : Stock, 2000.

–, Mes Mauvaises pensées, Paris : Stock, 2005.

–, Avant les hommes, Paris : Stock, 2007.

–, Appelez-moi par mon prénom, Paris : Stock, 2008.

Nothomb, Amélie, Hygiène de l’assassin, Paris: Albin Michel, 1992.

–, Le Sabotage amoureux, Paris: Albin Michel, 1993.

–, Péplum, Paris: Albin Michel, 1996.

–, Attentat, Paris: Albin Michel, 1997.

–, Mercure, Paris: Albin Michel, 1998.

–, Stupeur et tremblements, Paris: Albin Michel, 1999.

–, Métaphysique des tubes, Paris: Albin Michel, 2000.

–, Antéchrista, Paris: Albin Michel, 2003.

–, Biographie de la faim, Paris: Albin Michel, 2004.

–, Ni d’Ève ni d’Adam, Paris: Albin Michel, 2007.

–, Une forme de vie, Paris : Albin Michel, 2010.

 Notes

François Gramusset
Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3, France
francois.gramusset@numericable.fr

Illusion, discernement et altérité chez Thérèse d’Avila. Un commentaire du chapitre 23 de son autobiographie, le Libro de la vida / 

Illusion, Discernment and Otherness in Teresa of Avila: Reflections on the Twenty Third Chapter of Her Autobiography, the Libro de la Vida

Abstract: The Spanish Counter-Reformation witnessed paradoxical movements: the intensification of the normative control of the church on individuals and the openness of a number of spiritual people to new forms of relation to God that were more personal and more intimate than in mediaeval tradition. Teresa of Avila’s writings are an offspring of this tension. She observes the movements of her soul, affirms the singularity of her own experience, and communicates it in her mystical autobiography, El libro de la vida (The Book of Life), despite the danger that this implies for her. Teresa’s writing is not only a means of explaining and accepting her manner of praying and her conventual reform; it is first of all the place to find divine and loving alterity. Page, plume and ink provide Teresa with the means to confront the doubt, the possibility of illusions, indeed the truth of God. The mystical quest is well placed in the very midst of this medium that is both narrative and dialogical; in Teresa’s autobiography, the modern subject learns to articulate his psyche in speech, facing questions of resistance and autosuggestion. The concept of illusion is indispensable, since it opens up the possibility of doubt, which in itself invites one to exert discernment.

Keywords: Teresa of Avila – Libro de la vida; Autobiography; Doubt; Illusion; Discernment; Alterity; Autodiegesis; Mythos; Writing.

Illustration : Cette gravure est tirée de La vie de la séraphique mère Thérèse de Jésus, fondatrice des Carmes déchaussés…, à Grenoble, chez Laurent Galibert, 1678 (réédition de l’ouvrage de Claudine Brunaud publié à Lyon en 1670 chez Jullieron). Traduction de la devise latine : « Toutes ses illuminations spirituelles, sainte Thérèse les trouve, quand elle éprouve l’extase, tombées du ciel toutes marquées, pour servir d’exemple au graveur. »

            Le 28 mars 1515 Teresa de Ahumada naît près d’Avila, en Castille, dans une famille de la petite noblesse récente issue, du côté du père, du milieu des juifs convertis ; la même année est inauguré à Avila, en Castille, le monastère de l’Incarnation tandis qu’à l’autre bout du monde Juan Díaz de Solís découvre et nomme le Río de la Plata et que, dans le royaume voisin de France, François Ier accède au trône. L’année suivante, en 1516, le roi Ferdinand le Catholique meurt et Erasme publie à Bâle son édition du Nouveau Testament grec, avec sa traduction latine. En 1517 Teresa a deux ans et Martin Luther affiche ses 95 thèses contre les indulgences papales sur la porte de l’église du château de Wittemberg. En 1518, Charles Quint accède au Trône impérial. Puis commencent (1521) les guerres entre la France et l’Espagne et Ignace de Loyola, officier, blessé par un boulet de canon français lors du siège de Pampelune, entre par étapes dans une conversion qui va contribuer de manière décisive à la compréhension de la vie intérieure. En 1528 Teresa de Ahumada a 13 ans et elle perd sa mère, tandis que les persécutions s’enflamment en Espagne contre les « alumbrados » (les illuminés). En 1532 le schisme anglican est consommé et les Turcs progressent en Europe Centrale. Deux frères de Teresa, Hernando au Pérou (1534) et Rodrigo (1535), partent successivement, pour le Río de la Plata. Cette même année 1535, Pizarro fonde la ville de Lima sous le nom de Ciudad de los Reyes et  le 2 novembre Teresa, qui a 20 ans, s’enfuit de la maison paternelle pour le couvent de l’Incarnation d’Avila, où elle reçoit l’habit religieux un an plus tard, le 2 novembre 1536, puis fait ses vœux solennels un an et un jour plus tard, le 3 novembre 1537. C’est aussi l’année où Ignace de Loyola est ordonné prêtre. L’aventure thérésienne est encore discrète, inconnue du monde en crise de modernité.

Sainte Thérèse d’Avila a été longtemps connue comme la fondatrice du Carmel Déchaussé et l’instauratrice, avec Jean de la Croix, d’une mystique nouvelle propre à la contre-réforme espagnole. Au XX^e siècle (1970), elle est déclarée docteur de l’église par le pape Paul VI et ses écrits prennent ainsi une autorité plus vaste, puisqu’ils deviennent un enseignement spirituel et théologique autorisé pour tous les catholiques. Depuis quelques décennies, ce sont la condition féminine de Thérèse et son style qui retiennent davantage l’attention en raison de son audace, de la rareté des femmes écrivains à son époque et de la force de ses écrits fondés non sur une formation doctrinale et théologique universitaire qui était réservée aux hommes d’église (les « letrados »), mais sur son expérience. Or, comme le souligne l’historien français Joseph Pérez, pour une très grande figure de l’église espagnole de l’époque comme Melchor Cano (théologien dominicain), l’expérience est infiniment suspecte, « experimentum fallax », et seule est fiable la scolastique des docteurs en théologie. Pour Joseph Pérez, l’obsession anti-illuministe de Melchor Cano instaure le « despotisme de l’intelligence »[1]. Or c’est l’expérience qui donne matière à l’œuvre de Thérèse d’Avila, et une expérience avant tout intérieure et subjective. Thérèse, loin de valoriser l’expression spontanée et irréfléchie, accorde une grande importance à la compréhension intellectuelle et à l’expression formelle de l’expérience, considérant même la rencontre de Dieu, sa compréhension  et sa formulation comme trois faveurs divines distinctes et spécifiques qui ne sont pas toujours réunies : « Que le Seigneur accorde une faveur, c’est une faveur, mais c’en est une autre de comprendre de quelle faveur et de quelle grâce il s’agit, et encore une autre de savoir la dire et savoir faire comprendre en quoi elle consiste » (Vida 17, 5)[2].

L’autobiographie compte quarante chapitres et l’on peut y discerner, comme le fait Jesús Castellano Cervera[3], cinq parties :

1. chapitres 1 à 10 : autobiographie, depuis l’enfance jusqu’à la conversion de 1554
2. chapitres 11 à 22 : petit traité sur l’oraison et ses étapes (ou degrés)
3. chapitres 23 à 31 : récit autobiographique de la manière dont elle a appris, à partir de sa rencontre avec les jésuites vers 1555, à discerner les faveurs de Dieu (ou grâces)
4. chapitres 32 à 36 : histoire de la fondation de San José, son premier monastère, à Avila, où elle entre avec quatre compagnes en décembre 1562
5. chapitres 37 à 40 : récit des dernières grâces mystiques de cette période de sa vie.

Cette seconde rédaction du Libro de la vida est achevée en 1565[4].

La troisième des cinq parties du livre est cruciale et constitue l’axe central du récit. Thérèse en a conscience puisqu’elle écrit, reprenant, après son petit traité d’oraison, le fil narratif de sa vie : « A partir d’ici c’est un autre livre, c’est-à-dire une autre vie. La vie racontée jusqu’ici était la mienne ; celle que j’ai vécue depuis que j’ai commencé à formuler ce qui concerne l’oraison, c’est la vie de Dieu en moi » (Vida 23,1). Ce passage a été bien souvent cité, sans qu’on relève toujours la difficulté de son interprétation. Prenons-le à la lettre : Dieu vient vivre en elle alors qu’elle travaille à la formulation et à l’écriture des « choses concernant l’oraison » (« cosas de oración »).

La plupart des lecteurs de ce passage l’ont spontanément compris comme se rapportant au passé raconté. Pourtant, l’ambiguïté de la formulation est signifiante : sa vie nouvelle (celle de Dieu en elle) commence-t-elle à l’époque passée qu’elle s’apprête à raconter (le DIT du récit), ou maintenant, au moment de rédaction qu’elle aborde (le DIRE du récit) ? Les deux sans doute, dans la mesure où, nous le verrons plus loin, l’époque passée dont elle va parler est aussi celle où son travail autobiographique s’amorçait et se précisait. On pourrait entendre alors qu’au moment où elle écrit ces lignes, vers 1565, elle revit, accomplit et parachève dans l’écriture ce passage à la nouveauté commencé dix ans plus tôt, une conversion dans laquelle l’écriture et le rapport au verbe jouent un rôle essentiel. Nous essaierons dans la suite de comprendre cela en profondeur. Elle rappelle ses débuts en  répétant quelques lignes plus loin : «  Le Seigneur commença à m’accorder des grâces… Sa Majesté commença à me donner… » (Vida 23, 2). Et elle ajoute : « …à cette époque, des femmes avaient été sujettes à de grandes erreurs et illusions que le démon leur avait inspirées, et j’ai commencé à prendre peur, si grands étaient le plaisir et la douceur que j’éprouvais » (ibidem). Chacun des mots clefs de cette phrase pose quelque problème de traduction. Nous traduisons « engaño » par « erreur », mais l’on pourrait aussi traduire par « tromperie » pour mettre l’accent sur l’origine démoniaque de l’erreur. Le mot « ilusión » est facile à transposer, mais il faudra l’expliciter. Quant au verbe « temer », nous le traduisons par « prendre peur » en raison même de l’ambiguïté du verbe espagnol et de l’expression française : ce sentiment est-il bon ou mauvais, signe de clairvoyance ou de confusion ?  Quant au « deleite », faut-il le traduire par « plaisir », qui a en français une connotation sensuelle, ou par « joie » qui peut prendre une valeur plus spirituelle ? Ce souci du choix des mots n’est pas seulement le nôtre. Ç’a été aussi la préoccupation de Thérèse à l’époque dont elle parle, vers l’été 1555 (le passé du DIT),  mais aussi dix ans plus tard, lorsqu’elle rédigeait le récit de sa vie (le présent du DIRE), c’est-à-dire en 1565. Nous touchons ici aux éléments clefs de notre problématique, car une « vie », au sens latin, ce n’est pas une chronique ! Ce n’est pas l’accumulation chronologique d’« actualités », au sens que le mot « actualités » a pris dans la vie médiatique. Une vita n’est pas compilation mécanique d’événements consignés au jour le jour, ni un « journal des actualités ». Ce ne sont pas ces événements que les navigateurs et les aventuriers publient aujourd’hui quotidiennement sur leur blog, depuis l’Arctique, le Cap Horn, le Tibet ou l ‘Amazonie. Une vita, c’est l’arc tendu d’un récit au sens plénier, un mythos, c’est-à-dire le lieu langagier de la manifestation, du déploiement et de l’accomplissement du sens. Une vita est épiphanique. La nouveauté, ici, tient à l’autodiégèse : l’un des actes majeurs de l’héroïne est la rédaction même de son propre récit, dans la diction du transport mystique comme habitation par le verbe.

La question à laquelle nous voulons répondre dans ces lignes est donc la suivante : à l’heure où se constitue en Europe la subjectivité moderne, quels sont la nature et le rôle de l’illusion dans la vie intérieure, et comment le mythos, c’est-à-dire le travail narratif du sujet, lui donne-t-il sens ? Si une vie ne s’écrit que depuis sa fin, il faudrait que tout autobiographe l’écrive sur son lit de mort ! En fait l’autobiographie moderne s’écrit et se raconte dans une anticipation de la fin au moment de l’écriture. Montaigne l’a formulé autrement. Thérèse le dit à sa manière : une limite transcendante apparaît dans l’écriture, la « ligne du mourir-naître », selon la formule d’un exégète[5]. Dans la solitude contemplative du premier monastère, petit et pauvre, qu’elle vient de fonder, Thérèse d’Avila fait le récit de sa biographie et y inclut un petit traité sur ce qui forme le noyau ou le cœur de son vivre, l’oraison, qu’elle définit comme une amitié avec Dieu et une relation intime de présence mutuelle entre Lui et soi. Ce mode de vie est un aboutissement provisoire, car l’impulsion qui a animé Thérèse n’est pas retombée ; elle va renaître, s’amplifier et la conduire à bien d’autres fondations de monastères accompagnées de nouveaux combats. Mais pour le moment un terme provisoire est atteint, puisque Thérèse est parvenue à créer un monastère où elle peut vivre avec quelques sœurs une vie d’oraison, une oraison nouvelle dont elle a fait lentement l’expérience dans un milieu peu favorable, une oraison dont elle a lentement (parfois douloureusement) cherché à comprendre la nature et le chemin. La vie dans son premier monastère est donc un terme provisoire, tout comme l’achèvement de son autobiographie, le Livre de la vie, est un terme provisoire, dans l’attente des livres qui suivront. La rédaction du Livre de la vie complète se conclut sur une conversion qui s’est aussi concrétisée par la fondation du premier couvent, mais elle donne aussi un socle à l’aventure des fondations ultérieures, matière du livre suivant, le Livre des fondations. Sur la frontière mobile du verbe, sur cette ligne du mourir-naître, Thérèse d’Avila fonde le mythos de sa vie depuis son commencement.

Nos contemporains sont épris d’instantanéité  au point qu’ils ont créé l’extraordinaire expression « en temps réel » ! Vivre aujourd’hui un événement « en temps réel », c’est le vivre à distance grâce à la télévision ou à une webcam par exemple ! C’est ne pas y être mais y être quand même ; c’est un LÀ vécu immédiatement, comme un ICI imaginaire. Cela pose la question de la « présence ». Telle est la question nocturne et amoureuse que Thérèse et Jean de la Croix adressent à Dieu : Où es-tu ? Est-ce bien Toi ? Mais Thérèse, elle, prend le temps à bras le corps et répond à cette question avec un sens historique très aigu, en construisant longuement le mythos, c’est-à-dire le récit fondateur d’une relation. La construction de ce mythos est un lent processus historique qui aboutit à la phase finale et cruciale de l’écriture. Sa rédaction n’est pas un acte de copie, mais constitue un événement majeur du récit. Tout lecteur attentif peut s’en apercevoir : le Libro de la Vida se donne autant comme énonciation que comme énoncé. Le dire y est constamment d’actualité[6]. À l’époque de Thérèse, des cas de femmes visionnaires avaient reçu un large écho, comme « celui de sœur Madeleine de la Croix, abbesse des clarisses de Cordoue, dont les inventions avaient trompé toute la Cour et dont le procès inquisitorial fut un véritable événement »[7]. Thérèse était donc consciente à la fois des risques d’erreur spirituelle et des dangers politiques que lui faisaient courir les grâces surnaturelles qu’elle expérimentait.

Au chapitre 23 de son autobiographie elle formule clairement le dilemme :

[…] le Seigneur commença à m’accorder des grâces. Il commença à m’accorder ordinairement l’oraison de quiétude, et souvent celle d’union. À cette époque, des femmes avaient été sujettes à de grandes erreurs et illusions que le démon leur avait inspirées, mais je voyais en moi une très grande certitude que c’était Dieu, spécialement quand j’étais en oraison, et je voyais aussi que j’en sortais meilleure et plus forte, mais dès que je me distrayais un peu, je reprenais peur et me demandais si le démon, en me donnant à penser que cela était bon, ne voulait pas suspendre mon entendement pour me priver de l’oraison mentale et m’empêcher de penser à la Passion…  (Vida 23,2).

L’oraison de quiétude et l’oraison d’union sont deux degrés d’une relation où l’esprit entre dans une intimité avec Dieu, deux approches de la pure présence mutuelle sans pensée. Cette voie est très caractéristique de la spiritualité carmélitaine telle que Thérèse l’a expérimentée, comprise et structurée. Le discours de la pensée y est interrompu, suspendu, au profit de la contemplation. Thérèse met donc face à face deux réflexions contradictoires.  D’un côté elle constate les effets de ce qu’elle nomme « l’oraison » : elle en sort plus forte et meilleure. De l’autre côté elle sait que l’on ne peut à la fois « être en oraison de quiétude ou d’union » et « penser » (par exemple, dans ce qu’on appelle « l’oraison mentale », penser méthodiquement à telle ou telle scène de la Passion du Christ) ; elle envisage donc  l’hypothèse suivante : l’oraison de quiétude et l’oraison d’union pourraient être des manœuvres du démon pour l’empêcher de recourir à « l’entendement » (c’est-à-dire à la pensée discursive et volontaire) et de penser à la Passion du Christ. Comme on le voit, dès l’époque racontée, Thérèse se posait bien des questions, et la merveilleuse douceur des moments d’oraison de quiétude et d’union ne l’empêchait pas de raisonner ensuite, mais le fruit de ces deux pratiques contradictoires (grâces affectives et raisonnements intellectuels) était la peur. La peur est récurrente dans cette période de sa vie.

Elle raconte alors comment elle s’en affranchit. La peur grandit, et elle décida de chercher aide et conseil auprès de personnes compétentes et expérimentées. Elles avaient été bien rares dans sa vie précédente. On lui avait parlé des Jésuites, et ce qu’elle avait entendu dire de leur mode de vie et de leur manière de prier l’avait enthousiasmée. Or quelques-uns étaient arrivés à Avila. Survient alors un dernier obstacle, sous la forme de l’humilité, ou plutôt de la fausse humilité : elle se sent indigne de l’intérêt d’hommes si spirituels et la timidité la paralyse. A posteriori elle se moque d’elle-même : « le terme de ma détermination était sans fin ! » (Vida 23, 4)[8]. En somme, elle n’en finissait pas de se décider et attendait d’être meilleure pour prendre les moyens de s’améliorer ! Nous appelons cela un cercle vicieux. Elle le nomme démoniaque, mais la différence n’est pas grande, car nous appartenons à la même modernité, même si Thérèse vit à ses débuts, et nous, peut-être, à sa fin. Le démon du Moyen Âge a quelque place dans le Libro de la vida, car l’héritage médiéval n’est pas loin, et Thérèse y mentionne à l’occasion quelques épisodes qui en relèvent, avec apparition d’un petit personnage horrible ou émanation de pestilences sulfureuses, mais ce folklore demeure ponctuel, et dans l’ensemble le qualificatif « démoniaque » allégorise les mécanismes complexes de la liberté humaine aux prises avec elle-même et avec la peur de vivre, en particulier lorsque l’imagination se met au service de la peur.  Elle conclut : « j’avais besoin de l’aide d’autrui, besoin qu’on me tende la main pour me relever. Béni soit le Seigneur car, finalement, sa main fut la première » (Vida 23,4).

L’autobiographie entremêle ainsi des événements subjectifs et objectifs (comme l’intensification de l’oraison de quiétude et d’union, ou l’arrivée des Jésuites à Avila) et les analyses de leur sens, l’ensemble étant appréhendé depuis la vie que mène Thérèse dans le premier couvent qu’elle a fondé malgré de très fortes oppositions locales, une vie conforme à l’enseignement de son expérience. Là résident l’audace et la difficulté : que dans la Castille du XVI^e, une femme combatte pour donner forme pratique et institutionnelle à un enseignement qu’elle déclare avoir  reçu de Dieu lui-même, cherchant résolument à le partager et à le transmettre, alors que depuis l’origine de l’église et la fameuse diatribe de Saint Paul, les femmes sont écartées de l’enseignement et du magistère. L’expérience et l’écriture, le temps de l’expérience et le temps de l’écriture narrative-autobiographique jouent un rôle majeur dans cette aventure où la vie la plus intime cherche et trouve sa réalité dans les institutions que sont le récit et le couvent. Thérèse prétend faire du neuf et le fonder non en illusion mais en réalité. Quels sont les critères de l’une et de l’autre  et quelles sont les difficultés subjectives à surmonter ? Elle doit montrer que sa vie est réussie et peut constituer un modèle de vie pour d’autres alors qu’elle n’est qu’un être humain, une femme, une pécheresse. Il y a là un paradoxe qu’elle énonce dès les premières lignes du Libro de la vida, lorsqu’elle écrit : « J’aurais voulu que l’on me donne pleine liberté pour raconter en détails et en toute clarté mes grands péchés et ma vie misérable. C’aurait été une grande consolation, mais on n’a pas voulu et on m’a lié les mains sur ce point » (Vida 1,1). Elle a conscience du paradoxe de la tradition médiévale hagiographique et de ses saints qui, après leur conversion, cessent radicalement de commettre des péchés : « moi, non seulement je devenais pire, mais on aurait dit que je m’appliquais à résister aux grâces que sa Majesté me faisait, comme si je m’étais vue dans l’obligation de rendre plus, et avais cherché le moyen de donner le moins possible » (ibidem). Elle évoque donc ses faiblesses, fautes et péchés, tout au long de son récit, avec une discrétion étonnante, par allusions rapides et très voilées. Lisant cela depuis le XXI^e siècle, nous pouvons essayer d’entendre cette stratégie narrative.

1-      La confession sacramentelle est un aveu intime et secret ; les péchés avoués par le pénitent au confesseur ne doivent pas, en principe, être rendus publics.

2-      Tout exposé de fautes court le risque de devenir incitatif pour des âmes plus faibles que celle du pénitent, et, en somme, de leur donner des idées.

3-      À trop exposer et détailler ses péchés, Thérèse donnerait des arguments à ses opposants et à tous ceux qui veulent faire obstacle à sa réforme : il serait fou de faire confiance à une grande pécheresse ! Comment peut-elle prétendre à un enseignement spirituel ?

4-      Le plus important peut-être est le suivant : l’essence de l’option spirituelle thérésienne n’est pas dans l’ascèse ni dans la mobilisation constante de la volonté qui résiste à la tentation. Elle parle avec une très grande admiration de Saint Pierre d’Alcantara, avec qui elle était en relation et dont les avis et conseils lui ont été précieux ; elle évoque la vie ascétique de ce religieux franciscain et ses rudes pénitences. Mais sa voie à elle est autre : elle  consiste à apprendre à accueillir, à faire tomber les résistances, à entrer, par étapes, en amitié avec Dieu. Thérèse veut bien montrer que cette amitié est pur don, qu’elle n’est ni gagnée ni méritée ni achetée par quelque mérite que ce soit mais reçue gratuitement, le travail de l’homme étant de se disposer, de se transformer par l’apprentissage de l’hospitalité intérieure. Insister sur ses péchés pourrait soit donner à penser qu’elle y a héroïquement renoncé (c’est la figure hagiographique médiévale), soit qu’elle bénéficie arbitrairement de faveurs divines qu’elle ne mérite pas et qui lui tombent dessus sans qu’elle fasse rien. C’était le vieux balancement entre la grâce et les œuvres, qui à l’époque alimentait les polémiques entre Luther et Rome et alimentait en Espagne, au temps de Thérèse, la persécution des alumbrados. Thérèse met l’accent sur la grâce qui se reçoit, mais sa singularité est d’inventer une manière de rendre l’homme intérieur apte à accueillir les grâces.

La grande interrogation de Thérèse jusqu’à la fondation de son premier couvent et la rédaction de son autobiographie est donc en fin de compte : comment est-il possible qu’un être tel que moi (faible, pécheur, imparfait, ingrat…) reçoive de Dieu de tels signes d’amour (les degrés de l’oraison, les paroles du Christ…) ? À l’heure où elle écrit sa vie, cette question, qui ne disparaîtra jamais complètement, a tout de même reçu réponse dans le registre amoureux : parce que c’était Lui et parce que c’était moi.

Le paradoxe qui reste est évidemment  le fait que cette relation unique soit proposée comme exemplaire.

Nous avons vu que vers 1555 Thérèse n’exclut pas d’être en proie à l’illusion (démoniaque), mais ne tranche pas non plus dans ce sens et décide de demander l’aide d’experts en vie spirituelle, les Jésuites. Le temps passe, elle ne s’y décide toujours pas et, curieusement, tout s’exacerbe : « […]  je vis que ma peur allait de l’avant, parce que l’oraison croissait, et il me sembla que ce devait être soit un très grand bien, soit un très grand mal, car je comprenais bien que ce qui m’arrivait était d’ordre surnaturel, du fait que bien souvent je ne pouvais y résister, et que l’avoir sur commande, c’était également impossible. » (Vida 23,5). Elle décide donc, avant de demander de l’aide, d’éviter le plus possible les « occasions » de mal agir. Si les grâces viennent de Dieu, ce sera idéal. Si elles sont illusoires, alors ce ne sera pas bien grave, puisque tout effet pratique néfaste sera évité. Mais cela ne marche pas : pour que cela  marche, il lui faudrait être bien plus parfaite et capable d’éviter réellement toutes les occasions d’agir mal. Ce n’est pas le cas. Elle se décide donc à demander de l’aide, à la fois à un gentilhomme laïc mais très pieux et saint, et à un clerc « letrado », c’est-à-dire formé en théologie. Le clerc devient son guide spirituel et confesseur, mais il la conduit rudement et a des exigences de vertu auxquelles Thérèse est incapable de se conformer ; il prend des raccourcis qui font violence à l’esprit de Thérèse et la mettent en échec, la découragent, comme quelqu’un qui voudrait faire voler un oisillon encore sans plumes (la comparaison est de Thérèse : Vida 23,10) ! Elle se reporte sur le « saint gentilhomme », qui ne peut être son confesseur mais devient son conseiller et la traite avec douceur et patience. Cela lui fait du bien et elle en vient aux confidences, lui parle des faveurs surnaturelles qu’elle reçoit : il n’y comprend rien. Pour lui, tout cela est très inquiétant ; il pense que Thérèse n’est pas assez avancée spirituellement, que son ascèse personnelle n’est pas suffisante.  Bref, il considère ces faveurs suspectes car Thérèse, à son avis, n’est pas assez « mortifiée » et ne mérite pas de telles faveurs de la part de Dieu. Ecrivant tout cela, Thérèse précise, pour excuser le bon gentilhomme, qu’à l’époque elle même ne savait pas du tout lui parler avec clarté et pertinence de sa vie intérieure et de « son  oraison ». L’étape suivante est encore pleine de peurs, auxquelles s’ajoutent les larmes. Il lui faut apprendre à DIRE cette oraison qui est la sienne. Elle cherche les formules et les mots adéquats dans un livre de fray Bernardino de Laredo, Subida del monte Sión, por la vía contemplativa soulignant les passages où elle reconnaît ce qu’elle expérimente elle même, puis elle remet le livre au chevalier ainsi qu’un un récit complet de sa vie : la voici désormais sur la voie de l’autobiographie (Vida 23,14) !  Elle ajoute en passant que tous ces entretiens ont attiré l’attention dans le couvent et que les deux hommes n’ont pas été aussi discrets qu’il aurait fallu, si bien qu’on a commencé à jaser et à l’épier. Puis le chevalier et le clerc lui ont donné leur avis : ses expériences provenaient certainement du démon ! Elle devait faire d’urgence une confession générale à un père jésuite : un jésuite parce qu’ils étaient experts dans le discernement des esprits et une confession parce que ce sacrement avait le pouvoir de la guérir des illusions démoniaques. C’est sur cette injonction terrifiante qu’elle prépare l’aveu de ses péchés en mettant à nouveau sa vie par écrit : la voie autobiographique se précise ! Puis elle se confesse enfin à un jésuite et lui confie donc « toute [son] âme, comme à quelqu’un qui connaissait ce langage » (Vida 23,16). Et le jésuite lui déclare que les grâces qu’elle reçoit et expérimente sont bien de Dieu, qu’elle doit reprendre son oraison et ne plus la lâcher, ajoutant des conseils qui montrent qu’il l’a, en effet, bien entendue et comprise. Les effets de cette rencontre sont étonnants : « il me guida de telle manière que j’en devint toute différente. Quelle chose extraordinaire : comprendre une âme ! » (Vida 23,17).

Les critères de réalité des grâces divines sont donc :

1-      l’expérience proprement dite qui suspend toute pensée dans une pure présence unifiée,

2-      les effets de cette expérience tels que la certitude d’avoir rencontré Dieu, le calme intérieur, la force pour agir de manière plus droite,

3-      la confrontation ou soumission à l’intersubjectivité ecclésiale (Thérèse nomme cela « obéissance ») et la verbalisation du vécu surnaturel dans le récit-confession de cette expérience[9], une expérience qui doit être authentifiée et validée par autrui (ici, d’abord en vain, par le gentilhomme et le clerc théologien, puis avec succès par le confesseur jésuite).

Néanmoins, ce chemin est loin de s’achever ici. Nous l’avons dit, il s’agit d’un très long processus où l’écriture narrative autobiographique joue un rôle essentiel ; il s’agit de structurer  l’esprit et de donner assez de consistance à la vie intérieure pour qu’elle puisse non seulement être énoncée et décrite en confession mais aussi partagée et enseignée à celles qui deviendront des religieuses du Carmel réformé par Thérèse. L’autobiographie se présente donc à la fois comme un manuel d’oraison et comme le récit autobiographique des événements au long desquels cette forme d’oraison a été découverte, pratiquée et validée. Les chapitres suivants entrent dans le détail de ces faveurs ou grâces divines, et montrent que l’on est bien loin, avec Thérèse, de l’image si répandue de la jeune évaporée qui se livre entièrement à un délire enthousiaste et solipsiste sans recul intellectuel ni capacité d’entendre des critiques.

Les chapitres suivants sont d’un grand intérêt, car Thérèse y expose et formule la nature particulière et les différentes formes que peuvent prendre les « paroles silencieuses que Dieu dit à l’âme » (Vida 25,1). Au chapitre 25 elle distingue ainsi des « paroles très formées », dont la caractéristique est qu’elles sont silencieuses mais qu’il n’y a pas moyen de s’y soustraire ou de s’en distraire, comme si, en somme, Dieu communiquait les signifiés mêmes à l’esprit, de l’intérieur. Elle envisage une possibilité d’illusion au sujet de l’origine de ces paroles : il pourrait s’agir de paroles que l’esprit s’adresse à lui-même. Elle se souvient d’abord que toutes les choses qui lui ont été annoncées par ces paroles se sont réalisées par la suite. Puis elle ajoute que leur clarté est parfaite, alors que les paroles que l’esprit s’adresse à lui-même sont comme sourdes, artificielles. Elle complète enfin en disant que par elles Dieu ne communique pas seulement une information, mais que « ses paroles sont des actes » (Vida 25,3) dont la force transformante ou performative est nettement perceptible. Qu’elles soient de reproche ou d’encouragement, elles laissent l’esprit apaisé, joyeux, plus fort, alors même qu’il était auparavant distrait et troublé. Enfin, elle qualifie ces paroles d’impossibles à oublier. Il est curieux de noter les expressions qu’elle emploie : dans le cas de l’autosuggestion les paroles sont floues, comme entendues « dans un demi sommeil », dit-elle. Dans le cas des paroles de l’Autre divin « la voix est si claire que l’on ne perd pas une seule syllabe de ce qui est dit » (Vida 25,4), or il s’agit d’énoncés d’une profondeur et d’une complexité qui dépassent largement les capacités intellectuelles dont dispose habituellement l’esprit. Pour elle, en somme,  il s’agit bien de paroles

–          sans signifiant (silencieuses)

–          d’un signifié d’une grande complexité et d’une clarté parfaite (il faudrait au moins un mois pour articuler par soi-même ces pensées reçues d’un coup, en quelques instants),

–          qui exercent aussi une action profonde et vivifiante sur l’affectivité (l’esprit troublé s’en trouve apaisé),

–          inoubliables (en particulier si elles sont prophétiques).

Pour elle, sauf mensonge délibéré, l’erreur n’est guère possible. À son avis, toute personne qui entend de telles paroles et désire sincèrement savoir à quoi s’en tenir à leur sujet, peut distinguer l’illusion (autosuggestion/tentation démoniaque) de la vérité (divine). Dans le cas des illusions, qu’elle dit avoir connues deux ou trois fois, elle insiste sur l’indice des effets : elles laissent l’esprit dans une sécheresse inquiète et troublée. Elle signale aussi l’indice de la force : les paroles vraies ne soulèvent pas de petites vagues sur des cœurs de midinette sensibles[10] ! Il s’agit d’une paix puissante, profonde et durable, qui résiste aux difficultés et change la manière de vivre.

Mais il peut y avoir doute : là où il y a liberté, il y a place pour le doute. Thérèse croit ET doute, c’est pourquoi ses débuts sont si longs. Mais c’est ainsi qu’elle appartient à la modernité commençante. L’expérience subjective des grâces reçues de l’Autre (l’oraison),  le mythos comme travail du discernement (l’écriture), le corps social (les narrataires) sont les points d’appui du verbe thérésien. Le concept d’illusion lui est indispensable car il ouvre le temps du discernement.

Notes

Shogo Kanayama
GatsuzoujiTemple,Sakai, Japon
www.gatsuzouji.or.jp

Nichiren: from History to Legend, through Politics and Religion

Abstract: Often along the centuries a historical figure would acquire a status larger than life, tales of courage and glory. The personality that I intend to focus on is Nichiren, the founder of one of the six major Buddhist sects in Japan, who was born in the 13^th century and whose career marked not only the religion, but also the political life in that period. For more than 700 years, Nichiren has been regarded as a major religious leader. The various realistic and fabulous stories attributed to him in his biographies represent the focus of my paper. The main question I seek to address here is how the collective psyche/unconscious changes a great figure into a mythical hero? I am also interested in exploring the mechanisms at work behind this metamorphosis and how we can explain not only the belief in the miraculous, but also the need to believe and the intentional inclusion in the story of supernatural elements.

Keywords: Japanese religion; Buddhism; Nichiren; Lotus Sutra; Faith; Illusion.

Often, the life of historical figures whose name is transmitted along the centuries takes on an aura of legend and in many cases, the line between real history and legend becomes blurry, the real facts behind the legend sinking into the depths of time. Nichiren, the subject of this paper, is the founder of one of the six major Buddhist sects in Japan, a character who lived in the 13^th century, preaching faith in the Lotus Sutra and advocating religious reforms. He became so involved in confrontations with the representatives of other sects, that he was eventually sentenced to exile and had more than once close brushes with death.

Buddhism, founded by Gautama Siddhartha during the 4^th century BC, spread East towards China, where the sutras were translated and interpreted, then it penetrated Japan in the early 6^th century viaKorea. At that time, the imperial house constituted itself into a protector of Buddhism, which led to the development inNara of six sects whose purpose was to protect the country through religious devotion. At the same time, deep in the mountains of Yoshino, Katsuragi and Ikoma, Shugen practitioners focused on reading sutras and acquiring the magical techniques that allowed them to cast rain charms or cure diseases. 

However, during mid 8^th century, Dōkyō, a priest belonging to the Hōsō Sect, under the patronage of Empress Kōken, aimed at the Imperial Throne, a gesture representing only one of the problems related to the increased involvement of Buddhist priests into political affairs and the secularization of the religious world. As a result, in 794 Emperor Kammu moved the capital to Kyoto and attempted to reform both the political and the Buddhist worlds. At the beginning of the 9^th century, Saichō founded the Tendai Sect on Mount Hiei, while Kūkai established the Shingon Sect on Mount Koya, and the esoteric Buddhism spread in Japan. The 11^th century saw the decline of the Imperial House; the warrior class coming into power was followed by various disturbances. The increasing political instability was accompanied by numerous natural calamities and epidemics, the period being seen as mappō, the last and decadent Dharma prophesied by Buddhism. According to Buddhist theories, mappō represents the age after the death of Buddha when the influence of his teachings starts to decline, the society is tormented by upheavals and eventually Buddhism itself becomes extinct. Some records considered year 1052 (2000 years after the death of Buddha) as the first year of the mappō period.

As a result, new Buddhist sects which tried to find a way of dealing with this apocalyptic vision appeared, and most of them preached escape from the lay world and respect for the religious commandments. One of these was the Pure Land Sect, which advocated the earnest and continuous recitation of Amida’s name and the prayer for rebirth in the PureLand. Then, at the end of the 12^th century, when political power was in the hands of Minamoto no Yoritomo, Eisai and Dōgen contributed to the spreading of Zen Buddhism, which had been imported fromChina.

On the 16^th of February, 1222, in the house of a fishermen in the village of Tōjōgō,AwaCounty (present dayChibaPrefecture), the boy who would later become Nichiren was born. As it is usually the case with the birth of major religious figures, Nichiren’s birth was surrounded by auspicious signs. Despite the fact that it was winter, in February that year lotus flowers bloomed near the shore, while many sea breams gathered near the surface of the sea and when the baby’s first cry was heard, a pure water spring gushed forth in the garden. The three places where these auspicious signs manifested themselves are nowadays known as Renge-ga-fuchi (The Lotus Pool), Tai-no-ura (BreamBay) and Tanjō-sui (Birth Water).BreamBay in particular has been preserved across the ages, as the sea bream was seen as having a blood relationship with Nichiren, and thus the sea bream fishing has been strictly forbidden. The sea bream usually lives in the depths and is not in the habit of appearing in shoals, yet even today passengers of pleasure ships have the chance of observing the fish as they gather near the surface of the water, attracted by the sound of oars banged against the sides of the ship. The phenomenon has yet to be explained by scientists, while that particular spot was declared in 1922 a “Natural Memorial Place”, one of the few places in the world where shoals of sea breams can be observed. In 1967 it became aSpecial National Natural Memorial Place.

At the age of 12 Nichiren started his studies in Buddhism at the famous Tendai temple Seichōji, becoming a priest at the age of 16, under the guidance of Dōzenbō, a priest of the Pure Land Sect. He continued his studies in the esoteric teachings of the Tendai Sect and the mainstream Pure Land Sect, but during this process he started having doubts regarding the Buddhist world where various sects were based on various sutras, despite the fact that the truth preached by Buddha should have been one and only under any circumstances. In order to ascertain the true meaning of Buddha’s preaching, Nichiren prayed to the main bodhisattva worshipped at Seichōji, Âkâśagarbha, to turn him into the “wisest man in Japan” and performed gumon-jihō, an esoteric ritual which is supposed to strengthen the memory, for 21 days.

The day the ritual was completed, the bodhisattva appeared to Nichiren in the flesh and gave him a jewel meant to make his wisdom and knowledge shine as bright as Venus, which is seen as an embodiment of Âkâśagarbha. The jewel passed through Nichiren’s sleeve and entered his body, and Nichiren started vomiting blood and lost his consciousness, collapsing on the spot. He later remembered the episode, mentioning that when he regained consciousness, he felt miraculously refreshed in body and mind, and able to comprehend all the sacred writings. After that revelation day, Nichiren spent the next 16 years either confined on MountHiei, striving to read the whole Buddhist scripture, including the various commentaries and interpretations pertaining to it, or visiting Kyotoand MountKoyain order to study the history and precepts of the different sects. At the same time, he tried to gain knowledge on worldly affairs as well. Thus he came to understand the truth contained in the words of the Nirvana Sutra—“To follow the law, not to follow persons”, which meant to follow the teachings of the sutras which are regarded as complete and final, not to follow the provisional teachings. In the Buddha of Infinite Life Sutra he found a similar concept—“For more than forty years I did not reveal the full truth”, that is, all of the sutras preached before the Lotus Sutra contain only the provisional teachings of the Buddha, whereas the Lotus Sutra contain the full truth. Finally, at the age of 32, Nichiren reached the conclusion that the Lotus Sutra contained the true teachings of Buddha.

Nevertheless, the condition of Buddhism in Japanhad changed since its introduction and the adoption by Prince Shotokutaishi and Emperor Kōmyō of a doctrine meant to protect the country, based on the Lotus Sutra. 200 years after that, Saichō had founded the Tendai Sect on Mount Hiei, based on the same Lotus Sutra, but 400 more years later, the country was in turmoil due to the rise of the warrior class, the Pure Land Sect founded by Hōnen on the concept of reciting the name of Amida was stagnating, even the Tendai Sect was affected by the mappō trend of thought, and the newly-arisen Shingon and Zen sects were gaining more and more followers amidst the warrior class. Nichiren considered that precisely because it was the age of mappō, the Lotus Sutra had to be revived, and he thought it his mission to convince the statesmen to reform the religious system focusing on the Lotus Sutra, in order to insure the safety and stability of the country.

On his return to his homeland, Nichiren spent 100 days in meditation at the Tendai temple Shōmyōji in Ise; at the end of the 100 days he went to the great Ise Jingu Shrine, dedicated to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, to whom he prayed for help in spreading the Lotus Sutra. At that moment, Myōken Bosatsu (a bodhisattva representing the deification of the North Star) appeared to him and promised protection. 20 years before, when Nichiren received the blessing of Âkâśagarbha, Myōken Bosatsu had been worshipped in the inner hall of the Seichōji temple, as an embodiment of the Big Dipper. After revealing itself to Nichiren, Myōken-the North Star will play a significant role in his life.

Nichiren’s birth place, Tōjōgō in Awa County was an estate belonging to the Great Ise Shrine, where it had been donated by Minamoto no Yoritomo in 1185, after his victory against Taira no Kiyomori, and Nichiren viewed it as a sacred ground where the ancestors of the Imperial House were worshipped. The lord who ruled that territory was the one who had opened the gates for Nichiren to study at Seichōji. At the time when Nichiren returned to his homeland, the land steward appointed by the shogunate, Tōjō Kagenobu, tried to extend his power and was in conflict with the local lord over his invasion of the territory belonging to Seichōji, whose rights and interests he forcefully acquired, also ignoring the ban on the killing of any living things on the premises by hunting deer in the area. Moreover, Kagenobu pretended to be a follower of the Pure Land Sect and tried to turn the Seichōji temple, which rightfully belonged to the Tendai Sect, over to thePureLand. Nichiren found out that the lord had started a lawsuit and decided to stand by him, so he attended the suit at the High Court inKamakura, where he used his knowledge to create a logical and coherent case argument, which helped him win the lawsuit. However, that meant that Kagenobu’s resentment was now directed at Nichiren.

Back at Seichōji, Nichiren started gradually to spread his criticism of thePureLanddoctrine among the population, but Kagenobu heard of it and pressured Dōzenbō into dismissing Nichiren from the temple. Nichiren started towardsKamakuraand established a hermit hut at Matsuba-ga-yatsu as a basis for his preaching against the doctrine of thePureLand, and he began his movement on the streets ofKamakura. People started listening to his words and he invited them to his hut in order to commence the religious reform. He gained followers and disciples, yet the followers of the Pure Land and Zen sects would torment him by throwing stones and tile fragments, so the difficulties he had to face increased day by day.

From 1257 until 1260, Kamakurawas often afflicted by violent storms and earthquakes, which led to famine and the spread of epidemics, and soon the streets were flooded with corpses. As a response to that state of affairs, the monks and priests of the Pure Land Sect unanimously withdrew from the lay world, praying for rebirth in the PureLand, while the representatives of Zen simply prayed for personal enlightenment. Their followers in the ruling class ordered all sects to pray for the well-being of the country, but their orders had no effect and no measures for population relief were taken. Seeing this, Nichiren sought to find an answer to the problem in religious thinking, and to this purpose he re-read the Buddhist scripture confined at IwamotoJissōjiTemple. The result of his meditation was a work entitled On Securing the Peace of the Land by Establishing True Teachings of Buddhism, which he presented to the Shogun Hōjō Tokiyori on July 16^th, 1260. There he stated:

The cause of all calamities is the fact that people have turned their backs to the true law and embraced the path of evil, so the good deities have forsaken our country and the evil deities have brought about only disasters. That evil is the PureLanddoctrine, and if we do not stop following it, the country will fall into chaos and prey to foreign conquering powers, while the rule of its leaders will be short lived. The only way to avoid disaster is to reform religion and embrace the true law recorded in the Lotus Sutra.

Thus, Nichiren, who described himself as the son of a poor fisherman, the equal of any member ofIndia’s lowest caste, and who empathized with the suffering of the common people, delivered a poignant criticism of the religious sects who concerned themselves only with fighting for privileges and profits.

The Shogunate ignored Nichiren’s appeal, but he challenged the high priests of the Pure Land Sect in Kamakuraand he increased the violence of his criticism during the sermons addressed to the common people. As a result, 40 days after he had submitted On Securing the Peace of the Land by Establishing True Teachings of Buddhism, in the evening of August 27^th, an enraged mob ofPureLand followers took revenge by setting Nichiren’s hut on fire. Nichiren narrowly escaped the danger and withdrew for a while in theprovince ofShimousa. The following year he went back toKamakura, where he renewed his attacks on the Pure Land Sect. This time, however, members of thePureLand falsely accused him of attacking the Shogunate, which led to Nichiren’s arrest and his sentence to three years of exile in theIzuPeninsula, in the trust of the local governor, Itō Hachirōzaemon. The man charged with escorting Nichiren to the place of exile thought to put him to death by leaving him in the middle of the sea, on a rock which would be submerged in water during high tide. Fortunately, a hunting ship passed by and rescued Nichiren, offering him shelter and protection for 30 days. After that, Hachirōzaemon fell ill and found himself on the verge of death, so he asked Nichiren to pray for his recovery. Nichiren’s prayer proved efficient and Hachirōzaemon became one of his followers.

Three years later, in 1263, Nichiren received a pardon and he returned to Kamakura, but on the following year he had to go back to his homeland to visit his mother, who was sick. Near his village there was the mansion of the village head, Kudō Yoshitaka, who had already embraced Nichiren’s philosophy. He invited Nichiren at his place and on November 11^th, 1264, just as dusk was settling down, Nichiren together with 10 disciples were heading towards Yoshitaka’s mansion. As they were approaching Matsubara, all of a sudden arrows rained down upon them and a numerous group of heavily armed men fell on them. It seems that Tōjō Kagenobu, hearing of Nichiren’s return, decided to ambush and kill him, and in the fierce fighting that ensued two of Nichiren’s disciples lost their lives. Even Kudō Yoshitaka, who had tried to run, was finally murdered after a desperate fight. Nichiren himself had his left arm broken and suffered a sword injury on his forehead, but managed to make a miraculous escape under the cover of darkness. Nevertheless, Nichiren saw this misadventure as corresponding exactly to what the Lotus Sutra predicted: “Those who believe and try to put into practice these sacred words shall suffer various misfortunes”, and that strengthened his belief that he was a true disciple of Buddha and that his mission was to spread the teachings of the Lotus Sutra.

On January 18^th, 1268, Korean envoys carrying diplomatic messages from the Mongolian Empire arrived in the Province of Dazaifu. The Mongols, after having defeated the Sung Dinasty, had invaded Korea and intended to do the same to Japan. The Shogunate did not respond to the threats; instead, they reinforced the defenses and ordered all temples and shrines to pray for the safety of the country. What Nichiren had prophesied 8 years before in On Securing the Peace of the Land by Establishing True Teachings of Buddhism, namely the foreign invasion, turned out to be a real threat, so Nichiren sent letters to 11 prominent members of the Shogunate and high clerics, challenging them to a public confrontation. He was ignored by both parties, but, as from 1269 to 1271, Mongolian envoys kept coming and the menace of invasion became more and more real, the number of his followers and disciples increased dramatically. Due to the fact that many of them were village heads or had other high social positions, they were able to exert a certain influence in society as Nichiren believers.

In June 1271, after a long drought, the Shogunate demanded the Shingon priest Ryōkan, who was venerated as a living Buddha, to perform a prayer for rain. Hearing that, Nichiren addressed Ryōkan: “Should rain fall within 7 days, I shall become your humble disciple. But should rain fail to come, you should embrace the Lotus Sutra.” Ryōkan prayed for rain, but after 7 days nothing happened. All of his disciples got together and they prayed for rain, yet again nothing happened. Having lost face, Ryōkan challenged Nichiren to a theological debate, but Nichiren, who would accept nothing but a public confrontation, refused to comply. Then Ryōkan conspired with other high priests of the Pure Land Sect and falsely accused Nichiren of gathering and arming men, suggesting that he was a political agitator. The Shogunate, busy dealing with the Mongolian threat, saw Nichiren and his disciples as a turbulent group, and on September 10^th Nichiren was summoned for investigation by Hei no Yoritsuna, who commanded the Board of Retainers. During the cross-examination, Nichiren stated: “Should you get rid of me now,Japan will lose its supporting pillar, and soon internal disputes will ensue and foreign powers will invade us.”

On September 12^th, at around 4 in the afternoon, Hei no Yoritsuna and his subordinates attacked Nichiren’s hut, destroyed the Buddhist images, stepped on the sutra scrolls and grabbed even the scroll Nichiren kept close to his bosom, then hit and eventually arrested Nichiren. While dragging Nichiren through the streets to the place of judgment, the party happened to pass by the temple of the god Hachiman, and Nichiren reproached the god for not having honoured the promise to protect him, promise made in front of Buddha himself. That caused no small surprise among his escort, as the temple dedicated to Hachiman in Tsurugaoka was built as a center of worship for the tutelary god of warriors and many of those in the convoy guarding Nichiren used to pay their respects there.

At 6 o’clockin the afternoon of the same day Nichiren was sentenced to exile in Sado, and around 2 amon the following day he departed, together with some of his disciples, towards the place of exile, accompanied by an armed escort. According to the Jōei Code (the code of warriors), the highest punishment that could be inflicted on priests was exile, so Nichiren thought it strange that they would start on their journey in the middle of the night. “I was condemned to exile, but it seems that death will be my fate,” wrote Nichiren later about his thoughts that night. As Nichiren expected, on the way to the residence of Honma Shigetsura, the officer in charge of escorting him to Sado, it transpired that Nichiren would be beheaded on the execution place known as Tatsu-no-kuchi. The night was pitch dark, the moon hidden in the clouds, so Nichiren lit a bonfire and sat on a mat, surrounded by a few warriors who observed him and by his disciples, and started quietly chanting the daimoku (the sacred mantra of his sect), in preparation for his last moments. When the executioner swung his sword, from the direction of Enoshima a globe as bright as the moon floated over Nichiren’s head and from it a dazzling light shone, blinding the executioner, who dropped the sword and collapsed. The other people present also drew back, frightened and groveled away. The execution was canceled and the next day around noon Nichiren reached Honma Shigetsura’s house in safety. That evening, at the Honma residence, the warriors were finally able to relax and they went out in the garden, when Nichiren appeared and, facing the moon of the thirteenth night, read from the Lotus Sutra and said: “Candra, you who swore to protect the Lotus Sutra, why don’t you protect me?” Then, to the utter surprise of the onlookers, a star as bright as Venus descended from the sky and hung on the branch of a plum tree.

After that, Nichiren spent 3 years in exile in Sado, but 5 months after the Tatsu-no-kuchi incident, internal struggles related to the measures against the Mongolian invasion occurred within the Hōjō clan, who held the political power. Added to that was the continuous invasion menace, and thus Nichiren’s prophecy that the country would fall into turmoil came true. In April 1274, he was pardoned and Hei no Yoritsuna demanded to know his opinion as to when the Mongolians would arrive in Japan. Nichiren’s answer was “within the year”, but Yoritsuna was preoccupied with military and diplomatic issues, while Nichiren was concerned with the fate of Japan if it lost the Lotus Sutra, and thus the two failed to reach an agreement. As a result, in May Nichiren retired onMountMinobu, where he occupied himself with educating his disciples. The Mongolians did reachJapan in October that year, as he had foreseen, and again 5 years later, but each time a typhoon destroyed their ships, thus savingJapan from the danger of invasion.

The wonders surrounding Nichiren’s life did not fail to influence those around him. Date Tomoyoshi, a vassal of the Hōjō Clan who was present during both extraordinary phenomena that had occurred during the attempt to Nichiren’s life, gave up his belief in the Pure Land and converted to the faith preached by Nichiren. Consequently, he was dispatched to a territory far away fromKamakura, where he built numerous Nichiren temples. The life of Honma Shigetsura took a similar course when he also adopted Nichiren’s faith, which spread over the entireSadoIsland. Later, based on Nichiren’s letters recounting the Tatsu-no-kuchi incident, many argued that what had happened was in fact a natural phenomenon. Specialists in astronomy fromTokyoUniversityeven suggested that it was actually the Comet Encke that accidentally saved Nichiren’s life, the night when the globe of light supposedly hung from the branches of the plum tree being the night when the comet was at its most brilliant point. Other scientists have pointed out the fact that Tatsu-no-kuchi is an area where thunder and lightning occur frequently, thus explaining the phenomenon as a particularly powerful lightning stroke. Regardless of whether the miracles concerning Nichiren have or not a scientific explanation, what matters is the fact that the legends surrounding him have been transmitted up to the present day.

Nichiren’s case is, obviously, not singular, yet, as the era when he lived is closer to our times than the periods when other great religion founders lived, the historical records are more detailed and accurate. Thus, we have the opportunity to compare what we know to be the truth with various accounts and legends, the process through which a certain incident turns into a myth becoming clearer and easier to understand. Did Jesus really feed masses with just five fish and three loaves of bread? Maybe, or maybe he was a David Copperfield of his time. Did the gods really sent stars down to the earth to save Nichiren’s life? The phenomenon may have a scientific explanation, but one could argue that the natural phenomenon itself was an embodiment of the will of gods. So maybe the gods did send a star to hang down from the branches of a plum tree. Or it may be that Nichiren was simply extremely lucky and the executioner had a seizure right at that moment. Or the charismatic Nichiren convinced the executioner and the warriors to spare his life, concocting afterwards a story that would be not only plausible, but would also benefit his mission. As in the case of all myths, we shall never be in possession of the absolute truth, the myth being the elusive ground where illusion and reality merge until it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.