Category Archives: Vol. 10

Boyan Manchev

New University of Bulgaria

La Nouvelle Odyssée : le continent et l’aventure

The New Odyssey: The Continent and the Adventure

Abstract: In the perspective of the history of figures, the paper inquires into the symptomatic appearance of Ulysses’ character in Bulgarian literature and cultural history over the past three decades. The analysis is focused on the famous essay The Myth of Ulysses by the literary historian Tontcho Jetchev, which proposes a radical critique of Modernity and promotes in exchange a utopian vision of an originary idyllic being of community. Jetchev’s essay has an explicit ideological aim and takes active part in the debate on the destiny of the (national) community in the period of the legitimacy crisis of late communism. The paper examines the structural elements of the figure of Ulysses that allow its ideological use in Jetchev’s text and reveals the anthropotechnical background of Jetchev’s pretendedly idyllic vision.

Keywords: Tontcho Jetchev, Ulysses, Bulgarian late communism, utopia.

L’hypothèse préliminaire concernant la figure d’Ulysse, sans doute une des figures constitutives de l’imaginaire européen, est traduite dans le titre de ce texte : selon elle, l’importance de cette figure est directement liée à l’émergence de l’idée de « continent » (de l’idée du continent Europe) au début de l’époque moderne. Cette émergence a sans doute quelque chose à voir avec les grandes découvertes – des découvertes surprenantes de nouveaux continents, ou bien, comme on les appelle, de nouveaux mondes. L’époque des grandes découvertes a été marquée par le prestige de notions et figures inconnues auparavant, qui ont sans doute quelque chose de commun avec les événements marquants des voyages entre les continents. Telles sont les notions de la bonne surprise ou bien de l’aventure, dont Ulysse devient sans doute la figure exemplaire.

Ces figures renvoient aux procédés épistémiques qu’on associe de nos jours avec les débuts de la modernité, parmi lesquels il faut d’abord signaler la méthode expérimentale. Les expérimentations chez Descartes, le Philosophus Vagans, ou chez Bacon sont liées au risque de faire l’expérience de l’inconnu (du choix libre donc), de se laisser être surpris. Le procédé épistémique de l’expérience s’associe donc à la position éthique de s’exposer au risque de l’inconnu. De ce point de vue, l’émergence du roman d’aventures est symptomatique. Pour en aborder la rhétorique, on peut prendre un exemple d’avant la lettre, de Rabelais, ce contemporain des grandes découvertes. Voici donc, dans Le Tiers livre, dans le chapitre « Comment Pantagruel rencontra Panurge », l’introduction du fameux personnage de Panurge (qui fait son apparition, je le rappelle, dans un état bien lamentable): « ce sont les aventures auxquelles s’exposent les gens curieux qui l’ont réduit à cette pénurie et à cette indigence. » L’ami de Rabelais, le poète Jean Bouchet, avait pris comme surnom « Le traverseur de voies périlleuses » (l’expression de Rabelais dans le chap. 49 du Tiers Livre est : « le grand voyagier et traverseur des voyes périlleuses »). Il n’est pas nécessaire de rappeler que le voyage de Pantagruel et compagnie est fondé sur l’architexte de l’ « Odyssée ». Tout cela nous indique qu’il s’agit d’une transformation radicale et d’une re-valorisation de la figure d”Ulysse, surtout si on la confronte avec l”apparition lamentable d”Ulysse au chant XXVI de L’Enfer de Dante.

Dans cette perspective on peut formuler une hypothèse encore plus générale, à savoir la possibilité de considérer Ulysse comme une figure du sujet moderne : l’invention de la figure de l’aventurier serait un symptôme de l’advenir du sujet (on peut rappeler la métaphore navale qui décrit le cogito cartésien, ainsi que l’heureuse surprise chez Bacon, dont le traité Instauratio magno avait sur la couverture une image du bateau d’Ulysse). De cette façon, Ulysse apparaît comme la figure qui rend possible l’association de l’idée d’Europe à celle de la subjectivité moderne : toutes les deux impliquent une dialectique du proche et du lointain, la distance entre lesquels est parcourue par la curiosité de l’esprit parti à la découverte.

Cette correspondance permet l’appropriation possible de cette figure essentiellement moderne par le projet politique par excellence de la modernité, le projet national. C’est dans cette optique que se situent la thèse et l’exemple que je me propose d’exposer ici. Il s’agit d’un exemple assez paradoxal de prime abord, l’appropriation de la figure d’Ulysse comme figure légitimatrice de l’identité culturelle bulgare, en d’autres mots, d’une identité nationale. (D’ailleurs, il faut le dire, le choix de cet exemple a un autre motif plus particulier – c’est qu’une partie de ce corpus a fait déjà l’objet d’un article intitulé « L’éternel retour d’Ulysse ou l’Orient de la philosophie » qui a été publié, il y a trois ans, également à Cluj, dans le numéro 3 de la revue ARCHES). Ainsi, l’hypothèse en question est le résultat de l’analyse d’un phénomène particulier : l’abondance d’oeuvres littéraires et d’essais, parus pendant les quelques dernières décennies, où la figure d’Ulysse occupe une place à part. En 1997 seulement parurent deux livres poétiques et une oeuvre dramatique qui ont le sujet de l’Odyssée à leur base aussi bien qu’ils ont en commun Ulysse en tant que héros prototypique ou architextuel si l’on a recours à la notion de Genette. C’étaient Le mythe d’Ulysse dans la nouvelle poésie bucolique[1] de Kiril Merdjanski, Dans l’île des coprophiles[2] de Zlatomir Zlatanov et le drame Ulysse Periagon[3] de Georgi Tenev. Le texte de Georgi Tenev est de son côté à la base de la représentation théâtrale Le rêve d’Ulysse, réalisée par le jeune metteur en scène bulgare Javor Gardev dans le théatre Sfumato à Sofia[4] et un peu plus tard – de la pièce radiodiffusée L’Atoll ayant connu un succès international. Il faut ajouter que Zlatanov et Merdjanski jouissaient à cette époque déjà du statut de poètes faisant figure parmi les plus importants de leur génération – la génération des quadragénaires, tandis que Tenev et Gardev ont connu dans une large mesure leur succès le plus important jusqu’à ce moment à la suite de leurs occupations ulysséennes. Comment se fait-il que quatre jeunes auteurs parmi les plus remarquables de leur pays convergent sur un thème et un héros commun et dans la même année en plus ? Faut-il ajouter à cela que l’architexte odysséen est présent – tout au long de la décennie – d’une manière plus ou moins explicite dans l’oeuvre d’autres auteurs importants tels que Tzvetan Marangozov, Ivan Stanev, Emile Valev, Liubomir Kanov ?

Bien sûr, ce n’est pas seulement une coïncidence heureuse. Mais pour aborder sa raison plus profonde, je commencerai de beaucoup plus loin. Le rôle paradigmatique des figures mythologiques et historiques de la culture de la Grèce ancienne pour les projets polititques modernes est incontestable. En postulant cela, je n’envisage pas tellement une succession continue remontant aux origines : une telle vue ne serait qu’un mythe originaliste assez symptomatique en soi. Par contre, on pense à ce que ce symptôme implique : le fait que la Grèce ancienne est pensée comme le Territoire – l’incarnation – authentique de l’Esprit, et de ce fait elle équivaut au topos virtuel générique, à l’archifantasme universel de toute la culture européenne. Ayant en vue que l’époque moderne était marquée par l’avènement d’un nouveau type d’universalisme – l’universalisme national opposé au vieil universalisme de l’Empire – il faut tenir compte du fait que la nouvelle universalité nationale impliquerait par nécessité les figures génériques de l’universalisme : celles de la Grèce ancienne. En effet, c’est bien le fondement sur les modèles gréco-romains qui rend une culture européenne. Si le projet universaliste de l’Empire – l’Empire romain en l’occurrence – est fondé sur une universalité territoriale, c’est-à-dire quantitative, l’universalité nationale est une universalité abstraite, qualitative. La nation est une particularité dont la naissance est marquée par l’incorporation d’un projet universaliste – visant toute l’humanité – dans la singularité d’un « peuple »[5]. La constitution qui proclame la naissance de la première nation européenne – la nation française – le prouve incontestablement : on ne peut y lire que dans le préambule que la nation se réduit au peuple français. Cependant, la naissance de l’État qui incarne cette nouvelle « universalité » est un paradoxe incontournable : il exemplifie le fait que ce n’est qu’un universalisme « insuffisant », limité aux frontières de l’État. Alors, à la suite d’un mécanisme mimétique, typologiquement proche de celui proposé par René Girard pour décrire la rivalité mimétique constitutive de la communauté, les autres peuples commencent à refléter l’universalisme initial, et à la sortie d’un enchaînement successif celui-ci ne reste que le point de départ de la formation des États-Nations européens. C’est pourquoi, ce n’est que l’engendrement initial – celui de la nation française – qui peut être défini comme « objectif » ; celui de la nation allemande, paradigmatique pour les nationalismes de l’Europe Centrale, est « réflexif », ou, si on peut dire, « philosophique » : il compense la réalité traumatique, la non-existence absolue d’un État-Nation allemand[6]. C’est bien dans la philosophie romantique allemande que les notions de Patrie et de Nation seront reliées dans leur essence aux catégories de l’Esprit et à son topos virtuel, la Grèce (plus tard chez Hegel, l’Esprit allemand succède, à travers un véritable Aufhebung, à l’Esprit grec).

A l’issue de ces réflexions, on peut se poser une question juste et insistante concernant la possibilité même d’existence d’un projet national bulgare. S’il est vrai que le projet universaliste de n’importe quelle nation européenne peut difficilement se passer de l’architexte grec au cas où elle tiendrait à sa légitimation européenne, alors le projet national d’un pays voisin de la Grèce (le successeur phantasmatique de la culture ancienne), « collé » à sa frontière nord, s’avère une tâche assez complexe. À la suite des lois incontournables de la rivalité mimétique, le projet national bulgare ne peut pas adopter les modèles grecs anciens en tant que base de sa propre identité – ou plus exactement en tant que générateur d’une puissance figurative pour la formation de la nation bulgare – parce qu’une telle adoption mettrait en cause les fondations « ontologiques » de cette nation. Elle se trouve privée a priori de la possibilité de «se greffer » sur le modèle archétypal de l’universalité européenne qui se particularise dans les nations romanes et germaniques.

Le paradoxe paraît insoluble. Cependant, grâce à une flexibilité idéologique et figurologique, une sortie de l’impasse pourrait être trouvée. La possibilité de cette sortie consiste dans le fait que le modèle grec lui-même (cette fiction originaire qui n’est bien sûr qu’une construction néo-européenne a posteriori) n’est pas uniforme et privé de hiatus intérieurs. À côté de la face de la Grèce – le berceau de l’Esprit – s’érige une autre face, une figure obscure et menaçante, sinon transfigurée : celle de l’Autre Grèce, la face que le romantisme oppose à la reconstruction classique de la Grèce : l’opposition qui sera personnifiée par Nietzsche à l’aide des figures d’Apollon et de Dionysos. Cette seconde face n’est pas autre chose que l’Orient de la Grèce – et l’hymne Hölderlinien Der Ister, parlant de la recherche des origines de l’Europe en Orient, est parmi les plus révélateurs sous ce rapport.

Cette rupture intérieure rend possible une opération risquée mais capitale – l’identification de la Bulgarie – la figure universelle et totalisante du projet natio-universaliste bulgare – à l’Autre Grèce, en d’autres termes, ouvre la possibilité d’un programme nouveau et alternatif de l’autolégitimation bulgare, d’une nouvelle production – ni plus ni moins – de la nation bulgare.

C’est bien dans cette perspective que je vais introduire le cas privilégié de cet article, l’oeuvre de l’historien de la culture Tontcho Jetchev, auteur du fameux essai Le mythe d’Ulysse (1985)[7], qui considère la figure d’Ulysse comme figure communautaire, légitimatrice pour le communautarisme national. L’essai propose une critique conservatrice de la modernité, à laquelle il oppose la vision d’un être communautaire idyllique, préculturel, d’une humanité originaire. Le retour aux origines est la figure centrale de cet essai, dont, paradoxalement, Ulysse devient la personnification. Il n’est pas surprenant que cet essai se trouve à l’origine d’un des débats culturels parmi les plus fervents pendant la période communiste ; il devient la cible de la critique radicale des auteurs « structuralistes »[8], qui l’accusent, non sans prendre appui sur les théories marxistes, d’anhistorisme et de conservatisme.

Les essais de Jetchev (surtout Les Pâques bulgares et Le mythe d’Ulysse) se sont vus chargés d’un rôle idéologique crucial en raison de tendances politiques et culturelles très complexes dont l’analyse dépasse largement l’objectif de ce texte. Simplifiant à l’extrême on peut dire qu’à la suite d’une crise légitimatrice intérieure du régime communiste dans la seconde moitié des années soixante-dix, le pouvoir commence à chercher de nouveaux modèles d’identification qui se sont explicités dans la politique d’ouverture vers l’Extrême-Orient menée par Liudmila Jivkova, la fille de Todor Jivkov, et dans le soutien idéologique et matériel pour le développement du mythe des origines « thraces » – c’est-à-dire pré-slaves (on devine facilement les connotations politiques assez graves de ce projet – se détacher de la « grande » nation slave, la Russie) du peuple bulgare. Cette tendance devait finalement – inconsciemment – reconstituer l’identité européenne toujours traumatique en tant qu’insuffisante de la nation bulgare non comme périphérique mais comme « centrale », c’est-à-dire, faire repenser sa culture, la culture « bulgare » (ou thraco-bulgare déjà[9]) comme le berceau de toute la civilisation européenne. Cependant, tout cela ne donne pas une explication du fait que Tontcho Jetchev, un des porte-parole les plus importants de cette tendance, a choisi la figure d’Ulysse comme personnification cruciale de sa thèse.

Après avoir lancé cette hypothèse théorique, je vais aborder le cas concret, notamment l’appropriation de la figure d’Ulysse en tant que figure emblématique d’une identité collective. Ce qui importe ici, ce n’est pas de prouver que les identités et les idéologies identitaires se servent bien de figures. Ce qui est intéressant, c’est plutôt d’analyser la logique propre aux figures elles-mêmes : à leur choix, appropriation et fonctionnement. Il s’agit donc d’une figurologie : si depuis Nietzsche les concepts philosophiques et scientifiques sont pensables en tant que métaphores, les figures elles aussi ont leur fond « conceptuel », elles répondent à une certaine logique. Quelle est alors la logique du fonctionnement de la figure d’Ulysse chez Jetchev ?

Il faut d’abord dire que la néomythologie thraco-bulgare favorisait les figures des héros et des dieux supposés thraces – Orphée, Spartacus mais surtout Dionysos. Il est à noter que Tzvetan Stoianov, un des plus grands penseurs des années soixante en Bulgarie et ami personnel de Jetchev, avait déjà utilisé la figure de Dionysos dans son dialogue tout à fait remarquable, La conversation continue, où il parle d’un « complexe dionysiaque » des bulgares, mais conformément à sa vision critique, dans des termes négatifs. Cette utilisation négative a, sans doute, affecté Jetchev et a provoqué l’incorporation de Dionysos dans son programme un peu difficile. Et cependant Dionysos reste la figure parfaite pour une utilisation national-exotique – il est bien celui qui résiste à l’eidos formateur, il personnifie la résistance de la matière, lui, le Dieu de l’excès et de l’informe. Pourtant Jetchev, tout en étant fasciné par les figures de l’informe – la chaleur, le sang, l’utérus maternel (tel est son registre métaphorque régressif) résiste, de toute son énergie idéologique, à l’extase, à tout ce qui transgresse les limites de la forme. Le nouveau héros de Jetchev ne doit pas mettre en cause les limites stables, c’est-à-dire le Corps même de la communauté.

En rupture avec la tradition européenne moderne, pour laquelle Ulysse est le héros archétypal de l’aventure, de la migration, de l’errance dans l’archipel, du rejet du lien statique et de la Terre, Jetchev le pense en tant que figure emblématique du retour : selon sa formule éloquente, « Ithaque importe plus que Troie ». On peut noter en passant que, sur le plan philosophique, cette interprétation rapproche Jetchev du dernier Heidegger, accordant un privilège à l’epistrophe, au retour, qui n’a pas été sans influencer son projet. Si on rappelle les mots hégéliens de l’ « Histoire de la philosophie » selon lesquels « l”homme est chez soi dans son esprit, il s”y sent comme dans son pays natal », alors la figure d’Ulysse devrait être pensée comme l’archifigure du sujet européen, comme le fait Levinas, mais pour des raisons différentes. Cela exige de préciser ce qu’on vient d’affirmer un peu plus haut. Ce que je vais essayer précisément de montrer, c’est que, si la figure d’Ulysse se prête à des interprétations bien divergentes, c’est parce qu’elle est ambivalente elle-même dans sa structure anthropologique profonde et parce que ce caractère ambivalent dévoile ou bien s’associe à quelque ambivalence de base du politique.

Il est clair que le retour est une figure universelle de l’identité, de la tautologie existentielle d’être-le-même. Il est également clair que la raison profonde du choix d’Ulysse comme figure légitimant une communauté est basé sur son interprétation comme figure exemplaire du retour. Mais ce choix est motivé aussi par d’autres aspects « structurels » de la figure. En premier lieu, la figure d’Ulysse n’est pas simplement la figure archétypale du voyageur-aventurier. Au contraire, en elle se rencontrent quatre modèles structurels différents – outre l’aventurier, ce sont l’ouvrier, le guerrier et l’époux. Je vais prendre le risque d’affirmer que ces trois figures ont un rapport de base avec les traits structurels fondamentaux du politique. Leur trait commun principal, c’est leur productivité. Prenons d’abord le guerrier. Il faut dire avant tout que l’aventurier pourrait être considéré en quelque sens comme une figure subordonnée à celle du guerrier. Ulysse, avant d’être guerrier ou bien, tout en étant aventurier, est un guerrier survivant (contrairement à la plupart des héros du panthéon de la guerre de Troie). Son voyage représente en effet l’histoire de la survie du guerrier. Le guerrier est une des figures de l’accès au sacré, dans la mesure où la guerre est pensée, depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’au XXème siècle, comme un espace extra-ordinaire, opposé à l’ordre profane de la paix. La guerre est l’espace d’un excès sans limites, qui a partie liée avec l’ordre divin (à l’époque moderne, on retrouvera cette thèse de Friedrich Schlegel et Novalis à Ernst Jünger et Roger Caillois) ; pourtant, de son orgie sanglante, émerge le corps formé de la communauté. L’idée d’un rôle normatif de l’orgie (dans la perspective de la modernité radicale la guerre serait précisément une telle orgie sanglante) est présente chez Freud ou bien chez nombre de représentants de la Révolution conservatrice en Allemagne comme Alfred Baeumler, ou de nos jours dans l’anthropologie de René Girard. Cette idée permet de penser la guerre comme un instrument suprême de l’idéologie plastique de l’Etat, comme son baptême par le feu et le sang.

Dans ce sens le guerrier est celui qui fait le retour depuis le transcendant. L’accès à la violence sacrée et infigurable est le baptême du sujet de la figuration, le sujet de la plastique politique[10]. Il est sa condition nécessaire. Tel est sans doute un des arguments structurels de Jetchev pour considérer le retour en tant qu’un acte de création[11]. Ce retour–création est également retour à la matière prête à être formée, il implique le pouvoir formateur du guerrier-plasticien. Il implique le changement de l’armure par les vêtements de l’ouvrier (qui serait la troisième dimension de la figure d’Ulysse). Il signifie le retour au travail productif banal. Dans la tradition que j’appelle idyllique (car elle se fonde sur une fiction idyllique) de l’idéologie nationale bulgare[12], Jetchev réduit l’ouvrier au paysan. Pour lui Ulysse est à l’origine non pas un roi mais un paysan qui cultive la terre. Si l’on se rappelle la description bien connue du champ de blé dans l’île des cyclopes qui suscite le désir et la nostalgie d’Ulysse, on peut reconnaître que l’interprétation de Jetchev ne manque pas d’arguments anthropologiques. C’est pourquoi le retour à la terre qui attend d’être cultivée, est création. Ulysse a quitté, grâce à son voyage, l’état originaire préculturel de l’union avec l’immanence de la terre. L’expérience du lointain lui a donné le monde comme une scène transcendantale du travail créatif. L’apparente animalité pastorale se dissipe devant l’exigence de l’anthropotechnique culturelle et politique[13]. En d’autres mots, c’est le retour qui rend l’homme humain. Quitter l’immanence de la terre, l’origine, pour toucher au transcendant, est la condition nécessaire pour le devenir de l’Homme : tel est l’impératif de l’anthropotechnique. La fonction formatrice, productrice de l’ouvrier-paysan, est associée par Jetchev également au statut du mari. La fonction de l’époux est une fonction productrice, et en fin de compte politique. Dans ce sens l’imagerie régressive du retour à la terre, au sein de la terre, est pénétrée en profondeur de phallogocentrisme au sens de Derrida. Il ne nous reste qu’à conclure que la productivité – le trait fondamental de l’anthropotechnique politique et de l’idéologie plastique de la figuration – est également la caractéristique principale de la figure d’Ulysse. L’interprétation jetchévienne nous sert de catalyseur de la manifestation de cette structure profonde.

Cette analyse schématique des aspects de la figure d’Ulysse, exploités par Jetchev, permet de dévoiler à la fin le caractère fictif de sa vision rétro-utopique. Cette vision qui se veut une vision idyllique, révèle, en fin de compte, sa base politique conforme aux impératifs de l’anthropotechnique moderne. Si selon Jetchev Ulysse est un héros antidionysiaque, c’est parce qu’il est un héros de la création et de la production, et surtout de la modération. Bref, il est un héros exemplaire de l’ordre culturel et politique combattant les monstruosités chtoniennes et bestiales. Dans sa proximité de la terre Ulysse est un paysan voire un berger qui ne reste pas pour autant enfermé dans l’immanence préculturelle : il est presque un berger de l’être au sens heideggerien, il ouvre l’immanence par elle-même. Nulle surprise alors de constater que l’être idyllique de la rétroutopie jetchévienne, de son mythe régressif, est, dans la même mesure que la figure pastorale chez Heidegger, une figure politique[14].

De cette manière la rétroutopie jetchévienne, antimoderne et anticulturelle en général, apparaît en fin de compte comme un projet communautaire voire communautariste, pour ne pas dire politique. Ce qui permet à cette analyse, je l’espère au moins, d’ajouter un argument de plus à la thèse que la logique politique est en profondeur une logique figurale, donc une « plastique ». Le logos-eidos forme le corps plastique politique par l’intemédiaire des figures qui ont une puissance poïétique au sens étymologique du mot poïesis. Et dans ce sens l’imaginaire incarné en figures n’est pas secondaire par rapport à la présence hypothétique du réel ; au contraire, il fait partie de sa constitution. C’est pour cette raison que l’histoire critique des figures de l’imaginaire devrait accompagner les efforts de l’histoire conceptuelle et de l’analyse du discours.

Notes

Bojan Baskar

University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Imagining the Balkans in Trieste

Abstract: Building on analysis of the Triestine variety of Balkanist discourse, this paper proposes a more nuanced approach to the study of Balkanism. The internal diversity of Balkanist discourse is methodologically related to the loci of its production. Trieste is conceived as one such locus which paradoxically shares certain important elements of the Balkanist discourse with some other Balkan urban centers (in particular Belgrade, Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Skopje). Trieste is further conceived as a frontier town (ville-frontière), which is also represented as a southern extreme of the demarcating line between western and eastern Europe. It has also been positioned on the alleged boundary between the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Triestine Balkanism, together with its imagery of the Balkans, developed through the confrontation of Italian and Slovenian (cum Croatian) nationalisms. During the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, this local discourse was revived and further elaborated. The central attention was now paid to tracing the cultural frontier which allegedly ran immediately behind the town, separating the civilized town and its Mediterranean Venetian legacy from the barbarian Slavic Balkans.

Keywords: Balkans, Ex-Yugoslavia, Trieste, Slav and Italian nationalisms, cultural boundaries

In her seminal book, Maria Todorova (1997: 66) maintained that, ”maybe because of its physical proximity or because it did not become organically afflicted with a mission civilisatrice, Italy on the whole did not develop an abstract and hectoring pose toward the Balkans and never lost sight of their concreteness”. In this appraisal of the Italian perceptions of the Balkans, Todorova adopted a view of the Balkans characteristic of Italian political and cultural centers (Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples). This perspective is reminiscent of the notorious move by Edward Said (1978) who in his approach to orientalism focused on the view of the Orient as it was produced in the leading colonial metropolises.

Assuming the perspective of Italian cultural centers, however, one might easily fail to notice that the north-eastern part of Italy is bordering to the Balkan peninsula and that the notion of the north-east border of Italy had been particularly vaguely conceived throughout the period of the Italian nation-making. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the Italian north-eastern borderland, then part of the Habsburg empire, was increasingly targeted as unredeemed Italian lands by the new Italian nationalism. Ethnically and linguistically ‘alien’ populations (allogeni, allofoni) inhabiting the borderland, the ‘Slavs’ in particular, were deemed non-autochthonous (implying by that that their settlement in the region was a result of the Habsburg anti-Italian policy), yet easily capable of being assimilated to the Italian culture. The ensuing ethno-national strife which culminated for the first time at the turn of the century (then primarily as a sharp interethnic nationalist competition under the imperial umbrella) reached its climax during the fascist period (when the borderland became part of Italy) and its post-World War II developments related to the context of the Italo-Yugoslav demarcation and the emerging Cold War fault-line.[1]

The collision of the Italian and the Slav (i.e., the Slovenian and the Croatian) nationalisms in the borderland region (which at the time stretched also along the East Adriatic coast) naturally fostered the mutual imagination of the figures of the culturally different Other (Barbarian, Alien, Savage, Backward, Inferior, etc.). It comes as no surprise that in the perspective of the Italian nationalism, the figure of the barbarian Slav was epitomized by the Slovenians and the Croats. Among the Slavic peoples, the latter, due to their physical proximity, were the only two who were involved in the violent conflict of the Italian north-eastern borderland.[2] Among the Triestine nationalist intelligentsia, the distinction between the good Slavs (e.g. the Czechs) and the bad Slavs (preferably the Slovenians) used to be made already toward the end of the Habsburg period.[3] Occasionally the Slovenian and the Croatian ‘intimate foe’ could also be related to the balkanist imagery and hence externalized as a ‘Balkan barbarian’. At the same time – especially at the end of the Habsburg period – the Slovenian and the Croatian nationalisms were favorably disposed towards the Balkan unity and largely eager to assume the Balkan identity. In Trieste equating the Slavs with the Balkans became perfectly acceptable for both nationalisms.

Why choose Trieste?

If viewed in spatial terms, as a geographically embedded discourse on essential, insurmountable cultural difference of the Balkans, balkanism (or balkanist discourse) has its core regions as well as its peripheries. Anthropologists in particular are prone to presume that discourses of cultural difference reveal local variation which results from specific local experiences. They are always related to specific loci where they are produced and exploited as identity definers and redefiners. By the same token, anthropologists believe that the variability is also present at higher levels of integration (regional, national), thus questioning the occidentalist assumption that Said and Todorova maintain, respectively, for Orientalism and Balkanism.[4]

The reason why I chose Triestine variety of Balkanist discourse can therefore be envisaged. Due to its geographical situation in the northern extreme of the Adriatic as well as to historical contingencies, Trieste has for centuries represented a periphery and a borderland of different states, although in certain periods it could simultaneously play a much more important role (especially as the principal free port and emporium town of the Habsburg empire).

Taking a look at the map, one can easily notice that it is precisely in the bay of Trieste that the Adriatic coast turns towards south-east. This bay therefore represents the north-west extremity of the eastern Adriatic coast. If the Balkan peninsula were defined geometrically, Trieste would lie precisely on its north-west limit. Geographers, of course, pay more attention to other factors than geometry. In most geographical definitions of the Balkans, Trieste lies not on the Balkan border but more or less close to it.[5]

Geographers who would extend the north-west corner of the Balkans up to Trieste or even beyond it were extremely rare. Still, there is one famous and at his time quite influential representative of this view, namely the Serb geographer Jovan Cvijić. In 1918, when the first Yugoslavia was coming into being, Cvijić published a book in French entitled The Balkan peninsula: Human Geography (La peninsule balkanique. Géographie humaine). As president of the commission for the territorial questions at the peace conference preparing the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 and influential human geographer, guest lecturer at Sorbonne invited by Paul Vidal de la Blache (George 1991: 47), Cvijić was directly involved in the endeavor of putting Yugoslavia on the map. His voluminous work on the Balkan peninsula was thus to provide a human geographical ground for the new nation-state of the Southern Slavs or Yugoslavs. He insisted that the Dinaric Alps as the Adriatic border of the Balkan peninsula should be followed up to the northwest to their very junction with the Alps. To this effect, he proposed the Soča (Isonzo) river as a boundary line of the peninsula in its northwestern corner (Cvijić 1918: 6-7). As Soča runs into the Adriatic north-west of Trieste, the latter also figured on the map of the Balkans (as well as on the map of the desired Yugoslavia). At the end of the second world war, Marshal Tito’s divisions had roughly the same idea about the whereabouts of the north-west Yugoslav border.

Trieste has long been a frontier town in a region where Romance, Slav and German settlement collided. It has been the frontier town (ville-frontière) rather than the town on the border (ville frontalière), if we apply the distinction made by the Belgian scholar Joël Kottek (2000). According to it the frontier town is essentially a contested place; it is a town with two ore more names; a territory invested with two (or more) dreams; a place possessed by the past and overwhelmed by divided memories. As a frontier town, Trieste falls in the same category of towns as Belfast, Jerusalem and Cluj. It has a complicated history of ethno-nationalist conflict which culminated in the interwar period, during the World War II and in the aftermath of the war.

After 1848, the Italian Triestine cultural nationalism, primarily shared by the liberal-national oriented bourgeoisie, was slowly but steadily transforming into political irredentism. From older local representations of Trieste as a prosperous and cosmopolitan Austrian town where the Italian language (or its local Venetian dialect) and the Italian culture are ‘automatically’ embraced by the most diverse immigrants, a step forward towards claims to union with Italy was made. Yet the assurance of the Triestine Kulturnation of its assimilating power was shattered when the positive trend of assimilation of the Slovenian population was reversed toward the last decades of the nineteenth century. The growing number of self-declared Slovenians in the town at the turn of the century was a cause of alarm for it. It is largely over this period that the topoi and images of the menacing Slavic Other descending from his barren mountains above the town and threatening to submerge the old Venetian, Mediterranean or Italian civilization of the coastal plain, proliferated.

The Slavic ‘steppe’

In Triestine discourse the habitat of the invading Slav was increasingly represented as a barren landscape, a steppe which was supposed to be the homeland environment of the Slavs somewhere between the Carpathians Mountains and the Black sea, but also coterminous with the present settlement of the Slavic nations. The topos of the steppe homeland and its role in the invention of Eastern Europe was studied by the historian Larry Wolff (1995). In his next book (Wolff 2001), he studied in more detail the role of Venice in inventing Eastern Europe in the eastern Adriatic. In the perspective of the Enlightenment Venetian ‘discovery’ of Dalmatia, the steppe appeared as a homeland of the Morlacchi. With this ethnonym, the Venetians referred to the hinterland population of Dalmatia in general (both Orthodox and Catholic Slavs as well as Vlachs) while the name itself referred more specifically to the transhumant Vlach populations. The Morlacchi were made famous all over Europe thanks to Alberto Fortis, the famed 18^th century Venetian explorer of Dalmatia. In his Travel to Dalmatia (Viaggio in Dalmazia) he wrote also about “the homogeneous Tatar steppe stretching from the Adriatic to Siberia.” The barbarian Morlacchi were in his opinion culturally homogeneous with numerous other peoples inhabiting the space between the Adriatic, the Northern and the Black seas (Fortis 1774; see also Wolff 1995: 318-19; Wolff 2001).

As the steppe is popularly imagined as a homogeneous ecosystem lacking internal diversity, the metaphor of the steppe is particularly appropriate to refer to the construct of the culturally homogeneous world of the Slavs. In Triestine imagination this monotonous and homogeneous steppe starts immediately above Trieste and stretches until Vladivostok. Nowadays one still comes across this topos. It also appears in literature, for example in the novel The phantom of Trieste (La fantasma di Trieste) by Enzo Bettiza. Daniele Solospin, the protagonist of the novel, who during the World War I had been a war prisoner in Russia and eventually joined first the revolutionaries and then the Bolsheviks, narrates: “Here (in Russia – B.B.) I was domesticated in an easy and natural way. The steppe reminded me of Karst grown vaster and more dangerous” (Bettiza 1961: 393).[6] He is also admonished by a Triestine (il signor Ugo): “Don’t trust the s’ciavi,[7] Daniele (…) because there is nothing behind their back except the steppe, servility and insanity” (ibid: 99). The topos may be also evidenced in earlier travel writing by foreign travelers to Trieste. An Englishman named A. A. Paton in his Researches on the Danube and the Adriatic (London, 1862), when describing the Slovenian population above Trieste, wrote that “the dress and the appearance of the people remind one of the vicinity to the lands broad and wide that stretch from the Alps to the Baltic” (Carmichael 1995: 12). A German traveler J. J. Gerning in his Reise durch Östreich und Italien (1802) stressed the contrast between “blue waters and green hills” and “the infertile steppe” where the Slavs lived (Carmichael 1995: 19).

Superposed to the ethnic border of Latin and Slav (and German) settlement was therefore another, much more impactive border. In divisions of Europe into its western and eastern part, Trieste has regularly appeared as a southern terminal point of the dividing line. Over the cold war period it was widely assumed, in public discourses as well as in the academia, that this dividing line was based on the difference of two incompatible political systems and social orders. The role of ethnicity in this divide has been given almost no attention. Thus the virtual coincidence of the dividing lines, such as Trieste–Szczecin, Trieste–Gdansk or Trieste–St. Petersburg, with the western frontier of the Slavic settlement was seldom acknowledged. While the first of these three fault-lines was invented by a powerful politician and baptized ‘the Iron Curtain’, the third one (Sankt Petersburg – Trieste) originated in the scholarship, i.e. with the Cambridge historians of family whose intra-European border of different family patterns somewhat miraculously coincided with the western Slavic border.

Another division into two opposed cultural worlds which traces the boundary through Trieste and all along the eastern Adriatic coast, is the one between the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The Karstic Dinaric mountain range which runs along this coast represented a stark contrast to the Mediterranean world of olive groves, vineyards and small burgs of the Dalmatian riviera. This relief contrast of two ecosystems, one of the most conspicuous in the Mediterranean, has inspired hundreds of travel writers and other observers who have been passionately depicting it, inflating it and above all reproducing topoi related to it.

In this fascination of the eastern Adriatic contrast by foreign visitors there has been an interesting constant. Descriptions have always been ethnicized; the notion of an ethnic frontier has always been superposed upon the contrast of the relief and the cultural landscape. For Trieste, this holds truer than for many other places of the eastern Adriatic. As historian Cathie Carmichael has argued, descriptions of Trieste by travelers from the 18^th and 19^th centuries were “strikingly ethnicized, from both the point of view of the new ethnicity of Trieste (i.e. its multiethnic composition as a consequence of the new prosperity of the port – B.B.) and the contrast between the port and the Slavic hinterland” (Carmichael 1995: 12). To mention but two prominent instances: Stendhal felt in Trieste encircled by the barbarians (“in mezzo ai barbari”); for Chateubriand the last breath of civilization expired on the Triestine coast where barbarism started (Carmichael 1995: 20).

Insecurity of Triestine identities

Today one could hardly find a Triestine of whatever conviction or belonging claiming that Trieste is a Balkan town. One century earlier, however, Slovenian and Croatian ethnicity viewed their belonging differently. The Croatian intelligentsia of the town published a journal titled Balkan. The Slovenian community, much stronger in number and economic resources, was a proprietor of an imposing building in the close center housing the Slovenian home of culture-cum-hotel. This symbol of Slovenian economic prosperity and cultural self-confidence was also called Balkan.[8]

There are, however, several other reasons why Trieste can be deemed a Balkan town. These are primarily cultural[9] and demographic as a good part of the town’s population originates from the Eastern Adriatic. As one can infer from similar situations, the most ardent Triestine Italian nationalists and irredentists often wore recognizably Slavic names. In the whole of Italy, harboring nostalgia for the Italianness of the eastern Adriatic coast is most intense in Trieste. Triestine nostalgic milieux fully participate in the notorious Balkan game of appropriating prominent historical personalities, accomplishments and cultural features of other peoples. The merchant republic of Dubrovnik, together with its Renaissance and Enlightenment literature and science, has been the bone of contention for Croat and Serb nationalists but it is also being claimed by Italian nationalists from Trieste.

There is another, more important attitude that Trieste shares with other western Balkan towns, namely the contempt for everything rural. This attitude is bound up with characteristic dichotomizing of the rural and the urban, and of the mountains and the plain. In these towns – besides Trieste one should point out in particular Belgrade and Sarajevo but also Novi Sad, Skopje and Zagreb – diverse milieux of intelligentsia (writers, publicists, journalists and artists, but also scholars from diverse disciplines) can be identified who share this contempt of the countryside, the peasants and the highlanders.[10]

The contempt for the ‘violent mountaineers’ was recently reenacted during the wars of Yugoslav succession. At the time there was a lot of talk about the ‘revenge of the countryside’, the ‘urbicide’, the ‘violent Dinaric character’, ‘uncultured highlanders’, etc. Within this discourse – which represents a strong version of the local balkanist discourse – the opposition of the mountains and the plain was often exploited as a central explanatory device of the war and ethnic cleansing related to it.

Taking a look at the actors who were commenting in this vein on the Yugoslav bloody demise, one notices that they often originated from the mentioned Balkan urban centers. Moreover, it is possible to document that to a certain extent a dialogue went on between those milieux, thus adding to this variety of balkanist discourse a certain network quality. As a case in point I will bring forward the famed Triestine journalist and travel writer Paolo Rumiz. In his war-reporting from ex-Yugoslavia and his travel books from the eastern Adriatic he developed an amateur anthropology of violent highlanders driven by the force of geographical determinism to aggress the peaceful and tolerant people of the coast.[11] In his popular anthropology, the highlanders and the people of the plain are two different anthropological types who belong to two essentially opposed cultures. They are destined, sooner or later, to collide in an anthropological conflict. In the same vein, the Balkan separatism is something anthropological; it is an outcome of an anthropological selection (Rumiz 1996).

Rumiz eventually used the same device to explain the Padanian separatism, comparing, for example, Venice and Belluno to Sarajevo, pretending that they were in the same manner surrounded, even besieged by a hostile countryside.[12] Padanian separatists are depicted as highlanders suffering from the same ethnic psychosis as their Balkan counterparts. Interviewing the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, then mayor of Venice, Rumiz fully agreed with him that commandoes who one night climbed the top of the campanile of San Marco and hanged out their separatist standard, originated from a culturally backward environment (Rumiz 1998: 208). This environment, described as ‘sad villages’, a typical ‘rurban’ agglomerate of the subalpine Italy with its small family firms dispersed across the countryside, Rumiz considered a landscape which generated the separatist pathology. He also called it palanka. This term which in its original Ottoman usage denoted a small palisaded town in the Balkan borderland (Ćeman 2005) eventually became a synonym for the village and also for provincialism. In 1969 a book was published in Belgrade titled Filosofija palanke, i.e. Philosophy of the palanka (Konstantinović 1969). The book was much admired by Serbian intellectuals and students of the 1968 generation. In 1991 it had its second edition and in the following years its devotees, then largely present among Belgrade oppositional intellectuals, recognized in the book a prophecy of what was to happen in the 1990s. Recently one devotee claimed that Radomir ”Konstantinović was a prophetic reader of the signs around him in Belgrade in the 1960s” (Bjelić 2002: 12).[13] When Rumiz makes his use of the notion of palanka, his ideas about it are dependent on this cult book since he mentions it himself. He regrets that he discovered it only when the war was over and he boldly states that the book ”not only foresaw everything but it also contains a very useful theoretical model for understanding ethnocentric fanaticisms and pseudomythologies of our parts” (Rumiz 1998: 25). Rumiz, who doesn’t read Serbian, seems here to be reproducing what his Belgrade interlocutors have told him about the book.

In the same vein, Rumiz quoted his interlocutors from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Sarajevo or Zagreb whenever he needed some support for his geographical determinist view of the mountains-versus-the-plain conflict. Triestine Italian, Sarajevan Muslim and Belgrade Serb intellectuals of a certain cosmopolitan bent could thus fully agree that those strangling Sarajevo and other cultured towns from their mountains were actually not ‘the Serbs’ but just violent highlander bumpkins who hated everything urban and down land. The advantage of this rhetoric strategy was that it allowed one to avoid ethnic accusation, but it also helped a certain kind of the Belgrade oppositional intelligentsia to locate the evil in the rural area in order to be capable of believing in its own innocence (Baskar 1999).

Yet the background experience influencing one’s imagination of what does it mean to be an urbanite or a peasant or a violent highlander significantly varies dependent on whether one grew up as a Muslim in Sarajevo, a Serb in Belgrade or an Italian in Trieste. The experience of many Triestine Italians has been the one of the Italian-Slovenian nationalist competition which was, on the Italian side, largely represented as a Slavic threat from the mountains above Trieste. The most important single event was the invasion of Trieste at the end of the World War II by Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav divisions who liberated the town from the Wehrmacht forces. To that approximate half of population who experienced the short rule of Tito’s Partisans as an act of barbarian occupation (“the worst thing which happened to Trieste in its whole history”), this was a highly traumatic event. The memory of it was bizarrely reawakened in 1991, when the Yugoslav military, having agreed to retreat from Slovenia after the so called ten days war, asked the friendly Italian government for permission to retreat through the port of Trieste. The government in Rome, oblivious or perhaps even ignorant of the Triestine aversion to Yugoslav tanks and soldiers, recklessly agreed. This caused such a tremendous uproar in Trieste that the government had immediately to revoke its decision, so that the humiliated Yugoslavs had to move out through the neighboring Slovenian port.

Due to its position on the former Yugoslav border as well as its shared history of the eastern Adriatic, Trieste from the very beginning of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s anxiously followed the events. Much commenting followed the same balkanist lines as those developed in such a fascinating manner by Paolo Rumiz. When the term ethnic cleansing was coined, the Italian exiles from the eastern Adriatic, strongly present in Trieste, immediately proclaimed from the roof-tops that they had actually been the first victims of those same Dinaric ethnic cleansers. (“What they now do to each other, they first did to us”.) The news of Serbian shelling and strangling of Croatian and Bosnian towns reawakened memories of the Yugoslav army’s invasion of their town.

Imagining cultural boundaries

In the Triestine balkanist discourse of the 1990s the central attention was paid to tracing the cultural frontier which allegedly ran immediately behind the town. The amateur anthropology of Paolo Rumiz reveals a characteristic Triestine obsession with tracing cultural or civilizational frontiers, in particular those of the eastern Adriatic but also others. Let me quote one passage from Rumiz where he describes what is to be found on the other side of the cultural boundary immediately above Trieste (1994: 79-80):

Here the Venetian and Mediterranean influence ends, end the vineyards and hills and intensive culture, end the sandstone and the trigonometry of campanili. End the burgs on the top of the hills, the houses in straight lines like in small towns. There begin dispersed villages, latifundia, pastoral expanses, an arid world, marked by the ferocious defense of the space rather than the cycle of seasons, a world rich with strong myths and collective epos rather than secret magic. And it is also because of the clash of these two cultures that, more to the south, in Bosnia and Dalmatia, the war outbroke.

In these ‘arid pastoral expanses’ one easily recognizes a reformulation of the old topos of the Slavic steppe. The karstic plateau above Trieste was no doubt strikingly barren in the past which is not a case anymore in the time when Europe is complaining of the vegetation increasingly covering the noncultivated lands. From the fourteenth century onwards, the Karst was, the same as Trieste, part of the Habsburg state. When Trieste expanded as a port and emporium, the hinterland became the provisioner of the town.

Let me quote one more passage, this one taken from Guido Miglia, another Triestine journalist and essayist (Miglia 1994: 44):

The drama which is perturbing the Balkans passes once more through Trieste, with even stronger pressure on Istria and Quarnero: the fear, the terror of the civil war which rages between the Croats and the Serbs involves the destiny of a land which is so close to us and which was maturing over centuries between two illustrious civilizations of Europe, the Republic of Venice and the multinational Habsburg empire. For this reason, she grew up pacific and tolerant and had nothing in common with a hatred of race or religion that so often stained the Balkan regions with blood.

Both Miglia and Rumiz subscribe to the notion developed by the local intelligentsia that Trieste is heir to Venice.[14] This upper Adriatic translatio imperii enabled Italian nationalists in Trieste to redefine Triestine culture and identity as Venetian and hence Italian, and also Mediterranean (as opposed to the continental Central European civilization of the Habsburgs). Dependent on the situation, the Habsburg legacy may also be acknowledged and valued (as is the case in the above quoted passage by Miglia). As both civilizational legacies, the Venetian and the Habsburg, are being invoked in support of the claim of the Triestine non-Balkan belonging, the Venetian cultural reference cannot be used as a sole criterion. Neither the equation of the Balkans with the Ottoman legacy is of much help as the westernmost extremity of the Ottoman Empire was about three hundred kilometers away from Trieste. The sole remaining criterion of the Balkanness is the Slavs.

References

Ballinger, Pamela (2003) History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Baskar, Bojan (1999) ”Anthropologists facing the Collapse of Yugoslavia”. In: Diogenes, 4, 47, 51−63.

Bettiza, Enzo (1961) Tržaška prikazen. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba.

Bjelić, Dušan I. (2002) ”Introduction: Blowing up the ’Bridge’.” In: Bjelić, D. I. and O. Savić (eds.), Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press.

Bougarel, Xavier (1998) ”La ‘revanche des campagnes’, entre réalité sociologique et mythe nationaliste”. In: Balkanologie, 2, 1, 17−36.

Bringa, T. (1995) Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village. Princeton : Princeton University Press.

Brown, Keith S. (2001) ”Beyond Ethnicity: The Politics of Urban Nostalgia in Modern Macedonia”. In: Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 11, 2, 417−442.

Carmichael, Cathie (1995) ”Locating Trieste in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”. In: Borut Bumen and Zmago Šmitek (eds.), Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School, Vol. I. Ljubljana: Slovensko etnološko društvo, 11–21.

Ćeman, Mirza Hasan (2005) Zgodovina, tipologija, vsebine, funkcije, struktura i topografija grada u Bosanskom ejaletu od 15. do 19. stoletja. (Ljubljana, ISH, PhD dissertation)

Čolović, Ivan (2002) The Politics of Symbol in Serbia. London : Hurst.

Cvijić, Jovan (1918) La péninsule balkanique. Géographie humaine. Paris : Armand Colin.

Duijzings, Ger (2000) Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. London : Hurst.

Fortis, Alberto (1774) Viaggio in Dalmazia. Venice : Alvise Milocco.

George, Pierre (1991) ”Le destin de la Yougoslavie. Déterminisme géographique ou malédiction historique? La réponse de Jovan Cvijić (mai 1918)”, In: Hérodote, 63, 47–51.

Kolind, Torsten (2002) ”Non-ethnic Condemnation in Post-War Stolac: An Ethnographic Case-Study from Bosnia-Herzegovina”. In: Resic, Sanimir and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa (eds.), The Balkans in Focus: Cultural Boundaries in Europe. Lund: Nordic Academic Press.

Konstantinović, Radomir (1969) Filosofija palanke. Belgrade: Nolit.

Kotek, Joël (2000) ‘La frontière au XX^e siècle.’ In: Christian Bromberger and Alain Morel (eds.), Limites floues, frontières vives. Des variations culturelles en France et en Europe. Paris : Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, pp. 335–342.

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Rumiz, Paolo (199) Maschere per un massacro. Rome : Editori reuniti.

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Notes

Mircea Muthu

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania

Quelques stéréotypes : balkanisme, byzantinisme, orientalisme

Three Stereotypes : Balkanism, Byzantinism and Orientalism

Abstract: Notions that represent constitutive parts of the comparative history of mentalities, but, at the same time, of the European cultural examination, Balkanism, Byzantinism and Orientalism make the object of this present research study with a dual finality: on the one hand, we present the identification of each of the three terms, specifying the causes of the historical process of stereotypization; and, on the other hand, we study how the reciprocal contamination due to an insufficient identification (e.g. balkanité vs. balkanisme) or a forced identification (byzantinisme = orientalisme) led to a partly mistaken understanding of the three heavily loaded categorial terms.

Keywords: history of mentalities, stereotypes, Balkanism, Byzantinism, Orientalism.

Dans le langage courant, le terme balkanisme continue à illustrer une tare descriptive et catégorielle. On dirait que ce signifiant s’étend tel un élastique sur des réalités et des idéologies variées, alors que la finalité de ce processus, paradoxalement, en est une de négation et ensuite d’auto- négation. A partir d’une localisation géopolitique, projetée sur une situation de destin, le terme balkanisme se charge d’une somme d’attributs, dont beaucoup lui sont étrangers, pour retourner comme un boomerang et crucifier, ainsi, injustement, un espace de confluences multiples apparemment condamné à une malchance historique. Découvert, mais aussi inventé par des voyageurs et des diplomates surtout au cœur de la dispute entre les puissances européennes de l’époque, la « question orientale », le terme balkanisme cumule, rien qu’au XX^e siècle, une multitude de clichés qui en général, irritent plutôt que de inviter à l’introspection. Des contaminations réciproques (du byzantinisme vers le balkanisme et inversement) grevées par la même incompréhension fondamentale, des délimitations insuffisantes (balkanité / balkanisme) ou les décalages économiques et de mentalité entre l’Est et l’Ouest auxquels s’ajoutent les productions de l’imaginaire, surtout littéraire, saturé de sensationnel et de pittoresque du côté du décoratif, maintiennent ce concept dans la zone des contestations de plano. Or, l’historien des mentalités Alexandru Duţu avertissait sur l’existence d’un « noyau dur du balkanisme que l’on doit identifier et analyser si l’on vise une réelle intégration de la région à l’Europe »[1]. Nous citons ces considérations récentes car elles viennent s’ajouter à un véritable corpus d’études vouées à enlever le sens péjoratif du concept, dans quelques contextualisations absolument nécessaires, pour ne rappeler que le problème de la « mentalité balkanique » (dans la file Jovan Cvijič – Kitromilides), les Balkans comme altérité dans le discours occidental et central-européen et même le discours ottoman, le rapport existant entre les « solidarités organiques » et les « solidarités organisées » du Sud-Est etc. L’histoire moderne, plus précisément l’histoire des mentalités ou l’examen comparé de l’imaginaire offre un inventaire plus plausible du contenu de profondeur du terme balkanique. Au demeurant, la concurrence avec le jugement commun donne gain de cause à ce dernier, d’autant plus qu’une partie de l’univers fictionnel et aussi du réflexe critique empruntent l’éventail de poncifs en les interprétant du point de vue éthique. Qu’est-ce donc que le balkanisme, ou plus exactement, quelles en seraient les marques d’identification ? Énumérons-en quelques-unes : « dérision facile », « inconstance fondamentale », « empirisme ostentatoire », « sentimentalisme dérisoire », « familiarité agressive », « adaptabilité cynique et grossière du personnage », qui, l’on concède, dépasse cependant les limites de l’espace balkanique, « esprit grégaire », « vision infernale », « axiologie sociale renversée », « déviation ethnique », « folie généralisée », « manque d’uniformité de couleur et instabilité du caractère », « la ripaille comme réplique difforme à l’hédonisme philosophique », « instinct maléfique de dérision et de destruction », « hédonisme rudimentaire d’essence populaire orientale », « épicuréisme populaire », « ethnocentrisme agressif », « cynisme grossier », « le caractère inconstant de l’agressivité », « la précarité et le déséquilibre du style de l’architecture balkanique », « la vulgarité structurelle du langage », « le sensorialisme ostentatoire » etc. Ce qui est grave en l’occurrence, c’est la caractérisation réductive du balkanisme. Plus encore, dans ce conglomérat d’attributs, nous avons découvert d’autres traits caractéristiques que nous avons traités dans plusieurs ouvrages, traits qui, à peine énoncés sont presque submergés par l’avalanche d’éléments négatifs englobés dans le concept. Il y aurait, à mon avis, au moins deux éléments définitoires que l’analyse stylistique pourrait réargumenter pour une définition de ce que nous avons nommé balkanisme littéraire. Il s’agit d’une part du balkanisme comme association d’états contrastants et d’autre part du balkanisme comme rédemption esthétique d’un drame collectif – idées et observations que nous avons mises en circulation et qui demeurent fertiles pour un examen stylistique. Une telle application, sur la grille d’Auerbach ou d’Alonso pourrait confirmer ou, pourquoi pas, amender notre démonstration suivant laquelle chez le Roumain Mateiu Caragiale la « sanction éthique » est parfaitement équilibrée par ce que nous appelions, dans le titre déjà, « autocratisme esthétique ». Plus exactement, le balkanisme littéraire en tant qu’école de style (dont Paul Zarifopol eut l’intuition lorsqu’il découvrit chez Ion Luca Caragiale la théorie de l’art comme « excès », de souche méridionale) particularise – et l’examen stylistique peut le démontrer – la relation antinomique, mais paradoxalement, complémentaire aussi, entre « le plan de la réalité et celui de l’imaginaire compensatoire » et, également, l’illusion de la liberté dans la « spatialité fermée par excellence » que nous nommions ailleurs espace adiabatique en analysant sa fonctionnalité spécifique à partir de Istoria hieroglifică (Dimitrie Cantemir) jusqu’à Princepele (Eugen Barbu). La question de savoir en quelle mesure le balkanisme littéraire est, après l’entre-deux-guerres, une expérience esthétique en train de s’épuiser, réclame une redéfinition du problème général du balkanisme censée conduire à l’élimination de beaucoup de stéréotypes dont nous venons de rappeler quelques-uns. Le balkanisme (différent de la balkanité) doit être analysé dans au moins trois acceptions coextensives. Le balkanisme est d’abord une réalité politique et ethnique fragmentée qui engendre des conflits armés et le sentiment / la conscience de ce que nous avons appelé équilibre instable. Ensuite, vu sous l’angle de la mentalité, le balkanisme – en tant que drame collectif accompagné de son revers parodique – est partie intégrante d’une véritable philosophie de la survie. Il y a enfin le balkanisme comme rédemption par l’art, à fonction compensatoire, provoquée et alimentée, génériquement parlant, par le régime autocratique et par l’espace clos, adiabatique.

Cette première acception – le balkanisme en tant que réalité politique et ethnique fragmentée – a connu des développements qui sont pour la plupart des calques. Ainsi, la libanisation ou, plus récemment, la kossovisation particularise des états conflictuels, presque éternisés, d’un « modèle » assimilé par la conscience collective par un cliché : le « tonneau de poudre » de l’Europe. Dans sa seconde hypostase – le balkanisme comme mentalité condamnable et philosophie de la survie – les réflexes, réitérés eux-aussi, définissent un comportement caricaturé, mais aussi la riche typologie de l’homo duplex, quoique les mêmes paradigmes humains (le héros, le prélat, le sage etc.) aient établi aussi le profil de l’Est de l’Europe dans l’ensemble de l’histoire continentale. La dernière dimension – le balkanisme en tant que rédemption par l’art d’une géographie adiabatique – doit être comprise comme une école de style qui agglutine des sensibilités différentes (orientales / occidentales, septentrionales et méridionales, etc.) et, axiologiquement parlant, comme une forme de liberté, surtout intérieure, dans les conditions d’un régime essentiellement autocratique.

Les sens péjoratifs du terme balkanisme sont redevables en grande partie à celui de byzantinisme, connoté négativement par la mentalité occidentale peu disposée à assumer, ne serait-ce qu’en partie, le désastre subi par le monde chrétien en 1453. Considéré seulement à la limite des subtilités rhétoriques excessives ou, pire encore, à celle du comportement double, comme une danse sur la corde et comme illustration parfaite de la politique perfide de Byzance, le byzantinisme devient, corrélativement, une sorte de nomina odiosa qui prend racines à l’âge romantique pour aller se prolonger – dans cette même graphie ! – le siècle suivant. Al. Duţu faisait également remarquer le fait que « on ne perçoit plus le byzantinisme dans sa pureté, mais comme un mélange d’orientalisme ou de balkanisme »[2]. C’est surtout l’imaginaire littéraire qui a perpétué le syntagme « byzantinisme de la décadence » (Mateiu Caragiale), comme effet de cette contamination, et ceci parallèlement à la redécouverte graduelle du vrai Byzance, d’abord par le philologues, ensuite par les historiens. Byzance fut tout un monde, et la byzantinologie européenne – de Krumbacher et Iorga à Pertusi ou Cavallo – a contribué de manière décisive à en éliminer le dessin réductif, malgré le fait que les restitutions littéraires, avec des exceptions redoutables, en maintiennent la couleur fausse, la touche déformante. La structure quadruple de l’homme byzantin, étudiée magistralement par Nicolae Iorga, à laquelle s’ajoute l’établissement de la typologie de celui-ci[3] ont fait reculer l’attribution de traits inappropriés et péjoratifs du type « attitude byzantine » ou « comportement byzantin ». Le byzantinisme peut être considéré dans une perspective spirituelle plus nuancée et à la fois plus neutre, tout comme peut l’être l’idée de balkanisme et ceci non dans un sens unilatéral, exclusivement moralisateur, comme c’est le cas de certains auteurs. A cet égard, Mihail Sadoveanu parvient à équilibrer des réflexes bien assimilés du monde byzantin proprement-dit (dans son roman Fraţii Jderi) avec les stéréotypes (dans son roman Zodia cancerului) qui étaient déjà bien nombreux à l’époque de l’entre-deux-guerres. Il est cependant tout aussi vrai que la connotation dépréciative de la paire Byzance / byzantin(isme) est due également à certains états de facto enregistrés par l’histoire et commentés (id est amplifiés) par les historiens pour retourner ensuite au terme générique et à sa forme dérivée. Il est ainsi connu que le nom de Byzance a été remplacé peu à peu, surtout après 1453, par Tsarigrad (en bulgare, la « ville des tsars », en compétition pendant des siècles avec Byzance). Tsarigrad renferme aussi, dans la mentalité collective du Sud-Est européen le sens de Byzance turcisé, avec tout l’éventail d’attributs fortement stéréotypés engendrés ou plutôt provoqués par la présence ottomane dans les Balkans. A l’époque moderne, légitimée en quelque sorte par la solution – bien imparfaite, on voit aujourd’hui à quel point – de la « question orientale », le byzantinisme absorbe tout simplement de nombreux éléments de son deuxième âge (Istanbul), inconnus à l’époque de Constantinople. Un regard niveleur sur l’espace géo-historique transforme le terme (Byzance) et ses dérivés (byzantin, byzantinisme, byzantinisation) en un repère éminemment négatif emprunté tel quel par une importante part du domaine artistique et non seulement. Paradoxalement, la recherche historique a contribué elle aussi, même si partiellement, à perpétuer un cliché, au-delà du fait que ses formulations ont fait époque, et à juste titre, dans cette discipline. Le célèbre syntagme de Nicolae Iorga, Byzance après Byzance, a été souvent confisqué par le discours politique, juridique ou journalistique par des équivalents (fanariotisme et même lévantinisme) non seulement erronés, mais aussi loin du contenu sémantique imposé par Nicolae Iorga dans la byzantinologie moderne. A l’autre pôle, une formule contemporaine – « un byzantinisme sans Byzance » (André Mirambel) souffre des mêmes contaminations encore très résistantes dans le langage commun. Plus exactement, entre Byzance après Byzance et byzantinisme sans Byzance, le terme byzantinisme devient, malgré lui, un véritable dépositaire de ce qui est maniériste, criard, incriminable du point de vue ethnique et, par conséquent, coupable pour l’éternité. De là, sans doute, la relation avec des termes substituables (byzantinisme – balkanisme) – en fait, l’une des conditions sine qua non du processus plus général de stéréotypage. Évidemment, la technique du dédoublement, la prolifération des formes, la reconstitution livresque d’un Modèle qui renferme son dégradé, la sensation d’artifice ou une certaine serpentinata maniériste définissent l’esthétique byzantine. Cependant, tous ces éléments doivent être mis dans le contexte sur un trajet à au moins trois relais : l’histoire réelle de Byzance à Byzance en tant que dimension symbolique (allégorique) à Byzance en tant que Modèle (ou épure métaphysique). Une telle démarche, intertextuelle en fait, ne peut être que bénéfique dans le processus tellement difficile de re-sémantisation de la paire byzantin / byzantinisme, et ce d’autant plus que le byzantinisme et le balkanisme sont presque invariablement rapportés à un troisième concept, fortement stéréotypé lui aussi : l’orientalisme.

L’européocentrisme, dans sa variante actuelle, occidentalo-centrique, continue d’attribuer à la paire orient / oriental un éventail de significations vouées à privilégier une relation couramment antinomique entre Orient et Occident. Puisque la simple énumération serait oiseuse, nous allons rappeler seulement deux étiquettes qui ont fait école dans les discours idéologique et culturel. Ainsi, à l’opposition entre l’Orient agglutinant des espaces et des cultures différentes et l’Occident, dans une grammaire européenne et nord-américaine, correspondrait, d’un côté, l’antagonisme entre l’esprit autocratique et l’individualisme politique (démocratique) et entre traditionalisme et modernisme de l’autre. De là, la plupart des stéréotypes qui situent l’orientalisme sur au moins deux paliers communicants. Le premier est le palier idéationnel ou, plus correctement, attitudinal, qui réunit le fatalisme structurel, l’atemporalité, l’immobilisme, le contemplativisme non productif, la vision éléate etc. L’autre palier, culturel, apporte un nombre de traits spécifiques tels la préférence pour l’ornement, le baroque sui generis, les variations infinies sur un thème dans l’acte diégétique, la sensibilité au descriptif et à la spatialisation au détriment du verbe, et, par conséquent, du dynamis etc. De plus, le terme orientalisme sera constellé d’autres termes : l’ainsi nommé asianisme, le levantinisme et le fanariotisme, ce dernier facilitant le court-circuit de l’orientalisme avec le byzantinisme et avec le balkanisme. Le christianisme a contribué lui aussi, et d’une manière décisive, depuis les Croisades, à la dichotomie Orient – Occident, qui a maintenu pendant des siècles un état conflictuel et a engendré des dessins simplificateurs qui continuent d’entraver l’appréhension nuancée des différences de vision, mais aussi des complémentarités. Je ferais remarquer tout d’abord le fait que, du point de vue géographique, le terme orient avec ses dérivés « recouvre », à première vue, pas moins de trois espaces différents qui ont, il est vrai, des points d’incidence. Il y a d’abord l’Extrême Orient, qui n’intéresse pas la recherche balkanologique. Il y a ensuite un Orient qui, réduit, par exemple, à l’acception de Nicolae Iorga, engendre déjà la confusion : « … quand je dis Orient, je comprends surtout cet Orient qui comprend l’Est de l’Europe et quelques parties de l’Asie participant à la civilisation européenne »[4]. Il serait donc question d’une région « mi-européenne, mi-asiatique », que l’on ne peut pas délimiter de l’Occident ni par la race (car il y a là des « éléments de la même race, qui appartiennent à l’Occident aussi »), ni par le territoire (très variable, en fonction des secousses de l’histoire), et d’autant moins par les formations politiques, soumises, elles aussi, à des changements. Mais au-delà de la contextualisation de cette option dans la conception de Nicolae Iorga sur le Sud-Este européen[5], il est bien évident que cet espace dépasse les cadres de l’Asie Mineure. On y voit plutôt un complexe culturel (et non seulement !) arabo-islamique, où l’islamisme devient idéologie de masse et, plus encore, une véritable religion politique (Hichem Djaït)[6] à caractère offensif/défensif le long de l’histoire médiévale et moderne. Plus exactement, l’arabo-islamisme unifie et différencie à la fois l’aire nord-africaine, l’Asie Mineure et le périmètre asiatique proprement-dit, jusqu’aux frontières de la Chine.

La troisième acception, réductible à la dimension ottomane, se trouvant sous l’impact direct et prolongé avec l’Europe, est celle qui donne en fait la connotation la plus dépréciative au terme d’orient. Les localisations sont maintenant exactes : pour ce qui est de l’espace, le Croissant devient empire, aux frontières pourtant changeantes, et son existence débute avec la disparition tragique de Byzance en 1453. Placé à sa naissance sous les auspices de Rome, Constantinople illustre en fait, la « nouvelle forme de la Monarchie Orientale » (Edward Gibbon) reprise par le Croissant (Nicolae Iorga) sur une autre partition, jusqu’au siège échoué de Vienne (1683), événement qui marquera le début du long déclin de l’Empire. Or, ces continuités mises au jour par la recherche historique, auxquelles s’ajoutent des alluvions de mentalité ottomane (qui, dans son ensemble, a constitué plutôt une excroissance qu’un summum de l’esprit de l’esprit arabo-islamique), ont facilité les contaminations réciproques jusqu’à une exagération caricaturale entre byzantinisme et orientalisme. La proximité immédiate du modèle ottoman a imposé une première translation, en bonne partie dénaturante, du contenu sémantique de terme orientalisme d’une réalité géo-politique (actualisée périodiquement lors des guerres coloniales) à l’acception prédominante d’espace mental, d’habitude amendable du point de vue éthique, et vu, de toute façon, comme une altérité absolue par rapport à l’espace mental européen. La découverte de l’Orient dans ses grandes dimensions – historique, religieuse, philologique, anthropologique etc. – a contribué à une deuxième mutation, paradoxalement, assez réductive elle aussi. Il s’agit de l’orientalisme vu comme artifex, une sorte d’épure concentrée en maniérisme sous des formes itératives, dévitalisées. Cette dernière acception de l’orientalisme est proche de l’asianisme, un terme générique apparu par opposition à l’atticisme, et dans lequel Hocke voyait « l’exagération, l’équivoque, l’insignifiant comme point de départ et la dissimulation perfide de l’essentiel sous le vêtement de la prolixité, la représentation subjective qui « truque » consciemment l’angle de la perspective ». L’on retrouve à nouveau certaines connotations actuelles du byzantinisme en tant qu’école de style artistique et d’hermétisme (abstractionnisme) de type oriental. Les deux contaminations, en fait réciproques, maintiennent l’orientalisme dans un processus de rétro-projection fortement stéréotypée dans le mental collectif et non seulement là.

Les équivalences, voulues ou incidentales, entre le balkanisme, le byzantinisme et l’orientalisme ont comme source la connaissance distordue de l’histoire du Sud-Est européen de l’Orient, d’une part, et, évidemment, les mécanismes d’européocentrisme qui sont illustrés aussi par des étiquettes centrifuges, comme celles mentionnées plus haut.

Notes

Carmen Andraş

“Gheorghe Şincai” Institute, Târgu Mureş, Romania

carmen_andras@yahoo.com

Imagining Niagara: Victorian British Lady Travellers in North America[1]

Abstract: This paper reflects my interest in nineteenth-century British travel literature, several of my previous studies being dedicated to examining accounts of such journeys to the restricted space of Central and Eastern Europe, Romania included. I have decided to extend the geography of my research having in mind the great mobility and dynamism that characterized British travel and exploration in a century that brought about not only the imperial expansion but also the enlargement of knowledge, be it imperial or not, related to power or not. There is an extraordinarily rich and complex corpus of nineteenth-century British travel literature and I have decided to start my research restricting not only the geography of travel but mostly the social and gender category of the travellers: Victorian ladies’ descriptions of distant landscapes, particularly Niagara Falls. The tenacious character, intellectual posture and artistic skills of the British lady travellers, tourists, and explorers at the same time, are quite impressive. So is the quality of postcolonial and feminist critical works dedicated to the subject, especially those by Shirley Foster, Sara Mills, Amanda Gilroy, Dorothy Middleton, Mary Baine Campbell, Dea Birkett, Marion Tinling and so on. My paper represents an initial step in this endeavour. British lady travellers, such as Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird, Marianne North, Emily Pfeiffer and Frances Trollope, Frances Wright, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley etc dared to cross not only their frustrating feminine condition in Victorian England from which they tried hard to escape by travelling abroad (helped by their social status too, indeed), but also the boundaries between disciplines set by the Enlightened reason.

Keywords: British voyage literature; Victorian period; lady travellers and writers; Niagara Falls.

Women travellers’ accounts, Victorian ladies in particular, represent an increasingly important field of research in the academic circles, where particular attention is paid to the articulations of travel, gender, and representation. (Blunt, 1995; Fawley, 1994; Lawrence, 1994; Melman, 1992; Mills 1991; Birkett, 2004; Foster, 1990; Middleton, 1965; Tinling, 2000) Academic researchers consider it important to record the “physicality of representation itself”. This involves attending to “the multiple sites at which travel writing takes place and hence to the spatiality of representation”. (Duncan, 1999, 2)

Unfortunately, travel archive is “fractured”. “Too often, we think”, confesses James Duncan, that “journals, letters and published writings are assigned to literary scholars and historians; sketches, watercolours and paintings to art historians; and photographs and postcards to historians of photography. We suggest that the alternative strategy of attending to the physicality of representation imposes the obligation to read these different media together and, in so doing, to attend to their different valences and silences”. (Ibidem)

In James Duncan’s opinion, there is yet another sense in which we accentuate the spatiality of representation: “travel writing as an act of translation that constantly works to produce a tense ‘space in-between'”. (Ibidem; see Steven Totosy for the concept of “in-between peripherality”, which can be successfully applied to travel literature and translation) Considered literally, “translation” means to travel from one place to another and implies an obvious dialectic between the “recognition” and “recuperation” of difference. (Ibidem; see also Miller, 1996) “Memory”, individual, but mostly collective or social memory, is also a hypostasis of translation “marked by a boundary crossing and by a realignment of what has become different”. (Ibidem; see also Iser, 1996, 297; Motzkin, 1996, 265-81) Consequently, in representing other peoples, cultures and other landscapes, authors of travel accounts “translate” one space into another, “through a language-game going to and fro from their own cultural reference to the foreign one”. (Ibidem; see also Dingwaney, 1995, 5; Asad and Dixon, 1973; 1985) Just as in literary transpositions from one language into another, “translations from one culture into a referential one are approximate. They take place in an intermediary space where both cultures meet, define or reject, understand or reprehend, combine or clash, annex or censure, include or exclude, compare or classify each other”, “a space in-between”. “This space of translation is not a neutral surface and it is never innocent: it is shot through with relations of power and of desire”. (Duncan, 2) Translation is either a “domesticating method, an ethnographic reduction of the foreign text to target language cultural values, bringing the author back home” or a “foreignizing method, an ethnographic pressure on those values to register the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad”. (Venuti, 1993, 210) Travel literature is often domesticating or taming the unknown and intrinsically the dangerous in” a knowledge-power play”. Nonetheless, in its most fragrant imperial position, through its imaginative or authentic occupation of that “space in-between” -“the space of transculturation” (Pratt, 1992) -travel literature can also “reveal ambivalence and hibridity, a sense of questioning its own objectivity, expertise and theses”. (Duncan, 3-4)

Even though post-colonial theories speak about “travelling cultures” (Clifford, 1992; 1997; see Duncan) and “travelling theory” (Behdad, 1994; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Kaplan, 1996; Robertson et al., 1994; Rojek and Urry, 1997; see Duncan), travel is still widely identified with the fascination of picturesque, exotic, different, multi-coloured cultures. Additionally, travel to the past colonies is still described in a nineteenth-century romantic manner categorized by Said (1979; 1993) as “Orientalist”, and by Fabian (1983) as “a form of time-space substitution”.

It is all true in what British lady travellers concern. They dared to cross not only their frustrating feminine condition in Victorian England from which they tried hard to escape by travelling abroad (helped by their social status too, indeed), but also the boundaries between disciplines set by the Enlightened reason. They crossed the frontier between wonder and science, fiction and poetry, creating an imaginative geography; between aesthetics and ethics, creating a geography of pure beauty and human care; between medicine and aesthetics, within a geography of bodily and spiritual reinvigoration; between botany and aesthetics, within a geography of exotic flora; between sociology, politics and ethics, within a human geography of understanding and tolerance, refraining as much as possible feelings of imperial superiority and power.

They were wealthy, but had difficult family responsibilities (they had to look after bed-ridden parents). The few of them who were married had to carry the burden of their unhappiness even though they accompanied their husbands in their missions abroad. Almost all of them were the daughters of very influential fathers who travelled extensively and brought home the “facts” collected during their voyages around the world. Fathers were very authoritarian and did not always encourage their daughters to take part in their experiences. Nevertheless, the young ladies grew more and more interested in what existed far beyond their confined universe. More than this, they created a parallel universe for themselves, a realm of poetry, art, gardening and scientific study, where they escaped from the dullness of their lives.

As Dorothy Middleton notices, it is important to “describe the impulses which sent on their travels a surprisingly large number of women” during Queen Victoria’s reign, when “more women than ever before or perhaps since undertook journeys to remote and savage countries; travelling as individuals, and for a variety of reasons, they were mostly middle-aged and often in poor health, their moral and intellectual standards were extremely high and they left behind them a formidable array of travel books. Nearly always they went alone, blazing no trail and setting no fashion, their solitary ventures altogether different in kind from, for instance, the all-woman expeditions to the Himalaya in recent years. Though this outburst of female energy is undoubtedly linked with the increasingly vigorous movement for women’s political and social emancipation, it was neither an imitation nor a development of the male fashion for exploration which was such a feature of Victorian times. Whereas the famous lone travellers among the men were followed up by expeditions of ever greater size and complexity, the women did not inspire such an outcome”. (Dorothy Middleton, 3-4)

“But in the same way that professionally – as writers, educationalists and doctors – they found it hard to gain recognition, so as travellers they often encountered if not outright hostility at least patronising ridicule”, states Shirley Foster (6). “Frances Kemble, continues Shirley Foster, quotes a satirical article in a French review of the 1820’s, picturing the English female traveller of that period”:

“Coal-scuttle poke bonnets, short and scanty skirts, huge splay feet arrayed in indescribable shoes and boots, short waisted, tight-fitting spencers, colours which not only swore at each other but caused all beholders to swear at them, – these were the outward and visible signs of the British fair of that day”. (Frances Anne Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, 1878, I, p. 108, apud Foster, 6.)

I will not insist on much discussed aspects such as the difficulty women explorers experienced in gaining official acceptance by the Royal Geographical Society. “Not until 1892, observes Shirley Foster, were some of the most notable, including Isabella Bird, Kate Marsden and Mary French Sheldon, admitted as Fellows; and this was a concession which the following year a Special General Meeting, endorsing Curzon’s now renowned opinion that the “genus of professional female globetrotters.is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century”, rescinded by refusing to allow the election of any more women Fellows. It took another twenty years for this resolution to be overthrown, and only in January 1913 were women officially granted Fellowship privileges, an extremely delayed victory for them”. (Shirley Foster, 6)

For the most part the Victorian lady travellers were not chiefly concerned about reputation. Few were manifest feminist activists, though some of the more eccentric characters such as Harriet Martineau and Anna Jameson incorporated their radical views into their travel writings. However, in taking the task of their foreign travels, these women were, though unconsciously, affirming certain positions related to their place in society and personal gifts – “their right to do what men had done for centuries, their capability to face challenges while still preserving their female integrity, and their claim to be regarded as individuals, choosing and expanding the channels of their lives. All of them, however, shared her excitement about travel, eagerly tasting its novelty and relishing the freedom from the duties and mundane hard work of daily existence which it gave them”. (Shirley Foster, p.7- 8 )

For example, as Marion Tinling states, American travel had different personal reasons: Frances Kemble intended a successful theatre tour before returning to her London career. As it unhappily happened, she married and settled in the United States for a time and spent most of her later years in America. The imprudent Mrs. Trollope came from England to make money for her family. She failed as a businesswoman but her book about her two years in America launched a successful writing career back home.

Isabella Bird, a British clergyman’s daughter, came to recover her health, but all she desired was to escape from England and discover herself. Harriet Martineau was also given the advice to go abroad to recover from the hard work of writing two treatises on political economy. But nothing could keep her from exhausting travel and many hours of recording her observations on every possible subject.

A book of travel is the story of a quest, and also a study of people and landscapes. Travel on the American continent brought about pages about its natural wonders – Niagara Falls, the Tennessee Valley, the Rockies, Yosemite, and California redwoods, generally, about rich plains, tremendous waterfalls, magnificent purple mountains, and blossoming orchards.

Marianne North came to find “tropical foliage”. She visited the New England coast and the distinguished people of Boston and Washington before escaping to California alone to paint giant redwoods. As many European women, she knew a surprising amount botany, and was eager to see what was exceptional in the American landscape.

They were not so well specialized on fauna as on flora, in part because European mythology populated the New World with fabulous creatures. The Scotswoman Janet Schaw expected to see lions, bears, tigers, and wolves in North Carolina. She had not anticipated alligators, which she associated with Revolutionaries. Theresa Longworth [1] , from Ireland, did encounter a bear in the Yosemite Mountains, who seemed to her kind-hearted enough not to attack her, instead frightening her into falling off a cliff into a precipice.

One English humorist, Lady Theodora Guest, warns against certain creatures of the western prairies:

“There are, it seems, four venomous beasts on these prairies – first, the Tarantula, the enormous spider, ten inches across, on high legs, like a crab; and if he chooses to bite you, you die. Next, the Millepieds, nine inches or so long, like a centipede. If he runs over you, and you pretend to like it, all is well; but if you express the slightest objection to his freedom of action, he curls himself up, like a cantering caterpillar, sticks a few of his thousand feet into you, and – you die. The third is an obnoxious monster, something like a lizard, called, as far as I can remember, a Kilomonster, who behaves in the same sort of way, with the same result; and, finally, the Rattlesnake. This latter reptile does not seem to weight at all on the minds of the Aborigines, as they say if you let them alone they will not attack you, and they do not try to destroy them. A Rattlesnake coils up and throws himself at you, but as he always announces himself by three distinct rattles of his tail, and then can only fling himself his own length, and quite straight, it is supposed to be easy to avoid him. I am sure, though, if I had successfully avoided one, I should go straight home. His bite is not death, if you can get enough raw whisky and swallow it neat, right away” (A Round Trip in North America). Anna Jameson became acquainted with Great Lakes Indians and was adopted by the Chippewas after an act of daring. (See Marion Tinling, X-XI)

The concept of escape is in Shirley Foster’s view, of particular importance here. It is not only the escape into another space, but also the escape from a tedious life into the realm of literature. Self assertion through travel and writing! “But such desire still smacked too much of self-pleasing and irresponsibility, and so certain strategies were employed to ‘cover’ it, regarding both the journeys and the published accounts. Chief of these is the insistence on ‘proper’ purpose, a way of validating the respectability and usefulness of the activity, especially where this could be related to current notions of womanhood”. (Shirley Foster, 1990, 8 )

Their stories meant sometimes the search for health, with travellers like Isabella Bird (whose spinal disease immobilised her in a wheel-chair when she was at home), Marianne North (who suffered from severe deafness), Harriet Martineau [2] . (who suffered poor health as a child, resulting in an anxious, insecure personality. She began to lose her hearing early and by the age of twenty she was forced to resort to the use of ear trumpets). “There is often a link between physical weakness and geographical mobility, since the physical and psychological results of their journeys were often quite surprising”, observes Shirley Foster. (9-10) They were in fact crossing the boundaries of their weak bodies, social restraints and financial dependence upon their fathers and husbands.

Propagandist or philanthropic purpose is related to the desire for “improvement”, so dear to the Victorians. Postcolonial studies often exaggerate their imperialistic hidden purposes. Their enterprises could also mean both self-perfection through knowledge and experience and the enlightenment of others through communication of this knowledge. This motivation encouraged those women collect everywhere “facts” – sociological (about women, children, family, domestic manners), anthropological (primitive peoples and their customs) botanical, medical, archaeological, economical or, political (interested in American democracy; several had abolitionist views; they unmasked patriarchal mentalities, and the subordination of women and children both in foreign societies and at home). Anna Jameson was an Irish archaeologist, writer and art critic, author of the first systematic study of Christian iconography in English language (friend of Lady Byron, Goethe family, Elisabeth and Robert Browning with whom she travelled and exchanged letters); Marianne North, a botanical explorer and painter. Harriett Martineau gained widespread recognition as a social and political scientist, politician, historian, journalist, public educator and fiction writer; Emily Pfeiffer and Frances Trollope, were writers and self-taught social and political commentators; Frances Wright, was a fervent political activist for the equality of rights and militated against slavery in America (especially on her utopian settlement at Nashoba, helped by Frances Trollope, involved in the project of experimental education of black children); Frances Kemble, an actress, a writer and a political activist, tried almost the same thing on her husband’s plantation in Georgia. Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley (poet, specialist in theology and philosophy); Isabella Bird, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London(accepted in 1892) and the first woman Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Edinburgh, was a famous Victorian, who richly merited her place in the Dictionary of National Biography. By following up her adventures in remote places with her well-informed books, she ensured a continuing interest in her life and in her experiences. She was a writer an explorer and a very passionate photographer The reaction of the Royal Geographical Society to female globe-trotters shows how difficult it was for women to be taken seriously in such purposes; it also shows “how this more academic or intellectual activity was often considered unfeminine or beyond the female sphere”. (Shirley Foster, 11)

In physical terms the most salient evidence of “spiritual revival and widened horizons is the manner in which frailty or invalidism at home were replaced by extraordinary endurance and strength abroad, especially in wilder or more primitive regions where travel was hardly an obvious means of bodily restoration”. (Shirley Foster, p. 12)

Catherine Symonds’s picture of her sister, Marianne North [3] , a world traveller who sought out plants to collect and paint, provides another instance of female stoutness: “She could apparently sit all day painting in a mangrove swamp, and not catch fever. She could live without food, without sleep, and still come home . . . ready to enjoy to the full the flattering reception which London is always ready to give to anyone who has earned its respect by being interesting in any way”. (Marianne North, 1893. 315-6) “We can all work hard at what we like best”, wrote Marianne North, and when one looks round the North Gallery at Kew, at tier upon tier of her vigorous flower paintings. Quality and quantity, in fact, go hand in hand, the result of nearly twenty years of travelling and painting, in the course of Miss North’s self-imposed task of recording the world’s tropical flora. “Travel was a formative influence”. (Dorothy Middleton, 57-8)

“The transformation from invalidism to vigorous strength, states Shirley Foster, effected by the excitement of travel was often only temporary: once away from the stimulus of foreign novelty, the traveller frequently reverted to her previous state of physical debility… Bird offers the most extreme example of this phenomenon. As an adolescent she underwent an operation to remove a tumour on her spine and suffered from back trouble for the rest of her life, but this never prevented her from undertaking some of the most intrepid female expeditions of the century. The symptoms never actually disappeared – she frequently remarks that her back is so painful she has to dismount and rest, or walk instead – but she never allowed them to hinder her progress. Yet on her return to Britain she reverted to a kind of genteel invalidism; without a satisfying outlet for her energies, she could express her frustration only by capitulating to suffering once more”. (Shirley Foster, 13)

Another characteristic of female travel which, despite some protests, is generally well-known as having positive advantages is the chance for women to organise their own actions. Many preferred to travel without male company or assistance, probably anticipating the kind of frustration suffered by Anna Jameson on her trip to Europe with the family to whom she was governess – her employer is so cautious that she contemptuously dismisses him as “a complete wet blanket”. [4] (Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships. 38)

Isabella Bird was an enthusiastic camper. Always precise, even in her speech (Marianne North observed that Isabella talked very slowly and methodically, as if “she were reciting from one of her books”), Isabella Bird was not everyone’s favourite. Her feelings were violent, her health unstable and her vigour exceptional. She was eager to register facts and sights, struggling on horseback over the highest mountain passes and in native boats down the farthest rivers of the world, on a handful of rice and raisins, her senses open to all the wonders of nature and her mind in search of improving information and moral lessons. When she said “I do not care for any waterfall but Niagara,” she synthesized her obsession for the sublimities of Nature, which she was to seek in all remote places of the world for thirty years: volcanoes in eruption, hurricanes “howling in one protracted, gigantic scream”, the romantic snows of the Rocky Mountains and the desolate uplands of Asia – such experiences aroused to ecstasy this generous and intellectual Victorian lady with a Clapham Sect background and perpetual ill health.

For most of the women, the experience of travel was not in itself enough. Though there must be many who ventured abroad without leaving any record of their adventures, the voluminous body of nineteenth-century female travel literature suggests a major desire to transpose the adventures in books and to spread their words as much as possible. But it was not an easy task. During the 19th century firm conventions of travel writing were established, powerful textual restrictions which determined the reconstruction of the foreign experience: “women writers were defined according to a canon of ‘female literature’, with its prescriptions of appropriate subject matter and style-topics of romance and home and family life, emphasis on feeling and sentiment, and delicacy and emotionalism of expression. Thus the traveller who employed a masculine voice (and the very act of writing ‘factual’ material symbolised entry into male discourse) ran the risk of being regarded as unwomanly and presumptuous. On the other hand, to speak consciously as a woman was possibly to devalue her own creation, undermining its authority and indicating its inferiority. It is equally clear that many of them were knowingly conforming to current criteria of literary femininity in order to make their works acceptable. While implementing this strategy they could obliquely overthrow the gender-oriented constraints upon them.” (Shirley Foster, 18-19)

Frances Trollope, too, hardly notable for her deference to contemporary opinion, takes up a subversive position of mock-humility about her responses:

“I am very often, when greatly struck by some new spectacle, fearful of expressing what it makes me feel. . . affectation, hyperbole, exaggeration, are accusations that seem perpetually staring me in the face” [5] . (Frances Trollope, A Visit to Italy, II, p. 65; see Foster)

In her earlier Domestic Manners (1832), however, after admitting to her womanish superficiality and inability to reason, she adds, “there are points of national peculiarity of which women may judge as ably as men, – all that constitutes the external of society may fairly be entrusted to US”. (Frances Trollope, Gloucester, 1984, p. 32) All such apologia fails to mask the delight of writing about travel experiences.

The development of British travel literature made Lillias Campbell Davidson’s guide so needed and applicable, with its “suggestions to women of all means and conditions” (Lillias Campbell Davidson, Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad. 1889, p. 7) and its sensible practical advice. In the 80’s and 90’s women were learning to bicycle and to climb mountains. It was beginning to be possible to travel alone by train, to go on riding or walking holidays. “Nowadays,” declares the foreword to this efficient and wise little book, “when a hundred women travel to one who ventured from the security of her own roof-tree in bygone days, some practical hints upon the wide subject of wanderings abroad may be useful and welcome to those whose experiences are less varied than those of their sisters.” “Necessaries of travel” included a filter, a railway key and a travelling bath, and a tin of Keating’s powder “should never be omitted”.

Many of them travelled to several regions and made interesting cross-references between them: Isabella Bird, never well unless she was abroad, in America, Australia and the Far East; Marianne North, painting and collecting botanical specimens throughout southern Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Far East and lifelong travellers like Frances Trollope, Frances Kemble, Emily Pfeiffer, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley and Anna Jameson, who visited – and compared -Europe and North America.

I have started my research with the North American geographic area, paying also attention to the comparisons that the ladies used to draw between American and European places. Descriptions of landscapes are in my opinion appropriate examples of transdisciplinarity, genre crossing and gender crossing (they are both scientific accounts and literary transpositions of the emotional ties with nature, ethical and aesthetic judgements, fiction and poetry, discovery of foreign spaces and of the self confronted with new, totally different, environments, feminine travel accounts of places that had been the gentlemen’s territory before: high mountains and impressive water falls). Among all Niagara Falls, the symbol of the American freedom and energy, also concentrated the essence of other geographical areas, like Italy whose symbol was the Vesuvius. My presentation of British representations of Niagara is mostly based on Shirley Foster’s analysis of the subject.

Niagara Falls became in their imagination both a natural monument and a state of mind reminding of the dream of classical perfection in Italy and the desire of mental and physical escape in America. Niagara was intensely lived intellectually and physically as the free expression of desire after a frustrating existence in Victorian England. It was the step over the boundaries of scientific and literary expression, over the boundaries of gender and social status imposed at home.

The representation of natural scenery, Niagara Falls particularly, shows theoretical influences derived from aesthetic theories and literary tradition, which pretended that originality is not only impossible but perhaps undesirable. Burke’s theory of the sublime, taken up by Gothic and Romantic writers in their treatment of landscape, established a convention of “nature writing” which emphasised the magnificent, the dramatic and the visually striking. At the same time, eighteenth-century notions of the pleasingly pictorial quality in the natural environment were still influential. The aesthetic vocabulary of the sublime is often invoked by travellers in the nineteenth century: the sublime moment in a text for the woman traveller is one where the focus is both on the landscape and the emotions which it evokes in the narrator (Sara Mills, 2000). Both terrifying and exhilarating, sublime experience represented one of the most important challenges to the rationalism of Enlightenment thought. “Women writers, notices Amanda Gilroy, challenged the assumptions of aesthetic discourse, especially in their valorisation of the detail”. They revised Burke’s model of the sublime (as well as the categories of the picturesque and the beautiful), they personalized it, and invested their landscape descriptions with an “ethic care”. (Joanna Zylinska, “Sublime Speculations: The Economy of the Gift in Feminist Ethics”)

The experience of open, apparently infinite space offered the woman traveller a rare chance to enjoy pure “being”, as well as a means of self-discovery and self-testing. The backgrounds which made the most dramatic impact in this respect were those of mountains and water, both emblematic of limitlessness and unrestrained power. The sense of new being was felt more urgently in the encounter with water in its more dramatic forms. The most remarkable instance of this is their reaction to Niagara.

“For early and mid-nineteenth-century visitors, Shirley Foster observes, Niagara itself represented the apotheosis of their encounters with “uncivilised” America. Like Vesuvius, it exemplified all the supreme magnificence of untamed nature, mysterious, alluring and challenging, and indeed several of the women who had previously travelled in Italy connect the two sights in this regard. The young Victoria Stuart-Wortley comments that the raging water reminds her of the tumultuous eruption of the volcano which she had seen the previous year”. (Shirley Foster, 93). Niagara Falls were so differently perceived by the lady travellers in comparison to other “domestic” ladies represented in the pictures of the time, clinging to their male partners’ arms, the latter showing the Falls to the frightened female companions. While seen through men’s eyes by the representatives of their genre, whom they despised in fact, encounter with Niagara was both passionately desired and anxiously expected by the independent and adventurous women travellers. Generally speaking, America was not associated with the same fulfilment of romantic aspiration and youthful dreams as was Italy, but the Falls were an exception. Here, their imagination had already been animated by earlier accounts, and expectation could combine with personal desire. Frances Trollope, finally on her way to Niagara after a disappointing two years in the States, declares that it was “the object, which for years, I had languished to look upon” (p. 284), while for Anna Jameson, longing sadly in Toronto, it was “a thing to be imagined, hoped, and anticipated, something to live for”. (Winter Studies, I, p. 82) The accounts of the long awaited moment explode with fervour, and vibrantly rebuild the intensity of excitement.

As Shirley Foster notices, in the relation of the same impatiently expected moment, Frances Kemble, as a most talented actress, deliberately “exploits all the potential drama of the moment. She gives two versions of the event, one in her Journal, published in 1835, and the other in her later Record of a Girlhood (1878)… In the former, she builds up the reader’s suspense by depicting her own”: “My mind was eagerly dwelling on what we were going to see: that sight which [Trelawney] said was the only one in the world which had not disappointed him. I felt absolutely nervous with expectation. . . [when I heard] the voice of the mighty cataract. . . [a] frenzy of impatience seized upon me; I could have set off and run the whole way”. (apud Shirley Foster, 96) Her text “almost stumble over itself with its own fervour, continues Shirley Foster, and she carries us along with her frantic momentum as she describes how, without staying for anyone else, she leapt out of the carriage, rushed through the hotel hall and garden, down a steep and narrow rocky footpath and sprang on to the Table Rock where finally, at the brink of the abyss”, “I saw Niagara – oh God! who can describe that sight?” (Frances Kemble, Journal, II, pp. 285-7, apud Foster, 96) At this point, within a deliberate moment of suspense, the Journal ends. In the Record of a Girlhood, however, allows us to share her visualization, as she follows up her prologue with an extensive and powerful representation of the Falls themselves which suggests all the “passion of her response”. (Foster, 96)

Similarly, Isabella Bird declares: “the sublimity of the Falls far exceeded my expectations. It was so very like what I had expected, and yet so totally different. I sat there watching that sea-green curve against the sky till sunset, and. then the crimson rays just fell upon the column of spray above the Canadian Fall, turning it a most beautiful rose-colour”. (The Englishwoman in America, 1856, pp. 216- 236; see Foster)

“Confrontation with Niagara, Shirley Foster concludes, symbolised a process of self-discovery for many of these women, both bodily and psychically. Though less physically challenging than Vesuvius, the Falls could provide excitement and a sense of risk for the adventurous lady tourist not content with merely viewing them from the safety of the American or Canadian bank. Walking under the rapids themselves, for example, was a thrilling and potentially dangerous undertaking. The more intrepid women… were at once frightened and allured by the expedition”. (Shirley Foster, 96)

For Marianne Finch, at Niagara in the 1850s, going behind the Horseshoe Fall was “unspeakably fearful”. (Marianne Finch, An Englishwoman’s Experience in America, 1969, p. 366) Strongly clinging to the wet rock, she was conscious of a new individuality being drawn out of her – “Half drowned and deafened, I emerged with a deeper feeling of awe than I ever experienced before” (p. 367). Matilde Charlotte Houston, making the same trip a few years earlier, nervously comparing the slippery ledge with the unsteady Table Rock suspended over her head, was also caught up in the “wild magnificence” (Hesperos, I, pp. 126-7) despite her fear.

The feeling of risk was an almost attractive test. For Frances Wright, wet and breathless after her descent down a shaky and slippery ladder in order to get a closer look at the Falls, the sense of accomplishment, as well as the magnificence itself, more than compensated for the physical uneasiness; even the nervousness that the Table Rock might fall on her made her only the more appreciative of how here “the sublime is wrought to the terrible” (p. 127; see Foster).

Anna Jameson’s prophecies of the curative effects of the Falls were self-fulfilling. Initially disappointed with the spectacle, she found that the physical rigours awakened her torpid spirits. Making her first visit to Niagara during Canadian winter, she strode through the ice and snow to the Table Rock, the very effort totally converting her disillusion to fright at the “wild and wonderful magnificence. . . [of] the dark-green waters, hurrying with them over the edge of the precipice enormous blocks of ice”.

“There is something very exciting in this view; one cannot help investing Niagara with feelings of human agony and apprehension; one feels a new sensation, something neither terror, wonder, nor admiration, as one looks at the phenomena which it displays. I have been surprised to see how a visit to the Falls galvanises the most matter-of-fact person into a brief exercise of the imaginative powers”, meditates Isabella Bird before this “terrible majesty”. (The Englishwoman in America, 1856, pp. 216- 236)

The travellers’ re-creation of their experience of Niagara reveals the ambivalence of their response. On the one hand Niagara induces some of the most highly emotional writing in their texts, as in the case of Emily Pfeiffer: “The shock we feel when we see that this Hercules of falling waters has been set to work by an Omphale, and is patiently turning a paper mill before taking its awful plunge, is at first painful; but I at least am an epicure in enjoyment, and refuse to yield the delight that is left, in storming after that which has been taken away”. (Flying Leaves from East and West, 1885, pp. 114-5).

On the other hand, however, Niagara could produce in the observer a fear of uncertainty, and some commentators found it hard to come to terms with its powerful and often distressing influence.

A method of taming the disturbing or indescribable is to employ conventional literary terminology. Thus Niagara is variously described in terms of its “sublimity”, “helpless terror”, “inevitable doom”, “mysterious chasm”, “awful beauty”, “terrible majesty” and “manifold perfections and glories”, “sullen dignity”, “soft thunderous music”, “wonder of nature”, “wild and wonderful magnificence”, “magnificently mysterious”; the Falls themselves are “stupendously magnificent” and “fearfully beautiful” with their “silvery torrents”. (Frances Kemble, 1878; Frances Trollope, p. 286; Bird, p. 223; Stuart-Wortley, I, pp. 22, 20; Houston, Hesperos, I, p. 129; Trollope, p. 286; Frances Wright, p. 126; Finch, p. 367)

The sight of Niagara awakened in all the women suppressed or dormant emotions which, though in a roundabout way or unconsciously, they were driven to utter. In describing the water’s violence, for example – to them symbolic of liberated and unlimited energy – they invoke physical, often sexual, imagery, to express their own desire for personal release. The urge to identify with the scene before them often involved discovery of a new spiritual self. Marianne Finch expresses an almost desperate desire to throw herself down into the turmoil- “anything to know it – to feel its power” (p. 365) – and to become “inseparably united” (p. 368) with it. Her passionate response is imaged in her description of the Whirlpool, its agonized waters trying to “escape from their narrow prison-house” (p. 369) as a tormented creature, a suitable personification of her own desire for freedom.

Encounters with landscapes in America were most unlike anything at home and determined the ladies to invoke the sublimity of nature. Descriptions of the sublime were overdetermined for British women; at one and the same time the sublime combined high status aesthetic discourse (often a kind of Romantic poetic language) together with “feminine” emotional response. Their descriptions of Niagara a provide a good example, .especially since Niagara had already become established by the nineteenth century as a place where extreme responses were common and in some senses socially sanctioned (McGreevy, 1992).

“Characteristically”, Shirley Foster states, Anna Jameson and Frances Kemble most ardently “identify with the natural environment here”. Remembering her solitary meditation at Table Rock in the moonlight, Anna Jameson imagines “those wild, impatient, tumultuous rapids” (Winter Studies, 11, p. 67) as “a terrible creature, a tiger at play, which hypnotises her into a volitionless state yet also arouses in her intensely physical feeling. It is not hard to recognise the personal implications of her response in the context of her recent awareness that her marriage was beyond redemption: the waters, “whirling, boiling, dancing, sparkling along… rejoicing as if escaped from bondage” (11, pp. 52-3), become an image of her own new freedom and energies, now harnessed to a bold venture into the wilds of Canada; Niagara, “girdle(d)” with greenery and ‘breathing perfume’ (11, p. 38), enclosing “that furious embrace of the waters above and the waters below” (I, p. 86), symbolises sexual fulfilment which for her has now been sublimated into physical daring and self-discovery”. (Shirley Foster, 100). Overwhelmed by so much “…beauty and terror, and power and joy”, “.that even while I trembled and admired, I could have burst into a wild laugh, and joined the dancing billows in their glorious, fearful mirth-

Leaping like Bacchanals from rock to rock,

Flinging the frantic Thyrsus wild and high!

I shall never see again, or feel again, aught like it-never! I did not think there was an object in nature, animate or inanimate, that could thus overset me now!” (Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships, 82)

Niagara is openly associated with physical love that brings about both fear and delight to Frances Kemble, while Emily Pfeiffer imagines a passionate embrace: “The torrent here flings itself full-breasted over the precipice, and as we watch it, descends, a sea of diamonds, into the arms of a rainbow, not now a lunar, but a solar one, a triumphal arch of light and colour”. (Flying Leaves from East and West, 1885, pp. 114-5) and Frances Wright invokes the “coldly kiss” of death. (Views of Society and Manners in America in a series of letters from that country to a friend in England, during the years 1818, 1819, and 1820, pp. 124-135.)

Finally, Niagara brought the much desired peace of mind and body to the ladies who travelled to see it. The moments of fear and torment elapsed as by miracle, leaving behind a feeling of relief and harmony with God and with themselves.

These are only glimpses into the legacy of the 19th century British travel around the world, particularly the lady travellers’ accounts. It is a fascinating and rewarding subject that has been very seriously explored recently. Nevertheless, in my opinion, the critical works and anthologies of texts dedicated to travel and exploration in the 19th century leave out Eastern Europe from the destinations of the women travellers as if interesting writers and scientists like the Victorian Lady Emily Gerard Laszowska, who spent several years in Transylvania and wrote two volumes on the people, folklore and beauties of the province did not exist! Border crossing between Eastern and Western Europe is still a difficult endeavour! Much more difficult than genre and gender crossing!

What really matters in fact is not the geography covered by these pioneer travellers, but the way they made their voices listened to all over the world. For, as Emily Pfeiffer puts it metaphorically, “The lion has for so long been the painter, that he is apt too wholly to ignore the aspect which his favourite subject may take from the point of view of the lioness. If the latter will sometimes tell the truth, and tell, not what she thinks she ought to see, but what she really sees, many an intellectual picture which has hitherto satisfied the sense of mankind, may be found to be somewhat out of focus”. (Emily Pfeiffer, Flying Leaves from East and West)

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Notes

[1] Maria Theresa Longworth (1832?-1881) was a controversial figure in Great Britain. Because she was a Catholic and Major William Yelverton, whom she married in 1857, was a protestant, the marriage was declared illegal. Despite the fact that he had deserted her and married another woman, Theresa spent many years in litigation to establish her conjugal rights and continued to uphold her right to her husband’s name. After the major’s father died in 1870, he had the right of succession to the title of Viscount Avonmore, and she assumed the title of Viscountess Avonmore. Her visit to America took place in the early 1870s. She was educated in a French convent, and after the Crimean war she joined the French Sisters of Mercy in nursing the sick at the hospital of Galata. Major Yelverton had served with the Royal Army in Crimea.

[2] Harriet Martineau was born into a bourgeois Unitarian family of Huguenot descent in Norwich on 12 June 1802, the sixth of eight children. The family’s French heritage and bilingualism, Unitarianism, and Enlightenment values shaped the development of the Martineau children and their adult lives. Harriet suffered poor health as a child, resulting in an anxious, insecure personality. She began to lose her hearing early and by the age of twenty she was forced to resort to the use of ear trumpets. These factors resulted in a sense of isolation, unworthiness, and unhappiness. She sought refuge from the troubles of the world in books and study, and perhaps to a greater degree than her siblings immersed herself in the study of languages, classics, mathematics, music, literature, biography, history and religion. Quite early she had developed a passion to write. H. Martineau was particularly influenced by the writings of Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, and later Bacon, Condorcet, Montesquieu, Hegel, Lessing, Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld and Hannah More, David Hartley, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Malthus, Joseph Priestley, and Saint-Simon. She read avidly the fiction of Austen, Goethe, Wordsworth and others. In the Unitarian schools she studied logic, rhetoric, poetry, Latin, Greek and Italian and enjoyed translating Tacitus and Petrarch, and German and French authors. In brief, she was well educated in schools, by her siblings and tutors, and by herself.

H. Martineau loved to write and, in addition to some small books on the subject of religious devotion, she published in the Unitarian Monthly Repository during the 1820s over 100 articles, essays, stories and poems on religion, literature, philosophy, political economy, social issues (slavery, education, women’s condition), natural rights, science, and the works of Socrates, Godwin, Lessing, Doddridge, and Crombie. In 1832 she began the Illustrations of Political Economy, twenty-five tales or novelettes, which were meant to illustrate the principles of political economy as derived from a text on the subject by James Mill. The great success of this series established Harriet Martineau as a known and even popular author and made her financially independent. It was the strain of writing this series within a two-year period (1832-4) that precipitated her trip to America.

After a period of illness (1839-44), during which she wrote a number of books, she moved permanently to Ambleside in England’s Lake District, built a home, and pursued her interests through writing, correspondence, civic affairs, teaching at the Mechanics Institute, and entertaining numerous friends from England and America. Her further travels included a seven-month journey throughout the Middle East (1846), a trip to Ireland (1852), and stays in London, especially during the summers. These travels yielded her Eastern Life: Present and Past (1848) and Letters from Ireland (1852). Between these, however, the prodigious H. Martineau began to write articles for Dickens’s Household Words, published A History of the Thirty Years’ Peace (1849-51) and Household Education (1849), as well as an exchange with Henry Atkinson on science, phrenology and mesmerism entitled, Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development (1851). In 1852 she also began to write leaders regularly (1852-66) for the Daily News.

In 1853 she published her translation and condensation of Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive, which became the standard English and later French version of Comte’s foundational work in sociology. She had by now rejected organized religion altogether and was convinced that the positive social sciences were the only efficacious avenue to understanding the world and interpreting life. In the mid-1850s H. Martineau became ill once again and was convinced that she would die. Her preparation for the inevitable included writing her Autobiography, which was printed and stored for release upon her death. However, she lived for another twenty years and the eventual publishing date was 1877! H. Martineau remained socially and politically engaged with such issues as divorce and matrimonial laws, factory legislation protecting women and children, women’s suffrage, and the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. She continued to write fiction as well as non-fiction, publishing Sketches from Life (1856), considered by Dickens to be too sympathetic toward Catholics. Partly as a result of her correspondence with Florence Nightingale and her support of Nightingale’s work, H. Martineau was fascinated with India, and wrote two books, British Rule in India (1857) and Suggestions Towards the Future Government of India (1858), as well as many articles and leaders on the situation there.

Intrigued by the dynamics of the intersection of biography and history, H. Martineau became an expert author of obituaries (including her own!) and biographical sketches, a selection of which she published as Biographical Sketches in 1869, continuing an active writing career until near the end of her life. In the mid-1870s H. Martineau became weaker and was finally confined to her bedroom. She died on 27 June 1876.

[3] Marianne North (1830-1890) was an English botanical explorer. She travelled extensively in Europe with her father, and after his death in 1869 she ventured alone on the first of numerous trips that would take her to many exotic places in the world. She spent the rest of 1871 and 1872 in Jamaica, and, after a short visit to her London home, she set off for Brazil. This trip was followed by another to Japan in 1875, via the United States. When she reached the Pacific coast she visited the Big Trees and Yosemite. Her careful botanical paintings are now in the North Gallery, which she donated to the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, England. In the gallery she placed a dado of 246 panels of woods collected from all over the world. She travelled continuously from 1871 until 1882, visiting almost every continent and numerous islands in the pacific and the Atlantic. In 1881, returning from New Zealand, she crossed the United States again, visiting more big trees and Yosemite and, in the East, the lush gardens of Staten Island. In her travels she discovered many new plants, some of which were named for her. A shortened version of her recollections, with beautiful colour reproductions of some of her paintings, was published in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as A Vision of Eden: The Life and Work of Marianne North, New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1980. (1871).

[4] Anna Brownell Murphy Jameson (1794-1860) was an Irish archaeologist, a well-known writer and art critic. She came to Canada in the winter of 1838. Her husband, Robert Jameson, from whom she separated shortly after their marriage in 1825, was running for an office in Canada and she wished to support his bid. She spent a bleak winter in Ontario and in early June she travelled to Mackinac and Sault Ste Marie. She was much interested in the Indians and had fallen into best company to give her entrée to the Great Lakes Tribes. She travelled with two daughters of the then-deceased Irish trader John Johnston, from Sault Ste Marie. Johnston’s widow, Charlotte (Anna called her Neengai), was the full-blood daughter of a Chippewa chief. Her two months of travel into the north woods ended when she returned from the Manitoulin Islands with the Indian superintendent. She was the only woman in a party of twenty-two. They travelled by birch-bark canoe, slept out of doors, and cooked over campfires. The journey ended in Penetanguishene, on Georgian Bay. Anna spent the rest of her life in London, with excursions to Italy and Germany. She accompanied Elisabeth and Robert Browning to Italy after their marriage.

[5] Like her son, Anthony, Frances Trollope was a prolific writer of novels. She wrote -thirty-four of them. But unlike her son, Frances did not win acclaim and celebrity for her fiction. Rather it was the travel book Domestic Manners of the Americans that brought her notice. The book, a scathingly funny attack on the manners of the upstart Republicans, of “eternal shaking .hands” and of living in “primeval intimacy with our cow,” has as its center a concern for the role of women in America. Her novels were noted for their triumphant feminine spirit that heralded a new strong kind of heroine, and in Domestic Manners she bemoaned “the lamentable insignificance of the American woman.” When her family suffered financial setbacks, Trollope, at the age of 48, set off for the. United States, and for four years she pursued many business and cultural enterprises for income. Most of the businesses failed, and it was in the face of these failures that she turned to writing. With subsequent travel books and novels, Trollope was never able to recapture the popularity of Domestic Manners. She died at 83 in Florence.

Andrei Oişteanu

Romanian Association for the History of Religions (RAHR)

Nations & Stereotypes. Ethnic and Ethic Characteristics

Abstract: An analysis of the ethnic stereotypes developed between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, mainly in the traditional culture of the peoples from East-Central Europe. Sometimes stereotypical thinking is carried to the limit, the image being reduced to one single “cultural mark” (screw for the German, fiddle for the Gypsy, drunkenness for the Russian, work for the Romanian, etc.). Some legends present the images of the ethnic group which has generated them (auto-images), in comparison to the images of the nations with whom it has cohabited (hetero-images). The imagological equation is a complex one: it has numerous variables and levels. Paraphrasing a parable by Miguel de Unamuno, the relationship between, for example, the Jew and the Romanian is a multi-layered one. On one level, there is the relation between the “real Jew” and the “real Romanian”. On another level, that between “the Jew’s self-image” and “the Romanian’s self-image”. And on yet another level, that between the “Romanian’s image of the Jew” and the “Jew’s image of the Romanian.” This text is a chapter of Andrei Oişteanu’s book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Keywords: Imagology, ethnic and ethic stereotypes, self-image, image of the other.

The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. “Before being discovered, the savage was first invented,” noted Italian folklorist Giuseppe Cocchiara.[1] “This witty observation is not without its truth,” later commented Mircea Eliade.[2]

Knowledge of the savage (or merely exotic) stranger gave a new edge to the acknowledgement of the stranger “from home.” Without giving rise to a new literary genre as such, this type of discourse—a collection of ethical and ethnical stereotypes—was nevertheless fairly common during that age. This is how Gilles Le Bouvier, in A Book of Countries Described, written about the middle of the fifteenth century, presents the Europeans: the English are “cruel and bloodthirsty” and greedy merchants into the bargain; the Swiss are “ruthless and rude people”; the Scandinavians and the Poles are “fierce and possessed”; the Sicilians “fiercely keep watch over their wives”; the Neapolitans are “coarse and churlish, bad Catholics and great sinners”; the Castilians are “quick-tempered people, poorly dressed and shoed, their dwellings are in a bad way, and are bad Catholics,” etc.[3]

In Short Account of European Peoples and of Their Characteristics, a volume edited at the beginning of the eighteenth century in central Europe (Stiria, in western Austria), ten nations are presented hierarchically according to their traits, from most positive to most negative (the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Netherlander, the German, the Englishman, the Swede, the Pole, the Hungarian, the Greek, the Turk, etc.). A comparative table is devised, on the basis of seventeen categories: disposition, nature, intellect, vices, passions, knowledge, clothing, maladies, ability in warfare, religion, form of political government, and so on. From the point of view of mental characteristics, for instance, the Spaniard is allegedly “intelligent and wise,” the Frenchman is “cautious,” the German is “spiritual,” and the Englishman is “bad-tempered”; the Pole is allegedly of “limited” intellect, yet not as much as the Hungarian; the Russian is “empty-headed,” while the Greek Turk is “even less of that.”[4]

“It is not the barbarian and ignorant peoples who should come to know us first, but on the contrary, we are the ones who should…unravel the character, nature, and even physiognomy of contemporary peoples,” wrote the Frenchman Jean-Louis Carra, secretary to the court of the Moldavian Prince, in 1777. By “barbarian and ignorant peoples” Carra was not referring to some exotic populaces of Africa, America, or Asia, but to the Moldavians along the lower course of the Danube. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Carra envisaged the cognitive act as an empowering act of subordinating someone else. Therefore, “we” are supposed to know “them” before “they” get to know “us”: “It is for us, finally, to know these same peoples before they can know themselves, and seek to know us in their turn”[5]

The Romanians were neither conquerors nor great travelers or passionate merchants, but they cohabited and came into contact with many nations. In the preface he wrote for a volume by E. Baican, Gossip and Anecdotes (1882), Mihai Eminescu observed: “There is no people the Romanians have come in contact with that did not become their laughing stock.” Moses Schwarzfeld took over this concept, but in his own manner:

The Romanian calls the foreigners filthy, foreign heathens, and there is no people which has ever been in contact with the Romanians and was found fair, good, and honest. Thus, the German is a man of the devil, the French is awarded the same flattering epithet, the Jew is târtan [from the German Untertan = subject, vassal], the Greek is a mangy goat, the Serbian is feeble-minded [provincial Romanian, bleod, from the German blöd, stupid], the Bulgarian has leeks, and we would never come to the end if we were to enumerate every epithet and appellation Romanians contrive against foreigners.[6]

Dumitru Drăghicescu also commented on this delicate subject in 1907, when he published his book, Din psichologia poporului român [On the Psychology of the Romanian People]. According to his diagnosis, Romanians suffered from a superiority complex towards some

…people less fine, with an intelligence more laggardly and less spirited, and therefore in an obvious state of mental inferiority as compared with the Romanians. As a proof that this is the state of things we have the fact that the irony and humor of the Romanians is chiefly directed at the neighboring peoples. Romanians have always poked fun chiefly at Serbs and Bulgarians, Hungarians and Turks. They have always considered themselves superior to these neighbors. From this consciousness of superiority have sprung all the jokes and ironies made on their account. [At the same time,] the Gypsy is an unexhausted well of humor for the peasants.[7]

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, in political satires that were circulated underhandedly, orally or in manuscript, to avoid censorship and belonged to a species of city folklore, not only the Jews [jidani] were considered “scabby dogs,” but also the other “foreign hordes”: “Tomorrow, after the mangy Greek, / Come, at a round trot, / The Turk, the famished wretch, / The Russian, the foul brute, / And the German, the stinky lickspittle.”[8]

The profile of the Jew has taken on several shapes, among which is the presentation of his vices and virtues as compared to other peoples. Most often, Romanians express the opinion that the Jew uses his intelligence to swindle other people: “A Jew cheats two Armenians, an Armenian two Greeks, a Greek two Romanians.”[9]

Similar proverbs, in which the relationships of Jews with other nations are defined, are to be found among the Russians (“A Jew is worth two Greeks, a Greek two Armenians, an Armenian two nobles of Poltava” or, vice versa, “From two coppers of Jews the devil made an Armenian”); the Poles (“The Pole is cheated by the German, the German by the Italian, the Italian by the Spaniard, the Spaniard by the Jew, but the Jew is only cheated by the Devil”); the Lithuanians (“A Jew cheats three Germans, a Russian, three Jews”); the Macedo-Romanian people (“A Jew cheats ten Greeks, a Greek cheats ten Albanians”); the Germans (“Three Jews cheat an Armenian, three Armenians a Greek, and there are still a dozen Christians left,” or “A Jew is worth three Christians and a Yankee three Jews”); the Swiss (“Nine Jews cheat a Swiss and nine Swiss people from Basel cheat one from Geneva”); and the French (“Business take two Jews against a Genoese, two Genoese against a Greek, and two Greeks against an Armenian,” and “Three Jews are worth a citizen of Basel, three citizens of Basel are worth one in Geneva”).[10]

Sometimes, however, the situation is reversed and the Jew appears in the position of the one who is taken in, like in this Romanian saying: “The Gypsy steals, the Armenian swears, and the Jew pays for the jade.”[11] It is not so much the naïveté of the Jew which seems to be intimated here as his usual status as an object of discrimination and persecution and the fact that he is often held guilty and punished, irrespective of who is the true culprit. In this respect, the Georgians have a similar saying: “Mabshabeli had sinned and the Jews were punished,”[12] and so do the Ukrainians: “The Jew is to pay all damages.”[13] The Jews themselves have such sayings: “A boyar lost some-thing, a non-Jew found that something, and they both pick on the Jew,” or “No matter what, Jews will be hated.”[14] The German saying is the most explicit and most grisly of them all: “Macht nichts, der Jude wird verbrannt” (It matters not, the Jew must be burned).[15]

In Sibyl’s Prophecy, an old text of Slavic origin which circulated in the Romanian cultural area from the sixteenth century and, in the Romanian version, since the seventeenth century, the wise Empress Sibyl (in the text, daughter of the Judean King David) prophetically interprets the common dream of “a hundred great boyars.” The nine different suns, which had appeared in the sky in this dream, are explained by Sibyl in terms of ethnic imagology: “The first of the suns is the offspring of the Bulgarians, good, guest-loving, and devout people…. The second sun signifies the Greeks, for they have abjured their faith three times and have mixed with all tongues, usurers that they are and loving well the pieces of silver well….” Historians of old literature concur that the text originated in the first half of the fourteenth century and can be included in the corpus of Bulgarian literature, owing to the fact that the Bulgarians are positively depicted while their adversaries, the Greeks, are negatively portrayed.[16] Besides the Bulgarians and the Greeks, there are profiles of the Catholics, the Arcadians, the Saracens (who “shall lay Jerusalem waste…”), the Syrians, the “Iverians” (“who their Church guard well, and fear God…”), the “Tartars” (“who shall spill blood on the earth and no one shall stand against them…”), and the Jews [jidovi].

An extremely interesting fact is that no negative trait of the Jews is presented. According to Sibyl’s divinations, “a woman shall come from them and she shall give birth to a son from Heaven and his name they shall call Jesus.” He will be crucified and buried, then will rise again and “shall send twelve men” who will change the faith all over the world, including the empire ruled by Sibyl. “For I myself,” the prophetess ends the interpretation of her dream, “have until now cherished hopes of giving birth to Christ from this body, and I have guarded my chastity for these fifty years. And now I fathom that I am not the one.”[17]

Obviously, the emphasis is different in this case, as compared to the majority of the texts of that epoch. The Jews are presented not as the people who kill Jesus, but as those who give birth to Him. It is true that, to some, this has been the capital sin of the Jews; but we are now in a different century, a different geographic meridian, and another cultural perspective. For Voltaire and other French Encylopedists of the eighteenth century, who managed to “secularize” antisemitism, the “Jews deserve to be punished for conceiving Jesus, not for killing him.”[18]

Another old Romanian text, dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century (1705), lists an inventory of the gifts distributed by God to various nations:

“Trading to the Turks, / Drunkenness and swine-like living to the Russians, / Stoutness and stupidity to the Serbs,[19] / Preaching and lying to the people of Rome, / Filthiness to the Germans, / Scab and lassitude to the Saxons, / Luck with money to the Greeks, / Pride to the Poles, / Beauty to the Circassians, / Bragging to the Moldavians, / Envy to the Romanians, / Heresy to the Armenians, / Richness to the Jews, / Poverty and barrenness to the Gypsies.”[20]

I have transcribed this entire text, for it is a suitable example of ethnic imagology, as it contains not only hetero-images, but also auto-images, if its origin is Romanian. Indeed, Moses Gaster was convinced that this characterization was “autochthonous Romanian, stemming from the people’s own observation.” An argument to this effect is also that—in contrast to the text below, in which diverse animals are associated with nations from western Europe to central Asia—the 1705 text made no mention of faraway peoples, at “the back of nowhere,” but only of those with which the Romanians were neighbors, or with which they cohabited.[21]

“The zoomorphic characterization of peoples,” as B. P. Hasdeu was wont to call it, is not, according to Moses Gaster, specific to Romanian tradition but to the Palaeo-Slavic one. Indeed, the oldest text of this kind discovered in the Romanian area is a Slavic manuscript from the first half of the sixteenth century. It is not part “of a biblical apocryphal legend, namely The Legend of Abraham” as researchers Marianne Mesnil and Assia Popova have maintained,[22] yet it was copied in this collection of miscellaneous works together with that legend.

Entitled The Wise Man or the Teacher of All the Words of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the text was arranged in the usual form of questions and answers. To the question “What are the peculiarities of each nation?” an ambiguous answer is offered: to no less than thirty (European and Asian) peoples correspond as many animals. However, the characteristics of each animal and, implicitly, of the nation symbolically associated with it do not stand out—like in the celebrated Bestiaries (Physiologos):

…the Italian is a lion, the German an eagle, the Arab a boar, the Turk a dragon, the Armenian a lizard, the Indian a dove, the Syrian a fish, the Georgian a ram, the Tartar a greyhound and a dog, the Cuman a leopard, the Russian an otter, the Lithuanian a bull, the Greek a fox, the Bulgarian an ox, the Romanian a cat, the Serbian a wolf, the Hungarian a panther, the German a ure ox, the Ossetian a stag, the Saxon a stallion, the Pole a mole, the Jew a badger, the Albanian a beaver, the Egyptian a goat, the Szekler a kite, the Circassian a buffalo, the Persian a crane, the Croatian an asp, etc [emphasis mine—A.O.].[23]

In this metaphorical text it is the cat that corresponds to the Romanian (Walachian, in the original). Motivated by an obsolescent nationalism, yet a typical one for the second half of the nineteenth century, Hasdeu enumerates the real or attributed characteristics of this domestic animal, discovering all of them in the Romanian. “Love of the country” and “independence” are included for, unlike the dog, the cat “loves the home, the ‘homeland’ from where with the greatest pains, if at all, can anyone drag it out and chase it away, yet it never becomes the slave of one master.”[24] There are some extenuating circumstances for Hasdeu, since he published and commented on that text in 1879, only a few months after Romania attained its independence.

The Jew (evreanin, in the text) is symbolically associated with the badger. In this case, no more than in the former, we cannot be sure what were, almost half a millennium ago, the causes of this atypical association: perhaps because the withdrawn, isolated, and morose man (as the “imaginary Jew”is supposed to be) was called a “badger”; or maybe because the badger, like the Jew, is perceived by the people as being cunning and thieving (it steals flour or grains from barns);[25] or, finally, because the traditional costume of the Jew at that time included a hat, or shtreimel, made of badgers’ fur, for only rich Jews could afford sable.

In Mihail Sebastian’s novel For Two Thousand Years… (1934), the protagonist witnesses a scene in the heart of Bucharest of the early 1930s, in which cries of “Death to the Yids!” are uttered. People pass by quietly “without so much as a turn of the head from any of them…. If someone should settle oneself in the middle of the road to call for (let’s say) the ‘death of the badgers,’ I still believe that he would raise a certain amount of wonder from among the passers-by.”[26] Does the author suggest the existence of a symbolic and significant relationship between the Jew and the badger? Or is this rather a chance and gratuitous association, meant to demonstrate precisely the absurdity of thinking along these lines: I don’t care if you shout “Death to the Yids!” but what do you hold against the poor badgers?!

Turning once more to the “gifts” bestowed by the Divinity on various nations, the following is a brief popular invocation in which God is called to give “good things” to Christians and “bad things” to everybody else:

Let God grant health

To Christendom,

The pagans

May go to the dogs,

The Turks,

The pest on them,

The Jews, the scab on them,

All ailments to the Gypsies.[27]

It was in fact God, at the time of the Creation, who distributed the true “ethnic gifts”. This is a subject shared by several folk legends.

One of them has been taken over by Romanian prose author Mihail Sadoveanu and used at the very beginning of his pastoral novel Baltagul, [The Hatchet], published in 1930: “The Lord God, after He put the world together, put an order and a mark upon each people…. [To] the German He gave the screw,” the Gypsy—his fiddle. “In the Serb’s hand He deposited the hoe,” while to the Turk He said: “Thou shalt be a simpleton, but power thou shalt have over other nations, by your sword.” To the Hungarian He handed over some “top boots, and spurs, and resin” to make “handlebars on their moustaches” and told him: “Be proud and enjoy partying with your fellows.” “Upon the Russian He bestowed the gift of being the greatest drunkard of all and of proving his worth in begging and singing through the fairs.” “Among the Jews, He summoned Moses and commanded him: Thou shalt write a Law; and when the time comes, make the Pharisees crucify my well-beloved son Jesus; and after this thou shalt endure much trouble and persecution; and for this I shall let money flow to you like waters.” Finally, the last to share in the divine gifts, the Romanians (in the original, the “mountain people”), were addressed by God as follows: “I cannot give you anything more, just an easy heart, to enjoy what is yours. All things should seem good to you; the one with the fiddle, and the one with the drinking should both come to you, and you shall have beautiful and loving wives.” Nichifor Lipan, a character in the novel, is said to have learnt this story from the shepherds of northern Moldavia, “from an old head shepherd, who used to be a Jew in his youth, and God took pity on him and made him aware of the true belief.”[28]

This type of story falls into the greater category of etiologic legends. From them we learn how “ethnical characteristics” were established once and for all. Stereotypical thinking is carried to the limit in this case. Everything has to be reduced to one single “cultural mark” (the screw for the German, the fiddle for the Gypsy, drunkenness for the Russian, work for the Moldavian, etc.), or to a small number of such “marks,” considered to be defining characteristics of an ethnic group. This ethnic and cultural determination derives from a double authority. On the one hand, it is given by God Himself and, on the other hand, it occurs at the mythical beginning of the world, in illo tempore. The first sentence in the Romanian legend explicitly states all these aspects of the issue: “Lord God, after He put the world together, put an order and a mark upon each people.” Four “cultural marks” have been selected for the “Jews,” all trying to compress their destiny and history to the maximum: 1) Decalogue; 2) Deicide; 3) Persecution; 4) Money.

Toward the close of the 1930s, in his elaboration on a Project on the Research of Religious Life, ethno-sociologist Ion I. Ionică, of the Sociological School of Bucharest (headed by Dimitrie Gusti), formulated a few of the subjects referring to the question of kinship in the following manner: “Their multitude and their differences. Was there a single kin in the beginning, or have all nations existed ever since? What are the features of kinship? Kinship and color. The hierarchy of kinship. The Gypsy, the Jew, the Hungarian, the Swabian, the Romanian, etc. How can one account for national and ethnic characteristics?”[29]

An authentic folk legend, also recorded in northern Moldavia, unfolds the story of the “gifts” distributed by God at the Creation to “the first peoples.” According to this legend, the first nations were the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Moldavians (the latter further divided into “boyars” and “peasants”). The Moldavian boyars, the first to come into the presence of the Lord, asked for “wealth.” “God gave them wealth.” “Then came the Jews, for they were sooner dressed.” They asked for the “good.” “The good be granted to you!” said God unto them. Since the Moldavian peasants, as is their habit, came later in the day, they were refused both “wealth” and the “good,”[30]for wealth had been given to the boyars, and the “good was taken over by the Jews.” Instead, they received “work”: “And this is why work is sacred, for it has been given by God.” All that was left for the Gypsies was “laughter”: “ ‘Be a laughing stock,’ said God onto them. And so they remained a laughing stock.”[31]

As can be observed, the main ethical-ethnic characteristics attributed to the Jew are “good,” obtained without “work,” and “money,” obtained by devious means. Deviousness is also the mark of the Jew in a Hungarian legend entitled “What the Peoples Got from God,” recorded at the end of the nineteenth century. This time, God—He who sits on the celestial throne and gives to every people its due—is Jesus Christ. The Turk comes to Him and asks for the “Holy Land.” “All right, let it be yours, then Jesus replies.” Then comes the German, asking for the same, and Jesus explains that He has already given the Holy Land to the Turk. “Well, it is a nice thing,” replied the German, and Jesus added: “All right then, let you have the nice thing.” After Jesus turned down the same request made by the Hungarian, the latter replied, angrily, “Well, bad luck!” And Jesus decided “All right then, let you have bad luck.” When, to the same request, the Jew received the same answer, he exclaimed nervously: “Well, it is a big cheat.” Jesus replied instantly: “Well then, let the cheat be yours.” The end of this multiethnic folk tale is typical of etiologic legends: “That is why Hungarians always have bad luck, Germans have all the nice things, Turks have the Holy Land, and the Jews cheating.[32]” Considering the negative status meted out to Hungarians and the positive one enjoyed by the Germans, it is possible that this legend originated in the German cultural area.

Of the same parentage as the above-mentioned legends (of the type of “the gifts distributed by God to the nations”) are those regarding the genesis of ethnic groups and races. In a myth that is part of Transylvanian Gypsy lore, God made man out of clay and had him baked in the oven. He over-baked him, and so black was he, being burnt all over. This was the ancestor of the Blacks. Then God set out on another try. This time, however, he did not bake the man of clay long enough, so he was pale. This was the ancestor of the Whites. Finally, in a third assay, God succeeded: this third man was well baked, golden, and tanned. This was the ancestor of the Gypsies.[33] Romanian folkloric mythology too includes episodes of aborted species. Within mythical anthropogenesis, such an aborted species are the “Jidovi,” gigantic androids, monstrous, and anthropophagous.[34] This type of script was then transferred from the mythical sphere to a pseudo-scientific one. The ideological forefather of modern racism, J.A. Gobineau, who pro-claimed the inequality of races and the supremacy of the Aryan race, maintained that God had created the yellow race in an aborted attempt at anthropogenesis. This is why, according to his account, people of the yellow race are exceedingly ugly, lack intellectual interest, and are solely pre-occupied with the satisfaction of their basic needs.[35]

If one takes into consideration all the keywords concerning the Jew in the folk tales presented above (scabby dog, cheating and thieving, money, wealth, and “good” obtained without work, the birth and murder of Jesus, persecution and punishment, the Decalogue, and so forth), that is, all the ethical characteristics that have been noted and which define the profile of the Jew, one gets a cluster of well-known clichés, the old mental reflexes which make up the sketchy image of the “imaginary Jew.” The novelty in the lines above consists in the motivations offered for these stereotypes and, especially, in the relationship between the clichés about the Jews and the others— no less spurious and false—which focus on other nations.

Legends of this kind are extremely interesting because each story presents the images of the ethnic group which has generated it (auto-images), in comparison to (and rivaling) the images of the nations with whom it has bordered or cohabited (hetero-images). After centuries of cohabitation, the ethnic groups mix, cultures overlap and influence each other, vices are borrowed, and virtues are redistributed. In 1836, for instance, an anonymous Romanian defended the following theory to St. Marc of Girardin, a Frenchman traveling through Walachia and Moldavia:

Our mores are more or less the same as the mores or, better to say, the vices, of all peoples who have ruled us or have protected us. From the Russians we have borrowed their lechery, from the Greeks their lack of honesty in business, from the ruling Greek aristocracy (the Phanariots) a mixture of degradation and vanity, from the Turks their carelessness and indolence. The Poles have blessed us with divorce and [with] this host of Jews of the lower kind, which you have seen swarming in our streets: these are our vices.[36]