Category Archives: Vol. 3

Andreea Iacob

Imaginarul violent al muzicii hip-hop din România

Contestabilă în ceea ce-i priveste paternitatea, viata băietilor de cartier din România este o realitate intrinsec ascunsă, singurul jurnal al vietii de cartier reprezentîndu-l muzica hip-hop. Adevăratii „băieti de băieti” nu se lasă disecati spre studiu. În acelasi timp, rămîne nerezolvată însă problematica subiectului în sine: principiile vietii de cartier sînt preluate de muzica hip-hop din realitate sau sînt formate de versurile acesteia? Întrebarea se poate generaliza, extinzîndu-se pînă la importarea întregii “idei” a vietii de cartier din mediul american. Avînd în vedere modalitatea de creare a cartierelor românesti în perioada comunismului, este putin probabil ca o asemenea subcultură, sau oricare alta, să se fi născut în conditiile unei propagande care ucidea initiativa sau orice urmă de coeziune înafara „colectivizării” oficiale. Ideea trebuie să fi fost asadar copiată, cu legile ei, dar mai ales cu violentul hip-hop, apărut în ghetourile americane, după jazz si blues, ca revoltă, asemenea rap-ului, a tinerilor împotriva nedreptătilor la care erau supusi.

Mai mult decît atît, după episoadele în care tăranii români erau adusi cu forta în „blocurile gri” (la care fac referire cei din formatia B.U.G. Mafia), dezrădăcinarea si frustrările pe mai multe planuri nu puteau da nastere decît, în cea mai mare parte, unor reactii hibride, unor feti hibrizi, cu o identitate incertă, neajutorati pe de o parte, iar pe de alta temători, dar răzbunători pe lumea care îi înconjoară cu sila. Desigur, comunismul a murit, dar ecuatia de mai sus este valabilă si prin înlocuirea cu un alt dusman „comun”. Urmasi ai epocii industrializării, autointitulatii „băieti de băieti” sunt fie victime ale economiei, fie ale adaptării la mediu, după cum reiese si din una din piesele celor de la B.U.G. Mafia, prima trupă a hip-hop-ului românesc: „Mă uit în fiecare zi la mama si la tata/ Parcă sînt tot mai obositi…/ Vino acum, ia-mă sus, îngeras/ S-a adunat prea multă suferintă si umilintă…/ Ridică-mă la cer…”[1]

Venind dintr-o lume cu legi nescrise, dar cîntate, majoritatea pieselor hip-hop vorbesc despre viata de cartier, adresîndu-se, de cele mai multe ori, celor care nu o cunosc, outsiderilor; limbajul violent devine în acest context o încercare fortată de trezire a interesului pentru problemele de cartier, în fata unei societăti din ce în ce mai „călite” si mai putin dispuse la convietuirea sau cel putin recunoasterea alternativei. Violenta vietii de cartier este, deci, însăsi viata de cartier. Acesta este si motivul pentru care se încearcă si apelul la mesageri aparent mai credibili, prin binecunoscutul: „Zi-le Loredana!”. Iar Loredana spune: Orasul ăsta c-o mie de porti/ Cu mii de povesti tesute de nopti/ E-o lume-n care e loc pentru toti/ Cu zeci de destine trase la sorti/ E-o lume-n care poti să te pierzi/ Cu vise în care încă mai crezi/ Lumea e a mea.”[2] Lumea, cartierul adică, un spatiu telenovelistic, dar lipsit de siropos, este viată paralelă, brutală prin definitie, o contracultură–revoltă, un mediu închis (prin îndepărtare sau autoexcludere), format din „băietasi” si „bagaboante”, versus outsideri, „fraierii” adică (“Pentru ca fraierii să-nceapă să cunoască veteranii,/ Explic despre cum e zi de zi si cum trec anii/ Sînt băietii care fac/ Si sînt tîrfele cu muia”), outsideri care sunt mereu intimidati sau injuriati („Totul între noi si nici o treabă cu nimeni,/ Stăm pregătiti pentru orice, oricum, oricînd,/ Ia mai dă-i în p(…)a mea pe toti cei care nu sînt/ Care vor să facă parte si ei din căcat.”), dar cărora, în acelasi timp, li se dau mereu explicatii, într-un fel mai mult sau mai putin grosolan, în legătură cu ce si de este cartierul: „După blocurile gri stăm noi, majoritatea/…Să nu se vadă foamea/ Si nici băietii care prostesc pe prosti/ Si fetele care noaptea vînd p(…)dă la colt…”[3]

Tot în „După blocuri” apar cîteva dintre motivele sociale ale recursului la viata de cartier si, implicit, la violentă: motivul realitătii esentiale si de maximă intensitate care caracterizează cartierul („Uită-te cum zi de zi apar alte limuzine/ Si se-ntîmplă deseori să mai vezi un cersetor/ Si să spună cineva:/ Frate, ăsta a fost doctor./ Deci dacă vrei tratament, hai după blocuri/ Si-o să-ti facă toti ai mei, rînd pe rînd, electrosocuri.”), motivul mereu scăzutului nivel de trai („Poate că guvernul te crede curvă, frate/ Din banii care-i faci, dacă-s ai tăi jumate/ S-atunci ce să faci să supravietuiesti?/ Te gîndesti să jefuiesti”), cel al legilor underground care guvernează tranzitia („Spaga este cea care te scoate din căcat/ Un politist, un procuror, un senator si ai scăpat”); abordarea personalizată a acestor probleme este de natură să apropie cele două lumi pe care le formează aparitia cartierului: „Îi reprezint pe cei care nu au acum să vorbească/ Vocea străzii deranjează urechile sensibile care nu agrează cartierul/ Băietii mei vor să facă mai albastru cerul,/ Să facă ceva/ Că sansele sînt mici, să te ridici de după blocuri/ Din sărăcia despre care politicienii doar vorbesc…/ Bineînteles, le multumesc pentru viata asta ruptă-n două/ Nici nouă nu ne pasă ce vi se întîmplă vouă”[4].

Discursul adresat direct ousiderilor devine uneori motiv pentru un registru sexual extrem de bogat si aglomerat, ca maximă expresie a revoltei: „Sugi p(…)a cu poezia ta/ Pe stradă-n toată tara poezia-i Mafia/ … îmi bag p(…)a-n mă-ta/ Degeaba te holbezi la mine/ Că nu îmi pasă de tine”[5] sau „Tot ce-am învătat am învătat pe stradă/ Băga-mi-as p(…)a tu n-o să-ntelegi vreodată/…Deci, domnule, tine-ti nasul la tine-n oală/ Stiu că sîntem pentru tine o problemă socială…”[6]

Pluralul „sîntem” delimitează cea de-a doua dimensiune a vietii de cartier, pe lîngă violentă, si anume gasca („respect pentru fratii mei, nimic mai mult”); nu se întîmplă nimic în solitudine sau în liniste. Trimitînd si mai departe, la imaginea femeii în subcultura de cartier, iată cum începe piesa celor de la B.U.G. Mafia, intitulată „Anturaju’”: “Bună seara doamnelor, domnisoarelor, tîrfelor si domnilor,/ Bine ati venit la emisiunea nostră “După blocuri”/ Astă seară vom vorbi despre un subiect de multe ori ocolit:/ Anturaju’…./ Ce este anturaju’, părtile lui pozitive si părtile lui negative”. Continuarea este relevantă pentru ce reprezintă, sau vrea să reprezinte, hip-hop-ul în viata de cartier: „…i-am preferat pe cei cu Nike, celor la costum/ D-aia am acum Mafia lîngă mine/ Care mă-ndrumă, mă-ndreaptă spre bine, tine la mine”. Într-o timp si un spatiu fără modele, aceasta este alternativa underground: „Mai bine să facă rime decît să facă crime,/ Mai bine să ia bani decît să piardă ani”[7]. A face parte dintr-o gască cere si unele sacrificii, cum ar fi renuntarea la unele plăceri care nu „dau bine” la un băiat de cartier (gen muzica simfonică), dar, în acelasi timp, oferă compania unui grup în care nu mai există scări sociale, care luptă împreună împotriva legilor sau a prejudecătilor care îi împiedică să trăiască asa cum îsi doresc ei.

Ilegalitatea devine, pe această cale, un element esential. Limbajul violent din muzica hip-hop, tatuajele si graffiti-urile, cu rolul de a marca teritorii sau „filosofii” de viată, prin intimidarea celor din jur, sunt populare în rîndul tinerilor tocmai prin ilegalitatea existentei lor. Din acest motiv, în versurile multor piese se subliniază pozitia „contra” prin folosirea intentionată si insistentă a unui limbaj licentios: „bag p(…)a-n tot/ pun industria pe stop/ nu e loc, nici n-a fost, pentru cale de mijloc./ Băietii de cartier bagă boala-n fraieri, poezia în smecheri si cuvinte grele în creier./ Asta nu e pentru topurile de pe la TV,/ Comisia de cenzură nu vrea versurile mele/ Zic „muie”/ Si-i las pe băieti la microfon să le-o tragă si ei la…”[8] În probabil acelasi scop, albumul „Iartă-mă” al trupei Parazitii contine deja cunoscutele avertismente: „A nu se difuza în locuri publice” si „Atentie – Cel mai obscen album de la inventarea limbii române”.

Folosirea violentei de limbaj, si în special al registrelor sexual si excremential, variază de la o trupă de hip-hop la alta. Dacă la B.U.G. Mafia cresterea gradului de vulgaritate tine de un context exact (fetele, dar altele decît iubitele „oficiale”, subiect la care vom reveni în cele ce urmează), cei de la Parazitii sînt cît se poate de lipsiti de subtilitate („Sînt genul de om care mă pis în liftul tău”[9]), mergînd, în aceeasi piesă, pînă la gratuitate (“Sînt tată de familie, cel ce vă iubeste/ Copiilor le dau alocatia, părintilor mei le dau pensia/ Vreti să vă ia tata ceva?/ Sugeti din tata cu portia”), sau o ironie „discretă” (“Rîgîi si mă scarpin, mănînc pînă mor,/ Vreau să văd tîte si buci pe televizor”[10]). La polul opus se află trupa R.A.C.L.A. (prescurtarea de la „Rime alese care lovesc adînc”), care îsi recunoaste vulgaritatea prin vocea unuia dintre băieti “posed cea mai vulgară cascadă verbală din România”[11]. Ironia si revolta împotriva slăbiciunilor sistemului conturează însă în versurile lor o atitudine mai putin viscerală, implicit mai putin violentă, chiar dacă la fel de ascutită: “toti cu p(…)a mea se ling ca Paula”, “Sînt rudă cu Dracula/ Nume de cod: Vlad Tepes/ Deschide-mă la slit/ Si vizitezi Castelul Peles”[12].

Relatia borfas – iubită este percepută si ea diferentiat. În versurile trupei B.U.G. Mafia distinctia între „femeia” borfasului („Orice s-ar întîmpla, tot ea este regina…”[13]) si „curve” este clară: „Chiar dacă cîteodată o să vină mangă acasă/ Poate că-ntr-o dimineată te trezesti cu garda în fată/ O să te mintă că a stat la o bere cu băietii/ Mai mult ca sigur că a fost la bagaboante cu băietii/ O să te înjure, o să te bată, o să ia droguri non-stop/… Însă tu iartă-l de tot/ Orice s-ar întîmpla, el pe tine te iubeste/ Tu esti fetita lui si fără tine înnebuneste”. Mai mult decît atît, „femeia” nu este doar cea care „iartă tot mereu, pentru că o iubesc/ Cu mine are bani, putere si respect…”, ci si un factor de echilibru: „Stiu că fără ea as fi fost la închisoare” [14]. Cu celelalte fete, cu „bagaboantele”, lucrurile stau cu totul altfel: „Iubeste-mă de-aici în jos, începe de la cap/ Si suge, si suge, si suge fata p(…)a/ Si suge de vreo oră si ar mai vrea, mînca-mi-ar p(…)a…”[15] Personajul feminin este caracterizat exclusiv prin elemente de natură sexuală: „Să f(…)ă de plăcere”, „rupe p(…)a-n ea de mică”, „plăcerea cea mai mare, p(…)a mare-n păsărică”.

Constructia piesei este de factură să evidentieze faptul că acest gen de tratament al „bagaboantei” este unul la locul lui, un tratament pe care femeile si-l doresc. Refrenul melodiei, interpretat de Cătălina, cu o voce copilărească, este o replică la versurile de dinainte: „Îmi place tot ce faci,/ Îmi place cînd te văd între borfasi/ Îmi place să te văd cum numeri sute,/ Asa că hai să mergem să ne f(…)tem”. Acesta este contexul imaginii – concluzie: „Pentru mine, toate femeile sînt curve/ Si toate aleargă după p(…)ă”.

În versurile celorlaltor trupe, imaginile actului sexual sînt mai putin contextualizate. Femeia, dezumanizată („Încearcă să arăti un pic mai bine, mai frumoasă/ Vrei să-mi moară spărgătorii dacă-mi intră-n casă?”, „Monstrul din bucătărie, denumit sotie/ Nu-mi dă nici un motiv de bucurie,/ Face prost muie”, „Văd desene animate cînd te ard la ADN/ După ultimele calcule, f(…)t un OZN”), apare ca simplu obiect, iar participarea ei la relatia sexuală este ca atare („Cînd o sugi, o sugi din simplă datorie”), avînd obligatia de a satisface bărbatul, chiar dacă ea este, după cum am arătat mai sus, „doritoare” de un astfel de tratament („Scoti femeia la o prăjitură,/ Esti cu gîndul în ecler,/ Ea cu gîndu-nfipt în p(…)ă”[16]). Relatia sexuală trebuie să fie, asadar, în consens cu extremul vietii de cartier în general, un soi de sado-masochism adolescentin, vulgar, dar mult mai putin pătimas (în ceea ce priveste tonul de rostire a versurilor cît si linia melodică) decît referirile la problemele sociale sau la cei care, dintr-un motiv sau altul, au ajuns dusmani ai cîntăretilor de hip-hop. În relatia cu femeia, este vorba, mai degrabă de satisfacerea nevoii de dominare, poate chiar de intimidare (femeia – prostituată fiind considerată si ea un fel de outsider, de data aceasta): “Vreau să stiu dacă te risti/ Să sugi p(…)a cînd mă pis./ Io, beat mort în intersectie,/ Îti prezint p(…)a-n erectie,/ Îti promit clipe de vis,/ Cu scurgeri si sifilis”[17]. Libertinismul total, atmosfera oniric – halucinantă („Ce m-as f(…)e cu tine/ Să petrecem toată noaptea/ Să luăm hasis”[18]) există ca model, ca demonstratie a puterii celor care sunt modelul, care sînt trimisii întru a le face pe toate si a fi mai apoi îndrumătorii celorlalti băietasi neîntelesi de prima lume. În plus, interpretarea acestei atitudini fată de femei trebuie realizată din perspectiva celor două dimensiuni esentiale ale vietii de cartier: violenta, pe de o parte, si gasca, anturajul, pe de altă parte. În piesa „Dex 2000”, cei de la Parazitii subliniază tocmai acest lucru la definitia cuvîntului „vocabular”: “Un personaj integru face dragoste, nu f(…)te,/ Nu se scarpină la coaie, se masează decent în baie/ Modul meu de exprimare e brevetat în cartier/ Oare sînt obscen?/ Pentru noi ati inventat un vocabular pervers.” Nu trebuie uitat nici faptul că, după cum am subliniat la început, cartierul este o lume închisă; acesta este cercul la care trebuie raportate „toate femeile” despre care vorbesc hip-hop-erii.

Situatia se modifică însă în ceea ce îi priveste pe cei care intră în categoria „dusmanilor”. Dacă formatia R.A.C.L.A. face referiri subtile si ironice chiar la muzica pe care o cîntă („Am descoperit reteta, frate,/… vulgaritate,/ Dar se vinde? Se vinde,/ Asa că hai copii,/ Să scoatem anual două albume, un single si-un LP…”[19]), cei de la B.U.G. Mafia lansează o adevărată furtună de violentare la adresa ziaristilor, prin piesa „Unii sug p#l@”. Tonul grav al interpretilor, patima cu care sînt rostite versurile, trendul spre explozie al melodicului, sunt cele care sustin atacul verbal: „O parte din presă presează căcat”; urmează adresarea directă, cu o doză crescută de implicare: „O să ajungi la p(…)a mea/ Nu-ti fie frică, nu esti singură,/ Lista mea continuă”, „Ziaristule, paparazzi ai fost si o să rămîi/ Ăla care suge p(…)a pentru zvonuri”. Refrenul este repetat pe un ton mai relaxat, cu distantarea celui care are puterea de partea sa: „Toată lumea stie că esti doar căcat de căcat/ Tot ce faci, să te faci remarcat;/ De la noi si toti băietii care-ar vrea să-ti spargă gura,/ Sugi p(…)a.” Acest din urmă imperativ reprezintă răzbunarea supremă, care rămîne la nivel verbal asadar, căci defularea are loc numai prin intermediul rimelor, ajunse la nivel de necesitate (apare din nou idea alternativei underground, „Dacă nu eram aicea, acum eram la tine-acasă,/ Luam totul si plecam asa că lasă! / Am clasă/ Am darul să-ti explic despre cartier…”[20])

Complexă ca lumea fată de care s-a născut ca alternativă, viata de cartier are modele pe măsură, complementare, care vorbesc despre ele. „Cu scopul de-a lăsa în urma mea un semn/ Vă raschetez limba de lemn” spun cei de la R.A.C.L.A. Mai putin poeti, băietii de la B.U.G. Mafia s-au gîndit la timp si la criticii lor: “Vă f(…)t în gură pe toti…/ Asa pe fată cum tu n-ai văzut vreodată/ Bîrfiti, discutati, analizati, comentati, socati, stresati de fenomenul hip-hop/ Băieti de prin cartier în stare să vă f(…)ă-n gură/ În fiecare zi, la orice pas, la orice oră…/ Vorbim despre cartier direct din stradă pentru stradă”. Chiar si cu o coerentă de mai joasă altitudine, uneori, cîntăretii legilor de cartier îsi revendică pozitia de locuitori ai acestei lumi paralele, de creatori sau culegători, cu un posibil interes comercial. Dincolo de toate, rămîne o miscare greu interpretabilă, dar cu un imens succes la publicul tînăr: o subcultură care devine familie, care îsi insultă fătis dusmanii, în care există femei – pereche si prostituate, în care se încearcă defularea în violentă verbală, în care se dau si sfaturi: “Fii demn de numele ce-l porti/ Indiferent dacă e Popescu sau e Figo,/ Alege-ti drumul constient că ochii lui privesc din cer spre tine,/ O mînă invizibilă atunci cînd te mai clatini, te sustine/ Învată din greselile trecutului lui si-al tău,/ Discerne binele de rău, scapă de hău,/ Ascultă, sunt îngerii cu lira…”[21] Sună cunoscut?

Ruxandra Cesereanu

Masinăria falică

 Scânteia (1944-1950)

Violul ideologic. Un trup frankensteinian: sira spinării, pumnii si creierul. Priapismul Partidului unic. Sex-appeal muncitoresc si femeia-comisar

                Ziarul Scânteia, organ al Comitetului Central al Partidului Comunist Român, a demarat din 1944, de când si-a început aparitia legală, o adevărată campanie belică împotriva asa-zisilor “dusmani ai poporului” (acestia fiind membri ai partidelor istorice, legionari, chiaburi si mosieri, ofiteri de carieră, ziaristi, universitari, ingineri, industriasi si orice alte categorii care nu aderaseră la comunismul impus cu forta). Masinăria a functionat mai întîi la nivel lingvistic, în chip violent, ziarul analizat aici si ideologia care îl anima (împreună cu Partidul care îl tutela) rîvnind să dobîndească o corporalitate demonstrativă, tocmai pentru a-si legitima inclusiv visceral atacurile. Astfel, insistenta pe denumirea de “organ al Comitetului Central al P.C.R.” trimite la un machism fortat si insidios care are ca scop corporalizarea agresivă a Scânteii, aceasta actionînd ca un “falus” al Partidului. “Falus” care implantează noua ideologie si încearcă să fecundeze astfel matria românească si poporul, chiar dacă printr-un viol. Fireste, explicitarea unui ziar de a fi “organ” al unei formatiuni politice nu este o inovatie comunistă (ci tine de traditia subintitulării unei gazete care se doreste a fi element de propagandă în orice timpuri), dar odată cu Scânteia, virilizarea gazetei primeste sensul unei demonstratii de fortă. Dar tendinta de corporalizare nu se opreste, aici, ci continuă: despre clasa muncitoare se repetă obsesiv în discursurile ideologice ale epocii că este “sira spinării a tuturor fortelor democratice” sau “pumnul de fier al unitătii si fortei”, “creierul” acestei făpturi frankensteiniene fiind alcătuit dintr-un cvintet (Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Ana Pauker, Teohari Georgescu, Vasile Luca, Petru Groza, cel din urmă mai mult om de paie; figura lui Gheorghiu-Dej nu este încă exaltată în anii pe care îi vizează analiza mea) sau dintr-un triumvirat (“Ana, Luca si cu Dej bagă spaima în burgheji” suna un slogan la modă). Ce ni se mai spune în titlurile si leitmotivele din Scânteia pedalează, de asemenea, pe ideea de masinărie falică violatoare: căci P.C.R. “se căleste si se întăreste” atunci cînd procedează la arestarea “dusmanilor poporului”, chiar si atunci cînd acestia fac parte din propriile sale rînduri. S-ar putea spune, mentinînd simbolismul sexual, că Partidul Muncitoresc sau Comunist din România suferă de un fel de “priapism” rezultat din demolarea dusmanilor săi externi si interni, că vigilenta sa si “opera de luminare a muncitorimii” cu precădere îi mentin virilitatea. Ministrul Justitiei din primii ani ai comunismului românesc, Lucretiu Pătrăscanu, va afirma ritos la un moment dat că Tribunalul poporului a devenit o “fiintă adevărată” odată cu Legea pentru urmărirea si sanctionarea vinovatilor de dezastrul tării si de crime de război. Si, astfel, făptura aceasta ideologică este construită si confectionată, are trup (organe sexuale, sira spinării, pumni, creier), o piele de împrumut (comunismul), dar nu are nici inimă, nici suflet: ea se dovedeste a fi un boxer violator, apt să-i distrugă orbeste, mecanic, pe “dusmanii poporului”. În putinele desene stilizate cu muncitori, pe care Scânteia le publică, acestia apar atletici, cu alură de culturisti ori stripeuri mai degrabă, semn că inclusiv grafic se mizează pe un “sex-appeal” herculean al reprezentantilor clasei celei mai favorizate, teoretic, de comunism. Într-un număr din Scânteia anului 1950 apare stilizat pe prima pagină, într-un portret hiperbolic, un muncitor vînjos, cu un picamăr urias; el are chipul radios, satisfăcut parcă de “violul” colectiv împotriva “dusmanilor poporului”. Femeia comunistă, în schimb, este desexualizată si defeminizată, si de aceea ea nu va fi vizată de “violul” efectuat de Partid. În ce o priveste pe Ana Pauker, aceasta este o femeie-comisar virilizată complet, de la trup la vorbă, asa încît ea trebuie percepută tot ca un bărbat angrenat în masinăria falică a Partidului. Se cuvine precizat, apoi, că fotografia cea mai mediatizată în Scânteia (pentru perioada 1944-1950) a vreunui lider comunist este aceea a lui Stalin (apoi a lui Gheorghiu-Dej si a Anei Pauker), arhetipul agresorului de la care liderii comunisti români se împărtăsesc cu o admiratie de ucenici rîvnitori.

Infractori si lachei în cîrdăsie. Moarte trădătorilor! Satrapi si dihănii. Cioclii si strigoi

                Voi proceda, în cele ce urmează, la inventarierea limbajului violent instrumentat de comunisti prin ziarul Scânteia, pe categorii de termeni morali. Astfel, o primă categorie de termeni îi califică pe asa-zisii “dusmani ai poporului” în sfera imoralitătii infractionale. Acestia sunt “gangsteri”, “tâlhari”, “banditi”, “răufăcători”, “asasini”, “mardeiasi”, “borfasi”, “degenerati”, “potlogari”, “canalii”, “paraziti”, “huligani”, “lepădături”, “secături”, “snapani”, “jecmănitori”, “elemente necinstite”, “mână criminală”, “trântori”, “tripoteuri”, “triseuri”, prin această terminologie variată comunistii urmărind să-i consacre pe opozantii lor în toate categoriile infractionale posibile (inclusiv în cele argotice), fapt care ar fi justificat punerea după gratii a acestora. Presupusii “dusmani ai poporului” sînt, apoi, grupati într-o “sleahtă”, “tagmă”, “gască”, “cârdăsie”, “bandă”, “haită”, “clică” (reactionară), “hoardă” (a fiarei), “retele”, “detasamente ale urei si persecutiei sovine”, “agenturi”, diferitele forme colective de încadrare urmărind să justifice măcar teoretic de ce Partidul si Tribunalul Poporului vor actiona “fără crutare”, “crunt”, preconizînd o represiune masivă împotriva presupusilor infractori. O altă categorie de termeni îi include pe “dusmanii poporului” în subspecia “lacheilor” (fascismului etc.), “mercenarilor”, “slugilor” (plecate ale reactiunii) si “slugoilor” (hiperbolizare în spiritul epocii) “argatilor” (zelosi ai mosierilor), “cozilor de topor”, pentru a sublinia structura ignobilă, inferioară uman, colaborationistă a acestora. Această conditie de “pleavă a tării” catalizează spre următoarea orientare de care vor fi acuzati “dusmanii poporului”: nimic mai simplu ca ei să fie sau să devină “trădători” (ai clasei muncitoare si ai neamului românesc), “spioni” (în solda anglo-americanilor), “profitorii de ieri, sabotorii de mâine”, “agenti provocatori”, “diversionisti”, “reactionari”, “afaceristi”, “carieristi”, “complotisti”, “vânduti”, “Iude”, “farisei” (ai democratiei), “gheseftari istorici”, “zarafi”, “lefegii”, “misiti fără patrie”. De aceea, se scandează “Moarte trădătorilor!” Prin această trăsătură se pedalează pe un patriotism demagogic si gregar, insistîndu-se si asupra unei acuze financiare la care publicul ar fi fost sensibil în conditiile pierderilor masive suferite de România în timpul celui de-al doilea război mondial si ale refacerii ei după instalarea fortată a comunismului, cînd tara avea parte de o mizerie nedisimulată nici chiar de patronii ei ideologici. Calificativele morale cu care acuzatorii se năpustesc în avalansă rîvnesc, si ele, să desăvîrsească degradarea umană a celor vizati, care sînt catalogati drept “nemernici”, “îngâmfati”, “înselători”, “nedemni”, “verosi”, “hrăpăreti, “vicleni”, “misei”, “mârsavi”, “infami”, “odiosi”, “hidosi”, “oribili”, “scelerati”, “fiorosi”, “josnici”. De aceea, se scandează “În lături, netrebnici!”

                Dezonorarea si umilirea lingvistică a “dusmanilor poporului” merge progresiv, de la conditia inferioară de “lachei” ajungîndu-se la o ridicare în rang a acuzatilor care devin “monstri”, “brute sângeroase”, “satrapi”, “bestii” (trădătoare de popor), “dihănii” (fasciste), “călăi” (ai omenirii), “balaur”, “fiare” (“care  rânjesc” fiindcă sînt încoltite), “fiara crucii cu gheare” (drept care se scandează “Moarte lor!”). Iuliu Maniu este acuzat ca fiind “Sfinxul de la Bădăcini”. “Dusmanii poporului” sînt catalogati în mod obsesiv drept “cei ce sug sângele si vlaga poporului”, imaginarul lingvistic comunist vizînd aici, la nivel de mental colectiv, conditia de vampiri a celor incriminati; calificativul este mai totdeauna de “sângeros”, sîngele fiind hrana predilectă a vampirului care, din această pricină, trebuie ucis. Ion Antonescu este, cel mai adesea, un “maresal sângeros”, de pildă. Dezonorarea care a urcat treptele ierarhiei are un scop clar în acest caz: dat fiind că “dusmanii poporului” alcătuiesc un monstru cu mai multe capete (ca în basme si mituri), comunistii se doresc a fi mîntuitorii si salvatorii care ucid balaurul, adică niste eroi întemeietori, tocmai pentru că actiunea lor este una violentă si are ardoarea crimei întemeietoare. Iuliu Maniu este “Sfinx”, pentru că acuzatorii săi se doresc a fi în pielea lui Oedip. Dar, deoarece crima (oricît de întemeietoare s-ar dori ea) nu este legitimă, ci abuzivă si violatoare de lege, comunistii îndeplinesc, de fapt, functia unui monstru care uzurpă locul de drept al regelui uns si ales.

Plagă, cloacă, pecingine. Putregai si puroi. Decrepitudine si descărnare

                Batjocorirea continuă printr-o altă dimensiune. În 1948, în Scânteia, apare (în patru episoade) celebrul articol al lui Sorin Toma pe marginea poeziei lui Tudor Arghezi, articol intitulat “Poezia putrefactiei sau putrefactia poeziei”, în care, printre altele, acuzînd pestilentialul poetic al lui Tudor Arghezi, autorul sanctionează un “urât mirositor vocabular”. Acest lucru s-ar putea spune mai degrabă despre limbajul agresiv promovat de Scânteia împotriva “dusmanilor poporului”. Mai întîi, este speculată ideea de “plagă”, de molimă, “pecingine”, “cloacă murdară”, “dusmanii poporului” fiind purtători de “venin fascist” de obicei, drept care tara este “infectată” si infestată de otrăvitori (agentii “infectiei” fiind ziaristii legionari ori antonescieni, dar nu numai ei, ca “otrăvitori de suflete”, ci si universitarii “huligani” ca otrăvitori ai studentimii) si de “buruieni veninoase”. Iar si iar, mîntuitorii unei asemenea molime nu ar putea fi decît aceiasi comunisti cu rîvne oedipiene pervertite. Să vedem, însă, cum se manifestă “otrava” împroscată de ziaristii atît de blamati. Iată cîteva fragmente din articolul “Procesul a trei ziaristi fascisti” (ziaristi care, de altfel, s-au manifestat, o parte dintre ei, printr-un limbaj extrem de violent în perioada interbelică), semnat cu patos revolutionar de Horia Liman în Scânteia (An XVI, nr. 246, 1 iunie 1946):

“Sunt cavalerii unui apocalips provocat cu cinism, metodic, după un plan scelerat, pentru un blid de linte sau un sac de aur. Cavalerii condeiului otrăvit n’au însă nimic interesant, ca înfătisare, la prima vedere. Intră toti – turmă – putin intimidati de perspectiva cea nouă ce li se oferă, lor, criminalilor… /…/ Trei huligani, trei amatori de spectacole sângeroase. Toti trei au incitat la crime, au aplaudat vandalismele săvârsite de elevii credinciosi ai scrisului lor, au rânjit la vederea ruinelor, a prăpădului provocat de propria lor explozie de ură si dementă. Sunt autorii morali ai dezastrelor pe cari le-au dirijat cu o voluptate neroniană, zi de zi, cu tenacitate diabolică. /…/ În jurul lor se deslusesc doar flăcări fluturate spre cerul întunecat, doar crime, doar dâre de sânge care nici o clipă n’au avut răgaz să se închege /…/ Numele trinitătii din boxă duhnesc a sânge. Infectează aerul si scârbesc”.

                Treptele agresiunii sînt parcurse ierarhic, ajungîndu-se la o conditie putridă a “dusmanilor poporului”: acestia sînt “găunosi”, “elemente descompuse”, “rămăsite” (adică resturi, ruine umane) intrate în putrefactie, revelate prin “putregaiul fascist” (sau “putregaiul moral al burgheziei”) si “puroiul legionar”, drept care poporul si Partidul simt, pe lîngă “nemărginita revoltă”, “scârbă si dezgust”. Limbajul coroziv legat de putrid este completat, în această retorică agresivă, de o dimensiune funerară ofensatoare, “dusmanii poporului” fiind considerati niste “cioclii ai proprietătii tărănesti”, “ramoliti si “strigoi” ori “paiate” (oameni goi, carcase). În editorialul nesemnat intitulat “Chipurile lor…” din Scânteia (An XVI, nr. 519, 9 mai 1946), zugrăvirea acuzatilor din “procesul marii trădări” intentat lui Ion Antonescu si colaboratorilor săi atinge apogeul prin batjocorirea verbală si sublinierea decrepitudinii celor incriminati. Sugestia este aceea că, fiind “morti” din punct de vedere moral, ei pot fi ucisi fizic, fără ca nimeni să se simtă vinovat pentru aceasta, tocmai pentru că ar purta pe trup semnele mortii iminente, ale putrezirii de vii. Iată cîteva secvente ilustrative din acest editorial: “fetele lor, descărnate, livide ori pământii, brăzdate de sbârcituri cari nu sunt urmele unui travaliu al gândirii, ci pielea botită a cărnii unor trupuri din care a pierit tot ceeace constitue demnitatea si măretia unui om, credinta într’o ideie, fetele lor tremurătoare, crispate, căzute, cu buzele vinete, cu câte un rictus intermitent, de nevropati sau posedati, ca si calmul aparent al unora dintr’însii, este oglinda aceleiasi lipse de sperante”. Se sugerează că acuzatii sînt niste ipostaze ale omului degradat, niste stafii si “fosti oameni”, care au început deja să putrezească. Iată cîteva portrete intentionat construite pe ideea de decrepitudine: Constantin Pantazi (general) este o “figură caragialescă” dominată (ni se spune în transcrierea “Procesului Ion Antonescu” din acelasi număr al Scânteii) de un “bâlbăit dezgustător”; alt general, Picki Vasiliu, are “fata cenusie, la fel de descărnată, cu cărarea părului alb si rar, trasă dreaptă prin crestet, cu glasul mieros”; “gura îi joacă într’un tic nervos, tremurat spasmodic, involuntar, ca o expresie carnală a dezagregării materiei vii”; Traian Brăileanu este “stors, desarticulat, cu chelia semănată de peri cărunti, teposi, ca o perie tocită, cu gura stirbă din care cuvintele ies inconsistente, gelatinoase”; Ion Petrovicescu este “sbârcit si negru, cu gesturi iuti de nevăstuică sau de isteric”; alt acuzat, Busilă, are “aceiasi inconsistentă fizică a obrajilor căzuti”; Radu Lecca este “negru-vânăt la fată” (în extrasele din “Procesul Ion Antonescu” din acelasi număr al Scânteii, Radu Lecca este portretizat astfel: “Hidos, cu obrajii buhăiti si mâncati de vicii, Lecca îsi ascunde rapacitatea sub masca nesimtirii”); Eugen Cristescu are “ticul des al limbii scoase mecanic din trei în trei clipe, lingându-si masinal coltul drept al gurii”. După cum se vede, acuzatorii vizează să demoleze mai întîi aspectul fizic al victimelor degradate pînă la ipostaza de cadavre vii. O insistentă aparte este acordată gurii, chipului (ochilor aposi), cheliei si obrajilor, toate cele patru elemente dorindu-se a fi maculate de o senectute decrepită, dominată de o transpiratie cleioasă si de o buhăială pe care acuzatorii o doresc a fi porcină. Atunci cînd la stîlpul infamiei se află o femeie “dusman al poporului”, acuzatorii o maculează prin raportarea la conditia de tîrfă, chiar dacă termenul nu este folosit ca atare.

                Un text virulent împotriva lui Iuliu Maniu este semnat în 1946 (Scânteia, An XVI, nr. 539, 3 iunie 1946) de Ion Călugăru, purtînd titlul “Mortul care le trebuie”. Autorul îi proiectează pe liderii partidelor istorice ca pe niste pensionari amatori si profitori ai înmormîntărilor, figura centrală vizată fiind, însă, asa cum am spus, a lui Iuliu Maniu care si înainte, si în timpul, si după procesul lui Ion Antonescu, a vorbit despre acesta ca despre un patriot.

“În multe orăsele de provincie /scrie Ion Călugăru, n.n./ există câte un pensionar mititelut, plin de ticuri, năselnic, certăret, care mai mult tânjeste decât trăeste. Timpul trece pe lângă dânsul si îl înspăimântă parcă ar fi un torent. Molcome, risipite în negură sunt zilele târgovetilor, însă, pensionarul le simte repezite, nebunatece, ofense pentru dulcea lui bătrânete. Totusi, când dricarii drapează o casă si apar steagurile de doliu si dricul condus de cioclii în uniformă de diplomati, înfătisarea, umoarea bătrânelului ponosit se schimbă. Devine alt om, altă personalitate. /…/ S-ar putea spune că unica bucurie ce i-a mai rămas în cenusia-i existentă, marea lui preocupare este să participe la toate înmormântările.”

Într-un alt text din acelasi an, Iuliu Maniu este înfătisat din nou în mod ofensator, decrepitudinea fiind subliniată în cazul său astfel: ni se spune că vorbele îi sînt o “pârâitură penibilă”, liderul Partidului National Tărănesc fiind “găunos” si “în pragul ramolismentului” (Scânteia, An XVI, nr. 582, 25 iulie 1946). Însusi directorul Scânteii, Miron Constantinescu, va încerca o maculare cu orientare postumă în editorialul său împotriva unei celebre familii liberale (Scânteia, An XVI, nr. 688, 27 noiembrie 1946), încheindu-si textul cu o profetie ritoasă – “Iar pe cavoul familiei Brătianu, oamenii viitorului vor scrie: Aici zac rămăsitele familiei Brătianu/Care si-a clădit huzurul/Pe jaf, înselătorie si asasinat”. Criptocomunistii de după revolutia din 1989 în România îi vor urma tactica atunci cînd, la o demonstratie împotriva Partidului National Tărănesc Crestin-Democrat, îi vor trimite liderului acestuia, Corneliu Coposu (fost detinut politic timp de aproape două decenii în închisorile comuniste din România), ca dar, un sicriu.

Colti si gheare. Mîrîituri. Cîini, lupi, reptile, viermi, sobolani.

“A lichida” si variantele sale

                În sfîrsit, o ultimă mostră de vocabular agresiv prin care se încearcă impurificarea lingvistică a “dusmanilor poporului” este aceea a animalizării lor, nuantele fiind sugestive în acest caz. Prin bestializare, acuzatii erau implicit coborîti din nou în subuman, justificînd “arianismul” (fals al) omului nou încarnat de comunisti. Varietatea este destul de spectaculoasă, imaginarul lingvistic comunist rîvnind să găsească ipostaze animalice destul de abjecte si dezgustătoare: “dusmanii poporului” dotati cu “colti” si “gheare” erau declarati a fi “hiene” (speculantii), “lupi” (în haită), “câini turbati” (Ion Antonescu era adesea numit “câine rosu”; Mihai Antonescu este prezentat, la procesul care i se intentează, drept un “câine bătut” care tremură; se vorbeste, apoi, de trădătorii care “mârâie”; drept care se scandează “Jos laba murdară!”), “sobolani” (de pildă, generalul Picki Vasiliu are “ochi de sobolan”; cu altă ocazie, alti incriminati vor avea, în schimb, “ochi de peste”); cu un impact aparte era utilizată categoria reptilelor: “cameleoni”, “vipere” (în cuib; ziaristii antonescieni erau, de pildă, “vipere ale scrisului românesc”, “hitleriste” de obicei), “sopârle” (Radu Gyr era portretizat ca avînd un cap de sopârlă), “năpârci” (reactionare); un alt tip de “dusmani ai poporului” erau catalogati drept “plosnite” (“regale”); chiaburii erau considerati “corbii secetei” sau ai maselor populare; în sfîrsit, o ultimă categorie era aceea a “viermilor”, “limbricilor” (ziaristul Romulus Dianu este înfătisat ca un “limbric speriat”) si a “lipitorilor”. Iată acum cîteva mostre din articolul “Un vierme”, semnat de N. Corbu (în Scânteia, An XVIII, nr. 1263, 30 octombrie 1948), despre presedintele Partidului Social Democrat, Titel Petrescu:

“Multi au si uitat de el – dacă l-au stiut vreodată. Trebue să răscolesti adânc prin putreziciuni, ca să dai de urma lui, târându-se la fund. Câte nu visase viermusorul ăsta! Să se facă dolofan, să crească, să se umfle si iar să se umfle, să ajungă mare, să se vadă sarpe. Viermele îsi agătase o lavalieră cu picătele si se înfoia în ea, asuda tinând discursuri – cu fiere că nu e ascultat – /…/ viermele se băga peste tot si în toate, se agita în sus si-n jos, că poate-poate îi pică si lui ceva – si se bâtâia de ciudă că nu-l ia nimeni în seamă. Un vierme ambitios. Titel Petrescu”.

Cele din urmă ipostaze sînt cele mai abjecte (întrucît trimiterea este la o dimensiune anală, excrementială si putrefactă), prin ele încercîndu-se (pentru a cîta oară) justificarea represiunii împotriva “dusmanilor poporului” prin macularea lor totală. Morala sau, mai exact, antimorala este că unor “viermi” ai dreptul si poti să le faci orice.

                În finalul acestui studiu de caz, voi inventaria verbele agresive prin care ziaristii care semnau în Scânteia atîtau populatia împotriva “dusmanilor poporului” de toate categoriile, întrucît si în acest caz, functionează o ierarhie si niste trepte ale stigmatizării. Astfel, verbele a ucide si a extermina erau folosite rar. Într-o primă fază punitivă au fost folosite verbele moralizatoare a înfiera, a demasca (cu varianta a smulge masca de pe chip, întrucît “dusmanii poporului” erau suspectati de teatralitate), a încolti, a izgoni, a dispretui, a stigmatiza. A curăta era folosit în situatii de “deratizare” si igienă profilactică la nivel uman, ironic vorbind. Urmau, apoi, verbe care provocau durere fizică precum a lovi, a izbi si a smulge (“colti” si “gheare”), acestea fiind completate, la un nivel fizic si mai dureros, de a zdrobi si a strivi. În final, pedepsirea “dusmanilor poporului” era încununată prin verbele a stîrpi, a sfărîma, pentru ca ultima fază a extinctiei să fie redată prin a curma, a anihila, a nimici si, mai ales, a lichida. Reiese în mod limpede, din această însiruire verbală, că scopul final era distrugerea din rădăcini a făpturilor umane care intrau în categoria “dusmanilor poporului”. Dar pînă la capătul tunelului acestea aveau de parcurs destule trepte ale agoniei si umilirii.

Post-scriptum:

Jandarmeria culturală

                Am analizat anterior imaginarul lingvistic violent actionat împotriva “dusmanilor poporului” de către masinăria activistă comunistă din Scânteia. Voi seconda acest demers de analiza “tigăniei” sau “porcăriei” din viata literară, cum o numeste Tudor Arghezi, care s-a petrecut între scriitori, în primii ani de după invazia sovietică si instalarea fortată a comunismului în România. Mă voi ocupa, pe scurt, de felul în care scriitorii si ziaristii s-au spurcat între ei în functie de baricada pe care se aflau si de pe care combăteau. Dacă în 1944, o oarecare politete se mai simte în relatiile gazetăresti dintre scriitorii cu diferite orientări politice, începînd cu 1945, agresiunea verbală devine regină. Astfel de polemici dure si incorecte existaseră si în perioada interbelică ori în preajma celui de-al doilea război mondial, în special în timpul în care extrema dreaptă românească atinsesese apogeul său politic. Dacă autoritătile comuniste manifestă, la început, o oarecare retinere lingvistică în blamarea scriitorilor care nu erau convenabili, scriitorii si gazetarii însisi, actionati de Putere, nu se vor sfii să-si atace grosier colegii de condei. Multi scriitori vor fi incriminati: unii vor fi aruncati în închisori (agresiunea verbală din gazete fiind doar primul stadiu al agresiunii totale pe care o vor cunoaste ulterior), altii vor fi recuperati de comunisti ori chiar reeducati (ajungînd să scrie în stil proletcultist), altii vor fi izolati si interzisi pe perioade mai lungi sau mai scurte, altii vor încerca să supravietuiască decent sau printr-un colaborationism minim, altii vor trece oportunist si fătis colaborationist de partea Puterii[1].  Cele mai multe atacuri au loc în Scânteia, România liberă, Tribuna poporului, Contemporanul etc. Pe de altă parte, oficiosul Partidului National Tărănesc, Dreptatea, se va ambala, la rîndu-i, în atacuri verbale virulente, aceeasi gazetă (în 1946) propunînd în mod inspirat termenul emblematic folosit în acest Post-scriptum, pentru analiza de fată: acela de “jandarmi culturali” la adresa culturnicilor comunisti care încercau să dirijeze autoritar si discretionar si să sanctioneze, prin demolare, tendintele literare care nu conveneau. În general, între condeiele agresive de partea Puterii se remarcă Ion Călugăru, Ion Vitner, Miron Radu Paraschivescu, Mihnea Gheorghiu, Geo Dumitrescu, Zaharia Stancu, Sorin Toma (fiul lui A. Toma, demolator al lui Tudor Arghezi fată de care comite un fel de regicid pentru a-si instaura tatăl uzurpator în rangul de poet national) si altii. Dar puseuri violente întîlnim si la Oscar Lemnaru, N. Carandino, Ion Caraion, Serban Cioculescu, Iorgu Iordan, unii dintre ei aflati de cealaltă parte a baricadei, cel putin pentru o perioadă, înainte de a dezerta la comunisti.

                Acuza cea mai în vogă la adresa scriitorilor de dinainte de instaurarea comunismului este, lucru previzibil, aceea de trădare si slugărnicie. Sînt pusi la zid Emil Cioran si  Mircea Eliade, C. Noica si Ion Barbu, Nichifor Crainic si Radu Gyr, dar si Lucian Blaga, acuzati fie de obscurantism, fie de misticism, fie de extremă dreaptă (majoritatea, într-adevăr, aderaseră la sau simpatizaseră cu ideologia legionară). Ei sînt considerati a reprezenta “dezonoarea” scrisului românesc; Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinesti este taxat drept “creatură teutonă” si “bătrân huligan”, alti scriitori sunt catalogati “slugi naziste”, “agitatori fascisti”, “imperialisti”, “reactionari”, “contrarevolutionari”, “lachei odiosi”, “trântori”, “ploconiti”, “ciocoi”. Liviu Rebreanu (germanofil, în timpul războiului) este atacat postum în Dreptatea, de către N. Carandino, si incriminat ca trădător, în pielea lui Apostol Bologa care a intrat în Gestapo! Într-o altă fază sînt atacati Tudor Arghezi si George Călinescu, ambii rezistînd la început, ca, mai tîrziu, să fie înregimentati de regimul comunist. Registrul infractional este atasat incriminărilor de trădare, pentru a demonstra că scriitorii respectivi erau tarati si viciosi, cuvenindu-se a fi înregistrati în criminalitatea de drept comun: acestia sînt “răufăcători”, “huligani”, “satrapi”, “elemente nesănătoase si dusmănoase”, “lichele”, “banditi”, “sabotori” (termenii sînt seci si deloc spectaculosi, acuzatorii folosind clisee).

                Mult mai amplu si învăluitor este registrul care denuntă în scriitorii atacati niste “otrăvuri”, pentru a justifica ideea de demascare, epurare si pretinsă purificare care avea loc. Scriitorii respectivi sînt considerati “veninosi”, plin de pecingini, “ciuperci otrăvitoare”, promovînd “virusul retrograd” si demoralizant, “descompunerea formelor artistice” (de aici “decandentismul morbid”). Este vizată ideea de boală si de artă “bolnavă”, comisă de indivizi “găunosi”, “îmbâcsiti”, “dăunători”. Zaharia Stancu scrie acuzator despre cărtile de tip “ciupercărie” si “stârpiciune”, concentrîndu-se pe imaginea ciupercilor gălbui care ar reprezenta arta inamică la adresa noului regim. Anticariatele sînt considerate “focare de otravă”, întrucît ar promova cărtile scriitorilor fascisti si mistici. Dacă nu sînt otrăvitoare, atunci anumite gazete sînt acuzate de decrepitudine si caracter vetust: Revista Fundatiilor Regale (care rămăsese un bastion al literaturii neînregimentate) este proiectată în ipostaza unei “babe” sulemenite, de pildă. Atunci cînd nu sînt injuriati autorii, cele vizate sînt personajele lor, considerate a fi larvare, morbide, abjecte, monstruoase, decăzute, sterile, deformate. În alte cazuri, autorii însisi se autoflagelează; considerîndu-se “impură” si “becisnică”, Nina Cassian îsi va celebra exaltat si flagelator, într-un poem din 1945, autoreeducarea de  viitoare stahanovistă a spiritului: “Unde să-mi scuip viermăraia dinlăuntru!”. Registrul putrefact acoperă ca o acoladă ceea ce s-a acuzat pînă acum: Ion Vitner demască “mlastinile pline de miasme” ale unui curent literar decadent, Nestor Ignat îl atacă pe Ion Barbu si poemul Uvedenrode, aducînd în discutie tehnica picturii cu fecale, Sorin Toma îl declară putrefact, licentios si mahalagiu pe Tudor Arghezi. Sînt folositi termeni precum “bălăceală”, “hîd”, “hidos”, “sordid”, care au rostul să pigmenteze acuzele aduse pînă acum. La nivelul bestiariului detectat între scriitori, cei incriminati sînt “sacali”, “cotoi călugăriti peste noapte”, “maimute” (imitînd arta occidentală), “câini” (care “latră”) ori “potăi” (cîini decăzuti, jalnici) si, fireste, “năpârci”. Ca jivine imunde, scriitorii vizati sînt acuzati de “colcăială” în beznă, prin cotloane; or, colcăiala stimulează reactia acuzatorilor de a-i nimici, dar nu oricum, ci prin strivire. Lumina, la rîndul ei, trebuie să orbească întunericul “bolnav”, locuit de aceste jivine, întrucît se doreste a fi o lumină cu functie de bisturiu, o lumină chirurgicală si deratizatoare, adică.

                Alteori, atacul este unul funebru si fiintial; Miron Radu Paraschivescu regretă, în 1945, că poetul Arghezi nu a murit la timp (făcînd parte “din galeria poetilor ce mor prea târziu”), iar, în 1948, Sorin Toma îl proiectează pe Arghezi în ipostaza unui cadavru căruia îi mai cresc unghiile si părul; tot în 1948, lui Alexandru Phillippide i se sugerează, ca retragere din viata literară, un cavou. Voi lua ca studiu de caz, în cele ce urmează, linsarea mediatică a lui Tudor Arghezi, care a fost menită să catalizeze anexarea poetului, mai tîrziu, la ideologia comunistă. În perioada 1945-1948, Tudor Arghezi este unul dintre cei mai atacati scriitori, într-un registru ritualic-abject. Mai întîi fiindcă el nu putea fi incriminat prin acuze simpliste ca “agitator fascist” sau “sabotor”, neputîndu-i-se fabrica un proces politic. Apoi fiindcă Arghezi sanctionase curajos, la început, abuzurile noului regim comunist instaurat. În al treilea rînd, fiindcă era un pamfletar redutabil, cu o vînă demolatoare invidiată de comunisti. De aceea, i s-au fabricat procese literare (dar cu miză existentială) într-o ierarhie pe care o voi prezenta concis aici.

                Atacul frontal vine în 1945 din partea deja pomenitului Miron Radu Paraschivescu (“Un impostor: Tudor Arghezi”, România liberă, III, nr. 172, 21 februarie 1945), care-l decretează pe Arghezi nul si avorton (“statura lui de bărbat si cetătean nu întrec cu nimic dimensiunile literei si a gândacului în care e mester”), “parvenit al condeiului”, “trădător al ideii”. Într-o altă serie de incriminări, Arghezi este catalogat “rău cetătean si mincinos tovarăs”, apoi “poetul tuturor abdicărilor si lasitătilor”, ceea ce indică faptul că Puterea comunistă încercase să si-l ataseze pe Arghezi, care, însă, nu se lăsase anexat imediat. Era, la vremea aceea, un scriitor periculos lingvistic, prin verva-i nimicitoare, dovedită în pamflete, care sanctiona cu aciditate performantă. Urmează, apoi, acuze fără precedent, care lovesc în natura masculină a lui Arghezi, catalogat drept tată denaturat si individ lipsit de bărbătie. El este incriminat că ar fi tată denaturat (iresponsabil), întrucît îl preferă pe fiul său al doilea (Barutu), considerat un mediocru, fiului său dintîi, Eli Lotar (proiectat ca fiu risipitor, dar revolutionar). Prin asemenea speculatii se dorea lovirea în rădăcina fiintei lui Arghezi, anulat patern. Dacă Arghezi nu putea fi mînjit cu “bube, mucegaiuri si noroi”, întrucît acestea erau considerate deja a fi estetice, el trebuia nimicit altfel. M.R. Paraschivescu mizează pe lichidarea ca bărbat a lui Arghezi, cel putin în latura sa de paternă. Eli Lotar (revolutionarul si fiul cel dintîi) reprezenta, în această ecuatie simbolică, pe “fiii” comunisti, bastarzi, pe care Arghezi nu îi recunostea deocamdată. M.R. Paraschivescu si Puterea comunistă (masinăria falică) încearcă, de fapt, să-l castreze pe Arghezi: cum castrarea nu putea avea loc fizic, ea va fi oficiată verbal. Dar castrarea are loc si la un alt nivel mental, Arghezi fiind cenzurat inclusiv în functia sa de pamfletar imbatabil. Paralizîndu-l, Puterea încearcă să-i preia energia lingvistică, bărbătia verbală, si o face într-un mod violent. Regele bătrîn nu este ucis, ci devirilizat de o generatie alterată de tineri războinici care abordează orice mijloace pentru a-l deposeda de bărbătie pe fostul rege.

                Ceremonia nu se încheie aici, fiindcă, un an mai tîrziu, acelasi M. R. Paraschivescu (de data aceasta în Scânteia) îl va declara pe Arghezi ratat si estropiat, ca si cum castrarea simbolică oficiată în 1945 ar fi fost perimată sau nedesăvîrsită. Ceea ce urmează se stie deja: articolul, publicat în serial (Scânteia, nr. 1013, 1014, 1015, 1016, 5-7-9-10 ianuarie 1948), “Poezia putrefactiei sau putrefactia poeziei” de Sorin Toma. Încă o dată, Puterea simte nevoia să-l atace pe Arghezi, dar nu oricum, ci prin tehnica fecalizării si a registrului putrefact. Sorin Toma laudă partial începuturile proletare ale lui Arghezi, înainte de a-l detrona, obiectînd apoi tăios că lectura poeziei argheziene este precum contactul cu “balele otrăvitoare ale unei jivine monstruoase”. Apoi, îl psihanalizează ideologic pe Arghezi ca renegat si angoasat (dominat de psihologia înfrîntului si de cultul mortii). Este de mentionat, de altfel, tonul serios, stiintific, cu care Sorin Toma încearcă să demonteze si să deconstruiască poezia argheziană. El detectează un “manierism găunos” la autorul incriminat, precum si “aspectele bolnăvicioase ale realitătii”. Atacul îsi atinge apogeul atunci cînd functia poeziei argheziene este decretată a fi una de “bordel”, prin poemele “afrodisiace” din Flori de mucigai, care “excită” cititorii bolnavi. De-abia în final, Sorin Toma deconstruieste asa-zisul limbaj mahalagesc si trivial al poetului, apoi presupusa putrefactie (“cloacă de cuvinte” si “cloacă de idei”), inventariind o serie de cuvinte considerate orduriere din poezia acuzatului. Concluzia: Arghezi este un pestilential; el emană miasmă, asemeni poeziei sale, prin urmare este un cadavru. Solutia este propunerea si găsirea unui vaccin anti-Arghezi. Tot în final, Sorin Toma îl compară pe Arghezi cu Picasso care folosise, ca material artistic, excrementele. Ca artă burgheză, poezia argheziană este fabricată într-o “leprozerie”, devenind un “fenomen patologic” si producînd “contagiune”. Mă întorc acum la începutul acestui scurt studiu de caz: miasmatic si descompus, Arghezi este proiectat a fi un cadavru căruia îi mai cresc doar unghiile si părul. În locul poetului detronat se va ridica steaua lui A. Toma, nimeni altul decît tatăl lui Sorin Toma, o fantosă prizată de regimul comunist. “Castrat” ca bărbat-tată si văzîndu-si supusă poezia unui atac excremential, cum ar spune psihanalistii, Arghezi are să tacă o vreme, dar, după un timp, va accepta pactul cu Puterea. Masinăria falică a functionat cu prisosintă în cazul său, dar nu prin viol, ci printr-o castrare cu ceremonial.

Monica Gheţ

THE „BODY” OF LANGUAGES

(FACES OF IDENTITY VS. MONOCULTURED MULTICULTURALISM)

Someone belonging to a linguistic minority once said: “Without my identity, I don’t exist.” – more exactly meaning (experiences and papers on the subject prove it) that he cannot recognize his conscious, active ego outside the language and habits shaped within the historicity – historialité, Geschichtlich- (keit) (– in Gerard Granel’s distinctions following Heidegger’s – “à savoir qu’il n’y a pas d’historialité pour les humanites qui ne s’inscrivent pas dans l’histoire de l’Etre.”) as well as the history of his community. This is nothing but comman belief with populations of Central and Eastern Europe. Opposed to it, here goes another “ideological” position teaching students of advanced studies in European Universities that gender is mere convention – that is, being a man or a woman should be considered a “convention”, which may whenever be easily corrected. In other words, we face here a situation similar to the well known English joke: when the customer asks for a coffee (in England, naturally…), the waiter brings a dark coloured liquid in a cup; the customer asks if it is tea or coffee: “Can’t you tell the difference?” says the waiter. “No” answers the man at the table. “So, what does it matter” replies the waiter.

                Further on, we are told (customs’ instructions, not made public) that a person is allowed to have as many passports as he/ she pleases. Id est, the person can be the citizen of numerous states, if he/ she so chooses. A condition valuable even in Ceauşescu’s Romania. What officials of those days omitted to mention was that they were supposed to share the same ideology. Nobody dared to ask if, the other way round, a Romanian citizen could really become the citizen of several states – no such examples were given concerning Romanians of the time. To continue our question on identity, older days are plainly illustrating the ambiguity of the case: empires always used more than one language: there was the language of the administration, and a considerable number of the inhabitant populations’ idioms. Thus, Jews, Greeks a.s.o. were first identified as Roman citizens, only in second place members of their particular community – a religious less than a linguistic one. An aspect perpetuated during the centuries of Christian “sovereignty”, before the split of the Church, where Latin was dominant both in clerical and educational/ scientific activities. Furthermore, populations inhabiting kingdoms of the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, till the Reformation and even later were identified by their affiliation/ belonging to a religion or another. This proves the ongoing confusion around the historic character Matei Corvin (Matias Rex) – claimed by both Romanians and Hungarians, whilst he was indeed a valach nobleman, not yet a Romanian, for there didn’t exist a state of Romanian authority, but his Catholic religion as well as his social power and position favored his well known historic identity.

                A totally different situation aroused during the XIX-th century by the creation of nation-states following the Volksgeist ideology, and drew upon a revival of the Babel myth in the post-colonial 20th century. The modern languages we know are refined forms of the Word belonging to the outgrowth of national languages. Some territories didn’t have to wait so long. Take as an example Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare above all.

                Such examples are meant to lead us towards nowadays painful question: are we endowed with an assuring identity according to our citizenship, educational language etc., when multiculturalism is declared an official reality? And, what happens if as good post-modern Europeans or Americans we are trained to become polyglots. George Steiner developed the subject in After Babel, just to multiply the already given confusion. He was like some of us thought to communicate in three or four “native languages”. Which and why was one of them recognised as first, second or third ? “What language am I, suis-je, bin ich or sunt eu ? Steiner himself encounters difficulties in offering an answer. The examples he produces are poets’ and novelists’ obliged to defect their native country. A most brilliant name among them, Vladimir Nabokov as he can be read in Speak Memory or the novel Ada. Steiner tries his exquisite talents in impressive but bleak demonstrations, perfectly aware they are not satisfying enough. To begin with we should state that not only in After Babel, but also in other of his writings George Steiner considers each language the expression of human uniqueness. Even more, he accuses some of the famous linguistic schools (Moscow’s and the one in Prague) of ignoring the very essence of literature by searching criteria of “objectivism”, although such criteria don’t operate in fictional literature. The best he can do is to quote Jean Paulhan and Merleau-Ponty in order to distinguish the work of the mind from the words covering it. Thus, with Paulhan the reality of thinking would be previous or exterior to words. A reality which Paul Ricoeur called the “eternity” of our thinking reference. More precisely, we use past and future tenses rather as  conventions of our present mind, in its attempt to control reality. A suitable illustration of this, says George Steiner, seems to be the use of tenses (with significant anthropological meanings) regarding sexual equality and implied in the use of our verbs, compared to Semitic languages, not indicating the gender of the action. Quite a paradox, if considered the much claimed discrimination of women in those cultures…Taking Proust as a literary witness, Steiner, after a short exposé devoted to the refined, unique forms of past tenses recognisable in A La recherche du temps perdu, concludes that no matter of the tenses in use, memory functions only like a present act. And furthermore, God’s tense (Time) is an perennial, extraterritorial Present. In this respect, future-telling as bases of future tenses/ projects are rather close to madness, for we know what follows certain actions, nevertheless are still thrilled by their fulfillment. A first consequence of this cruel issue is art’s representations. So goes our attachment to metaphysics, religion, ethics, etc. as means of our denial of truth. For the frame is not comprising morality but techniques of survival. In Steiner’s opinion, only an almost insignificant percentage of the human language is genuinely informative, trivially said, reliable. All the rest goes with creating/ inventing of our world and ourselves, because each individual language accumulates the information of it’s community, builds a wall against the surrounding environment, in a secret code/ realm invented for its subjects alone. So poetry “concentrates” energies with no respect for routine or conventions, finally modelating that language. That’s probably how rather recent languages get numerous poets to shape it, while traditionally, rather “crystallized” expressions of culture prefer to ignore them. And last but not least Steiner concludes that “language is a constant creation of alternative worlds”, for “there are no limits imposed to modeling forces of the word” finally producing “ambiguity, polysemia, opacity, the violation of grammatical and logical bounds.”

                But one question doesn’t get a proper answer, not even in Steiner’s remarkable work, which after all is build around the semantics of translations: what if I speak a certain language? Does it change my way of thinking, does it shift to the very memoirs/ references of that given language ? Do I become through its use the exponent of that particular background ? Does my English make me more British or American than French, Romanian, Italian and so on ? The kernel of a possible response is already recognisable in Steiner’s appeal to the previous, exterior “work” of human thinking he draws from Paulhan and Merleau-Ponty. In this respect we may legitimately ask to what language, culture do belong Paul Celan, Beckett, Cioran, Nabokov, Kundera, Culianu etc. Are they mental issues of the so called “openness”, demolished with credible arguments by Allan Bloom (in The Closing of the American Mind), or do they carry on their “prejudices” through the languages they got used to write in? For all of them are obviously not the cultural “breed” of the languages they wrote in and brought them fame.

                Before venturing an explanation let us find out an inevitably simplified version of the common perception of multiculturalism. This enterprise reaches a sense when compared to interculturalism, for both concepts are valid. In the 20th century intercultural process we should first identify the effects of national state’s secularism, since culture had already become those days the substitute of no longer satisfying demands set to religion. (Allan Bloom, Berdiaev) The announcements of which were already quite clearly stated by the Enlightenment, but less admitted as such. Anyway, with Nietzsche’s famous statement: “God is dead”, habits of European thinking could no longer stay the same. And it is somehow relevant to see that the period of massive emigration to America is contemporary to this “discovery”, so into the New World where God wasn’t late in getting transferred from the Book (Bible) to the dollar bill. But, looking back to intercultural interferences proper to the birth of national-states, and following the discourse of Remi Brague (Europe la voie romaine, Paris, 1992) and of Claude Karnoouh’s analyses (Un logos fără ethos), we reach the astonishing conclusion showing us that “those were the days” (the XIX-th century) of the supreme profit of European intercultural “fertility”, allowing people to compete with their cultural legacy – in other words, get mutually stimulated. Bur also to achieve a level of standardisation, mostly visible after the First World War. What first appeared a benign influence of habits, religions, traditions, within different state-languages, was overcome by the imperatives of modern economic facilities: a larger comfort, a superior welfare and, finally, meant the cultural and political standardization of the Eastern and Western areas. On the other hand, and opposed to the general belief, multiculturalism, as a recent trend – also called an effect of affirmative action, proves to divide the general rules of “surviving welfare”. “Multiculturalism”, apparently “the smiling face of the <global village>, as Claude Karnoouh puts it, is nothing but the climax of economic and linguistic way of standardization. Matching very well the necessities of productive potentialities, among other things.

                But what created the invention of such a concept? The origins of “multiculturalism” are met in the multiple forms of “affirmative actions”, belonging to once rejected or unfavoured groups: of race, ethnic, religious, physical ability, gender, and especially language – obviously indicating a different community of culture from the privileged, leading one. The perverse effects of the overcoming “melting pot” didn’t tire to show their poison. The logical consequences that “immigration countries” had to envisage from the beginning, and which are now in full show points to the vulnerability of democracy all over the world, whether we like it or not. For those people (immigrants) had to be, and were aware about the “federal” laws of their new existence: a common language, no matter of their ethnic diversity. Id est the culture belonging to the adoption state is always opposed to their original culture and the institutions representing it. Kymlicka, for instance would accept their claims of preserving specificity, but underlines the common sense, an evidence helping them to participate in the competition of “values”. In this field most interpreters mix up multiculturalism with interculturalism. Perfectly aware that I am r oversimplifying the problem, a hot going on contemporary debate, I dare say that no country, state-nation (especially not the Federal Nation of USA) has ever officialized at the present moment, several state languages. Traffic or flight indicators, announcement made in English and Spanish, or Romanian and Hungarian and sometimes German for Central- Eastern Europe,) are ironically irrelevant (see the case of France, including Corsica). Take as an example the completely absence of the German community, once at the very roots of urban Transylvanian civilization. No matter how many section of German the University would invent, Germans won’t be brought back. Finally, multiculturalism is a covering story for the reservation type of preserving communities within monocultural and linguistic social/ state dominance which need their cooperation, all tuning well in the choir of the European Union, or the Overseas English language speaking countries. All this is nothing but to prove an overwhelming monoculturalism at work from “Alaska to the Don”.

                For most members of other communities, that is not belonging to the official language community, such a “forced” shift from a language to another is traumatizing or creates frustrations, although, they were initially supposed to assume the consequences of emigration, including the use of the new language. Still, this is particularly true for people living within new shaped frontiers. Central and Eastern Europe offer dramatic examples, far from being solved. The common opinion judges writing in another language (in the official language, for instance) as a betrayal of one’s original identity. Thus meaning: keep your language, or you are “lost”. In other words, your personal process of thinking has to observe a specific language and no other. A “rule” which education in the world today no longer favours. On the contrary, learning the best you can a widely spoken modern language has become a prime condition of professional and social promotion. The same stands for the United States, where English must be well known as a first step of social recognition. Not including those willing to “change” their identity – a legitimate individual right, as they say – the perception of the “silent majority” of other linguistic communities doesn’t seem to be at ease. Nowhere.

But there is one “privileged” category, indeed, a very small number of artists who proved able to “save their souls”. Naturally, they are exceptions hard to follow. Coming back to the creative personalities, like the ones mentioned above, what have they to do with this “global” – not only linguistic – “village” ? May be here is the place of a possible answer to the transnational artists of the word (not many, but of major significance) who cared enough about their traditions to “dress” them in the “clothes” of another expression, or simply to recreate them by ironical identity (fake identity). This all is true with Kundera, Eugen Ionesco, Cioran, Beckett, Nabokov, more recently, Andre Makine, Anne Wiazemski, and others. However brilliant the language of their work in French or English, they are not considered exclusively French or English authors. Their “background” covers much of the anxieties of the “village” we share.

                What is certainly accepted is that after Freud, as Rorty’s brilliantly demonstrates, imagination remains the only faculty of expression. An if so, the language it uses is of no importance, as long as freely chosen. Two literary artists of the XX-th century: Joyce and Nabokov fully shaped this anxiety of the “alienated” word. Joyce proved it in Finnegan’s Wake and Nabokov quite successfully tried the same in Ada. Exaggerating, we might say: “the rest is silence”. Stage directors like Peter Brook, Andrei Şerban or Silviu Purcărete have made visible on stage their own intuition on the subject, where few words support the image story. The same goes for the great cinema we witnessed in the XX-th century.

Still, words continue to be written in as many languages we care to preserve, while personal and cultural identities are no longer the same they used to be.

Christian Moraru

Hologrammatology:

Bits and Pieces of a Postmodern Ontology

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”; “Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery… We stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping  in a documentary on color TV.” Who would not recognize these famous passages? The first opens William Gibson’s Neuromancer (3). The second can be found in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in the novel’s third section, “Dylarama” (227). A strange title, indeed, but not illegible, especially if one recalls “Waves and Radiation,” and “The Airborne  Toxic Event,” as DeLillo entitles the previous parts. “Dylarama” combines “Dylar” and horama. “Dylar” is a medication supposedly countering the fear of death, a pill whose formula is developed with help from volunteers like Babette, Jack Gladney’s wife. Horama means “sight” in Ancient Greek. One can of course read “Dylarama” as a lexical analogue of “panorama,” “a complete view of an area in every direction,” as Webster defines it. Accordingly, “Dylarama” would designate a “panorama” of death, a totalizing view informed by the viewer’s fear of death. Now, virtually nobody dies in White Noise-even Gladney’s attempt to kill Gray fails. Death does not occur as we may expect even though everybody seems obsessed with it, and there is never a shortage of people eager to participate in exorcising simulations of deadly phenomena. While one can hardly locate it as a “terminal” event, as a “discreet” fact, linguists would say, death is nonetheless omnipresent as an ongoing, surreptitious process. This process brings about a radical transformation in postmodern ontology and DeLillo’s fictional world in particular. What White Noise plays out is a different kind of death, namely the accelerated erosion of the “real.” Subjectivity and its formerly “natural” environment are the categories most decisively affected by such an ontological displacement of the real. To be sure, death has combed out the rhetoric of its “classical” visibility. If it still deploys a “terminal” scenario, this is to be taken in a sense which sets DeLillo’s dark imagination and cyberpunk reconstructions of subjectivity in a promising dialogue: White Noise’s subjects and  objects have been made into “terminal identities,” to recall Scott Bukatman’s Baudrillardian title. People’s lives do not “terminate” due to “fatal” accidents or “terminal” diseases. However, death is in-scribed, literally written in the very structure of subjects once “the system” (the market, technology, etc.) has turned them into “terminals” of various networks, as Baudrillard insists in “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Humans and their environment have lost the ontological foundations that had so far granted their “reality” and “autonomy.” They are no longer self-sufficient entities, but effects and even side effects, fallout of various phenomena. Nature–human nature included–has become artificial performance and is now being staged as a “postmodern” play, a mediatic make-believe. The anthropological notion of subjectivity does not hold any more since the subject has changed into “a bunch of electronic dots,” to quote from DeLillo’s novel Running Dog. My purpose here is to look closer at the structure of the  “real,” of people and objects in White Noise and eventually locate the point at which this structure and the cyberpunk articulation of reality may overlap. My intervention also touches on the relationship between “mainstream” fiction and (still) “peripheral” genres like cyberpunk within postmodernism at large. As Brian McHale suggests in Constructing Postmodernism, these may share more than we tend to believe. Far from just covering a “marginal” sector of postmodern narrative, cyberpunk pieces like Neuromancer squares with “hardcore” texts such as Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland by Pynchon or Ratner’s Star, White Noise, and Mao II by DeLillo. They all draw on the transformation real people and environments undergo under the pressure of technology in “late capitalism.” Needless to say, there are important differences between DeLillo’s and Gibson’s views of this process. But, again, what I am here most interested in is the area in which mainstream and not-so-mainstream postmodern representations of reality and  subjectivity may cross each other. It seems to me, in this regard, that the ontological assumptions belying these representations demarcate such a zone. Not only both DeLillo and Gibson, along with Pynchon, Coover, Barth, or Reed address chiefly ontological issues, foregrounding epistemological questions to a lesser extent, as McHale argues in Postmodernist Fiction. The treatment of human and natural reality in White Noise and  Neuromancer also shows that their specific takes on these issues dovetail pretty well. In both texts, such a reality gets dislodged or, shall I say, “deconstructed” as reality since, as I have pointed out, it is produced, written–which renders the ontological distinction  between the natural and the artificial hardly operative. The subject appears in DeLillo, to recall the terms Derrida uses in his interview “Eating Well,” as a “fable” (102), “a surface effect, a fallout” (103). It is the result of a “plot” that “writes  together,” mingles heterogeneous data or “pocket litter,” to recall a famous phrase of Libra. “You are the sum total of your data” (141), Gladney learns during a “simulated evacuation.” One can view this type of subject as the core theme of DeLillo’s whole work. In White Noise it is less the CIA “plotters” and “writers” who concoct the story of the subject, of the subject as an object and therefore as an instrument. Subjectivity gets processed, “written” by other, less visible  “agencies” and “agents.” Their intervention makes it fit into the post-structuralist paradigm that punctuates, to quote Derrida again, “dehiscence…, intrinsic dislocation …, différance, destinerrance” (103). In this light, DeLillo’s novel brings to the fore the subject’s condition in a “post-humanist” environment. To come back to the section titles, the human and its “natural” surroundings have been transformed into “unnatural” objects, upshots and spin-offs of various technologies. Once affected by “waves and radiation,” “airborne toxic events,” and the like, they have gotten “dehumanized,” to use a more traditional term. The subject is nothing more than a “fallout,” an “ersatz,” but so is its medium. Natural phenomena are always suspected of being nothing more than “by-products.” Chemistry has taken over. Psychologically, the formerly “genuine” perception of nature has been replaced by a “hermeneutics of suspicion” that routinely denounces the natural as technological setup. Heinrich, Gladney’s son, insists that what we assume to be rain may actually be “sulphuric acid from factories across the river” or, even worse, “fallout from awar in China” (24). It is such an unexamined belief, he suggests, that lays the basis for a sort of unacknowledged compact undergirding social life. We are simply supposed to take the natural origin of the visible for granted. But beside “spills, fallouts, leakages” (175) as visible phenomena that may motivate the exercise of the hermeneutics of suspicion, there are less noticeable yet far more menacing phenomena impinging upon us. “The real issue,” Heinrich claims, “is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway” (174). There are at lest two important implications here, physical (or physiological) and intellectual (or ideological). First, humans are literally affected by “being exposed to constant rays” (175). They are radiated and turned into “fields” themselves, dissolved as bodies and self-sufficient, Cartesian entities once they have come to be modelled by and depend upon an external source of energy. At a less symbolic level, this can result in “nerve disorders, strange and violent behaviour in the home,” “deformed babies” (175), and so forth. An analogous deformation may affect people’s minds, turning them into “Tubeheads,” as Pynchon suggests in Vineland. Watching TV is the utmost ritual of Gladney’s household. Hypnotically gazing at catastrophic  reports amidst catastrophic developments completes the disintegration of subjectivity. Intellectual radiation–intellectual eradication–equals physical radiation, whether this is controlled or occurs by accident, nuclear or otherwise. Exposure to TV rays or TV information, to X rays or atomic radiation, to media discourse or “toxic events” yields basically the same results. In this view, physiology may very well function as an intellectual trope. Our thinking is–or can turn into–the sum total of the information the TV screen “radiates” as much as our identity is, Gladney realizes, a computer file, a chemical formula perpetually “rewritten” by technology or a “contract,” a “capitalist transaction,” as Babette owns (194). White Noise brings forth a “digital subject” held captive and refashioned in a “digital world,” as Horst Ruthrof points out (196). The subject and its environment strike us, to use Gladney’s own term, as “texture,” writing effects, whether we are talking about humans, the “natural” or “commercial” landscape (the omnipresent “supermarket”). To cite one of Derrida’s observations of his essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” reality has become “fabulously textual,” “constructed by the fable” (23). Both Derrida’s nuclear criticism and DeLillo’s catastrophic imagery play out a reality, human or natural, deprived of original substance, a reality as fallout, effect, writing effect. Subjects and objects are being transformed into holograms through radiation, radio waves, toxic and TV emissions–which are basically the same thing. To indulge into etymological play a bit, not only renders DeLillo’s narrative hologrammatology the body–the nature’s body included–a technological performance, a hologram, specter, chemical sunset, or other picture “developed” by technological means. White Noise is more than such a simulating writing that defines reality, as Jonathan Culler described Derrida’s grammatological project, as “already written,” produced as text (75). It also forcefully foregrounds the ontological displacement such a writing brings about. Its “hologrammatology” pinpoints the lack of “substratum,” of “Aristotelian substratum,” to quote from another novel by DeLillo. Such lack characterizes his people and places. Not only are these pictures, computer simulations or “toxic events,” holograms; they are also generated through a “referentless” writing of sorts, to recall Gregory Ulmer’s Applied Grammatology (7 and passim). This “writing of emptiness” generates “empty” (hollow) subjects, objects, places, dŽj?-vu situations, simulated disasters and disastrous events that look like perfect simulations.  Cyberpunk hologrammatology dramatically intensifies the demise of the real, plays it off at a higher level. Neuromancer performs, as Veronica Hollinger points out, a radical “cybernetic deconstruction.” At a larger extent than White Noise, it blurs the boundary between the real and the simulated (the fictive), the “natural” and the “written.” DeLillo’s world at least still carries the painful memory of reality, of a subjectivity that may have boiled down to more than just a “field,” “contract,” of twilights that may be, or once had been, more than fallouts of ecological disasters. Disenchanted and “postmodern” as it can be, this universe is not simply accepted. The charecters still argue over its structure, the possibility of resisting incorporation into this destructuring structure does not get ruled out. Unlike DeLillo’s, Gibson’s writing of the fallout does write such a possibility off. Resistance and dissent take up different forms, they do not bear upon the ontological texture of cyberspace. On the contrary, the latter has become “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (51). “Criminal ecology” is hardly an exception, caused by “leakages” and other accidents: it represents, so to speak, “naturalized” negativity, the “normal” state of things after the ecological catastrophe has occurred. Gibson spins out a post-catastrophic world, one can hardly imagine any further deterioration of reality. A crucial paradigm shift has taken place: the matrix as omnipresent and all-comprehensive writing has replaced the fallout as “accidental” writing. “Dylarama,” an individual hallucination in the beginning, has become “consensual.” The sky does not look like a hologram–it is a hologram and nothing else, above Night City, the Sprawl, everywhere. But, of course, subjectivity marks the site of the most spectacular transformations. Subjects have turned into holograms, simulated presences, pictures. Much more than in DeLillo, they are “discursive constructions,” to use N. Katherine Hayles’s phrase (147). They embody both technological and cultural texts, even though Gibson gestures towards the obsolescence of “the written word” (88). The locus of the body is an intersection of grafted muscles, artificial organs, implants and “holographic memory” (170), which a certain character compares to an “ancient television . . . vacuum tube” but also to his own DNA (171). Subjectivity and its environment seem to rest upon such a nuclear vacuum, substratum without substance, “original,” “founding” emptiness. Pushing to an extreme some of the still “realistic” insights of mainstream postmodernism, literalizing certain of its most daring yet somewhat still “humane” allegories or narrativizing various post-structuralist concepts, Gibson sets the stage for a post-humanist rearticulation of reality. Humans and nature no longer are what they used to be. Neither is any kind of nostalgia or ethical judgement possible. The Lacanian “empty subject,” Barthes’s death of the authorial self, Foucault’s “vanishing” subject, Derrida’s fictitious, “supplemental” ego, Lyotard’s “inhuman,” and so many other post-human theoretical and fictional enactments converge and gets enhanced, upgraded in Neuromancer. At the very bottom, though, Gibson’s and DeLillo’s fiction meet. The degrees of their intervention in the inherited constitution of the real, of the self, the body, the organic, the natural may vary. Nonetheless, the specific emphasis they place on heterogeneous textuality, technological and cultural formation as practices that “inscribe” and “incorporate” (Hayles 156) both nature and humanity brings these authors under the authority of the same logic. 

Claude Karnoouh

Adieu Gutenberg*

Dès l’instant même où Christophe Colomb mit pied sur le sol d’Hispaniola (aujourd’hui Haïti), l’homme occidental a été pris dans un vertigineux et incessant mouvement d’extension de son espace de domination, et, simultanément, il s’est confronté au rétrécissement de différences de plus en plus minces et de moins en moins contrastées. A chaque fois que de nouvelles terres étaient mises à la disposition des hommes d’Occident, la planète devenait de plus en plus isomorphe et homogène. Au fur et à mesure que les Occidentaux s’éloignaient un peu plus de leurs sites propres, de leurs traditions marquant leurs expériences existentielles séculaires, le nouveau, le moderne, le changement, devint le motto de leur devenir et du devenir en général.

Le journal matinal d’abord, la radio ensuite, la télévision enfin, ont mis à la disposition de chacun des images du monde qui semblaient rapprocher les hommes des uns des autres. Mais ces mots, puis ces images ressortissent à une sorte d’irréalité. Outre que personne ne pouvait en saisir ni la provenance ni le contexte, la surabondance même d’informations qu’ils véhiculent, a finit par annuler leur pertinence. Le monde mis à la disposition de tous est devenu un monde totalement médiatisé, un monde filtré par diverses volontés toujours dissimulées au sujet-récepteur, qui reçoit sans pouvoir émettre. N’en déplaise à Habermas, il n’y a là rien moins qu’un simulacre de communication dès lors que celle-ci se déploie en sens unique, toujours du média vers l’homme médiatisé sans que celui-ci puisse véritablement lui porter contradiction. Aussi le « transcendantalisme communicatif », généralisé et transparent, assurant échanges honnêtes et débats démocratiques se présente-t-il, une fois encore, comme l’une de ces fadaises métaphysiques, illusoires et trompeuses. Le barde du politiquement correcte dans sa version teutonique a probablement oublié (et, sait-on jamais, peut-être s’est-il autocensuré ?) que la grande presse et les grand médias audio-visuels appartiennent à de puissants groupes financiers aux intérêts multiples ; or, je n’ai jamais ouï-dire que ces groupes fussent portés à défendre la transparence de leurs pratiques et que les jeux d’influences politico-économiques auxquels ils se livrent, ne seraient point justement la manifestation du détournent du sens propre de la pratique démocratique moderne.[1] Pour eux le mot information s’identifie à son sens littéral originel, à savoir infra-former, c’est-à-dire, ramener l’interprétation des événements du monde soit à des réponses données à des stimuli émotionnels, soit à des explications univoques confirmant les discours des pouvoirs politiques et économiques.[2] Ce que jadis l’on a appelé la presse d’opinion et qui s’affichait comme tel, a disparu devant ce qui s’autoproclame, à juste titre, — si l’on prend le titre au pied de la lettre —  la presse d’information.

L’arrivée d’Internet avec son réseau mondial de sites en nombre théoriquement infini, a prétendu changer cet état de chose, redonner à l’échange communicatif, aux débats, une double, une triple, une quadruple, voire de multiples directions. Sur le Net d’aucuns “ branchés ” trouvent tout et n’importe quoi, n’importe quelle marchandise, n’importe quelle information, n’importe quel interlocuteur pour aborder n’importe quel sujet. Le Net, plus encore que la multiplication des canaux de télévision, incarne le monde regardé et reconstruit en la guise du “ zapping ”, c’est-à-dire dans le champ d’une simultanéité désarticulée, et, de ce fait, installée dans une totale discontinuité discursive. En effet, sur le Net on ouvre simultanément des « fenêtres » où l’on peut lire les dernières productions philosophiques, sociologiques, biologiques, géologiques, écologiques, etc., de professeurs possédant leur site personnel, regarder une annonce pour acheter je ne sais quel objet, un appareil photo, un fusil d’assaut, un livre d’art, des médicaments, ou contempler sur les sites du « Hard porn », les photos des corps maltraités de femmes ou d’hommes. En d’autres mots, le Net est une poubelle, mieux, c’est la poubelle, à la fois virtuelle et réelle, du monde compris comme la somme des objets qui s’y produisent.

Assis dans son fauteuil, l’œil rivé à l’écran de son ordinateur, la main crispée sur la “ souris ” ou le « track pad », l’homme nouveau, le petit prince du “ surfing ” internautique sillonne les sites du monde, lance des messages dans le vide, attend des réponses aléatoires, se repaît à satiété de milliers d’images et, ivre de cette lumière scintillante, comme un zombie, s’endormira la tête pleine de vide… L’internaute est l’homme d’une planète unifiée en sa totalité, il est l’enfant du “ global village ”, l’adulte du “ multiculturalisme ”, il a réduit sont langage au minimalisme univoque d’une même langue anglo-américaine[3]. Il est le personnage d’un individualisme illusoire, de fait, la répétition à l’infini de la “ mêmeté ”. L’internaute n’a plus l’horizon d’expérience de la vie hormis le monde virtuel concentré sur son écran. Enfermé entre les quatre murs d’une chambre ou d’un bureau, il ressemble à un prisonnier (mais à un prisonnier repu de protéines) qui rêve et vit par procuration. L’internaute ne regarde plus son lieu de vie propre, ne parle plus à ses proches, à ses voisins… puisqu’il communique avec tout le monde dans l’espace déréalisé de la proximité virtuelle. Pour lui toute chose ne se présente plus que sous les formes standardisées propres aux écrans (lettres, dessins, photos). L’internaute armé de son ordinateur n’a plus aucun rapport avec la matière brute : il ne connaît plus la sensation qui naît lorsque les doigts caressent le grain d’un papier, évaluent son glaçage, lorsque l’olfactif perçoit l’odeur singulière, agréable ou désagréable, de certains livres, des revues ou des journaux fraîchement imprimés. L’internaute ne sait plus percevoir les personnes au travers d’une forme d’écriture (saura-t-il un jour prochain encore tenir un stylo ou un crayon ?) ; il ne saisit plus les jeux changeant de la lumière propre à un objet placé dans un espace singulier. L’internaute vit dans une sorte de biotope aseptique et uniforme. Certes, sur l’écran il peut modifier les images ; il en joue, mais arrachant toujours et encore les œuvres à leur site propre, c’est un autre monde qui défile sous ses yeux. Dès lors, toutes les œuvres des hommes deviennent à la fois proches, à portée de main, et dans une totale extériorité par rapport au sujet…

On a souvent dit que les instruments techniques produits par les hommes ont, non seulement engendré un rapport artificiel au monde, mais, et de manière essentielle, ont produit un nouveau monde artificiel. Cette artificialité tient au fait que les instruments mécaniques, électromécaniques ou électroniques portent plus en eux-mêmes qu’une extension et une intensification des fonctions humaines élémentaires qu’ils tendent à décupler, à centupler, à surmutiplier. Les instruments transforment le monde et plus encore le rapport de l’homme au monde, et donc créent de nouveaux besoins, de nouvelles fonctionnalités qui, au bout du compte, engendre un nouveau monde. Se rapporter au monde avec un ordinateur dans le champ d’action défini et organisé par les contraintes imposées par la logique de l’instrument lui-même, rien de moins que de se soumettre à cette logique. Comme le dit avec force Georges Steiner : “ Les ordinateurs sont bien plus que des outils pratiques. Ils mettent en branle et développent des méthodes et des configurations de pensée non verbales, de prise de décisions, voire de perception esthétique. Ce sont eux qui forment les nouveaux ‘clercs’, jeunes, très jeunes et qui sont, de manière flexible, pré- ou anti-lettré. Les écrans ne sont pas des livres ; le récit d’un algorithme formel n’est pas celui de la narration discursive[4]. ” Au bout du compte, l’internaute ne serait-il pas le premier homme produit par la révolution anthropologique et génétique qui se profile à l’aurore de XXIe siècle, et le dernier homme de la modernité selon la prophétie nietzschéenne ?

* Il s’agit de la version largement remaniée d’un article paru pour la première fois en roumain dans la Revue Balkon, juin 2000, Cluj.

Notes

[1] Il suffit de constater les taux des abstentions rencontrés lors des  élections législatives dans les pays occidentaux, pour avoir la preuve que les pratiques électorales contemporaines, les débats médiatiques qui les accompagnent de représentent plus l’expérience de la démocratie politique.

2 Voir le célèbre essai de Max Weber, Le savant et le politique où il mit en évidence ce trait singulier de la modernité, à savoir la symbiose entre les journalistes et les hommes politiques.

3 J’emploi avec quelque ostentation ces mots anglo-américains de manière à montrer que ce monde de l’ordinateur exige un lexique et une grammaire simplifiée pour une compréhension univoque.

4 Georges Steiner, Réelles présences. Les arts du sens, Gallimard, Folio, Paris, 1991, p. 144 (publication originale, Real Presences. Is there anything in what we say ?, Faber and Faber, Londres, 1989).

Jean-Jacques Wunenburger

JEUX SUR ECRANS, APOTHEOSE OU SIMULACRE DU SPECTACLE ?

                L’intelligence des pratiques sociales passe généralement par des catégories binaires, qui découpent le réel en moitiés égales ou inégales, mais qui prétendent épouser une totalité de comportements ou de vécus. Ces binômes classiques ont pourtant servi autant de leviers que d’obstacles épistémologiques. Le profane et le sacré, le privé et le public, le travail et la fête, le sérieux et le jeu prétendent ainsi renvoyer à des champs spécifiques et complémentaires. Le divertissement ne serait-il pas de même à la fois éclairé et masqué par le couple vie active-loisir, qui a fait les beaux jours d’une certaine sociologie des loisirs ? Suffit-il en effet de convoquer l’opposé du travail, l’inactivité et le ludique, tant sur le plan individuel que collectif, pour rendre raison du divertissement ? Outre que la ligne de démarcation entre travail et jeu semble de moins en moins assurée et étanche, le jeu n’épuise sans doute pas toutes les formes de spectacles et de vécus émotionnels, passionnels, imaginatifs qui débordent la sphère du travail productif. Inversement d’ailleurs le travail, manuel (le bricolage) ou même communicationnel (sur Internet), ne relève-t-il pas souvent du jeu, de l’amusement, de l’activité récréative ?

                La consommation de spectacles télédiffusés et télévisés, si elle coïncide certes avec la cessation d’une activité laborieuse, est-elle vraiment un loisir, un jeu relevant d’une phénoménologie ludique ? Certes les téléspectateurs n’hésitent pas à décrire leur occupation audiovisuelle comme une source de distraction, d’oubli du réel existentiel, des soucis, des souffrances, de la fatigue, de la solitude de la vie quotidienne, mais cette qualification et cette interprétation subjectives peuvent-elles vraiment être ramenées à la sphère classique des jeux de divertissement qui ont toujours servi à désigner des espaces-temps sociaux de détente par opposition à l’effort et à la contrainte de l’activité de production de biens ? Ou bien ne faut-il pas, par une analyse plus fine du couple téléspectateur-écran, soupçonner l’émergence d’un nouveau type de regard, de posture, d’activité psychique qui seraient sans précédent et dont les effets primaires et secondaires sur la condition de l’individu et sur le corps social sont encore peu étudiés et a fortiori mal connus et imprévisibles. Si la télévision constitue de fait l’activité principale de loisir des jeunes et adultes (3 h 30 par jour en moyenne, 26 heures par semaines, soit une journée pleine par semaine), ne serait-elle pas, en Occident au moins, l’occasion, voire le vecteur d’un déplacement, d’une métamorphose insensible, subliminale, du rapport ludique et festif au monde ? Si la télévision parait relayer, synchroniser, totaliser par sa pléthore de programmes toutes les formes de spectacle, de jeux et de fêtes (variétés), n’en serait-elle pas ultimement la forme la plus sournoise de leur érosion, de leur disparition, voire de leur négation ?

1/ L’écran ludique

                Dès sa mise en oeuvre technique, après une phase expérimentale, au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale, la télévision, encadrée généralement par l’Etat, se donne un cahier de charges explicite qui se résume par le célèbre triplet : instruire, informer, divertir. Cette récupération d’une fonction récréative par le canal de la télévision résulte sans doute d’une double visée : technique et commerciale d’abord, car seuls des programmes de délassement, au premier chef ceux de la transmission de films, peuvent servir à meubler le temps de diffusion et fidéliser des spectateurs ; idéologique ensuite, dans la mesure où le pouvoir d’Etat a toujours pris en charge une part de divertissement du peuple par le biais des fêtes religieuses et civiques, des spectacles de mise en scène du pouvoir (les fêtes royales), puis des fêtes politiques ; les gouvernants instituent par ce moyen des périodes d’occupation ludique destinées au plaisir et à la socialité festive du plus grand nombre. L’Etat moderne, aussi, n’a eu de cesse de régenter la détente des corps, la stimulation des émotions et des passions, l’entretien des rêves, et de surcroît le lien social, en particulier par le biais d’une communion rituelle autour de symboles politiques. La télévision n’échappe pas à cette mission :  dès son apparition elle prétend devenir une scène centrale affectée aux amusements et aux distractions collectifs, qui sont livrés à domicile et vus en même temps par des spectateurs épars sur le territoire national. Cette concentration et cette uniformisation des spectacles participent, parallèlement à la centralisation et la synchronisation des informations, une sorte de religion civile de la détente, qui sert d’occupation alternative au travail et au quotidien. Comment cette nouvelle technique audiovisuelle, signe du mariage de l’image et de l’électricité, parvient-elle alors à relayer l’ancienne fonction des rites sociaux festifs ?

                En un sens l’analyse des spectacles télévisés et diffusés depuis un demi siècle sur un réseau de plus en plus dense de chaînes sur la planète, confirme la filiation de cette catégorie de divertissement avec la sociologie du jeu, d’abord phénoménologiquement, ensuite typologiquement. En interrompant en effet ses activités sociales ou domestiques pour se placer devant une lucarne qui diffuse des chansons, des films, des épreuves sportives, des pièces de théâtre, le téléspectateur reproduit bien le rapport au monde de l’Homo ludens tel que le restitue Huizinga. Loin du sérieux, le jeu se veut frivole, gratuit, superflu, occasion de s’évader de la vie quotidienne. Maintenu dans un espace-temps délimité, il répond à un ordre propre garantissant une sorte d’illusion magique source de plaisirs. Et de fait dans la rythmique quotidienne il est un temps et un lieu pour s’adonner à la détente télévisuelle. Ensuite le spectre des programmes se laisse assez aisément superposer aux quatre formes typiques d’activité de jeux dégagés par R. Caillois : mimesis, agon, ilinx, alea. On pourrait peut-être même reconstruire l’évolution d’un diagramme ludique des divertissements télévisuels en fonction de l’évolution globale des sociétés, les proportions de chaque type de jeux variant selon les époques, à l’image probablement de leur propre prégnance dans le corps social :

– d’abord les productions mimétiques (dans le sillage de la narrativité théâtrale, romanesque et cinématographique) forment un noyau incompressible de l’imagination privée et collective. Comme le soutenait déjà Aristote dans sa Poétique, l’homme a un besoin natif et chronique de mythes, de confrontation à des histoires différentes de la sienne, qui rassemblent les ressorts des passions à travers lesquelles il construit sa propre vie et simultanément l’oublie par une fuite dans l’irréel. Toute mise en scène ritualisée de la vie satisfait ce besoin de représentation de l’humanité qui sert à nous arracher à notre propre finitude et à nous faire partager un monde à la fois même et autre. La diffusion télévisée quotidienne d’histoires, réelles ou fictionnelles, non seulement remplace le rituel du récit mythique et du conte, depuis longtemps raréfiés et réservés à une élite, mais supplante par la force de l’animation audiovisuelle la lecture du roman, qui a servi de médium ces trois derniers siècles pour répondre au besoin mythopoétique ;

– les spectacles agonistiques de leur côté subliment la violence sociale par un jeu de compétition qui est particulièrement développé dans les sociétés industrielles, où l’autocontrainte, imposée par la soumission du corps à la machine et de l’esprit à la hiérarchie et à l’autorité patronale, se trouve compensée par une socialité ludique faite de libres affrontements, catalyseurs d’extériorisations de tensions. Le sport de compétition, qui se développe tout au long du XXe siècle dans les communes, les associations, puis à une échelle nationale par l’intermédiaire de la radio et de la télévision, devient ainsi l’envers du monde du travail pénible et contraint. Les compétitions exacerbent les passions, poussent au paroxysme les luttes, sur fond de rires, de colères voire d’animosités, avant de récompenser sans délai les joueurs, ce qui s’oppose à la répression des émotions dans le milieu professionnel ou familial et à l’expropriation des fruits du travail transformés en marchandises. Cette fonction de compensation de l’agon, particulièrement vive dans les sociétés où règne l’oppression politique ou économique, s’étend grâce au médium télévisé à la masse des populations qui trouvent ainsi un dérivatif garanti à leurs inhibitions, frustrations et ressentiments. Le succès mondial des matchs de football, relayés par des chaînes de télévision, ne se laisse certes plus ramener à ce seul dérivatif du monde du travail imposé par la société industrielle, mais répond sans doute à un besoin institutionnel d’espaces licites d’expression de passions interdites ou normalisées, d’explosion légale de tensions violentes contenues le reste du temps du fait de la dépendance aux pouvoirs économiques ou juridiques ;

– l’alea assure quant à lui la satisfaction de pulsions de gain, le plaisir de la chance, forme de jeu d’affrontement au destin aveugle ; sa médiatisation contemporaine par la radio et la télévision va de pair avec son institutionnalisation par les pouvoirs publics qui s’assurent souvent le monopole des jeux d’argent. Première ressource nationale dans beaucoup de pays, ces jeux, qui dilapident d’ailleurs une part des revenus du travail, jusqu’à provoquer parfois endettement, misère et ruine des joueurs, trouvent dans la radiotélévision un support recherché et efficace. La retransmission des résultats des loteries nationales sous diverses formes ou des courses de chevaux, suscite une consommation très ritualisée et hautement captive des médias. La multiplication des jeux télévisés avec leurs gains impressionnants signe sans doute une tendance sociale lourde vers une fétichisation de l’argent, qui troque de plus en plus sa valeur d’échange contre celle de bien réifié, de marchandise immatérielle. Qu’ils soient mus par le hasard ou liés à une récompense de compétences reconnues (habileté, ruse, savoir, etc.), les jeux sont devenus une source privilégiée de productions audiovisuelles ;

– enfin la catégorie de l’ilinx, qui associe le vertige, l’excès, la possession, toutes formes de régression et de dilatation du Moi, a sans doute bénéficié de peu de relais collectifs dans les sociétés occidentales, que des religions apolliniennes et non dionysiaques ont tenu à distance de rites de transe, l’ilinx restant une occupation plutôt individuelle ou communautaire (consommation d’alcool et de drogues). Paradoxalement la médiatisation audiovisuelle récente a permis par le disque, le concert et les chaînes musicales, de développer des expériences de transe et possession, inconnues jusqu’alors. Cette expansion de la frénésie musicale, fortement amplifiée par le visuel, qui favorise le processus d’idolâtrie des chanteurs et la fréquence d’états hypnotiques produits par les enregistreurs et diffuseurs (lecteurs portables) des auditeurs/spectateurs, caractérise de manière significative une évolution de nos sociétés vers une consommation d’émotions violentes, une intensification de la vie corporelle, au détriment des échanges sur la base de contenus langagiers signifiants.

                La culture de masse du divertissement relayée et amplifiée par la radio et surtout la télévision présente ainsi des traits paradoxaux. On y observe certes une palette à peu près stable de formes sociales de jeux, d’ailleurs subtilement entremêlées : ainsi le sport allie  l’agon des joueurs, l’ilinx des spectateurs en furie, la mimesis assurée par la narration des classements des compétitions, sur fond d’aléa (celle des valeurs marchandes et des gains des joueurs), concentrant ainsi à lui tout seul tous les ingrédients de la sphère du divertissement. Mais inversement une approche diachronique plus poussée révélerait sans doute aussi une évolution de la part accordée aux différents composants ludiques, du fait en particulier d’une présence croissante d’un imaginaire de la violence attisé par la musique et les effets des jeux de hasard. La retransmission d’événements sportifs ou la production de jeux en studio tend de même à croître sur les chaînes, repoussant dans les marges les émissions d’instruction et d’information, jusqu’à provoquer la création de chaînes dédiées à la culture, qui s’y trouve comme enfermée dans un ghetto. La télévision n’est plus un prestataire de transmission de spectacles mais devient une institution de création et de contrôle de la distraction sociale.

                En effet la télévision ne se contente plus d’être le miroir de l’évolution des besoins pathétiques et esthétiques de jeux, en les multipliant par la diffusion permanente, elle devient aussi responsable du renforcement et de l’exacerbation de nouvelles formes collectives d’amusement. La télévision se présente même comme un circuit fermé de formes de distractions : plus elle en propose plus elle s’en voit demander par un marché perméable aux modes. Prise dans un cercle vicieux, la télévision finit par se transformer en entreprise de production de jeux et spectacles ce qui lui permet d’assurer la meilleure adaptation de l’offre et de la demande. L’intégration d’équipes sportives ou de groupes de variétés dans l’économie audiovisuelle témoigne ainsi de ce que la télévision ne se limite plus à une médiatisation mais revendique une puissance de création de divertissements. Qu’elle soit d’Etat ou privée, par le biais des annonceurs, la télévision exerce une main mise sur l’évolution des formes sociales du jeu en en assurant le contrôle économique et symbolique. Par là elle se substitue à l’Etat en prenant elle-même en charge l’instrumentalisation des activités ludiques, libérées des fonctions de régulation des passions sociales. Il n’est pas étonnant que les effets induits de ces jeux télévisés finissent par échapper au contrôle social, comme l’illustre la violence générée par les stades ou les concerts de rock retransmis à une masse de co-participants spectateurs, complices de la transgression.

2/  L’hypnose cathodique

                La télévision a incontestablement servi l’essor des arts et techniques du spectacle en participant à leur généralisation dans l’espace et le temps tout en assurant simultanément leur privatisation, qui contribuent tous deux paradoxalement à intensifier les rapports des individus au jeu et au divertissement. Pourtant ce processus apparent ne masque-t-il pas une dérive, une perversion voire une dénaturation de la vie même du loisir ? Et si l’on est fondé à donner crédit à cette hypothèse, comment rendre compte de ce processus ? Et ne faut-il s’en prendre qu’à la prétendue pauvreté des programmes audiovisuels si souvent invoquée comme faiblesse du médium ?

                Le procès est fréquent et ressassé : la télévision aurait favorisé la diffusion généralisée de spectacles médiocres, triviaux, démagogiques, qui trancheraient avec le divertissement noble, édifiant, élitiste, véritable promoteur de culture. La déploration sur la décadence culturelle est aisée et apporte à son auteur des bénéfices immédiats. Mais peut-on oublier que la sphère des spectacles et des jeux, depuis la Rome antique, a toujours été exposée à la vulgarité, à la facilité, au mauvais goût voire au dégradant ? Entrer dans le seul débat de la qualité des programmes risque de nous condamner à une échelle de jugement moralisante, qui n’est sans doute pas le référent premier auquel on peut mesurer la distraction. Ne faudrait-il pas se demander plutôt si la télévision ne corrompt pas le vécu du spectacle, le plaisir ludique, du fait même du dispositif technique et esthétique qu’elle interpose entre acteurs et spectateurs ? La perte de sens du jeu ne devrait-elle donc pas être rapportée à l’ensemble des effets secondaires du médium, dans la mesure où la télévision coupe l’homme de l’expérience vécue du jeu ? Mais de quelles manières ?

                La mutation des spectacles lors de leur enregistrement, diffusion et réception télévisée est profonde et touche tous les aspects de leur manifestation. L’hypertechnicisation de la mise en images constitue un premier signe de cette transformation. Certes une large part d’émissions se limite à une retransmission de spectacles vivants (cabarets, théâtre, concerts, épreuves sportives, etc.) mais, sous cette forme directe déjà, la sélection des images et leur montage les condamnent à n’en restituer qu’un champ perspectif très partiel. Si l’on voit apparemment mieux un spectacle sur écran que dans une salle, la perte de l’espace global, de la vie environnante, la réduction à deux dimensions du monde, entraînent une sorte de proximité illusoire, de bulle artificielle qui ne peut compenser vraiment le spectacle réel et total dans lequel est immergé le spectateur dans la salle.

                Un pas de plus est franchi lorsque la télévision entreprend la production de spectacles originaux, le plateau de télévision devenant un nouveau lieu scénique, et le jeu sur scènes une espèce inédite de dramaturgie. Sous une apparence de spontanéité, d’improvisation, renforcée par la confiance en l’image, le spectacle confine cependant vite à l’artefact le plus factice où l’illusion est de tous les instants. Maquillage, prompteurs, qui soufflent les paroles, éclairages qui aveuglent ou font disparaître lumière et ombre, caméras qui ceinturent l’étroit espace d’évolution des acteurs, tous ces ingrédients parasites font que la scène du plateau se ramène à un espace d’exhibition tout entier encadré, hérissé d’artefacts. L’ancien deus ex machina du théâtre ne descend plus sur la scène en fin de spectacle mais est aujourd’hui en permanence en train d’agencer le pseudo-direct, de s’interposer entre les joueurs et les spectateurs. L’image captée et transmise sur l’écran à domicile fait croire à un monde sans vitre, sans fard, alors même que le spectacle médiatisé in fine sur le petit écran résulte d’une construction plus sophistiquée que jamais, faussement livré à l’improvisation. Autrement dit, le spectacle de télévision s’apparente à un produit fini, réalisé sur commande, adapté au médium, à la caméra et à l’écran, où même les réactions des spectateurs, rires ou applaudissements, peuvent être simulés sur bande sonore jointe. Ainsi l’immixtion de la caméra dans la sphère du spectacle vient soit le perturber (on sait combien le fait de filmer peut modifier le comportement, par le simple fait d’être placé sous l’objectif, c’est-à-dire d’être objectivé par la photographie), soit le recréer selon des impératifs de transmission qui modifient le déroulement propre d’un spectacle. Tout y est dès lors minuté, programmé, coupé, collé, amplifié de telle sorte que le téléspectacteur croit qu’il s’agit d’un événement spontané et improvisé. Si le spectacle télévisé ne rompt pas à première vue avec la technique théâtrale, dont le masque est l’essence, il n’en reste pas moins que tout est fait pour non seulement dissimuler l’artifice, mais surtout pour faire croire qu’il n’en existe aucun. En éloignant l’oeil du spectateur de la scène, en confiant à un dispositif d’enregistrement complexe et coûteux (caméras multiples, sélection d’images ou montages de séquences) le soin à tout moment d’instituer, de fabriquer la réalité du spectacle, la télévision contribue à un leurre qui transforme sans aucun doute l’être même du spectacle.

                Un autre signe de la dénaturation du divertissement tient à une espèce de dévitalisation même de la participation au spectacle. Le divertissement populaire traditionnel implique toujours la participation de l’individu réel, avec son corps propre. Qu’on soit joueur ou spectateur, on se déplace dans l’espace, on adopte des postures nouvelles, on déploie des gestes et des mouvements typés, on est saisi d’émotions vives. L’accomplissement le plus éminent du divertissement est la fête, entendue comme passage à un mode d’être excessif, transgressif, qui fait accéder à une socialité renouvelée. Le triomphe de la technique télévisuelle invite au contraire à lier le temps du divertissement au repos, à la station assise voire couchée, à l’apathie des muscles, au relâchement des nerfs. S’installant devant l’écran qui lui sert déjà pour s’instruire ou pour travailler, le téléspectateur prolonge la posture et la gestuelle de sa vie ordinaire. Du travail au loisir les préoccupations psychiques changent, mais les dispositions anatomiques, physionomiques restent les mêmes. La télévision veut ses spectateurs assis, rangés, accoudés, la détente mentale étant assortie d’une relaxation corporelle. Or cette atonie, préambule d’une atrophie sensori-motrice des téléspectateurs, n’inhibe-t-elle pas en partie les fonctions psychiques mises en jeu par un divertissement ? Peut-on comparer, rendre commensurables les réactions musculaires et émotionnelles d’un être participant à un spectacle vivant et celles d’un spectateur inactif, consommant passivement une image à distance ? Mouvements, bruits, sensations du corps propres forment la texture vécue du spectateur, qui se trouvent comme filtrés, distanciés par la position devant l’écran. La télévision, même si elle provoque des passions, ne peut du fait même de l’éloignement et donc de l’absence du réel vu, provoquer ce condensé d’émotions en prise directe avec la vie, au premier degré. Participer à un spectacle vivant c’est aussi laisser l’imagination amplifier le vécu, c’est rêver, anticiper, se projeter, s’identifier, toutes formes d’activation d’affects et de représentations que l’écran vient atténuer, aseptiser, assoupir. On peut donc se demander si l’encadrement télévisuel du spectacle et des jeux ne sert pas de véritable amortisseur des émotions, affects et rêveries qui forment l’enveloppe indécomposable des vécus du monde réel du jeu.

                Enfin que devient la sphère du spectacle lorsqu’elle est à la fois diffusée à une masse anonyme, standardisée de spectateurs et consommée à tout moment de la vie quotidienne ? La production de divertissements télévisés échappe au cercle étroit d’une institution (un théâtre, un cirque), d’une ville, d’un groupe social. Le divertissement télévisé continue certes à véhiculer des spécificités culturelles de son auditoire (de ce fait la télévision européenne est encore à venir, car chaque chaîne flatte les manies et attentes de son public régional ou national), mais la fabrication s’apparente à celle d’une marchandise décontextualisée, destinée à être expédiée sur les ondes, sans qu’on sache jamais quel est le public qui y assiste. Avant la télévision, le public se rendait au spectacle, à présent le spectacle va à la rencontre du public, mais dispersé, anonyme, abstrait, caché derrière un écran. De ce fait même l’écran en rapprochant le divertissement de moi, en le mettant à ma disposition, ne donne accès qu’à un monde mis en scène, sans destinataire en chair et en os. Le spectacle est mis en boîte et peut être recyclé librement sans entrer dans un monde commun, sans devenir un spectacle pour des personnes reconnues comme spectateurs.

                Cette disparition d’un espace de rencontre entre joueurs et spectateurs s’accompagne encore d’une diffusion mécanique, automatique, indépendamment de toute temporalité consacrée au jeu. Le divertissement, par la force des choses, prend place dans un horaire, un calendrier, une rythmique psychologique et sociale, qui lui libèrent une place. En diffusant en continu des programmes, les chaînes déjà pléthoriques permettent de se brancher à tout instant sur des spectacles, en dehors de toute préparation, de tout aménagement de la vie. Le spectacle fait irruption dans nos vies au détour de n’importe quel écran disposé sur nos itinéraires, perturbant ainsi l’attention. A la temporalité propre du loisir, devenue scène de genre de la vie collective (la peinture hollandaise a conservé un riche corpus de scènes de récréation collective), s’oppose à présent une fragmentation des spectacles sur un fond discontinu d’instants hétéroclites. Le spectateur se comporte d’ailleurs de plus en plus en consommateur, qui clipe et zappe, interrompt et mixe des fragments d’images et de sons, indépendamment de toute attente, indifférent à l’ordre intérieur du spectacle. Alors même que les créateurs d’une oeuvre veillent à à la cohérence d’une histoire (tout récit ne devait-il pas comporter pour les Anciens un début, un milieu et une fin ?), le téléspectateur peut interrompre, sectionner, mélanger les moments et les séquences. Alors qu’en temps réel et sur le vif, nous sommes soumis à la nécessité interne d’une oeuvre (théâtre, cinéma, drame, compétition), devant un téléviseur nous sommes prêts à disséquer les flux d’images, à donner libre cours à l’impatience. D’où la nécessité en retour pour les producteurs de spectacles de provoquer à tout prix l’attention, d’occuper l’espace mental du spectateur, car il faut lui faire violence, pour l’attacher, avant qu’il ne cherche à vagabonder vers d’autres images plus excitantes. L’appareil fonctionne donc comme un stimulateur de sensations de plaisirs qui doit renouveler sans cesse ses excitants pour maintenir coûte que coûte le spectateur devant son écran. L’émission de divertissement n’est plus une oeuvre autonome qui s’auto-développe pour elle-même, dans son temps et espace propres, mais un stimulus en concurrence avec d’autres ; elle ne vit donc plus comme une totalité qui a sa raison d’être, sa durée propre pour se faire reconnaître. Cet “effet zapping” qui témoigne de l’instrumentalisation du spectacle TV qui doit obéir à une surenchère de stimuli attractifs, fait glisser l’être-au-monde ludique vers une régression infantile, où le monde extérieur se confond avec le principe du plaisir. Ce besoin de l’industrie du spectacle de fixer les spectateurs papillonnants conduit par la même à une sophistication de la forme des spectacles, à une démagogie des contenus, afin d’échapper à la lassitude et répondre à la compétition.

3/  Le divertissement post-spectaculaire ?

                Pourtant ce procès n’est-il pas déplacé, empreint de quelque nostalgie de l’âge d’or du jeu ? La télévision ne favorise-t-elle pas l’accès démocratique au droit de se divertir, d’oublier le sérieux de la vie par un passe-temps certes insignifiant mais inoffensif ? L’accroissement du nombre de téléspectateurs et leur fidélisation au médium contredit en apparence l’interprétation soupçonneuse proposée ci-dessus. Faut-il incriminer l’erreur ou la fausseté d’une analyse qui aurait tendance à projeter une interprétation sceptique et mélancolique sur un besoin de distraction satisfait massivement ? Ou sommes-nous bien en face d’une mystification réussie qui parviendrait à faire croire à une masse entière de téléspectateurs qu’ils ne s’ennuient pas, ne perdent par leur temps devant la télévision ? La télévision relèverait ainsi de la même analyse que la “caverne” allégorique décrite par Platon, en occupant comme elle la place d’un leurre dont on ne peut s’arracher, s’émanciper sans violence. Le propre de la culture télévisuelle n’est-il pas en effet d’induire, de renforcer, comme par réflexe conditionné, une dépendance, une sorte de fascination qui inhibe tout esprit critique ? Dans ce cas le plaisir pris au spectacle télévisuel, tout en étant assumé par les intéressés, ne serait-il pas finalement qu’un plaisir faussé, une illusion de plaisir ? Mais un plaisir illusoire offre-t-il moins d’excitants bienfaisants qu’un plaisir dit vrai ?

                La difficulté s’accentue du fait que la fonction distrayante de la TV n’a pas à être évaluée en fonction de son rapport au vrai. On ne cherche pas dans le spectacle une vérité mais une occasion pour suspendre la pensée, pour neutraliser le sérieux. Peut-on dès lors juger qu’un divertissement est faux, fragile, inconsistant, faible, médiocre s’il permet de se divertir de la vie ? Pourquoi la consommation de la télévision serait-elle de valeur moindre que la participation à une fête collective, à une compétition sportive, à une pièce de théâtre ? Mais si le vécu du divertissement se voit précisément reconditionné par le phénomène même de la télévision, celle-ci n’impose-t-elle pas un mode de jeu qui n’est plus comparable au spectaculaire antérieur ? Et s’il existe bien une spécificité du divertissement TV, comment le caractériser s’il rompt avec les formes du spectacle ? Dans quelle socialité sommes-nous entrés pour que cette expérience esthétique d’un nouveau type puisse y trouver une consistance, une fonction ? De quel divertissement s’agit-il dans la télévision, corollairement quelle image de la vie sociale le divertissement TV transmet-elle ?

                En premier lieu, la télévision ne peut être tenue pour un simple canal de diffusion du spectacles, qui se contenterait de démultiplier les lieux d’amusement et de les servir sur écran à domicile. Loin de n’être qu’un transport d’images, la télévision est parvenue en un demi-siècle à modifier l’être et les effets même de l’image dans ses dimensions ludiques. Car la sphère archaïque du jeu et de la fête est en un sens l’inverse de la consommation, puisqu’elle vise d’abord à “consumer” la vie. Par la transe, la possession, la violence physique, le déguisement, l’excès, le spectacle conduit l’être à rompre avec la maîtrise de soi, nécessaire au travail, à la soumission du corps à des tâches imposées et programmées. Se divertir est alors moins se détendre, au sens d’un relâchement, comme le suggère la détente devant son téléviseur, que de retendre notre corps, nos affects, nos images. L’opposé de l’activité contrainte par les besoins sociaux n’est peut-être pas l’activité libre, au sens de libérée de toute activité. L’inaction, la passivité, la détente sont nécessaires à la vie mais elles donnent lieu à des conduites finalisées, sous forme de repos et de sommeil. Il reste à vivre autrement, à explorer et acclimater l’envers de la production et du travail, c’est-à-dire à rechercher une situation existentielle globale, qui donne accès à une vie autre. Danse, sport, théâtre, fêtes populaires, carnaval, ont de tout temps joué ce rôle, non d’assagir la vie, mais de la porter à l’excès, l’excédent.

                Au contraire en nous capturant, aussitôt les tâches contraintes achevées, en nous figeant devant un appareil de transmission des images de la vie, la télévision nous condamne à un étrange divertissement. Nous tournons moins le dos à la vie en l’abolissant par la tension, l’effort, la violence, l’excès, que nous l’aseptisons, la parodions, sans engagement, sans implication. La TV assure une sorte de mise entre parenthèses du pôle dionysiaque de l’existence, qui n’est restitué que sur l’écran apollinien des apparences sans contact autre qu’à travers la vitre et le haut-parleur. En dédiant une large part de notre vie de loisirs aux spectacles du petit écran nous laissons s’atrophier notre pouvoir de dépenser l’énergie de la vie, de jouir des possibles rêvés, de nous adonner au jeu, entendu comme écart avec le réel.

                Il est vrai que cette mutation du spectacle ne semble pas provoquer de déception, de frustration, de désertion majeures. Bien au contraire. L’image télévisée occupe, retient le spectateur, le fascine, en dépit de la médiocrité souvent avouée. Il est donc à craindre que le divertissement est indépendant de l’objet même qui en est la source, ce qui le ramène à une sorte de conditionnement primaire. En ce sens d’ailleurs l’interchangeabilité des stimuli, jamais autant réalisée qu’à la télévision, favorise sans doute l’intensification de la sidération de la subjectivité. La télévision, par la saturation de spectacles qu’elle impose, peut être rapprochée d’un hypnotique dont le défilé vibrionnaire d’images provoque une baisse de la vigilance et un bien-être proche de l’inconscience.

                Mais on peut aussi faire l’hypothèse que les téléspectateurs se trompent, s’illusionnent sur leurs loisirs et que leurs sentiments d’être distraits sont à leur tour une fiction. D’ailleurs le vécu de la distraction est en un sens semblable au vécu de tout sentiment, qui se soumet mal à la disjonction, réel et imaginaire. De même qu’il existe des plaisirs et des amours imaginaires, qui peuvent disparaître par désillusion, on pourrait parler d’une expérience du divertissement fictive, feinte, qui leurre le sujet lui-même. La télévision aurait ainsi la puissance de suggérer à ses consommateurs qu’ils éprouvent effectivement un plaisir qui serait imaginaire et donc faux. Il est vrai qu’il n’est pas aisé de se mettre en situation d’évaluation de la fausseté d’un plaisir et de la mauvaise foi de celui qui croit aimer une chose ou une personne alors qu’il n’est que la proie d’une autosuggestion qui ne résisterait pas à une vraie mise à l’épreuve. Nous parons, spontanément, le spectacle télévisé de vertus et magies à l’égal de ce que nous faisons dans la cristallisation amoureuse, telle qu’elle est décrite par Stendhal. Mais ne faudrait-il pas mettre à l’épreuve cette croyance illusoire et envoûtante ? Comparée aux jeux et spectacles réels, la TV  peut apparaître comme une morne et triste parodie. Qui a connu la passion d’une aventure, le monde réel de la compétition sportive, les coulisses ou même la salle d’un vrai théâtre, peut difficilement se laisser duper par ces reproductions étiques qui se succèdent sur notre petit écran. L’impression de divertissement de la TV risque de ne tenir qu’à la rareté ou à la disparition de la vie, réelle, de ses espaces et temps de jeux. On n’aime donc peut-être la TV que par défaut. Si elle se trouvait ouverte à la concurrence, si elle connaissait de temps en temps des pannes généralisées, elle ne résisterait pas à la désillusion et au désamour. Encore faut-il précisément que l’homme contemporain trouve encore l’occasion et surtout le désir de l’alternance, préfère différer la tentation du petit écran pour sortir de chez lui, descendre dans une rue, une salle, une enceinte de jeu. Or n’est-il pas déjà gagné par le syndrome lymphatique de la TV, qui pousse à vivre à l’économie, dans une sorte d’atonie du corps, de ralentissement généralisé des sens ? Par là la TV se révélerait comme un narcotique collectif, qui atténue notre sens critique, coupe les élans de nos désirs, étouffe notre curiosité. Se divertir sans TV, loin de la télé, c’est renouer avec la vie, le jeu de la vie, la vie en jeu, mais encore faut-il réactiver en nous la puissance de vie que l’image télévisée s’ingénie à endormir, pour mieux nous soumettre à son empire et son emprise de faux spectacles.

                Ces esquisses d’une critique anthropologique de la télévision permettent en tout cas de confirmer l’hypothèse initiale d’un insensible déplacement de la ligne de démarcation entre travail et jeu, vie et spectacle. La télévision succède certes à la sphère du travail (mais peut s’y loger aussi) mais sans réactiver les éléments constituant le vécu du divertissement d’un âge pré-électronique. Et si elle occupe de fait l’attention d’une masse indénombrable d’individus il n’est pas sûr qu’elle les pourvoie d’un type de distraction comparable aux spectacles et fêtes du passé. Bien plus la télévision a peut-être été la première forme technique et esthétique de mutation, de transfiguration de l’être-au-monde ludique. Elle a certes rapproché l’homme des spectacles par le biais des caméras et écrans, mais en même temps elle a imposé un renforcement de toutes les illusions sur fond d’une désocialisation du plaisir même de l’illusion. En remplaçant la vie festive par un asservissement de l’oeil et des mains à une machine (qu’Internet vient à l’heure actuelle généraliser), elle est cause d’une régression psycho-motrice, d’un appauvrissement émotionnel et imaginatif et enfin d’une uniformisation des contenus intellectuels. Inversement la télévision vient de donner naissance à un nouveau type d’occupation de la vie, où l’on cherche avant tout à se griser de flux d’images, par un renouvellement continu de stimuli audiovisuels, afin d’accéder à une sorte de torpeur quasi hallucinée où le contenu du message importe moins que le médium. Là où le divertissement pourrait servir d’alternance à une revitalisation de l’existence, la télévision et ses formes évoluées de machines audiovisuelles risquent de jeter les spectateurs dans une béate somnolence, condition favorable pour toutes sortes de manipulations et d’assujettissements, qui signent la fin de la liberté.

Carmen Bujdei

Feminine Monstrosity Reconsidered: Sirens, Mermaids and Giant Women in Contemporary English Novels

 “All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that she is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.”

Barbara Creed (1986) “The Monstrous-Feminine” Screen 27:I

From the Medusa of ancient mythology to Freud’s uncanny, arising out of the encounter with the horrific sight of the mother’s genitalia[1], from Aristotle’s[2] association between the female and the monstrous to Victor Frankenstein’s horrific dismemberment of the monsterette: what all these figures of feminine monstrosity allude to is the female body as a site of abject liminality[3] – an emblem of lust, of irrepressible sexuality or of uncontrollable fecundity. If it is true that each cultural epoch needs to define those characteristics which it regards as essential to its humanity, and that only by identifying pollution phenomena, perceived as impure or dangerous, monstrous or abject, can a culture clarify and delineate more firmly the taxonomies that anomaly violates[4], it will be interesting to find out how the theme of female monstrosity resonates in the works of two contemporary English novelists, to what extent cultural clichés linking femininity to monstrosity are perpetuated or discarded.

Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1985) relates the picaresque adventures of a 19^th-century celebrated trapeze artist who is about to embark on a Grand Imperial Tour scouring the vastness of two continents. Sophie Fevvers, who is so called because of her literal endowment with wings, is referred to as “the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no women will be bound to the ground”. Despite the attempts of the American journalist, Jack Walser, to denounce the birdwoman as a hoax, Fevvers – whom I perceive to have definite associations with the mythical siren figure – has complete control over the production of her own identity, including the construction of her own originary myth.

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) revisits notions of culturally-constructed, stable gender identities, and resorts to a grafting of perspectives which renders the traditional opposition masculine-feminine, heroic-monstrous, solar-chtonian ineffectual. The 17^th-century giantess and her 20^th-century counterpart, are, literally, the colossal heroines whose very monstrosity provides the impetus for destabilising social and political hierarchies. Both the Dog Woman, a royalist who helps bring down the Puritans’ rule of terror, and her alter ego, an actively engaged environmentalist, are figures that conclusively unsettle the traditional woman-monster dyad.

Sirens at the thresholds

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

Adrienne Rich, Planetarium

As he proceeds to interview the winged aerialiste of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, Walser reluctantly gets enthralled by her narrative and appearance, becoming slowly reeled in and rendered captive by the very yarn that he attempts to unravel. Constantly on the lookout for visual and physical clues as to Fevvers’s fraudulence and bogus monstrosity, he becomes increasingly unsettled by the “marvellous giantess’s” sheer bulkiness, evincing no other flaw “in the classic cast of her features, unless their very size was a fault in itself, the flaw that made her vulgar”.

Becoming immersed into the atmosphere of specular/spectacular distortion that pervades Fevvers’s London dressing room, Walser’s discomfiture is augmented by her “appropriation of space” (Michael 1998: 211): she appears not only to enhance her narrative to mythic or even fantastic proportions but also to literally consume the enclosed space of her boudoir: “Fevvers yawned with prodigious energy, opening up a crimson maw the size of that of a basking shark, taking in enough air to lift a Montgolfier, and then she stretched herself suddenly and hugely, extending every muscle as a cat does, until it seemed she intended to fill up all the mirror, all the room with her bulk”. Intent on living up to her slogan (“Is she fact or is she fiction?”), she allows her self-devised icon to be explored by Walser primarily as it is reflected in the mirror and in another artefact, as if the inseparability of fact and fictional representation were being alluded to[5].

Fevvers’s constant wavering on the threshold of verifiable reality and illusory contrivance is illustrated by the wall-size poster in her dressing-room which arrests “l’Ange Anglaise” in a simultaneously hovering and upward-shooting flight (“a disconcerting pact with gravity”). The “steatopygous perspective” from which her ascent is illustrated (“bums aloft, you might say”) and the “tremendous red and purple pinions, pinions large enough, powerful enough to bear up such a big girl as she” are the graphic details of this “preposterous depiction” that at the same time question and confirm the massive creature’s ability to take wing. Fevvers’s “self-advertisement”, as well as her flight in the real arena, where the arrestment of her “Rubenesque body” “in slow motion” is designed to both allow the spectators “enjoy the spectacle” and to invite an “absolute suspension of disbelief” by highlighting the very “limitations of the act”, are exercises of pure simulation, whereby the impact of her self-concocted image overrides the meaning behind it, and renders the flesh, corporeality as subordinated to its mediation through representation. Fevvers “makes a spectacle of herself” (Lee 1997: 94), her very existence is dependent upon her being the “object of the male gaze” (Boehm 1998: 195), as long as she can manipulate and remain in control of her self-constructed image.

The “scopic regime” (Tucker 1998: 17) governing Walser’s (mis)guided perception of Fevvers’s morphology[6] is kaleidoscopically amplified in the ‘Fevvermania’ phenomenon (“mass hysteria and the delusion of crowds”), which accounts for the ubiquitous display of the winged woman’s picture, in consumerist fashion, on “garters, stockings, fans, cigars, shaving soap… She even lent it to a brand of baking powder; if you added a spoonful of the stuff, up in the air went your sponge cake, just as she did. Heroine of the hour, object of learned discussion and profane surmise, this Helen launched a thousand quips, mostly on the lewd side“. Far from refusing to exhibit herself as alluring surface, as the “object” of the “the eye of the beholder”, Fevvers’s “self-fashioning” demands that her misshapen body be displayed in plain view: “Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited herself before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvellous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch. She was twice as large as life and as succinctly finite as any object that is intended to be seen, not handled. Look! Hands off! Look at me!” This must read more than a sheer “insistence on the nature of femininity as impersonation” (Tucker idem: 18). Provided that the constant focus of the gaze[7] is on Fevvers’s nonhuman appendages, the authenticity of which might dictate her inclusion into or exclusion from the ranks of genuine freaks (“in a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world”), and that monsters are closely related to performance and spectatorship (one etymon[8] is the Latin monstro, to show forth visible evidence), it will be interesting to detect the extent to which Fevvers’s sirenlike accessories invite a reductive or indeterminate construal of meaning. The reference to Fevvers’s eyes being “Chinese bodies” opening “into a world into a world into a world, an infinite plurality of worlds”, is an intimation of the irreducible potential of meaning inscribed across her composite body.

While critics have noticed the multiplicity of interpretations[9] to which Fevvers’s body generously lends itself, the possibility of reading the “Virgin Whore” as a 19^th-century replica (informed by a 20^th-century perspective) of mythical sirens has not yet been investigated. Classical sirens, as human-beast composites, displayed avian characteristics[10], predating mermaids in ancient myths and bestiaries. Denizens of earth and water, their hybrid morphology, transgressive of the boundary between animal and human, was also reflected in the liminal space they straddled – rocky outposts in cut-off islands – whence by singing or playing enticingly beautiful music, they lured sailors off their course to death. Their watery habitat – see Ovid’s reference to them as “monstra maris” – led to the conflation of winged sirens in medieval representations with fish-tailed mermaids; the deceptively virginal beauty of their upper body was belied by the concealed hideousness (fish-like, scaly, abhorrent) of their nether parts.[11] The seductive weaponry deployed by sirens, variously depicted as devouring monsters, anthropophagi who preyed on living mortals, resided either in their mellifluous voices[12], or in the promised knowledge of “all that happens on the much suffering earth”: Odysseus, of course, vanquished the sea temptresses by outwitting them.

Fevvers is repeatedly referred to as singing out in a “raucous and metallic” voice, sounding at times rather like the “clanging of contralto or even baritone dustbins”. Walser becomes “a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, sombre voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it strangely was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve tones. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s.” However, in building up the atmosphere of growing enchantment and mesmerizing stupor that enthrals Walser to the point of his losing touch with reality, Carter seems to have emphasised the latter aspect of the sirens’ arsenal, that is the exclusive knowledge promised to the inquiring reporter, the “whole truth and nothing but”, which she has never revealed to any living man before: “Now, sir, I shall let you into a great secret, for your ears alone and not for publication, because I’ve taken a liking to your face, sir.” The lesson that Fevvers offers the self-assured, sceptical American journalist, who is here to expose her as one of the “Great Humbugs of the World,” is that her identity, her meaning is sheer fluidity, that it cannot be ossified into a mere tag.

While the protagonist of Nights at the Circus is indeed a “fabulous bird-woman”, at various points during her interview with Walser she is clearly foregrounded as a sea enchantress. Walser notices the “marine aroma”, the core ingredient of the “essence of Fevvers”, which amalgamates into an almost “solid composite of perfume, sweat, greasepaint and raw, leaking gas”. The ice on which their champagne is cooled comes from a fishmonger’s, “for a shiny scale or two stayed trapped within the chunks.” Walser’s determination that there is “something fishy about the Cockney Venus” is gradually substantiated by his sighting in Fevvers’s boudoir “a writhing snakes’ nest of silk stockings, green, yellow, pink, scarlet, black” and even a corset that looks like “the pink husk of a giant prawn emerging from its den”. He becomes so enmeshed in Fevvers’s narrative, that his “brain is turning to bubbles” to the point of hallucinating about seeing a “fish, a little one, a herring, a sprat, a minnow, but wriggling, alive-oh, go into the bath when she tipped the jug.” Another clue to Fevvers’s representation as a siren-mermaid composite is the account of her maiden flight: not only are the wing movements “not dissimilar to those of a human swimmer,” but flying itself is defined as cutting “a corridor through the invisible liquidity of the air.” Fevvers’s maiden flight poses her at the brink of the borderline of species: its successfulness would imply a commitment to her “irreparable difference”, which is not necessarily morphological, but essential, profound: “I feared a wound not of the body but the soul, sir, an irreconcilable division between myself and the rest of humankind. I feared the proof of my own singularity.”

Nonetheless, the most overt signifiers of Fevvers’s transgressive nature are her much publicised “feathery appendages”. Her assumed anatomical doubleness is evinced by her allegiance to both the human and the avian species (see her refusal to “strike […] or harm another mortal even in self-defence” or to “touch a morsel of chicken, or duck, or guineafowl and so on, not wanting to play cannibal”). Her ostensibly displayed swan’s wings, emerge into the discourse as an occlusive sign (a conundrum Walser feels empowered to demystify), which then circulates excessively in an escalating spiral of signification. Based on her purported circumvention of the normal channels of creation (like Helen of Troy, this “Helen of the High Wire” was “hatched out of a bloody great egg”), Fevvers claims mythical ancestry by soldering the “mystery” of her parentage (“my father and my mother both utterly unknown to me, and, some would say, unknown to nature”) onto the image of Leda’s ravishment by the swan god: “I always saw, as through a glass, darkly, what might have been my own primal scene, my own conception, the heavenly bird in a white majesty of feathers descending with imperious desire upon the half-stunned and yet herself impassioned girl”.

Through the caked surface of this painting, prior to the narcissistic contemplation of her mirrored surface, Fevvers claims to have experienced an intuitive realisation of her selfhood as hyphenated alterity; in Lacanian terms, the subject, initially experiencing itself as a fragmented body, a body in pieces, perceives a specular, exterior image to be what it inside already is: a composite self that contains its own dynamic contradiction. The London aerialiste’s body is an occluding referent around which an entire “Fevvermania” is spun, which refuses commodification into a specific, quantifiable meaning, and which, in a catachrestic volley of self-staged representations, ultimately reveals Fevvers’s radical indeterminacy.

Her somatic hybridity can no longer be translated merely as the perilous female sexuality that ancient or medieval sirens embodied, for she destabilises “all sorts of fundamental boundaries” (Booker 1991: 223): in addition to her challenging the human-animal distinction, she not only straddles the boundaries separating the animate from the inanimate (in Ma Nelson’s brothel, her initial assignment is to pose as a sculpture of Cupid), but she also conflates the boundaries of gender, deflating stereotypical views of woman as a delicate, ethereal creature: “Her face, in its Brob­dingnagian symmetry, might have been hacked from wood and brightly painted up by those artists who build carnival ladies for fairgrounds or figureheads for sailing ships. It flickered through his mind: Is she really a man?” Moreover, her fluid, anamorphic identity conflates the monster-angel opposition that writers like Gilbert and Gubar (1984) have identified to govern patriarchal representations of womanhood. When in Ma Nelson’s home she assumes the pose of the Winged Victory, her accessories include a sword, which undercuts her angelic, protective role (“At close quarters, it must be said that she looked more like a dray mare than an angel”). “L’Ange Anglaise” is in effect temporarily incarcerated in the traditional image of the castrating woman (“as if a virgin with a weapon was the fittest guardian angel for a houseful of whores”), yet despite the magnificence and grandeur of her attire, her inadvertent revenge at this reification is not long awaited, bringing about the collapse of the business: “it may be that a large woman with a sword is not the best advertisement for a brothel.”

Fevvers’s materialism and greed (“she dreamed, at nights, of bank accounts […] to her, the music of the spheres was the jingling of cash registers”) approximate at times the harpies’ voracity and insatiability. Given the illusion of corporeal beauty as well as the dangerous femininity of monstrous sirens, medieval Christian representations of sin often resorted to them as symbols of lechery and concupiscence, conjoining their morphology with that of the harpies: a shift from beautiful maid above the navel, bird below the waist to hideous clawed monsters (“her white teeth are big and carnivorous as those of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother”)[13]. Fevvers’s boudoir routine involves considerable scatology. Her gluttony and enormous, unappeasable appetite acquire gargantuan dimensions: she can devour “a Fujiyama of mashed potatoes; a swamp of dried peas cooked up again and served swimming in greenish liquor”. Her table manners are repugnant: she “gorged, she stuffed herself, she spilled gravy on herself, she sucked up peas from the knife; she had a gullet to match her size and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. /…/ She wiped her lips on her sleeve and belched. She gave him another queer look, as if she half hoped the spectacle of her gluttony would drive him away, but, since he remained, notebook on knee, pencil in hand, sitting on her sofa, she sighed, belched again.” Fevvers’s flaunting of any rules for decorous female behaviour has been seen to reflect a Bakhtinian inscription of the potential for subversiveness in the fluid, unfinished and open female body[14]. Carter’s “highly carnivalesque treatment” of the female body as excessive physicality, abject matter – Fevvers is a “mistresspiece of exquisite feminine squalor”  – appears to parodically challenge both the patriarchal and the feminist appropriations of the woman-matter complex. In this sense, Fevvers’s liminality translates an opposition to any essentialized idea of the feminine and a deconstruction of representation stereotypes.[15]

The paradoxical Fevvers refuses any attempt to have her meaning ossified into a quantifiable equation, for here is a purported freak who, instead of having her body examined by the Royal College of Surgeons, does not even so much as unbutton her bodice, entertaining their curiosity with a three-hour lecture on navigation in birds “with such infernal assurance and so great a wealth of scientific terminology that not one single professor had dared be rude enough to question her on the extent of her personal experience”. Like the figure in the carpet, Fevvers’ monstrosity – understood as a transgression of all categorical boundaries – is complex and circuitous, refusing even containment in a fetishistic iconography as elaborate and pompous as that of Mr. Rosencreutz: “Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in‑between states, being on the borderline of species…. Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air, virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body, reconciler of the grand opposites of death and life.”

The museum of female freaks

I want you for my museum of woman monsters. (NC 55)

Given the dangerous slippage of spectatorial desire into fetishism or voyeurism (Tucker ibid: 18), as well as the mixture of desire and fear elicited by the female body as a potential “site of dangerous excess”[16], the possibility of the woman who self-manages the production of her own representation losing control of her spectacular/specular image is always pending. Reification of the female body into the object of the gaze of the beholder is what afflicts not merely Fevvers, in her chilling encounters with prototypal male Gothic antagonists such as Rosencreutz or the Grand Duke, but an entire array of other women characters, whose deformity of the soul or of the body is fully exploited in various horrific stagings of or variations on the motif of the freak show.

In her survey of gothic monstrosity across the 19^th and the 20^th centuries, Halberstam argues that gothic strikes a markedly “modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse” (1995: 23), in that it constitutes a versatile narrative technology of producing “the monster as a remarkably mobile, permeable, and infinitely interpretable body” (idem: 21); the monsters of modernity become “meaning machines” (ibid), characterized by their increasing proximity to humans and configuring otherness no longer as a single negative identity, but as a complex of race, nationality, gender, sexuality and class: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body” (cf Cohen 1996: 7). The accretion of women’s bodies that verge on monstrous aberration in Madame Schreck’s museum signals how a doubly marginal creature[17] (the female monster), onto whom masculine anxieties concerning women’s alleged proclivity towards sexual duplicity have been ingrained, has served to legitimate the establishment of male prerogatives of power.

As if responding to the feminist statement[18] that womanhood is a body hybrid that amalgamates and integrates difference and heterogeneity (“women”) without completely reducing and absorbing its components into a monolithic corpus (“woman”), Carter adduces evidence to the manner in which an ostensibly “misogynistic” period such as the 19^th century attempted to reify femininity in an inventory of clichéd portrayals. Fevvers’ landing in Madame Schreck’s subterranean museum of female freaks coincides with her exploration of one of the most horrendous Gothic sites: here, encased in underground niches, can simultaneously be admired and abhorred[19] a startling array of female marvels and quasi-hominid freaks, some sort of “anatomical performers” (Russo 1998: 228) who cater for the voyeuristic needs of equally grotesque males[20]. The sense of claustrophobia that translates the arrestment of women within the masculine dictates of bodily representation points to the containment of woman’s desire for “self-representation” (see Robinson idem: 11).

What is variously referred to as the “lumber room of femininity”, or the “rag-and-bone shop of the heart” is a disaffected wine cellar lodged in the bowels of a gloomy abode in Kensington, which exhibits all the ominous ingredients of the stock gothic mansion: a “melancholy garden” with “worn grass” and “leafless trees”, a soot-blackened façade “as if the very stucco were in mourning”, tightly barred shutters and even the door knocker swathed in crepe. The male guardian and caretaker of the place is no less a monstrous creature than the women he has in custody. Toussaint eats through a tube up his nose “liquids only but sufficient to sustain life”, and Fevvers again provides “scientific verification” for this case: a mouth-insertion surgery was allegedly performed on him at St Bartholomew’s Hospital[21], even the news is to be found in a paper (“You’ll find a full account of the operation in The Lancet for June, 1898, sir.”). The vault or crypt where the “girls” are displayed in “profane altars” (“stone niches cut out of the slimy walls”) is dubbed the “Down Below” or “The Abyss”. The show routine involves “some gent” selecting the masked outfit of his choice (the most dreaded one being “the executioner’s hood”) and being ushered in by Madame Schreck, with all the background effects characteristic of gothic horror: requiem tunes, “clanking of chains”, candles throwing “all manner of shadows” on the bleak and “sweating walls”; however, the Dantesque innuendoes are there all right: Madame Schreck “comes like Virgil in Hell, with her little Dante trotting after” arousal of expectation and desire (“deliciously scarified anticipation”), skilfully slipped questions: “Shall I open the curtain? Who knows what spectacle of the freakish and unnatural lies behind it!”

To the extent that Nights at the Circus queries the relationship between “women as spectacle, and women as producers of spectacle” (Russo idem: 234) – examples of such female countercultures ranging from Ma Nelson’s brothel to Countess P’s self-gratifying panopticon – Madame Schreck’s manipulation of women into dematerialised images betrays the highest degree of complicity with the patriarchal establishment: she is indeed “the body as performance in extremis” (idem), “some kind of wicked puppet that pulled its own strings”. The “female prodigies of nature” (Fanny Four-Eyes, the Sleeping Beauty, the under three-foot high Wiltshire Wonder, the bipartite Albert/Albertina, who was “half and half and neither of either” and Cobwebs), whose identities become all surface – “arrested images of various ‘perversions’ of femininity assembled for penetration by the male gaze”[22] in a gallery of “tableaux vivantes” – differ from the prostitutes under the care of Ma Nelson, for if the latter “accommodated those who were perturbed in their bodies”, Madame Schreck “catered for those who were troubled in their … souls”. While Ma Nelson functioned as a sort of catalyst of desire, who “wished to verify that, however equivocal, however much they cost, the pleasures of the flesh were, at bottom, splendid”, Madame Schreck is a “connoisseur of degradation” and a “scarecrow of desire”, whose business is not in the female body trade, since what she has for hire is the “idea” of woman.

In this world crammed with bodies transfigured and deformed, the denizens of “Down Below” are integrated into an amalgamative female body whose perpetually transgressed borders place the limits of identity under ceaseless interrogation.  For instance, Fanny’s corporal deformity is reminiscent one of the Plinian races[23], the Blemmyae[24], who were once thought to inhabit the marvellous margins of imagined geographies. While Fanny’s “mamillary eyes” should account for an augmented power of vision – as they enable her to see the same as with her top ones, only “lower down” – they nevertheless segregate her from the rest of womanhood, barring her from experiencing maternity, for “How can you nourish a baby on salt tears?” Another female exhibit, the Wonder, is a diminutive dancer whose high kicks resemble the “opening up a pair of embroidery scissors”. Not only is she at the antipodes of Fevvers’ size, but her attitude to displaying her body is contrasted with the gigantic woman’s exhibitionism: the reason for degrading herself in the “house of shame” is concealment, for she would rather expose herself to private viewings than perform for “an entire theatre-full of the horrid, nasty, hairy things”. To the Wonder, confinement in the Abyss means the protection and camouflage provided by the proximity of same-self creatures: “Amongst the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?” This desire for similarity in difference, while recalling the desperate plea of Frankenstein’s monster for a companion in the likes of himself[25], corresponds, as Becker remarks (1999: 54), to the emergent construction of a sense of self as other, implying the subject’s self-recognition as monstrous, as well as an awareness of the mainstream repudiation of otherness and difference.

The only female exhibit lying prostrate in The Abyss is the Sleeping Beauty, a “living corpse” and clearly a rewriting of the fairytale pattern of damsels in distress being awakened to full life by the kiss of a prince. Hers is a “tragic case”: her soporific state is triggered by her very sexual maturation (“the very day her menses started, she never wakened”). As her “dreaming body” is taken to the crypt, her female flow subsides, her hair starts growing in a portentous unleashing of dormant sexuality. That the slumbering beauty is not a “dreamless sleeper” (a disturbing revelation evinced by the continuous convulsions and twitching of her limbs “as a dog’s paws do when it dreams of rabbits”, by her restless eyeballs continually rolling under the closed eyelids that are dark like “the underskins of mushrooms”, or by her moaning and crying out, punctuated by a soft laughter) and that her recumbent effigy should be guarded by the resplendent Fevvers masquerading as “the tombstone angel”, “the Angel of Death”, “Death the Protectress” with her wings fully spread, attest to an insistent portrayal of female sexuality as resilient, always on the verge of erupting in the most stifling of environments, such as Madame Schreck’s “chamber of imaginary horrors”.

From holy harlots to warring suffragettes

The French poet, sir; a poor fellow who loved whores not for the pleasure of it but, as he perceived it, the horror of it, as if we was, not working women doing it for money but damned souls who did it solely to lure men to their dooms, as if we’d got nothing better to do… Yet we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for “Votes for Women”, I can tell you! (NC 38)

In The Sadeian Woman, Carter expresses her endorsement of the moral pornographer, an artist whose “true obscenity”[26] critiques “current relations between the sexes” and involves, through a “total demystification of the flesh”, the projection of a world model where “absolute sexual license for all the genders” would dislocate “our culture[‘s]” distorting contempt for women (1979: 19-20). Tucker (ibid: 12) remarks that Carter’s cultural study of pornography came out at a time when a heated debate around the issue of pornography emerged in feminist circles, some of its detractors conflating it with the aggressive societal relegation of women in positions of inferiority[27]. Longino, for instance, makes a strong case against pornography on feminist grounds, decrying its injurious, libellous character – the fostering of sexist, male-centred attitudes and its reinforcement of the suppression and exploitation of women, by subjecting them to an objectifying and dehumanising portrayal: “pornography is verbal or pictorial material which describes sexual behaviour that is degrading or abusive to one or more of the participants in such a way as to endorse the degradation” (1980: 221).  In Nights at the Circus, the commodification of women in Ma Nelson’s brothel, where they can share in the management of the masquerade of “libidinal gratification” as well as derive financial satisfaction from it, allows them to experience a “degree of explicitly sexualized freedom” (Tucker ibid: 17). Fevvers becomes Carter’s acclaimed “virginal” prostitute of The Sadeian Woman: “At least the girl who sells herself with her eyes open is not a hypocrite and, in a world with a cash‑sale ideology, that is a pos­itive, even a heroic virtue” (55).

Angela Carter’s contention in Nights at the Circus is that in the midst of marginalized subcultures there germinate the seeds of social transformation and reform. Not only are the prostitutes sheltered by Ma Nelson’s establishment contained within the contours of “a wholly female world”, to the exclusion of even the male representatives of the canine or feline species, but the brothel, officially inscribed in historiographic discourse as the site for lewd gratification of the flesh is subversively revealed to be an unorthodox academy, with a well-stacked library where even abstruse or hermetic material can be perused by its unconventional students. Fevvers’s estimation of the male patrons’ loss of interest in brothels as triggered by the fin-de-siècle feeling of malaise which she assigns to the influence of the French poète maudit, Baudelaire[28], refutes the end of the 19^th-century biased conception of “fallen” women as demonic sirens, whose sole intent is to dispatch a tragic fate to men, and reveals instead the political commitment of the suffragette harlots. Ma Nelson’s brothel (she is a “one-eyed, metaphysical madame, in Whitechapel”) is not simply a site for the exploitation of female bodies, or merely a “repository of so many bittersweet memories and humiliation and camaraderie, of whoring and sisterhood”, but a veritable “academy” whose members are constantly exposed to learning (“We all engaged in our intellectual, artistic or political […] pursuits and, as for myself, those long hours of leisure I devoted to the study of aerodynamics and the physiology of flight”) and political awareness (“we were all suffragists in that house; oh, Nelson was a one for ‘Votes for Women’”).

The fin-de-siècle association between prostitutes and their mythical counterparts, the sirens, was also prominent in medieval discourse, where their common denominator resided in their lasciviousness and their deadly threat. It is useful, therefore, for a comparative outlook, to consider Carter’s reassessment of the prostitute identity in the context of the 19^th-century commodification of female sexuality alongside with medieval representational practices of siren prostitutes. Hassig (1999: 79-81) considers the sirens depicted in medieval bestiaries to be the most frequent icons of moral depravity, serving as caveats against lewdness of behaviour and against the perils of female sexuality. Moreover, she highlights the identification of siren representations in bestiary texts with the ubiquitous social class of harlotry (sirens as aquatic harlots, or meretrices[29]). Whereas it is difficult to claim that female prostitution could be regarded as having represented a subjective, intrinsic identity in the Middle Ages, it is the awakening of a group identity at the turn of the 20^th century – Ma Nelson’s employees emerging as a self-conscious and self-assertive occupational category – that Carter’s novel appears to emphasise. Prostitution, as an externally demarcated, socially constructed and sexually determined identity, is not necessarily confined to the 19^th-century scientia sexualis[30]. Karras (1999: 159) takes issue with Foucauldian supporters of sexual identities being mainly constructs of 19^th-century bourgeois society, and, adopting Sedgwick’s concept of “minoritizing discourses”[31] around sexuality, examines the shaping of the medieval prostitutes’ identitarian category. In Carter’s novel, this group identity has already emerged, as Fevvers presumptuously confesses to her upbringing in the brothel (“in a brothel bred, sir, and proud of it”), where she served as a statuary emblem of the establishment.

Given the impossibility for past marginalized groups such as prostitutes to encode or textualise their experience, one must necessarily look – for a more or less ”reliable” and “accurate” reading of historical fact – at the manner in which societal systems of classification and dominant discourses framed an externally imposed identity onto these individuals[32]. What Carter’s novel does is exactly to allow such a marginalized minority as that of prostitutes to voice their own perception of subjectivity, valorising it in the process. For instance, while Hassig contends that the containment of the medieval prostitutes’ pollution behaviour[33] could be enforced through prescriptive codes, including sumptuary legislation and clothing regulations which compelled them to display such visual signals as the garish striped headgear, for the presumed 19^th-century star aerialiste, with all her declared exhibitionism, the wearing of similar stigmatising yet glamorous accessories is a prerequisite endorsing the success of her show: “[o]n her back she bore an airy burden of furled plumage as gaudy as that of a Brazilian cockatoo”.

However, even this negative, outwardly constructed identity appears to be slightly undercut by what Karras outlines as, on the one hand, the medieval prostitutes’ incipient sense of solidarity and pride in their collective identity[34], and, on the other hand, the compelling imagery of holy harlots, sinners converted into saints, who became potent symbols of repentance and charted the most profound identitarian reorientation and transformation that the Middle Ages could envisage. In Carter’s novel, apart from picturing the brothel as a site of emancipation and its employees as the mouthpieces for various strands of feminism, ranging from a most “subversive utopian variety” to “an engaged Marxist one” (see Michael 1998: 206), the persistent image is that of women witnessing the demise of old structures of power (along with “the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of a nineteenth century” being “ground out in the ashtray of history”) and empowering themselves in the process. Thus, even the abused and “monstrified”[35] members of Madame Schreck’s extreme version of a brothel recuperate their essential humanity: the Lilliputian Wonder is persuaded to return to her adoptive Brobdingnagian family, casting aside the divergence of size that has so far been seen to segregate otherwise similar humans; Fanny sets up an orphanage, “so now she has twenty lovely babies to call her ‘mama’”; Cobwebs establishes a “fine reputation as a painter in chiaroscuro” and the Sleeping Beauty’s “marvellous fate” is to bestow her “lifelike” dream onto “the coming century”, anticipating the total divestment of female sexuality from its abject undertones. Above all reigns supreme “the common daughter of half-a-dozen mothers”, Fevvers, who “has all the éclat of a new era about to take off.”

Hybrid identities

My mother, when she saw me patiently trying to make a yield between a Polstead Black and a Morello, cried two things: ‘Thou mayest as well try to make a union between thyself and me by sewing us at the hip,’ and then, ‘Of what sex is that monster you are making? (SC 78-79)

The title of Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry (1989) refers to determining the gender of a cherry tree that has been subjected to grafting. Whereas for the 17^th-century natural scientists who perform it – the royal gardener Tradescant and his apprentice – grafting is a legitimate means of begetting disease-resistant, climate-inured plants by fusing tender and vigorous subspecies, for the Church, it is clearly associated with unnatural, monstrous births, “without seed or parent”, which circumvent the normal, God-given channels of procreation. The possibility of applying this process to humans is hinted at by both the gargantuan motherly figure of the Dog-Woman, who likens the grafting of two cherry scions to an incestuous suture of cross-human limbs, and by the foundling son himself, Jordan, who “wondered whether it was an art I might apply to myself”. Jordan’s quest for a hardier, more accomplished “heroic” self implies, more than scouring the world’s oceans in search of exotic fruits (he is “identified” as the first sea-faring explorer who fetched the scaly pineapple from outlandish Barbados to England, just in time to be relished by the newly crowned monarch, Charles II), a sequence of metaphorical fusions with the spirits of self-poised women he encounters. In outlining the male protagonist’s journey as informed by a heroic quest but as effected through an exploration of feminine experiences, Winterson disrupts the rigid, culturally-inscribed boundaries that demarcate and objectify identities into unequivocally sexed bodies, opting instead for charting a fluid bodily geography that allows for mergings, crisscrossings and reinscriptions of one’s gendered identity.

On one fantasmatic return to the city of Jordan’s mind, he accompanies a female cleaner whose menial service consists not in scrubbing the cobbled streets, but in erasing, from a balloon, a thickening canopy of hovering words that amass in violent, life-threatening throngs and acquire a repulsively visual, as well as olfactory, materiality. Far from being ethereal, disembodied carriers of logos and reason, the indelible words that get “trapped under the sun” and “form a thick cloud over the city” are not merely polluting emissions that need cleansing, but also aggressive, ferocious entities inflicting malicious laceration (“biting”, “mauling”) on the street cleaners’ flesh. The concrete visualization of language as a noxious effluvium released by “people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties” unbalances the traditional dichotomy spirit-matter, whereby the former term has tended to assume precedence over the latter; in true deconstructive fashion, the rigid demarcation between these polar opposites is seen to slacken and collapse, bringing about an interrogation of other hierarchically structured pairs of opposite such as high-low, masculine-feminine, normal-abnormal or heroic-monstrous.

In the very same city of words, Jordan can enhance his collection of odd life experiences, which contribute to constantly remoulding his heroic pursuit[36]. He reminisces exploring a floorless house where diners, either lying in gilded chairs suspended from the ceiling or walking about on tightropes, feast above a bottomless crocodile-infested abyss, ignoring their “ever-downward necessity and [continuing] ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors”. That the residents of this, by now, deserted house should have turned oblivious to the fact that the chasm underneath is in actuality a garden of scented strawberries, “some clutched in spiders’ webs like forgotten rubies”, attests to the perils ensuing from rigidly divorcing matter and spirit. It is at this point of utter disregard for matter that Jordan’s pursuit of Fortunata, the elusive “woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt”, begins, leading him through downward-spiralling “circles of infamy” (read “cafes, casinos and bawdy-houses”) to experience, in travesty[37], the gothic version of a harem, a brothel where the female detainees take nightly flights from the “Locked Citadel” via underground streams to the nearby Convent of the Holy Mother. The proximity of the lewd and the holy, of the heavy and the light is all too apparent, in so far as the proceeds of one are revealed to have financed the other all along, and as the treasure vault of prostitutes is one day found to have been deserted by the recently converted novitiates at the convent.

Accustomed to the female attire, Jordan decides “to continue as a woman for a while”, taking a job on a fish stall and deeming himself in female disguise as “a traveller in a foreign country”, where he is abhorred as well as fascinated to learn about a conspiracy concocted by women in order to compensate for their absence of power, which at the societal level, seems an exclusively male prerogative. Much aggrieved by the women’s manual of hatred against men that he is conspiratively let into, yet even more discomforted by what he perceives to be its underlying accuracy, Jordan is snatched away from the bevy of unfortunate females by ravenous birds of prey, which, “somehow imagining [him] as a great fish”, carry him across the seas, teeming with Tropics-bound ships, to other imaginary sites. These include a city whose inhabitants outwit the creditors by regularly tearing down and rebuilding their houses in ever-changing locations so that buildings vanish and reemerge in a disconcertingly anamorphic array (with houses being successively displaced by museums or by windmills); this subterfuge and “most fulfilling pastime” accounts for the extraordinary longevity of the denizens of this city who have reconciled two discordant desires, fixedness and perpetual motion. An interregnum simile is again employed concerning mankind at large – “since settling down and rooting like trees, but without the ability to make use of the wind to scatter our seed, we have found only infection and discontent” – as a means of suggesting the lassitude and pathogenic vexation of a once nomadic species.

It is in this shifting urban geography, architecturally mirroring its dwellers’ grafted identity (at once static and dynamic), that Jordan is told the stories of the twelve dancing princesses, who, at night time, used to escape the paternal cage and embark on dancing sprees in the silver city; the novel, which has up to this point grafted the perspectives and alternative narratives of Jordan and his mother, now embeds yet another scion, the multi-headed fabulous tale (in a feminist revisionary grid) of abused, maltreated or deceived women who have carried out the letter of the manual of hatred against men and set up an all-female community.

Jordan is greeted at the entrance of a circular chamber by the princesses and their attending maid, actually a mermaid (now spouse to one of the princesses), described as “very beautiful but without fine graces”, and whose irresistible gluttony compels her to gobble at Jordan’s piscine offertory, “dropping [the fish] back into her throat the way you or I would an oyster”. While Jordan has so far pursued a fantastic picaresque voyage searching for a union with the idealised figure of Fortunata (the twelfth dancing princess, absent from the premises), his quest is rendered futile by the dismaying catalogue of abortive heterosexual unions, suggesting somehow the impossibility of the traditional idea of happy marriage. For instance, one princess who is a collector of religious items, including “the still-born foetus of the infamous Pope Joan”, retaliates at her husband’s interference with her hobby and immolation of the wrapped-up body of a saint’s relics, mummifying him in return. Another princess rewrites the Rapunzel tale by rendering the cohabitation of the maiden and the hag in the windowless tower a self-willed lesbian union, eventually intruded upon by a reckless, senseless male. Yet another resents her husband’s excessive greed and gargantuan appetite, feeding him on a poisonous potion that after causing his belly to swell out of proportion, triggers its explosion and release of “a herd of cattle and a fleet of pigs”.

The tragic end to which many of the husbands come in these tales – slaying, dismemberment, evisceration – is synthetically resumed in mythical frame in the story recounted by Fortunata herself, when she is encountered at her dancing academy on the magical island: Artemis, who vengefully kills Orion with a scorpion after her ravishment, becomes an emblematic figure of strong, self-dependent women who reject male companionship and domination. The out-of-timeness of this sacrificial act makes its endless recurrence possible, with history being rewritten ceaselessly into both the 18^th-century Dog-Woman’s massacring of the Roundheads and, even further, into the 20^th-century carnage inflicted by her environmentalist militant version.

The nonlinear journey (“always back and forth, denying the calendar; the wrinkles and lines of the body”) undertaken by Jordan renders the customary definitions of androgyny and transsexuality problematic. While it is true that in Winterson’s exploration of the relationship between the body as sexed and the body as gendered Jordan’s emergent identity is hybrid (“I thought I might become someone else in time, grafted on to something better and stronger. And then I saw that the running away was a running towards. An effort to catch up with my fleet-footed self, living another life in a different way”), corporeality is no longer a datum, a mute, inert facticity[38], but a topos under constant construction and resignification.

Gargatom refigured: giantesses and shrivelled crones

“…are they, in reality mother and daughter?

Yet, if this were so, what Nordic giant feathered the one upon the swarthy, tiny other?” (NC 28)

Gigantism and its reverse phenomenon, dwarfism, consistently occur as signifiers of monstrosity in teratological taxonomies. As Williams (1996: 111-113) notes, somatic deviances such as violations of the norm of size, through either hypertrophy or atrophy, engender figures of “exorbitance” (giants) or figures of “deprivation” (pygmies, dwarves), which function as both “physical and conceptual opposites” policing the extreme edges of the spectrum of body height. While the morphology of grotesquely huge or tiny bodies could be drawn by reference to the normal human body, viewed in its integrity, it is nevertheless true that this standard is by no means absolute, bigness and smallness existing in varying degrees within a range of relative normality. Extreme diminution or massive exaggeration of bodily size, as phenomena transgressive of prescriptive limitations, also assist in the definition of these normative boundaries: “It is not in measuring some suspected deviant against an established, absolute norm that the abnormal is derived from the normal; prior to that measurement there must have occurred a comparison of beings of a range of sizes against extremes of large and small, the maximum and the minimum, for the norm to have come into existence. In this way, the abnormal always precedes the normal, making possible the definition of the normal” (Williams idem: 113).

In both Sexing the Cherry and Nights at the Circus the female subjects are allowed to voice their own interrogation of what constitutes monstrosity – and in particular their gigantism – to the effect that they challenge their relegation to peripheral cultural and societal positions and manage to secure stations of purported centrality. Both women posit themselves as tangentially or crucially involved in decisive historical events and as interacting with historically verifiable characters, which serves to challenge the authenticity and reliability of official historical records from which the agency of such portentous female figures may have been effaced[39]. In Winterson’s novel, the 17^th-century Dog Woman is a giantess who modestly avows a focal role in both avenging the death of King Charles, by wreaking mass murder amongst the “snivelling Puritans”, and starting the Great Fire that devastated London (“a foul place, full of pestilence and rot”) in 1666.

Despite her exorbitant size (her skirt is so wide that “would serve as a sail for some war-torn ships” and her shawl is made of “a dozen blankets sewn together”), she dismisses her formidable girth as fitting the paradigm of the monstrous since “despite my handicaps I cut something of a fine figure, I thought”; the very feature that confers the Dog Woman the ex-centric position of a female woodwose becomes, for the self-querying subject, divested of its pejorative associations and even interpreted as a mark of pride: “[Jordan] was proud of me because no other child had a mother who could hold a dozen oranges in her mouth at once”. While the human community marginalizes her, she foregrounds her nonnatural hugeness as an advantage, explicitly linking it with superhuman aspects such as sheer strength and the terror she inspires: it keeps her enemies at bay and even makes her immune to the all-consuming Plague (“I have no fear of the Plague. My body is too big for sour-sickness to defeat it, and if it is a judgement on us all then surely I am the last to be judged?”. The Dog-Woman’s refusal to assume her position as “other” in a society bent on damming up “the abject or demoniacal potential of the feminine” (Kristeva 1982: 65) is clearly evinced by her radical reassessment of the female body as a hallowed site, stripped of any connotations of sinful carnality. Since “gargoyles” are typically placed outside the confines of holy enclosures such as churches, and the parson’s injunction prohibits the Dog Woman’s access to the choir stalls, she resigns herself to pursuing her calling (“singing is my pleasure”) “inside the mountain of my flesh”. The image of the spotted toads from Tradescant’s garden who “engage in madrigals and set up an anthem more fair than any choir in church”, and the Orphic valences of the Dog Woman’s “slender” voice (“[w]hen I sing the dogs sit quiet and people who pass in the night stop their jabbering and discontent and think of other times, when they were happy” contribute to querying the legitimacy of conflating physical and moral grotesqueness in what clearly emerges as a cultural inscription of morphologically “aberrant” bodies.

“Remember the rock from whence ye are hewn and the pit from whence ye are digged”: these are the words carved on the medallion that the “only woman in English fiction confident enough to use filth as a fashion accessory”, “a huge and monstrous creature with a powerful right hook and a wide vocabulary “[40] bestows onto her adopted son on the day she excavates him from the slime of the river. The Dog-Woman is a blatantly overcoded feminine figure, coalescing attributes of a chtonian mother goddess[41], a Cynocephalic giantess and a vengeful Amazonian warrior.

In a self-portrayal, which questions the degree to which her unsightliness might amount and her failure to conform to societal standards of attractiveness (“How hideous am I?”), the Dog-Woman adopts an extrinsic gaze at herself in an attempt to understand why the surface of her body should be read as abject otherness. However, size, no doubt the most obvious indicator of her departure from the norm, is not conclusively inserted in the inventory of her repugnant features – the flatness of her nose, the scarcity of teeth in her mouth, or the cave-like holes in her face that are big enough to shelter fleas: “In the dark and in the water I weigh nothing at all”. Questioning the relevancy of size as a defining characteristic of monstrosity, the Dog-Woman suggests that fallacious perspective can erroneously distort the correlation between physical appearance and essence, external somaticity and identity.

For instance, the crowd who attend a weight contest between the Dog Woman and an elephant, a beast of fabulous magnitude carried around by an itinerant circus, respond differently to their display: pleasure at the sight of “the huge beast with a wandering nose”, massive swooning at glancing the “mountain range” to which the Dog-Woman’s prominently displayed genitalia are hyperbolically likened. What becomes a clearly gendered confrontation between beastly masculinity  – Samson, the elephant’s trick is to “sit itself in a seat like any well-bred gentleman, and wear an eyeglass” – and excessive femininity, renders the giantess victorious as she purportedly enacts a feminine version of a cosmogonic feat: “Far above us, far far away like a black star in a white sky, was Samson”. The correlation size-weight is left unsettled, and the whole exploit becomes laden with gender-sensitive connotations: “It is a responsibility for a woman to have forced an elephant into the sky. What it says of my size I can­not tell, for an elephant looks big, but how am I to know what it weighs? A balloon looks big and weighs nothing”.

Like Carter’s aerialist giantess, who relishes in perpetuating her self-constructed image of outlandish grotesqueness, the Dog-Woman resists her incarceration in a specular frame, reification, exclusive containment within a “cultural gaze”[42]. Giants by their nature violate the concept of containment (Williams ibid: 113), perpetually struggling against limitations of form. The Dog Woman recounts how after her Thumbelina-like infancy, when she “was tiny enough to sleep in [her] father’s shoe”, she experienced such excessive growth that the idea of exhibiting her in a freak show dawned on her father. Her rejection of the imposition of a freakish tag onto her expansive physicality is poignantly evinced by the image of her overgrown body violently bursting out of the confines of the barrel in which she had been immured, inadvertently slaying her own father with the slivers flying thereof. Cohen (idem) insists on the giants’ morphic and semiotic slipperiness and on the manner in which they refuse teratological as well as textual control and restraint by their progenitors – one need only think of Frankenstein’s progeny and the havoc he wreaks on his creator, or Frankenstein the book itself as a monster, given the surfeit of meanings that the novel cannot stably accommodate[43].

Through her gigantic size, her cohabitation with canine beasts and her devoted allegiance to royalty, secular and divine, the Dog-Woman bears clear similitudes with the 3^rd-century converted Christian and martyr, St. Christopher, whose life is widely documented in western hagiographical literature, such as the 13^th-century Golden Legend compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. A member of the lineage of heathen Canaanites, Saint Christopher (whose originary name is Reprobus) is of colossal stature (he measures twelve cubits in length), cynocephalic appearance, fierce countenance and cannibalistic appetites. The ambition that he harbours is to serve the mightiest of all masters: Reprobus successively vows obedience to an earthly king, to Satan and ultimately to Christ. Entering the service of the most powerful master implies his acceptance of the task of safely ferrying on his shoulders all those requesting passage across a river in whose turbulent waters they might otherwise perish. Traditional iconography however focuses on the representation of Christopher (i.e. the Christbearer, a name etymologically derived from Gr. christos, Christ and pherein, to bear) wading, staff in hand, through the river with a minuscule child placed onto his shoulder. Paradoxically, as he progresses through the waters, the child is growing increasingly heavier, as if the whole world were pressing on his shoulders, almost crushing and drowning the giant under his weight. The image of the giant carrying an infant on his shoulders is grotesquely echoed in the text “When Jordan was new I sat him on the palm of my hand the way I would a puppy, and I held him to my face and let him pick the fleas out of my scars”. The huge woman is also associated with riverine banks, and she even names her foster son whom she rescues from drowning after the great river of Palestine encountered by the Israelites in their passage to the Promised land: “I call him Jordan and it will do. He has no other name before or after. What was there to call him, fished as he was from the stinking Thames?”

While prior to his conversion, Saint Christopher represents a monstrosity that is both corporeal (dog-man hybrid) and linguistic (barking), the Dog Woman’s communal residing with the dogs implies a rejection of human companionship to the point of utter estrangement from humanity’s biological norms[44]. However, she is allowed to provide her own narrative, running in parallel with that of the male hero, the explorer prototype. Saint Christopher’s ranking as a Cynocephalus, based on the episode of his cannibalism outlined by The Contendings of the Apostles, appears to be related not merely to his grotesque canine appearance and inarticulate barking but also to his pre-conversion habit of anthropophagy. The Dog Woman is also fascinated with mouths and what mouths can do. In Tradescant’s exotic garden where ponds teem with “fabulous fishes of the kind imagined but never seen”, the Dog Woman’s favourite spot is a cherry-lined grotto basin at the bottom of which fresh-water shrimp are “feeding on creatures even smaller than themselves” only to fill the beak of a kingfisher that afterwards “ascends like a saint, vertical and glorious”. The Dog Woman’s enthralment with ingurgitation, with mouths and beaks that feed on and are fed on by others, may denote a desire to explore the precarious limits that discriminate selfhood from otherness: if the boundaries demarcating physical entities collapse in an endless cycle of erasure and redefinement (the food chain), to what extent is otherness literally absorbed and assimilated into selfhood?[45]

According to Cohen, anthropophagy, cannibalism constitute an exploration of selfhood’s limits: “the material incorporation of one body into the flesh of another, cannibalism condenses a fear of losing the boundary that circumscribes identity and produces discrete subjects” (1999: 2). When the Dog-Woman attends the public display of a banana brought over from the Bermuda island, allegedly located in the proximity of paradise, she interprets its shape in anthropomorphic terms, abhorring the idea of its edibility: given its livid yellowness and length, the banana is likened to the private parts of an Oriental, “either painted or infected”. As soon as instructions are offered as to the consumption of this wondrous exotic fruit, the crowds exhibit the same indignation against what they perceive to be a cannibalistic practice: “At this there was unanimous retching. There was no good woman could put that to her mouth, and for a man it was the practice of cannibals. We had not gone to church all these years and been washed in the blood of Jesus only to eat ourselves up the way the Heathen do”. The Dog-Woman appears to express at this stage the typical revulsion medieval travellers experienced when confronted with alien cultures and dietary habits; moreover, the act of consuming a banana is firstly interpreted in a sexually segregated grid, implying sexual perversion if done by a woman and anthropophagy if done by a man, and then resumed in a generalised statement encompassing all Christians for whom ablution in the blood of the sacrificed Jesus makes the reiteration of sparagmos inconceivable.

If the giant’s body is an affront to natural proportion, it may well encode “an excess[46] that places him outside the realm of the human, outside the possibility of desire” (Cohen 1999: xiii). The Dog Woman fits the prototype of the castrating woman, whose willingness to experiment (“I like to broaden my mind when I can”) drives her to accepting the overtures of a man. The intended fellatio entails, however, his emasculation: her mouth becomes a devouring organ, and the sexuality of the scene is supplanted by connotations of feeding.[47] This mere act of dismemberment[48] is hyperbolically inflated in the Dog Woman’s enactment of the Old Testament enjoinment, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth”: taking upon herself the loyalist assignment of avenging the death of the King, she wreaks carnage amongst the Puritans, collecting a sack of trophies that amount to “119 eyeballs, one missing on account of a man who had lost one already, and over 2,000 teeth”. That she should use the dental waste as a “drainage for my watercress bed” attests to another similarity with the cynocephalus saint, who is protector of orchards and vegetation: having ferried Christ safely across the river, he plants his staff in the river banks where it blooms and bears fruit.

Whereas in teratological taxonomies giants and pygmies bracket the normal at one or the other extremity of the size spectrum, separated as they are by a gapping continuum of normal size constituents, the possibility of juxtaposing the immense and the nugatory in a conjoined figure raises problematic aspects of perspectivism and the positioning of the nondeviant relative to this coupling. Citing Friedman, Prescott (1993: 75) remarks not only the definitional marginality of monsters, but also their spatial or situational eccentricity, nature affording greater playfulness and sporting at the edges of the world. While size-entrenched monstrosity is rendered ambiguous by spatial relativity[49] (a human of default size may become a giant in Lilliput and a dwarf in Brobdingnag), the textual and figural conflation of the gigantic and the minuscule in a position of spatial and ontological centrality may serve either to synthetically express “mingled or contradictory feelings” about such “double-bodied grotesques” (Prescott idem: 88) or to legitimate ”abnormality” as the distorted projection of an extrinsic gaze and not as an intrinsic deformity.

Both Sexing the Cherry and Nights at the Circus feature female couples of blatant disparity in size. In Winterson’s novel, the Dog Woman and her neighbouring crone are grotesquely inversed mirror reflections: contrasted with the former’s expansive body, the latter’s carcass seems in a continuous process of emaciation and diminution. While the Dog Woman is so huge that when she puts on a plumed hat, it sits on her head “as a bird nests in a tree”, the next-door hag is withered, “blackened and hairless” almost to the point of becoming reified into “a side of salt beef wrapped in muslin”; her head resembles “a piece of leather like a football”, her body disseminates into “a fantastical mass of rags” and her hands are “always beckoning and twisting, look like the shrivelled monkeys the organ-grinders carry”. Compared with the giant wench’s earthen propensity, her ageless neighbour, who “airs herself abroad as a witch”, has invisible feet (“there’s no knowing what it is she walks on”), which generates the illusion of her lack of movement. In contrast with the Dog Woman’s self-professed civility and decent manners (“I’m not one for a knife and spoon myself, but I do know how to eat in company”), the virago’s hands are constantly engaged in a scatological exploration of her own body, which makes her feeding manners approximate those of troglodyte cave-dwellers: “her hands are never still, scratching her head and her groin and darting out to snatch food and ram it square into her mouth”.

Through their physical juxtaposition (“I am designed on the grand scale and, even at fourteen, you could have made two Lizzies out of me”) and rhetorical coupling (the two women take turns recounting the Fevvers myth to the American journalist), the pairing of gargantuan Fevvers and Thumbelina-Lizzie approximates what Prescott has coined as “Gargatom”, “a single anamorphic and unimaginable figure” that frequently featured in 17^th-century chapbooks[50]. Such juxtapositions operated on confrontational grounds, opposing astuteness to aggressive force, with midgets (Tom Thumb) at times outwitting and therefore vanquishing giants (Gargantuas).

Antagonism in the female couples under discussion, however, is only superficially and transitorily explored, as both Carter and Winterson convey their characters’ soldered identities, refashioned in the foster mother-daughter dyad in the first case, and gradually shaped into a continuum of foster motherhood in the second case. The 20^th-century alter ego of the Dog Woman is a version of Gargatom turned outside in: she is an environmentalist chemist whose gigantomachia is targeted at earth-polluting companies and who contains her own discordia concors, reconciling normal surface and giant core, a living shell encasing her colossal predecessor who resists contraction, compression and threatens to burst open the boundaries of her host’s body, like a dwarfish outfit stifling its gigantic wearer.

“The giant is represented through movement, through being in time… In contrast to the still and perfect nature of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical forces… And while our daydream may be to animate the miniature, we admire the fall or the death, the stopping of the giant.”[51] That Winterson’s giantesses should deny containment, both spatial and temporal, evinces, nevertheless, a crucial reconsideration of the monstrous female paradigm.

Both Nights at the Circus and Sexing the Cherry revisit traditional notions of female monstrosity and, while dismantling assumptions of women’s necessary relegation to societal and political margins, provide an effective critique of what White calls the “technique of ostensive self-definition by negation” (1978: 151-2) deployed by mainstream civilisation (in this case, the patriarchal establishment). Carter’s investment of the siren-prostitute figure with the potential for destabilising 19^th-century stultifying notions of excessive female sexuality and Winterson’s outlining of the giantess as the foundational heroic figure whose underground quest allegedly brought about a restoration of the legitimate monarchical rule in the 17^th century, highlight a radical shift in the paradigm of the monstrous female: as Halberstam argues, “within postmodern Gothic we no longer attempt to identify the monster and fix the terms of his/her deformity, rather postmodern Gothic warns us to be suspicious of monster hunters, monster makers, and above all, discourses invested in purity and innocence” (1998: 21).

[1] See Creed, for whom “the concept of the monstrous-feminine, as constructed within/by patriarchal and phallocentric ideology, is intimately related to the problem of sexual difference and castration” (idem: 44 qtd in Becker 1999: 56), or Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985) in which she outlines the inscription of the female as “lack.”

[1] Both monsters and women represent figures of dissimilarity and deviations from the norm: “The female is as it were a deformed male” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, qtd in Huet 1993: 3). On the Greeks’ concern with self-definition attained by “exploring the boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘self being the Greek male subject”, i.e. “not-barbarian, not-woman and not-beast”, see King (1995: 138-141).

[1] Cf. Kristeva  (1982: 1-11).

[1] Douglas (1966: 147-9)

[1] Cf. Michael (1998: 210)

[1] Tucker (1998: 17) remarks the “power of the image … to govern the subject’s trajectory of desire”.

[1] Fevvers both complies with and challenges the “traditional exhibitionist role” of women who are “simultaneously looked at and displayed” by the “determining male gaze”; her “to-be-looked-at-ness” is not passive acquiescence to but active involvement in the outlining of her body as sexual fetish. See Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” included in Rivkin & Ryan (1998: 389).

[1] Derived from Saint Augustine’s connection in De civitate dei of the Latin monstrum with the verb monstrare, meaning ‘to show, to reveal’ (cf. Cohen 1999: 187).

[1] Lee (ibid: 94) and Booker (1991: 210) point to the infinite plurality in any act of seeing or reading across Fevvers’s body a “compendium” of images of transgression.

[1] See South (1987: 148-153) & King (1995:143-148).

[1] Durand highlights the fatal connotations of sirens as feminised avatars of the beastly monsters lurking in polluting, stagnant waters (1977: 128).

[1] Sirens are briefly referred to in Pausanias’ Description of Greece as having lost the singing contest with the muses. On the other hand, it is their melodious alluring voice that prevails in Plato’s association of the sirens with the harmonious music of the spheres, as evinced in the myth of Er, which closes his Republic. The sirens’ music rather than their words posed a fatal threat to the Argonauts as they passed by the delightful island of Anthemoessa, yet their song was drowned out by Orpheus’ lyre, setting yet another example of the manner in which the male hero can break their lethal spell of carnal seduction, countering the perils of sexuality which most half-woman, half-animal monsters such as the Echidna or the mermaids seem to embody. See King (idem).

[1] The deceitfully alluring surface of the siren’s body conceals foul inner substance, the contrast between the world of sensory perception and the underlying reality deepens, as happens for instance in Dante’s 9^th Canto of the Purgatory, where, under the gaze of Virgil, a misshapen, faltering siren becomes beautiful and articulate, yet when her clothes are tore open her flesh emits a terrible stench. See King (idem).

[1] Cf. Russo (1998: 238-244); Booker (1991: 226-7).

[1] See also Booker (idem: 230-1).

[1] Mary Russo (1994) The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity New York: Routledge p. 67 qtd. in Tucker (idem: 18).

[1] See Robinson (1991).

[1] See, for instance, Rich A “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” in Rivkin & Ryan (eds) (1998: 633-649).

[1] On the mixture of “revulsion” and “enchantment”, “horror and desire” characterising male constructions of female bodies, see Robinson (idem: 129-130).

[1] Not only the brothel women collected by Madame Schreck but also their clients, whose ugliness makes Fevvers remark that “he who cast the human form in the first place did not have his mind on the job”, hover on a fragile boundary demarcating naturalness from unnaturalness. This incites the winged woman’s rumination on the brittleness of the standard anthropomorphic mould: “Give it the slightest tap with your fingers and it breaks”.

[1] What Fevvers alludes to is the reversibility of monstrosity and the possibility for deformed others to join the ranks of the same. Toussaint’s mouthlessness and his food ingestion through a single orifice that also serves for breathing approximates the figure of Straw-drinkers or Astomi, a Plinian race synthetically catalogued by Friedman as follows: “noseless and mouthless, they breathe through a single ori­fice and eat and drink through a straw” (2000: 12).

[1] Cf. Robinson (ibid: 130)

[1] Friedman (idem) dubs “Plinian” those monstrous races of the Latin Middle Ages which were initially cataloged by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History.

[1] North African people whose faces supposedly lay on their chests, and whose fabulous appearance has been historically confirmed and offered a plausible explanation:  seen from a distance, the ornamented armoury worn by the Blemmyae may have terrified travellers into believing that what they saw were neckless warriors (cf Friedman ibid: 25).

[1] “I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species and have the same defects.” Shelley M (1993) Frankenstein, or: A Modern Prometheus London: Pickering.

[1] Scenes of violent obscenity, such as the clowns’ massive orgy in the “Petersburg” section, which are reminiscent of Sade’s staging of “rites of monstrous cruelty” in spaces secluded from a “pusillanimous” world, allow for transgressing any borders of decorum and implicitly relaxing the tight strings that restrain sexual licentiousness. What Carter seems to be taking for granted is “the political nature of sex”, simply assuming “that the body politic is also the individual body and proceeds to play outrageous games with their identity” (cf. Kendrick 1993: 68).

[1] Tucker (ibid: 12-14) subscribes to the idea that the issue of pornography is more likely to receive nonbiased treatment in the context of filmic representation and spectatorship. Far from sanctioning a reinscription of patriarchy, pornographic fiction and photography, or the “pure forms of sexual fiction, of the fiction of sex” (SW 17), counter the mythic inscription of femininity in such falsely empowering and abstracting figures as that of the goddess, whereby the “actuality of the flesh” is belied and the “enslavement of women” is perpetuated. Fevvers’s construction of her own originary myth, based on the blurred Titian portrayal of Leda’s rape by the swan god, would testify to an undermining of western representations of subdued feminine sexuality.

[1] See Carter’s story “Black Venus”, where Baudelaire’s satanically inspirational yet silenced muse avenges her reduction to the figure of the biblical temptress, a “vase of darkness” always on the brink of infesting the world with her “black light”.

[1] The term used for prostitutes in canon law, meaning “women who earn”, cf. Hassig (1999: 79). Karras (1999: 162) contests the ascription of the label of prostitute on the grounds of a woman’s commodification of her sexual favours; the defining feature of meretrices, which was closer in meaning to today’s ‘whore’ than to ‘prostitute’, was not necessarily their commercial behaviour (accepting money for sex), but their essential sinfulness – a “state of the soul”, “what we today call an identity” (ibid) and indiscriminate sexual availability.

[1] Foucault M (1990) The History of Sexuality, Robert Hurley (transl)  New York: Vintage.

[1] In Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 45-47, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reframes the debate around sexual identity in terms of coextant and conflicting, “minoritizing” versus “universalising” discourses, amending the previous scholarly distinction between acts and identities (discussed in Freccero 1999: 186).  In contrast with the latter type of discourse, which renders all people liable to appropriating a certain sexual identity should they engage in certain nonpermissible acts, the minoritizing discourse provides identitarian cohesion (minority identity).

[1] Minoritizing historiography envisaged prostitutes as members of an outcast, stigmatised group functioning as a safety valve at the margins of the medieval city, “preventing the seduction or rape of respectable women, or redirecting men away from sodomy” (Karras idem: 163), while universalising discourses insisted on applying this label to any sexually transgressive woman, given all women’s inherently sinful nature. “The (minoritized) prostitute thus was a paradigm for the (universalized) lustful woman” (ibid: 170).

[1] Douglas (1966) considers that only by identifying so-called abominable, deviant, or impure phenomena can a culture firmly delineate and clarify the epistemological boundaries that such anomalies tend to transgress and confound.

[1] In the French fabliaux, for instance, there is cooperation amongst prostitutes, designed to outsmart their lovers. In Nights at the Circus, Fevvers’s “legendary inaccessibility” is a gross distortion of fact, a lie jointly uttered by both Lizzie and her gigantic offspring.

[1] See Russo’s concept of “monstrification” (1994) or its application by Braunberger (2000).

[1] Jordan voices his androgynous identity by professing that what he “would like is to have some of Tradescant grafted on to me so that I could be a hero like him. He will flourish in any climate, pack his ships with precious things and be welcome with full honours when the King is restored” (SC 79).

[1] Perhaps the climactic instance in which Jordan’ body itself can be read as sexually ambiguous is the episode of his literal crossdressing, a subterfuge apparently necessitated by external circumstances – only by masquerading in female attire could he attend the trial and executions of Charles I: “Everyone anxious to attend the trial was subjected to a rigorous search and investigation, though the Puritans, concerned to uphold their public image, had promised an open trial free to all, except supporters of the King. Tradescant and Jordan dressed themselves as drabs, with painted faces and scarlet lips and dresses that looked as though they’d been pawed over by every infantryman in the capital”. That only Jordan should have attracted “a good few offers of a bed for the night” raises questions regarding his effeminacy or possible androgyny. Williams (1996: 168) claims that in medieval discourse “the monster par excellence is the being deformed by the possession of both sexes”, yet, citing Eliade, he amends the phenomenon as not merely sexual in nature but ontological: “androgyny signifies, not the existence of two sexes in one being, but rather the transcendence of the oppositions and metaphysical limitations that maleness and femaleness signify” (170).

[1] see Butler (1993).

[1] On Nights at the Circus as a “historiographic metafiction”, with Fevvers “being the object of the peculiar erotic fantasies of the rich and famous”, see Lee (1997: 103). Fevvers “advertises” herself as a ubiquitous presence at the nexus of the forces shaping history on the brink of the new century: mass suicides are committed in Paris for her sake, the post-impressionists vie to paint her and in Vienna, she deforms “the dreams of that entire generation who would immediately commit themselves whole­heartedly to psychoanalysis”.

[1] Cf. Winterson, <http:// www.winterson.net> (The official Jeanette Winterson site).

[1] The Dog Woman’s earthliness and her protectiveness of vegetation clearly associates her figure with that of primitive mother goddess (see Baring & Cashford, 1991, for the evolution of the myth of the earth goddess).

[1] See Cohen (1999: xiv)

[1] See Halberstam (1995: 28-52) & Baldick (1987: 1-9).

[1] Human  reproduction, fertilisation necessitate external eplanation: “In copulation, an act where the woman has a more pleas­urable part, the member comes away in the great tunnel and creeps into the womb where it splits open after a time like a runner bean and deposits a little mannikin to grow in the rich soil. At least, so I am told by women who have become pregnant and must know their husbands’ members as well as I do my own dogs.”

[1] “The mouth constitutes one of the principal thresholds of the body and thus of the self, a border between the inside and the outside, a portal giving access to the recesses of the living organism or, in the other direction, to the phenomenal, physical world. Through the mouth the self deals with the other” (Williams idem: 141).

[1] Consider the Dog Woman’s programmatic rejection of self-effacement: ““I would rather live with sins of excess than sins of denial.”

[1] As the Dog-Woman touches the “pea-pod”, it grows into a cucumber, she is urged to put it into her mouth as she would a “delicious thing to eat” but then swallows it up entirely and bites it off with a snap, eventually feeding one of her dogs on it. This cannibalistic gesture is then explained as having been triggered by the conviction that males have their sexual organs grow again, like lizards’ tails, as well as dictated by ignorance and a desire for “humble” submission to the males’ “reckless” will. The male body, sexuality itself is a forbidden experience for the Dog-Woman and are explored only tentatively:

[1] While here she merely feeds her dogs on the eyeballs, in another episode of sadistic revenge against the “unrepentant vermin” 87, a brothel becomes the stage for their execution in a grotesque unleashing of orgiastic necrophilia – the “sisters” at the Spitalfields brothel made a fortune by announcing that there were “freshly dismembered bodies to be had” (105).

[1] As was the case of the 13^th-century Jacques de Vitry (quoted in Friedman 2000: 163-164), who in Historia Orientalis introduced an incipient “cultural relativism” into the medieval consciousness: “just as we consider Pygmies to be dwarves, so they consider us giants… and in the land of the Giants, who are larger than we are, we would be considered dwarfs by them”.

[1] Prescott’s analysis includes early Stuart chapbooks, such as Richard Johnson’s History of Tom Thumb (1621) and samples of nonsense writing, such as Martin Parker’s Legend of Sir Leonard Lack-wit (1633), charting the political overtones of these popular 17^th-century English narratives.  In the former pamphlet, an anonymous, English-born minuscule Tom ensures his victory over the mighty, excessively overgrown Gargantua, whose tumescent bravado makes it even more challenging and entertaining a task for the witty, ironic midget who deflates, shrinks and eventually defeats his gigantic opponent. It is ultimately through rhetorical diminution and subversion, operating on a logic of lack and negation, that this feat is accomplished. In the latter burlesque, carnivalesque figments of the likes of Gargantua and Tom Thumbe are interpreted by Prescott as supporting a persistent, underground royalist, unpuritanical feeling.

[1] Susan Stewart (  1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, qtd in Cohen (1999: xi).

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Prescott A L (1993) “The Odd Couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb” in Cohen J J (ed) Monster Theory. Reading Culture

Rivkin J & Ryan M (eds) (1998) Literary Theory – An Anthology  Blackwell Publishers

Robinson S (1991) Engendering the Subject. Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction State University of New York Press

Russo M (1998) “Revamping Spectacle: Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus” in Tucker L (ed) Critical Essays on Angela Carter

South M (ed) (1987) Mythical and Fabulous Creatures. A Source Book and a Reference Guide Macmillan

Todd, D (1995) Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England The University of Chicago Press

Tucker L (ed) (1998) Critical Essays on Angela Carter NY: G K Hall & Co

White H (1978) Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Williams D (1996) Deformed Discourse. The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press

Winterson J (1989) Sexing the Cherry Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd

Andrei Oisteanu

The Taboo Jew in Communist Romania

During the last years I worked at a study entitled The Image of the Jew in the Romanian Culture. Study of Imagology in Central-East European Context (Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2001). The research was carried out under the aegis of The “Vidal Sasoon” International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among the predicaments that I have faced in the process of researching this comparative study of ethnic imagology was one that, although expected, to a degree, I could not have foreseen its proportions. This predicament is due to the unhealable wounds that the communist censorship inflicted upon the corpus literature of the social sciences.

For their great majority, the books, publications and studies devoted to folklore and ethnology in Romania in the period after the Second World War avoid making one single mention of the Jew, because that nomen ethnicum and everything that was connected to him had become, in most circumstances, a taboo. After an excessive popularity – it is true, a negative one – enjoyed in the period between the wars, when the Jew had become the unwitting protagonist of all too many books, studies and articles of an anti-Semitic character, as soon as the communist regime came to power in Romania, in 1945, the Jew became the object of yet another excess: nothing whatsoever was written about him, as if he did not existed. (This went according to a general principle of totalitarian regimes: “Who/what is not talked about, does not exist”). An excess of silence took the place of an excess of noise.

This “timidity” was present at the very top of authority, too, be it Romanian or Jewish. Initially, in order to make the official voice of authority “politically correct,” Ceauşescu would use the famous formula, “irrespective of nationality: Hungarians, Germans, Jews.” Since the middle of the ‘70s, the Jews began to be omitted from the discourse of power and crowded in the more aseptic expression, “and other nationalities.” (The Gypsies, instead, were never mentioned in official discourse.) Some of the authorities of the Jewish community did not count upon remaining behind in this matter. In my opinion, the chief rabbi Moses Rosen, himself a person with an authoritative attitude, was wrong campaigning in the ‘80s for the banning from print of the socio-political writings of Mihai Eminescu, particularly those referring to the Jews. I believe such energy and authority might have found better outlet, namely reclaiming the inclusion, in the respective volumes in the series of Complete Works (vol. IX and X), of an adequate study, which would, correctly in context and with all the appropriate nuances, have explained Eminescu’s anti-Semite discourse. In 1957, Moses Rosen had also been the one to request (and obtain, for a while) the purging of the first page of the novel Baltagul (The Hatchet), where Mihail Sadoveanu had set down an innocent folk legend that explained the fate of several peoples, among which the Jews were included.

In volumes of folklore and ethnology – otherwise worthy of all praise – in anthologies or typologies of carols, of ballads, of legends, of folk anecdotes or folk theatre, etc. – written or edited by otherwise creditable authors – the texts about the Jews were carefully censored and, in the best of cases, marked with dots. In this last case, the omission was at least signaled, and the researcher could search, and, with some luck, even find the integral text in the original. The reasons that justified that political phenomenon were different along the decades, sometimes even antagonistic: at the beginning, in the period of “internationalist communism,” it was from an erroneous understanding of the fight against anti-Semitism (when Jewish activists must have had themselves a say); later, in the “national-communist” epoch, it was out of an excess of nationalism or even anti-Semitism. Commenting upon an album-monograph of Iaşi, printed in the ‘80s – where no mention is made of the history of the old and important community of the Ashkenazim Jews from the town (51% of the population before the Second World War), or of its great economic and cultural achievements – some researchers have called this phenomenon the “elimination of the Jews from the history of the town of Iaşi”.1 The examples of this type are many. For instance, it is difficult to imagine how an author who in 1982 writes a book about merchants, moneylenders, innkeepers, carters and wagoners, about the tradition of the fairs in the Romanian space doesn’t mention the Jews even once.2

I hasten to add that the phenomenon under discussion is not specifically Romanian, nor is it specifically communist. It rises and grows in any regime that has nationalistic traits, wherever an ethnocentric, if not downright ethno-exclusive, cultural perspective is enforced. Greece may be a good example to that effect, with its alleged “religious and ethnic homogeneity of the Greek population” (98 percent, in official records), and with the authorities refusing to acknowledge the existence of (present and past) national minorities.3 Here is what an intellectual Jewish woman from Thessaloniki declared a few years ago about the present state of culture in that city, where, in 1913, around 51% of the inhabitants belonged to the community of Sephardim Jews: “Today [i.e., October, 1990], at the University of Salonika, there is not a department, not a course, nothing about the Jews  or about the Turks or other communities either. There is nothing in the historical institutes. Nothing in the city’s museums. Hardly a book [on this subject] in the Greek bookstores. Nothing. As if we [i.e., the Jews] were never here”.4

Coming back to post-war Romania, I shall give a few examples of censoring  Jewish topics in print. In all post-war editions of Alecu Russo, the text Iaşiul şi locuitorii săi în 1840 (The Town of Iaşi and Its Inhabitants in 1840), has the pages referring to the Jews in Iaşi drastically expurgated.5 Letter XX, entitled Ovreii – The Jews –, was omitted by the censors from the post-war editions of the volume Scrisori către V. Alecsandri (Letters to Vasile Alescandri), by Ion Ghica.6 Vasile Alecsandri himself was censured in that epoch, his more or less ‘complete’ works failed to include (with some extremely rare exceptions) the caustic texts directed at the Jews (like Lipitorile satului – The Village Leeches).

Historical sources did not enjoy a treatment at all different. In 1959, Dan Simionescu published Cronica lui Baltasar Walther despre Mihai Viteazul (Baltasar Walther’s Chronicle on Mihai Viteazul), written at the end of the 16th century.7 The literary historian expunged – by replacing it with dots – the following passage, “likewise, [Mihai Viteazul] had all the Jews murdered, who, according to their custom, as they were wont, conducted themselves as traitors of the country”.8 The editors of subsequent volumes of Romanian history and old literature took over the document thus truncated, without even marking the censured passage with the dots. In a recent book, Dan Horia Mazilu absolves both Dan Simionescu and the editors, yet he neglects to mention the real culprits, “It is not late Professor Dan Simionescu who bears responsibility for the elisions,” and “the innocence of the publishing houses seems to me beyond question”.9

A similar treatment was applied by the censors to foreign books. Here are just a few examples. In all Romanian editions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Prioress’ Tale (written in 1387), which dwells on the Jews and their “lucre of villainye,” and on the accusation of ritual infanticide, was either reduced to an incipient fragment without any relevance, or replaced with a laconic and neutral summary. Even the very recent edition of The Tales does nothing to remedy the situation (528). The well-known book by Lion Feuchtwanger, Die Jâdin von Toledo (The Jewess from Toledo) has been translated into Romanian under the neutral title of Balada spaniolă (The Spanish Ballad).10 Then, the writer who signs the preface to Elias Canetti, Die gerettete Zunge (The saved Language/ Tongue), an autobiographical novel that describes the childhood of the author within the Jewish community in Rusciuc – accomplishes the difficult feat of not mentioning the ethnonym – horrible dictu! – ‘Jew’ even once; when she cannot avoid it, she replaces it with that of “Sephardim:” “besides the Bulgarians, there [i.e., in the town] lived so many other nationalities: Sephardim, Turks, Romanians, Armenians, Russians”.11

In the period August-October 1919, Benjamin Fundoianu published in the magazine that came out in the Jewish language in Romania, Mântuirea (The Deliverance), a series of eleven essays, under the title “Judaism and Hellenism.” In 1980, there has been an attempt to publish this important text in an ample volume that contained all of Fundoianu’s published works.12 In the end, however, the censors ordered the purging of that cycle of essays from the volume. This important philosophic study was reprinted only now, in 1999, 80 years later.13 Also with respect to Fundoianu, in December 1945, in The Magazine of the Royal Foundations, Tudor Arghezi signed a warm article in memory of the “poet assassinated [in Auschwitz] with poisonous fumes.” A passage that mentions Benjamin Fundoianu’s Jewishness was excluded by censorship when the text was reprinted in mid ‘70s.14

A volume of Romanian miniatures and texts written around the year 1840 by the church attendant Picu Pătruţ were published in 1985. The Jews [jidovi] in The Legend of St John the New were expurgated from the book, in spite of their being main characters: according to tradition, they had been the ones who beheaded the saint.15 I had to search for and consult the manuscript when it came to filling up the gap that the censor’s ‘scissors’ had left. In an anthology of studies on The Legend of Master Manole, published in 1980, Lazăr Şăineanu’s study was censored to the same effect – the mention about the sacrifice of a “Turk or a Jew” was replaced with dots.16 In another anthology of studies signed by Vasile Bogrea, published in 1971, the editors eliminated the ethnonym “jidani” from the text of a legend recorded by Sim. Fl. Marian.17 In a monographic study on another essential motif of Romanian popular mythology, Mioriţa, Adrian Fochi enumerates the “Armenian”, the “Gypsy”, even the “Austrian” among the foreign shepherds that crop up in different variants of the poem18, but not the Jew [“jâdan”] from a version recorded in the region of Vrancea in 1926 and published in 1930: “Lo, flocks of sheep three, / Are acoming down / With handsome lads three: / One is Transylvanian, / One is a Moldavian, / And the other is a Jew [jâdan]”.19 As he comments today upon this regrettable omission, the linguist Stelian Dumistrăcel reminds the reader of the younger generation of the “politic bashfulness” (an ironic euphemism is used) “that characterized the moment [1964] at the moment the quoted monograph was drafted”.20

Finally, the most conspicuous case is related to the attempted publication, in 1972, of the volume signed by an ethnologist from Iaşi, Petru Caraman, entitled Descolindatul, în orientul şi sud-estul Europei (Negative Carolling in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe). The direction of Minerva Publishing House conditioned the author the publishing of the volume on the removal of the chapters on the Jews and the Gypsies. The request of the editors appears so much stranger today as the ethnic groups under discussion were described with sympathy and humor. The ethnologist did not agree to the compromise required of him and the book was eventually withdrawn. It could only come out recently, in 1997, after 25 years.21 “The study could not be published at Minerva Publishing House [in 1972],” writes the editor, Iordan Datcu, “because of censorship growing harsher, as it is well-known that in 1971 a famous, in its anti-cultural consequences, ideological plenum of the only [i.e., communist] party had taken place”.22

As can be seen, the Gypsies as well the Jews were subject to the same regime of interdiction. It is interesting that, after 1990, the Gypsies themselves demanded the ethnonym ţigan (Gypsy) to be banned, as overloaded with disparaging connotations. Coming back to the national-communist epoch, I remember that, in 1979, Romulus Vulcănescu complained to me that the censors expurgated the entire heading of ziganologie (Gypsy studies), which he had drafted for the Dictionary of Ethnology in preparation at Albatros Publishing House. The author replaced the mentioned term with gipsologie, and the text of the article could be printed in the book.23 This may be a ridiculous story, yet it is symptomatic. It demonstrates that the general degradation of communist society had even reached the activity of censorship, which began to be undermined by an inept formalism. An instrument of degradation (censorship) was itself degraded. Thus, the agents of Ceauşescu’s censorship had come to be more frightened by terms, than by ideas. This happened at a time when the catalogue of taboo-terms (a list as long as it was inane) was sure to contain certain ethnonyms, such as those – nomina odiosa – of ‘Jew’ and ‘Gypsy.’

I have dwelt longer on this issue not merely to emphasize the difficulties of research that I have faced, but also because this political phenomenon is an aspect that can by itself round out ‘the image of the Jew in Romanian culture.’

Notes

1. Leon Volovici, “On Several Concepts and Stereotypes in the Historiography dedicated to the Jews”, in “Studia Judaica”, vol. VII, “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj, 1998, p. 89-98.

2. Ion Faiter, Trecător prin târguri şi iarmaroace [Traveler through fairs], Editura Sport-Turism, Bucureti, 1982.

3. Daniel Perdurant, Antisemitism in Contemporary Greek Society, The Hebrew University, The Vidal Sasoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, ACTA, No.7, Jerusalem, 1995.

4. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts. A Journey Through History, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1993, p. 237.

5. Alecu Russo, Iassy et ses habitants en 1840; cf. Alecu Russo, Opere complete [Opera Omnia], Cugetarea Publishing House, Bucharest, 1942, p. 103-134.

6. Ion Ghica, Scrisori către V. Alecsandri [Letters to V. Alecsandri], Socec & Comp. Publishing House, Bucharest, 1887.

7. Dan Simonescu, Studii şi materiale de istorie medie [Studies and Documents of Medieval History], The Romanian Academy Press, Bucharest, 1959, vol. III, p. 65.

8. Al. Papiu Ilarian, Tesaur de monumente istorice pentru România [Thesaurus of Historical Monuments for Romania], Bucharest, 1862, vol. I, p. 13.

9. Dan Horia Mazilu, Noi despre ceilalţi. Fals tratat de imagologie [We About the Others. False Treaty of Imagology], Polirom, Iassy, 1999, p. 167.

10. Lion Feuchtwanger, Balada spaniolă (in original, Die Jâdin von Toledo), Univers Publishing House, Bucharest, 1973.

11. Elias Canetti, Limba salvată. Istoria unei tinereţi [The Saved Language/Tongue. The History of a Youth], Dacia Publishing House, Cluj, 1984, [first edition, Die gerettete Zunge. Geschichte einer Jugend, Carl Hanser Verlag, Mnchen, 1977].

12. B. Fundoianu, Imagini şi cărţi [Images and Books], Minerva Publishing House, Bucharest, 1980.

13. B. Fundoianu, Iudaism şi elenism [Judaism and Hellenism], edited by Leon Volovici and Remus Zăstroiu, Hasefer Publishing House, Bucharest, 1999.

14. Tudor Arghezi, Scrieri [Writings], vol. 27, Minerva Publishing House, Bucharest, 1975.

15. Picu Pătruţ, Miniaturi şi poezie [Miniatures and Poetry], Bucharest, 1985, p. 124. As the text in this volume has been censored, I have completed the missing lines resorting to Picu Pătruţ’s manuscript, Stihos adecă Viers [Verse], p. 729-735, which is in the possession of Mr. Mihai Ghibu, to whom I hereby express my thanks.    

16. Meşterul Manole [Master Manole], anthology of studies co-ordinated by Maria Cordoveanu, Eminescu Publishing House, Bucharest, 1980.

17. Vasile Bogrea, Pagini istorico-filologice [Historical and Philological Pages], Dacia Publishing House, Cluj, 1971, p.450.

18. Adrian Fochi, Mioriţa. Tipologie, circulaţie, geneză, texte [Mioriza. Typology, Circulation, Origins, Texts], Editura Academiei Române [Romanian Academy Press], Bucharest, 1964, p.232.

19. Ion Diaconu, Ţinutul Vrancei [The County of Vrancea], Bucharest, 1930, p.116.

20. Stelian Dumistrăcel, Dicţionar. Expresii romneşti [Dictionary. Romanian Idioms], Institutul European [The European Institute], Jassy, 1997, p.116.

21. Petru Caraman, Descolindatul, în orientul şi sud-estul Europei. Studiu de folclor comparat [Negative Carolling in Eastern and South-eastern Europe. A Study of Comparative Folklore], edited by Ion H. Ciubotaru, “Al.I. Cuza” University Press, Jassy 1997.

22. Iordan Datcu, “Petru Caraman. Epistolar”, in Petru Caraman, Studii de folclor [Folkloric Studies], vol 3, edited by Iordan Datcu and Viorica Svulescu, Minerva, Bucharest, 1995, p.278. See also Ion H. Ciubotaru, Valea Şomuzului Mare. Monografie folclorică [The Valley of omuzu Mare. A Folkloric Monography], Caietele Arhivei de Folclor [The Folklore Archive of Moldavia and Bucovina], vol. X1, Jassy, 1991, p. 179.

23. Romulus Vulcănescu, Dicţionar de etnologie [Dictionary of Ethnology], Albatros, Bucharest, 1979, p. 150.